Chapter 8 - Conclusion

Summary

Riešiť Despite the Mess

“We stand in between the different parties, but in the end, we are the ones who have to riešiť despite all the nice slogans and catchphrases.” This statement is key to my understanding of refugee supporters’ positionality. Sofia said this when she came out of the meeting Marginal had organized with Abed and the Migration Office, which led to the decision to let Abed have his will and go to India for a diploma. The social worker from the Migration Office had concluded the meeting by saying that refugees “can achieve anything” and should be encouraged to “fulfill their potential.” In Sofia's view, these were just romantic platitudes, making everyone feel righteous and comfortable while obfuscating the fact that this ‘achievement’ was really a kind of scam.

At the same time, refugee supporters still face other (more disturbing) slogans, the rallying cries of extremists and xenophobes who claim that refugees are “parasites” or “terrorists” who “threaten our culture” and “cannot be integrated.” ‘Slogans’ refer here to the grand proclamations of principles and normative judgments—which may be naïvely simplistic and dangerously ignorant of the messiness of real life. The practice of refugee care in Slovakia is diametrically opposed to the logic of slogans: it lacks the clarity and unambiguity, the claims to truth and comprehensiveness encompassed in snappy catchphrases. Their work also eschews the reductionist, essentialist, manipulative quality of populist slogans. By distancing herself from other people's moral statements and fearmongering, encapsulated in pointed catchphrases, Sofia downplays the role of principles, making it secondary to the short-term, inescapable logic of riešiť. She suggests a realm beyond moral commitments, where the goal is not to find the best but just good enough solutions.

This realm consists of expectations, experiences, norms, lessons, and emotions. They all have the potential to direct action. They are methodically, meticulously, or spontaneously weighed, negotiated, appropriated, prioritized, neglected, or forgotten. Refugee supporters find themselves in a moral laboratory, for instance, when testing and shifting the boundaries between tolerance and accommodation. They go through moral breakdowns that trigger, among other things, leaps to trust or distrust. All these operations belong to a fundamentally ephemeral and unstable situation in which moral sentiments and emotional judgments constantly mix.