Reflection On The Ugly Duckling

The article that I have chosen for my reflection is “The Ugly Duckling: Denmark’s Anti-refugee policies and Europe’s race to the bottom” written by Hansen and Malmvig (2016) regarding Denmark, which, known as the liberal darling of the world, suddenly closes the door and presents itself to be extremely unwelcoming to refugees and asylum seekers since the beginning of the European refugee crisis.

This essay will first prove that the act of inhospitableness featured in the article falls into the political domain of hospitality and then, look into the issue through the abstract hospitality lens of philosophy. Furthermore, principles of unconditional hospitality and obligations will be employed to offer a deeper understanding of the discourse.

The principle of unconditional hospitality suggests that as hosts, we should open up our doors to not only known invited person but also to “the absolute, unknown, anonymous” (Derrida, 2000: 25) without asking for any compensation, imposing any restriction or requiring any information (Westmoreland, 2008). In this case, Denmark was questioned for violating the principle by, instead of letting refugees move freely into the country, strictly control the numbers and even place an advertisement to advise people not to come to the country (Hansen & Malmvig, 2016). However, I would argue that when it comes to the domain of politics, hospitality needs to be regulated under conditions (Laachir, 2007; Naas, 2003) due to the constraint of financial, social and political security (Laachir, 2007). In other words, cosmopolitan hospitality is always subjected to conditions of universal hospitality (Kant, 1970). Considering the enormous pressure Danish social welfare system and the social division and racism issues associated with the influx of refugees (Hansen & Malmvig, 2016; Zucchino, 2016), there is no possibility that Denmark can offer the unconditional hospitality to the refugees. In other words, despite the ideology of pure hospitality, in realism, hospitality cannot go beyond the limits of legal measures, economic calculations and political boundaries

The experience has been shaped by different dimensions such as laws, types or culture. However, the most significant one should be exclusion which is defined as metaphorical symbolism of hospitality with unwelcome “others” on the spatially or perpetually outside (Lashley et al., 2007). Particularly, by offering significantly fewer social benefits (which has just been slashed by 45 %) and wages for refugees than its residents (Hansen & Malvig, 2016), Denmark has explicitly reinforced the differences between host and guest, or in other words, perpetually excluded refugees. At the same time, by accepting and protecting some of refugees across the threshold while refusing to welcome others, Denmark has implicitly excluded many refugees in terms of space. This exclusion even turns into hostility when it ran an anti-refugee ad campaign to advise people against fleeing to Denmark. This, once again, reinforces the point that hospitality in political domain has a threshold, making it impossible to applying the philosophy of absolute hospitality to include guests into the society and that when it comes closer to the threshold, it can turn into