The international news network Al Jazeera sparked off a debate the other day about what to call the tens of thousands of persons from Africa, the Middle East and Asia flocking to Europe in a wave the continent has not seen since World War II, most of them enduring misery and suffering on a Biblical scale: Are they primarily refugees, or just migrants?
An opinion writer for the UK Guardian sought to widen the debate still: Why not just call the multitudes what they are basically: people?
At first blush, this debate may seem academic, a semantic excursion at best, and unhelpfully diversionary to boot. But it is nothing of the sort. Definitions matter. As the sociologist Ruth Benedict noted long ago, if we define a situation as real, it is real in its consequences.
By whatever name you call them, those arriving in such large numbers in the European Union – some 100, 000 in July alone— constitute a daunting challenge to its member-nations grappling with serious social and economic problems of their own. But how you characterise them will influence, if not determine, how they are perceived or received.
Call them refugees, and they could in good measure be received with empathy and fellow-feeling. Call them migrants, and they could face the visceral hostility of those who regard the “other” as the source of all problems, as elements who must be kept away at all cost.
Not surprisingly, Germany has been more welcoming to the beleaguered persons pouring into Europe, seeing them principally as refugees fleeing from war and persecution in their homelands. Forty percent of them are likely to find accommodation in Germany, as against eight per cent France and four per cent in the United Kingdom where they are viewed principally as migrants seeking better economic opportunities at the expense of the nationals.
Poland and Slovakia will accept only Christians; no “Islamists” please, and no “jihadists.” In Hungary, vigilantes actually took up arms to chase away asylum-seekers who manage to navigate the120 km-long barbed-wire fence it has erected to keep them away.
The news media are the principal purveyors of the frames through which we select and interpret and organise what we see and experience, and by that fact the purveyors of our definitions of “reality”. Through the use of selection, emphasis, exclusion and elaboration, the media suggest, and large sections of the attentive audience come to accept, what the issue is.
That is why countries pay particular attention to, and often seek to influence, the way they are profiled by the international news media.
Defining the situation is a task not to be taken lightly, and Al Jazeera is right to examine its own role in performing that function. In this, it is following the BBC which long ago decided to drop the term “terrorist” from its news reporting on the Israeli -Palestinian conflict, if not from its entire reporting, and to employ less evocative terms, such as “militants” or “insurgents.”
To the Israelis, the Palestinians are invariably “terrorists,” a definition echoed by the largely sympathetic Western news media. There is no redeeming grace to that term, no patience with and no sympathy for any cause espoused by any person stamped with that label.
Its effect is to strip individuals or groups identified as “terrorists”of their humanity and to render whatever is done them not merely acceptable but just.
But framing is an indispensable element in the contest for influence and preferment in the policy debate. Sparing no effort, no expenditure, each side seeks to come up with a frame that will dominate the debate and ultimately shape its outcome.
Take as an example the September 11, 2011, attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, masterminded by Osama bin Ladin and executed in the main by his fellow Saudi nationals. Few disputed the attacks as acts of terror, and few questioned the American response – a war on terror.
But that soon morphed into an invasion of Iraq, which had absolutely nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks, framed as an expedition to oust Saddam Hussein, rid Iraq of its frightful arsenal of “weapons of mass destruction”and plant the seeds of American democracy – genetically engineered, to be sure — in the barren sands of the Middle East.
That frame, kept alive by relentless propaganda, dominated the debate and won enthusiastic support in America and even abroad, notably from former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, who would be undone by the misadventure.
The term “weapons of mass destruction” was a key element in the framing. It was designed to conjure up weapons so novel that the English language had not yet found names for them, or so frightfully destructive that their names were unmentionable.
Iraq had no such weapons. It had nothing resembling the nuclear, thermo-nuclear, chemical and biological weapons that those who invaded and occupied it have in super abundance. Today, Iraq lies in ruins. Millions of Iraqis, combatants and non-combatants alike were killed, and much of the country’s population has forcibly dispersed. Several thousand American and several hundred British soldiers in the occupation force lost their lives.
Definitions matter. And as the case of Iraq shows powerfully, they can have tragic consequences.
Back home, former President Goodluck Jonathan, remembered now more for the culture of grand larceny that thrived during his tenure than for the “transformation” he claimed to have wrought, even tried his hand at framing the debate on probity in public life.
Chafing at those who were forever talking glibly about the lack of public accountability, he said the issue was not corruption but stealing and that the one must never be mistaken for the other.As usual, his point was not entirely clear. Was he saying that stealing was a lesser, more acceptable, crime than corruption?
There were those who thought he was only creating a distinction without a difference. I thought he was advocating plain speaking; a thief is a thief in the exact sense that a spade is a spade and not a device for excavation.
Too bad Dr Jonathan did not avail us of his seminal thoughts on the difference between mere stealing and outright looting, the term that has come to dominate the discourse on the conduct of a good many of the men and women who served with him.
What cannot now be disputed is that a great deal of what Dr Jonathan preferred to call stealing went on unchecked during hiswatch. Each passing day brings forth staggering new allegations of stealing that make the revelations of the previous day seem like amateur pilfering.
