C-Archief

De onzichtbaren Elke week schrijft Margriet Oostveen een column waarvoor zij het land intrekt. Deze keer: de noodopvang in IJsselstein.

Margriet Oostveen beeld Milo

22 juli 2026 – verschenen in nr. 30

Luisteren

Cadeau geven

Delen

Leeslijst Play

00:15 03:26 Mute

Settings Dit verhaal is voorgelezen door de auteur.

Tien witte kindertjes spelen op een groot blauw zeil met water (‘Hier komt de zee!’). Plaats genoeg, bij voetbalvereniging IJFC in IJsselstein. Lege voetbalvelden zinderen in de zon. Alleen op het hoofdveld laten wat jongens relaxed een bal rondgaan, muziekje uit een boombox erbij. Recht in het zicht van de noodopvang maar onbereikbaar voor leeftijdgenoten daar.

7 baby’s en peuters, 84 leerplichtige kinderen en 53 volwassenen leven de komende zes maanden zorgvuldig opgeborgen op het veelbesproken achterste voetbalveld, in noodcontainers zonder schaduw. Kleine slaapkamertjes voor vier personen, twee stapelbedden. Zonder airco, zoals de wethouder nadrukkelijk vermeldde in zijn informatievideo: ‘heel sober’.

Allen zorgvuldig apart. Onzichtbaar gemaakt, secuur afgeschermd door hekken met zwart plastic. Zo regelt Nederland problemen weg: heel precies, netjes en duidelijk uitgevoerd. Zodat het bijna normaal lijkt. Knappe statushouder die van hieruit weet te integreren.

Alle onzichtbaren op dit veld worden statushouder of zijn dat al. Ze kwamen om te blijven, ze zijn erkend nareizend familielid van gezinsleden die in hun eentje vooruit gingen en vaak hun leven waagden op zee. Meestal al jaren geleden. Niet zelden waren die destijds zelf nog kinderen.

Toen de eerste vijftig nareizigers maandag 6 juli aankwamen, stonden hier ’s avonds weer twintig hooligans voor de opvang. Er is brand gesticht en geïntimideerd. Die mensen hebben nu een gebiedsverbod. Op het prikbord bij de receptie beschrijft, tussen andere lieve kaartjes, een geschokte IJsselsteinse wat ze hoorde toen ze die avond langs liep: dorpsgenoten die ‘kotsgeluiden’ maakten naar de arriverende nieuwe bewoners.

Het gemeentebestuur berekende de schade uit april, toen extremisten de ruiten van het gemeentehuis met bakstenen ingooiden: 25.000 euro. De man die agenten daarbij met zwaar vuurwerk bekogelde (gehoorschade, brandplekken op een hoofd) kreeg vijf maanden cel.

Mensen die zichzelf beter vinden dan anderen bevestigden tientallen Nederlandse vlaggen met tiewraps aan lantaarnpalen. Een huiveringwekkend gezicht, ook nu ze slap als vieze vaatdoeken in de hitte hangen. Veel IJsselsteiners vinden de vlaggen beschamend.

Maar vanaf nu moeten we door, of met vakantie, en doet iedereen die professioneel betrokken is hartgrondig alsof alles weer normaal is.

Niemand mag van het COA de eerste vier weken het terrein op, ook de tientallen vrijwilligers niet, die graag al zouden beginnen met taallessen en spelletjes voor de kinderen. Het formele argument is dat de nieuwkomers, net in Nederland, deze tijd nodig hebben om te ‘landen’. Ik zie veel klusbusjes voor zaken die door alle consternatie nog niet af zijn. En veel rondscharrelende kinderen in de leeftijd waarop vier weken een eeuw kunnen duren van verveling.

Links in de noodopvang is nog een strookje gras. Een jongen van een jaar of zestien kijkt zoekend rond. Maar er is geen bal.

Skip to content

SUBSCRIBE Europe and Its Discontents Pope Benedict XVI January 1, 2006 Share What is the true definition of Europe? Where does it begin, and where does it end? Why, for example, is Siberia not considered part of Europe, even though many Europeans live there, and it has a European style of thinking and living? To the south of the community of Russian peoples, where do the borders of Europe disappear? Which Atlantic islands are European and which are not? Europe is a geographic term only in a secondary sense: Europe is rather a cultural and historical concept.

Experts on the origins of Europe traditionally refer back to Herodotus (c. 484-425 B.C.), the first known writer to designate Europe as a geographic concept: “The Persians consider something of their property to be Asia and the barbarian peoples who live there, while they maintain that Europe and the Greek world are a separate country.”

Though the lands at the heart of today’s Europe were completely outside of the visual field of the ancient historian, the formation of the Hellenistic states and the Roman Empire led to the establishment of a “continent” that would be the basis for the later Europe. As a whole, the lands facing the Mediterranean came to form a true continent by virtue of their cultural ties, trade routes, and common political system. It was not until the advance of Islam in the seventh and early eighth centuries that a border would be drawn across the Mediterranean, subdividing what had been a single continent into three: Asia, Africa, and Europe.

In the East the ancient world was transformed more slowly than in the West. Shifting its capital to Constantinople, the Roman Empire would resist in the East until the fifteenth century, although it was pushed further and further to the margins. During the same period, the southern Mediterranean region found itself cut off completely from what had been a cultural continent for centuries, while Europe grew steadily northward. The ancient continental border that the Romans called limes disappeared. A new historical space opened up whose heartland encompassed Gaul, Germany, and Britannia, and whose northern reach expanded more and more toward Scandinavia.

Amid this process of shifting borders, a theology of history was constructed that guaranteed ideal continuity with the earlier Mediterranean continent in its various configurations. According to this thinking, rooted in the Book of Daniel, the Roman Empire had been renewed and transformed by the Christian faith, which therefore became the last reign in the history of the world. The framework of peoples and states that emerged defined itself as the permanent Sacrum Imperium Romanum, the Holy Roman Empire.

The process of forming a new historical and cultural identity took place in a fully conscious manner under the reign of Charlemagne, when the ancient name of Europe returned to circulation with a new meaning. It was now used to define the kingdom of Charlemagne and to express an awareness of both the continuity and the novelty of this new aggregate of states, which presented itself as a force that would be propelled into the future—into the future, because it saw itself as a continuation of a world history that until then had been mired in an unchanging situation. This emerging sense of self-consciousness expressed an awareness of finality and of mission.

With the end of the Carolingian reign, however, the concept of Europe almost disappeared, surviving only in erudite usage. The term did not become popular currency again until the beginning of the modern era—as a means of self-identification, in response to the Turkish threat—and was asserted more generally in the eighteenth century. Apart from the history of the name, the decisive step toward Europe as we understand it today was when the Frankish kingdom constituted itself as the heir to the Roman Empire.

In Byzantium (which considered itself the true Rome), the Roman Empire had withstood the upheaval of migrations and the Islamic invasion. The Eastern Roman Empire continued to advance claims on the Empire’s Western half. It extended as far north as the Slavic world and created its own Greco-Roman world that distinguished itself from the Latin Europe of the West by introducing variants in the liturgy and in the ecclesiastical constitution, adopting a different script, and renouncing the use of Latin as the common language.

The two worlds also had enough unifying elements, however, to be considered a single continent. First of all, both the East and the West were the heirs to the Bible and to the ancient Church, which in both worlds refer beyond themselves to an origin that lies outside today’s Europe, namely in Palestine. Secondly, both shared the idea of the Roman Empire and of the essential nature of the Church, and therefore of law and legal instruments. The last factor I would mention is monasticism, which throughout the great upheavals of history continued to be the indispensable bearer not only of cultural continuity but above all of fundamental religious and moral values, of the ultimate guidance of humankind. As a pre-political and supra-political force, monasticism was also the bringer of ever-welcome and necessary rebirths of culture and civilization.

Alongside the common ecclesiastical inheritance of the two Europes, however, a profound difference remained. In Byzantium, Empire and Church were virtually identified in each other. The emperor was also the head of the Church. He considered himself a representative of Christ and—following the Biblical example of Melchizedek, who was king and priest at the same time (Genesis 14:18)—he bore the official title, “king and priest,” from the sixth century on. Once the Emperor Constantine had left Rome, the autonomous position of bishop of Rome—as successor to Peter and supreme pastor of the Church—could be transplanted to the ancient capital of the Empire, where a duality of powers had been established at the beginning of the Age of Constantine. Neither the emperor nor the pope was absolute; each had separate powers.

Pope Gelasius I (492-496) expressed his vision of the West in a famous letter to the Byzantine Emperor Anastasius I, and, even more clearly in his fourth treatise, where, with reference to the Byzantine model of Melchizedek, he affirmed that the unity of powers lies exclusively in Christ: “Because of human weakness (pride!), they have separated for the times that followed the two offices, so that neither shall become proud.” On worldly matters, priests should follow the laws of the emperor installed by divine decree, while on divine matters the emperor should submit to the priest. This introduced a separation and distinction of powers that would be of vital importance to the later development of Europe, and laid the foundations for the distinguishing characteristics of the West.

Despite these restrictions, both sides continued to be driven to seek absolute power and to impose their power on the other, making the principle of separation also the source of endless strife. How this principle should be lived properly and how it should be concretized politically and religiously continue to be a fundamental issue in present and future Europe.

The European continent was born from the rise of the Carolingian Empire and the shift of the Roman Empire to Byzantium, with its mission toward the Slavic peoples. If we accept this premise, the beginning of the modern era marked a watershed, a radical change, for the two Europes in both the essence of the continent and its geographic outlines.

In 1453 Constantinople was conquered by the Turks. The historian Otto Hiltbrunner describes the event laconically: “The last . . . learned men emigrated . . . to Italy and passed on their knowledge of the original Greek texts to the Renaissance humanists; but the East was overcome by the absence of culture.” This may be an overstatement, since the reign of the Osmanli dynasty had its own culture, too. The European, Greco-Christian culture of Byzantium, however, did indeed come to an end.

There was a risk that one of the two branches of Europe would disappear, but the Byzantine heritage did not die: Moscow declared itself to be the third Rome, and founded its patriarchate on the principle of a second translatio imperii or transplanting of the Empire. Russia thus presented itself as a new metamorphosis of the Holy Roman Empire, as a distinct form of Europe, which nevertheless remained tied to the West and was increasingly oriented toward it, even to the point that Peter the Great sought to turn Russia into a Western country.

This northward expansion of Byzantine Europe meant that the continent’s borders also began to extend toward the East. While the choice of the Urals as the border may have been exceedingly arbitrary, the world to the east of the Urals became a kind of substructure of Europe, neither Asian nor European, that was substantially forged by the European subject at the same time as it was excluded from having subject status itself. It became the object rather than the architect of its own history, not unlike a colonial state.

At the beginning of the modern era, two events took place that were at the base of non-Western, Byzantine Europe: the break-up of ancient Byzantium and of its historical continuity with the Roman Empire; and the establishment of a second Europe, with a new capital in Moscow, whose borders extended eastward, and of a type of pre-colonial structure in Siberia.

During the same period, two events of major historical significance also took place in the West. The first is that most of the Germanic world broke away from Rome. The rise of a new, “enlightened” form of Christianity drew a separation line through the “West” that clearly marked not just a geographical but also a cultural limes: a border between two different ways of thinking and relating. Within the Protestant world, there was also a rupt