738 European Journal of Criminology 10(6) accommodation and security’. Yet as the International Commission of Jurists and the European Council on Refugees and Exiles stressed in a subsequent joint report of their own, ‘in reality, the UNHCR has expressed reservations regarding the centre. UNHCR’s only positive assessment of the centre was that it was in better condition than others in Greece, a comparative estimate that does not qualify as “exemplary”’ (ICJ and ECRE, 2013: 8). What lies behind the veil of philoxenia? To date, the Greek state has essentially rebutted or otherwise circumvented domestic and international pressures to effectuate substantive progressive changes to its treatment of immigrants. In so doing, Greek state authorities have deployed a range of dubious rhetorical defences against criticism, the most blatant being the evocation of philoxenia as an innate and constant trait common to all Greeks. But to show, as this article has done so far, that immigrants in general and irregular migrants in particular are hardly accorded philoxenia in Greece today is by no means to imply a call for restoring philoxenia in the country. Such a call would at best be superficial, and at worst play into the hands of those whose policies practically deny philoxenia even as they lay claim to it rhetorically. The philoxenia deficit, if the term can be used at all, is not merely a matter of exclusion or insufficient inclusion of immigrants. It is ultimately a matter of domination, given that immigrants’ exclusion, and indeed certain forms of their inclusion, have long served to reproduce asymmetrical relations of power in the Greek context. In this account, the discourse of philoxenia is an ideological veil that supports the reproduction of power imbalances, whether by denying them altogether on the deterministic premise that unconditional openness is the only attitude Greeks are naturally inclined to adopt towards outsiders, or by helping to legitimate injustices against immigrants through connoting the established superiority of the host community and the inherently conditional nature of its hospitality to newcomers. As Derrida argues, conceptions of hospitality that do not necessarily or fully extend to uninvited strangers are essentially marks of sovereignty (see further Borradori, 2003; also Cheliotis, 2010; Herzfeld, 1992; Rozakou, 2012). Minister Dendias himself brought this point home during the interview he gave at the detention centre of Amygdaleza in 2012, when he defended the choice of naming the then newly launched police operation to capture irregular migrants around Greece so as to deport them after the ancient Greek god of hospitality: The country, the society, reserves to itself the right to host those whom it wishes itself to host. This is the semiology of the name [Xenios Zeus]. We do not have the obligation to host whomever judges that they wish to cross the borders clandestinely. […] We are an organised society, we want to show everyone that we are not a fenceless vineyard, that not everyone who crosses our borders has the right to stay here; it’s not like that, it can no longer be like that. (SKAI, 4 October 2012) And yet, although the conditions under which irregular migrants find themselves in Greece, be it in society at large or inside detention centres, are anything but philoxenous in the conventional sense of the word, the Greek state has practically shown much less Downloaded from euc.sagepub.com at Oxford University Libraries on November 25, 2013