740 European Journal of Criminology 10(6) for a range of discontents amongst the Greek public, from heightened socio-economic anxieties, to increased anger with political elites, to a spreading sense of national humiliation before foreign audiences (Cheliotis and Xenakis, 2010, 2011; Xenakis and Cheliotis, 2013b). In this case, the notoriously harsh conditions of conventional imprisonment and immigration detention may be said to have helped unconsciously alleviate the pains of downward mobility and falling living standards for the average Greek citizen, providing him or her with reassurance that they continue to enjoy material advantages over those on the margins of society (and over some foreign population at that). The point here is not so much that immigrants are detained under conditions that remain inferior to those found in free society, as the principle of ‘less eligibility’ stipulates, but rather that free society itself tends to interpret the substandard conditions of imprisonment and immigration detention in terms of personal and in-group superiority – as a form of ‘more eligibility’, as it were (see further Cheliotis, in progress). One should nevertheless take care not to conclude that responsibility for the ways in which immigrants are treated on Greek soil resides exclusively within Greece itself, or even that the case of Greece has no parallels elsewhere in Europe, although neither of these caveats could provide a plausible excuse for immigrants’ plight at the hands of the Greek state. The European Commission, for example, has offered both rhetorical and financial support to Greek state authorities in order for them to strengthen the policing of national borders and territory as an ‘imperative’ for the protection of immigrants’ human rights (IPS, 17 March 2013; see also Human Rights Watch, 2011; Pro Asyl, 2012), whilst Italy has continued summarily to return unaccompanied migrant children and adult asylum seekers to Greece in violation of international law, thereby adding further pressure to an already overcrowded system (Human Rights Watch, 2013b). At the same time, other EU member states have not been immune to the cruel repressive policies and practices adopted against immigrants in Greece, and one can also find occasions where the notion of hospitality is similarly perverted by Greece’s European counterparts so as to justify their own treatment of immigrants and consolidate underlying power hierarchies (see further Borradori, 2003; Hall, 2012). That Greece has been particularly likely to face international disapprobation is no doubt reflective of the exceptional degree to which the country has fallen below, and has even challenged, the very standards of all-inclusive philoxenia she purports to archetypically embody. Arguably, however, the likelihood of disapprobation would not be as strong were it not for Greece’s own marginal political position within Europe (see further Herzfeld, 1992). This brings us full circle back to the social functionality and consequent political expediency of the discourse of philoxenia as applied to the treatment of immigrants and especially immigration detention in contemporary Greece. The country’s peripheral role in the international arena and the adverse conditions that go along with it – a comparatively weak domestic economy, an increased propensity of national governments to accept relations of economic dependency vis-à-vis external powers, a heightened sensitivity to criticism from abroad, and the greater likelihood of foreign disapprobation in itself – raise the susceptibility of the Greek public to self-flattering discourses, and even more so when such discourses can additionally licence exploitation of weaker others as labourers and authorise activities against them through which to act out aggravated anxieties, angers and complexes amidst conditions of financial crisis (see further Cheliotis, in Downloaded from euc.sagepub.com at Oxford University Libraries on November 25, 2013