In recent years, European media and public discourse have been increasingly categorising newcomers using terminology like 'immigrants' and 'refugees'. The aim of this practice is to distinguish ...legitimate from illegitimate newcomers in the wake of the 2015 'refugee crisis' in Europe. Drawing on data from an online survey in Belgium, France, the Netherlands and Sweden (n = 6000) in September and October of 2017, this article investigates how the use of these categories relates to public opinion on 'immigrants' and 'refugees'. Findings show that people hold more positive attitudes towards 'refugees' than towards 'immigrants', a process which is likely driven by media framing. Attitude discrepancies within 'immigrant' and 'refugee' categories are also investigated, as categorical fetishism causes further differentiation of attitudes within these groups. Public opinion differences within 'immigrants' and 'refugees' are found along three cleavages: ethnicity, the economic situation of the origin country, and region of origin. Newcomers with the same ethnicity (vs. a different ethnicity), from 'rich' countries (vs. 'poor' countries), and from European countries (vs. non-European countries) are preferred in both categories. With these findings, this article reveals important aspects of the influence of migrant categorizations on public opinion towards vulnerable groups of newcomers.
This article argues that the activity of walking in Jenny Erpenbeck's 2015 novel Go, Went, Gone (translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky in 2017) is crucial in establishing a singular intimacy ...between its protagonist, the retired professor Richard, and the refugee-subjects of colour who live in precarious circumstances when they arrive in Berlin. It suggests that walking, as an action as well as an activity, triggers a transformation in his negotiations with radical alterity. This can be traced through a gradual shift in Richard's perception of walking from an aesthetic pleasure to its utilisation in matters of ethical urgency. In this manner, it studies the new ethics of flânerie premised on affective and ethical engagements with various others in Erpenbeck's novel.
This article scrutinizes how local responses to irregular migrants vary across European cities. Existing literature shows that cities develop inclusive policies and practices for irregular migrants ...as a response to the restrictive asylum and migration policies of welfare states. This article goes beyond this monolithic understanding of cities by unpacking city actors into local governments and local civil society organizations, as well as exploring various dynamics between them. This benchmarking study builds an overarching urban solidarity typology based on an empirical analysis of policies and practices in 13 European cities between 2015 and 2019, inclusive. Binary coding of collected data leads to an inductively built descriptive typology that consists of analytical categories of urban solidarity (top-down; bottom-up; hybrid; limited). These four different categories reveal that urban solidarity is not one-size-fits-all. It emerges as a spectrum of transformative practices of various actors, as well as a constellation of displays of diverse sets of contentions, solidarity repertoires, compromises, negotiations, and consensus as well as their various combinations over a long period.
•Irregular migrants (undocumented migrants) have fewer rights than refugees and asylum seekers.•Local governments and/or local civil society organisations have a capacity to build urban solidarity for irregular migrants.•Urban solidarity is sum of contentions, compromises, negotiations, and consensus between various actors.•Urban solidarity constructs, deconstructs and reconstructs new possibilities of coexistence in the city.•Urban solidarity is not one-size-fits-all, because it is contextual, fluid, pragmatic, and transformative.
This study examines how citizens made use of online platforms to direct diverging critiques and demands at the Finnish Immigration Service during what has come to be known as the refugee crisis in ...Europe. Focusing on peak periods of debate, identified using big data, we closely observe how public scrutiny of the immigration service occurred in the interactions between online users, the news media and the agency itself. Our analysis indicates that networked publics can be regarded as influential drivers of accountability for government agencies, which often feel obligated to justify their actions to these publics. However, the operation of networked publics as accountability agents remains heavily dependent on the broader public debate, which is still largely shaped by news media organisations, political elites and the officials themselves.
Since the ‘refugee crisis’ in 2015, civil society across Europe has participated in an unprecedented wave of support towards migrants. This article focuses on the volunteers engaged in this movement ...and explores how they relate emotions of compassion and evaluations about the ‘deservingness’ of refugees. We do so by analysing the moral dilemmas British volunteers face in their interaction with refugees, and the strategies they develop to avoid the difficulties that emerge when judging who the ‘deserving’ refugees are. We illustrate how these coping strategies lead them to emphasise the practicality of their role and to move beyond logics of deservingness. We argue that these dilemmatic situations reshape the meaning of compassionate acts in ambivalent ways: while reinforcing a tendency to create an emotional distance, they also allow volunteers to challenge idealised representations of refugees and foreground the political nature of their vulnerability.
Decisiveness and Fear of Disorder examines how democratic representatives make decisions in crisis situations. By analyzing parliamentary asylum debates from Germany’s Asylum Compromise in 1992-1993 ...and the 2015-2016 refugee crisis, Julius Rogenhofer identifies representatives’ ability to project decisiveness as a crucial determinant for whether the rights and demands of irregular migrants were adequately considered in democratic decision-making. Both crisis situations showcase an emotive dimension to the parliamentary meaning-making process. As politicians confront fears of social and political disorder, they focus on appearing decisive in the eyes of the public and fellow representatives, even at the expense of human rights considerations and inclusive deliberation processes. Rogenhofer shows how his theoretical approach allows us to reinterpret a range of crisis situations beyond the irregular migration context, including democracies’ initial responses to Covid-19, the European Sovereign Debt Crisis, and United States climate politics. These additional case studies help position concerns with decisiveness amid the challenges that populism and technocracy increasingly pose to representative democracies.
We review the literature on the rise of identity politics and populism in Europe. Populist parties have gained large vote shares since the Great Recession of 2008. We observe in many countries, and ...even in the European Parliament, a transformation of the main dimension of politics from the left-right cleavage to a new cleavage opposing the mainstream parties to populist parties. We examine how this transformation relates to changes in voter attitudes and the adjustment of political parties to these changes. Two main types of causes for the rise of populism have emerged: economic and cultural. In reviewing the evidence, we find a complex interaction between economic and cultural factors. Economic anxiety among large groups of voters related to the Great Recession and austerity policies triggers a heightened receptivity to the messages of cultural backlash from populist parties.
Commencing with some recent examples drawn from Anglophone media, this introductory article reflects on the multiple ways in which crisis and migration have been interconnected over the last decade ...in public discourse, political debates and academic research. It underlines how crisis has not simply become a key descriptor of specific events, but continues to operate as a powerful narrative device that structures knowledge of migration and shapes policy decisions and governance structures. It explains the rationale for choosing Europe as a multidimensional setting for investigating the diverse links between migration and crisis. It ends with a summary of the contributions that are divided into four thematic strands: relationships between the economic crisis and migrant workers and their families; the Mediterranean in crisis; political and public discourses about the post-2015 ‘migration crisis’; and ethnographies of everyday experiences of the ‘refugee crisis’ on the part of migrants, activists and local people.
This article examines the European Union (EU)'s response to the 2015-2016 refugee crisis. Departing from the understanding that Europe is a contested phenomenon, it investigates how different - ...Thick, Thin, Parochial and Global - Europes influenced the EU's management of the crisis culminating in the March 2016 EU-Turkey 'refugee deal'. Two findings are advanced. First, European actors reacted differently to the EU's initially attempted Thick Europe approach to the crisis, following their respective Europe conceptions. Second, faced with growing divisions, they ultimately united around a lowest common denominator solution represented by the refugee deal which illustrated Thin Europe at the expense of a more norm-based policy associated with Thick and Global Europes. The findings demonstrate the significance of embedding the various European reactions to the crisis within different Europe categories while showing that consensus was still possible to tackle an external problem.
This article engages with the political struggles staged by illegalised migrants and activists in solidarity amid the long summer of migration and the “Greek crisis”. Grounding its analysis on ...Orfanotrofio’s housing squat in Thessaloniki, it narrates how such struggles are articulated to politicise migration and stage the equality of newcomers—migrants and refugees—and locals. Drawing on Jacques Rancière’s political writings and contemporary geographical work on solidarity, the article argues that such struggles not only disrupt the exclusionary ordering of our cities but also construct political spaces and infrastructures of dissensus wherein equals in solidarity discuss common political problems and devise common political strategies. Through the notion of equals in solidarity, the article investigates how the performative enactment of equality can form the basis for solidarities across differences and analyses how some of the tensions that emerge around collective political subjectification are negotiated. Building on this, it explores some of the challenges and limitations that these struggles face in their efforts to transform the existing order of the city.
Resumen
Este artículo explora las luchas políticas de migrantes ilegalizados y activistas en solidaridad entre el “gran verano de la migración” y la “crisis griega”. A través del análisis de la okupa Orfanotrofio en Tesalónica, se analiza cómo la articulación de estas luchas encarna la politización de la migración y la igualdad entre los recién llegados—migrantes y refugiados—y los activistas locales. Apoyado en los escritos políticos de Jacques Rancière y los trabajos de la geografía contemporánea sobre solidaridad, el artículo defiende que además de romper el orden excluyente imperante en nuestras ciudades, estas luchas construyen espacios políticos e infraestructuras de disenso en donde iguales en solidaridad discuten sobre problemas políticos comunes y articulan estrategias políticas conjuntas. A través de la noción “iguales en solidaridad”, el artículo investiga cómo el carácter performativo de esta afirmación de igualdad constituye una base para la solidaridad que trasciende las diferencias, al tiempo que permite el análisis de la negociación de las tensiones colectivas que emergen en los procesos de subjetivación política. Finalmente, se exploran algunos de los desafíos y limitaciones que estas luchas afrontan en su esfuerzo de transformar el orden existente.
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