Europe and the Refugee Response

A Crisis of Values?

Elżbieta M. Goździak, Izabella Main, Brigitte Suter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000036411
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Políticas europeas

This book explores how the rising numbers of refugees entering Europe from 2015 onwards played into fears of cultural, religious, and ethnic differences across the continent. The migrant, or refugee crisis, prompted fierce debate about European norms and values, with some commentators questioning whether mostly Muslim refugees would be able to adhere to these values, and be able to integrate into a predominantly Christian European society. In this volume, philosophers, legal scholars, anthropologists and sociologists, analyze some of these debates and discuss practical strategies to reconcile the values that underpin the European project with multiculturalism and religious pluralism, whilst at the same time safeguarding the rights of refugees to seek asylum.

Country case studies in the book are drawn from France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom; representing states with long histories of immigration, countries with a more recent refugee arrivals, and countries that want to keep refugees at bay and refuse to admit even the smallest number of asylum seekers. Contributors in the book explore the roles which national and local governments, civil society, and community leaders play in these debates and practices, and ask what strategies are being used to educate refugees about European values, and to facilitate their integration.

At a time when debates on refugees and European norms continue to rage, this book provides an important interdisciplinary analysis which will be of interest to European policy makers, and researchers across the fields of migration, law, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, and political science.

The Open Access version of this book, available at

https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9780429279317, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license

1 European norms and values and the refugee crisis

Issues and challenges

Elżbieta M. Goździak and Izabella Main

Deaths and suffering of migrants trying to enter Europe have become one of the defining moral and political issues of our time. Many humanitarian organizations and refugee advocates argue that these deaths result from Europe’s policy of exclusion and closure. Others, especially those who claim that asylum seekers, particularly Muslims, constitute a threat to ‘European values’ call for even stricter border controls to resolve the ‘refugee crisis.’

Contesting the crisis narrative

Is it a crisis? What kind of a crisis? It certainly does not seem to be a ‘refugee’ crisis, because the people fleeing armed conflicts and prosecution are not the problem. Catherine Woollard, the Secretary General of the European Council on Refugees and Exiles (ECRE), posits that what is often called ‘the refugee crisis’ is in fact ‘a deep European political crisis which unrolled in 2015/2016, paralyzing decision-making and creating deep, probably irreparable, divisions between EU Member States’ (Woollard 2018: 150).

There is no denying that large numbers of asylum seekers and migrants reached Europe in recent years. According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 34,196 refugees have risked their lives reaching Europe by sea in the first half of 2019. In previous years the numbers were much higher. In 2017, over 105,000 refugees and migrants entered Europe. In 2016, an estimated 362,000 refugees and migrants risked their lives crossing the Mediterranean Sea, with 181,400 people arriving in Italy, and 173,450 in Greece. The highest number of arrivals – 1,015,078 – was recorded in 2015. More than 800,000 of them were smuggled by sea from Turkey to Greece, and the majority continued to travel through Europe to reach Germany and Sweden.¹

These are indeed large numbers, but do they constitute a ‘crisis’? Today’s exodus from the Middle East pales in comparison with the situation Germany faced, and surmounted, after World War II. At the end of WWII, there were some 11 million displaced people in Germany alone. They were slave laborers, prisoners of war, and Holocaust survivors. The Germans who had lived in Eastern Europe were being expelled from Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary. The arrival of several million newcomers in Europe in recent years presents real challenges, of course, but a prosperous European Union with a population in excess of 500 million has the means to overcome them, doesn’t it?

There are also those who perished in trying to reach Europe by sea. Who could forget the small, lifeless body of three-year-old Syrian toddler Alan Kurdi found on a Turkish beach in September 2015? Although the number of arrivals in Europe has drastically decreased since Alan’s death, people continue to attempt the journey, and many have lost their lives in the process. According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), between the beginning of 2014 through August 2019, close to 19,000 migrants have died trying to cross the Mediterranean and reach Europe.² The death of each and every one of those who perished is a crisis for their loved ones, but it is also a crisis of values as governments continue to criminalize the rescue operations (HRAS 2019). As we write this introduction in August 2019, 507 migrants and refugees are stranded on two rescue vessels, which picked them up of off the coast of Libya. The UN’s Refugee Agency (UNHCR) made an urgent appeal for the refugees to be allowed to disembark, calling it a ‘race against time’ as bad weather approaches (Squires 2019). While some are trying to rescue refugees to avert a true crisis, others continue to propagate the crisis narrative.

Reinhart Koselleck (2006) shows how ‘crisis,’ a concept which the Greeks used to delineate stark alternatives – right or wrong, salvation or damnation, life or death – has constantly framed modern ideas of history. Migration scholars, however, argue that face-value acceptance of crisis narratives related to recent flight of asylum seekers to Europe results in viewing and managing migration according to binary divisions: integration versus segregation, modernity versus cultural backwardness, the deserving versus the undeserving, and through the manufactured dichotomy between refugees and economic migrants (Crawley & Skleparis 2018; McMahon & Sigona 2018).

Cautionary lectures by migration scholars notwithstanding, politicians have certainly been exploiting the powerful narrative of ‘crisis’ as a political tactic. Sebastian Kurz, the Federal Chancellor of Austria and a rising star of Europe’s center right, in an article published in Time magazine in 2017, invoked ‘crisis’ multiple times. He paired the term with phrases such as ‘loss of control,’ ‘overwhelmed by developments,’ ‘a huge challenge for our country,’ ‘regain control,’ and ‘find solutions’ (Kurz 2017). For Sebastian Kurz, ‘the “migration and refugee crisis” was not just an objective state of affairs: it was also a political tactic to present himself to a global Anglophone readership as a firm but measured state leader’ (Dines et al. 2018: 440).

Viktor Orbán, the Prime Minister of Hungary, has exploited the crisis narrative to defend his draconian measures aimed not only at barring refugees from Hungary, but also at criminalizing assistance to refugees and migrants. When some 400,000, mainly Muslim, refugees and asylum-seekers crossed the Serbian-Hungarian border, and descended on the Keleti Railway Station in Budapest in 2015, Viktor Orbán did not see the refugees fleeing war-torn countries as a humanitarian challenge but as a Muslim invasion that required an appropriate response: closing the Balkan land route to the European Union (Goździak & Márton 2018), and pressing the ‘moral panic button’ (Gerő & Sik, this volume). His friend, Jarosław Kaczyński, the president of the Law and Justice party in Poland, has also been making the most of the crisis narrative despite the fact that, with the exception of some Chechens, there are virtually no refugees in Poland (Klaus, this volume).

Both Orbán and Kaczyński use the crisis narrative to talk about the threat that Muslim refugees pose to the Christian identity of Europe and call for protection of ‘European values.’ The Hungarian media likened the current ‘migration crisis’ to the Ottoman era ‘when Hungary was a “bastion,” defending Christianity from “Muslim hordes”’ (Pall & Sayfo 2016: 6). Antal Rogán, at the time leader of the Hungarian Fidesz’ parliamentary group, warned of a future ‘United European Caliphate’ (Villányi 2015), while former Secretary of State László L. Simon urged Hungarians to make more babies in order to counter the negative cultural effects of mass migration such as the envisioned ‘impending victory of Islamic parties imposing polygamy and destroying the remainder of European culture’ (Simon 2015: 231). These political statements have been used to strengthen the discourse about Christian identity of Europe and to portray refugees as terrorists despite the fact that neither Hungary nor Poland have ever experienced a terrorist attack, and those that launched terrorist attacks on different European cities were born in Europe. However, as Hasan (2012: 61) argues, ‘propaganda against Islam and Muslims is nothing new in the West. […] Europeans always constructed Islam as a civilizational adversary and the religion, an antithesis of European values.’

What are ‘European values’?

There are multiple interpretations of ‘European values.’ The expression is often subject to different uses and misuses, by individuals, and institutions. The European Union and its member states refer to the EU Treaties, with the clearest expression of values in Article 2 of the Treaty of the European Union (TEU). Article 2 states: ‘The EU is founded on the values of respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law, and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities’ (TEU). These quintessentially democratic values are shared by other democracies outside the European Union, and outside the European continent – countries like New Zealand, and Canada come immediately to mind – therefore calling them ‘European values’ seems a little presumptuous.

Recently, ‘European values’ have been invoked both to support refugees and migrants and to attack them. On one hand, demagogues such as Viktor Orbán have positioned themselves as defenders of a Christian Europe, and enacted anti-migrant policies to protect Europe from being overrun by Muslims. On the other hand, humanitarians often appeal to a vision of Europe ‘As a community of nations that has overcome war and fought totalitarianism’ (Barroso 2012). In his acceptance speech of the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the EU in 2012, José Manuel Barroso (2012), President of the European Commission, assured his audience that the European community ‘will always stand by those who are in pursuit of peace and human dignity.’

Daniel Trilling (2018) asserts that the visions of Europe promulgated by Orbán and Barroso are wrong. Orbán’s rendition omits the fact that Europe is a diverse continent, in which Christian, Muslim, Jewish, and secular traditions have been present for centuries. Orbán’s vision also claims that refugees and asylum seekers present a threat to ‘European’ traditions of tolerance, freedom, and democracy. History reminds us that these principles have been fought for and won, usually against the violent resistance of European elites. Ironically, many of the refugees seeking safe haven in Europe have struggled for the same values and rights in their home countries.

The vision endorsed by humanitarians such as Barroso presents Europe as a beacon of hope to the rest of the world. Trilling (2018) argues that Europe is in the position to affect the world for better or worse and pressing politicians to live up to such an ideal is certainly worthwhile. However, he further argues:

The aspiration will remain unfulfilled if we ignore the fact that while the nations of Europe have overcome war and fought totalitarianism, many of these same nations became rich and powerful by conquering and administering huge empires, which were partially justified by the idea of European racial supremacy. And European unity, in its founding documents, was conceived of as a way of maintaining imperial power, as well as preventing future conflict in Europe.

(Ibid. 2018)

Let’s not forget the history of Europe. Let’s also remember that European racism is not a thing of the past and that Europeans need continued education about racism, and skills to fight it (see Mosse, this volume).

Which values are at risk?

Taking stock of the actions implemented to solve the Mediterranean crises and the wider European political crisis on migrant and refugee protection, Catherine Woollard (2018) concludes that the solutions seriously undermined Europe’s values, both directly and indirectly. ‘Human dignity is clearly absent in the conditions in which refugees and migrants find themselves in Europe and in the countries in which they are stuck as a result of European action,’ she writes (Woollard 2018: 151). In this volume, several authors provide examples of lack of respect for human dignity. In Ventimiglia, local politicians on both sides of the Italian-French border, have created a hostile environment, where the presence of migrants was not welcomed and attempts were made to encourage the disappearance of migrants from the area by denying them housing spaces, prohibiting food distribution, and expelling them from the territory of the city (Aris Escarcena, this volume). In Germany, the Willkommenskultur approach to refugees early on (Hermann, this volume) has shifted and detentions and deportations have increased resulting in a polarized nation fearful that more migration will lead to a greater divide in society (Günther, this volume).

Human dignity is also undermined in the ways refugees and migrants are portrayed by the media, and by politicians. Migration is often discussed in military terms – words and phrases such as invasion, threat, defense of borders – are used along with either openly or insidiously racist or Islamophobic commentaries. Framing the current ‘refugee crisis’ as a security threat is part of a broader and older attempt to portray migration across international borders as a security risk. Once it was announced that the nineteen hijackers, who attacked the Twin Towers in New York City, the Pentagon in Washington, DC, and crashed a plane in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, were foreign nationals, those critical of the U.S. immigration system argued that the government must use all available means to protect the national security of the country. The critics called for ‘enhancing and enlarging the border security functions of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS)’ (Chebel d’Appollonia 2012: 1). Within a few days, the Immigration and Nationality Act was adopted, and a series of reforms aimed at implementing immigration restrictions, including detention of foreign-born individuals without charge, began.

Terrorist attacks in Paris, Brussels, and Niece have sparked similar assertions in Europe despite the fact that the terrorists were French and Belgian citizens. Facts notwithstanding, policy-makers on both sides of the Atlantic allege that human smuggling and human trafficking are a conduit for international terrorism. On September 20, 2001, the Council of the European Union called for strengthening of surveillance measures, including vigilance in issuing residency permits, and systematic checking of identity papers, under article 2.3 of the Schengen Convention. The bombings of Madrid on March 11, 2004 and London on July 7, 2005 further consolidated the national security policies in Europe.

However, these anti-immigrant sentiments and conceptualizations of migrants as criminals and terrorists predate the terrorist attacks by at least a decade or more. In the 1990s, conservative discourses identified multiculturalism as a cause of societal disintegration. The best-known version of this kind of discourse is Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations (1996). It mediates the differentiation between us and them by identifying other peoples and cultures that endanger the survival of the home culture. Migration is identified as being one of the main elements weakening national tradition and threatening societal homogeneity. The current debates in Europe (and elsewhere) also contribute to ‘othering’ refugees and migrants, which is another way to strip people of their dignity.

The human rights that are not respected start with the most basic and most important right: the right to life, which is undermined by the ceasing and disruption of search and rescue missions, and criminalization of assistance to asylum seekers. As Aris Escarcena writes in this volume, in extreme cases, such as that of Cedric Herrou, a French farmer who provided support to migrants in the border area between France and Italy, volunteers were convicted for ‘crimes of solidarity’ (Tazzioli & Walters 2019). Carola Rackete, the German captain of a humanitarian rescue ship with 40 migrants aboard, was arrested in June 2019, after she rammed her vessel into an Italian border police motorboat while docking at a tiny Mediterranean island in defiance of Italy’s anti-migrant interior minister, Mateo Salvini. German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas criticized the Italian decision to arrest the captain. ‘Saving lives is a humanitarian duty,’ he said on Twitter. ‘Rescue at sea m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• 1. European norms and values and the refugee crisis: issues and challenges
• 2. Echoes of memories of forced displacement: the case of the Greek island of Lesvos
• 3. Against the expansion of racism: the experience of the Camp des Milles
• 4. The Moral Panic Button: construction and consequences
• 5. Abolishing asylum and violating the human rights of refugees. Why is it tolerated?: the case of Hungary in the EU
• 6. Between closing borders to refugees and welcoming Ukrainian workers: Polish migration law at the crossroads
• 7. Debating deportation detention in Germany: the many faces of the rule of law
• 8. Integration by contract and the ‘values of the Republic’: investigating the French State as a value promoter for migrants (2003–2016)
• 9. Box-ticking exercise or real inclusion? challenges of including refugees’ perspectives in EU policy
• 10. Being a ‘refuge-city’: welcoming rhetorics in Paris and Barcelona
• 11. Holding course: civil society organizations’ value expressions in the Swedish legislative consultation system before and after 2015
• 12. Community-based sponsorship of refugees resettling in the UK: British values in action?
• 13. Crisis and Willkommenskultur: civil society volunteering for refugees in Germany
• 14. Cosmopolitanism at the crossroads: Swedish immigration policy after the 2015 refugee crisis
• 15. (Un)Deserving refugees: contested access to the ‘community of value’ in Italy
• 16. Christian charity as the last line of defense for migrants in Ventimiglia
• 17. Proclaiming and practicing pro-immigration values in Poland: a case study of Poznań
• 18. Concluding thoughts
• Index