Crisis and Politicisation

The Framing and Re-framing of Europe’s Permanent Crisis

Benedetta Voltolini, Michal Natorski, Colin Hay, Benedetta Voltolini, Michal Natorski, Colin Hay

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000395273
• Subtopic: Diplomacy & Treaties
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book elucidates the link between the politics of a now seemingly permanent crisis in Europe and the politicisation of European integration. Looking at the epistemic dimension of crises, it suggests that the way in which a crisis is framed and contested determines its potential impact on the level of politicisation of European integration.

Europe is more challenged and contested today than it has even been, facing crisis of an almost existential kind. Yet, political crises are manufactured and narrated, so Europe has the possibility to intervene and 'bring about her recovery', instead of letting these crises prove terminal. This book explores the political process in and through which certain events come to be framed as constitutive of a moment that requires a decisive intervention. It shows that crises require a double framing: a situation needs to be identified as one of crisis in the first place and, subsequently, the nature and character of the crisis need to be specified. By examining a wide range of policy areas, the book demonstrates that framing of crises, i.e., identifying one situation both as a crisis and a crisis of a particular kind, contributes to the politicisation (or depoliticisation) of the process of European integration.

The chapters in this book were originally published as special issue of Journal of European Integration.

OPEN ACCESS

Politicizing support and opposition to migration in France: the EU asylum policy crisis and direct social activism

Pietro Castelli Gattinara

and Lorenzo Zamponi

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the migration policy crisis in France to illustrate how social movements contribute to the epistemic construction of ‘crises’ of European Integration. To tackle politicization, we compare the framing and mobilization choices by grassroots actors in solidarity with asylum-seekers and groups aiming to defend national borders from them. Using original Protest Event data and 21 face-to-face interviews, we find that the construction of the crisis as a policy failure crucially reshaped mobilization on both sides of the conflict. Specifically, direct social actions allowed the two camps to respond to a context perceived as critical, politicizing the crisis in light of the declining trust in representative institutions, while also responding to the growing demand for efficacy and concreteness. The findings offer novel empirical insight on movement–countermovement interactions and contribute to the scholarly debate on the relation between crises and the politicisation of contentious issues in Europe.

Introduction

This article focuses on how social movements react to emergency circumstances and mobilize during situations described as crises. The main argument is that the way in which collective actors cope with perceived crises has to do with how they understand and frame the public problems at stake. Most notably, collective actors might reconfigure their mobilization strategy to accommodate the specific demands of times of crisis (Bosi and Zamponi 2020). These choices, in turn, might reshape the way in which crises are politicized, increasing the salience of specific public problems, expanding the range of contrasting actors, and polarizing the content of public debates (Grande and Hutter 2016). To this goal, we look at the impact of the European migrant crisis as a dimension of the broader process of politicization of the EU, assessing the reaction by collective actors supporting asylum-seekers and groups mobilizing against their arrival in France.¹

We illustrate that the migrant crisis reshaped the available space for contention on both sides of political conflict in France, and facilitated the diffusion of specific forms of actions aiming at exerting a direct impact on society. In addition to their material effects, these Direct Social Actions (DSAs) politicized the need for decisive intervention in support of – but also against – refugees. In line with the remits of this Special Issue, therefore, the article suggests that collective action choices participate to the epistemic construction of crisis, since even though unexpected events may have material bases, it is their perception and interpretation that makes them ‘crises’.

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.

In the following sections, we discuss the linkages between the EU migration policy crisis and European integration and illustrate our argument concerning the expected role of DSAs in the process of politicization. We then present our data and the choice to focus on France as a case study. Using original Protest Event Analysis data and 21 face-to-face interviews, the empirical analysis discusses the evolution of mobilization over time, offering an in-depth account of the interaction between contrasting camps and the relationship between collective action and politicization. The concluding section offers a general reflection on how grassroots mobilization in response to highly visible humanitarian emergencies within the EU borders nourished the construction of the European crisis as a policy failure.

The migration crisis, mobilization and the politicization of Europe

By looking at mobilization during the 2015 asylum emergency, this paper tackles the question of how the politics of permanent crisis influence the politicization of Europe. Previous scholarship in fact suggests that the politicization of EU integration has been associated to a series of groundbreaking events, such as the subsequent enlargement waves but also landmark shocks like the Great Recession, Brexit, and the refugee crisis (Pirro and Taggart 2018). The latter holds a particular importance, configuring a veritable critical juncture in the politicization of the EU (Hutter and Kriesi 2019). The 2015 emergency, in fact, siphoned migration policy at the core of public debates about Europe and turned the issue of asylum into one the most controversial topics in the European integration process (Della Porta 2018; Castelli Gattinara 2017). The asylum policy crisis is in fact closely connected to core EU issues like the tearing down of internal border controls and the less successful efforts to build a common external border and foreign policy. Hence, the migrant crisis had critical repercussions for European integration, reinforcing pre-existing centripetal forces within the union, eroding the consensus for solidarity with frontline states, and triggering the renationalization of border control policies and other measures to reinstate the national sovereignty of individual member states (Colombeau 2019).

Yet, the 2015 emergency was not simply a result of the sheer number of arrivals to the EU, nor it merely stemmed from the strategic use of the term ‘crisis’ – which had long been routine in debates on this issue (Alcalde 2016). Indeed, civil society mobilization on this issue is by no means a new phenomenon, both in terms of migrant and solidarity activism (Koopmans et al. 2005; Eggert and Giugni 2015) and anti-immigration street politics (Castelli Gattinara and Pirro 2019). If the recent inflow of asylum seekers did not configure an unfamiliar situation, national governments in the EU appeared critically unprepared to provide humanitarian intervention. This triggered a perception that the policies and regulations in place were unfit to address what was presented as an emergency, justifying calls for urgent and atypical decisions. The 2015 ‘summer’ of migration (Hess and Kasparek 2017), thus, came to configure a critical turning point, whereby the occurrence of a relatively unexpected event was framed discursively as a crisis to justify decisive interventions (Hay 1996).

In our understanding, these exceptional circumstances relate to the mobilization choices of grassroots actors in two main ways, which we deem crucial to understand the construction of the migration crisis in the EU. First, moments of perceived crisis might facilitate the development of new forms of political engagement, on both sides of the conflict. Perceived emergencies, in fact, reshape the available space for contention by collective actors, and reconfigure their network of potential allies and opponents (Della Porta 2018; Fontanari and Borri 2017). Second, moments of crisis might be associated with the diffusion of specific forms of mobilization, because collective action choices carry alternative interpretations of the issue at stake (Simonneau and Castelli Gattinara 2019). Notably, emergencies might propel Direct Social Actions (DSAs), i.e. forms of engagement that – rather than demanding the intermediation of the state – aim at producing a direct effect on society (Bosi and Zamponi 2015). Opting for this specific form of action, in fact, conveys the idea that a problem requires decisive, immediate, intervention. In sum, by reconfiguring their repertoires of contention, collective actors might respond to the specific demands of efficacy, necessity, and concreteness that characterise moments of perceived crisis. At the same time, these mobilization choices participate to the politicization of the emergency, contributing to its epistemic construction as ‘crises’.

Direct activism and the framing of crises

The idea that crisis circumstances have an impact on collective action rests on two separate streams of research. First, the vast literature on political crises and politicization in Europe. Second, social movement scholarship linking mobilization choices to the specific demands of times of crisis.

Previous research on the politicization of emergencies provides initial support to the idea that mobilization ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: the politicisation of permanent crisis in Europe
• 1 Politicizing support and opposition to migration in France: the EU asylum policy crisis and direct social activism
• 2 ‘Push or pull’? Framing immigration in times of crisis in the European Union and the United States
• 3 Construction of the Eurozone crisis: re- and depoliticising European economic integration
• 4 The Troika in its own words: responding to the politicisation of the southern European crises
• 5 Half-full or half-empty? Framing of UK–EU relations during the Brexit referendum campaign
• 6 A “Europe des Nations”: far right imaginative geographies and the politicization of cultural crisis on Twitter in Western Europe
• 7 United we stand in metaphors: EU authority and incomplete politicisation of the crisis in Ukraine
• 8 Ontological crises, framing and the (de)politicisation of EU foreign policy: the case of EU-Israel relations
• 9 European foreign policy in times of crisis: a political development lens
• Index