A Call for Solidarity with All Refugees, Beyond Double Standards!

Since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, two observations among others, are haunting many social scientists: First, unprecedented solidarity of European states and their people with refugees fleeing Ukraine. Second, a double standard applied to other refugee groups from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq or African countries. These two observations seem to be at least partially intertwined. The unprecedented solidarity seems Janus-faced, as it not only reinforces the idea of other, undeserving refugee groups but also creates unequal treatment. Yet, it is time to seize the momentum of solidarity to extend it to all refugees.

Countless examples bear witness to the encompassing solidarity of European states and their people with refugees fleeing Ukraine. People send money or goods to refugees in Poland, civil society initiatives in support of the refugees are mushrooming, and many open their private homes to host refugees. The EU introduced a temporary protection directive; similarly, Switzerland instated the temporary S permit – a permit that had been created after the Yugoslav Wars but had never been used before. Railway companies – among them the Swiss Federal Railways – offer free travel for refugees from Ukraine, a never before seen gesture.

While the civil society has of course initiated manifold acts of solidarity at various moments in time – in 2015, or during the Yugoslav Wars – on this particular occasion, States, Universities, and private companies also show support toward the Ukrainian refugees. We can, of course, partly understand this high degree of solidarity by the immediacy of the war and the tragedies we witness every day. Additionally, among refugee scholars, it is a well-known pattern that neighboring countries generally host the big share of refugees (predominantly in the so-called Global South). Yet, as I will show, unfortunately, it is also possible to observe the double standards currently at stake, which lead to highly unequal treatment between different refugee groups.

Solidarity Toward People Represented as White, Christian Europeans

A first piece in understanding the puzzle of this all-encompassing solidarity is that Ukrainians are presented as Europeans. In the words of Philippe Corbé, the head of the political service of BFM TV: “They’re not Syrians but refugees who look like us(…)We’re talking about Europeans who are leaving in their cars that look like our cars, and who are just trying to save their lives.” Yet, who is considered European and therefore like ‘us,’ belonging to the group we refer to as ‘us’ is not inherently natural, nor does it correspond to a set of allegedly objective cultural or phenotypical attributes – after all culture, similarly to race, is a mere social construct.

It is, therefore, rather a question of geopolitics, historical legacies, boundary work, categorizations, which all are related to the politics of power. In other words, presenting Ukrainians as white European refugees who look like us reinforces feelings of membership and solidarity within Europe (it looks like many Europeans still connect to this imaginary which clashes with the reality of highly diversified European post-migration societies), while simultaneously establishing a hierarchy and excluding non-white refugees who a priori are considered as non-Europeans.

Traces of the former cold-war narrative based on a moral and geopolitical hierarchization between the West/Europe and the East/Soviet Union, namely the evil others, can also be observed. Moreover, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine revived this narrative which is illustrated, for example, by the many allusions to the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary or the 1968 one in Czechoslovakia (an example, the Swiss Federal Councilor Karin Keller-Sutter, Head of the Federal Department of Justice and Police FDJP). According to this revived narrative logic, Ukrainians belong to ‘us’, the Europeans, while ironically, during the cold war Ukraine was part of this ‘evil other’ (Achermann 2022).

The Double Standards

As it becomes clear, this representation of Ukrainians as Europeans highlights issues, recognized by many scholars before, related to the colonial legacies of European Asylum systems (Krause 2021) or more generally, to global hierarchies and ideologies of Western dominance, according to which Europe is seen as superior to the rest of the world (Quijano 2008).

A correspondent of CBS News apologized in the NewYorkPost after having said on-air that the war in Ukraine could not be compared to those in Iraq and Afghanistan — as he considered the Eastern European nation more “civilized.” While reporting from Kyiv, he stated that Ukraine “isn’t a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan, that has seen conflict raging for decades. This is a relatively civilized, relatively European — I have to choose those words carefully, too — city, where you wouldn’t expect that or hope that it’s going to happen.”

Beyond the racist and historically inaccurate character of his intervention, this quote also points to a shift in the opposition between ‘us’ and ‘them’ according to nationalism to what Brubaker (2018) called “civilizationism.” The idea of a civilizational threat from Islam gave rise to an identarian “Christianism” and a secularist posture, which in turn can be interpreted as a twist of the old-established orientalist representations (Said 1976). As indeed, the Spanish Vox party leader said bluntly: “Anyone can understand the difference between these flows and the invasions of young, military-age males of Muslim origin that have been launched against Europe’s borders.”

This hierarchization and the double standards become also evident through the many witnesses who reported racial profiling of refugees crossing the border to Poland (one among many examples here). Black refugees were, at times, pushed back at the border. As Elzbieta M. Gozdziak states, the violence of a racialized boundary work between deserving and undeserving refugees was crystallized at the Polish-Ukrainian border.

The immediate danger to which the population in Ukraine is subjected is discursively instrumentalized to reinforce a boundary between the deserving and the undeserving refugees. According to the Neue Zürcher Zeitung: “They are real refugees this time… We see the suffering of these people. No one can deny the danger they are in. It’s different with many migrants who came to Europe in the past as supposed refugees.” The reasons any other refugees might have for requesting asylum in Europe are discredited by a simplistic and inaccurate opposition. The tragedy of the refugees from Ukraine is misused to defame other refugees.

A Nationalist, Gendered Narrative

The narrative of the true and deserving refugees is, moreover, highly gendered and anchored in a nationalist logic. In the same article of the NZZ, it is stated that: “While the men in Kharkiv and Kyiv are fighting for their homeland and making sure their wives and children get to safety, in earlier years it was strikingly often young men who came to Europe from other continents. They left their families behind.” Many scholars have pointed to the ways nationalism and the nation-state logic bring up particular constructions of masculinities and femininities. One of them is the male hero who defends his mother/fatherland.

As Leandra Bias states, male bodies are used as weapons in war. This nationalist gendered narrative is again mobilized to discredit other male refugees who flee from other contexts (see also here). Furthermore, one of the strongest narratives observed in Europe in the last decades is the one about the Muslim refugee as a threat to security, as a terrorist who is violent towards ‘our’ women (Wyss & Fischer 2021). These clashing discursive constructions – the male hero versus the male villain – create again a double standard and can be considered as another facet of the construction of the deservingness of other refugees.

A Way Forward

How to support this encompassing solidarity towards Ukrainian refugees without introducing these double standards? Solidarity is not naturally demonstrated, nor is it natural to belong to a group. Naturalizing any solidarity is dangerous as it can fade away soon and easily. Yet, we are witnessing not only an unprecedented wave of solidarity, but also the blatant double standards and violence of the European and Swiss asylum systems. It is time to seize this momentum of solidarity to extend it to all refugees. The warm welcome of refugees from Ukraine gives us the leverage to improve conditions for all refugees

Janine Dahinden is a professor of Transnational Studies at the Maison d’analyse des processus sociaux (MAPS) of the University of Neuchâtel and a Project Leader of the nccr – on the move.

Further reading:

– Achermann, Christin (2022). Comments of my blog.
– Rogers Brubaker (2017). Between nationalism and civilizationism: the European populist moment in comparative perspective, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 40 (8), 1191–1226.
– Krause, Ulrike (2021). Colonial roots of the 1951 Refugee Convention and its effects on the global refugee regime. Journal of International Relations and Development 24, 599–626.
– Quijano, Aníbal (2000). Coloniality of Power and Eurocentrism in Latin America. International Sociology 15 (2), 215–32.
– Said, Edward (1978). Orientalism. Pantheon Books.
– Wyss, Anna & Fischer, Carolin (2021). Männlichkeit im Spannungsfeld: Auswirkungen ambivalenter Darstellungen afghanischer Geflüchteter in Deutschland und der Schweiz. Z’Flucht : Zeitschrift für Flucht- und Flüchtlingsforschung, 5(1), 44–76.