Back in the USSR: The Policy Response to the Ukrainian Refugee Crisis

One month after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, nearly 4 million people have fled the country – a movement of population unseen in Europe since the Second World War. Europe’s response to this exodus has been similarly remarkable; the EU States have shown a degree of solidarity unobserved since the reception of refugees during the Cold War. This extraordinary reaction may well be interpreted as the result of a boundary work process around the perceived collective identity of the protection seekers, the nature of the conflict and the regime of mobility implied.

Nearly 4 million people have fled Ukraine, including over 2 million who have crossed the border into Poland, a month after the beginning of the attack. These figures – excluding an estimated 7 million internally displaced people – dwarf the numbers of the other recent episodes of  “refugee crises” to make this one the largest and fastest that Europe has witnessed since World War II. The political reaction of the European states to this exceptional situation has been widely portrayed as one of unprecedented solidarity. In fact, such a coordinated and generous policy response is unseen in Europe since the reception of refugees during the Cold War. The reasons for such an exceptional political reaction therefore merit further study.

The Revival of Cold War Solidarity

The upsurge of wholehearted solidarity throughout Europe was given legal expression by the unanimous decision of EU member states to activate the Temporary Protection Directive (TPD hereinafter). Drafted 21 years ago in the aftermath of the Yugoslav crisis, this directive had never been triggered before, mainly because of political unwillingness. A few days later, Norway and Switzerland followed suit and activated similarly generous and dormant legal provisions, which also had been adopted at the same time and ignored until now.

In a nutshell, people fleeing Ukraine would obtain facilitated access to the EU, free choice of a country of destination, and prima facie granting of a protection status offering immediate access to full social and economic rights. Such an inclusive legal treatment for protection seekers is unseen in Europe since the reception of refugees from Hungary in 1956 and to some extent from Czechoslovakia in 1968. It marks a remarkable shift away from the “deterrence paradigm” (Gammeltoft-Hansen and Tan, 2017) that has come to dominate asylum policymaking in Europe from the 1980s onward to dissuade protection seekers from arriving in the territory of European states and accessing their asylum systems.

In terms of interstate solidarity, the unanimous decision to activate the TPD can only be compared to the large-scale resettlement schemes established during the Cold War for Hungarian refugees in 1956, and Indochinese boat people in the first years of the crisis.  It is a staggering turnaround of the policy response to the “refugee crisis” of 2015/2016, when member states, failed to implement the EU Emergency Relocation Scheme, and reintroduced internal border controls in a domino fashion, thus triggering the collapse of the Common European Asylum System and resulting in a profound constitutional crisis in Europe (Byrne et al. 2020). More generally, this decision stands in sharp contrast to the competition-like environment in which European states have engaged since the 1980s to insulate themselves from the spontaneous arrival of asylum seekers within their territory.

Three Modes of Boundary Work

While many scholars in migration studies have debated the reasons for such a paradigm shift, I  would argue that some of these interpretations could be seen as the result of “boundary work” (Lamont, 1992; Wimmer 2013) that generates feelings of similarity and group membership with those fleeing Ukraine in three distinct, yet interrelated ways.

First, inclusive boundaries are drawn around the perceived identity of those fleeing Ukraine, at the intersection of ethnicity, social class, and gender. In public debates, Ukrainians are widely portrayed as Europeans, defined not only in geographical but also civilizational terms, suggesting that this exceptional political reaction is driven by the perception of cultural and ethnic similarity, and thus closely linked to processes of racialization. Yet, the reference to cultural similarity also serves as a social class marker, as Ukrainian refugees are perceived as better educated and more qualified than other refugees, and their access to the labor market in host societies is thus considered less challenging. Moreover, this inclusive boundary work is clearly gendered, as the overwhelming majority of the persons fleeing are women and children, traditionally perceived as posing less of a security threat than their male counterparts.

Second, the outpouring of public and political support for Ukrainian refugees is driven by a collective representation of the nature of the conflict they are fleeing from. For a wider audience, this interstate war of aggression appears to be much more understandable than the intra-state conflicts that have generated most forced displacements since the end of the Cold War. Furthermore, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has also been portrayed as a war against Europe and its liberal democratic values in what appears as the defining conflict of our time for many observers. In those circumstances, we might observe a return to the ideological refugee policy of the Cold War, where the reception of opponents of communist countries was a way of affirming the moral and ideological superiority of the “West” over the Soviet bloc. Similarly, welcoming people fleeing Ukraine may well be framed as confirmation of the moral and ideological superiority of liberal democracies over authoritarian regimes like Putin’s contemporary Russia.

The third mode of boundary work concerns the regime of mobility implied. Exempt from visa requirements, Ukrainian refugees have a major advantage over most protection seekers; they do not have to turn to irregular entry and migrant smugglers to access European asylum states. While this privileged mobility can be regarded as the institutionalization of the two boundaries outlined above, it generates its own dynamic of boundary making in the collective imagination. Because their mobility is not illegalized, Ukrainian refugees are not the objects of the “Border Spectacle” (De Genova, 2013) that has rendered the “illegality” of other protection seekers’ mobility highly visible since the 1990s. As such, their cross-border movement is not embedded in the security continuum – i.e. the discursive and institutional linkage of irregular migration, organized crime, and terrorism – that has accompanied the other refugee flows and provoked a recurrent call for more stringent border controls to combat irregular migration and migrant smuggling.

Replicating the Ukrainian Example in Future Asylum Policies?

This brief overview shows that the exceptionally inclusive and coordinated political reaction towards Ukrainian refugees is primarily driven by a process of boundary work around their perceived identity, the nature of the conflict they are fleeing from, and the regime of mobility implied. As such, it confirms historical analyses showing that asylum has been granted in the name of moral and/or legal obligations, but only when other state interests, such as domestic policy, geopolitics, economics, demography, have also been served (Schuster, 2004; Stünzi and Miaz, 2020). This suggests that the generous political response towards Ukrainian refugees is unlikely to be replicated in the case of protection seekers falling beyond the boundaries outlined above, despite legitimate efforts to recall states that the decision to welcome them is primarily a question of political will.

Robin Stünzi is the Education Officer of the nccr – on the move. He wrote a doctoral thesis on the securitization of the Swiss politics of asylum from a historical perspective. His research focuses on the Swiss and European politics of migration and asylum, on the movements of refugees and the integration of the second generation.

References:

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–  De Genova, Nicholas (2013). Spectacles of migrant ‘illegality’: the scene of exclusion, the obscene of inclusion. Ethnic and racial studies, 36(7), 1180-1198.
–  Gammeltoft-Hansen, Thomas, and Nikolas F. Tan (2017). The end of the deterrence paradigm? Future directions for global refugee policy, Journal on Migration and Human Security 5 (1), 28-56.
–  Lamont, Michèle (1992). Money, Morals, and Manners: The Culture of the French and American Upper-Middle Class. Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press.
–  Schuster, Liza (2004). The use and abuse of political asylum in Britain and Germany.
–  Stünzi, Robin and Jonathan Miaz (2020). Le discours sur les abus dans le domaine de l’asile: contexte d’émergence dans une perspective historique et européenne. In Leyvraz, Anne-Cécile, et al. (2020). Asile et abus. Asyl und Missbrauch: Regards pluridisciplinaires sur un discours dominant. Multidisziplinäre Perspektiven auf einen vorherrschenden Diskurs. Seismo.
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– Wimmer, Andreas (2013). Ethnic boundary making: Institutions, power, networks. Oxford University Press.
– Zieck, Marjoleine (2013), The 1956 Hungarian Refugee Emergency, an Early and Instructive Case of Resettlement (June 29, 2013). Amsterdam Law Forum, Vol. 5, No. 2, 45-63.