Authoritarian leaders at Europe’s external borders regularly made it a habit: to drive a wedge between EU member states by triggering a flood of refugees into Europe. Recently, think of the Turkish president Erdogan or the Belarusian dictator Lukashenko. Remarkably, Russian President Putin seems to be failing to do this.
In fact, with hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians fleeing the Russian invasion of their country and moving to neighboring countries, but also to Western Europe and the Netherlands, there seems to be unprecedented unity and solidarity. Even in Hungary and Poland, where until recently refugees and also their helpers were denounced and opposed. citizens are called on to show sympathy for the displaced from Ukraine.
Nowhere in the EU is the venomous anti-immigration rhetoric so often heard from populist politicians when large groups of Syrians and Afghans fleeing Assad and the Taliban arrive. But the indifference to the fate of, for example, Eritreans fleeing the brutal dictatorship in their own country, also contrasts sharply with the dozens of applications that citizen initiatives such as Onderdak Ukraine and RoomforUkraine now receive daily from Dutch people who want to receive Ukrainian refugees in their homes. .
Why is it easier to show solidarity with the Ukrainian refugees than with refugees from the Middle East or Africa? And will this new solidarity also lead to a fair European division of responsibilities when it comes to refugees?
Thea Hilhorst, professor of humanitarian aid at Erasmus University Rotterdam.
‘Solidarity with refugees from Ukraine is an impressive relief after the indifferent chill that has become increasingly prevalent in recent years. I think we have to go back to the refugee flow from the former Yugoslavia of the 1990s to find a similar response. What’s up? Ukrainians are Europeans, our history is intertwined. The shock of the sudden war has the effect of a natural disaster, which always evokes more solidarity than a prolonged conflict.
‘The question is what this will mean for all those other refugees. The chill surrounding migration has to do with geographical and cultural distance, habituation, and mistrust. Are they really refugees? It has undertones of racism and Islamophobia. Above all, migration has become a political issue. It is forgotten that research shows time and again that citizens across Europe show more solidarity than their governments. Perhaps this crisis will further fuel solidarity with refugees.
“However, it is also likely that the crisis in Ukraine is diverting attention and resources to refugees from elsewhere. That would be bad news for Afghans, Uyghurs, Syrians, Yemenis and all those other people who have nowhere to go.’
Nanda Oudejans, senior lecturer in philosophy of law at the University of Amsterdam. She obtained her PhD with a dissertation on the international protection of refugees.
‘Refugee law is a battleground in which conflicts about identity and the distribution of power are fought. The 1951 UN Refugee Convention was already called a Cold War document: every refugee from the former Eastern Bloc was seen as a sign of the failure of communism and as a victory of the West. The intuition that refugee law revolves around ‘The Other’, the stranger who disrupts our identity with his arrival, is wrong. Because time and again we appear to be especially willing to receive refugees who look like us. Refugees who look like us are seen as real refugees who deserve our protection.
‘Refugee law therefore mainly confirms who and what we are. It is difficult to recognize people fleeing war who are not like us as real refugees worthy of our protection. They belong in the region to which they must return as soon as possible. Contrary to what you might think, our interaction with refugees, after all, perpetuates the dichotomy between our own and the foreign.
“I have little hope that the responsibility we rightly take for Ukrainian refugees will lead to a new solidarity with refugees from other continents.”
Leo Lucassen, director of the International Institute of Social History and professor at Leiden University.
‘History shows that it is easier to identify with people from the same region and who you think – wrongly or not – have roughly the same culture. Especially if such agreements are emphasized by the media and politicians (‘they are Christians’). Closely related to this is that these refugees are the result of a political conflict that affects us directly as a member of the EU and NATO and that has deep roots in the Cold War. There was also a lot of compassion for Hungarians in 1956 and the Czechoslovaks in 1968 who fled the communist regime.
‘It is at least as important that we cannot separate this solidarity from the xenophobic and Islamophobic climate of recent decades, in which refugees from Islamic countries or with a different skin color in particular are wrongly portrayed as a major cultural threat. Whether this will lead to new solidarity is therefore highly questionable. The fact-free ideas trumpeted by radical right-wing politicians such as Wilders, Baudet and Eerdmans that half of Africa is about to move in this direction and that refugees with an Islamic background do not share ‘our values’ – also politically – are already too much. established.’
Eduard Nazarski, former director of the Dutch Council for Refugees and Amnesty International Netherlands.
‘In its annual report for 1999, the Council for Refugees noted that the 4,000 Kosovars in the Netherlands who had fled the Serbian violence and the NATO bombing were bombarded with attention and hugs. Now we see a similar compassion towards people fleeing Ukraine. Common factor in these situations: a common enemy, a clear aggressor. This factor applies much less to other situations of war or oppression. That is why I do not think that the now usual anti-migration discourse will give way to solidarity with all refugees, although refugee law prescribes this.
‘It is conceivable that the EU is now entering a phase where the stalled discussion about the redistribution of refugees will receive a new impulse. That discussion started from the northwest of the EU, and led to a situation where the southern countries were left on their own. If indeed several million people are going to flee Ukraine, then Poland and Hungary, hitherto staunchly against redistribution, will urge other countries to take some people over. Perhaps that will finally lead to practical and fair agreements about the distribution of all refugees.’