By Vassilios Paipais

Refugees roaming Greece’s central highways heading for the Greek borders

Last Wednesday, Vienna hosted a meeting of Balkan countries involving Albania, Bosnia, Croatia, Kosovo, FYROM, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia in divisive move that deliberately excluded the Greek government from decisions concerning the tackling of the mounting refugee crisis in Europe’s borders. On Monday, FYROM had already previously decided to deny entry to Afghan migrants and restricted access to Syrians and Iraqis. Greek authorities summoned the Austrian ambassador to protest against the Vienna meeting, which they described as a ‘unilateral move which is not at all friendly toward our country’. The day after the meeting, the Greek Prime Minister proclaimed that Greece will not be turned into a ‘warehouse of souls’ and just today, in an unprecedented move, he recalled the Greek ambassador in Vienna. In the meantime, the situation in Greece is rapidly spiraling out of hand. The images of desperate refugees roaming the Greek highways and heading for Greece’s northern borders are shocking suggesting that the situation might soon become unmanageable.

What Europe has witnessed the past few days on a diplomatic level is simply the first serious shocks of a long-brewing crisis that has its origins in a complicated series of diplomatic failures and mismanagement by some and deliberate war-mongering by others. Europe is paying a hard price for something she didn’t directly cause, yet nevertheless tolerated, as part of a ruthless geopolitical game that has its epicenter in the Syrian crisis and the broader Middle East antagonisms. The civil war in Syria broke out, and was portrayed as such by Western media, as a rebellion against the oppression and brutality of the Assad regime. What of course was never openly admitted (but is nevertheless a common secret) was that this is a war that some of the major players in the region -the US, Israel, Turkey and Saudi Arabia- not only welcomed but in varying degrees deliberately fomented in an effort to dismantle the Hezbollah-Syria-Iran axis due to which Israel paid a heavy price in the 2006 war in Lebanon. Russia’s active involvement in the conflict last October with the commencement of the bombing campaign was rightly perceived by many as an effort to tilt the balance in favour of the crumbling Assad regime. Yet, apart from restoring the internal dynamics of the conflict, it was also a move that served wider Russian objectives. The continuation of the Syrian civil war causes internal division among EU members as the flow of Syrian refugees wreaks havoc in the European borders and keeps Europe in disarray. EU’s weakening status as a diplomatic power is not a meager gain for Russia as it finds itself less pressured on the Ukrainian front and makes Europeans more pliable to Russian demands.

On the other hand, as long as the conflict keeps Hezbollah’s forces occupied, the Syrian regime weak and Russia overextended, the US, Saudi Arabia and Israel are also content with the continuation of the Syrian conflict which means that any prospect for a resolution of the root cause of the refugee crisis is not on the map. That also partly explains the vehemence and lack of diplomatic etiquette in the European member states’ reactions. They are very well aware that the ‘hot potato’ is dropped on their front door while they themselves have no real say in the resolution of the conflict apart from the management of its consequences. In other words, Europe is hopelessly toothless in a geopolitical crisis in which it absorbs most of the heat. As a result, the dramatic events that were unleashed since last summer (when the influx of refugees through the Greek borders took unprecedented dimensions) have not only revealed the cracks and fissures in Europe’s integration experiment. It has also exposed the hypocrisy at the roots of Europe’s so-called soft power: its alleged humanitarian sensitivity and the values of hospitality, tolerance, openness and cosmopolitan solidarity that have routinely inspired and decorated its official declarations.

Apart from being highly volatile and unpredictable as a whole, the ongoing crisis is also imminently threatening the Eurozone’s stability. The Greek government is currently under assessment according to the terms of the 3^rd bail-out agreement and it seems once more unable or unwilling to deliver. Europe’s patience with successive Greek governments has been very generous, partly due to geopolitical reasons, but it is gradually becoming common knowledge that the Greek situation is probably unsolvable within the Euro. Given the enormous pressure that the refugee crisis is going to exert on European societies in the immediate future it is doubtful whether further tolerance and further fiscal injections are going to be extended to Greece in the near future. What would result from a Grexit at this juncture is relatively unpredictable although it is certain that the Americans are expected to do their best to prevent it. The difference this time is that in view of the future cost of adjustments involved in the tackling of the refugee crisis it might prove tougher, if not impossible, to convince Germany to keep carrying the bill of an insubordinate and erratic member (either by turning a blind eye to the current assessment or agreeing to a 4^th bail-out programme). The glooming prospect of a Greek state geopolitical collapse is not an entirely unlikely scenario if immediate steps are not taken to interrupt or ease the flow of refugees at the Greek-Turkish borders in the Aegean.

The current situation, there, is however even further complicated by Turkey’s adventurous foreign policy trying to extract geopolitical gains from NATO’s recent involvement. Apart from her dubious role in the Syrian conflict, Turkey has actively pursued an exploitative tactic in the negotiations for limiting current migration flows in the Aegean. The EU strategic objective was to cajole Turkey into actively curbing migration flows by offering a generous international monitoring scheme. Turkey has managed to turn her involvement into an opportunity to promote her long-term geopolitical aims in the Aegean. After stalling the operation of the recently mandated NATO mission, Turkey insisted that the latter should not operate in the southern Aegean: ‘Turkey disputes the sea border between its southern coast and the Dodecanese islands in Greece, hence it wants to avoid this border being implicitly recognised in the operational plan of a NATO mission’. As a result, it is highly improbable that immigration flows will be seriously diverted or reduced since the current state of affairs is serving Turkish interests on multiple fronts (or at least so Erdogan seems to believe): by recording Turkish demands in the border dispute with Greece and by putting pressure on the European Union and the US to intervene in Syria in favour of Turkey’s strategic interests and abandon their Kurdish allies who are by the way the only forces seriously opposing ISIS in northern Syria.

If all this sounds crazy, cynical and unimaginably entangled, welcome to the international politics of the 21^st century. Unlike what Fukuyama had predicted in the idyllic ambiance of the early ‘90s, history is not only back but viciously upon us.

Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the Euro Crisis in the Press blog nor of the London School of Economics

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Can the EU be hospitable?

By Natasha Saunders

Fidelity to one’s principles is measured by how they are honoured in times of crisis. Hannah Arendt – a refugee who fled Nazi Germany and became one of the most influential political thinkers of the twentieth century – showed us how European states, supposedly built upon a foundation of human rights, deserted their principles with disastrous effects when faced with an influx of rightless refugees in the 1930s. Her insights, published the same year as the UN Refugee Convention was opened for signature, are eerily prescient. This week the EU and Turkey finalised a deal that would see blanket returns of irregular migrants to Turkey, and a resettlement programme for Syrians – but not Iraqis, Afghans, or Eritreans – who stay in Turkey and do not try to cross into Europe, implemented on the basis of a “1-Out-1-In” mechanism. In exchange for acting as Europe’s migration policeman, Turkey will receive €3 billion in aid, the possibility of visa-free Schengen-zone travel by June, and “reenergised” EU-Accession talks. Following the serious concerns expressed by rights groups when the possibility of such a deal was first announced, EU leaders claim to have inserted safeguards into the deal that will ensure that it complies with international and EU law. But rights groups and UNHCR are unconvinced.

The problem with EU professions of fidelity to human rights and international obligations in this particular area is that Europe has a long history of trying to get out of its obligations under the Refugee Convention, and an equally long history of, to all intents and purposes, criminalising the seeking of asylum – an act which is not a crime but a basic human right enshrined in Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The EU-Turkey deal should not be seen as exceptional episode but, rather, as the latest policy in a long-running series of attempts to reduce the numbers of asylum seekers and irregular migrants reaching European territory. These policies began in earnest in the 1980s once international travel became cheaper and travel routes opened to people fleeing wars and rights abuses in Africa and Asia. European asylum systems, which were not designed to deal in an efficient manner with large volumes of applications, quickly became backlogged and costs spiralled. But rather than attempting to reform the structure of asylum systems, European states decided instead to conflate asylum with irregular economic migration, and implement restrictive policies designed to prevent, reverse, and deter arrival.

Among the measures implemented to prevent arrival were visa requirements for people from countries considered to be “refugee-producing”; airline carrier sanctions which fined airlines for transporting individuals without appropriate travel papers into the territory of a European state; and the interdiction of boats thought to be carrying migrants at sea, to prevent the individuals on board from reaching European territory and lodging an asylum claim. For those people who managed to get around these non-arrival policies, a range of measures designed to reverse arrival, or shift responsibility for these arrivals onto other states, were implemented. Safe third country arrangements were signed with states on the periphery of Europe, which would allow returns of irregular migrants, including asylum seekers, if it could be demonstrated that they had transited through and could, theoretically, have lodged an asylum claim there. Within Europe, the Dublin Regulations permit responsibility-shifting among European states, enabling those in the north and west of the continent to shift the majority of the burden of examining asylum claims and providing protection onto the southern and eastern states. These policies have proven to be rather ineffective both at preventing arrival and ensuring the efficient functioning of asylum systems. But they have also been partly responsible for the creation of the image of a “genuine” refugee as a person who seeks physical safety and little else; and for whom the exercise of choice and the desire for a real life, and not just to be alive and living with difficulty, is illegitimate.

For those whose arrival could not be prevented or reversed, campaigns to reduce the protections they were afforded in a bid to deter future arrivals were the next stop on the journey. Across Europe asylum seekers have been denied the right to work while their claims are processed, leaving them no choice but to be reliant on minimal state welfare – perpetuating the image of the refugee as an economic burden. As the asylum issue became conflated to a greater degree with security throughout the 2000s, the detention of asylum seekers became more and more common. The UK, for example, currently has no time limits on immigration detention, and detention centres have frequently been criticised for the appalling conditions in which people, whose only “crime” has been the exercise of a basic human right, can be forced to live. When faced with no other option than to examine an asylum claim, the Refugee Convention itself became the next target. Highly questionable interpretations included restricting “persecution” to only those actions of state authorities and not non-state actors, or refusals of claims which included violations of socio-economic rights. Ultimately, none of these policies seems to have had the desired effect. According to Eurostat, numbers of asylum seekers have risen progressively throughout the 2000s, although the numbers still pale in comparison with the numbers of displaced people elsewhere in the world. This latest attempt to prevent the arrival of asylum seekers in Europe is unlikely to work any better, and is instead more likely to drive ever more people into the arms of people smugglers.

There have been improvements in some of these conditions. The recast Qualification Directive of 2011 raises the standard of the protection offered to those who are not eligible for refugee status but who are still in need of international protection; and individual states have had to scale back some of their more restrictive policies. But it is arguably the intervention of rights groups and the bringing of cases to the European Court of Human Rights, or to domestic courts, that deserve the credit for reminding control- and prevention-oriented states not only of their human rights obligations, but of the fundamental role that human rights are supposed to play in every aspect of European life.

But the EU, it seems, is suffering from selective amnesia. It wasn’t so terribly long ago that Europe was a prime refugee-producing region and it was Europeans running for their lives – both in the 1920s to 1950s and then again in the 1990s. The rest of the world resettled a great many of these earlier refugees, and we all know what happened to those to whom our doors were slammed shut in the 1930s and in the mid-1990s. Ultimately, this deal has very little to do with respecting the human rights of any of the people trying to reach Europe, or any of the millions more who are not. But, in their negation, human rights are indeed central to this deal. Not only does the violation of the human rights of refugees undermine the protection of refugees everywhere, but also undermines the strength and force of human rights for everyone. And ultimately it undermines, perhaps fatally, the entire European project. Our most basic and dearest principles have turned out, once again, to be not quite so dear after all.

Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the Euro Crisis in the Press blog nor of the London School of Economics

Natasha Saunders teaches at the School of International Relations, University of St Andrews. Her research focuses on forced migration, human rights, and political theory. She is the author of “Paradigm shift or business as usual? An historical reappraisal of the ‘shift’ to securitisation of refugee protection” in Refugee Survey Quarterly.

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By Pierluigi Musarò

‘We need more than a humanitarian response […] We need political leadership and action,’ Filippo Grandi, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, said on 8 March 2016. Referring to the fact that ‘Europe is now seeing record numbers of refugees, and migrants, arriving on its shores’, Grandi stressed that ‘this emergency does not have to be a crisis, it can be managed’. Grandi, who was speaking to the European Parliament in Strasbourg, did not mention to what extent, in recent years, the militarisation of migration and border controls has been explicitly bound with notions of humanitarianism. Nevertheless, I guess he is aware that the current focus on both the humanitarian and security-related aspects of the phenomenon suggests a more complex logic of threat and benevolence that allows for a security-humanitarian response.

Unfortunately Grandi’s concern is not new. The problematic relationship between humanitarianism and politics was clearly described 17 years ago by James Orbinski of Médecins Sans Frontières, on the occasion of his Nobel Lecture: ‘Humanitarianism is not a tool to end war or to create peace. It is a citizen’s response to political failure. It is an immediate, short term act that cannot erase the long term necessity of political responsibility.’ The novelty is that Orbinski was criticising those interventions called ‘military-humanitarian’, while Grandi is referring to the ongoing migration management, too often framed as a humanitarian emergency.

A quick look at how the moral discourses typically associated with the humanitarian aid organisations are today gaining importance in the context of border control makes clear what types of political and epistemological implications this discursive dislocation has. Consider, for example, the news, images and video produced by the Italian Navy during the operation Mare Nostrum – the military-humanitarian operation in the Mediterranean targeted at both rescuing migrants and arresting smugglers. Let me note that Mare Nostrum (our sea) was the Roman name for the Mediterranean Sea, hijacked by Mussolini to frame fascist propaganda about the ‘Italian lake’. As the same (ambivalent) name indicates, the possessive ‘our’ projects the Mediterranean as a European space of care and control, while it ambiguously refers to both Italy and Europe.

Looking at the images produced by the new ‘frontline journalists’ (read: soldiers on the ships), we see how most of the photographs trigger sympathy for the soldiers and pity for the migrants. The images draw us into a community of witnesses. A community in which the spectator is positioned as the possible saviour, while the rescued bodies are the ‘other’. Border control is redefined within a moral imagination that puts emphasis on human vulnerability. The soldiers’ activities are depicted as similar to the recurring type of imagery of aid delivery, with just rescued, grateful migrants receiving food parcels and water. Quite revealingly, women with their tiny, innocent babies are the most commonly represented subjects.

The extent to which the legitimacy of this military-humanitarian operation (which costs €9 million per month) depends on how it is described and explained through media, becomes evident through the analysis of the official video of the operation. As you can see, while in the first part of the video we are invited to witness the dramatic ‘emergency’, feeling the pressure to be concerned or upset in response to the horrifying images; in the second part, the high-adrenaline spectacle pivots on the soldiers challenging the waves to resolve the catastrophe. And, what about the happy ending of the final frame that presents us with an intensely moralistic context that reframes the operation as humanitarian benevolence? Outside of any historical or political framework, of course. The issue of migration flows is here construed as a journey without destination, as a tragic game of fate. As protagonists of a crisis that comes from nowhere, migrants are depicted at the same time as subjects who are forced to put themselves in danger – departing on unsafe boats – and as subjects at risk (of death and trafficking) who need to be saved.

To sum up, speaking the language of combatting human smuggling and potential terrorists, while rescuing lives and protecting migrants’ human rights, Mare Nostrum performs the spectacle of the ‘humanitarian battlefield’. It is one spectacle, but different publics understand it differently. Like the different light refractions of the same kaleidoscope, the national spectacle of surveillance, policing, and border control is also the cosmopolitan spectacle of rescue and salvation. Mare Nostrum speaks different languages to different political constituencies: to migrants and citizens, to smugglers and transnational activists, to right-wing government coalition members and NGOs.

As an illustration of my argument, let me conclude with two recent examples that unequivocally demonstrates the integrality of humanitarian discourses of assistance and protection in the on-going migration governance. On 15 October 2015, during his visit to the Italian Parliament, the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, paid homage ‘to the Italian soldiers who saved thousands of human lives in the Mediterranean’, and thanked ‘the Italian population for the efforts made to welcome and assist migrants.’ Concluding the event, the Italian Prime Minister, Matteo Renzi, affirmed: ‘the Italy that welcomes you is the country of the Italian officers who became nurses to deliver babies in the ships on the Mediterranean. It is an Italy of which we are proud.’ Again, the bio-political imperative of managing lives is expressed through an aesthetics of trauma, where war (on migrants) is represented both as an intimate experience of sorrow and a public act of peace-making.

On the other hand, in these days we finally see several humanitarian actors criticising the EU-Turkey deal, and their use of humanitarian narrative (and actors) to legitimise border control. UNHCR, Médecins Sans Frontiers, the IRC, and the Norwegian Refugee Council say they will not work on controversial aspects of the EU-Turkey migration deal. “UNHCR is concerned that the EU-Turkey deal is being implemented before the required safeguards are in place in Greece,” a spokesperson said. “UNHCR is not a party to the EU-Turkey deal, nor will we be involved in returns or detention. We will continue to assist the Greek authorities to develop an adequate reception capacity.” I think it is an important point. Migration and asylum are political concepts. And the statements of these actors raise questions on the (terrible) EU crisis management, denouncing how humanitarianism is often being confused with political responsibility.

Back to the refraction of the military and the humanitarian frame, I think that even though images can do much to expose a crisis, they can do little to explain it. Rather than promoting solidarity in the name of human dignity, the military-humanitarian narrative sustains a complex ontology of inequality that reproduces specific value hierarchies and evaluations of human life. As in other instances of humanitarian government, care and control both fuel and feed off each other, nurturing a ‘compassionate repression’ that fails to bridge the gap between ‘us’ and ‘them’. On the contrary, this risks providing support to the neo-liberal global governance in establishing an asymmetric (in terms of both agency and dignity) moral geography of the world.

In stark opposition to this framing, we should keep in mind what is happening in the last few months. The collective march of refugees across the Balkans has rendered the agency of migrants themselves highly visible, exposing the crucial role they play in challenging existing governance structures. As we can see, people on the move challenge the subject position of the helpless victims, and reassert their agency, their social and political identities, their hopes and dreams, their capacity to choose their own destiny.

Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the Euro Crisis in the Press blog nor of the London School of Economics

Pierluigi Musarò is Associate Professor of Sociology at the Department of Sociology and Business Law and at the School of Political Science, University of Bologna. He is also Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and at the Institute for Public Knowledge, New York University.

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By Catherine Harris

Brexit – the UK vote to leave the European Union – has caused uncertainty in a number of areas. One of which is the impact that potentially reduced immigration will have on the British economy, particularly in industries which have a high proportion of migrant workers from the EU.

Workers from the EU are allowed to continue to work in the UK for the two years of Brexit negotiations, after which their future is uncertain. But the the UK’s new prime minister, Theresa May, has warned that the status of EU migrants is up for negotiation.

This could have a significant impact on the UK economy. Research has long shown that it will be worse off without its immigrant workers. Indeed, ratings agency Fitch has already downgraded the UK’s credit rating to AA from AA+ with a negative outlook, hinting that further downgrades might follow. It cited reduced immigration as one of the reasons for the UK’s weaker economy. Meanwhile, the National Institute of Economic and Social Research has said that reducing immigration by two-thirds will see the UK economy shrink 9% by 2065.

The significance of EU migrants in the UK workforce can be explained by figures showing their high employment rate and concentration in particular industries. Despite EU migrants making up only about a third of all migrants in the UK, data from the Office for National Statistics shows that EU nationals constitute 64.3% of the migrant workforce in the UK. Accordingly, working age, non-UK EU nationals have a higher employment rate than both non-EU nationals and UK nationals, at 78% compared with 61.7% and 74.4%, respectively.

EU migrants tend to be concentrated in certain sectors of the economy. The public sector (which comprises public administration, education and health) is the largest sector for migrants from Western Europe (EU14 nationals) at 27.6%, but only the fifth largest for nationals from A10 countries (countries that joined the EU in 2004) at 11.1%. For nationals in the rest of the world the figure is 28.1%.

For A10 countries, the largest industry sector is distribution, hotels and restaurants at 27.6%, followed by manufacturing at 19.3%. This compares to just 9.6% of UK nationals employed in manufacturing and 6.7% of rest of the world nationals.

There is variability in the sectors in which EU nationals from different countries work within the UK. However, it is clear that the sectors of public administration, education and health, hotels and restaurants, distribution and manufacturing have high levels of EU migrant workers and could be significantly impacted by Brexit.

The NHS

Focusing on the NHS, EU immigrants make up about 5% of English NHS staff, according to the English Health Service’s Electronic Staff Record. Across the UK, EU immigrants make up 10% of registered doctors and 4% of registered nurses. EU immigrant nursing numbers have risen at a time when the numbers of British-trained nurses has actually fallen, therefore plugging an important skills gap. The figure for registered doctors from the EU is significant, but it is below the level of staff from outside the EU.

Campaigners who were in favour of Britain remaining in the EU argued that leaving could cause an NHS staffing crisis. Indeed, one of the UK’s top economists, Stephen Nickell, claimed that the NHS would be “in dire straits” without migrant workers. Former Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg has previously said the NHS will be “in serious trouble” without EU workers. UKIP, however, says these NHS jobs could be filled if immigration was reduced.

Restrictions on non-EU immigrants have affected NHS recruitment, suggesting that the same could happen if there were limits on EU immigration to the UK. These restrictions did not trigger a process of existing healthcare workers fleeing the UK. But it has been suggested that a skills shortage in the NHS could be caused directly through new restrictions preventing EU-born NHS staff from working in Britain, or indirectly because EU-born staff will leave the UK pre-emptively due to the uncertainty created by talk of restrictions to migration.

Food production

Manufacturing in the form of food production may also be profoundly changed by Brexit if EU nationals are forced to leave the UK. Migrant labourers from the EU make up more than 30% of all workers in the manufacture of food products, including jobs such as processing cheese and meat, making baked goods and animal slaughter. It is unlikely that UK nationals or migrants from outside the EU could fill such a gap.

Brexit could also leave a great many unfilled jobs in areas such as agriculture and hospitality, which are significantly staffed by migrants. Since many of them are taking unskilled jobs British people do not want to do, the result could be a serious labour shortage in temporary and seasonal work.

Businesses that are particularly reliant on migrant workers may therefore need to rethink their business models. It has been suggested that greater automation could help them cope with the loss of migrant workers in sectors such as agriculture and manufacturing.

The high proportions of EU migrant workers in the sectors featured here could be used by Brexiters to argue that Britons are losing out to foreign workers taking their jobs. They might argue that the roles can be filled by British workers or opened up to the global market. But the evidence that British workers or migrants from outside the EU have either the capacity or desire to fill the vacancies EU migrants could leave behind is lacking.

This may well leave sectors such as manufacturing or the NHS understaffed and under-skilled and could have a negative impact on the UK economy. But the extent to which this occurs really depends on how the government decides to treat EU migrants already living in the UK. As with many other issues related to the referendum, the impact remains uncertain.

This post originally appeared on The Conversation.

Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the Euro Crisis in the Press blog nor of the London School of Economics.

Dr Catherine Harris is a Senior Research Fellow on EU labour migration at the University of Birmingham. Catherine’s expertise lie in the fields of entrepreneurship and enterprise, ethnic entrepreneurship, social difference, EU enlargement, EU migration, Polish migration and the Polish community in the UK.

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Brexit and Democracy 

By Max Hänska

Citizens are voting for candidates hitherto considered unlikely; the future of the EU, and indeed the post-war international order is in question. It is unsurprising that the current fin de siècle atmosphere, and many citizens’ sense of precarity, uncertainty, and loss of control, would produce the current outpouring of scorn in response to perceived political immobilism in the face of burgeoning challenges. A few weeks ago Roberto Orsi contributed to the expansive debate about the causes, consequences and appropriate responses to these political ruptures emerging across the western world. Orsi’s piece is helpful because it identifies important symptoms and systematic failures in western policy, but he willfully pushes a uni-causal account of events, and points us towards fallacious solutions. Though this pieces is at least in part a response to Orsi, having read his piece (which can be found here) is by no means a prerequisite for following this one.

Competing narratives

The Ratification of the Treaty of Münster, 15 May 1648 (1648) by Gerard ter Borch.

It is undeniable communities have changed. They have become more diverse in their ethnic makeup, languages spoken, and in some communities immigrants form majority sub-cultures that can make natives feel unwelcome. This may not be apparent to those with the means to move to cities in search of the best jobs, or to the neighborhoods with the best schools and amenities. The best paid jobs usually draw from a global talent pool, involve airport lounges, and the kind of cosmopolitan culture in which nationality as a relevant marker of distinction is all but irrelevant. The failure to understand the concerns of many voters, goes hand in hand with the so-called ‘elite’s’ failure to relate to experiences of those whose economic lives are more precarious, whose regions have lost stable jobs, and for whom national identity still holds significant purchase. As the economic and cultural experience of urban (or in the US, costal) populations diverged ever more starkly from the experience of rural, small-town, deindustralising parts of the West, the public narrative contrived by politicians and the news media lost resonance with large parts of the public who’s lives are clearly shaped by a sense of decline. British tabloids, Breitbart, InfoWars, Trump and UKIP have filled this narrative void. The story Orsi tells is distinctly in this vein. It was prescient to recognize that there was a need for an alternative narrative where prevailing stories rang hollow to many. These narratives fill the gap, characterizing the struggle as one of elites against the people, returning the scorn many citizens have felt themselves exposed to (let’s be honest, those living in urban centres of prosperity, where political, media, and economic power is concentrated have had little patience or regard for the culture, concerns and views of the population outside these melting pots). But these narratives are also wrong, and their moral arc leads to conflagration.

This isn’t all about identity

It is, for instance, true that politicians failed to properly articulate the wider challenges and risks that the refugee influx brought, which is not to say that admitting refugees was wrong (the frequently peddled idea that Merkel invited a million refugees is, in any case, a rhetorical device of the right which suggest that there was some simple and obvious alternative which politicians, conspiring against their own people, declined to pursue.). But for those, who for decades were on the receiving end of the neoliberal mantra of individual responsibility, to whom the political system signaled that they must make their own fortune, calls for solidarity with refugees must have rang cruelly dissonant.

Taking his cue from such mistakes, Orsi interprets our political rupture in terms of identity and culture. He describes political upheavals across the West as a response to the willful destruction of national communities. This story appears to be premised on a belief that the natural place of persons is within communities defined above all by a shared and sharply demarcated identity—a departure from this unity-in-identity spells doom. Immigrants, refugees, and others, disrupt this cultural order, the hierarchy of identities, that social peace depends on. As Orsi puts it, western policy has sought to do away with itself by pushing “for the obliteration of any sense of difference and the deconstruction of any collective identity or hierarchy (civilisational, religious, national, local, relational, sexual).” Here identities are rivalrous, and zero-sum. He describes Merkel’s refugee policy as “complete insanity”, as an undoing of Germany itself. The current backlash is cast as a brave defense by ‘the people’ against enemies, extraneous and internal (read: everyone else, elites, experts or Muslims). And the narrative is compelling because it identifies a culprit for the prevailing sense of precarity and insecurity. But this story is also woefully incomplete.

Centering an interpretation of our times on identity and culture is only achieved by systematic omission. In order to make sense, the story demands that everything must be explained in terms of the threat ‘others’ pose to ‘us’. But what about rising inequality, economic stagnation, the decline in reliable public services, all those things that brought a level of welfare and stability to people’s lives? How about an account of economic governance, the feckless and shambolic response towards the culprits of the financial crisis, the way automation is replacing ever more jobs, and other factors which have wrought a sense of decline and precarity? What about the fact that most parents now expect future generations to be worse off than current ones? What about the observation that in an increasingly interconnected world, where governance requires closer international coordination, citizens will feel besieged by a sense of their powerlessness (as Giddens observed)? What about all the evidence of the economic benefits immigrants bring to the places they make their home? If automation leads to the loss of stable jobs, then how would banning immigrants help? Orsi does not even hint that such causes could be lurking behind the outpouring of scorn that we are witnessing, instead elevating culture and identity as the beating heart of the problem. Indeed many populists on the right and the left brazenly ignore a whole range of obvious factors that only inconvenience their preferred narrative.

Of course identity and culture play into the wider crisis we are facing. However, we are not facing only one crisis, but an amalgamation of different crises, each with different causes, and distinct consequences. A uni-causal explanation in terms of identity lends succor to populists everywhere (both on the left and the right). But a uni-causal explanation is also a recipe for failure. An account of our rupture that omits the broader picture is either ill informed, or willfully peddles a narrow interpretation for political ends.

Pluralism isn’t the problem, but the unavoidable baseline

Orsi’s uni-causal account, like others with a similar thrust, takes aim at a ‘misguided’ pluralism as the fungus that ails our societies. He reads events as an understandable response to “a suppression of meaningful pluralism,” the suppression of those who believe their countries are being disfigured, and who seek to end this havoc. This suppression of pluralism, he argues, can drive polarization to the point where violence becomes inevitable. The solution is restoring the privileged status of the identities of those who rose up, those who supported Brexit, Trump, Le Pen, AFD, etc.. But this line of argument naturalises, and comes uncomfortably close to actively advocating the kind of anti-pluralism that is barely disguised in much of the discourse on the right. It views identities as zero-sum, where there is a limit to the diversity that a community can bear. Such accounts are not anti-elitist, as they often claim, but anti-pluralist. They are not advocates for a uniquely oppressed and under-represented ‘people’, but advocates for a hierarchy of identities, in which some people should be uniquely privileged. Their aim is greater homogeneity, not a fairer pluralism. Follow their logic, and it will march you inexorably towards violence, while doing exactly nothing to address the underlying causes of precarity.

None of this is to say that identity should not matter. I am not disputing that citizenship should confer rights that are denied to others. But we must remember that the most successful political arrangements of intra- and inter-state order were those that accepted pluralism as a necessary given, rather than a problem. They were political arrangements that explicitly sought to accommodate pluralism, accepting it not so much as a virtue, but a means of avoiding violence. The treaties of Münster and Osnabrück accepted religious pluralism in Europe, not out of virtue, but because exhausted and depleted by 30 years of war in which a third of Europe’s population had perished, pluralism was recognized as an unavoidable feature of human community. Civil wars end similarly, not out of virtue, but because eventually parties come to the realization that accepting difference is less costly than achieving purity. Unfortunately too many of us appear to have forgotten these lessons of history. They may condemn us to learn them all over again.

Taking aim at pluralism itself is not only a sign of a deeply inadequate account of the political present, but the doctrine of anti-pluralists it advances can only lead to calamity. This is not to say that immigration reform, internal and external security aren’t serious issues to discuss. They are. But the anti-pluralist line of thought inevitably will require one side to achieve dominance, and that, invariably, requires violence. The real task of the present is not to undo pluralism, but to urgently find a way of renewing arrangement which can sustain political order amidst pluralism. The line of thought espoused by Orsi and others does nothing to advance that aim.

Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the Euro Crisis in the Press blog nor of the London School of Economics.

Max Hänska is a lecturer (Assistant Prof.) at De Montfort University (UK) where his research interests center on social media, political communication and collective decision-making.

This post is a reply to: President Trump and the Politics of Tragedy

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The battle lines have been etched

‘We want our country back’ – stop sneering, start listening

The EU, a Fair-Weather Ship Between Scylla and Charybdis 

by Alessandro Franzi

Immigration is going to be the political battleground of the next Italian general elections due in 2018. Virtually all major political leaders have hardened their position on borders protection following the new migration crisis in the Mediterranean. Austerity policies and lack of democracy in the EU integration process were the main concerns during the European elections campaign three years ago. Identity issue is now deepening Italian disaffection with Europe by boosting a patriotic rhetoric promoted by both right-wing and left-wing parties.

The fear of an uncontrolled influx of people has strengthened in the last two years while the sea crossing from Libya to South of Italy has become the main access route for migrants and refugees to Europe. According to the minister of Interior, the number of people arrived on Italian shores has increased almost 7 per cent since the beginning of the year. The current 94.000 asylum seekers [1] are expected to grow to 200.000 by the end of the summer.

Italy is just a transit country for most of them who try to reach their networks to the North. The Italian government has repeatedly invoked European solidarity to cope with reception problems. However, Italian citizens feel their concerns over immigration are ignored by EU institutions in favor of national interests [2]. The main consequence could be the rise of the first Eurosceptic government among the founder countries.

The Left Dilemma

“We cannot welcome them all”, leftwing leader Matteo Renzi said after his Democratic Party had lost June 2017 local elections to the center-right opponents. The party has been running the government since 2013 and it’s under pressure because of the rising number of asylum seekers and the denial of other EU countries like France to open their ports to refugee rescue boats. Additionally more and more local mayors refuse to welcome new migrants [3] in a bid to avoid unpopularity amongst their communities.

A recent SWG survey [4] indicates that the majority of Italians (54 per cent) is in favor of a total ban on new arrivals. This percentage has increased by six points since January. Furthermore back in 2003 65 percent of the Italian public considered migrants a resource but the percentage has now dropped to 35 percent. Researches underline that “approval for hard and simplistic solutions are finding fertile and expansive soil in the middle-low classes, in the middle class affected by the crisis and inflamed in its social identity”. They add that “the immigration issue has been underestimated by European governments and has been faced with an emergency approach”.

The Democratic Party seems to be paying the higher political price for this emergency approach that has exasperated Italian public opinion. When Mr. Renzi served as Italian prime minister up to last December, he used to say only “beasts” want to block immigrants who risk their life crossing the Mediterranean. He changed tone after June council elections by arguing that “too much” of them have been going on national shores these years. The former PM invited left-wing establishment to give traditional identity a good value and suggested to “help migrants in their own countries”. The latter is the same slogan of both far right candidate Matteo Salvini and populist Five Stars Movement.

It’s not just a lexical revolution, because current left-wing government is trying to pursue a ‘law and order’ political action. Italy urges Europe to share the responsibility of migrant crisis and is trying to impose on NGOs operating in the Mediterranean Sea new rules of conduct in order to limit their rescue activities [5]. Rome wants also to speed up the repatriation process for those migrants who are not qualified for international protections. This effort could unfortunately be out of time.

The Populist Option

Immigration is not a new problem for Mediterranean countries but it has become significantly worse following the ouster of Muammar Gaddafi from Libya in 2011. In the past six years Italian politics has been ideologically divided into two factions. The one on the left side supporting extreme hospitality as a duty, the other on the right side accused of xenophobia [6]. Meanwhile no government party has proposed a comprehensive reform of immigration laws. The result is a growing popular concern boosted by a growing sensational approach by mainstream media.

Just six months before the next general elections, the Italian political landscape is now dominated by the current immigration issue. The Left is considering to be chasing its political enemies in order to stop the loss of consents. However this could definitely decrease its chance of victory. Traditional left-wing parties are not yet able to “offer protection” to the weakest member of society because they are associated with the élite in charge, as claimed by sociologist Luca Ricolfi [7]. Mr. Ricolfi, who has a progressive background, suggests this protection nowadays comes easier from populist options.

Underestimating the immigration consequences has strengthened all opposition forces in Italy and weakened citizens’ confidence in the EU. Virtually all politicians publicly blame the European institutions for allowing what they call the “invasion” of Italy. They had done the same in order to justify the high rates of unemployment. Moreover, the recent choice for a proportional electoral system contributes to a greater radicalization of party proposals.

According to current polls, Beppe Grillo’s populist Five Star Movement has the highest chance to lead the next Italian government. The movement wants a political reset and refuses any alliance because of its opposition to the politici di professione (professional politicians). Mr Grillo wants a regulated immigration and a soft European Union, possibly leaving Italy out of the Euro. The programmatic basis of Five Star Movement is very similar to that of Matteo Salvini far right Northern League [8], a Marine Le Pen ally since 2014.

A Political Gamble

The two populist and Eurosceptic parties account for more than 40 per cent of voting intentions. And a growing number of analysis believes it possible a government alliance among Five Star Movement and Northern League after 2018 elections [9]. This hypothesis could lead Italy to extremely critical positions regarding the European integration process, with a government closer to Hungary’s Orbán (and Putin’s Russia) than to Germany or France.

According to the same polls, in this scenario the Democratic Party could lead a center-left post-vote government only if it were able to arrange a large progressive alliance. Mr. Renzi, who was defeated at a constitutional referendum last December and suffered a recent party split, does not seem inclined to do so. It’s finally the former center-right PM Silvio Berlusconi to play the kingmaker role.

Forza Italia’s leader is against mass immigration and in favor of a EU treaty reform, but he has a moderate approach closer to Merkel’s Germany. With his 15 percent, Mr. Berlusconi could decide to rebuild a center-right alliance with Northern League by breaking the extremist axis. Such a coalition could also win the elections, based on current projections. In alternative, Mr. Berlusconi could decide to make a deal with Renzi’s Democrats and give birth to a great coalition government.

What is certain is that anyone wishing to govern Italy should be more or less patriotic on the two issues that are dividing national public opinion. Summing up Grillo, Salvini, Berlusconi and their allies strength, ‘Italians first’ motto is worth more than 60 per cent of consents. A remaining 20-25 percent belongs to a Democratic Party leader who is promising Brussels not to pay Italian EU budget shares without new immigration aides measures.

In the face of the migrant crisis, Italy feels treated as the periphery of Europe. And it is not a fleeting sentiment. A recent Demos survey [10] published on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of Treaties of Rome indicates that only 34 percent of Italian citizens still have trust in European Union, back in the 1998 the figure was 73 percent.

The more Italians feels overlooked by Europe in migrant crisis, the more Eurosceptic position will grow in the electoral polls. It would mean a request for greater border control power, for a Dublin rules on refugees reform and for more identity laws. Every next Italian government will have to take it in account.

References

[1] http://www.interno.gov.it/sites/default/files/cruscotto_statistico_giornaliero_del_26_luglio_2017.pdf

[2] http://www.ansamed.info/ansamed/en/news/sections/politics/2017/07/20/italy-shd-stop-moving-migrants-from-islands-kurz_990c6d4d-c04c-4b69-b10b-ee0197e1df96.html

[3] https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/italian-mayors-try-to-block-migrants-from-settling-down-in-rural-towns-6xvhmwsg9

[4] http://www.swg.it/politicapp?id=obob

[5] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-europe-migrants-ngos-idUSKBN19X2U1

[6] http://www.e-ir.info/2015/06/02/the-politics-of-the-humanitarian-crisis-in-europe/

[7] http://www.linkiesta.it/it/article/2017/04/27/luca-ricolfi-la-vecchia-sinistra-e-rimasta-senza-popolo/33991/

[8] http://time.com/4645415/matteo-salvini-italy-liga-nord/

[9] http://www.politico.eu/article/populist-italian-marriage-to-give-brussels-heartburn-5star-movement/

[10] http://www.demos.it/a01368.php

Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the Euro Crisis in the Press blog nor of the London School of Economics.

Alessandro Franzi is a Milan-based journalist who works for Italian news agency Ansa. He writes about politics with particular interest in the Northern League and centre-right parties. He holds a bachelor degree in History and he is MA Science Political candidate at University of Milan with a thesis in Eurosceptic movements.

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Renaissance or Decline? Europe‘s Crisis of Solidarity

The Politics of the Humanitarian Crisis in Europe

By Alessio  Colonnelli

Putting a cap on EU immigration was all that mattered for many. But now, what about Belfast and Dublin? No need for a border, they say. Soft Brexit will do, it’s the only sensible way. As long as those speaking in tongues stay out, anything else is peripheral and can go on as it is.

Nothing new. A conspicuous minority of Brits did have previous bouts of strong irritation towards newcomers. The Jamaicans in Brixton in the late ’40s and ’50s; the Italians of Wales, Glasgow and Bedford; and that’s before mentioning the Irish.

 That was a long time ago, and now many sense it’s just got a whole lot worse. Who will ever forget the day Labour MP Jo Cox was assassinated by a man who could not stand foreigners? Egged on by a web mob and, much worse, an atrocious sense of superiority, self-importance and moral impunity. It was shocking. Campaigning to remain in the EU, as Cox was doing, led the murderer to believe he should do his bit to dam the hordes of barbarians. The same attitude has paved the way to a number of gratuitous assaults of a similar nature.

So, is there a very negative atmosphere lingering in Britain? And how’s the country seen from outside? European media are depicting it as having too many neglected areas, all bearing grudges against incomers, especially those from struggling parts of Europe.

It’s a whole new scene; and it all goes way, way back. This is an ongoing multi-faceted drama which began elsewhere and initially affected Britain via the run on Northern Rock. For the record, Italy is worth comparing: different latitude, but similar in size and also knuckling under a heavy north-south economic divide, the peninsula has a problem not only with banks but crucially foreigners as well – only their geography of origin differs and the EU is sneered at, by some, for different reasons.

Therefore, nothing to do with the national health service, the European Court of Justice, rebates or the Schengen treaty. These nations resemble one another up to a point: the same globalisation can mean very dissimilar things to neighbouring yet distinct peoples.

Today, what’s really troubling for EU migrants residing in the UK is the growing evidence that the real reason behind Britain quitting the EU originates from one source. Very recently, the Independent‘s columnist Sean O’Grady put it in the clearest way possible: “I never understood … why someone from Bulgaria has more of a right to work in the UK than someone from Bangladesh, or why all Austrians rank ahead of all Australians. Brexit … does mean an opportunity to bring in an immigration policy that is fairer and which commands public support.”

Europe as a cohesive block – like a new, safer house with larger rooms – is dismissed out of hand. O’Grady’s sentiment is far-reaching and very much shared beyond the Leave camp too. It should be respected, of course, but also make ‘pro-free movement, no-soft-Brexit’ Remainers think a lot harder.

Dissociation from fellow Europeans has reached articulate highs; and, if you put yourself in the left-behinds’ shoes, you can spot a degree of reasonableness to this. Their anger at the lack of opportunities is genuine; but perhaps misdirected. Successive White Hall governments dismantled crucial industries over various decades, not Brussels. But pain and societal polarisation are both all too real.

Is it time, then, for hundreds of thousands of Europeans residing in the UK – clearly, not all – to start drafting an alternative plan of action and imagine an easier life outside the UK, as a permanent choice? Things are different today, and March 2019 isn’t far off at all. “The vote to leave can’t just be wished away as if it never happened. Those who want to overturn it need a more grassroots, populist strategy,” said the political analyst Owen Jones. A strategy that is alarmingly nowhere to be seen as yet.

Similarly, those who are not convinced by Theresa May’s 8 December deal with the EU Commission on respective citizens’ rights – and many aren’t – had better get packing. Luckily, the union of countries out there still has plenty on offer, for young and old Europeans alike.

In fact, if successful, the reversing of Brexit ought to keep its momentum going and make sure 10 Downing Street places the EU platter of opportunities within everyone’s reach. Education for all is key. However, the recent appointment of the extremely classist Toby Young as head of a new university watchdog doesn’t bode well. Who’d ever thought that one day roving EU citizens would unwittingly open Britain’s Pandora’s box?

Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the Euro Crisis in the Press blog nor of the London School of Economics.

 Alessio Colonnelli holds a B.A./M.A. in German, Spanish and literary translation from Padua University. He has written for The Independent (10 times), International Business Times (4), Open Democracy (29), Prospect Magazine (1), Little Atoms (1), Foreign Policy (1), Politico Europe (1), Aspen Review Central Europe (1), plus the London-based professional blogs Labour List (5), Left Foot Forward (19) and the LSE’s Euro Crisis in the Press (5). He taught languages in Madrid and Barcelona, and was an international press editor for a well-known media intelligence company in London.

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A View on Brexit from Abroad

By Luis Cornago Bonal and Delia Zollinger

Over a decade ago, Alesina and Glaeser (2004) argued that support for welfare policies in Europe will decrease as European countries become more ethnically diverse, primarily due to the difficulties of maintaining solidarity among different ethnic groups. However, the reality is still unclear, particularly the extent to which the increase in immigration-generated ethnic diversity challenges the political sustainability of the welfare state in Europe. Furthermore, although a rise in immigration does not necessarily reduce support for the welfare state in general, it can lead to a more restrictive and dualistic, so-called “welfare chauvinistic” type of welfare state where immigrants are less entitled to certain welfare programs than natives. The success of radical right parties (RRP) mobilizing the working class with nativist appeals, along with the consequent pressure on these parties to position themselves in terms of welfare and labour market policy, seem to partially explain the increasing relevance of welfare chauvinism.

Ethnic Heterogeneity and Public Support the for Welfare State

Underlying the idea of ethnic heterogeneity eroding support for the welfare state is the notion that it is difficult to develop feelings of trust and national solidarity across different ethnic groups, which “leads to a decrease in welfare state support because people do not want to redistribute resources to people they do not trust and with whom they do not identify” (Banting and Kymlicka, 2006, p. 18). Since the publication of Alesina and Glaeser’s (2004) seminal book, an expanding body of research on immigration and European welfare attitudes has produced mixed findings. While single-country studies in Sweden (Eger, 2010) and Germany (Spies and Schmidt-Catran, 2016) have demonstrated a negative relationship between regional variation in immigration and welfare attitudes, cross-national analyses have shown a less clear relationship (Brady and Finnigan, 2014). Recent studies (Eger and Breznau, 2017) suggest that once immigration is measured at the regional level, the negative impact of immigration on support for redistribution and a comprehensive welfare state can be observed.

On the contrary, other studies have showed that an increase in immigration can enhance support for welfare policies, or what is known as the “compensation hypothesis”. According to this theory, some sectors of the population –especially those more disadvantaged– will perceive a higher risk of decrease in their incomes from the arrival of foreign-born population in the labor market. Therefore, instead of opposing social policies, they would support them even more in order to overcome those potential income losses (Finseraas, 2008). Interestingly, Burgoon et al. (2012) find that support for redistribution is much higher among those individuals with occupations that attract a larger number of immigrants, whereas national-level immigration does not have any effect on support for government redistribution.

In many of these accounts, the fact that they do not attribute any relevance to the attitudes towards immigration is striking. If, for instance, someone has a favourable view of immigration (even in a very ethnically diverse country or region) for cultural and economic reasons, it is hard to see how the presence of immigrants can reduce his or her support for the welfare state. Additionally, because the welfare state is a multidimensional concept, the research in this area would greatly benefit from studying the impact of immigration on support for specific welfare policies, such as unemployment benefits or health care, rather than considering overall support for redistribution in the sense of more versus less welfare spending. One possibility is that an increase in immigration in a region only negatively affects support for those welfare programs that are perceived to be used mainly by immigrants (Fox, 2012).

Welfare Regime Type and the Rise of Welfare Chauvinism

Some prominent authors in the welfare state literature have traditionally argued that different welfare regimes, according to the Esping-Andersen typology, can have an impact on the kind of preferences towards the welfare state that people hold in different countries (Svallfors, 1997; Larsen, 2008). The social democratic type of welfare regime would generate the highest support, and the liberal or Anglo-Saxon type the lowest. Perhaps more interestingly, the type of welfare state regime may also help to explain why welfare chauvinism is more likely to arise in some countries than in others. For instance, some studies argue that universal regimes tend to reduce the level of welfare chauvinism of natives, while means-tested welfare regimes and programs are more likely to lead to ethnic conflict over welfare (Andersen, 2006; Crepaz, 2008). In a similar vein, Crepaz and Damron (2009) affirm that “the effect of targeted welfare delivery systems is one of separation, stratification, and difference” (p. 446).

However, the opposite can also be argued. In a citizenship-based type of welfare regime, as is typical of Scandinavia, the foreign-born population is, at least formally, eligible to receive welfare benefits once they acquire, for instance, the Swedish nationality. However, in an occupation-based type of welfare regime – such as Spain or Germany – access to certain welfare programs, such as unemployment benefits, hinges on eligibility conditions based on a minimum period of contribution and provides benefits proportional to past contributions (Fernández-Albertos and Dulce Manzano, 2016). In this type of welfare regime, immigrants are entitled to gain access only insofar as they have also contributed themselves.

Having this reasoning in mind, it seems plausible that the perceived competition with immigrants for welfare benefits or resources may be higher in the citizenship-based type of welfare regime than in the occupation-based model. Moreover, as Fernández-Albertos suggested here, in those welfare programs where it is more obvious that the state is making transfers from one sector of the population to another, such as housing or cash benefits, the welfare state of, say, Spain is very weak compared to other countries in Northern Europe where welfare chauvinism seems to be more wide-spread.

A similar logic could also be useful to hypothesize why RRP are especially prominent today in countries like Norway, Sweden or Denmark and not in Spain or Portugal, although this is an ongoing and complex debate (Alonso and Rovira, 2015; Hobolt and Tilley, 2016; Vidal, 2018). For instance, the fact that in Spain recently arrived immigrants do not have access to many welfare programs because they have not yet contributed to the social security system may lessen the emergence of welfare chauvinistic attitudes and, ultimately, the success of a radical right party.

Radical Right Parties (RRP) and Welfare Chauvinism

RRP in Europe have in many cases moved from neoliberal positions in economic policy to a more pro-welfare stance and protectionist agenda (Schumacher and van Kebergsen, 2016; Afonso and Rennwald, 2016), with welfare chauvinism a key part of their programs.  One clear example is the Front National in France, and parties such as the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands and the Freedom Party in Austria. How and why has welfare chauvnism come to form part of these parties’ profiles?

Afonso and Rennwald (2016) argue that RRP –which have mobilized voters primarily on the universalism-particularism rather than the traditional economic dimension of political competition– have had an increasingly difficult time avoiding positioning themselves clearly in terms of economic policy. Forming part of governing coalitions, incentives to “normalize” and pursue more catch-all strategies, and the increasing salience of economic issues in the Great Recession have put pressure RRP to take a stance on social policy. This is exacerbated by working-class realignment, that is, shifts in support of this class from social democratic parties to RRP. Where the working class forms an important part of their electorate, RRP have an incentive to accommodate the economic preferences of these voters. Indeed, the authors find a general trend among RRP (with some exceptions) towards a more supportive stance for welfare spending. This development relating to the traditional economic dimension is also of consequence for the formerly purely “cultural” universalism-particularism dimension. Here, welfare chauvinism plays a key role. This second dimension –which is crucial for distinguishing who votes for RRP– has come to incorporate “not only the issue of immigration, EU integration and cultural liberalism, but also questions of welfare chauvnism and welfare misuse” (Häusermann and Kriesi, 2015, p. 25). In terms of welfare chauvinism and deservingness, voters’ attitudes towards welfare policies depend not only on their position regarding the state-market dimension, but also on their universalistic versus particularistic attitudes. Where the support base of RRP is predominantly working class, endorsing welfare chauvinism presents a logical strategy for these parties.

Therefore, it is necessary to bring party politics into the study of welfare chauvinism. From a demand-side perspective, voters’ preferences may partly explain the emergence of RRP. However, it is also conceivable that these parties have the ability to influence public opinion towards greater welfare chauvinism beyond their support base. The European Social Survey includes the question “when should immigrants obtain rights to social benefits/services?” As shown in Figure 1, in Denmark and the Netherlands, where relatively strong RRP exist, a high percentage of the population wants immigrants to obtain access to social benefits once they become citizens (the second most restrictive option). However, around 14 per cent of Danish people (a high number compared to other countries) agree that immigrants should be entitled to benefits immediately after arrival (the least restrictive option).

Figure 1

A preliminary look at such simple descriptive statistics suggests that parties’ impact on aggregate public opinion towards immigrants’ welfare entitlements is not immediately clear. However, Andersen (2007), using a more specific survey question, suggests that welfare chauvnism has been on the rise among Danish citizens since the Danish People’s Party started influencing the policy agenda in 2001. In fact, in Denmark the “length-of-stay” principle for welfare eligibility has been implemented and has excluded de facto some foreign-born immigrants from welfare entitlements (de Koster, et al. 2013). Moreover, as shown in figures 2 and 3, in Spain, even though there is not a RRP, welfare chauvinism is relatively widespread in public opinion for certain policies (although it decreased slightly in the last years). Therefore, these ideas can also emerge without a party carrying the banner for them. In other words, RPPs may not be a necessary condition for welfare chauvinism.

Figure 2

Figure 3

Finally, Oesch and Rennwald (2017) look at how the different occupational segments of the electorate have evolved from 2002 to 2014 in various European countries. Interestingly, they find that not all occupational segments are disputed bastions. For instance, sociocultural professionals (such as medical doctors, teachers or social workers) vote, by majority, for left-wing parties, whereas large employers and managers tend to remain loyal to the centre-right. However, RRP have increasingly challenged both the centre-right by competing for the votes of “small business owners” and the left by competing for the support of the traditional working-class. According to the evidence shown by Oesch and Rennwald, the universalism-particularism dimension is the main factor explaining the support for RRP by production workers (such as mechanics, carpenters and assemblers) and small business owners. Furthermore, as shown below, in the universalism-particularism dimension (vertical axis) radical right voters take a significantly more traditionalist position than in the economic one (horizontal axis), where these voters are more likely to place themselves between the left and the centre-right.

Figure 4 (from Oesch and Rennwald, 2017)

In conclusion, it cannot be affirmed that the immigration-driven increase in ethnic diversity has undermined political support for the welfare state in Europe. Previous work has produced mixed findings. This is not surprising given the multidimensional nature of welfare politics and the apparent relevance of both the state-market and universalism-particularism dimensions for social policy-making. The rise of the immigrant population in most European countries –where this gives rise to politically articulated welfare chauvinism– is relevant for the future development of the welfare state in terms of specific policy design in times of financial austerity. RRP have an incentive to take a restrictive, welfare chauvinistic approach to the welfare state as the share of working class voters in their electorate increases, particularly in the context of the Great Recession. The politicization and increasing relevance of issues such as welfare chauvinism suggest that, in addition to the traditional state-market dimension, the identity based universalism-particularism dimension has become relevant for economic policies regarding welfare and labour market regulation. Preference formation regarding welfare deservingness seems to follow a different logic than preferences for more versus less redistribution (Häusermann and Kriesi, 2015). Taking this into account will allow for more differentiated assessments of how ethnic diversity affects welfare policy making.

(Thanks to Enrique Chueca for helping with the graphs).

Note: This article gives the views of the authors, and not the position of the Euro Crisis in the Press blog nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Luis Cornago Bonal (@luiscornagob) holds a dual bachelor in Political Science and Sociology from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) and is pursuing a master’s degree in comparative politics at the London School of Economics. He has been the recipient of the ‘la Caixa’ scholarship (2017) to carry out postgraduate studies in the United Kingdom.

Delia Zollinger is currently completing an MSc in Comparative Politics at LSE. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science with minors in Law and Arabic from the University of Zurich.

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By Christian Kloetzer

After elections for the German Bundestag in September 2017, the phase of government formation has now ended, as the coalition between Christian democrats and social democrats has voted another cabinet under Chancellor Merkel into office last week. But the country, including the voters of the coalition partners, are deeply divided on the issue of migration. The political establishment needs to come to grips with that fact and respond to it, as political parties in neighbouring countries have done. Otherwise, the decline of Germany’s traditional parties may continue.

Elections for the Bundestag, Germany’s Lower House, took place on 24 September 2017. The social democrats (SPD) plunged to an all-time low in German federal elections, after having governed in a grand coalition with the Christian democrats for the past four years. Hours after election results came in, social democratic leader Martin Schulz already announced his party’s intention to return into parliamentary opposition.

But when the coalition talks involving Christian democrats, the Liberals and the Greens (dubbed “Jamaica”) failed in November, a renewed grand coalition began to emerge as the only realistic alternative to new elections. Three-way coalition talks were held, between the SPD, Angela Merkel’s CDU, and its Bavarian sister party, the CSU, resulting in a 170-page coalition agreement. A reshuffled cabinet with some fresh faces has now taken over the reins of governing again.

The degree of continuity that a refashioned version of the German grand coalition under the same Chancellor might suggest, needs to be put into perspective, however. In total, the three parties lost 13.7% of vote share since the previous round of elections in 2013. At the same time, the right-wing AfD made its entry into the Bundestag with a score of 12.6%. In 2013, it had narrowly failed to reach the electoral threshold of 5%. And while the party itself is notoriously fractured and disordered, its voters tell us relatively straightforwardly what their vote means: in infratest dimap’s exit poll, 92% of them say that the AfD is mainly there to influence the German government’s policy on refugees. In a separate poll ahead of the elections, a full 100% of AfD supporters declared (see page 30) that they were somewhat or very dissatisfied with Angela Merkel’s policy decisions on asylum and refugees.

And while this opposition is clearly focused in the AfD, the general sentiment is shared more widely. We can see it in the exit poll. 35% of all voters like the fact that the AfD wants to limit the influx of refugees, while 37% approve of the party’s intention to reduce the influence of Islam on Germany, and 49% say that it has understood better than other parties that many in the country are not feeling safe anymore. 57% say that they worry about a growing influence of Islam. Assuming that all AfD voters agreed with the affirmations, that still leaves between 22% and 44% of the electorate either supporting the AfD’s general policy orientation on immigration, or sharing sentiments that the AfD has itself tapped into quite successfully (see Figure 1 below). Who are these voters?

Some of them will undoubtedly come from the CSU. The party has been the main exponent of criticism of German migration policy among the established parties, whilst being part of the governing coalition. Since the peak of the migrant crisis in late 2015, CSU politicians have sought to establish a more restrictive legal framework for humanitarian migration, in the form of a limitation on the intake of refugees and migrants (“Obergrenze”) around the order of 200,000 persons per year. Both the CDU and the SPD have categorically rejected the idea of a “hard” limit, but the CSU has not abandoned it, and so an on-again off-again debate about this proposal has dragged on for long. Still, due to the party’s geographical limitation to Bavaria, CSU voters only account for 6.2% of the whole electorate. So they alone can only make up a small piece of the rest. But we need look no further than the CDU and SPD.

First, both parties lost a considerable number of voters to the AfD: 980.000 from the Christian democrats, and 470.000 from the SPD. This is not surprising for either party. In the CDU’s base, some would like to see a closer alignment of their own party with the CSU on the issue of migration. In a poll in January, 44% of CDU and CSU voters (see page 11) agreed that Angela Merkel has not taken popular concerns about migration sufficiently into account in her policies. And, in a separate poll, when asked about the CSU’s call for a limit on the intake of refugees and migrants, 55% declared their support.

Among social democratic supporters, 54% also approved of this policy proposal. But criticism or skepticism around the issue of migration and integration are not new to the party. When, in 2010, social democratic politician Thilo Sarrazin published a controversial book on the failed integration of some immigrants in Germany, the reactions unveiled a rift in the party. His book was harshly criticized by party leaders, but in parts of the base, some of his ideas were received more favorably. Not so surprisingly then, 52% of SPD supporters were dissatisfied with the current German government’s migration policy ahead of the elections.

So, as we can see, the division in Germany’s electorate on the issue of migration extends far into the camps of the prospective coalition partners. Diverse viewpoints on a particular issue within a political party are nothing extraordinary of course. They may even be considered constitutive of the kind of big tent parties (“Volkspartei”) that both Christian democrats and social democrats see themselves as. But the coalition agreement between CDU/CSU and SPD does not reflect this division. In fact, the social democrats even pressed for an easing of restrictions on the reunification of families of migrants that had applied for asylum, but were not given the full legal status of refugees under German law. More generally, the agreement contains no indication that the government’s response to a renewed migrant crisis would be any different from that of 2015.

Taking furthermore into account that, since 2014, the political issue that voters identified as most important has been immigration and integration — currently leading 37 to 17 over pensions —, this produces a somewhat delicate situation. The three parties have adopted a stance that half of their supporters are opposed to, specifically on the one issue that voters tend to see as the most pressing. Here it is instructive to briefly consider the cases of the Netherlands and Austria, which have held general elections in 2017 as well. In both countries, the political parties have generally been responsive to the fact that migration has become voters’ top concern since 2015. Two candidates, that each made control of migration a key part of their platform and nudged their party to the right on this specific issue, went on to win the elections and form a government: the liberal Mark Rutte in the Netherlands, and Christian democrat Sebastian Kurz in Austria. In Germany, no such realignment with the electorate has taken place yet.

Since the parties of the grand coalition are, as we have seen, not accurately representing the division in their electorate on the issue of migration, the segment of the population that we have outlined above is being largely ignored in policy-making. The risk now is that support for established parties continues to erode as more voters move to the fringes of the political spectrum. Especially in the East German states, this is an acute concern. In the state of Saxony, the AfD already narrowly came out as the strongest force in the Bundestag elections. And one recent poll has the party closing in on the CDU in East Germany as a whole, with scores of 25% and 26%, respectively. But the party has also made inroads in urban districts in the South and West. Other voters may also not identify with any party on the ballot, and therefore stay home next time around. This disaffection from political parties happens gradually and is fairly silent, until it manifests itself all the more forcefully in another electoral upset of the coalition partners.

Therefore, it is imperative that the established parties, and first and foremost those who are now in government, formulate a political strategy to engage with their voters on both sides of the migration issue. Failure to do so may lead to a further erosion in future election scores. Germany’s political stability and the effectiveness of its government will decrease accordingly — at a time when leadership in Europe is very much needed.

Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the Euro Crisis in the Press blog nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Christian Kloetzer is a freelance writer. He holds a BA in political science from the Université Libre de Bruxelles, an MSc in political science from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, and an MA in political history from Utrecht University.

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By Alessandro Franzi

The new Italian government, formed by the Five Stars Movement and the League, also poses a challenge to the Catholic Church. However, it is not only its populist tones that create a division between State and religious powers, in a country where ecclesiastic hierarchies have always had a strong influence in decision making. The current battleground is the nationalist approach to immigration policies, a main pillar of the new government action. The official line of the Italian church, embodied by Pope Francis, insists on the evangelical duty of receiving people who cross the Mediterranean sea to reach Europe every week. The winners of the 2018 elections push in the opposite direction by pursuing restrictive policies.

Source: https://pixabay.com/en/blessing-of-children-pope-religion-604358/

According to Minister of the Interior Matteo Salvini, the far-right League leader and the de facto prime minister, Italy can not afford to let new migrants enter the country. He claims that there are too many as it is, and that they are changing the country’s traditional way of life. Salvini’s guiding principle is ‘Italians first’. Hence his first acts were to close national ports to NGO boats carrying victims of shipwrecks, and to promise to cut public funds for asylum seekers’ assistance. Italy’s goal is to force its EU partners to accept mandatory quotas of migrants by changing the so-called Dublin Regulation. This position is shared by both government parties because they are widely popular among voters, although the Five Stars Movement is a less compact party than the League and risks a split in the long term.

The conflict with the Church on immigration policies can either lead to a difficult compromise, or a political clash, bringing out traditionalist positions within the Catholic world. The Italian Episcopal Conference (CEI) did not give any indication of a vote last March. This has been the case for several years. Since the fall of the Catholic mass party Democrazia Cristiana in 1994, the Church has sought a dialogue with both centre-right and centre-left governments on specific policies. In particular, there was a strong relationship with Silvio Berlusconi’s cabinets on ethical issues like the defence of the ‘traditional family’, and the ‘right to life’. Nevertheless, the Italian bishops did underline their positions in a series of official statements in view of the 2018 general election. The president of the Episcopal Conference, Cardinal Gualtiero Bassetti, stated that Italy must “be pacified” in order to reduce “widespread social resentment” fueled by unemployment and international migration. The latter in particular has monopolised public debate. “Since its foundation” – Cardinal Bassetti stated during the plenary assembly of the Italian bishops, in January, “the Catholic Church has taken care of the poor and the forgotten people in total obedience to the Gospel, because it sees Christ in them”. This is at the heart of Pope Francis’ message, whose first visit outside Rome, in 2013, was to the small island of Lampedusa in the southernmost part of Italy where in the recent past thousands of immigrants have landed from Africa to reach EU countries. According to the Holy Father, welcoming refugees and immigrants escaping wars, violence and poverty is the moral duty of all Christians. And, moreover, “populism is not the solution” to the crisis of our time – a warning addressed to the US President, Donald Trump, but also to his European supporters such as Salvini, who are trying to form a transnational alliance for the 2019 EU elections.

The Church claims that it is necessary to build ‘bridges’ and to dialogue with different religions and ethnic groups, while the League and its European and domestic allies evoke the image of ‘walls’ through a strengthening of state and cultural borders. Some claim that the Catholic Church already represents a real opposition to populist leaders across Western countries, for as long as the current papacy lasts. In Italy, hundreds of Catholic parishes are mobilising to provide accommodation and education to new migrants. Several priests spoke out in public against Salvini and his actions, for instance when the new Interior minister suggested a census of the Roma population. It would be a mistake, however, to consider immigration a common political issue.

The outcome of the 2018 Italian elections and the subsequent government agreement between the Five Stars Movement and the League relegated the Church’s official line to the political minority. In March, the two government parties accounted for 50,1% of votes: the Five Stars Movement was at 32,7%, the League at 17,4%. Approval has increased after the government led by Giuseppe Conte, an almost unknown professor of law, took office in June 2. According to recent polls, jointly the two political forces are now closer to 60%, and Salvini’s party has reached at least 28% thanks to anti-immigration policies. This should not come as a surprise, because the fear of an ‘invasion’ has grown in recent years, a time when most of Italians citizens felt overlooked by European institutions and hard-hit by austerity policies, which fuelled a new patriotic rhetoric. The left-wing Democratic Party (dropped to 18%) paid the highest political price after being in charge of the Italian government for the last five years. The surprise is that in this scenario the Church’s voice may become “irrelevant” if it does not become louder in the political sphere, according to some prominent ecclesiastics close to the Pope.

Source: https://pixabay.com/en/boat-water-refugee-escape-asylum-998966/

Immigration is of course not only a problem of numbers. According to official data by the Ministry of Interior, the amount of people arriving to Italy has decreased by about 80% since the beginning of 2018, compared to the same periods in 2016 and 2017. This also led to a fall in arrivals to Europe after the 2015 emergency. Instead, immigration is a problem that plays out in the sphere of identity.

Nationalist politicians use religion to strengthen community membership, to evoke an ideal past, and to identify ‘others’ (such as Muslims). Salvini himself is not a practicing Catholic but he recently carried a rosary during some rallies and still campaigns to display crucifixes in all Italian public offices. He claims to be the defender of the Christian tradition and insists that he prefers the conservative Pope Benedict XVI to Pope Francis, as he considers the latter too globalist. The League leader wants to push the more traditionalist elements of the Church into the open, knowing that a relevant share of Catholics voted for his party, as underlined by an Ipsos study. It was not by chance that, having been in office for just a few days, Salvini met Cardinal Raymond Burke, one of the more critical ecclesiastics under the current Pope. What seems certain is that religion has returned to being a major political theme in Europe and it is strengthening the political imaginary of the new nationalist parties – the same parties that are questioning EU solidarity. In Italy, the Church continues to support the Pope’s progressive actions. Instead, the opposite is taking place in a number of Eastern European countries, where religion is a prominent aspect of the rise of nationalism. In Viktor Orban’s Hungary, it is used it to justify the closure of the border. In Catholic Poland, the epicentre of this conservative counter-revolution, the Church is also in close ties to the anti-liberal government. In Poland, religion is instrumentalised as a way of reclaiming the ‘pride’ of a people often defeated by history, and to oppose Islamic immigration, against which the rosary was also brandished. Hungary and Poland are seen as political models by leaders like Salvini. All these are elements to be taken into consideration in view of the 2019 European elections, the first ones after the Brexit referendum. They will be an important turning point for the EU.

Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the Euro Crisis in the Press blog nor of the London School of Economics.

Alessandro Franzi is a Milan-based journalist who works for Italian news agency ANSA. He writes about politics with particular interest in the Northern League and centre-right parties. He is the co-author of the ebook ‘il Militante’ on Matteo Salvini’s leadership. He holds a bachelor degree in History and he is an MA Political Science candidate at the University of Milan with a thesis on Eurosceptic movements.

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