Abstract:This article uses the current ‘refugees/migrants crisis’ and Brexit as illustrative of the numerous challenges the European Union faces today when it comes to its identity and the construction of a ‘European citizenship’. By discussing the proliferation of borders on the European continent and by analysing the sociological significance of such proliferation, the article argues that Europe is experiencing an ontological and epistemological rather than an existential crisis that relates to its incapacity to ackn… Show more
“…The European refugee crisis of 2015-2016 has even further problematised this distinction between the native white population and the Other. At the core of this distinction, as argued by the researchers, is the notion of whiteness that seems to play the key role in the construction of the European identity and that comes into being with the help of a juxtaposition against the non-white population [22]. Such a practice of migrant othering has been described as a form of cultural racism and a form of symbolic violence since it primarily includes overt forms of discrimination based on social or cultural difference [23, p. 1-3].…”
This work aims to study the construction of migrant categories and immigration discourse on Swedish-speaking Facebook pages in the last decade. It combines the insights from computational linguistics and distributional semantics approach with those from discursive psychology to explore a corpus of more than 1 M Facebook posts. This allows one to compare the meanings of labels denoting various categories of migrants and identify the key interpretative repertoires used to discuss the immigration topic. The study finds that the ‘immigrant’ category has stronger association with potential costs, benefits and threat to the host society, while the ‘refugee’ category is presented as in need of support and solidarity. Nevertheless, objectification and exclusionary rhetoric are used in relation to both categories, although in different ways, while the immigration issue is often interpreted as a matter of Sweden’s national concern rather than as a part of people’s actual experiences and life paths.
“…The European refugee crisis of 2015-2016 has even further problematised this distinction between the native white population and the Other. At the core of this distinction, as argued by the researchers, is the notion of whiteness that seems to play the key role in the construction of the European identity and that comes into being with the help of a juxtaposition against the non-white population [22]. Such a practice of migrant othering has been described as a form of cultural racism and a form of symbolic violence since it primarily includes overt forms of discrimination based on social or cultural difference [23, p. 1-3].…”
This work aims to study the construction of migrant categories and immigration discourse on Swedish-speaking Facebook pages in the last decade. It combines the insights from computational linguistics and distributional semantics approach with those from discursive psychology to explore a corpus of more than 1 M Facebook posts. This allows one to compare the meanings of labels denoting various categories of migrants and identify the key interpretative repertoires used to discuss the immigration topic. The study finds that the ‘immigrant’ category has stronger association with potential costs, benefits and threat to the host society, while the ‘refugee’ category is presented as in need of support and solidarity. Nevertheless, objectification and exclusionary rhetoric are used in relation to both categories, although in different ways, while the immigration issue is often interpreted as a matter of Sweden’s national concern rather than as a part of people’s actual experiences and life paths.
“…In addition to the administrative, logistical, and ethical challenges that receiving countries like Hungary faced during the 2015 refugee crisis, the arrival of hundreds of thousands of refugees from the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa in Europe prompted 2For this reason, however, we cannot estimate any precise causal effect of the crisis on public opinion, because there is no counterfactual Ukraine that was not invaded by Russia in 2022. difficult questions about European identity (Ammaturo 2019). Analyses of the crises have focused on its implications for nationalism and national identities (Schenk 2021), for religious identity and the politics of religion (Schmiedel and Smith 2018; Peker 2022), and through a lens of racialization (Burrell and Hörschelmann 2019;Rexhepi 2018).…”
Section: Refugee Crises and European Politicsmentioning
The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine is a watershed moment in European politics. An immediate consequence of the invasion was a massive influx of refugees into Central Europe, a region in which immigration has proven highly contentious and politically salient over the past thirty years. We study public opinion towards refugees in Hungary, a highly exclusionary political environment in which anti-migrant and anti-refugee sentiments are commonly invoked by the ruling government. Combining historical public opinion data from the past decade with original survey data collected in April 2022, we demonstrate that the Ukrainian refugee crisis was accompanied by a large increase in tolerance for refugees, reversing what had previously been one of the most anti-refugee public opinion environments in Europe. To explain this reversal, we use a series of survey experiments to investigate how conflict proximity and racial, religious, and national identity (three manifestations of what we term civilizational characteristics) shape openness to refugees. We find that the distinguishing feature of the 2022 refugee crisis was that refugees were mostly white European Christians driven from their home country by conflict. We discuss the implications of our argument for Hungary, for European politics in times of crisis, and for the politics of public opinion in competitive authoritarian regimes.
“…Whiteness in activists' European identity can partly be explained by the fact that it is not an explicitly political EU identity – indeed, some participants say that they were not very aware of the EU in a political sense until the referendum. For some, it rests on a cultural sense of Europeanness that reproduces discourses of European exceptionalism and constructs Europe as inherently white and neocolonial (Ammaturo, 2018, p. 3). For example, when asked what Europeans have in common, one participant explains I think we are different in a way from people who are, sort of tribal, say, living in Africa, or people who are so far away from us that they are very different, maybe the Far East.…”
Section: From Exclusive To Multiple Identitiesmentioning
Although Brexit campaigns mobilized discourses of hegemonic masculinity that marginalize women, women seemed to be at the forefront of pro-EU campaigns post-referendum. I explore to what extent pro-EU activists make claims to EU citizenship that contest the masculinities of Brexit. Combining Isin's approach to citizenship as 'performed subject positions' with intersectional feminist theory, I argue that masculinity became a site of EU citizenship contestation, which nevertheless reproduced racialized and class-based exclusions. Drawing on interviews with grassroots pro-EU activists, I argue that activists reject militaristic discourses of British identity by asserting multiple embodied identities, demand rights relating to the intimate sphere, and participate in informal, local and non-hierarchical ways. Yet, they reveal a white cultural European identity, a European exceptionalism in demands for rights, and a failure to break with the whiteness of traditional social movements. These findings demonstrate the need for feminist and intersectional analysis within EU public opinion research.
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