‘It won’t work without ugly pictures’: images of othered masculinities and the legitimisation of restrictive refugee-politics in Austria

ABSTRACT

In summer 2015, the Austrian migration regime was temporarily disrupted when refugees for a brief moment managed to assert freedom of movement across the country’s border. This article discusses how negative images of foreign masculinity allowed Austrian politicians to regain control and legitimise new restrictive asylum laws. The analysis shows that politicians took up and reframed existing notions about foreign masculinity to create gendered, racialised and classed images of racial difference. They established a securitising perspective in debates on refugees which allowed them to gain support for restrictive measures against a highly vulnerable group.

KEYWORDS:

• Masculinity
• refugees
• racism
• Austria

Introduction

When the Austrian Interior Minister demanded new legal means for refugees to enter Europe at a press conference in August 2015, she surprised many. Over the past years, the ministry had established a restrictive position in shaping migration policy (Stern, 2010), which it now apparently abandoned. But this should not remain the only unforeseen development in this ‘long summer of migration’ (Hess et al., 2017). In the weeks to come, thousands of refugees crossed the Austrian borders without being controlled or stopped, accompanied by a wave of solidarity from civil society. However, this openness did not last long. The state soon restored border controls and, as in other European countries, authorities deployed new restrictive measures against refugees and asylum seekers.

How did the process of regaining control after a brief moment of relative freedom of movement succeed? Focussing on the period from summer 2015 to November 2016, I analyse how Austrian politicians used imageries of ‘foreign masculinity’ to portray refugees as a threat to society, to delegitimise solidarity with them and to argue for restrictive measures. The analysis integrates approaches of masculinity studies, critical migration studies, and postcolonial feminist research and applies methods of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). The paper shows that political answers to the so-called refugee crisis of 2015 continued a long history of legitimising social exclusion by invoking images of problematic foreign masculinity.

Theoretical framework

A central insight of critical masculinity studies (CMS) is the fact that patriarchal gender relations do not solely articulate themselves in the structural domination of men over women, but also in hierarchical relations between men or masculinities (e.g. Connell, 1995; Hearn, 2000). While male domination is thus structured around normative masculine ideals – i.e. ‘hegemonic masculinity’ in Connell’s understanding – it is also fundamentally based on the marginalisation and exclusion of masculinities that are deemed problematic. In analysing hierarchies between masculinities, CMS recognises the role of multiple social relations of dominance and bears resemblance to the intersectional paradigm, coined by black feminists (cf. Crenshaw, 1989; Davis, 2008; McCall, 2005). Among other social relations of dominance, masculinities are hierarchised along the norms of heterosexuality, class relations, racism or citizenship status.

In his influential historical work, Mosse (1996) showed the dialectic relation between normative and othered masculinities: it is through the social production of male ‘countertypes’ that normative ideals of Western manhood are continually negotiated and redefined. Historically, different groups were ascribed the status of the male countertype, e.g. men in colonised territories and homosexual or Jewish men. While groups thus differ across historical periods and societies, the process of marginalisation and othering is recurring. By ascribing a problematic masculinity (be it ‘uncivilised’, ‘diseased’, ‘asocial’, etc.) to certain men they are denied the status of unmarked masculine normality. This process of othering facilitates their social exclusion, discrimination and violence against them. Such a theoretical approach is based on a relational understanding of the construction of ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ masculinities. Against this background, the following analysis asks how migration policies contribute to the construction of othered masculinities by marking them as problematically different.

To this end, this paper integrates masculinity studies with feminist postcolonial theories and perspectives of critical migration studies. Feminist postcolonial theorists highlight the gendered and sexualised character of racism in the context of colonial and imperial exploitation (e.g. McClintock, 1995; Mohanty, 2003). These analyses show how colonial exploitation and conquest was legitimised and made intelligible within a racialised, masculinist framework. Colonial narratives reframed the project of imperialist disappropriation into adventures of ‘discovering’ uncharted territories and exotic people. These narratives were not only gendered and sexualised but also contradictory. Regarding colonised men, imageries about their masculinity ranged from childishness and femininity (Sinha, 1995) to uncivilised violence posing a threat to ‘their’ women which thus had to be saved by white men (Spivak, 1988). These gendered and sexualised narratives created an inventory of knowledge about othered masculinities that is invoked and re-articulated to the present day, as the following analysis shows.

To analyse how gendered knowledge and power are articulated in debates around the enforcement of restrictive asylum policies, this paper draws upon a third theoretical strand. Critical migration studies has developed an understanding of border regimes as more than mere lines, fences or walls and questions the role of politics and the state as omnipotent actors of migration control (e.g. Bojadžijev, 2008; Hess & Kasparek, 2010). Border regimes are complex and contradictory fields of institutional negotiations of norms, laws, procedures and discourses. They are neither static, nor are they ever able to control (let alone stop) migration completely. Rather, they are dynamic, changing responses to (dynamic, changing) practices of migration (Bojadžijev & Karakayali, 2007).

Equipped with these theoretical approaches, I analyse how notions of problematic masculinity were used by Austrian politicians to try to regain control over the movement of refugees and to legitimise new restrictive asylum laws.

Methodology

The analysis draws on the methodology of CDA as developed by sociologists and socio-linguists (see Fairclough & Fairclough, 2012; Jäger, 2015; Van Dijk, 2008; Wodak, 2009). Building on a Foucauldian understanding of discourse, CDA analyses how power and dominance is realised through speech acts. Studies in CDA have particularly focussed on this nexus of power and discourse within the political field. Scholars employed CDA to study the discursive strategies through which politicians manage to establish a particular perspective on social issues and legitimise particular actions to confront that issue. This often goes hand in hand with discursive strategies of assigning characteristics to different social groups in order to establish ‘positive self-presentation’ and ‘negative other presentation’ (cf. Reisigl & Wodak, 2009; Wodak, 2009).

A central topic of research in analysing political discourse is the study of ‘elite racism’, i.e. how racism is articulated in political debates about migration, asylum or ethnic issues (Charteris-Black, 2006; Van Dijk, 2008). Analysing such strategies as othering (‘us’ vs. ‘them’), stereotyping or the propagating of dystopian scenarios, scholars could show how a ‘politics of fear’ (Wodak, 2015) is used to legitimise racist politics and restrictive migration laws.

In line with this approach, the paper analyses how the figure of the male refugee was used to legitimise political action in Austria during the so-called refugee crisis of 2015 and beyond. To do so, the methodological approach to conducting CDA as proposed by Siegfried Jäger (2015) was employed to analyse how the topic of refugees was presented by members of the ruling parties SPÖ and ÖVP¹ as covered in media reports, newspaper interviews and in parties’ press releases in the period from August 2015 to November 2016.² To show how parties of the political right influenced the debate during this time, statements concerning refugees by members of the parties Freiheitliche Partei Österreich (FPÖ) and ‘Team Stronach’ were included. The analysis focussed on accounts and arguments in which politicians either explicitly talked about male refugees or implicitly made reference to masculinity.

The analysis asks how male refugees were represented and what characteristics were ascribed to them in politicians’ statements. Which role did notions of gender and difference play in representing male refugees as problematic? How were these representations used to establish a particular frame on the refugee issue as such and to legitimise political measures in the field of asylum migration?

Focussing on three central topics found in the data – security, sexuality and fraud, the analysis below presents the role that notions about ‘foreign masculinity’ played in regaining political control after the summer of 2015. The analysis shows that these recent debates continue an Austrian and wider European history of using problematic constructs of migrant masculinity in migration politics (Scheibelhofer, 2012, 2016).

The long summer of migration

After the number of people who fled to Europe had steadily increased in the years before, the year 2015 saw a further, drastic increase in refugees.³ As more people tried to make their way to Europe, the number of men, women and children who died during their dangerous journey also rose. As elsewhere, Austrian media increasingly covered this reality in 2015 and the tragic fate of refugees⁴ dying in the Mediterranean and other migration routes became a public issue. The deadly realities that refugees faced hit close to home when the police found a truck with 71 corpses who had suffocated in the back of the car on an Austrian highway in late August 2015. The pressure on political actors to take action rose and it was in response to this tragic incident that Interior Minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner (ÖVP) publicly spoke out for safe routes for refugees. She called for the immediate implementation of ways ‘to legally bring people to Europe’ and warned that the EU would ‘fail at solving the asylum question’ if nationalisms prevail.⁵ At the same time, the situation along the ‘Balkan route’ became more tense, with increasing media reports about state violence against refugees and a rising number of refugees stuck at Budapest Keleti train station after it was closed to hinder their onward journey. When it became known that refugees had been taken from Keleti to a Hungarian asylum camp on a false pretext, the Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann (SPÖ) publicly criticised Hungary as reminiscent of ‘the darkest time of our continent’,⁶ alluding to mass deportations of Jews to concentration camps during National Socialism.

In the end, it was the refugees themselves who altered the situation on the ground when thousands decided to leave Budapest on 4 September by foot towards Austria. Later that day, Austrian and Hungarian authorities reacted and organised buses and trains, which took them to Vienna and further to Germany. Manifold solidarity movements emerged in the Austrian civil society which articulated themselves in a variety of forms: from donating clothes to voluntary work at shelters to actively assisting refugees on their travels by organising transports in private cars. In these days, refugees were able to pass through Austria to Germany without the police stopping or registering them, railways let them travel by train without charging fare, assisting them in their onward journey through Austria. While refugees had effectively dismantled much of the Austrian and the wider European border regime during these weeks of the long summer of migration, a positive view of the events dominated the Austrian public. One example of this was a widely covered visit of Austrian President Heinz Fischer to a Viennese railway station in September 2015 that had become a hotspot for refugees on their way to Germany. Praising the work of volunteers at the station, President Fischer claimed that, here, Austria ‘presents itself from its most beautiful side’. Also, he claimed he was ‘very proud’ of the Federal Railways as well as of the police, who acted as ‘true friends and helpers’.⁷

The shifts in migration realities during the summer of 2015 were accompanied by shifts in representations of otherness. But it should not take long before this positive view was met with opposition.

Rebuilding fortress Europe

In the months that followed the summer of 2015, more and more Austria politicians called for measures to tackle what they came to call the ‘refugee crisis’. State authorities enacted restrictive measures against refugees in order to regain political control over borders and movements. To justify and legitimise these measures, a security perspective was established in the political discourse on refugees. Notions of dangerously foreign masculinity played an important role to establish this negative perspective.

Already in September, the right-wing Freedom Party (FPÖ) used drastic images to position itself against the Austrian refugee policy of the summer. FPÖ’s chief Heinz Christian Strache criticised the government for promoting a ‘population exchange’ and ‘Islamisation’ of Austrian society and called for the closing of Austrian borders, rather than ‘inviting terrorists into the country’.⁸ Strache thus created the dystopic vision of a society threatened both culturally by a dangerous Islam and physically by terrorist violence, drawing heavily on an imagery of threatening masculinity. Although more moderate in his tone, Minister of Integration and Foreign Secretary Sebastian Kurz (ÖVP) also used imageries of problematic foreign masculinity to convey a tough political stance towards refugees:

We have to uphold our values. Those who want to stay must respect our rules of coexistence. Amongst these basic values are the rule of law or gender equality. We have to makes this very clear to the people from other cultures who have come to us.⁹

This statement not only serves to create a positive view of Austrian society but also conveys a message about refugees: Women’s rights are alien to them. So much so, that it will need a firm hand to make them adopt the value of equality.

In the weeks to come, politicians increasingly drew upon scenarios of chaos and threat to argue for a change in Austria’s refugee policy. In October 2015, for example, the governor of the province of Styria demanded: ‘Something has to be done eventually in order to prevent the situation at the border to escalate.’¹⁰ To accomplish that, his colleague from Upper Austria reasoned that Austria could build border fences as ‘the very last resort’.¹¹ Interior Minister Mikl-Leitner took up this idea and publicly called for the setup of fences at Austria’s borders, because refugees ‘have become more impatient, more aggressive, more emotional over the last days and weeks’ according to the Minister.¹² Here, refugees are depicted as increasingly uncontrollable masses, whose emotionality poses a threat in need of containment. As the ÖVP did not manage to convince its partner SPÖ to erect a kilometre-long barbed wire fence at the border, they eventually agreed to build a reduced version in November at the border to Slovenia. While Austrian politicians prominently criticised Hungary’s policy in summer 2015 for its restrictive treatment of refugees, they now gradually started implementing such measures themselves.

But safeguarding Austrian borders was not enough. Already in October 2015, Minister Kurz had called for a ‘complete’ control of EU’s external borders in order to ‘contain the stream of refugees, because the surge to Europe is far too strong’.¹³ In the same spirit, Interior Minister Mikl-Leitner called for the need to ‘build a fortress Europe’.¹⁴ At an international conference in November 2015, she called on ‘Europe to give up on its welcoming culture’¹⁵ and increase measures in the fight against traffickers to ‘guarantee our security’.¹⁶ In January 2016, Minister Kurz stressed the need to close EU’s external borders, even if this would ‘not work without ugly pictures’.¹⁷ In order to safeguard ‘our society’, so the argument goes, the violence of a ‘closed border’ is necessary and legitimate.

Authorities finally managed to restrain the movement of refugees into the EU through an agreement between the EU and Turkey. Yet, the closing of the ‘Balkan route’ had already started before, with Austrian politicians playing a central role. In February 2016, Kurz and Mikl-Leitner hosted a ‘Western Balkans Conference’ in Vienna, where they set in motion the closure of the borders along the ‘Balkan route’. This was facilitated by a measure the Austrian government introduced before the conference that put extra pressure on the Eastern neighbours to introduce stricter border controls themselves. Austria had implemented an annual limit of asylum applications and threatened to stop all refugees from entering the country once the limit of 37,500 applicants was reached. Several ministers from both ruling parties and the leader of the SPÖ¹⁸ promoted the measure as a much needed corrective to save the small country of Austria from the ‘masses of refugees’¹⁹ yet to come. To authorise the government to stop accepting asylum applications at a given point, the government proposed the uncommon legal measure of an ‘emergency decree’ (‘Notverordnung’). The law provides a ground to revoke the right to asylum for future refugees if further applications would jeopardise ‘the maintenance of public order and the protection of internal security’. While commentators heavily criticised the decree when it was first discussed in spring 2016 and even caused turmoil within the ruling SPÖ, the negative stance later waned. The government ratified the decree, which the ÖVP’s security spokesman propagated in martial language as an important ‘self-defence measure’²⁰ in the summer of 2016. After the decision, the newly elected head of the SPÖ also declared publicly that his party fully supports the decree.²¹

To underscore the urgent need for the emergency decree, the interior minister presented a report in autumn 2016, which painted a drastic picture of the state of Austrian society. According to the report, social institutions such as the labour market or the health care system were already at the verge of collapse due to the high numbers of refugees. In the section ‘security and penal system’, the report warned of the dramatically worsening security situation in Austria due to crimes committed by refugees – a depiction that many NGOs working in the field challenged (cf. AGENDA ASYL, 2016).

Regaining control by establishing a security perspective

To regain political control over the movement of refugees after a brief period of openness, a shift in perspective was pursued that reframed asylum from a humanitarian to a security topic. This shift of perspective allowed to depict people with individual histories and hopes for a life in safety as a dangerous mass moving towards a seemingly defenceless country. According to this perspective, it was the intersection of being young, male and Muslim which made the refugees a security threat and called for measures of protection.

To this end, discursive strategies were taken up which were already used in the course of policy restrictions in Austrian migration and asylum law of the 1990s (Scheibelhofer, 2012). In the wake of the fall of the ‘Iron Curtain’ and subsequent migration movements, a discourse was established in Austrian politics that warned of ‘invasion’, ‘waves’ and ‘streams’ of migrants hitting the already ‘full boat’ Austria (Rohrauer, 1997). Typical to political migration discourse (see Charteris-Black, 2006), metaphors of fluids and flows were thus employed to create an image of excess and threat. At that time, the issue of crimes committed by foreigners (described with the then newly coined term ‘Ausländerkriminalität’) became a central topic in Austrian migration debates (Zuser, 1996, p. 34). Already then, the main source of threat was attributed to male migrants. When politicians demanded measures against foreign ‘gangs’, ‘traffickers’, ‘car thieves’ or ‘robbers’, they alluded to gendered imageries of dangerously foreign men. Meanwhile the Ministry of the Interior became the central actor in shaping Austrian migration policy, which helped establish a security perspective on asylum and migration. This process, which happened in several European countries in the 1990s, was described by Bigo (2002) as a ‘securitisation of migration’. Bigo (p. 69) argues that migration increasingly appeared as uncontrollable ‘penetration’ of the nation and state. The gendered and sexualised metaphor (which Bigo himself does not discuss further) is significant. It was imageries of foreign men that were evoked in narratives of penetration and loss of control. These narratives linked migration with danger and helped legitimise harsh measures.

This gendered security perspective had already been established in Austrian political discourse and was successfully re-launched in the context of the ‘refugee crisis’ in 2015. Again it was crowds of strangely foreign men that crossed ‘our’ boundaries and threatened a helpless country. Again it was argued successfully that restrictive measures were needed in defence against this threat.

The dangerous sexuality of foreign patriarchs

When news broke about hundreds of cases of sexual assault by ‘men of Arab or Northern African appearance’²² during New Year’s Eve in Cologne, the already increasingly negative stance towards refugees was fuelled with imageries of dangerous male sexuality. As in other European countries, this news received great attention in Austria and led to virulent debates about the sexual perils of male refugees, even though very little was known about the actual crimes committed or the perpetrators involved (Dietze, 2016).

Media reports quickly identified a misogynistic Arab culture and archaic Muslim religiosity as the cause of the incident.²³ Many politicians made similar arguments, such as Nicole Hosp of the right-wing FPÖ who issued a press statement entitled ‘Austria must not become Cologne’, in which she wrote: ‘Immigration of Muslim refugees’ threaten to undermine the ‘hard-won and shared view of women in our society by silently eroding our values’.²⁴ In several statements, politicians depicted the assaults as proof for the particular threat that young male refugees posed. Minister Kurz, for example, noted that he was not surprised by the attacks: ‘In light of the enormous masses of people that now come to us, I have already anticipated tensions, assaults and violent clashes.’²⁵ More explicitly, Robert Lugar of the neoliberal right-wing party Team Stronach, stated: ‘Just imagine that thousands of young men have come here, who suddenly find themselves without wife and family. The attacks on women in Austria and Germany are only the beginning.’²⁶ In these statements, the aspect of young age is highlighted to sexualise the image of the male Muslim refugee: here, sexuality is presented as a natural force that will eventually erupt. For lack of ‘own’ women, attacks on ‘our’ women were a logic outcome, according to this sexualised notion of foreign masculinity.

Many of these statements blamed lax refugee policies as well as the naïve ‘good will’ of parts of the society for making the attacks possible. Consequences were thus called for and the demands ranged from completely closing the borders to stricter deportation laws and compulsory DNA-testing of all male refugees at EU borders to curfews for male refugees. To counter the perceived threat, several cities founded vigilante groups.²⁷

A few months later, the narrative of the dangerously patriarchal male refugee was taken up in political debates, but this time not in connection with ‘our’ but ‘their’ women. In August 2016, Minister Kurz demanded a legal ban on Burqa and Niquab, since they are ‘symbols of a counter-society’.²⁸ Already two years earlier, such a ban on Muslim veils was demanded by the right-wing FPÖ, but back then, Minister Kurz has dismissed it as an ‘artificial debate’.²⁹ Now in 2016, Minister Kurz took up the proposition and also received support from his Social Democratic coalition partners for the ban.³⁰ In a commentary to the proposed new law by ÖVP politician Lopatka however, it became clear that the debate was not so much aimed at the improvement of women’s living conditions. The veil was rather a site for a symbolic battle against foreign men: ‘Full veiling is a marginal problem in the whole integration question […]. But it is about setting a signal together across Europe: Burka and Niqab are imposed on women by Islamic fanatics who reject our society.’³¹ Although seemingly a ‘women’s issue’ the debate was implicitly informed by – and reproduced – notions about archaic, patriarchal Muslim masculinity.

Ethnosexual constructs of foreign masculinity

While the already ongoing shift in migration debates in Austria had focussed on questions of security and order, suspicions around the sexuality of male refugees consistently appeared in discussions after the assaults of New Year’s Eve. According to many commentators, Muslim religiosity and archaic values made the young men’s sexuality precarious and perilous. They thus adopted a gendered and racialised notion of Islam and ‘Muslim culture’, which shapes recent migration debates. Building upon an understanding of Muslim religion and culture as monolithic, resistant to change and prone to violence, Muslim men are portrayed as dominant, archaic patriarchs (Abu-Lughod, 2002).

These backward traditions, so the argument goes, are now being ‘imported’ to Europe through migration. Underlying this argument is a specific understanding of temporality and progress, which has already been used to legitimise colonial domination and exploitation (Butler, 2008). Such arguments posit Europe or ‘the West’ as the pinnacle of a linear trajectory of human development, while they relegate whole populations and their cultures to a distant past. For this racialised construction of difference, references to exotic and problematic sexualities played an important role and still do so in contemporary debates.

Nagel (2003) coined the term ‘ethnosexual’ to describe the complex nature of these imageries, in which gendered and sexualised notions of the self and of otherness intertwine. Such ethnosexual images shaped the portrayal of problematic foreign masculinity in the context of the ‘refugee crisis’. They linked assumptions about archaic culture and Muslim religion with images of patriarchal gender relations and dangerous male hyper-sexuality. This form of representation makes it possible to locate the male other in an archaic past while the Austrian/European self is depicted as modern and emancipated. In such a discursive framework, existing inequalities as well as new contradictions that shape contemporary Western gender relations can comfortably be neglected (Erdem, 2009). Women’s rights typically play an important role in such discourses, that Farris (2017) termed ‘femonationalism’. People who until then cared little about gender equality, such as conservative or right-wing politicians, take up feminist arguments in debates about problematic foreign masculinity and the need to introduce harsh measures against migrants.

Since the 2000s, debates about problematic gender norms and masculinities among Muslim migrants and their children increasingly accompanied the introduction of new migration and integration laws in Austria (Scheibelhofer, 2013). In the context of the ‘refugee crisis’ of 2015, this perspective was applied to refugees as well. As Messerschmidt (2016) argued, the dominant reactions to the New Year’s Eve assaults ‘positioned a self-image of a gender-equal and sexually emancipated society […] in opposition to a culturalised and racialised counter-image of a misogynist and patriarchal stranger’ (p. 165). This shows, Messerschmidt argues, how ‘the belief in a liberated self’ can be employed to formulate reactionary demands for discipline and punishment of foreign masculinity. And even arguments regarding Muslim women’s attire, a discourse that has been shaping Islam-debates in Europe over the past decades (Auslander, 2000; Lentin & Titley, 2011), served to demonstrate strength against the image of a powerful patriarchal Muslim man by liberating ‘his’ wife from him – if necessary even against her own will.

Five Euro are too much

Questions around trustworthiness and credibility play a central role in asylum procedures (Good, 2011). These questions also entered political discourse on the ‘refugee crisis’ and were employed to present cuts in payments and benefits as a legitimate strategy to stop ‘bogus refugees’ of coming to Austria. Drawing on dominant notions of victimhood and vulnerability, it was particularly male refugees who were presented as deceiving and fraudulent.

Already in fall 2015 members of the right-wing FPÖ argued that a large proportion of the refugees actually were ‘economic refugees’ (‘Wirtschaftsflüchtling’), thus had economic interests and were not entitled to asylum in Austria. FPÖ politicians used this notion to call for more deportations to neighbouring countries as ‘there is no right to choose the best social system’.³² Later another FPÖ member argued that ‘70 per cent of the refugees are economic refugees’ and demanded, striking a martial tone, that they should be deported in army aircrafts where they could ‘scream as loud as they want’.³³

Many others also invoked the image of the ‘economic refugee’. In March 2016, for example, Interior Minister Mikl-Leitner presented a media campaign in which the ministry pointed out that Austria did not grant asylum for economic reasons. The ministry disseminated this clarification on billboards, in newspaper ads and on TV-commercials in Afghanistan with the declared aim of reducing the number of asylum seekers.³⁴

Building on the suspicion that it was actually economic factors that drove migrations, the ÖVP vehemently demanded from January 2016 onwards, that the ‘pull-factor social system’ should be mitigated as the situation in Austria was ‘too attractive’ for refugees.³⁵ In this vein, the newly appointed Interior Minister Sobotka later opposed the plan that asylum seekers should be given the opportunity to work for five Euros an hour while their asylum application was adjudicated. The Minister demanded a maximum of 2.50 Euros, stating that ‘in Afghanistan, policemen earn about 50 cents an hour’ and thus an hourly wage of five Euros would be an incentive for many ‘to come here right away’.³⁶

For members of the Christian-conservative ÖVP, the reduction of the ‘Mindestsicherung’ (a minimum allowance for people with little or no income) for accredited refugees became a central goal in reducing the ‘attractiveness’ of Austria. Since their coalition partner SPÖ did not agree to the reduction, such a measure could not be enacted on a federal level, leading several Austrian states to autonomously introduce reductions in payments for these refugees. Heated debates on the federal level continued beyond November 2016 and thus the period analysed here, with politicians like Gabriel Obernosterer (ÖVP) warning that opposing a country-wide reduction of the minimum allowance would ‘jeopardize social peace in the country’.³⁷

Building on images of lazy refugees who want to cash social benefits, several politicians also demanded measures to force unemployed refugees who were granted asylum status to take specific jobs. In August 2016, Minister Kurz demanded the introduction of compulsory ‘One-Euro Jobs’³⁸ for unemployed accredited refugees. A refusal to take up the job, according to Kurz, should lead to financial sanctions.³⁹ To argue the need for this compulsory measure, the Minister activated images of latent threat, when stating: ‘Those who sit at home or in the park the whole day have a lot of spare time to come up with stupid ideas.’⁴⁰ While the Minister was silent about laws which make it almost impossible for asylum seekers to work in Austria, he alluded to notions of dangerous masculinity that needs to be constrained through work to prevent risks.

The Minister also got support from social scientists for the proposition. The so-called independent expert council for integration, run by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, came up with an integration plan for accredited refugees already in November 2015. In this plan, members of the ‘expert council’ proposed that refugees should only receive full ‘Mindestsicherung’ if they complied with a compulsory ‘integration agreement’ (i.e. attended courses in ‘Austrian values’, language courses, etc.). According to the integration plan, the minimum allowance should increasingly ‘be understood as a pedagogical instrument to push people into an existence without state transfer payments and to realize the concept of “help for self-help”’ (Integrationsexpertenrat, 2015, p. 14).

Resurrecting the image of the ‘bogus asylum seeker’

In political discourse on migration, the use of labels is an important tool for drawing dividing lines and ascribing status (Woods, 2006, p. 62). According to the statements presented above, only a small number of the people who came in 2015 and thereafter were genuine refugees, while the others were ascribed the status of bogus asylum seekers. This enabled politicians to call for fiercer controls and restrictions while signalling their commitment to asylum law in principle. To do so, they could draw on the contradictory and gendered notions about deserving vis-à-vis undeserving refugees.

As Ludwig (2013, p. 5) has argued, the refugee label is in itself contradictory: while the legal refugee status brings advantages concerning rights and provisions, the informal label ‘refugee’ often involves negative stereotypes. In these stereotypes the ‘proper refugee’ is depicted as helpless, poor and in need of aid. This stereotype not only denies refugees agency and subjectivity (McKinnon, 2008, p. 398) but it is also informed by feminised notions of passivity and suffering (Oxford, 2005). Against this dominant feminised image of ‘proper refugees’, the masculinised image of the ‘bogus refugee’ is created: ‘Predominantly pictured as male, “bogus” asylum seekers are associated with gendered suspicions and expectations regarding agency, strength, and cunning’ (Griffiths, 2015, p. 473).

Drawing on these gendered notions of ‘proper refugees’, politicians could claim that most of the men who came during the ‘refugee crisis’ were actually tricking the state and society. In doing so, they continued a political discourse that was already established decades before. As Zuser (1996, p. 34) showed in his analysis of Austrian migration debates of the 1990s, the concept of the ‘bogus asylum seeker’ entered the political discourse in the course of the securitisation of migration. Creating laws and procedures to better identify ‘asylum abuse’ and keep illegitimate applicants from accessing asylum status became a central concern of migration law reforms in that period (Götzelmann, 2010, p. 101).

During the present ‘refugee crisis’ debates continued this tradition and employed the notion of the male ‘bogus asylum seeker’ to legitimise restrictions in asylum law. The image of the conning asylum seeker that had bad work ethics and actually came to Austria because of welfare benefits also played a central role in arguments for compulsory ‘One-Euro Jobs’. Finally, the notion of the dangerous bored male refugee, also found in other national contexts (Griffiths, 2015, p. 473; Hubbard, 2005), was used to call for a strict labour regime.

Conclusions

The intensity of refugee movements in 2015 caused a massive crisis of the European border regime. This not only led to a phase of relative freedom of movement for refugees on their way to the European North but was also accompanied by an unusual openness and solidarity in Austrian public. The analysis shows that, to regain ground in political debates on asylum control in Austria, images of problematic and dangerous foreign masculinity in which notions of gender, sexuality, age and Islam intersect were an important resource.

Politicians invoked these negative images to shift the dominant perspective away from an empathic view on the experiences, struggles, needs and rights of refugees and re-establishing a securitising view. As we have seen, this was accomplished by drawing on and reconfiguring elements of an already existing archive of knowledge about dangerous foreign masculinity. The representations that emerged in the course of the ‘refugee crisis’ are an amalgam of already existing images of masses of dangerous, conning asylum seekers, on the one hand, and assumptions about archaic fundamentalist Muslim patriarchs, on the other.

Alarmist discourses about violence and crime by refugees drew upon culturalising arguments, according to which the majority of the men harboured misogynist attitudes and supported violence against women. In debates about sexualised violence, theories of male sexuality were propagated that actually seemed long overcome. Discussing the sexuality of refugees, politicians resurrected disproven assumptions of male sexuality (Sanyal, 2016) as being a brute force, always on the verge of violent eruption and thus in need of taming and self-regulation. Insights into the complex social, institutional and biographical factors that can explain the realities of male (sexualised) violence (e.g. Kimmel, 2005) have no place in these unidimensional, culturalist explanations. While such depictions lend themselves to demands for drastic measures against refugees, they hinder a critical engagement with masculinity and violence.

A securitising perspective on refugees legitimised measures to protect safety and public order. It not only promoted a view that presented refugees as potentially dangerous but also conning and mainly interested in improving their economic situation. While all asylum seekers – women and men alike – are faced with suspicion today, men more easily fit the dominant picture of the fraudulent ‘bogus refugee’ (Mascini & van Bochove, 2009). Employing this image, politicians could argue for reductions in social benefits for refugees, which will increase the risk of poverty for the affected men, women and children and thus – contrary to the claims of its proponents – hinder integration and social inclusion.

Finally, the shift in perspective also changed the public view on solidarity with refugees. While, in summer 2015, the media and politicians praised volunteers for their support and assistance of refugees, their efforts later came under attack. Increasingly, commentators made the so-called Willkommenskultur responsible for a range of problems commonly associated with refugee migration.

The analysis of the political discourse around the ‘refugee crisis’ in Austria from mid-2015 to November 2016 illustrated the relational character of constructions of othered masculinities. The analysed images of dangerous Muslim male refugees need to be understood as embedded in processes of boundary-drawing and the social production of difference. These debates articulated new male ‘counter types’ building on familiar gendered, sexualised and classed notions of problematic difference. In this context, restrictive measures against a highly vulnerable group could be legitimised and criticism thus diminished. As the analysis shows, this strategy has been broadly successful: left-wing and centrist politicians could adopt demands from the political right including many they had previously vehemently criticised. The established perspective on refugees as a threat to society has made these measures seem necessary and legitimate. Images of dangerous foreign masculinity have played an important role in this shift.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Ari Joskowicz and Gerd Valchars as well as the anonymous reviewers for valuable comments and critique on the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Paul Scheibelhofer is Assistant Professor at the department of Educational Science, Innsbruck University, Austria. His research interests are in masculinity, gender and sexuality; migration and racism; emancipatory pedagogy and sex education.

Notes

1. The ÖVP (‘Österreichische Volkspartei’) is a Christian-conservative party in Austria. As in several legislative periods before, it was in a coalition with the center-left SPÖ ('Sozialdemokratische Partei Österreichs’) at the time of this analysis.

2. Media analysis focussed on the Austrian Newspapers Die Presse and Der Standard but reports from other media were included in cases relevant to the analysis.

3. These numbers are, however, small compared to the amount of refugees hosted by countries of the global south. See, for example, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ ‘Global Trends’ publications at www.unhcr.org.

4. A note on wording: The question, who should be counted as ‘refugee’ is a heavily debated subject in politics, law and also among social scientists (see Ludwig, 2015, p. 37). From a legal point of view, the term ‘refugee’ applies to migrants who have asked for and have been granted asylum. The above sentence would thus, from a legalistic point of view, be incorrect, as the people who died on their way to Europe were not yet granted asylum. Circumventing this problem, one could use terms such as ‘migrant’, ‘irregular migrant’, ‘illegalised migrant’. But, in the context of the research focus of this article, these alternative labels seem unfitting and the term ‘refugees’ is used in a broad sense. In those cases where groups with a particular legal status are referred to, the terms asylum seekers and accredited refugees (i.e. after asylum was granted) is used.

5. In Der Standard of 28 August 2015. All direct citations from newspapers and other sources have been translated by the author.

6. In Die Presse of 12 September 2015.

7. In Die Presse of 11 September 2015.

8. In Die Presse of 25 September 2015.

9. In Die Krone of 22 September 2015.

10. In Die Presse of 26 October 2015.

11. In Die Presse of 26 October 2015.

12. On the national radio station Ö1 on 28 October 2015.

13. In Die Presse of 23 October 2015.

14. In Die Presse of 22 October 2015.

15. During Summer 2015, the German word ‘Willkommenskultur’ gained prominence to describe the positive reception of refugees in Austria and Germany.

16. In Der Standard of 18 November 2015.

17. In Die Welt of 13 January 2016.

18. In Kleine Zeitung of 21 February 2015.

19. From an article published on the website of the ÖVP (www.oevp.at/team/kurz/Kurz-Wir-muessen-Obergrenzen-festlegen.psp, accessed on 14 November 2016).

20. Press release of the Parliament Directorate of 25 April 2016.

21. In Die Krone of 11 August 2016.

22. In Die Presse of 05 January 2016.

23. See, for example, the first issues of 2016 of the magazines Profil or Falter.

24. From statement published on the FPÖ website on 07 January 2016 (www.vfreiheitliche.at/2016/01/07/fpoe-frauensprecherin-hosp-oesterreich-darf-nicht-koeln-werden, accessed on 14 November 2016).

25. In Die Welt of 13 January 2016.

26. Press release of the Team Stronach of 07 January 2016.

27. On the national radio station Ö1 on 11 February 2016.

28. In Kurier of 18 August 2016.

29. In Der Standard of 10 July 2016.

30. In Tiroler Tageszeitung of 20 August 2016.

31. In Der Standard of 25 August 2016.

32. In Die Presse of 25 September 2015.

33. In Kurier of 17 June 2015.

34. The Ministry reported about the project on its website on 1 March 2016 (http://www.bmi.gv.at/cms/bmi/_news/bmi.aspx?id=477833493269586B2B2F6F3D&page=8&view=1, accessed on 14 November 2016).

35. In Die Presse of 12 January 2016.

36. In Der Standard of 3 October 2016.

37. Press release of the Carinthian ÖVP of 5 November 2016.

38. Germany introduced such a measure several years ago for those who registered as unemployed. The individuals concerned must accept these jobs or the state will reduce their benefits. As a compensation for the job the employment office pays one to two Euros an hour.

39. In Der Standard of 19 August 2016.

40. In Kurier of 18 August 2016.