How to Hatch the Wings of a Mockingbird: A Comment on the EU’s New Migration and Asylum Pact and the Risk of Destroying Civil Society Engagement in Refugee Relief Work Internally to the EU Memberstates

ABSTRACT

It is now more than 5 years since Europe experienced a so-called “refugee crisis” challenging the European Union's asylum system to such an extent that the system is still transforming. This commentary identifies a dangerous trend in these transformations. It does so with reference to the manifestation in Europe in 2015 of grassroot engagement and cross-border initiatives to welcome and support refugee arrivals, known as “welcome cultures”. Bearing this willingness to support refugees in mind, the EU Migration and Asylum Pact appear to communicate an even more exclusive notion of Europe than hitherto seen. Even though “solidarity” is a core notion in The Pact, it is a very different understanding of solidarity than the ones expressed in the welcome cultures: In The Pact “solidarity” refers to the collective responsibility of EU member states to follow refugees back to where they came from. This consensus, neglecting how civil society was an invaluable resource during the summer and autumn of 2015, endanger the activities and maybe even the very existence in Europe of civil society engagement in refugee relief work. We write this commentary because we think these developments should be recognized as a dilemma located at the heart of European democracy.

KEYWORDS:

• EU Migration and Asylum Pact
• civil society activism
• volunteering
• European welcome culture

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Using citation marks we recognize the complexities of this term (see also Sandberg and Andersen 2020b).

2 We recognize the many discussions of how humanitarianism and ‘the value of volunteering in refugee relief work’ are extremely complex phenomena, full of inherent paradoxes and contradiction (cf. Malkki 2015; Rozakou 2016; Pallister-Wilkins 2017; Cabot, 2019; Sandberg and Andersen 2020a; Bendixsen and Sandberg 2021). It is not our intention, however, to normatively judge the greater benefit of the different actions; our concern is rather how the entire field of civil society engagement is being instrumentalizsed by the European border regime and in the case of refugee relief work, also “externalised.”

3 Such sentiments counter Ida Danewid’s argument (2017) that a certain ‘white’ and ‘innocent’ faith in humanity necessarily regenerates the self-indulgence of the liberal left-wing; it also sows seeds for opposite sentiments, including fundamental doubt indicating the need for other kinds of resistance.