Local Governments and Social Movements in the ‘Refugee Crisis’: Milan and Barcelona as ‘Cities of Welcome’

ABSTRACT

Amid the so-called ‘refugee crisis’, South European cities have experienced far-reaching societal transformations, magnified by flaws in multi-level governance. How can urban actors cope with such critical questions, which affect their communities and yet lie beyond their full jurisdiction? This article contends that left-leaning governments and ideologically sympathetic social-movement activists at the city-level are incentivised to join their forces. Alliance-building is a strategy to secure political gains while shaping policies within an otherwise unreceptive, hostile context. This argument is built by intersecting multiple scholarly contributions and illustrated through a comparison of pro-migrant policies in the cities of Milan and Barcelona.

KEYWORDS:

• Municipal government
• migrant solidarity movement
• local migration policy
• multi-level governance
• opportunity structures
• urban politics

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank participants at the IWPP1 Workshop ‘Towards an urban policy analysis: Linking urban politics and public policy’, the ECPR Panel ‘Movement and Party Participation – From Partners to Adversaries’, and the SISP Panel ‘The Politics of Local Government’, for excellent feedback on an earlier version of this paper, especially the chairs David Kaufmann, Mara Sidney, Endre Borbáth, Matteo Bassoli, and Fred Paxton, and the discussants Felix Butzlaff and Tiziana Caponio. I also thank Pietro Castelli Gattinara, Martín Portos, Pablo Castaño Tierno, Giorgio Malet, Donatella della Porta, Patrick Le Galès, Paolo Graziano, two anonymous reviewers, and the Editors of South European Society and Politics for helpful suggestions. Foremost, I want to acknowledge all the interviewees who have participated in this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In 2018 the so-called ‘Security Decree’ (Decree-Law 113/2018) drastically curtailed the SPRAR. The restriction of asylum protection has been a flagship initiative of Matteo Salvini, appointed Minister of the Interior on 1 June 2018.

2. See https://www.sprar.it/pubblicazioni/rapporto-sulla-protezione-internazionale-in-italia-2017 .

3. Governo Italiano, Decreto-Legge no. 451, 30 October 1995.

4. For instance, in 2018 the city participated at the negotiations within the United Nations for the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration and the Global Compact on Refugees.

5. Gobierno de España, Ley no. 12, 30 October 2009.

6. The Italian Navy’s Mare Nostrum search-and-rescue operation had both humanitarian and military purposes. It was replaced by Triton, conducted by the EU agency Frontex. As compared to Mare Nostrum, Triton had a more limited budget and a mandate focused on border control rather than rescue (Caponio & Cappiali 2018, pp. 118–119).

7. Alan Kurdi was a three-year-old Kurdish migrant who fled Syria with his family and died while moving to Greece. The picture of his lifeless body made news headlines worldwide.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Raffaele Bazurli

Raffaele Bazurli is a PhD candidate in political science and sociology at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Florence, Italy. He has held visiting researcher positions at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and Sciences Po-Paris. His research focuses on migration policy, social movements, and urban affairs.