Event Highlights: Migration Management as Nation-Building: Responses to the European Migration Crisis in Migrant-Receiving European Democracies – A Lunch Talk with Ruxandra Paul
The Boston University Center for the Study of Europe was honored to host a lunch discussion with Ruxandra Paul, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Amherst College and an affiliate of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University, as she tackles the topics of migration management and nation-building. This discussion took place in conjunction with the international workshop Disrupting the Human Trafficking – Migration Nexus, organized by the Forced Migration and Human Trafficking Initiative at BU’s Pardee School of Global Studies.
In examining the nature of the government and political elites’ responses to the current European migration crisis, Paul discovered that there are a multitude of new questions being raised—questions that Europeans have thought to be already answered—such as what it means to be European and what it means to be a citizen of any nation.
“Due to a combination of factors that include sheer magnitude, an uncertain time horizon, and strategic framing by national political elites, these flows [of migrants] have dramatically reopened a range of fundamental questions about the state, national sovereignty, territorial boundaries, the nation as a political community, and the state-citizen relationship. In other words, the migration crisis has reopened the ‘stateness problem’ in Europe, in democracies thought to be long past their nation-building phase,” Paul explains.
“These conversations get reopened to be reconsidered,” Paul states. “Any semblance of consensus should be revisited.”
Paul dove into her talk by outlining her goals for the discussion. “My goal today is to persuade you,” she states. “There are interesting patterns of divergence and convergence when it comes to the patterns of responses to this crisis. The data we have fails to capture the whole picture.”
Paul’s project challenges the conventional wisdom that nation-building is a thing of the past by reframing it as an ongoing, cyclical, and dynamic. “It is useful and fruitful to apply the lens of state-building and nation-building in order to understand what is happening. Typically, those lenses have been used to understand founding moments, when nation-states are coming together and when political leaders are making the case for why they should exist within certain borders,” Paul explains.
The nation-building literature of the time, however, allows for us to consider events like the migration crisis that, on the surface, may look like isolated, nation-founding events, when in reality, they are re-founding moments. There exists a delicate formula of crafting such nation-building literature. “The narrative you’re telling will have an economic dimension, a political dimension, and a constitutive dimension. It’s up to you to figure out what the best mix is.”
“In terms of what kind of story you’re telling, there are two narrative forms that are particularly relevant for understanding nation-building. One of them is a teleological argument about the broader mission of a nation, and the other is a kind of contextual narrative,” Paul explains. These two narratives are two of the approaches that nations have taken to solidify their stance on the migration crisis, and we’ve seen countries like Germany, Hungary, and Slovakia use these tactics differently from one another and from other European countries.
“When it comes to [the migration crisis], there are big discrepancies in terms of the nation-states’ government’s reactions when it comes to what the EU tells them to do—some countries were accepting, and in other countries this caused outrage.”
“There is a motif of Europeanness,” Paul adds. “Europeans are cautious of reopening the national question.” Unfortunately, politicians have also learned to avoid the question of national identity in politics. “A lot of political parties stay away from that question because it’s so loaded,” Paul says, “but there is more to explore. Talking about the broad convergence, as puzzling and surprising as that might be, let us know that there has to be a more sophisticated approach to this.”
– Toria Rainey ‘18