Ruxandra Paul Discusses Migration Management as Nation-Building
The Center for the Study of Europe, an affiliated regional center of the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, hosted Assistant Professor of Political Science at Amherst College Ruxandra Paul for a conversation entitled “Migration Management as Nation-Building: Responses to the European Migration Crisis in Migrant-Receiving European Democracies,” on October 27, 2017.
The discussion took place in conjunction with the international workshop Disrupting the Human Trafficking – Migration Nexus, organized by the Pardee School’s Initiative on Forced Migration and Human Trafficking (FMHT).
Paul’s talk drew on her current research project examining the nature of government and political elites’ responses to the current European migration crisis in fifteen migrant-receiving democracies in Western and Eastern Europe.
Through her research, Paul found that policies and the discourses surrounding them diverge from typical migration-management measures and previous debates on how to cope with irregular flows across the European Union’s external border. Instead, due to a combination of factors that include sheer magnitude, uncertain time horizon, and strategic framing by national political elites, these flows have dramatically reopened a range of fundamental questions about the state, national sovereignty, territorial boundaries, the nation (demos) as a political community, and the state-citizen relationship.
Paul argues the Mediterranean migration crisis has reopened the “stateness problem” in Europe, in democracies thought to be long past their nation-building phase. Her research project analyzes policy responses and discourses surrounding the ongoing European migration crisis in comparative perspective, and challenges the established view of nation-building as a thing of the past, inextricably related to the foundation of modern national states, and instead reveals it to be an ongoing process that advances in fits and spurts.