A world map marks the concentration of refugees in a few countries. The text is written in a foreign language.

RefugeesAdd Venezuela and Ukraine on the mapSource: UNHCR The State of Refugees in the World 2022

The management of refugees is perhaps the aspect of migration that has been most extensively viewed and approached from an international perspective. After a period when there was no public policy in place related to refugees, during which they were welcomed by churches and other private networks (such as French Protestants during the seventeenth century seeking refuge in Germany, the UK, and the Netherlands), and some individual elites went into exile in response to regime changes and revolutions (such as Chateaubriand, Louis Napoléon Bonaparte, and Victor Hugo, to mention the most well-known exiles from France), the topic became far more pressing on the international scene after the collapse of some of the Great Empires of the nineteenth century: the Russian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. The Nansen passport was created in 1922 in order to avoid a situation of statelessness for Armenians, Russians, and other populations of Eastern Europe, then to assist victims of fascism (the “fuorusciti” in Italy, and Spanish republicans from 1939). The Geneva Convention of 1951, written in the early years of the Cold War, defined refugees in terms of the persecution or fear of persecution of individuals, but definitions of refugees are now a matter of parallel processes of migration diplomacy.

In the early twenty-first century, refugees have come to be the most positively viewed category of migrants. Public opinion in Europe is also more positive towards so-called “good refugees” (from the Middle East) than towards so-called “bad migrants” (from Sub-Saharan Africa). Europe has faced unprecedented flows of refugees since 2015, and large flows of forced migration more broadly, even if the individuals in such “mixed flows” do not all fit the profile of the definition set out by the Geneva Convention of 1951. In 2015, 1.2 million refugees entered Europe. However, this crisis is not without precedent: after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Europe received 500,000 asylum seekers between 1989 to 1993, mostly in Germany, which welcomed three-quarters of all the asylum seekers to Europe, as well as most of the refugees from the former Yugoslavia.

3.1 I – Historical Overview

If we adopt a broad definition of refugees, including forced migration, we can observe that, over the last 70 years (from 1951 to 2021), the world has witnessed large movements of refugees and forced migration approximately every 20 years. After the Second World War, Europe faced flows of forced migration owing to the creation of new borders in Germany and an Iron Curtain between East and West. Between 12 and 14 million Germans (“Vertriebenen”) returned to Germany when their land became Polish (in the regions of Gdańsk, Szczeczin, Poznań, and Wrocław), Russian (the oblast of Koenigsberg/Kaliningrad), and Czech (the Sudetenland). These were ethnic and forced migrants, but not refugees in the strict sense. Their former borders and countries had disappeared. Later, “Ubersiedler” tried to cross the Berlin Wall, built in 1961, and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 brought asylum seekers to Western Europe, along with other dissenters from communist regimes in the USSR and Eastern Europe. These dissenters from the Communist Bloc fitted perfectly with the popular image of refugees: mostly well-educated, cosmopolitan intellectuals, leaving their countries with the hope of finding freedom in Western countries in Europe, the US, or Canada, and sociologically very different from the migrant workers of those times, who tended to be rural and uneducated, and intended to return to their countries of origin. Most of these asylum seekers attained refugee status without difficulty. However, the management of refugees was not a politicised issue in destination countries. Debates on migration were instead focused on the management of labour migration.

The 1970s witnessed the emergence of new political crises, with flows of exiles from various civil wars in Latin America, mainly travelling to the US and Canada, and of Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian “boat people”, who sought shelter in the US, Canada, and France. Public opinion in countries of destination was very positive towards these exiles, even if the political orientation of the newcomers was sometimes opposed (the Vietnamese tried to escape to communist regimes, while Chileans arriving in France in 1973 after the putsch of General Pinochet were leftist activists, who were warmly welcomed by French intellectuals). This second period of major flows of forced migration ends with the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and the arrival in Western Europe and the US of Iranian refugees fleeing the risk of religious radicalisation in the 1980s. These were also recognised as refugees, and most of them were received and without difficulties.

The 1990s marked a turning point. Firstly, the fall of the Iron Curtain and of the Berlin Wall created flows of ethnic migration (but not refugees) in a process of disentanglement of European nation states: 2 million “Aussiedler” arrived in Germany after 1989, mostly from Russia, the Baltic regions, Kazakhstan, and the regions around the Volga River (Saratov), and acquired German citizenship based on linguistic and cultural criteria; 500,000 Muslim Bulgarians, faced with religious discrimination, left their country for Turkey; Romanians in Transylvania, of Hungarian origin, returned to Hungary; and 350,000 Greeks from the north-east coast of the Black Sea (in the former USSR) returned to Greece. However, the largest flow of exiles of this period was the departure of Jewish Russians from the former USSR to Israel, which had an impact on Israeli society in terms of politics (the exiles were mostly right wing voters) and cultural balance (between Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews). Some other conflicts, such as those in Lebanon, the African Great Lakes, and Eritrea, as well as the long Darfur crisis in Sudan, created flows of refugees, which were mostly South-South flows. From 1990 until the present, the reception of refugees has ceased to be practised as a demonstration of Western values in the face of repression by communist regimes. Countries of destination are faced with groups whose forced migrations are motivated by threats other than purely political ones: besides political activists, forced migrants may face persecution on the basis of religion, ethnic belonging, social class, and sexual identity or orientation.

The years 2011–2015 saw the emergence of the so-called Arab Springs, as well as some long-lasting conflicts which also gave rise to millions of refugees, notably those in Afghanistan (6.5 million from the end of the 1970s until now), Sri Lanka, Somalia, and Darfur. Most of these were received by neighbouring countries, in South-South flows: Iran and Pakistan for Afghans, Chad and Egypt for Sudanese (Darfuri), and Syria and Lebanon for Iraqis. Northern Europe, the US, and Canada also received refugees from the Middle East (Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Palestinians, and Kurds) and the Horn of Africa. The Syrian crisis, which was a consequence of a failed Arab Spring uprising in 2011, led to the departure of 5 million people, mostly families, while 7 million people were internally displaced within their country. Currently, Venezuela is the greatest source of exiles (4.5 million people, seeking asylum mainly in Colombia and Brazil, but also in Europe). The largest flows to Europe are those of Syrians, Afghans, Venezuelans, Colombians, Iraqis, and most recently Ukrainians. The countries receiving the largest numbers of forced migrants are Germany, France, and Spain. 84% of Syrian asylum seekers are granted refugee status, 80% of Eritreans, and 73% of Yemenis, with large differences between different European countries, owing to the different diplomatic stances among EU Member States.

In 2015, according to UNHCR, Greece received the largest share of newcomers, who then tried to enter other EU Member States. The EU-Turkish agreements of March 2016 stopped most sea crossings between Greece and Turkey. However, many asylum seekers were held in camps, such as that on the island of Lesbos, for months or even years, without any resolution to their request for refugee status, in physical conditions that contravened their human rights (Le Blanc & Brugère, 2017). The “soft diplomacy” involved in this case had several dimensions: following the agreement with Turkey, Greece was grateful to Angela Merkel for her role in creating this arrangement, which came after years of conflict between Greece and the EU (and particularly Germany) owing to Greece’s debt situation. On this matter the German chancellor thus won some recognition from Greece.

3.2 II – The Refugee Crisis of 2015: Path Dependency, Crises of Solidarity, and Unanimity Rule in Brussels

The main reasons for the failure of managing the reception of refugees in Europe are to be found in European immigration and asylum policy itself. Since 1990, most instruments of dissuasion, repression, and confinement have involved European immigration and asylum policy. The Frontex mechanism for policing Europe’s external borders (created in 2004 as a joint European police force at the external borders of the EU, and implemented from 2005) had its funding renewed and increased several times over (Rodier, 2019). The principles of the Dublin agreements on asylum were not questioned.

The greatest failure was the crisis of solidarity between EU Member States. In previous years, the approach most commonly proposed by large countries of destination for refugees was that of sharing the burden, which was notably adopted by Germany and Austria after the fall of the Berlin Wall. However, the Dublin II regime effectively transferred the task of receiving refugees to Southern EU Member States with a Mediterranean coast, particularly Italy and Greece. A second crisis of solidarity appeared in 2015 between Eastern and Western EU Member States with regard to EU proposals for the resettlement of refugees: most countries belonging to the Visegrad group (Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia) refused to receive newcomers and closed their national borders. Solidarity, one of the values of the EU, as defined in the EU Treaty of Lisbon (2007), collapsed owing to a lack of trust between EU Member States regarding the management of refugees, and also as a result of the growing strength of nationalist ideologies all over Europe. These Eastern European countries were not ostracised for their positions: no judgements were passed (although trials were conducted in the cases of Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary), no fines were imposed (a fine of €250,000 for each asylum seeker rejected was proposed but never implemented), and these states did not face any cuts to the structural EU funds that they were receiving. The refugee crisis gave rise to many such cases of the return of national borders and assertions of national sovereignty, such as at the border between France and Italy (2011 and 2015), between Hungary and its neighbours (2015), and between Bulgaria and Greece (2016).

The weakness of the EU on these matters is partly due to the requirement for a unanimous vote to pass any measures on migration and asylum affairs at the European Council. This system gives individual countries considerable power to veto any possibility of reforming the Dublin agreements, even though these are strongly criticised by all NGOs and associations involved in taking care of newcomers. Other approaches on the part of the EU would be possible but have not even been debated, such as implementing a 2001 European directive on providing temporary protection for newcomers who do not fit the criteria of the Geneva Convention definition of refugees, or creating an obligation to receive boats of refugees crossing the Mediterranean, thus saving people at risk of dying at sea. It would also be possible to reopen legal channels for labour immigration, which would reduce the proliferation of so-called mixed flows of job seekers attempting to get refugee status. The weakness of Euro-Mediterranean dialogue and the adherence to old failed solutions, such as return policies (as decided at the Valletta Euro-African summit of autumn 2015 and again in 2019) are also part of the crisis, which is ultimately more a crisis of solidarity than of refugees themselves.

An externalisation of borders beyond the EU space led EU Member States to sign bilateral and multilateral agreements with many extra-European neighbours asking them to control their borders with Europe in exchange for money, visas for their elites, and development aid, even in non-safe countries.

A renewal of the migration crisis occurred in 2020 when President Erdoğan began to reopen the borders of Turkey to refugees wishing to enter Europe to apply for a refugee status that they could not get in Turkey. Turkey signed the Geneva Convention of 1951, but never extended its definition of refugees to include non-Europeans (whereas the New York Protocol on Refugees of 1967 extended access to refugee status to the whole world). In a game of soft diplomacy with Europe, Turkey threatened Europe with the arrival of thousands of newcomers on Greek shores, where the situation was critical owing to the COVID-19 crisis. Instead of proposing to share the burden of newcomers among the 27 EU Member States, the EU opted to help Greece, at a time when public opinion was protesting day after day against the existence of refugee camps. Turkey’s use of asylum as a bargaining chip to obtain concessions that it had not received in 2016 brings to mind the opposition between Belarus and Poland in autumn 2021, when Belarus organised the arrival of Middle Eastern refugee flows at the Polish border (and thus an external EU border) in order to apply pressure and reinforce its demands upon the EU.

Faced with these migration crises, which challenge policymakers and are a subject of intense political controversies, European leaders are trying to find ways to cope with one of the largest refugee flows in European history without contradicting public opinion, which is increasingly influenced by populist parties. However, attempts to “manage” the situation through security-orientated and anti-immigration policy instruments, both by individual Member States and collective EU measures, seem to provide limited results. Meanwhile, these measures have serious adverse effects: thousands of deaths in the Mediterranean Sea, the emergence of both formal and informal camps for detaining migrants, increasing tensions on the borders of Europe, the violation of rights and legal provisions at the national, European, and international level, and the proliferation of human smuggling, trafficking, and other criminal activities around migration and migrants.

Why do policy makers adhere to decisions and policy options that seem to have failed to achieve their explicit goals in the past? The refugee crisis has revealed the social mechanisms underpinning this process (organisations, human smuggling, which is becoming a pull factor, and push factors linked to political crises and unemployment), the different and conflicting ways in which EU Member States and EU institutions have responded to the influx of migrants, the lack of trust between Northern and Southern European Member States amid the refugee crisis of 2015, and the ongoing inability of Europe to find a solution to the treatment of refugees.

3.2.1 The Ukrainian Case: An Exception?

The invasion of Ukraine by Russia in February 2022 brought about a new approach to the crisis of hospitality and solidarity towards refugees in Europe. The same countries that had previously been particularly reluctant to receive newcomers were very willing to receive their neighbours from Ukraine as refugees. Through a multilevel reception policy, which was decided at the EU level with the implementation of temporary protection measures according to a directive of 2001 (first formulated for Kosovars and never applied before 2022), Ukrainians were received in Europe and institutionally settled thanks to public policies at national and local level. These settlement programmes involved housing refugees in the homes of citizens, which was a method implemented in Germany in 2015. Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Romania, and Moldova were the countries most heavily involved in the reception of refugees, for historical reasons (the movement of borders since the end of the Second Wold War) and owing to the shared memory of facing a Russian enemy (Budapest in 1956, Prague in 1968, the Solidarność movement in 1980). Ukrainians, being white, Christian Europeans, were more readily accepted in those countries, and also in Western Europe, owing to the selective approach used to distinguish between European and non-European refugees.

3.3 Conclusion: Is There a Migration Diplomacy Around Refugee Policies?

After a period of 30 years in which research on refugees in political science and international relations was rare (because the topic was mostly treated in the field of international law), there has more recently been a large number of publications. We would point first of all to the works of Aristide Zolberg (Zolberg et al., 1989), Emma Haddad (2008), and Karen Akoka (2020). Aristide Zolberg particularly emphasises the place of the Global South in the refugee question. Emma Haddad, like Zolberg, analyses refugees as actors in the relationship between the internal political order and international affairs. She considers that the arrival of refugees on the international scene gives rise to a mismatch between the theory and practice of the international system and the concept of the sovereignty of states: whereas the concept of the migrant belongs to the national order of states, the concept of the refugee is a political construct which transcends the state-citizen-territory model. Refugees, as international actors, exist only in a context of international societies of sovereign states with borders between them. They therefore challenge the classical international order of states, and they are now becoming central actors on the international scene. Whereas the migrant is heavily dependent on the practices of individual nation states, refugees do not belong to states as such, thus escaping from the logics of states, nationalities, and territories, as they are protected by an international status recognised by the United Nations.

In her book on asylum and exile (2020), Karen Akoka argues that the bottom-up treatment of refugees reveals a parallel system of diplomacy. Two main historical trends can be seen in the treatment of refugees: during the Cold War, the reception of refugees was linked with foreign policy, and both in the East and the West refugees were admitted based on their nationality alone, with acceptance rates of 99% for Vietnamese or Chilean asylum seekers; in recent decades, the reception of refugees has become a matter of domestic border control, with rates of acceptance decreasing to levels between 50% and 70%. However, some exceptions can be observed: in the French case, in the 1960s and 1970s, Portuguese, Spanish, and Yugoslavs were barely recognised as statutory refugees because public policy was aimed at preserving good relations with these regimes. Since these nationalities were in demand as a source of labour, when these migrants arrived without documentation they were legalised as workers. Until 1965, most refugees were perceived as being orphaned from their former national status (mostly in cases of states that had ceased to exist) rather than as persecuted victims. There was a collective recognition for all refugees coming from behind the Iron Curtain and for Vietnamese. The turning point of the 1990s is linked to a subordination of asylum issues to security-based policies for border control, leading to rates of recognition below 20% in 1990–2000 for Sub-Saharan Africans. However, the profiles of these migrants were individually filtered, owing to the will to preserve good relations with some African presidents, as well as a fear in public opinion of an African “invasion”. The present discourse on mixed flows, which blurs distinctions between asylum seekers and job seekers, is rooted in this practice, without acknowledging it.