Responses to Refugees: Political and Public Discourses during the Migration Crisis in Central and Eastern Europe

Abstract

This panel deals with the political discourses and public responses towards refugees in the region of Central and Eastern Europe. Over a million of refugees and migrants arrived in Europe in 2015, triggering a crisis and division in the EU as most of the European countries have struggled to cope with this influx. Their arrival has sparked intense debates not only at the EU level, but also among national elites and within public, polarizing discourses into compassionate support for refugees and negative, even hostile positions against them. Though antagonistic sentiments in relation to immigrants can be traced in political and public debates across Europe, the countries of Central Europe, mainly Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, have been very reluctant to discuss the distribution of refugees through a system of compulsory quotas and strongly opposed the refugee influx, taking negative stances against different aspects of migration, claiming political, cultural, or religious incompatibilities. Though the extreme right has targeted “the Others” in their propaganda as a result of their populist and nativist ideology, some mainstream political actors, especially in the context of public discontent with politics, economic crisis and high unemployment and negative sentiments towards immigrants among parts of public, have built upon populist and intolerant discourse and radicalize their rhetoric for political purposes. These positions have been then often reflected and encouraged through the mass media, but challenged by parts of civil society, mainly by different civil organizations tackling racism and xenophobia. To contrary, in Austria, a neighbouring country that lies geographically in the region of Central Europe, elites and public mostly enthusiastically welcomed refugees, while the political and public discourses during the year of 2015 promoted mostly humane and sympathetic reactions. This panel, reflecting on the current situation, will bring together papers dealing with these different aspects of political, public and civil society reactions towards refugees, offering contemporary theoretical approaches and empirical findings to the discourses on migration crisis. On the one hand, the individual papers discuss public and civil society responses; the first paper analyses public claims-making and framing over refugee crisis, with an emphasis on the Czech Republic, and the other paper examines claims-making of civil organizations that support refugees through prefigurative and expressive activism, with focus on Hungarian civil society. On the other hand, another individual paper will look at the political discourse on migrant crisis, comparing mainstream and extreme right responses towards refugees in Austria, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The papers include theoretical and empirical examples of the political and public discourses in Central and Eastern Europe and discuss the future challenges for the study of these phenomena.

Title	Details
Rejecting the refugees: prejudice, threat and elite discourse in Romania	View Paper Details
Claims, framing and symbolic networks during the 'refugee crisis' in the Czech Republic	View Paper Details
Claims making and prefigurative action: the case of helping organizations in Hungary during the refugee crisis	View Paper Details
Enemies at the borders: Political Claims-Making on Refugees during Migration Crisis in Austria, the Czech Republic and Slovakia	View Paper Details