Victims or Opportunists? Framing the Refugee Crisis in Flanders and Scotland

The recent refugee crisis poses significant challenge, both politically and socially, to the central state as well as the units within a multinational state. In multi-level systems, substate national governments typically have responsibility for providing integration programmes and social services (in Catalonia, Flanders, and Scotland) or competences over immigration policies more generally (Quebec) , resulting from a process described by Hepburn and Zapata-Barrero (2014) as a territorial rescaling of immigration policy. Substate nationalist parties operating within these systems must adopt positions regarding migration, and may use this as an opportunity to draw a distinction between the substate national community and larger state. Migration touches on issues of resources but also identity. A substate national community’s understanding of itself is formed, to some degree, by its approach to the ‘other’ traditionally in the form of the dominant state but crucially for current debates, also newcomers. The recent, and ongoing, refugee crisis has increased the political salience of these issues further and I draw on Schmidt's et al’s (2009) work on crisis narratives. In this paper, I adopt a cross-national qualitative approach, examining the discourse advanced by the centre-right Flemish nationalist Nieuw-Vlaamse Alliantie and the centre-left Scottish National Party. Drawing on statements published by the party, manifestos, speeches and transcripts of parliamentary debates, I ask how each party has developed its position and the ways in which these issues are framed and constructed, particularly in terms of identity, resource management, and political and social values.