The Refugee Crisis, Political Opportunities and Threats and Transnational Solidarity Organizations in Greece and Denmark

In the past few years the number of refugees and/or migrants entering the European Union in Greece to reach North European destinations such as Denmark has increased drastically, to the extent that 2015 has been considered a refugee-crisis year. These changes may be influenced by political opportunities and threats (Tilly and Tarrow 2006, Goldstone and Tilly 2001) in the involved countries. For example, whereas under SYRIZA’s left government, refugee and migration policies facilitated migration inflows in Greece, these were considerably constrained under the right-wing government in Denmark. Our analysis will use a fresh set of empirical evidence on solidarity activities drawn from a random sample of Transnational Solidarity Organizations (TSOs) on migration, disabilities and unemployment across the two European countries. It aims to illustrate the effects of political opportunities and threats during the past five years on migration related solidarity activities o­rganized by TSOs in Greece and Denmark. It also aims to examine if and in to what extent the recent refugee crisis was an opportunity for solidarity actions by groups and organizations who are not traditionally engaged with pro migrant/refugees actions such as disability-related organizations as well as unions and unemployment groups etc. The data used is produced in the context of the TransSOL project by a new methodological approach based on hubs-website retrieval and the subsequent content analysis of the websites following protest event and protest case analysis (Kousis and Giugni 2015).