This paper examines political claims-making over European refugee crisis in the region of Central Europe, namely in Austria, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Although among these countries, the direct refugee route crossed only Austria, the political and public debates have become intense, contentious and polarized in each of these states, and in some instances even lead to institutional changes. Political and cultural elites in Slovakia and the Czech Republic, which as countries have hardly been a target of mass migration, have tended to suggest links to terrorism and cultural and religious incompatibility of refugees in an attempt to harness on anti-immigrant sentiments that have become prevalent in parts of public. Surprisingly, these discourses have aligned well with the extreme right actors, who in Central and Eastern Europe traditionally rather focus on ethnic and national minorities, but with the migration crisis profoundly engaged in exclusionary discourse towards refugees. In contrast, some political actors and civil society organizations in these countries launched anti-racist and pro-migrant campaigns to extensively support refugees. Elites in Austria, on the other hand, have during mid-2015 helped refugees with asylum or transport further to the West and the public discourse was also for some time very positively skewed towards warm welcome of refugees.
In the paper, we apply cross-country analysis to political discourses on refugees in three countries that geographically belong to Central Europe but politically are still rather divided between Western and Central Eastern Europe. Building upon political claims-making analysis (Koopmans & Statham, 1999; de Wilde, 2013), we content analyse media articles from three newspapers (two major broadsheets and one tabloid) and TV news from a public broadcaster in each country. Specifically, we analyse different issues related to migrant crisis, forms of actions, distinctive aspects (frames) emphasized by respective actors, language they use in relation to refugees, and relations between subject and object actors within claims, looking at similarities and differences between countries and among different types of actors. Though the successes of extreme right parties have been in relation to immigration rather extensively studied, we know relatively little about mainstream parties’ positions on migration and reactions to the changed economic and social circumstances and even less on Central European mainstream and extreme right responses towards refugees. However, in light of real-world events, it is crucial to understand what meanings do different actors construct in relation to refugees since this helps us not only to understand responses to immigration but also identify the positions of mainstream and extreme right actors that may have profound effects on policy-making in the field.
