Global Affairs

ISSN: 2334-0460 (Print) 2334-0479 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rgaf20

The refugee crisis: European and global

perspectives

Andrey Makarychev

To cite this article: Andrey Makarychev (2017) The refugee crisis: European and global
perspectives, Global Affairs, 3:1, 31-32, DOI: 10.1080/23340460.2017.1320056

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23340460.2017.1320056

Published online: 05 May 2017.

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GLOBAL AFFAIRS, 2017
VOL. 3, NO. 1, 3132
https://doi.org/10.1080/23340460.2017.1320056

FORUM

The refugee crisis: European and global perspectives

This cluster of articles intends to problematize from the global studies perspectives the current
refugee crisis in Europe and its consequences, including the rise of anti-immigration/far right
parties across the continent, economic and financial repercussions, and new cultural imageries.
Migrant flows, being one of the most controversial elements of globalization, trigger political
reactions within the affected societies that are not immune to populist nationalism, xenopho-
bia and radicalism, even within the framework of EU supranational/cosmopolitan project. For
the latter the refugee crisis is a strong challenge to its liberal emancipatory underpinnings,
which has already triggered serious political consequences such as the growing demand for
renationalization of foreign policies, and the diminishing support for trans-Atlantic security
relations. Not all of these events can fit into the extant explanatory frameworks of globalization
studies and thus require a deeper multidisciplinary scrutiny and empirical research. The con-
tributors to this cluster discuss global, regional and national reverberations of the migration
and refugee debate based on the experiences of a group of European countries.
The changing political, economic and cultural landscapes in Europe are therefore in the
limelight of authors analysis. The contributors explain how the refugee crisis and reactions
to it generate new discourses and policies that reshuffle the extant political and cultural under-
standing of Europe through greater accents on national regulations and bordering. Hence, it is
new lines of distinctions, divisions, and partitions that are at stake for this cluster, along with
their controversial impacts upon the concepts of European integration, solidarity, security,
norms and values. Thus the overall idea is to place the refugee crisis in a variety of scholarly
contexts and discuss whether the responses to this crisis may be conducive to the changing
meanings of Europe and its political, social and cultural contours. In most European countries
the refugee crisis triggered new lines of inclusion and exclusion, new definitions of the inside
and the outside, and elucidated the crisis of governance within the EU. This crisis has differ-
ently affected EU member states, and challenged the grounding of the EU project in the tech-
nologies of liberal depoliticization. By the same token, the refugee crisis is a factor that
influenced relations between old and new member states within the EU, affected the refer-
endum on Brexit, as well as reshaped European discourses on EU neighbourhood.
A particular emphasis is made on the rise of groups and parties that might be differently
labelled far right, populist, or nationalist. Vassilis Petsinis in his article looks at the
Golden Dawn that remains Greeces third most popular party. Since 2012, it has succeeded
in maintaining the solidarity and loyalty of its voters intact during a series of electoral contests
(local, national, and European). Nevertheless, Golden Dawns leadership is currently standing
trial on criminal accusations and this has complicated the operation of the party. The main
questions addressed in this piece are: how significant is Golden Dawn as a political actor
and what does this imply for the Greek state? Does Golden Dawn still manage to attract
voters on the basis of its opposition to migration and how?
Another important dimension to the topic comes from ethnically diverse countries. Based
on their research on Estonia, Andrey Makarychev and Alexandra Yatsyk show how the exist-
ence of a sizeable Russophone community in this country affects the refugee debate. They also
juxtapose the dominant political discourses and art projects in which the issues of immigration

2017 European International Studies Association

32 A. MAKARYCHEV

are central, and identify those cultural discourses that leave ample space for various articula-
tions of diversity and respect to minorities.
Raul Eamets and Leonardo Pattacini analyse economic effects of migration as seen from the
perspectives of destination and sending countries. Typically, migration is treated as a negative
phenomenon, particularly in the case of sending countries that face brain drain, losses in pro-
ductivity and in some cases also increasing demographic problems. Much less attention has
been paid to increasing domestic mobility, higher return on human capital (temporary
migration), remittances and potentially lower social protection expenditures. The authors
argue that migration has both positive and negative effects on destination countries. In the
West one can observe higher unemployment rates, particularly among migrants from
Africa. Often migrants accept poor working conditions, lower salaries and overtime work.
At the same time, they can boost domestic demand, diversify services, create new jobs and
make labour market more flexible. Using simple neoclassical labour market equilibrium
model, the article shows that low skill migrants displace local labour because of lower
wages; in the case of high skill migrants, employment and wages tend to increase. This
approach assumes that low skill migration is supply-driven, while high skill migration is
demand-driven. From a macroeconomic viewpoint, the longer refugees are kept in selection
process and the later they benefit from different adjustment and training programmes, the
harder it would be for them to enter labour market a conclusion that adds practical dimen-
sion to otherwise academic inquiry.

Andrey Makarychev, Guest Editor

Skytte Institute of Political Science, University of Tartu
asmakarychev@gmail.com