By Nathan Akehurst* – Jacobin
In Europe, the volunteers welcoming Ukrainian refugees are often the same people attacked for aiding refugees in the Mediterranean. That’s not just hypocritical, it’s inhumane — we should welcome all migrants fleeing war and terror.
Across Europe, vast networks of collection points and delivery systems for aid to Ukrainian refugees are springing up, in some cases formally organized but often simply run by everyday people doing their bit. In a small city in rural France, I saw no less than three homemade signs pointing to such help on a short walk. Meanwhile, backed by volunteers, the Polish railways ministry is frantically rebuilding a line to move people through the region. Images of baby strollers left at Przemysl station on the Polish-Ukrainian border for those who need them have gone viral.
Cities across the continent have made public transport free for incoming Ukrainians. The Czech Republic, a country about the physical size of Scotland, has announced its ability to absorb up to two hundred fifty thousand Ukrainians. The EU’s internal borders remain resolutely open. There are severe problems, including reports of racism at the borders and attempts to dismiss such claims as Russian propaganda. But taken as a whole, Europe’s response to the sudden upheaval of millions of Ukrainians has been admirable.
It is a small silver lining to a dismal few weeks. Yet as someone who has followed and worked on migration and refugee protection for years, it is also maddening to watch this and realize that we were capable of such a response all along. Europe has worked diligently over the last decade or two to build one of the world’s most violent borders; including routine pushbacks that are linked to thousands of drownings every year. Dozens have drowned in the last few days alone.
Then there are the exchange deals of the kind that return people to slavery in Libya, alongside a vast and expanding web of military and surveillance infrastructure policing the sea, and the widespread criminalization of rescuers. Now, the Ukraine response has proven that the institutions had it in their power not to orchestrate such a campaign of barbarism.
Beyond Double Standards
The role of selective compassion in all this has been commented on at length. In the UK, a Sunday Times newspaper cartoon welcomes refugees from this crisis, in a sharp departure from the section’s previous tasteless racism on the issue. As well as aid, one can even buy military equipment for irregular Ukrainian forces in online crowd-funders; something that in any other case would get you swiftly put on a watch-list or worse.
Obviously, this is partially because the surge in violence has in this case been driven by a rival power rather than a NATO country or ally, as in the cases of Yemen or Iraq. But Europe’s swift moves to slam the door to Afghans fleeing the Taliban — hardly a friendly regime — last fall suggest that straightforward racial as well as geopolitical concerns inform such markedly different responses. Indeed, plenty of commentators have flatly said so. Meanwhile, Russia is engaged in its own strategic and equally uncharacteristic fast-track citizenship policy for people in separatist-held territories.
But talking about selectiveness only gets us so far, because assisting refugees is always the right thing to do. The UK Home Office’s initial approach, which seemed to involve being as bluntly sociopathic toward Ukrainians as it is toward anyone else fleeing war (with just fifty Ukrainians granted visas in the first two weeks of the war), is hardly preferable to selectiveness. Instead, we should focus on how Europe’s relatively liberal approach to Ukrainians seeking safety has exposed its usual behavior as not only cruel but profoundly unnecessary.
For years European politicians and commentators across the political spectrum have told us that the continent is full up, that letting people in only encourages more people to move, and that most refugees aren’t genuine anyway. In the Ukraine case, such facile arguments have melted away. Even usually virulently anti-migration governments have not entertained them. What we were told was impossible and impractical by countless hand-wringing European politicians is now happening, rapidly and at a huge scale.
The positive implications of this for refugee protection as a whole need to be seized on swiftly. Firstly, this is likely to be a protracted crisis, with considerable potential for escalation. EU commissioner Josep Borrell is already warning that up to 5 million Ukrainians could flee as it goes on. In such a context, attitudes could easily begin to shift with time, and so we need to ensure that provisions made for Ukrainians in the EU are maximal and long-lasting, and include rights to work and social security regardless of the status of Ukraine’s mooted EU accession.
Secondly, there are already record levels of displacement around the globe and a high chance that current instability will produce more. The war is already driving a pre-existing fuel crisis and sparking fears of food shortages in third countries, causing some countries to further endanger supply by hoarding grain. And finally, because the same Europe that is behaving with an uncharacteristic level of human decency toward those fleeing their homes is also about to strengthen its ability to do the exact opposite in other cases.
On March 22, the EU’s new Strategic Compass is set to be approved at the European Council. It is a grand new concept of operations for European defense and as such, it is about far more than just migration. But escalating border violence is written into the strategy’s DNA. Continue reading