The growing Ukrainian refugee crisis in Europe

This is a decent 13-minute English report from Deutsche Welle on Germany's handling so far of Ukrainian refugees, Germany's lessons learned from the 2015 refugee crisis 04/30/2022:

It features comments by Gerald Knaus, an Austrian-born migration expert who was a major figure in developing the 2016 EU-Turkey agreement that provided the immediate resolution of the 2015 refugee crisis referred to in this report. He's the director of the European Stability Initiative (ESI). It's a helpful summary of what kinds of services countries need to provide to refugees. (If anyone is wondering how the *US* performance on this is currently: it's really bad.)

The report has an upbeat tone. So it waits until the end (12:20) to give the quote from Gerald Knaus that I would have put at the beginning:

Let's not forget, we only have [had] this war for seven weeks. After seven weeks in 2015, those who were skeptical [i.e., hostile to refugees] were not very loud. Because the real test will be in four months when there might be two and a half million refugees in Germany - a number that we've never seen before. When we have a shortage of every kindergarten, of schools, then the test will be if German society will show the same empathy as now and I hope it will. And I think we should focus on sustaining this because there hasn't been a refugee crisis like this in Europe since the 1940s. [my emphasis]

It's appropriate that in the clip where he says this, the hair on top of his head is sticking straight up. Because he's been in a Cassandra role since the successful agreement with Turkey in 2016, saying that the EU countries need to really get it together on preparing for refugee crises because there would be more of them. Now there is one. And most EU governments have taken the understandably tempting approach of kicking the can down the road and letting some later officeholders deal with it.

But the "can" is now more like a brick wall. The UN figures as of April 29 estimate 4.8 million Ukrainian refugees in EU countries and Moldova, Poland receiving by far the largest number. These estimates are not precise counts. But the influx of refugees to the EU in 2015 that is remembered as a terrible refugee crisis was 1.1 million. Most of those wound up settling in Germany. The far-right parties - some of them more-or-less openly "Putinist" in their politics - went all-in on xenophobic propaganda. And the center-right and center-left parties did a mostly pitiful job in trying to counter it, to the extent they tried at all. The refugee scare was a big boost to the Brexit campaign.

This is a different situation in some ways. But the math is easy: 4.8 million is a lot bigger than 1.1 million. And we're just now in the third month of the war. Knaus has been estimating that there could be 10 million external refugees this calendar year. The EU countries have around 447 million people, Britain another 67 million. A well-coordinated refugee policy would make even 10 million manageable. In 2015, with Britain still an EU member, way too many political leaders freaked out over 1.1 million.

Knaus also speaks about the current situation in this German interview, Es ist im Interesse Deutschlands, Polen zu helfen NDR 29.04.2022.

A look back at the previous worst European refugee crisis since the Second Woirld War

The current influx of refugees to EU countries of millions of Ukrainian refugees is a crisis of this type unprecedented since the end of the Second World War.

But the 2015-16 refugee crisis that become a political crisis in which the far right and conservative parties exploited real and imaginary concerns over the refugees for political advantage. The arguments, resentments, and ideological twists of that crisis and its aftermath provide a starting point for seeing the current political reactions as they develop.

What became a major political crisis over refugees began in 2015, shortly after the Greek debt crisis was resolved in way that generated nationalistic tensions with the EU. So I've been looking back at some of the reporting and analysis on the 2015-16 crisis.

September 2015 is the point where the refugee crisis became what was generally seen also as a refugee crisis. The refugees then were largely coming from Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan. As the refugee processing and centers and camps in Italy, larger numbers began arriving in other countries in Europe. In one of his most effective and malicious blows at democracy, the rule of law, and the coherence of the EU, Hungarian President Viktor Orbán organized a melodramatic moment in which he brought refugees from all over Hungary to the Austria border. Most of them wanted to get to Germany. This then provided news footage that the far right could use to promote a "Great Replacement" scare in which hordes of refugees were flooding Europe and in which national governments had "lost control of their borders."

Marei Pelzer wrote about the 2015 crisis in Flüchtlinge: Der inszenierte Notstand Blätter 2015-09 with particular reference to Germany. Reading this piece from 2019, a number of things caught my attention.

The 2015-16 arrivals were largely asylum-seekers. In 2022, the EU Commission invoked the Temporary Protection Directive, which means that Ukrainian refugees have the legal status of "displaced persons" for at least a year. There is still registration involved. But it reduces the initial legal complications for new arrivals compared to those officially designated as "refugees/asylum-seekers."

The complaint that huge numbers of refugees are abusing the laws and faking their asylum eligibility won't be entirely missing in 2022. But at least they will have to reformulated a bit as far-right groups adapt them to the Ukrainians.

There were violent attacks on refugee residences. "Right-wing thugs are blatantly trying to spread fear and terror among migrants and intimidate their political opponents," wrote Pelzer.

There was a lot of conversation and legal maneuvering around attempts to stigmatize categories of refugees as less deserving or genuine than others. Senior German politicians were discussing creating special refugee camps, which Pelzer called "a discriminatory and stigmatizing Praxis."

Every time an unexpected crisis occurs, one of the easiest and safest complains to make is that the government was not adequately prepared for it. And that was so in 2015, as well. Pelzer wrote:

The current state of emergency could have been avoided by acting with foresight. It is not the sheer number of refugees that poses challenges for local administrations – but years of mis-planning by federal policy. Although the increase in the number of refugees was foreseeable for a long time, the Grand Coalition [Angela Merkel’s government at the time] reacted far too late. For this reason, emergency shelters, tent cities and other temporary arrangements for asylum seekers are now being built ad hoc in many places.

She also observes that administrative procedures like processing of asylum requests also showed seriously inadequate preparation.

In the ugly competition among EU countries to make taking care of refugees somebody else's problem, there's a cynical logic in not being adequately prepared for refugee emergencies. A popular talking point among anti-immigrant politicians is what they call the "pull effect." The idea is that asylum-seekers know they count on safety, decent handling, and efficient processing of asylum claims, that will make more people want to come to Europe and apply for asylum. Such a "pull effect" has never been established on a factual basis. The argument is even applied in deadly ways as a reason to not rescue refugees in life-threatening situations in the Mediterranean and to improve appalling living conditions and health dangers in refugee camps.

(All German translation in this post are mine.)

The (political) pushback against Ukrainian refugees is peeping its ugly head out of the political swamp

I fully expect the far-right groups in Europe to make xenophobic propaganda against Ukrainian refugees. That's not really in doubt. Nor is there any doubt that for decades they have cultivated a constituency for it that is a significant part of the electorate in many countries. The 2015-16 refugee crisis that saw 1.4 million refugees enter the EU in those two years provided a big example of how that works. And, unfortunately, the center-right and center-left parties were at best ineffectual in countering that agitation. (To the extent they even tried at all.) So the real question this time around is whether those parties will handle this refugee crisis differently, or whether they will make lazy compromises with the far-right.

It's not our problem!

And this is already a far bigger refugee crisis than 2015-16. The current Russian invasion of Ukraine started four weeks ago (February 24). The UN estimates that as of March 25, 3.7 million Ukrainian refugees have already arrived.

Die neue Einigkeit der EU – und ein alter Streit Tagesspeiegel 21.03.2022 reports on how EU officials including the German Foreign Minister Analena Baerback are trying to organize a distribution of Ukrainian refugees throughout the EU. But Poland and Hungary in particular are already raising objections - on the face of it surprising, since they both are looking at significant Ukrainian refugee inflows and would presumably be pushing for such a distributon:

In principle, there is also a willingness in the states in the west of the EU to take in more people from Ukraine than before. Ireland's Foreign Minister Simon Coveney said that all states must support the refugees in the current emergency situation. During implementation, however, one very quickly ends up with the concrete question of how many refugees each EU country should take over. Poland and Hungary rejected exactly such a quota concept during the refugee crisis in 2015/16.

According to EU diplomats, these same states want to avoid everything that comes close to the concept of resettlement of refugees. The reason: If a resettlement system were to be introduced now, Poland and Hungary would also be bound by it in the event of a future admission of refugees from Africa who arrive in the southern European EU states. (my translation, my emphasis)

This is an example of the "It's not our problem! Close the borders!" approach to refugee problems. Poland and Hungary were by no means alone in that sentiment. During the Austrian EU Presidency in 2018, then-Chancellor Sebastian Kurz of the center-right ÖVP actively blocked planning for any such systematic program of distributing the burdens among the EU. (See: Vianey Lorin and Anthony Mills, Austria restricts immigration and hampers integration France 24 09/20/2018)

The center-right/far-right problem on refugee issues

To understand the general positioning that the Austrian ÖVP as well as other EU conservative parties used (and to some extent center-left parties also), multi-party parliamentary politics allows the far-right parties to take a sharp anti-foreigner/anti-refugee position while the center-right parties can present themselves as also xenophobic and anti-refugee but a little more polite about it.

The ÖVP Governor (Landeshauptmann) Thomas Stelzer of the state of Upper Austria is positioning himself as taking a reflective, responsible position on the current refugee situation. But in this interview („Aus heutiger Sicht war das natürlich fatal" Oberösterreichische Nachrichten 19.03.2022), he takes three positions that seem to be the current, cautious main public positions of the ÖVP more generally.

One is that he is vague about the legal structure governing the current status of Ukrainian refugees, which is the Temporary Protection Directive that gives Ukrainians the legal status of "displaced persons." This EU legal facility gives national governments considerably less discretion on the kind of restrictive or discriminatory measures against refugees that can exercise.

On the one hand, it's understandable why the Governor would be reluctant to himself emphasize that special legal status, because it could be confusing to people who aren't paying close attention. On the other hand, he's also not getting out in front of the nationalistic rhetoric that the far-right will certainly use about the dreadful violation of national sovereignty that the far-right will soon enough claim this represents.

Second, Stelzer presents the Ukrainian refugees as the "good" variety, though he wasn't so crass as to use that word. The interviewer challenges him on how his position on Ukrainian refugees compares with his general hardline position on refugees. He responds:

Helping people quickly in times of need has never been in question. We have accepted many [refugees]. A constant challenge is the question of integration. The access to the common language and the interaction with others does not change. Now mainly women and children are coming.

The "good refugee" part is that its "mainly women and children." But he reinforces two of the favorite xenophobic tropes - more politely than the hard right, of course! - "Integration" is of course extremely important. But as the France 24 report above notes in the 2018 report above, Stelzer's own party actually worked to make integration more difficult for refugees. Including reducing the number of German language classes available to them. But "they can't speak German" is a standard anti-refugee talking point. (I must say it's entertaining to hear some Austrian making this complain in a local dialect that at least 90% of native German speakers can't understand.) The "interaction with others" line is a reference to the stock Islamophobic complain that Muslims form a "parallel society," i.e., they are The Others.

It's true that most of Ukrainian refugees are women and children. But the notion of the "good" refugees is a treacherous concept. At best, it's highly misleading. President Joe Biden actually gave a very good picture of what real-world refugees are in his March 24 news conference:

I’ve been in refugee camps. I’ve been in warzones for the last 15 years. And it’s — it’s devastating. And what — the thing you look at the most is you see these young children, you see children without parents that are in those camps or in — or refugees. You see women and husbands — men and women who are completely lost and have no — you see the look — that blank look on their face, that absolute feeling of, “My God, where am I? What’s going to happen to me?”

The notion of "good refugees" can detract from the difficulty of refugee problems even under the best of circumstances. And it leaves a big opening for the time when more people realize that real-life refugees present serious problems that require responsible government action to handle effectively. The rightwingers will play the "hey, we were told that these would be good refugees" card.

Stelzer also brings in another double-edged trope. "What we hear, is that many of them with want to return [to Ukraine] inorder to rebuild their home countries." This is also misleading at best. Depending on how long the war goes on and how much damage the Russians do, a very significant portion of the up to 10 million refugees that the EU could receive from Ukraine this year will not be going back. Refugees aren't tourists on vacation. They are what Biden vividly described.

(None of this means that I approve of the bad and sometimes flat-out illegal refugee policies the Biden Administration is following on the US southern border. But he will supposedly soon announce some relaxation of at least some of the illegal portions of the policy.)

1) Gesetzlicher Zustand nicht erwähnen 2) "Gute" Flüchtlinge: Frauen und Kinder 3) Nur übuergehend, dann gehen sie zurück in die Ukraine

Center-left NIMBYism on refugee matters

Hans Peter Doskozil is the social-democratic (SPÖ) Governor of the smallest Austrian state, Burgenland. While his general positions are more-or-less center-left, on refugee issues, he's a rightwinger who panders to compete for xenophobic sentiments. (Or whether he's just a xenophobic jerk himself is a question on which people can make their own speculations.)

He's already making a NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) argument, which is really a variant on the favorite "It's not our problem! Close the borders!" nationalistic slogan: Burgenland gegen Flüchtlings-Großquartier Oberösterreichische NachrichtenAPA 22. März 2022. He's opposed to initial plans by the Austrian Interior Ministry to set up facility for 100 Ukrainian refugees in Burgenland. That's one hundred.

The idea that in Burgenland, population 300 thousand, there's not any parking lot or field available to set up a refugee center for one hundred persons is so ridiculous that it's almost impossible not to imagine a cynical political game being played out here. The conservative Interior Minister Gerhard Karner (ÖVP) - who is an admirer of Engelbert Dollfuss who set up a Mussolini-style fascist dictatorship in Austria in 1933 - proposes a tiny refugee facility for Burgenland. Doskozil from the center-left SPÖ bitches and moans about the whole idea. So a well-known figure of the center-left SPÖ gets to take the lead with the NIMBY argument. So this gives the far-right and the center-right the cover to say, "Even the socialist Hans Peter Doskozil says..."

Criminal refugees

"Criminal foreigners" and "criminal refugees" is and will continue to be a favorite xenophobic framing. This is often mixed with mostly feinged concern over how refugees are being exploited by human traffickers, people smugglers. Given the EU's still unrealistic immigration polices - Ukrainian refugees momentarily excepted - the only way many asylum-seekers can get to an EU border is by paying someone to bring them illegally.

In the case of Ukrainian refugees, the national railways of Germany and Austria are giving them free transit for their flight out of Ukraine. Nobody's calling them "people smugglers" yet that I've heard. People smugglers are often bad actors who endanger, abuse, and cheat their desperate customers. But rarely do they create an artificial demand for their services. The only real way to deal with the actual problem of people smugglers is by a sensible and well-fumctioning immigration policy. But neither the center-right or center-left parties want to say that out loud, though they know that is the case.

But the "criminal refugee" trope provides an insight into a very practical reason that that refugee affairs need to be professional managed by government agencies that are both qualified and committed to following the law. Because refugees are refugees, and by far not all of them will fit a "middle-class" European notion of what a "good" refugee is.

And some of the worst of the actual human traffickers are already trying to take advantage of this situation, according to Europol (Europol warnt: Ukraine-Flüchtlinge sind im Visier von Verbrecherbanden Oberösterreichische Nachrichten 23.03.2022):

Minors travelling alone are particularly at risk, Europol warns. According to estimates by the United Nations, more than 3.5 million Ukrainians have fled abroad to date, including about one million children – many unaccompanied by their parents. Europol called for special vigilance at borders, reception centers, mass accommodation and railway stations. There, criminals were specifically on the lookout for victims.

In particular, the European police authority warned that criminals pretend to be helpful citizens and offer supposedly free accommodation or transport or promise jobs.

Criminals also sought contact via platforms for refugees on social media. According to Europol, Eastern Europe has been a key region for traffickers for years. Many gangs have their roots in Ukraine's neighbouring countries. (my transaltion)

As genuinely inspiring and encouraging the "welcome culture" of ordinary people wanting to aid refugees is, organizing the refugee evacuations and protecting the refugees cannot be adequately handled by private charities, particularly in such a chaotic situation. This is a responsibilty of governments.

The following is a classic example of the center-right and center-left ducking-and-covering on demagogic, anti-refugee agitation rather than directly countering it, which is what they should be doing. (Irene Brickner, Flüchtlinge aus der Ukraine warten auf ihre Registrierung Standard 22.03.2022) This example comes from Austrian state of Lower Austria, from the state-leve Minister of Asylum, in charge of administering laws on asylum-seekers and those granted asylum, Gottfried Waldhäusl. He part of the far-right party FPÖ, which has made xenophobia and ethnonationalism a key theme for at least the last three decades. Waldhäusl here seems to be testing a variation on the popular theme of "good" refugees" versus "bad" ones. Even though for the FPÖ, they all turn out to be "bad" ones in the end.

Last week, The Lower Austrian Asylum Minister Gottfried Waldhäusl (FPÖ) made negative headlines. In view of the Ukraine exodus, he called for a "triage in the field of asylum". There will be quarters in Lower Austria only for "women and children from Ukraine", not for "arrivals from Syria or Afghanistan", he said.

Thus, Waldhäusl has once again proven to be unsuitable for its function, says the green Lower Austrian club chairman Helga Krismer. The Social Democrats should submit a motion for a redivision of the rules of procedure at the government meeting in St Pölten [the state capital] on Tuesday, she demanded: "The SPÖ should take over the asylum portfolio in Lower Austria."

In the office of the Lower Austrian SPÖ leader Franz Schnabl one reacts cautiously. There will be a "statement" from the Governor Johanna Mikl-Leitner (ÖVP) on the Waldhäusl case, it was said on Monday. There was no reaction from the ÖVP by the editorial deadline. (my transaltion; my emphasis)

Even the far right can be temporarily limited by the rhetorical frameworks they have built. The xenophobic agitation in Austria and in many other European countries has been put a heavy emphasis on anti-Muslim Islamphobia. This doesn't work very well for Ukrainians, not many of whom are Muslims. But they will look for a replacement spin.

What does the war in Ukraine tell us about how well the US "unipolar moment" worked out?

"All wars are popular for the first thirty days," the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. famously observed.

We have a few days before we reach that point with the war in Ukraine. The resistance of the Ukrainians to the Russia invasion is very popular in the US and Europe. And Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is being celebrated like a rock star. This is just one example, from the Austrian news weekly Profil two weeks ago: "The Hero of the West."

But the ugly reality of the war in Ukraine is that Russia has begun the process of leveling cities as it previously did in Chechnya and Syria.

🇺🇦 mariupol - destruction of a city https://t.co/zTDjPGj2Ui

— Gerald Knaus (@rumeliobserver) March 20, 2022

Refugees are leaving Ukraine at the rate of a million per week. The UN figures as of March 19:

There's nothing glamourous about being a refugee. (Perhaps an oligarch here or there excepted.) And it's tragically predictable that the same news magazines now celebrating the real heroism of Ukrainians will all too soon be featuring stories about ugly problems in dealing with the large number of refugees in the EU.

I would very much like to be proved wrong about the latter, and there are some encouraging signs that EU leaders have learned some constructive lessons about their failures in the 2015-16 refugee crisis. But the current number of Ukrainian refugees in the EU is well more than twice the number for all of 2015 and 2016. And the very real "welcome culture" and its willingness to provide massive help to refugees in 2015-16 was also accompanied by a xenophobic opposition, to which the center-right and center-left too often cowered instead of countered.

In the larger picture, the "unipolar moment" of the US as the overwhelming "hyperpower" of the world, the era now mockingly but once seriously referred to as the End of History, is over. And what did the US accomplish with its 30-year "unipolar moment"?

Have we achieved big and continuing rollbacks in nuclear arsenals and major process in nuclear nonproliferation? No. In fact, we are currently discussing how close the US should be willing to come to risk nuclear war with Russia over the Ukraine war.

Have we dramatically slowed the atmospheric warming due to fossil fuel consumption? Well, no. From NBC/AP 03/19/2022:

Has the US had more wars or fewer since the End of History? More.

We could go on. After some base closures and adjustment of the defense budget in the wake of the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and then the Soviet Union, the US Congress now routinely increases the defense budget year after year. And year after year by more than the Pentagon even requests.

And the growth of Western-style liberal democracy that the End of History was expected to bring? Well, let's say that it has been far from an unqualified success. According to the widely cited standards of Freedom House, "A total of 60 countries suffered declines in political rights and civil liberties over the past year, while only 25 improved." (01/24/2022) "As of today, some 38 percent of the world’s people live in countries rated Not Free, the highest proportion since 1997. Only two in 10 people live in Free countries. ... The largest 10-year score declines among democracies were in Hungary (Partly Free, −19), Nauru (Free, −16), Poland (Free, −12), India (Partly Free, −11), and the United States (Free, −10)."

And far from bringing about a situation where the political system in the US where the two major parties compete over which can do the better job of protecting health care and increasing wages and job security or defending individual rights, we have a Democratic Party stuck in Clintonian duck-and-cover "moderation" (often indistinguishable from "conservatism") and a Republican Party howling at the moon, more loudly year after year.

Partisan hostility and distrust is similar in both US parties. But the asymmetric polarization in tactics and willingness to obstruct even basic governance is worse than ever, with the Republicans in a seemingly endless state of radicalization and the Democrats lamely promising "bipartisanship" with a stunningly intransigent Republican Party.

What we need now that the End of History is clearly over is a world with fewer nuclear weapons, much less war, and much less fossil fuel consumption. Those issues don't send a thrill up the legs of corporate media reporters like hectoring Biden Administration officials as to why they aren't escalating faster into a potential nuclear war with Russia does. But those things are what the world needs. A world nuclear war, we definitely do not need.

For the US and the world, the drug of Cold War Triumphalism turned out to be more like oxycontin abuse. Or maybe horse dewormer used for things for which it was never intended.

Ukrainian refugees: 3.3 million as of March 18

Tucker Carlson this week went on a xenophobic rant about how immigration to the US from Latin America is the same as Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine. Carlson is tying himself into some impressive knots between being a good Putinist while not always sounding exactly like a complete pro-Russian hack. (Tucker Carlson clashes with Rep. Salazar over Russia-Ukraine war and borders Fox News 03/16/2022)

When I heard your report on his baiting of Congresswoman Salazar, I found myself thinking that besides the usual ethnonationalism, Tucker may be trying out one of the arguments the far-right will likely use against Ukrainian refugees: They are just like an invading army! They are part of Russia’s military strategy against the West!

The Temporary Protection Directive-A Tool Now Used for the First Time

The current refugee crisis is huge, and EU governments are starting to scramble to deal with it. (Irene Brickner and Thomas Mayer, Flüchtlinge aus der Ukraine: So wäre es zu schaffen Standard 19.03.2022) The EU's European Commission during the first week of the Russian invasion of Ukraine already invoked a special legal facility created based on the experience of the 1990s Balkan Wars, the Temporary Protection Directive. This is the first time it has been used.

Legal regimes matter, even though the EU and individual countries have been willing at times since the 2015-16 refugee crisis to violate international law on refugees. The Schengen Area is a group of 26 European countries who have agreed that the country of entry will be responsible for verifying the legitimacy of their the travel documents of people arriving, after which under normal conditions (e.g., no pandemic!) the person will be free to travel unrestricted to any of the other Schengen countries.

There is another set of rules, the Dublin Regulation, aka, the "Dublin System," which requires that application for asylum be processing by the country of arrival. In the case of the refugees of 2015-16 and the several years before, that means Italy and especially Greece was the EU country on whom the proportionally biggest burden fell. Applicants for asylum are normally required to remain in the country until their asylum application has been decided.

But the Dublin Regulation/Dublin System rules do not currently apply to Ukrainian citizens in the EU. On February 24 when the Russian invasion was launched, Ukrainian citizens already had the legal authorization (that Americans also have) to travel and remain in the EU for up to three months without a visa. That is the case for the two Schengen Area countries that border on Ukraine (Hungary and Poland) and the two non-Schengen EU countries (Rumania and Slovakia).

The Temporary Protection Directive that is now in force means that Ukrainians can stay in the EU for at least a year (which the EU Commission can extend to three years) without applying for asylum status. They can travel freely within the Schengen zone and they can also work legally in the EU.

There are always nuances in the law, which demagogues can and often do use to agitate against refugees. The three months vias-provision still applies to people who left Ukraine before February 24. Formally they do not fall under the Temporary Protection Directive protections. The EU Commission guidelines currently include this: "Encouraging Member States to consider extending temporary protection to persons who strictly-speaking would not fall under the scope of application of the Decision but who need protection such as those who fled Ukraine not long before 24 February 2022." Ukraine: Commission proposes temporary protection for people fleeing war in Ukraine and guidelines for border checks EU Commission press release 03/18/2022

Invoking the Directive was a good move by the EU that maybe, perhaps, possibly be a useful application of lessons from 2015-16 by the EU officials. This provides at least a window of opportunity to do things like airlifting refugees out of countries like Moldova and Poland to other EU countries. And more of the EU countries at the moment open to receiving significant numbers of Ukrainian refugees than was the case in 2015-16. The "Dublin System" reflex could kick in at any time and the far right will try to promote that. So getting out in front of that is a sensible move by the EU Commission.

There is already a hint of that in the air. As Brickner and Thomas Mayer reports (my translation): "On Friday [03/18/2022], the Czech government made people sit up and take notice with skepticism: it was at the limit with 270,000 refugees. What will happen when five or six million people arrive in the EU?"

The size of the current refugee crisis is staggering. I rely heavily on the immigration expert Gerald Knaus who heads the European Stability Initiative think tank devoted to refugee issues. He’s considered the architect of the landmark EU-Turkey deal of refugees in 2016, on which he worked closely with Angela Merkel’s government. So he’s familiar with the devilishly complicated politics of refugees in the EU.

He also tends to be conservative in his estimates. He criticizes the UN refugee agency for not distinguishing clearly enough among types of refugees (refugees currently in flight, longtime refugees in other countries, internal refugees) in the statistics they publish. So when he’s now estimating that the war in Ukraine will produce up to 10 million refugees, I hope the EU policymakers are really paying attention!

He is currently arguing for an urgent, major airlift of refugees to various EU countries. A bare beginning is taking place in evacuating refugees from Moldova. Here is the estimate from the UN Refugee Agency as of 03/18/2022, the end of the third week of the war on Ukrainian refugees.

Of that number, only about 200 thousand are in Russia and Belarus. The rest are in other European countries, mostly EU members:

During the 2015-16 refugee crisis, the number of refugees arriving in the EU was around 1.4 million in both years combined, mainly in 2015. That contributed to some serious political turmoil in the EU, empowering far-right parties and contributing to Brexit. (The Greek debit crisis was also in 2015.) And in most EU countries, the center-right and center-left parties reacted more by ducking-and-covering on the issue rather than confronting the xenophobic propaganda directly.

Gerald Knaus on Austrian public TV ORF this week pointed out the obvious math: the EU is getting a million refugees per week. He expects it to continue for at least the next couple of weeks. And he’s now even saying that a full 10 million could arrive in a matter of a few more weeks. It’s already the biggest refugee crisis Europe has faced since the end of the Second World War. (That situation became the source of a major part of current international law on refugees.)

The EU failed a significant test in 2020

Poland actually used a version of the refugees-as-invaders argument in 2020 when Belarus flew in refugees from Afghanistan and the Middle East and sent them across the Polish border as asylum-seekers, which they were. Poland’s reaction was to engage in “pushbacks” of the refugees arriving on Polish territory to ask for asylum, which is flat-out illegal in international law. Poland argued that Belarus was using the refugees as “hybrid warfare” against them.

Much to their own discredit, the EU actually endorsed Poland’s illegal action. And that at a time when the EU was sanctioning Poland for refusing to abide by binding EU legal provisions.

That was an incredible sign of weakness on the part of Poland and the EU. And there we were talking about a few thousand refugees, some number of whom died unnecessarily as a result of Poland’s criminal handling of the situation. I saw this as a remarkable reminder of how vulnerable and weak the EU still is in responding to a refugee crisis. I wouldn’t be surprised in light of subsequent events if that was an action encouraged by Russia to get a measure of how the EU would respond to a new refugee crisis.

Obviously, the EU now has more than a few thousand refugees coming from Ukraine. The far-right European groups and parties are only now starting to agitate against the refugees, but they are starting. The two far-right Presidential candidates in France are currently doing so.

And they will almost certainly use the “invading army/hybrid warfare” angle, because that was a successful one during and after the 2015-16 refugee crisis. There, they could draw on decades of War-on-Terror Islamophobia to say, “they are terrorists coming to kill us all!” It will take a little extra effort to make that one stick on Ukrainian refugees. But they will try. And dirtbags like Tucker Carlson will be more than happy to help them.

How much the Russians may have calculated the refugee crisis as a part of their invasion, it’s important for people to remember that Ukrainian refugees are not an invading army. I would hope that even the corporate media will be careful about adopting the “hybrid war” framing for the refugees.

The European far right is priming their xenophobic agitation

Two of Austria’s best investigative reporters who are very familiar with far-right politics, Barbara Tóth and Nina Horaczek of the left-of-center Vienna weekly Falter, recently wrote about how the far-right is morphing their antivaxxer COVID narrative into one that says the COVID “hoax” was just one stage in the Great Replacement conspiracy, and now the war in Ukraine was provoked by George Soros and other “globalists” and God-knows-who-else. This is all part of “World War III” which is already underway in the thinking of that dark corner of the political world. (Das russische Virus 08.08.2022  )

This narrative that turns the Ukrainian immigrants into “invaders” involves a gigantic piece of gaslighting: Russia didn’t invade Ukraine, Ukraine attacked Russia, and now the Ukrainians are attacking the West with a big Jewish plot involving refugees. But since the hardcore xenophobes and the COVID antivaxxer conspiracists are heavily overlapping groups, there are lots of people who may not see that as obviously ridiculous, crazy though it is.

European refugee crisis 2022 and the war in Ukraine

Martin Staudinger has an analysis of how the Ukrainian refugees could very likely have been a major part of Vladimir Putin's calculations in the Ukraine were: Die vielen Waffen des Wladimir Putin Falter 15.03.22:

It comes in larger look at the "hybrid warfare" he describes the Russians as using in Ukraine. I know "hybrid warfare" is a common term. But I'm always cautious about it. Dropping bombs, firing missiles, armies shooting at each other - those are easy to recognize as war. Blockading a country is an act of war.

But when we starting rolling in economic sanctions, refugee flows, cyber-attacks, and even propaganda operations as parts of "hybrid war," things quickly get a lot less clear. A Foreign Minister putting out press releases with propaganda claims does not give the targeted country the right to send in the troops.

In other words, a term like "hybrid warfare" can serve for threat inflation. Sort of like Hitler comparisons.

But Staudinger's is the first analysis I've seen making the point that generating refugees may have been a key aim of the war. This could explain part of what seems to have been surprisingly slow advancement by Russian forces:

As of yesterday, 2.8 million Ukrainian women and children (the men are not allowed to leave) had fled abroad – and this is probably only the beginning, because so far widespread fighting has been concentrated in the south and east of the country; the western half has so far been largely spared. Against his first enemy, the Ukrainian people, Putin has already won a partial victory.

This brings us to [Putin’s] enemy number two [after Ukraine] : the West. It can be assumed that the Kremlin has drawn the conclusion from the experience since [the much smaller refugee crisis of] 2015 that nothing is better suited to dividing Europe, its states and its societies than a major refugee crisis.

Again, Putin's calculation is not difficult to guess: it is probably only a matter of time before the refugees he uses as a weapon become a noticeable political and financial burden on the EU and its member states; until the first parties (bets on which those could be are gladly accepted; however, the odds are low due to a certain predictability [he’s referring to the far-right parties’ xenophobia]) can no longer resist the temptation to profit from it; until the resulting pressure breaks up the unity of Europe. [my translation, my emphasis]

I don't read this as a fatalistic prediction, but rather one that emphasizes how absolutely critical the approach of the center-right and center-left parties will be in directly countering anti-refugees hysteria, as opposed to a duck-and-cover approach of also promoting themselves as anti-refugee, too, but politer about it than the far right.

Seeing how poorly they have generally performed that task in 2015-16 and since, it would be easy to be fatalistic about the prospects of the center-right parties especially rising to the challenge in an effective way. The temptation to treat the far right parties xenophobia as existing on a left-to-right spectrum which can be divided up by peeling of some of the xenophobes from the far right by adopting their rhetoric and policy positions is very strong.

One early ray of hope in that regard is how quickly the EU invoked a special legal facility authorizing people from Ukraine to stay in the EU for a year without having to apply for asylum. But we aren't quite through the first three weeks of the war yet.

The New Yorker has a “human interest” report on Ukrainian refugees from March 14 that doesn’t give much information at all on the dimensions of the refugee emergency. (Ukrainian Refugees' Journeys Have Just Begun 03/14/2022) It uses an estimate of the refugee number of around two million, which for March 14 is low. The UN refugee agency for March 15 has the number at 3 million, of which around 150 thousand are in Russia and Belarus.

Refugee expert Gerald Knaus has a March 15 article (Wir brauchen eine neue Luftbrücke, sofort Die Zeit 15.03.2022) stressing the urgency of government action by the EU and others, as well. UN relief agencies, charities, and NGOs can do a lot. But how well or poorly this situation develops hangs on how well the EU and the individual national governments organize aid to the refugees. He writes:

Knowing the numbers [of refugees] is one thing. Understanding their importance to us is something else entirely. Many in Europe find it even more difficult to understand what this means: to experience the greatest refugee catastrophe in Europe since the end of the Second World War. And what it means to react to it correctly. Unfortunately, we don't have much time to get used to the new reality. We must now immediately think and act in a way that corresponds to the dimensions of the task. [my translation, my emphasis]

Poland currently has by far the largest number of the Ukrainian refugees. According to Knaus’ article apparently the only country in the EU to commit to accepting a specific number of refugees from those that have arrived is Sweden (population) has agreed to take 200 thousand.

He suggests that Germans and Austrians check out a map of European rail lines to see where most of these refugees are going to be coming without a relatively quickly organized program of distributing them to other EU countries via airlift: “Almost of them will be coming to Berlin and Vienna.”

Some have already been arriving. There are a lot more coming, and quickly, in the coming weeks.

Ukrainian war and Ukrainian refugees

Julia Ioffe, a Russian-Jewish immigrant to the US who reports on Russian affairs, gave this interview to PBS for a Frontline Special on the Russian war against Ukraine, Putin's Road to War: Julia Ioffe (interview) Frontline PBS 03/10/2022.

Near the end (43:45), she says of Vladimir Putin:

I think he's more dangerous than he's ever been at any point in the last 22 years. I think he did not expect to lose in Ukraine. And therefore he will not lose. He will grind the country down to a fine, fine ash. And it doesn't matter how many Russian soldiers die in the process, how many Ukrainian soldiers and civilians die in the process, he will not be humiliated by people he calls "little Russians".

The honest answer, eight million more on top of the two million or so already there.

But virtually no European politicians wants to say that directly because it's a very touchy political theme, which will quickly become much more controversial. To be realistic, the EU countries will argue and negotiate among themselves over which countries accept how many Ukrainian refugees. So even the most pro-refugee office-holders and leading politicians have to take the negotiating positions of their country into account.

Ioffe gives an idea of the size of the current refugee challenge (46:45):

What that means for Europe, you know, if you just - even if you set that tragedy aside of that, you know, blooming tragedy aside, again: a million people in a week fled - to some of the most xenophobic countries in Europe, who right now are greeting them with open arms because, (a) they're their neighbors, and (b) they're white and Christian and look like them. But how long does that last? How many more refugees can the West absorb? We say with the refugee flows from Syria, they gave us Brexit, they gave us the rise and empowerment of the far right in Germany, and in Hungary, in the Czech Republic and France. Is this going to keep emboldening the far right?

Answer: There's no point in even formulating it as a question.

I'm sure Putin is very, very aware that managing an immigration crisis is a huge weakness for the EU. Because he and everybody else saw what Ioffe refers to there. If there were any lingering doubt, the Polish and EU reactions to the few *thousand* refugees Belarus sent across the border into Poland last year confirmed it about as clearly as it could. I haven't seen any specific reporting on this aspect, but it's obvious now that there's a very good chance this was something that Putin encouraged just to see the EU's reaction.

The nominal reason for it was to retaliate for sanctions the EU had placed on Belarus for a blatant act of air piracy by the Belarusian government. But it seemed like an odd kind of response.

Here is a news report from four months ago, Warnings that Belarus migrant crisis risks military conflict BBC News 11/13/2021:

I'm hopeful about how the EU will respond to the refugees. Hopeful but very skeptical. The far right is already trying out their xenophobic spin on this, portraying this as part of the George Soros COVID Virus "Great Replacement" conspiracy theory. Although several European far-right parties have been tiptoeing around invasion of Ukraine, they are generally Putinist parties. They have a long-standing ethnonationalist vocabulary to morph "white" Ukrainians into "subhuman Slavs." (It's not consistent with their current admiration for Russia, but they don't care.)

The common media image of Ukrainian refugees as mostly white women and children is accurate. But there are already cases where EU countries are (illegally) refusing entry to refugees from Ukraine who are not Ukrainian citizens. When the war started, Ukrainians already could legally travel in the EU for three months visa-free. And under a special law the EU just invoked, Ukrainian refugees can stay for a year without asylum, and that can be extended to three years.

But everyone will soon see that the refugees are not only middle-class women with small children who need short-term support and then will go back home, but also individual men and women of all ages as well as adolescents and children. Assuming that Russia continues as they are at present, we're looking at as many as 10 million refugees, many of whom unlikely to go back to Ukraine any time soon, and many of them never. I saw someone recently saying that a lot of them don't need temporary assistance, they need a new homeland.

And with 10 million refugees, there will also be very sick people, criminals, and many people severely traumatized and people without easily marketable skills among them. That's why the response can only be handled responsibly with solid governmental direction, from the EU and national governments. The rightwing has a big menu of anti-refugee stereotypes ("economic migrants," "freeloaders", "criminal foreigners", "don't speak our language," etc.) that they are already skilled at using. To the extent that Russian information operations are able, they will boost the xenophobic message, like they did in 2015-16. What will make the different is primarily how the center-right and center-left react to the xenophobic demagoguery. I see zero chance that the rightwingers won't use it. In the 2015-16 crisis, most center-right and center-left parties reacted with some version of "we hate the refugees, too, but we're politer about it than the hard right."

In just two weeks of war, the EU already has more refugees that have arrived than for the entire two years of 2015-16. And as many as four times more could be coming in relatively short order. The EU economies are so deeply integrated and everyone can see what a mess Brexit has been that any talk about an "existential crisis" for the EU is overblown at this point. But how bad it gets really does ride on how willing the center-right and center-left politicians are willing to actually push back against the xenophobic politics and *not* play duck-and-cover like they did in 2015-16.

There is another kind of "pushback," though. The term is used to describe the expulsion of asylum seekers without allowing them to apply for asylum. This is flat-out illegal in international law on refugees. But that's exactly what Poland did in the Belarus incident last year. And the EU endorsed that illegal policy on Poland's part. (The United States and Australia also use this illegal, disgraceful practice.)

Poland is currently accepting a huge number of Ukrainian refugees. Most of the two million or more that have arrived in the EU enter through Poland. But Poland is also practicing illegal pushbacks against third-country citizens from African and South Asian countries that are fleeing Poland. (Lorenzo Tondo and Emmanuel Akinwot, People of colour fleeing Ukraine attacked by Polish nationalists Guardian 03/02/2022)