Introduction

Abstract

Unlike settler societies such as the United States or Australia, European nation-states generally do not perceive of themselves as countries of immigration. Rather than being part of their national founding or ongoing nation-making myths, immigration in Europe has historically been perceived as exceptional to the normal state of things – a disturbance or even a threat. However, Europe’s history is, in fact, characterised by migration driven by war, imperialism, trade, faith, poverty, love and myriad other reasons. More recently, the fall of communist regimes in 1989-1991 brought about radical changes in human mobility on the continent, as liberalised border regimes induced population outflows on a massive scale, and civil wars in the former Yugoslavia awoke the spectre of ethnic violence, displacing thousands of people. In addition, the post-Maastricht European Union (EU) (1991) started building its migration policy, thus affecting people’s movements both within, and towards, the EU. Expanding European migration systems (i.e. East-West and South-North) prompted searches for new policy responses across the continent, as all countries in Europe gradually became both receiving and sending countries for migration. To a large extent, the successes of these policy responses have been uneven. The flow of asylum seekers from non-European countries to the EU in 2014-2016, which eclipsed any previous asylum seeker flow to Europe since World War II, uncovered the variations in public and governmental responses to immigration across the continent. First of all, there were differences in the rise of anti-immigrant attitudes expressed in public debates and policy reactions. While such attitudes may be observed throughout Europe, they have been particularly intense in European countries that had not previously experienced significant waves of immigration, such as Poland or Hungary. Second, there were differences in understanding and the level of awareness among political elites and the public in various European countries regarding immigration and the complexity of related social, economic and legal issues, which, arguably, have been the lowest in countries such as Romania and Lithuania, which experience negligible immigration flows. Within the EU in particular, the steep rise in asylum inflows has resulted in a severe political crisis. Any attempts to come up with an EU-wide policy response that is in line with existing EU asylum and migration policies and their underlying principles of solidarity and burden-sharing, have failed to gain acceptance from member states in which (non-European) immigration flows have become suddenly politicised (and this does not concern only Central Eastern Europe).