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The War in Ukraine, with millions of exiles, mainly women and minors, has revealed a difference in the reception of these European citizens that is far from the treatment offered to refugees from the Middle East and Africa. Solidarity in the current conflict is very important to understand the opening of the eastern borders, says historian Delphine Diaz, guest of Escala in Paris.
“This exodus is the most brutal and massive since the end of the Second World War. This war that takes place at the gates of the European Union is also changing this view of forced migration, because there is a more positive view of these migrations, more positive of what has prevailed in recent years”, emphasizes Delphine Diaz, professor of contemporary history at the University of Reims Champagne Ardennes, author of ‘In Exile, refugees in Europe from the end of the 18th century to the present day’, recently published in France for the Folio editions.
The figure of the exile and the refugee has historically been used in Europe as a political weapon and one of the paradoxes of this war is that several of the countries that have stood out the most for their refusal to receive migrants from the Middle East or Africa, such as Poland and Hungary, are now the ones who are hosting the most refugees.
“There is a real change of course with these countries in terms of receiving exiles and that also shows the racial, religious and cultural construction of the refugee and the acceptable or even desirable exile. This religious and cultural solidarity is very important to justify the opening of the eastern borders,” says Diaz.
The decade that just ended (2011-2021) marks a new stage in Europe in terms of migrants and refugees. Specifically, after 2015 and the arrival of nearly 1.5 million people fleeing war and massacres in Syria, Iraq, Libya, the EU has not only sought to prevent these people from reaching its soil, but it outsources reception to other countries, such as Turkey, and even violates international asylum laws.
“Europe did everything possible to prevent these arrivals and in the public debate there was talk of a migration crisis, but now we can compare with the figures of the war in Ukraine, of the Ukrainian exodus. These almost two million migrants from the southern Mediterranean have to compared to the European population, which consists of 450 million Europeans. So we must bear in mind that this migration crisis was also an asylum crisis, and also a crisis of European solidarity”, maintains the historian.
The so-called Arab revolutions also greatly modified the perception of exiles and the multiplication of returns at the borders, illegal. At this time there is a very important selectivity of asylum in Europe, which is also noticeable with the war in Ukraine.
On the other hand, the coronavirus pandemic served the EU states, although they were not the only ones, to attack the rights of people seeking refuge or asylum. “There was a violation of international law, of the Geneva Convention, because we cannot, in theory, carry out returns at the borders,” says the expert.
Diaz also stresses the importance of talking about the change in vocabulary that has been used around recent migration with respect to those from the Middle East or Africa. “We used to talk about migrants to talk about those exiles and now, with the Ukrainian exiles, we talk about exiles or refugees, even though they don’t have that status.”
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