Here are some thoughts on the humanitarian, historical, moral, and environmental implications of the crisis of refugees fleeing the Russian invasion of Ukraine. They were prompted by questions asked of me by a public radio interviewer. I’m still working on the answers (and the interview has not aired, as far as I can tell). Comments welcome.
1. Migration has always been with us. It is what makes humans human. It’s the flip side of settlement, or co-settlement (since there are always others to live and settle with), which is what we still need to get better at.
2. The crisis is not one, but many. What we call a “migrant crisis” could, if reframed, be called a political crisis; a crisis of the nation state, of borders, and of territorial sovereignty; an economic crisis, where there aren’t enough resources to go around, or where their distribution is unfair; or a moral crisis. Each of these reframes can offer suggestions for action: if it’s economic, some form of (entrepreneurially “friendly”) wealth redistribution; if political and national, a “rescaling” of decision-making away from the national to regional and transnational levels; and if moral, an emphasis on moral and inspirational leadership that cross-cuts the inequities at play in a bordered world (such as the basic class difference between those who travel freely and fluidly and those for whom borders are impassable).
In a more ultimate sense, it is an environmental crisis, where what’s at stake is people’s relationship to specific places — places we call nations, countries, territories, homelands — and where those relationships get uprooted by events.
3. Migration crises will only get worse; we need to get better at dealing with them. Refugee/migration crises arise where there are wars or other disasters, with their usual combination of human and “natural” causes. These events displace people internally and externally. Ukraine’s displaced, for instance, are in the millions internally and now nearing three million externally. Such disasters can be expected not only to continue but to increase, as climate change and associated global risks deepen and multiply, which we know they will. Moreover, territorial borders are hardly eternal; they, like nation-states, need maintaining and are ultimately fragile. Dealing with migrations will therefore be an issue for all of us.
4. Migrants’ impacts on “host” countries depend on those countries’ capacity to absorb them and on their willingness and skill in doing that. Whether refugees and immigrants “help” or “hurt” a country depends on how well that country welcomes and integrates them into itself. If it does it well, they will contribute far more to the economy than they may initially “cost” it. If not, then they may do the opposite. A country’s capacity to absorb migrants tends to be inversely related to its general wellbeing, which includes both its economic stability/capacity and its political stability and unity. If a country is poor (like Moldova today) or politically deeply divided (like the United States), it will tend to greet migrants with fear, blame, ostracism, and politicization.
5. Perception of migrants’ similarity or difference to oneself is a critical variable in how they are welcomed. If migrants/refugees are seen as “other,” “alien,” and inassimilable, then they are more likely to become that. Ukrainians seem far less “other” to East European nations than do, for instance, Syrians, Libyans, or Africans. This may be partly for racial reasons, though it is generally perceived by host communities to be more for “cultural,” or even “civilizational,” reasons. Ukrainians, however, are also seen as kindred in that the threat they are escaping — of Russian military invasion — is well understood in Eastern Europe. Hungarians remember 1956, Czechs and Slovaks remember 1968, Poles remember the imposition of martial law in the 1980s, and so on. All have joined NATO for the same reason that Ukrainians today want to join it: for protection against this (below).
Ukrainians, collectively, have also made their desire to be “Europeans” more clear than the refugees arriving, mostly individually or as families, in boats across the Mediterranean. These factors, alongside media attention to the war in its suddenness, have contributed to the welcome Ukrainians have received, but it is not clear how long this will last.
6. Capacity to take in and “benefit” from migrants is a skill that can be cultivated. Here I want to propose a working hypothesis: that, other things being equal, the more, and the more different kinds of refugees and immigrants a country takes in, the more experienced and self-aware it can become in its acceptance of refugees and immigrants. A country (say, Canada) that recognizes that it was built by immigrants, is more likely to welcome them (sometimes even at the expense of those who’ve lived in it the longest, in that case Indigenous people). Countries faced by the knowledge that they have greeted different refugees differently have at least an opportunity to think through those differences and to grant them some moral consideration.
In this sense, the “Ukrainian refugee crisis,” as an additional layer to the already existing “European refugee crisis,” provides an opportunity for deeper reflection on what refugeeism is, what providing refuge entails, and how it enriches rather than diminishes us. To that reflection process, Ukrainians are adding the theme of a war experienced viscerally (at least via media screens) at the hands of a known military threat (Russia). If a new wave of refugees were to arrive bearing another clear theme — such as that of climate change-induced sea level rise, for instance — that would present a similar opportunity for deepening a host community’s reflexivity with respect to the larger migration issue. In a sense, the “problem” with Europe’s “migrant crisis” so far is that there has been limited understanding of who the migrants are and why they are coming to Europe. This is a question in part of politics — that is, of how political actors have rhetorically framed the migrants arriving at their borders — and in part of history, of education, and of culture.
7. Xenophobia has global support networks, which are very much in play here. This may be the wild card in the current turn of events. As historian George Makari puts it, the far right, in recent years, has gained a “mothership,” and it happens to be Russia. Putin’s leadership has come to be seen by xenophobes across Europe, the U.S., and elsewhere, as offering a kind of “white, Christian protectorate” for anti-liberal, anti-globalist, and anti-immigrant movements. This is the novelty in the current situation that Cold War models of “great power rivalry” have missed entirely.
That makes the Ukrainian situation all the more interesting, because it threatens to scramble the coordinates by which Putinism and far-right movements have been coalescing. If Ukrainian “freedom fighters” and “homeland defenders” succeed in fighting off a militarized, fascistic Russian state, will that Russian state continue to be seen as a partner to the far-right groups who, sentimentally at least, fashion themselves more akin to the Ukrainians in this case than to the faceless Russian military? And even if not, the political calculus of “Putinophilia” (and “Putinophobia”) seems different today than just one month ago. And on the other side, the stakes of “democracy” have become invigorated.
8. As with migration, so with everything. All of these factors are relevant not only to the migrant and refugee crises, but to how the world deals with pandemics, climate change, and the other challenges we are or will be facing in coming years. As a friend recently posted on Twitter, “Nuclear war anxiety has overcome my Covid anxiety which took over from my climate anxiety.” The series will continue indefinitely; what will change is the coordinates by which we make sense of and respond to them.
Another social media user, living in a parallel reality, perhaps on Telegram, Parler, or Gab, might have written: “Nuclear war anxiety overcame my deep-state anxiety which overcame my immigrant anxiety.” The growing trend had seemed to reflect precisely this divergence: between a presumably hegemonic “liberal globalism” and an emergent “conservative internationalism.” Western democracies had appeared to be been cleaving into “populist” and “illiberal” political constituencies (often supported, actively or passively, by Russia) on one side, and the kinds of big-umbrella, liberal-centrist alliances that elected Macron in France, Biden in the U.S., and other standard-bearers of stay-the-course liberalism on the other.
With the Ukraine crisis — and in fact with every such crisis — what we might see is that each such event (or “hyper-event“) provides affordances that might scramble those coordinates and make new alliances and new articulations possible. The way we respond to such events defines us, and can potentially redefine us. We have seen this with the Covid crisis; we will see it with other crises to come.
9. Stay with the event. Here’s the upshot, then: in a dynamic world where traditional analytical frames are no longer adequate, the best we can do is to apply them (in their multiplicity) with some reserve, while “staying with the event” as closely as we can. In the case of a war, invasion, or natural disaster, this entails that we do three things:
(a) Listen to the voices of those bearing the burden. In this case, they are Ukrainians, sheltering, fleeing, fighting. Listening to them means hearing the vigor and unity in their resistance to the invasion of their homeland, their desire for a better life in that homeland, and the civic nationalism that has come to largely define it. If you are organizing an event about “the Ukraine crisis,” don’t ignore Ukrainians as if this is a crisis in which they have no agency. Reach out and invite them; they are accessible on social media. To a much lesser extent (because sanctions are not bombs), the burdened are also Russians: both soldiers, many of them confused about their role, and regular citizens. But most immediately, and daily, it is Ukrainians.
(b) Don’t assume you understand the reasons for what’s happening. In this case, it is an invasion that had been planned and directed from a single source, an aging autocrat who has craftily positioned himself at the top of the Russian power vertykal. Pay attention to what Putin and his cronies have been saying, and to the ideas and thinkers influencing them (from Ilyin to Dugin to Gumilev). Don’t just attend to what resonates with you, but also to what seems alien and puzzling. Be prepared to do some reading in order to ground-truth what you hear in a broader, more verifiable historical reality. Investigate the larger picture, by all means — the geopolitics, the role of other states and forces, and so on — but treat what you want to hear, and what would confirm your bias, with some suspicion.
(c) Listen for the opportunities that are immanent to the moment, and then act on them. This is where it’s helpful to have a vision of a different world, so that one knows what opportunities to listen for. “The West” may not be the corrupt and decadent empire disdained by Putinist ultra-conservatives and other critics, but the vision of liberal democracy that it represents to many is a bit too vacuous. To carry us through difficult times, it will need more ballast, more spirit, and more conviction. That’s where my final point enters in. What are the entry points, the values, and the coordinates, by which we might listen to the moment so as to hear new things being said and new stories emerging, even from war and other disasters?
10. There is another way of framing the “crisis” that looks forward to a different world. Social justice movements have held out the proposition that “another world is possible,” and that it is a world based not on scarcity (of resources, of land, of recognition, and so on), but on an open-ended model of a good and flourishing life. Some have associated this idea with concepts such as “Buen vivir,” Ubuntu, and others. I call it an ecotopian vision and sensibility, a politics of interdependence grounded in territoriality of a different kind, based on social fairness and ecological sustainability. In this vision, economies are tethered not to a growth and extraction based system of production that ignores its environmental costs, but to a system of reproduction in which value is accorded to sustenance, regeneration, multi-generational continuity, and the flourishing of life.
Borders, in turn, are correspondingly loosened so that identities come to be more closely bound to local, ecoregional, and at the same time more globally connected projects of eco-just transitioning. Borders are, in effect, not needed to keep people out because they take away space, jobs, opportunities, or other scarce goods. Rather, as Brian Stout puts it, “the freedom to move is the right to belong,” and in Bruno Latour’s words, the “question of belonging to a particular soil” is increasingly the question of belonging to “a land that must be cared for.” There is not a dearth of “jobs” for hosts and migrants to compete for. Instead, there is plenty to be done to make the land into a better abode for those who live and dwell with it. With the task of creating a better abode for all of us comes the “right of abode,” as Achille Mbembe refers to it.
Those who are capable of moving are, by this definition, capable of working, and can be welcomed with this understanding. And the crises that lead them to move are crises occurring not in some distant periphery, but in the Earth’s politically critical zones, the fault lines of eco-social change that we are all collectively responsible for. They are part of the world that we are remaking, together.
All of this calls for a shift in understanding… which may seem to be getting ahead of the situation of Ukrainian refugees lining up at the borders of Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Moldova, and other countries. The immediate task is to help them, and to end the brutality of the Russian invasion. Here are some ways to help.
