The ‘refugee crisis rhapsody’ : Variations on cultural closeness in Central European refugee discourses
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| Year of publication | 2019 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | Over the past decades, tens of thousands of people fleeing from African and Middle Eastern countries have tried to enter the European Union. The peak of the arrivals, between 2015 and 2016, was accompanied by heated discussions about the redistribution of asylum applicants, border protection, and the European asylum system, at both national and the European levels. Loud voices were heard from Central Europe, especially when a compulsory refugee relocation mechanism was proposed and adopted at the EU level. This paper provides insight into political discourses in two Central European countries – Czech Republic and Slovakia, which both adopted a strong negative stand against the relocation system. It examines how cultural diversity and state sovereignty are used in political discourses as frames to problematise the EU’s refugee resettlement system, creating boundaries, symbolic and social, between different groups of refugees. The boundary between deserving and undeserving refugees is built upon national identity in the Czech discourse and upon religious identity in the Slovak discourse. |
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