The Politics of Social In/Exclusion in the EU: Civic Europe in an Age of Uncertainty 3031312635, 9783031312632

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN EUROPEAN POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY

The Politics of Social In/Exclusion in the EU Civic Europe in an Age of Uncertainty

Markus Thiel · Ernesto Fiocchetto Jeffrey D. Maslanik

Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology

Series Editors Carlo Ruzza, School of International Studies, University of Trento, Trento, Italy Hans-Jörg Trenz, Faculty of Political and Social Sciences, Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, Italy

Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology addresses contemporary themes in the field of Political Sociology. Over recent years, attention has turned increasingly to processes of Europeanization and globalization and the social and political spaces that are opened by them. These processes comprise both institutional-constitutional change and new dynamics of social transnationalism. Europeanization and globalization are also about changing power relations as they affect people’s lives, social networks and forms of mobility. The Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology series addresses linkages between regulation, institution building and the full range of societal repercussions at local, regional, national, European and global level, and will sharpen understanding of changing patterns of attitudes and behaviours of individuals and groups, the political use of new rights and opportunities by citizens, new conflict lines and coalitions, societal interactions and networking, and shifting loyalties and solidarity within and across the European space. We welcome proposals from across the spectrum of Political Sociology and Political Science, on dimensions of citizenship; political attitudes and values; political communication and public spheres; states, communities, governance structure and political institutions; forms of political participation; populism and the radical right; and democracy and democratization.

Markus Thiel · Ernesto Fiocchetto · Jeffrey D. Maslanik

The Politics of Social In/Exclusion in the EU Civic Europe in an Age of Uncertainty

Markus Thiel Steven J. Green School of International & Public Affairs Florida International University Miami, FL, USA

Ernesto Fiocchetto Steven J. Green School of International & Public Affairs Florida International University Miami, FL, USA

Jeffrey D. Maslanik Department of International Relations Vietnam National University, Hanoi Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology ISBN 978-3-031-31263-2 ISBN 978-3-031-31264-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31264-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: peepo/getty images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface

This book was initially designed to be a political sociology-focused analysis of bottom-up European politics, but the Covid-19 pandemic shifted our focus to analyze the politics of minority inclusions in an era of crises. Hence it was our desire to examine specific populations that have moved from the margins of European societies to the center of political activism and concern, especially given the series of subsequent crises that occurred in the EU in the recent past, from the Euro crisis to the pandemic. Our expertise in the respective areas of sexuality and gender and refugees and migration led us to concretize our political sociology analysis to highlight the politics of inclusion of those groups impacted by crisis-induced vulnerability, welfare state retrenchment, and populist re-nationalization of policies. To substantiate the theoretical assumptions regarding the agency of minority groups and the EU’s structural constraints, we choose four exemplary case countries where we similarly had expertise based on our research, namely Sweden, Germany, Poland, and Spain. Tracing social in/exclusions over time, we found on the one hand substantial progress made to include those minorities, but at the same time that those processes are contingent on a number of preconditions, and that they often come alongside specific exclusions. Thus social inclusion is uneven throughout the EU, constrained by the unintended effects of EU integration, and indicative of a hierarchy of in/exclusion whereby some minorities fare comparatively better than others.

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PREFACE

We would like to acknowledge the generous support of the European Commission, as well as of Florida International University’s (FIU) Jean Monnet Center of Excellence, through the financial support in providing research stipends to Jeff and Ernesto, and to organize the annual Jean Monnet Center conference at FIU focused on ‘Social inclusion & societal diversity’ in 2022, which provided much food for thought and reflection. We would be remiss if we did not highlight the positive collaboration between the US Jean Monnet Centers of Excellence, which provide a fertile ground for advancing EU studies on the ‘other’ side of the Atlantic, as well as with fellow European-based institutes such as the Jean Monnet Chair at the University Saint Louis, Brussels, where the gender-related parts of this project were presented. Lastly, we also want to thank our editors, including Ambra Finotello and Ashwini Elango, who helped move the project along, as well as Palgrave’s political sociology series editors Carlo Ruzza and Hans-Jörg Trenz for endorsing our project. Markus wants to thank especially Christine Caly for her support in running the Jean Monnet Center, Sarah Wolff, Jocelyn Cesari, Ayse Dursun, Mariely Lopez-Santana, Joyce Mushaben, Romain Pasquier, Barbara Sgouraki, Nils Ringe, Sophie Jacquot, Serena D’Agostino and Paul Copeland for their thoughts and contributions to this project. Finally, thanks goes to Florida International University’s Department of Politics and International Relations, where Markus found an intellectual, collegial home in one of the few remaining free-standing IR departments in the United States. This despite the fact that Florida has become a battleground for minority rights and academic freedom in the recent past as well, where racial, ethno-cultural, and gender minorities have been securitized for the self-serving ambitions of state politicians. Jeff would like to thank the editors for their support and incredible patience and creative insight throughout the process of this project. Additional thanks goes to Markus, as both a doctoral adviser and mentor, as well as to the Jean Monnet Center of Excellence for their support during my time at FIU and to numerous others who have assisted, advised, and guided me over the years. Ernesto would especially like to thank Christine Caly, Ana Maria Bidegain, and Whitney Bauman for their help, support, and understanding. He would like to deeply thank those with whom he shares his personal quests: his family, friends, and colleagues at the university. Special thanks goes to the Department of International Relations of the Florida International University for giving him a space to grow professionally and

PREFACE

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intellectually. But above all, Ernesto wants to highlight the fact that FIU gives him the possibility to think and express himself freely, even when the socio-political context jeopardizes academic freedom. In an uncertain, politicized era where minorities are increasingly exposed to discrimination and populist exclusion, we hope that this book may contribute to more inclusive policy-making. Miami, USA Miami, USA Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Markus Thiel Ernesto Fiocchetto Jeffrey D. Maslanik

Contents

1 2

3 4 5 6 7 8

European Societies, EU Politics, and Social In/Exclusions of Minorities

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The Euro-/Refugee-/Security/Fragmentation/ Environment/Corona-Crises: The New Europeanized ‘Normal’?

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Identity Politics, Political Mobilization, and Social In/Exclusions

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The Politics of In/Exclusion in the EU: Gender and LGBT+

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Political Mobilizations Regarding Gender and LGBT+: Poland, Germany, Spain, and Sweden

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The Politics of In/Exclusion in the EU: Refugees and Migrants

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Political Mobilizations Regarding Refugees and Migrants: Poland, Germany, Spain, and Sweden

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Conclusion: Social In/Exclusions of Minorities in an Uncertain European Future

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Index

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About the Authors

Markus Thiel is a professor in the Department of Politics and International Relations at Florida International University (FIU), Miami and director of FIU’s Jean Monnet EU-Center of Excellence. Dr. Thiel’s research interests are the political sociology of the EU and European (Union) Politics, transatlantic relations, as well as LGBT+ politics. He has published several EU-related articles and book chapters in peerreviewed journals, including the Journal of Common Market Studies and the Journal for Contemporary European Studies. In addition, his research on the political sociology of the EU produced the monographs The Limits of Transnationalism (Palgrave, 2011) and EU Civil Society and Human Rights Advocacy (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), as well as 5 co-edited volumes on: Diversity and the European Union (with Lisa Pruegl, Palgrave, 2009), Identity Politics in the Age of Globalization (with Roger Coate, Lynne Rienner/First Forum Press, 2010), European Identity & Culture: Narratives of Transnational Belonging (with Rebecca Friedman, Ashgate, 2012), Sexualities in World Politics: How LGBTQ Claims Shape International Relations (with Manuela Picq, Routledge, 2015), and EU Development Policies Between Norms and Geopolitics (with Sarah Beringer & Sylvia Maier, Palgrave, 2019). Most recently, he published The EU’s International LGBTI Rights Promotion: Promises & Pitfalls (Routledge, 2021).

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Ernesto Fiocchetto is a Sociologist from Universidad Nacional de Cuyo, Mendoza, Argentina, and is currently writing his dissertation to fulfill the Ph.D. in International Relations program at the Department of Politics and International Relations at Florida International University (FIU), Miami. He holds two master’s degrees: in Religious Studies (FIU 2017) and International Studies (FIU 2019). At FIU, he has worked as the graduate assistant of the Jean Monnet Center of Excellence for three years and has taught undergraduate classes on Theories of IR and Migration and Refugees, among other topics. His research interests center on the multiple intersections of religious identities, migration, international politics, and gender and sexuality, mainly focusing on Latin America, the European Union, and the United States. In addition to his publications in Spanish, he has contributed some chapters to books on religion, identities, and migration, including World Christianity, Urbanization, and Identity (edited by Moses Biney, Kenneth Ngwa, and Raimundo Barreto/Fortress Press, 2021) and Christianity in Latin America and the Caribbean (edited by Kenneth R. Ross, Ana Maria Bidegain, and Todd M. Johnson/ Edinburgh University Press, 2022). Jeffrey D. Maslanik graduated from the Department of Politics and International Relations at Florida International University with a doctorate in International Relations in 2017. Since graduating, Jeff has taught in various departments globally, including at the Department of International Relations at Vietnam National University and at Keuka College’s satellite campus in Ho Chi Minh City. His research interests are pluralistic but largely fall under the theme of migration or the political economy of development. His forthcoming monograph ‘Be My Neighbor: Civil Society, Social Capital and Refugee Integration in Scandinavia’, is currently under contract with the University of Michigan Press.

Abbreviations

CDU CEE CSO EIGE EU GAMM ILGA IPVAW LGBT+ NGO Pis PP PSOE SD SOGIESC TCN UN

Christian Democratic Union Central and Eastern Europe Civil Society Organization European Institute for Gender Equality European Union Global Approach to Migration Management International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association Intimate Partner Violence Against Women Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender+ Non-Governmental Organization Prawo i Sprawiedliwo´sc´ /Law & Justice Party Partido Popular Partido Socialista Obrero Espanol Sweden Democrats Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity & Expression and Sex Characteristics Third Country National United Nations

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List of Figures

Fig. 5.1

Fig. 5.2

Fig. 5.3

Fig. 5.4

Fig. 5.5

Fig. 5.6

Fig. 5.7

Fig. 5.8

EU gender equality index scores (columns) and indicators scores (lines); 2013–2021 (0–100) (Source Own elaboration based on EIGE, 2022) EU gender equality index scores per case study (lines) and the EU (columns), 2013–2021 (0–100) (Source Own elaboration based on EIGE, 2022) Eurobarometer gender equality attitudes 2014–2017 (Source Own elaboration based on Eurobarometer, 2014, 2017) ILGA-Europe’s rainbow index scores per case study, 2013–2021 (0–100) (Source Own elaboration based on ILGA Europe, 2022) Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law’s LGBT+ Acceptance index score per case study, 2013–2021 (0–10) (Source Own elaboration based on Flores, 2019, 2021) EU gender equality index scores (columns) and indicators scores (lines) for Poland, 2013–2021 (0–100) (Source Own elaboration based on EIGE, 2022) ILGA-Europe’s overall rainbow index score and criteria scores for Poland in 2021 (0–100) (Source Own elaboration based on ILGA Europe, 2022) EU gender equality index scores (columns) and indicators scores (lines) for Germany, 2013–2021 (0–100) (Source Own elaboration based on EIGE, 2022)

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LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 5.9

Fig. 5.10

Fig. 5.11

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Fig. 5.13

Fig. 7.1

Fig. 7.2 Fig. 7.3

Fig. 7.4

Fig. 7.5

Fig. 7.6

ILGA-Europe’s overall rainbow index score and criteria scores for Germany in 2021 (0–100) (Source Own elaboration based on ILGA Europe, 2022) EU gender equality index scores (columns) and indicators scores (lines) for Spain, 2013–2021 (0–100) (Source Own elaboration based on EIGE, 2022) ILGA-Europe’s overall rainbow index score and criteria scores for Spain in 2021 (0–100) (Source Own elaboration based on ILGA Europe, 2022) EU gender equality index scores (columns) and indicators scores (lines) for Sweden, 2013–2021 (0–100) (Source Own elaboration based on EIGE, 2022) ILGA-Europe’s overall rainbow index score and criteria scores for Sweden in 2021 (0–100) (Source Own elaboration based on ILGA Europe, 2022) Migrant integration policy index scores per case study, 2010–2019 (0–100) (Source Own elaboration based on MIPEX, 2020a) Gallup’s migrant acceptance index scores, 2019 (0–10) (Source Own elaboration based on Gallup, 2020) Overall MIPEX index and criteria scores for Poland, 2010–2019 (0–100) (Source Own elaboration based on MIPEX, 2020) Overall MIPEX index and criteria scores for Germany, 2010–2019 (0–100) (Source Own elaboration based on MIPEX, 2020) Overall MIPEX index and criteria scores for Spain, 2010–2019 (0–100) (Source Own elaboration based on MIPEX, 2020) Overall MIPEX index and criteria scores for Sweden, 2010–2019 (0–100) (Source Own elaboration based on MIPEX, 2020)

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CHAPTER 1

European Societies, EU Politics, and Social In/Exclusions of Minorities

Introduction A frequent traveler to Europe will notice how the societal landscapes across the continent have slowly but steadily changed over the past two decades. The EU’s Schengen area agreement in principle allows one to travel to another European country for the weekend crossing largely invisible borders to meet friends or visit European capitals—something that is, however, a more precarious undertaking for people that are racialized, misgendered, or do not possess legal residency. This seemingly expected right has also been curtailed since the arrival of the refugee waves of 2015/2016, when selective passport controls often resulting racial profiling were widely re-introduced, or during the Covid-19 pandemic, when travel restrictions were implemented aimed at curbing the virus’ transnational transmission in the EU. Traveling through those locations, one may or may not notice how these cities have become cultural attractions that often represent a national past that doesn’t exist today anymore as such. Instead, we find large number of migrant populations contributing to Europe’s societal diversity, and its economies, often working in underappreciated, low wage service positions. These ethnically diverse newcomers are needed to rejuvenate aging European workforces and sustain Europe’s intergenerational welfare systems, so much so that © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Thiel et al., The Politics of Social In/Exclusion in the EU, Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31264-9_1

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the EU developed a pan-European ‘Bluecard’ process to facilitate skilled worker immigration. Yet most of the already present residents or denizens continue to remain at the margins of society. One may also experience how women have become more represented in public and political life, and how rainbow flags and stickers are visible in many urban areas, signaling a welcoming LGBT+ culture present there. At the same time, racism, sexism and homophobia remain, ranging from everyday microaggressions to structural disadvantages in private and public sectors. Beyond these quotidian and mundane impressions, there are deeper, contradictory societal trends at work that mark contemporary European societies: on the one hand, more inclusive domestic and EU-level policies and civil society organizations (CSOs) striving for more equality for ethno-racial or gender minorities exist than ever before. As a result of the pandemic, the EU institutions and the member states raised unprecedented amounts of capital and established various COVID-recovery funds under the label NextGeneration to make the EU ‘greener, more digital, healthier and more equal’ (European Commission, 2021). On the other hand, the increased visibility and salience of minority issues have led to opposition from societal and political actors across Europe, who aim to delimit such inclusion and worry about their privileges in uncertain times. Apart from this counter-reaction to claims for minority inclusion, Europe’s socio-political cohesion has become more volatile through a number of crisis events that particularly impacted the EU, from the Euro crisis to the refugee pressures to the energy and security crises caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In fact, analysts speak of the global polycrisis that seems to engulf the world these days, in which various linked systemic risks seem to become more disruptive and to occur simultaneously, creating vicious cycles (Homer-Dixon & Rockstroem, 2022). With reference to the EU, these have varyingly been conceptualized as ‘permanent emergency’ (Wolff & Ladi, 2020), or ‘permacrisis’ (Zuleeg et al., 2021), referencing the near-constant state of threat the EU finds itself in. Others have termed it the EU’s ‘polycrisis’ (Zeitlin et al., 2019) to highlight the multiplicity of causal factors at work in these complex, often interlinked crises. A debate exists about the degree to which these crises are a recent phenomenon, either for the EU itself which has experienced many before in previous decades (Wolff & Ladi, 2020), or for the societal minorities whose marginalization is persistent, albeit more pronounced during challenging times. Social in/exclusion is thus more strongly accentuated during these times, as more conflictive, exclusionary divisions,

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called ‘polycleavages’ (Zeitlin et al., 2019) emerge: ‘the multiple crises that affected the EU in recent years have generated new, durable dimensions of conflict, which mainly revolve around the defense of national political, social and economic ways of life’ (Corti, 2022: 18). More than just espousing protective measures by established societal and political actors, this concept points in the case of this project to the development of new socio-political forces in favor, or in opposition, to enhanced opportunities for minorities. These cleavages emerge in part because of the protectionist ambition of political agents fearing for the loss of existing privileges when threats are on the horizon and resources stretched thin because of emergencies. To illustrate this challenge, about a third of EU residents feel at risk of social exclusion in the aftermath of the Covid pandemic based on socio-economic marginalization (McCaughey, 2022), though the inclusion challenges for minorities are even more accentuated based on prevailing sexism, racism, etc. This book, then, aims to analyze these countervailing tendencies of in/exclusions by exposing a conceptual framework based on Beck’s notion of an emerging ‘risk society’ (2015) and Bauman’s ‘liquid modernity’ (2007), both of which preview an increased instability in private lives and public spheres. Moreover, it connects those volatile background conditions to actual in/exclusion policies and civil society activism in four case countries representing the EU’s geographical subregions. In view of these socio-political developments, two questions emerge that this book will examine in detail: First, what effects do the structural changes caused by crises in the EU, and ‘liquid modernity’ more generally, have on socio-economic and socio-political in/exclusion of minorities in Europe? Focusing on the structural background conditions marked by increasing risks and threats (Beck, 2015) as well as instability and fluidity of political institutions and policies (Bauman, 2007), this book makes the case that the augmented societal fragility, partly caused by the instable conditions of late modernity and in part furthered through geopolitical shocks and EU policies themselves, has had contradictory effects on European minorities. While more inclusionary and equality-oriented policies were instituted by many political actors and institutions, and advocated for by progressive CSOs, simultaneously a contestation of increasing diversity and equality has been advanced by nationalist and conservative forces. The next two chapters in particular focus on the succession of impacting crises, and the corresponding rise of political mobilization, and prepare the substantive case analyses that follow.

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Secondly, as a result of socio-political volatility, to what extent does the rise of political mobilization advance minority in/exclusions in Europe? Assuming the co-constitutive nature of socio-economic (i.e., marketbased) and socio-political (governance-based) structural influences and the corresponding agency of individuals, groups and institutions, this question focuses specifically on the political activation and mobilization of those entities. Such activism is often marked by grievances and identities emblematic of ‘identity politics’, which can be inclusionary or exclusionary in nature. The societal middle is often contend with the status quo, or may become disengaged from politics, and as a result may be less politically active. We focus in this book on four groups that have become particularly visible, politicized, and, in part, contested, in the past few years: women and LGBT+ populations, and asylum seekers and migrants. Recognizing potentially problematic essentialist categorization issues, gender and sexuality-based issues as well as asylum and immigration-based ones are treated here together as there are substantial theoretical and practical interlinkages between those two major minority issues. Scholars have described the social inequalities these demographics experience as overarching and intersecting and affecting all social groups belonging to these identity categories, thus making their social exclusion ‘structural’ and ‘deeply embedded’ (Koehler et al., 2020: 18). In our case analysis Chapters 5 and 7, we highlight four representative case countries with their political and civil activism that stand for the various geographical (North, South, East and West) subregions in the EU. Europe is too diverse as to allow for broad-based explanations, which is why representative cases were chosen to show similarities and differences of civic in/exclusion in subregions with similar socio-political conditions. Hence this book provides an updated analysis of some of the most significant and transformative as well as constitutive aspects for the political sociology of the EU today (Horowitz, 2018). It examines in detail how civic and political activism regarding the inclusion and integration of minorities striving for equality have become substantial forces in today’s politics. It also highlights the factors that have led to an increase in their relative importance vis-à-vis established governmental institutions and representatives. Recognizing the essential role of governments for social inclusion, the book exhibits a political sociology perspective that aims to move away from the predominant state-centrism and institutional focus of mainstream analyses of European politics. Instead, it brings to the fore

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the role of citizens, civil society, and identity politics as well as transnational societal phenomena impacting on the ambivalent civic in/exclusion tendencies that are more prevalent than ever in the EU. Socio-political minorities such as gender and LGBT+ ones, or refugees and migrants, are not only minoritized in recognition, but are also often excluded from the political process. Moreover, the book analyzes the linkage of EU institutions and policies to established and new societal actors in response to recent challenges in Europe, from the lingering effects of the Euro crisis to Brexit to the Pandemic. These threatening circumstances for majorities and minorities alike led to a renewed focus on the challenges of identity politics, and relatedly, a more generalized instability of domestic societal structures and democratic norms (Avramovska et al., 2022). Hence conceptually the book emphasizes questions of political culture, legitimization, and participation. It details how issues and agents interact in their socio-cultural/economic/political environment impacted by a high degree of Europeanization as well as what Beck (2015) termed a (global) ‘risk society’, and Bauman (2007) ‘liquid modernity’ (for more on these concepts, see the following chapter). The centrality of political culture is recognized in the changing attitudes and political priorities which in contemporary Europe are predominantly post-material in nature, and the orientations toward nationalism or Europeanism as a response to the political performance of actors within the EU dealing with ever more Europeanized issues. This adaptation and orientation toward EU influences, however, is not neatly progressive, but contains a number of diverging and often conflictive societal and discursive processes. Our book foregrounds this shifting terrain in which citizens express those preferences through political participation in movements, organizations, and parties, resulting in more contentious politics. These are marked by patterns of expanded inclusion of minorities, but also by exclusions based on, for instance, populist politics and antagonistic movements.

Filling a Gap in the Political Sociology of Europe With the rise in available information and political mobilization, and the coinciding augmented instability of identities, institutions, and policies, the field of political sociology has received more attention in the recent past. Whereas classical political science is mostly interested in the political structures and formal mechanisms in politics, sociology traditionally

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examined the social structures of societies, economies, and states. Political sociology then is an attempt to bridge both of these two distinct but related fields, a hybrid field of research combining social and political explanatory variables (Sartori, 1969) existing in the ‘socio-political’ fields linking societies and political institutions. More concisely and important for this book in its emphasis on the contentious politics of in/exclusion, ‘political sociology is the study of power and the relationship between societies, states, and political conflict’ (Manza, 2011). In terms of this research field’s referent subjects, a number of often divergent areas are central to political sociology, including the impact of social identities, forces, and structures on political institutions, policies, and activism—and vice versa. Concretely, questions of class, culture, gender, race, education, and other differentiating human characteristics are examined in relation to political development, and change and contestation over time, on an individual and collective level. Applied to Europe, this also concerns the increasing ‘politicization’, meaning salient contestation (De Wilde et al., 2016), of EU affairs and thus, a corresponding political mobilization of citizens and residents aiming to advance or block policies coming from ‘Brussels’. Based on the topics of this book, one can see how this research endeavor falls within the remit of political sociology. For one, the question of social in/exclusion of minorities and the advocacy thereof clearly leads to an analysis of a number of social actors that may or may not be part of established political institutions, such as CSOs and social movements, but that still significantly impact upon the social and political integration of minorities. In our book, we therefore explore how socio-political actors relate to established political state or EU institutions and policies when campaigning for/against the integration of gender and LGBT+ minorities as well as ethnic minorities and refugees. Their activities are often based on preexisting, but also create new, sociopolitical tensions and conflicts that are unavoidable in regulatory or distributive politics with limited resources and competitive claims. In this book, we focus on the campaigns and policies within four representative EU member states (Germany for Western Europe, Poland for Central and Eastern Europe, Sweden for the Nordic countries, and Spain for the Mediterranean ones) to show how the interplay of supportive and opposing forces result in distinctive patterns of advocacy and identity politics, public policies, and, ultimately, social in/exclusion of minorities. Yet

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it is also important for us to note how the structural, transnational conditions that exist in the EU today, signifying its increased power but also its contentiousness, impact on those national patterns. While a well established field of contentious politics within European political sociology (Della Porta & Tarrow, 2004) as well as regarding the ramification of European governance on politics and societies (Guirardon & Favell, 2011) exist by now, political sociology literature examining the role of social inequalities in Europe and their impacts on the societal constitution of the EU has just begun to emerge. Especially in the past decade, politically active individuals and groups advancing politics based on their identities have contributed to more democratic pluralism, but at the same time engaged potentially in ‘identity-democracy tradeoffs’ that may weaken democratic norms (Avramovska et al., 2022), for instance through a singular focus on the preservation of ethno-national identities. This erosion of liberal democratic norms has been further advanced by a series of conflictive crises in the EU polity, beginning with the EU’s failure to ratify an EU constitutional treaty in 2005, to the Euro crisis, to the challenging attempts to establish a joint migration and asylum policy. Hence as Guiraudon et al. (2016) point out, a need exists for analyses in ‘understanding the effects of the crises (our pluralization) on the changing state-society relations, the rights and empowerment of citizens, and the transnational contestations’ (10). This book advances this research agenda by exploring questions of identity politics, political culture, and contestation through social in/exclusion of minorities within an increasingly politicized EU. Hutter et al. (2016) view the politicization of societal transnational issues (such as immigration, the environment, civic and human rights, etc.) together with EU-based processes (of regional integration and its multifaceted economic and security-related challenges) as important drivers for the augmented society-politics linkage in Europe. The latter often results from societal cleavages that emerge from the so-called ‘winners and losers’ of the EU’s regional integration process, and neoliberal globalization more generally. The literatures on social in/exclusion are dominated by a marketcentric social policy paradigm that focuses on issues of human and social capital, poverty reduction, and labor market integration, as well as the development of social cohesion indicators that can be used to trace progress (Gingrich & Lightman, 2015; Marlier et al., 2009). These tend to be more policy-oriented and view socio-economic class positioning as one, if not the most important factor for inclusion (Oxoby, 2009).

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Hence these theories often conceive of macro-level solutions in a topdown manner in that policies should be supplied by governments to reduce social inequalities, especially when it comes to poverty reduction, education, and participation in the labor market. In their focus on the supply side of politics, they neglect to take power differentials and societal struggles into account, which are arguably ‘political’. On the other end, bottom-up perspectives on social in/exclusion of minorities concentrate through micro-level analyses on civil society activism addressing certain demands and claims for equality and inclusion (Larruina et al., 2019; Ruzza, 2011; Thiel, 2017). These tend to focus on civil society strategies and advocacy, social dialogue with political stakeholders, education, etc. With this book, we aim to link these somewhat disparate fields together by showing how civic identity politics impacts policy development, and conversely how public policies have repercussions for the reduction or progression of societal inequalities for minorities. We trace these domestically variegated processes against an ever diversifying societal and political EU governance space, which has mitigated but simultaneously augmented social marginalization. Hence this book contributes to a novel subfield within political sociology focusing on social inclusion of minorities in the EU, using concepts and methods taken from established research fields dealing with social policy, contentious politics, civil society, etc. Specifically, we interrogate the in/exclusion campaigns and processes of some of the most visible social and ethnic minorities in Europe. Other works have explored the politics of inclusion in a global picture (Koehler et al., 2020), though we concentrate on the EU as it represents a more cohesive socio-political entity. Moreover, we relate minority positions to broader structural inequalities and stratifications that cause political conflict over integration and adaptation; and this not only within domestic minority–majority tensions, but also on a transnational and supranational EU level. The latter point is important because the EU has acquired sufficient power to regulate and fund the social in/exclusion of those minorities in ways that are supposed to complement national policies, but also because the EU has augmented certain crises phenomena that impact upon social cohesion and equality for minorities through its role in the Euro crisis or the continent’s refugee policies, to name just a few examples (see Chapter 3 for more). Guiraudon et al. (2016) recognized the significant role of the EU’s transnational configuration in furthering crises, including of its own legitimacy, in the process of European integration: ‘from a perspective

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of political sociology, we need to ask which social groups are at risk of social exclusion and how they are exposed to the long-term implications of crisis’ (12). Overall, this book makes the case that the EU ought to be recognized as a social entity as much as a political framework, and that the integration of ever more diverse societies is paramount for the future of the EU and its member states.

Social Inclusion and Equality as Hallmarks of Contemporary Europe Social inclusion itself is a multifaceted, complex process as the following definition makes clear: social inclusion may be defined as ‘…the process by which efforts are made to ensure that everyone, regardless of their experiences and circumstances, can achieve their potential in life. To achieve inclusion, income and employment are necessary but not sufficient. An inclusive society is also characterized by a striving for reduced inequality, a balance between individuals’ rights and duties and increased social cohesion’ (Center for Economic and Social Inclusion, 2002). Here, the various constitutive components become evident: on the one hand, for inclusion to occur there is a need for socio-economic integration to guarantee self-sufficiency and autonomy. However this is not enough as inclusion also means the reduction of inequalities in other areas of social, cultural, and political life. In this sense, social inclusion functions on a spectrum, with a minimal level of inclusion representing economic integration, but more advanced conceptualizations also taking into account socio-political factors that help individuals and groups feel that they belong to society. Moreover, this definition hints at the capricious balance of rights and duties (as citizen, legal resident, or simply societal participant) in order to achieve social trust and cohesion. Policies make up a significant part of social inclusion efforts, but additional civic measures and inclusive, tolerant attitudes are needed. Some scholars have referred to those as transnational solidarities, although it appears that a sharing of resources is conditional upon recognition as deserving of support, thus often favoring natives over migrants, for example (Lahusen, 2020: 28). We posit that certain inclusive solidarities are emerging as a byproduct of salient identity politics in an era of liquid modernity, but at the same time more exclusivist sexist, homophobe, and xenophobic positions are vocalized as

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well in view of an uncertain, risky future. The EU as Europe’s overarching political framework thus bears co-responsibility for the successful adaptation to a more diverse societal landscape. Initially, the EU’s precursor did not play much of a role in the mitigation of social inequalities. As its main post-war focus centered around economic reconstruction and regional market integration, questions of social protection were more narrowly focused around competitiondistorting labor market differences. In addition, the member states had, and still have, legal competence as primary actors to deal with social policy, welfare policy, and labor market regulations. From the 1980s onward, the European Economic Community started to develop action programs focused on specific demographics as well as sub-regional challenges, and began to establish funds to help states co-finance social policies. After 2000, the EU’s so-called Lisbon strategy developed a seven criteria-based peer-review to advance national inclusion action plans, in order to strengthen EU economies and overall social cohesion (Atkinson et al., 2002). It was followed in 2010 by the ‘Europe2020’ strategy aiming toward ‘smart, sustainable and inclusive growth’, as well as other assistive policy strategies and funds (Copeland & Daly, 2018). However, neither the increased involvement of the EU institutions, nor the augmented state attention to social issues were able to significantly counteract periodic economic crises arising from the EU’s own governance, such as the Euro crisis, or react appropriately to external geopolitical shocks, for instance in the uncoordinated response to refugee inflows or Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Yet as we show in the following chapters, the EU can achieve significant progress in the collaboration with member states in high-visibility inclusion issues relating to gender and sexuality and refugees and migrants. While the EU has been able to support gender equality, and to a lesser extent, LGBT+ equality through directives, funds, and strategic benchmarks (see Chapters 4 and 5), the social inclusion of refugees and migrants has been more challenging, in part because their inclusion is a ‘newer’ issue and in part because of significant resistance of member states to a coordinated European effort (Chapters 6 and 7). The role of member states is thus essential, not only in terms of social inclusion policies and funds provided by governments, but also in terms of the evolving societal responses. Yet national legal frameworks, as well as domestic governments, vary widely and thus a domestic-level analysis is required. Governments and constitutional provisions provide the

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legal basis for social in/exclusion, which are further impacted by bottomup civic pressures, in addition to political parties campaigning for their issues. While social inclusion was less of a challenge in the Cold War era, in part because of the relative homogeneity of European societies and the subordinate position of women, LGBT+ individuals and migrants, to use our case populations, things have changed in the twenty-first century. On the one hand, geopolitical and economic instabilities have led to more people seeking refuge in Europe, while on the other hand political and social mobilizations of minorities increased with the rise of information and identity politics more generally. Hence many states have shifted from a conception of solidaric ‘welfare nationalism’ to a more restrictive ‘welfare exclusionism’, even or especially in Scandinavian countries that are known for their extensive welfare programs built for previously homogenous populations (Keskinen, 2016). Moreover, Central and Eastern European states that joined the EU in the new millennium had less exposure to gender and LGBT+ issues, as well as refugee and migration ones, and tend to be more cautious in these issues. These policy transformations had corresponding impacts on the rise of nativist movements, although in cases such as Germany and Spain, new forms of migrant rights activism and political mobilization emerged as well (Siim et al., 2018). Adding pressure to these changes, social transfer payments for poverty reduction have overall declined in the EU since the outbreak of the Euro crisis 2008, though some countries, including the Netherlands, the Baltics, and Greece have improved in this regard whereas others such as Hungary, Bulgaria, or Romania did not (European Commission, 2022). Incidentally, many of the more progressive states in the EU also polished their inclusionary gender and LGBT+ credentials while at the same time excluding Muslim migrants and refugees based on an assumed lack of liberalism in that regard (Siim & Meret, 2016). Hence the discussion of social in/exclusion centrally points to political mobilization, including identity politics by affected populations themselves. As will be detailed in the following chapters, people are increasingly motivated to mobilize for/against the inclusion of minorities, which ambiguously reflects on the often voiced desire for a more participatory democracy (Lahusen, 2020). This includes moving from passive rights bearers to becoming active civic participants, even if this may lead to a more politicized public sphere. Participatory democracy as part of active citizenship implies that social injustices should be minimized and equality for all attained through means that go beyond periodic voting, especially

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through civic activism in the spirit of solidarity. Yet this optimistic view is tempered by the variety of competitive advocacy campaigns in the EU, the professionalization of CSOs with close links to political funders, and the corresponding lack of a broader activation of the general public (Garcia, 2015; Thiel, 2017). In addition, being a civic member of a community is also conditioned by the neoliberal de-politicization of individual agency as economic contributor and consumer, by misinformation in today’s competitive media landscape, and an increasing polarization over the challenges of late modern industrial societies. Moreover, urban–rural societal divides similarly steer the trajectories of in/exclusion. Whereas in urban areas with more multicultural populations, even in the absence of formal citizenship, recent social movements have used their lack of privilege to contest the existing status quo and to empower themselves (Birte, 2016), rural areas tend to be more conservative and restraining. In fact, newer research has found that there is an increasing pushback in the EU against progressive, inclusive CSOs by different strands of neoliberal, nativist as well as socially conservative right-wing activists and parties (Ruzza & Sanchez Salgado, 2021). Hence social inclusion for minorities represents an ambitious, multifaceted goal in an EU marked by increased politicization, but also empowerment, of those populations.

Chapter Previews The next chapter moves toward the structural environment in the EU and shows how crises have become the new ‘normal’ as postulated in the concepts of (post)modern global ‘risk societies’ (Beck, 2015). These are embedded in what Bauman (2007) calls ‘liquid modernity’, i.e., the increasingly volatile but also fluid institutional configuration of modern capitalist societies. Given the rapidly changing demographic, economic, environmental, technological, and political landscapes, national political cultures and politics are exposed to vulnerabilities that cannot easily be adapted to, especially since globalization and Europeanization have diminished problem-solving sovereign policy structures. To illustrate this process, the Euro-, Refugee-, Security-, Fragmentation-, Environmental, and Pandemic crises of the past decade are examined. These various crises are lasting features that make it more difficult for European societies, governments, and the EU institutions to constructively develop a linear vision for social inclusion and regional integration more generally.

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In theoretical terms, this chapter highlights the ‘politicization’ and eventual (de)‘securitization’ of previously mundane social policy issues in the process, and the polarization over those topics. In contrast, the third chapter focuses on political agency by individuals and groups and highlights the increased salience of identity-based politics for social in/exclusion. This chapter emphasizes individual as well as collective political agency and the contextual societal components characterizing contemporary political activism. It details how individual aspects of social identities, such as age, gender, class, ethnicity, and religion determine collective political cultures, i.e., the attitudes of citizens toward governance, in domestic and regional clusters in (Southern, Western, Northern, Central- and Eastern) Europe. Moreover, it provides evidence of political participation as expressed through voting and other participatory actions such as petitions, demonstrations, boycotts, etc. It traces the transformation of political culture and participation from more passive stances in representative democracies to more activated forms of political engagement, based on increased education, information, and identity politics. These characteristics, however, are more pronounced among political and economic elites, resulting in equality and participation gaps within the EU. Hence this chapter details the agency that citizens express, but also highlights how domestic socio-economic structural factors, such as the form of national governance, political economy, the welfare state, and degree of globalization and Europeanization play a role, as these factors contribute to a particular form of domestic political culture. Following these conceptual chapters, the following four chapters focus on the minorities examined in this chapter, gender and LGBT+ ones, and refugees and migrants. A set of two chapters highlights each grouping, with the first chapter introducing minority claims and policies lodged primarily at the EU level of governance, and the subsequent chapter then analyzing in detail the state of in/exclusion in the four case countries representative of the EU’s subregions. Chapter 4 examines gender and sexuality equality issues in the EU, focusing on the state of gender and LGBT+ equality claims and policies mainly on the EU level. The increasing diversity within European states, as well as fragility of liberal democratic governance and the emergence of populist right-wing politics nationally as well as in EU politics elicit contestations of gender and sexuality equality claims. Ongoing social and demographic challenges have not been addressed sufficiently on domestic and EU levels, with resulting societal tensions. For instance, the #MeToo movement deeply

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resounded across Europe, despite the fact that women’s organizations have been active for decades now and the EU advocates gender equality through a variety of policies. Yet the lack of gender equality becomes evident in residual gender violence, the construction of gender as ‘ideology’, and the lack of parity when it comes to feminist representation and income equality, for example. Conversely, LGBT+ rights still vary substantially across Europe and have received outsize visibility as a new ground for contesting Europe’s liberalism by more conservative factions. Thus the salience of sexual orientation and gender identity issues evidence the increase in actor-driven identity politics, but also shows that societal inclusion is often accompanied by exclusion. Chapter 5 concentrates on the repercussions of gender and LGBT+ related issues on the societal and political levels, from the political mobilization of individuals and parties, to the advocacy of Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) that provide services and activate the citizenry. Together, these actors contribute to varying levels of societal in/exclusion that are traced over time for four specific case countries. Tracing the in/exclusion mobilizations and related politics and analyzing EU gender index and public opinion data, the country cases illustrate these differences, with references to the notion of ‘crises’ and ‘risks’ (of socio-economic equality, patriarchal-traditional cultures, and others). While in both cases, a more notable opposition to these rights has emerged through the stoking of moral panics, different conceptualizations of risks associated with late modernity condition the degree of in/exclusion as well. In Spain, Sweden, Germany, and Poland, gender and LGBT+ rights have become more salient, however, with diverging socio-political responses: while in Spain and Sweden, both political and civil society actors by and large have diffused an inclusive human rights frame for gender and sexual minorities, in Germany and particularly in Poland, a more notable opposition to these rights have emerged on societal and political levels, respectively. The next chapter focuses on another increasingly contentious policy area: the lack of solidarity among member states when developing an effective and sustainable refugee and asylum policy, with attendant questions of redistribution, reception, integration, and border management. These issues have produced insecurities among citizens and tensions between member state governments, with detrimental effects for the inclusion of refugees and migrants, and also for the perceived performance of the EU. Coincidentally, civic and political activism for/against hosting refugees has increased, in part to fill in governmental gaps and

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in part as a result of societal tensions. This chapter brings together a compelling set of politicized issues regarding refugees and migrants including debates on how to best manage asylum within and migration to the EU in view of the considerable socio-political and economic differences between states. Despite the EU’s joint values and decision-making in these areas, it is facing a crisis of solidarity, for instance regarding the reform of the Dublin Regulation or the implementation of the Common European Asylum System. This chapter also sheds light on the challenges concerning sovereignty and the ability of the EU to de-securitize these issues for European societies, exemplified by the Visegrad-4 states’ rejection of asylum redistribution. As with gender and LGBT+ rights, issues surrounding refugees and ethno-religious migrant minorities, and the integration of immigrants and refugees have emerged as central points of contention within Europe. Hence Chapter 7 first lays out the terminological and policy complexities when receiving and integrating migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers in the EU, and then details the domestic articulations of in/exclusion through (non)state actors in our four case countries. An increasing political polarization over issues of immigration and citizenship emerged in EU member states. This has led to racism and discrimination against migrants—especially if they are Muslim—in many areas of life, and is reflected in lower educational attainments, lower job placement rates, and less political participation and representation. In addition, far-right parties and movements across Europe have used their presence to advance exclusive-nativist positions. The corresponding lack of inclusion is recognized by progressive CSOs that aim to support refugee and migrant integration, aid the state in service provision, and have become essential interlocutors co-determining the societal in/exclusion of those minorities in Europe. Based on the Migrant Integration Policy Index and public opinion data, we trace the political mobilizations and highlight some of the most prevalent trends in the four case countries Spain, Sweden, Germany, and Poland. Finally, the concluding chapter brings together an overview of the key components outlined and analyzed throughout the book. It highlights the linkages and gaps between the EU-level formulation of policies and their domestic implementation, the differences between member states, as well as between various aspects of social inclusion as measured by the most important indexes. It also lays out some trends in EU policy making as well as future challenges: changing demographics (Europe’s

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graying economy and social welfare), increasing diversity (cultural and social), geopolitical fragmentation, human rights protections (internally and externally), and the management of new challenges (for instance with the decline of democratic norms, environmental degradation or the rise of artificial intelligence). It stresses that in all these areas, societal inclusions as well as political exclusions co-determine the range of possible actions the EU can take to prove more resilient in an uncertain time, and a less secure world. It posits that while shared governance through the EU has come under pressure, given the complex interplay of these often rapidly emerging issues, it is in the best interest of states to respond to those, taking into account not only public opinion but civic input and activism.

Conclusion Social inclusion should not only be considered a valuable policy goal for governments or the EU aiming at more social cohesion and labor market participation. The politicization of minorities in European societies, the increase in contentious identity politics and the re-emergence of far-right nativist opposition to more inclusive societies evidences that it has become a central legitimization challenge for the functioning of ever more diverse and volatile societies. The augmented risks in European and globalized governance have accentuated the need to promote social cohesion and inclusion for the most disadvantaged minorities. Moreover, the reduction of inequalities contributes in a broader sense to transnational connectedness and awareness of the democratic constitution of contemporary domestic political and public life. Equality for women and LGBT+ individuals should be a normative hallmark of the EU, given the long history of gender and sexual repression in Europe. And in the EU’s potential to absorb and integrate people from outside, it also connects Europe in unprecedented ways to Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, and thus potentially provides for ways of exercising global citizen- and leadership in human rights matters. The EU and its member states are not only the guarantors of the well-being of its citizens and residents, but in their historical responsibility, ought to redress past injustices by a conscious focus on marginalized populations, whoever they may be and wherever they may come from.

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References Atkinson, T., Cantillon, B., Marlier, E., & Nolan, B. (2002). Social indicators: The EU and social inclusion. Oxford University Press. Avramovska, E., Lutz, J., Milacic, P., Svolik, M. (2022). Identity, partisanship, polarization. How democratically elected politicians get away with autocratizing their country, Report, Friedrich Ebert Foundation. Retrieved November 12, 2022, from https://democracy.fes.de/e/how-politicians-get-away-withautocratizing-their-countries Bauman, Z. (2007). Liquid modernity. Polity. Beck, U. (2015). Global risk society. The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Globalization, First Edition. Edited by George Ritzer. Wiley. Center for Economic and Social Inclusion (2002). Mission statement. Retrieved August 22, 2022, from http://www.cesi.org.uk/ Copeland, P., & Daly, M. (2018). The European Semester and EU social policy. JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies, 56(5), 1001–1018. Corti, F. (2022). The politicisation of social Europe. Edward Elgar. De Wilde, P., Leupold, A., & Schmidtke, H. (2016). Introduction: The differentiated politicisation of European governance. West European Politics, 39(1), 3–22. Della Porta, D., & Tarrow, S. (2004). Transnational protest and global activism. Rowman & Littlefield. European Commission. (2021). Next generation EU. Landing Page. Retrieved November 11, 2022, from https://next-generation-eu.europa.eu/index_en European Commission. (2022). Report: Minimum income: More effective support needed to fight poverty. Retrieved November 5, 2022, from https://ec.europa. eu/social/main.jsp?langId=en&catId=89&newsId=10417&furtherNews=yes Garcia, L. (2015). Participatory democracy and civil society in the EU: Agendasetting and institutionalisation. Springer. Gingrich, L., & Lightman, N. (2015). The empirical measurement of a theoretical concept: Tracing social exclusion among racial minority and migrant groups in Canada. Social Inclusion, 3(4), 98–111. Guirardon, V., & Favell, A. (2011). Sociology of the European Union. Bloomsbury. Guiraudon, V., Ruzza, C., & Trenz, H. J. (Eds.) (2016). Europe’s prolonged crisis: The making or the unmaking of a political Union. Springer. Homer-Dixon, T., & Rockstroem, J. (2022, November 13). What happens when crises collide? New York Times. Retrieved December 4, 2022, from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/13/opinion/coronavirusukraine-climate-inflation.html Hutter, S., Grande, E., & Kriesi, H. (Eds.) (2016). Politicising Europe: Integration and mass politics. Cambridge University Press. Keskinen, S. (2016). From welfare nationalism to welfare chauvinism: Economic rhetoric, the welfare state and changing asylum policies in Finland. Review of General Psychology, 36(3), 311–320.

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Koehler, G., Cimadamore, A., Kiwan, F., Manuel. P., & Gonzalez, M., (Eds.) (2020). The politics of social inclusion: Bridging knowledge and social change. Ibidem Press. Lahusen, C. (2020). Citizen’s solidarity in Europe. Edward Elgar. Larruina, R., Boersma, K., & Ponzoni, E. (2019). Responding to the Dutch asylum crisis: Implications for collaborative work between civil society and governmental organizations. Social Inclusion, 7 (2), 53–63. Manza, J. (2011). Political sociology. Oxford Bibliographies in Sociology. https:// doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780199756384-0001 Marlier, E., Atkinson, T., Cantillon, B., & Brian, N. (2009). The EU and social inclusion. Policy Press. McCaughey, M. (2022). Citizens need clarity on Europe’s challenges. Social Europe. Retrieved December 11, 2022, from https://socialeurope.eu/cit izens-need-clarity-on-europes-challenges Oxoby, R. (2009). Understanding social inclusion, social cohesion, and social capital. International Journal of Social Economics, 36(12), 1133–1152. Ruzza, C. (2011). Social movements and the European interest intermediation of public interest groups. Journal of European Integration, 33(4), 453–469. Ruzza, C., & Sanchez Salgado, R. (2021). The populist turn in EU politics and the intermediary role of civil society organisations. European Politics and Society, 22(4), 471–485. Sartori, G. (1969). From the sociology of politics to political sociology. Government and Opposition, 4(2), 195–214. Siim, B., & Meret, S. (2016). Right wing populism in Denmark: People, nation and welfare in the construction of the ‘Other’. In G. Lazaridis, G. Campani, A. Benveniste (Eds.), The rise of the far right in Europe (pp. 109–136). Springer. Siim, B., Krasteva, A., & Saarinen, A. (Eds.). (2018). Citizens’ activism and solidarity movements: Contending with populism. Springer. Thiel, M. (2017). European civil society & human rights advocacy. University of Pennsylvania Press. Wolff, S., & Ladi, S. (2020). European Union responses to the Covid-19 pandemic: Adaptability in times of permanent emergency. Journal of European Integration, 42(8), 1025–1040. Zeitlin, J., Nicoli, F., & Laffan, B. (2019). Introduction: The European Union beyond the polycrisis? Integration and politicization in an age of shifting cleavages. Journal of European Public Policy, 26(7), 963–976. Zuleeg, F., Emmanouilidis, J., & Borges de Castro, R. (2021, April 13). The age of permacrisis. Euractiv Op-ed. https://www.euractiv.com/section/fut ure-eu/opinion/the-age-of-permacrisis/

CHAPTER 2

The Euro-/Refugee-/Security/ Fragmentation/Environment/ Corona-Crises: The New Europeanized ‘Normal’?

Introduction Crises appear to have become the new normal. Although intermittent large-scale crises occurred throughout the course of history, globalization processes have accelerated and augmented the impact of those, be it through wars, environmental catastrophes, or cyber crime, to name just a few transnational phenomena. Since there is a dearth of literature exploring the intersection between crises and inequalities (Curran, 2022), the following sections highlight how EU-based crises, defined as crises occurring in but also furthered by the EU, have contributed to social in/ exclusions. Thus this chapter moves toward the structural environment in which political mobilization occurs and shows how crises have become the new ‘normal’ as postulated in the concepts of (post)modern global ‘risk societies’ (Beck, 2015a, 2015b), embedded in what Bauman (2007) calls ‘liquid modernity’. Bauman coined the phrase ‘liquid modernity’ to describe the near-constant change and mobility of people, institutions, and ideas that were more formalized and stable in the twentieth century. Ideally suited to describe our globally networked, accelerated interdependence at the beginning of the new millennium, ‘“liquid modernity”, is

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the growing conviction that change is the only permanence, and uncertainty the only certainty’ (Bauman, 2007: 82). His description of late modern times, with its emphasis on change and indeterminacy, contextualizes the structural political and geo-temporal background under which individuals experience governance and everyday life today. Liquid modernity is thus characterized by the related twin processes of globalization and individualization, meaning on the one hand the all-encompassing global interdependency of countries, and on the opposite end, the shift toward individual responsibility and decision-making. These also encompass a disaggregation of political power away from governments, be it through the augmented role of globalized neoliberalism or an increase in individual responsibility, and collective action to design and adapt to changing circumstances (Davis, 2013). Change can be agent-centered and thus empowering for individuals and collectives, but in liquid modernity, the notion of externally induced impermanence is also an important constraint, signaling the vulnerability and uncertainty of established ideas, procedures, and institutions. This putting into perspective of traditional structures and institutions causes what some theorists called ‘ontological insecurity’ (Kinnvall et al., 2018), leading to an individualized, yet at the same time, generalized feeling of uncertainty and risk. Here it becomes apparent how the notion of liquid modernity constitutes an apt contextual framework for the idea of the global risk society (Beck, 2015a, 2015b). In its original formulation, risks need to be distinguished from perennial threats such as natural catastrophes, as risks involve human agency. They are specific uncertainties that might only be determinable in terms of probability, and often result in humanly manufactured or contributed crisis events. Hence these risks depend on human decisions, are partly created by society itself, immanent to society, collectively experienced, and thus individually unavoidable. In their novelty, their experience breaks with the past, thus making them somewhat disconnected from previous risks and institutionalized routines. They tend to be delocalized, incalculable, uncontrollable, and in the final analysis no longer (privately) insurable. Climate change is a classic example of this sort of risk (Beck, 2015a, 2015b). In this sense, risks are conceived of as being somewhat undeterminable in their effects, but because of their potential drastic impact in need of being researched and communicated, usually from experts to policy makers and publics. Yet because of their amorphous nature and slow advance, coupled with the challenge to cope appropriately, they can be manipulated, politicized, and

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(de)securitized; meaning risks can be portrayed as a security threat. This exposes risks and threats to public discourse, but also opens the door for interest-based exploitation, misinformation, political mobilization, etc., by different political actors. The effects of the ‘threat’ itself, as well as its apparent (de)securitization strategy, are unevenly felt across societies as risk exposure is also conditioned by class positioning. The latter has been relativized by the assumption that some risks may have an equalizing effect, captured by Beck’s much-discussed notion that ‘poverty is hierarchical, smog is democratic’ (Beck, 1992: 36). However, this project takes it as a given that individuals are differently impacted by threats based on their socio-economic status as it affects the kind of resources available for mitigation, something that most risk researchers tend to agree with (Curran, 2022). More recently, risk assessment has evolved as a political and economic forecasting sector intended to depoliticize risks and threats by attempting to make those more predictable. In its emergence, this field reflects Foucault’s knowledge/power linkage, in that the potential knowledge gains establish a modus for control. For instance throughout the Covid-19 pandemic governments used scientific and governmental expertise to prescribe mobility restrictions for citizens. On the other hand, Voltolini et al. (2020) have theorized the depiction of crises as requiring political framing, aside from politicization, whereby challengers to the political status quo popularize the notion of failures that need to be addressed and improved. These conflicts do not only play out within domestic political arenas to establish and maintain legitimacy, but increasingly Europeanized issues also impact the pro/anti-EU cleavages within member states. In regard to perceived pan-European risks, Beck and Grande (2007) view Europe, just like Habermas, constituted in a post-national state to which the EU significantly contributed. They situate the EU between Europeanization, the thorough adaptation of states to EU policies and structures, and cosmopolitanism with its global outlook. They argue for a cosmopolitan Europe that reconsiders its automatic-reflexive reshaping of the region according to nation-building principles on a pan-European level. Such a cosmopolitan polity would continue to pursue joint policies based on common interests, but would also be less neoliberal, technocratic, and Euro-centric and thus better prepared for transnational risks and threats. Written after the failure of the EU constitution in the midst of the Euro crisis, their vision for European unification contains a challenge

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for reform in order to better manage the uncertainties of late modernity. In their own words, a cosmopolitan outlook is not a panacea for Europe, but ‘rather a set of instructions for dealing with ambivalencesambivalences that are irreducible, because they are characteristic of the second modernity’ (27). Harking back to the notion of the unknown and the search for an appropriate European response, this optimistic vision is yet to come to fruition, as national divisions over the handling of various crises have predominated over the past decade. Yet these politicized disagreements also had the unintended effect of ‘bringing the EU closer to its citizens’, if not always in the desired manner, by mobilizing individuals and civil society to a hitherto unknown extent. In fact, Cross (2017) recognizes the social nature of what she calls ‘integrational panics’ and states that looking at the EU’s past, post-crisis catharses tend to result often in more integration policies, thus representing an opportunity as well. Similarly, Wolff and Ladi (2020) argue that ‘inter-crisis learning’ by the EU led it to be more adaptable over the past decade although this response is conditioned by the sensitivity of policy areas, and by the degree of cooperation by member states. Zeitlin et al. (2019), however, caution that despite the Union’s integrationist response to the ‘polycrisis’, a term coined by former European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker in 2016 to describe the various crises the EU faces, ‘a patchwork approach has prevailed and no comprehensive solution is in sight’ (963). What they call a policy trap, more commonly known as muddling through in the face of augmented polarization over crises, has arguably been the dominant EU policy mode of the past decade, rather than attempting to modify its institutional design to more sustainably address these challenges. Such uncertainty and stagnation allow political elites of various ideological strands to offer apparent solutions to difficult-to-manage risks, which is where the element of performative manipulation comes in. When political actors use risks and/or threats to shape and apparently mitigate them, they conjure up the notion of ‘crisis’ as a critical juncture in the public discourse. ‘Crises, as moments of decisive intervention, involve the active display of agency by actors or bodies that have some autonomy at the level at which the crisis is identified’ (Hay, 1996: 425). By detailing below the role of (non) state actors in the attempted management of risks, this chapter also highlights the politicization and eventual (de)securitization of these potentially threatening policy issues. It illustrates through various crisis examples how bottom-up societal influences

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increase the salience of and polarization over those topics, and lead to an expansion of socio-political actors (de Wilde et al., 2016) that are needed for politicization to occur. With the rise of politicization, securitization emerges, defined as the process by which an actor identifies a ‘threat’, attributes a special status to that threat and by so doing is able to justify and then execute ‘urgent and exceptional measures’ (Buzan & Waever, 2003: 491). The latter are the mechanisms involved in the management of crises, which then can be (de)securitized, i.e., actively represented as an (un)manageable risk in a performative threat (de)construction (Balzacq, 2010). In other words, risks and especially crises provide a pretext to advance the notion of a security threat that then can either be resolved or mitigated and hence de-securitized, or alternatively securitized and propagated as in need of protection and emergency measures. Based on these assumptions, we make the argument that the EU’s own teleological indeterminacy, in terms of its integration trajectory, opens up opportunities for a number of political actors to advance the notion of crisis or to use existing challenges to further their own political interests. This is especially effective since it highlights individual agency in the name of the European ‘common good’, and thus leads to an incremental perpetuation and normalization of crises by representing crises as the new normal that need to be dealt with by appropriate actors and institutions. Hence a certain reform potential exists alongside the political risk of mitigation and manipulation. Beck himself coined the phrase ‘emancipatory catastrophism’ (2015a, 2015b) to express the potentially cathartic shock effects of crisis in bringing about expanded normative horizons for improvement in the face of crisis. Focusing on the topic of this book, these actors advance political strategies and public discourses that then either aid societal inclusion or prevent it through othering, exclusion, etc. Given the rapidly changing demographic, economic, technological, and political environment in Europe, national political cultures and politics are exposed to vulnerabilities that cannot easily be adapted to, especially since globalization and Europeanization have diminished problem-solving sovereign policy structures. On the European level, the EU institutions are in turn bound by their limited competencies to regulate specific, mostly market-related areas, and thus have to rely on member states’ willingness to act in concert in other policy sectors. Although the case has been made that EU states increasingly experience collective securitization and security governance and thus show agency

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in light of increasingly systemic risks and threats (Sperling & Webber, 2019), European integration has furthered national constraints on implementing solutions as well. These limits are reflected in the setup of a thoroughly interdependent and neoliberal EU, which produces risks on a larger scale (for instance, with the Schengen-zone containing 26 members including non-EU states, or the Eurozone with 20 member states), and with decision-making institutions that are partially detached from national mandates (e.g., the European Commission, the EU’s executive in charge of EU administration and policy development). Prime examples of these kinds of national constraints in the process of European integration consist in the Euro crisis or the mishandling of the refugee streams detailed further below. As has become clear in many of the recent examples, when threatened with an extraordinary crisis, even if it is of a transnational nature, the increase in fear of the unknown leads to an almost reflexive regression to domestic geo-temporalities of the European nation-state of the past. Rather than trying to solve crises on a common EU level, many governments initially resort back to national protectionist or even authoritarian policies in the name of ‘security’ that can exacerbate the impact of those crises, for instance in Hungary where gender and refugee issues have been instrumentalized to expand Prime Minister Orban’s hold on power. This politicization and securitization in turn elicits bottom-up responses from individual leaders, interest groups, civil society, and social movements, which either aim to redress the shortcomings in terms of social inclusion or, support a government’s threat depiction and exclusionary policies. Hence the crises inherent to late modernity can lead to a crisis of governance and democracy, and on a meso-level, of societal cohesion and inclusion.

European Crises and Their Impact on the Politics of In/Exclusion To illustrate this process, this section examines the Euro-, Refugee-, Security-, Fragmentation-, Environmental, and Pandemic crises of the past decade. In the context of the global risk society, many of the crises cited here predominantly involve EU-internal processes, such as the Euro- or Fragmentation crises, though others are to some extent also byproducts of the region’s policies if one considers the external implications of EU policy with regard to refugee streams, radicalization, or environmental

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degradation. Yet there is little awareness, or recognition, of the EU’s share in the formation of such transnational crises by the EU institutions. Moreover, the demise of the somewhat artificial post-war transatlantic alliance with the United States, coupled with the decline of US power globally, further engenders a feeling of Europe’s ontological insecurity when faced with multiple assertions of geopolitical power by Russia, China, or even official EU candidate states like Turkey. Adding to this ambiguous global picture are Europe’s former colonies, which challenge the EU to be less paternalistic in their post-colonial trade and aid relations, and which are being increasingly influenced by Europe’s geopolitical challengers. Hence at the beginning of the twenty-first century, European elites and publics look decidedly more pessimistic and fearful on the EU’s role in the world. As a result of subsequent crises that at times impact member states differently, EU decision-makers more often than not are unable to come to productive joint solutions, and tend to prefer protective nationalistic policies instead. All the while a more complex set of public opinions exist ‘back home’: while large population segments in Europe favor a retreat into Europe’s safe isolation and national or EU protectionism in times of crises, especially younger generations feel a responsibility for the welfare of people beyond its borders, and the health of the planet more generally (European Council on Foreign Relations, 2020). As a result, people-led political mobilization in various forms of citizen diplomacy through social movements, CSOs, online engagement, etc., appears to be on the rise, albeit with differences across EU member states (Kitanova, 2019; see also Chapter 3). The most significant crises are detailed below, with a view to how they impact public opinion and political mobilization. Beginning at the end of 2008 and lasting almost five years, the Euro crisis laid bare the complexity, but also inflexibility of a European monetary system that maintains a single monetary policy but 20 different fiscal policies. Once it became apparent that the United States was experiencing a recession based on short-term financial speculation and a construction bust, international investors in search of safe deposits quickly zoomed in on Greece’s volatile public finances. With entry into the Eurozone, Greece developed a high budget deficit and continued to under-perform economically. To a lesser extent, Spain and Italy were in a similar situation with their bloated banking sectors and lagging economies. But it was really Greece that came to the brink of financial collapse and exit from the Eurozone, which would have impacted most EU member states

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because of the financial interdependence generated by sharing a common currency. This financial crisis evolved into a broader political one, which seemingly divided Europe into ‘Northern creditors’ with Germany at the helm, and ‘Southern debtors’. Over the following years, Greece had to implement, in order to obtain a total of three so-called bailout emergency funds for over 300 billion Euros, strict austerity measures. Greece and other Southern countries that received such aid from the EU and peripherally, the International Monetary Fund, were asked to cut back government spending, liberalize their domestic markets, and increase government revenue through tax raises and retirement delays. All these measures produced popular discontent, and domestic government crises in return (Varoufakis et al., 2011). Despite having come up with interim solutions, such as increased macro-economic and banking supervision, the stability of the common currency remains volatile and Greece is still the most heavily indebted country with debt accounting for over 180% of its GDP (Eurostat, 2020). Beck (2015a, 2015b) commented that the inability to cope adequately with the Euro crisis exposes the shortcomings of the financial and political systems that aim to include risks, but have insufficient past data points to do so. This drawn-out crisis, also termed the ‘sovereign debt crisis’ to apparently locate the origin in the accumulation of domestic debt, rather than in the deficient construction of the Eurozone, has left its mark on people and politics as well. Not only did it lead to economic downturns and domestic political upheavals in the affected countries, but it also morphed into a pan-European conflict pitting Northern creditor countries against Southern indebted ones. The situation also significantly harmed public opinion in the EU. At the height of the crisis in Spring 2009, only 20% of EU citizens judged the economy of their countries positively and 78% thought that the situation was bad. Before the crisis in Spring 2007, the opinions were remarkably different. A slight majority of 53% had a positive view of their countries’ economy, whereas 44% had a negative opinion on the matter. In 2013, the crisis-shaken discussions between the EU Parliament and the EU Council on the approval of the next Multiannual Financial Framework 2014–2020 further affected citizens’ trust in the EU. As a result of the negotiations, only 31% of member states’ citizens were confident about the viability of the EU at that moment. The same percentage of Europeans thought their country’s economy was in good shape, while the proportion of citizens who feared that their situation was going to get worse increased to 68% (European Commission, 2013).

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The crisis also negatively impacted citizens’ assessment of the advantages deriving from their countries’ membership, and provoked bottomup responses at different levels. Within each of the Southern states receiving bailout funds, exclusionary tendencies manifested in the form of emerging right-wing forces (Vox in Spain, Chega in Portugal, Lega Nord and the Brothers of Italy in Italy, Golden Dawn in Greece) that contested the EU’s supervisory role and Europeanization more generally. Similarly, other EU states saw their far-right parties gain traction during the Euro crisis, from France and Germany to Finland and the Netherlands. Notably, this already occurred before the asylum waves of 2015 set in. The restrictions on public welfare, however, also produced more positive mobilizations of civil organizations focused on supporting deprived citizens and calling for alternatives to austerity, for instance with the indignados movement in Spain or the various ‘Refugees Welcome’ movements across Europe. These two opposing forces led to a higher degree of domestic polarization in the Mediterranean states that suffered austerity, but also in the Northern states that were asked to back moves toward joint debt mutualization (Hutter & Kriesi, 2019). On a European level, patterns of in- or exclusion concentrated on the question if Greece should leave the Eurozone (or alternatively, Germany), in order to reduce macro-economic disparities and the risks associated with those. Domestically, families, senior citizens, young adults, and migrants were the most affected by welfare cutbacks and deteriorating labor markets. Notably, the debate about the potential collapse of the Eurozone, and thus the EU, also impacted member states that were not using the Euro, leading them to wonder about the future cohesion of the Union. Whereas in 2009, more than 60% of non-Eurozone citizens considered membership an advantage, by the end of 2012, only 49% remained positive in this regard (European Commission, 2012). Thus, with the United Kingdom being the most skeptical member regarding the future of the EU—54% of its citizens agreed that they could better face the future outside the Union—, the situation, in turn, foreshadowed the British exit from the EU Brexit and a drive toward fragmentation, or re-nationalization, as will be detailed below. Similarly, refugee streams have become a defining feature of EU politics nowadays. With the creation of the borderless Schengen agreement in 1985, the EU’s border management has come under pressure to protect the internal Schengen space. This became even more pronounced with the rise in numbers of refugees and migrants entering EU territory following

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the Arab Spring revolutions in North Africa, the ongoing instability in Afghanistan and Iraq, and most importantly, the prolonged civil war in Syria. In addition, from 2019 onward, the persistent political crises in Venezuela and Colombia placed these two countries in the top five of firsttime asylum applicants in the EU. Yet the EU and its member states have been slow to react to the inflow and have yet to reform the problematic Dublin regulation, which stipulates that the responsibility for examining an asylum claim lies first and foremost with the member state that played the greatest part in the applicant’s entry to the EU. In most cases, it is the state of first entry, thus putting a heavy burden on the Mediterranean border states. Given that this situation is unsustainable if current migration patterns continue, the European Commission presented new options for reform of the Common European Asylum System in 2016. However, the delay in negotiating and approving new policies results to a large extent from the lack of progress on the reform of the Dublin regulation. Such policies constitute significant challenges to state sovereignty and are consequently the most challenging to agree on. Moreover, attempts at creating flanking policy solutions resulted in externalizing, piece-meal approaches (such as the outsourcing of refugees through the problematic EU–Turkey migrant swap deal, the rapid buildup of the equally problematic EU-external border agency Frontex, and the related patrolling of the Mediterranean Sea or build-up of border fences to deter human traffickers). These policies have been contested within the EU by some member states, but also been reprimanded externally by the UN, and even by involved states such as Turkey and Libya. Taken together with the prospect of demographic decline within Europe, the increase in asylum seekers and immigrants poses a dilemma for many European (governments): on the one hand, they need to replace their slowly dwindling populations-some have implemented pronatal policies that encourage reproduction and make childcare easier—, but on the other hand the attempt to replace ‘native’ populations with non-native ones is not a politically winning argument, and produces xenophobic sentiments across the continent (Thiel, 2011). As with other crises, the immediate refugee pressures coupled with a long-term demographic decline engenders a fear of an indeterminate future, with resulting political upheavals, as is detailed in Chapters 6 and 7. The notion of a ‘refugee crisis’ has been advanced in the media and public discourse with a certain ambiguity. First off, many domestic governments as well as the EU institutions seemed to have been caught

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by surprise by the allegedly surprising peak of individuals entering the EU in 2015/2016. However, data from Eurostat, the EU’s statistical body, shows that the number of migrants has steadily increased by 100,000+/ year after the Arab Spring, coinciding with the Syrian Civil War in 2011. However, when the numbers doubled from 630,000 in 2014 to 1.3 million in 2015 and 2016 (Eurostat, 2020), European governmental stakeholders were unable to agree on a common reception and redistribution policy. The lack of solidarity among member states did lead to pan-European tensions (Thielemann, 2018): while Southern border states, including the Balkan EU candidate governments, voiced that they were unwillingly drawn in as transit countries by of the unilateral German and Swedish welcome of refugees, they admonished the inability to come to consensus of a reform of the Dublin regulation to more evenly shoulder the burden. More importantly, the refugee influx, which seems to have plateaued since 2017 at ca. 700,000 individuals/year until the pandemic interrupted mobility in 2020, has led to ongoing domestic polarization and political mobilizations. The bottom–up responses to such manufactured uncertainty have been diverse. While many established conservative and emerging far-right parties decried the ‘sudden’ increase as detrimental to their countries on economic, security, and other grounds, socially liberal parties, civil society groups, and citizens mobilized to aid refugees where states would not, and to develop a counter-discourse focusing on Europe’s human rights commitments. Far-right forces across Europe, though, have not had the gains they expected, and even a transnational strategy for the European elections in 2019 did not provide the desired results—but led to higher voter turnout indicating overall politicization (Ghitis, 2019). Nonetheless, anti-migration and anti-refugee discourses had taken a toll on public opinion. While 29% of Europeans are not able to correctly estimate the proportion of their country’s population which consists of immigrants, more than 50% tend to overestimate such proportion, in some cases significantly (European Commission, 2018). And 34% of all EU citizens still consider immigration to be the most important issue facing the EU (European Commission, 2019). European governments have also struggled to contain the security risks of internal open borders. Multiple terrorist attacks by ISIS-affiliated agents, as well as so-called ‘lone wolfs’ attacks, from the mass casualties in the 2004 train bombing in Madrid, to the series of attacks in Paris and Brussels in 2015, to the more recent small-scale attacks throughout (Western) Europe have produced anxieties. These incidents

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led not only to the restriction of movement within the passport-free Schengen area and increased surveillance, but more implicitly, to an equation of terrorism and immigration in policy discourses after few individuals were found to have been non-citizens (Chebel d’A, 2012). Such conflation has augmented the appeal of extremist parties and movements and led to a more generalized discussion about civic freedoms in open societies under the threat of sudden attack. This uncertainty elicited discourses that are underpinned by European attitudes toward ‘domestic’ security. According to a Special Eurobarometer’s study, while a large majority of citizens feel secure in their cities (90%) and neighborhoods (91%), the proportion of those who think that the EU is a secure place to live in has decreased from 79% in 2015 to 68% in 2017. Furthermore, respondents regard challenges to the internal security of the EU as important, particularly terrorism (95%), organized crime (93%), and cybercrime (87%) (European Commission, 2017). Despite the smaller scale of contemporary terrorist acts, the socioeconomic root causes of terrorist radicalization within and beyond Europe are largely untouched, and attempts to institutionalize a better counterterrorism strategy seem beset by policy failures on the EU level, including the inconsistency of leadership of the EU’s counter-terrorism agency (Bossong, 2021). Moreover, even if domestic security forces are able to better prevent planned attacks in the recent past through increased surveillance, which in itself is potentially problematic with regard to civil liberties and privacy, knowing that there are radicalized individuals spread across Europe further contributes to a generalized societal feeling of insecurity. Bauman (2007) noted prominently how European countries have moved ‘from a social state to a security state’, which ironically decreased Europeans’ security, socio-economically and otherwise. Following the logic of a manufactured uncertainty, this example evidences how the risk of terrorism, theoretically unavoidable because of its unpredictability and managed through the increased securitization of everyday life, can never truly be eradicated. However, a security-heavy approach, with the ensuing trade-offs for private liberty and data privacy, seems to be a more palatable partial solution to the impending doom scenarios evoked by political opportunists. In response, civil activists for data privacy have begun to push back on government’s heavy-handed surveillance policies. The latter finds parallels with the handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, in which privacy and public rights and risks appear in tense relations as well. With the sudden emergence of Covid-19 as a potentially deadly

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disease with a rapid spread across Europe and beyond, it took weeks for governments to realize the danger, and to act decisively with shutdowns and other delimiting measures. This despite previous epidemics in Europe, such as the ‘Mad-Cow’ disease of the 1990s in which a few hundred individuals, and thousands of cattle, died around the turn of the millennium, and various other regionally contained ones, such as Ebola, or the various ‘bird flu’ strains. Once again, an anticipatory threat was not recognized as such in a timely manner, nor were there appropriate guidelines developed by and for the EU. At the beginning of the pandemic, initial protectionist impulses took hold across EU governments, which for example led to mandated delivery stops of equipment and medications, and the threat of an extended border shutdown that would have endangered the functioning of the EU’s single market and disrupted highly integrated supply chains. The European Commission had to urge governments to come to a joint comprehensive strategy to counter the spread of the pandemic, which was eventually adopted, together with an EU Covid recovery fund for the most drastically affected countries (EU Council, 2020). In this ongoing crisis, specific European countries such as Italy or Spain suffered more heavily than others, which did not only reflect on cultural-familial or demographic transmission patterns, but also were a sign of the limited healthcare capabilities in those countries. The latter seemed to be in part caused by the previously mentioned austerity policies necessitated by the Euro crisis, hence connecting an EU-external phenomenon to internal policy construction. This makes the feedback loop from citizens to politicians an important indicator for the resiliency of governments in times of all-encompassing crises such as the Covid-19 pandemic. Although in general, more than half of the citizens supported their national government’s measures to fight Covid-19 in 2020, 35% opposed it. As for the level of support, 41% expressed they are not satisfied, including 15% who stated they are not at all satisfied. Analysis of national results show that levels of satisfaction vary significantly by country. At opposite ends, Denmark and Ireland are the most supportive societies, while the lowest levels are found in Spain, Poland, and France (European Parliament, 2020). Consequent with the bottom-up responses that this book examines, popular resistance toward some of the stricter, or in few cases such as Sweden, more relaxed containment measures have developed with the temporal extension of the crisis in almost all EU member states. Evidence of this can be found in urban protests against

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the emergency measures, and the discursive polarization over the wearing of masks, social distancing, and travel restrictions. Similarly drawn out in time, the fragmentation of the EU began initially with a 2016 popular referendum in the United Kingdom to leave the EU. Yet this process, which could end up costly for both sides, has been beset with multiple domestic problems in the United Kingdom and pre-occupied EU political agendas for over several years now. It also resulted in a 10+ % increase in citizens supporting the EU as per Eurobarometer surveys, and has been termed the ‘Brexit effect’ on strengthening pro-EU sentiment within the region (European Parliament, 2018). The Brexit negotiations have been contentious and arduous between the UK and EU counterparts, and while the often-invoked catastrophic hard Brexit did not come to pass, many questions about the future bilateral relationship remain, especially in light of the drawn-out leadership crises in the United Kingdom. These uncertainties reinforce political polarization in the United Kingdom over the issue, and the future stability of the multi-national island-state is at risk through renewed calls for Scottish or Northern Irish independence, and the drastic economic challenges the UK experiences. In respect to the politicization of risks, one can detect both a strengthening of polarization with an increase in mobilizing actors, as well as a presumed mitigation of the risks associated with Brexit from the side of the United Kingdom as well as the EU. The latter occurred largely through extending various political and negotiation deadlines, which however do not solve but only delay the difficult distancing process, with ensuing effects on the perceived socio-economic volatility on both sides. With the United Kingdom’s self-exclusion from the European club of countries, European citizens remaining there, as well as Europhile citizens of the United Kingdom are struggling to retain their pre-Brexit rights. The 2019 Eurobarometer shows both continued strong support for the EU and increased uncertainty and tensions. Despite the salience of Brexit, the European sense of cohesion remained at a high level, with 68% of respondents across the EU-27 believing that their countries have benefited from being part of the EU. However, uncertainty increased in 19 countries, while a sizeable portion of Europeans (27%) view the EU as neither a good thing nor a bad thing. As for the question if the citizens would hypothetically vote to remain or leave the EU if given the opportunity, an average of 14% of the EU-27 citizens would vote to leave and 18% would not know what to do. The tendency to vote to leave is

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particularly high in Czechia (24%), Austria (21%), France (21%), Greece (21%), Cyprus (20%), Italy (19%), Croatia (17%), and Hungary (15%) (European Parliament, 2019). As becomes evident from this data, neither temporary cohesion based on fear, nor transactional allegiance or indifference are indicators of a genuine or sustainable collective pan-European identity, with resulting differences for societal in/exclusion. In such a context, Brexit also resulted in few other EU governments threatening to follow suit, e.g., in Hungary, Poland, and Italy. While the latter has moved to a more conciliatory stance on both, governmental and elite levels, after the ouster of the far-right Deputy Prime Minister Salvini from the government in 2019—albeit replaced by farright Prime Minister Meloni—and Italy’s preeminent allocation of EU Covid-19 recovery funds, Hungary and Poland’s Euro-skeptic governments continue with controversial policies such as the censorship of judges, the rejection of asylum seekers, the intimidation of media outlets and educational institutions, and the controlling of civil society, to name a few. Their ongoing confrontation with the European Commission over rule of law, corruption, and human rights issues together with the EU’s inability to effectively sanction current member states has resulted in a stalemate. In late 2022, the Commission decided to withhold billions in funds for Hungary, stating that it had not implemented requested political reforms and similarly delayed Polish payments. Recent elections have not changed their trajectory, but rather than calling for an outright exit, these countries play the political game of profiting from EU funding and market access while simultaneously eroding EU norms. In France, the far-right contender for the presidential office in 2022, Marine LePen, has similarly moved from earlier calls for separation from the EU to a tempering down of its influence, and in Germany questions have arisen about the continuance of moderation in its post-Merkel constitution with a strengthened right-wing opposition. This fragmentation process can also be found on domestic levels, as Belgian, Spanish, or Scottish secession movements have been revived lately. Lastly, these issues and the polycrisis further widen the center–periphery gap across Europe, with Central and Northern Europe increasingly pitched against Southern or Central/ Eastern European members on a number of policy issues. These tensions between the EU and nationalist forces in various member states have been played out in media and political discourses, providing attention to extremist and populist positions from the left and right, and enabled political movement actors to enter politics.

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According to the 2019 Eurobarometer survey, climate change was the second largest concern for EU citizens after immigration. In it, 91% of citizens in all EU member states express that climate change is a serious problem in the EU. Ninety-four per cent of them consider that protecting the environment is important, and, consequently, according to 83% of those surveyed, European legislation is necessary to protect the environment, indicating a strong pan-European will for EU action in this policy area. As the EU has been one of the main proponents and steering forces of the UN’s 2016 Paris Agreement to limit CO2 emissions and has dedicated political programs and funds for climate change mitigation, European citizens increasingly perceive this issue as a pressing one. This perception is further fuelled by UN projections, the EU’s own prominent climate change policy, and activist Greta Thunberg’s highvisibility ‘Fridays for future’ youth movement. The bloc has even passed an ambitious ‘Green Deal’ strategy to become carbon neutral by 2050, but whose socio-economic impact is still unclear, given the extended time horizon. In addition, there seem to be countervailing effects of other crises holding back a dedicated focus on climate because of other more pressing ones and at least in part because of the limited term-thinking of politicians. The climate change crisis, as many others, has a long time horizon, another indication of the semi-permanent salience of these types of threats. This extended projection opens it up to delays and contestation over what should be done, in which economic and social considerations are intensively debated by Europeans across states and demographics. Moreover, European citizens have also engaged more politically on this front, despite the insecurity over the best way forward. Not only have climate crisis movements such ‘Fridays for Future’, ‘Extinction Rebellion’, or ‘Last Generation’ become more prominent with demonstrations and protest actions heavily concentrated in the EU, but broader population segments increasingly support Green Parties across Europe. Green parties have moved into parliaments with significant vote shares while green policies have been taken on by other parties, and environmental issues appear to replace traditional left–right politics over economic cleavages with a more post-material outlook (Inglehart, 1997). In this sense, the popular engagement of ecologically minded citizens in Europe has reshaped the political spectrum in most EU member states as well as provided a platform for the EU to collectively advance such an agenda. Given the perceived urgency and success of environmentalism as a mobilizing topic, green topics have been mainstreamed across most domestic

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and supranational policy sectors, have activated citizens in a sustainable if contentious way, and have led to an economic rethinking as well. This apparent regional success of collective climate securitization, however, betrays the fact that the climate crisis can only be managed if addressed globally (Dupont, 2019). As with many of these crises, individuals and collective groups, be they citizens, NGOs, or policy elites, are faced with a succession of often interacting events. Given the complexity and inability to anticipate them, despite increasing advances in data gathering and mining, a number of possible reactions to these events occur. These can range from outright denial to resignation, to a transformation of attitudes, conditions, and institutions. Social Movement research has evidenced that a generalized political mobilization across member states did more heavily occur by proponents of conservative-national solutions to the various crises, as well as by adherents of critical Europeanism, a political orientation which rejects a technocratic and neoliberal EU and works toward an alternative, more inclusive Europe (Moore & Trommer, 2020). In between these two poles, the crisis-related framing, activism, and agenda-setting effects of political actors determine the political in- or exclusion of an increasingly diverse European population.

Conclusion The various crises are lasting features that make it more difficult for European societies, governments, and the EU institutions to constructively develop a stable vision and plan for the future. This chapter argued that the succession of crises in the EU has led to a sharpening of public and political elite divides that also impact the social in/exclusion of minorities being particularly exposed to those risks because of their social, economic, and political status. In theoretical terms, this chapter highlights the ‘politicization’ and eventual (de)‘securitization’ of these previously mundane policy issues, and elaborates on the degree to which bottom-up influences increase the salience of and polarization over those topics, and lead to an expansion of mobilized actors (de Wilde et al., 2016). However, the increase in political agents, just as the increase in member states, makes consensual governance more complex and thus, more difficult to maintain. The polarization over these issues also leads to opposing calls for more cohesion and socio-political and -economic inclusion on one

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end, and national protectionism and exclusion on the other hand. Hence the following chapter highlights the role of political activism and identity politics as drivers of polarization and mobilization.

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Kitanova, M. (2019). Youth political participation in the EU: Evidence from a cross-national analysis. Journal of Youth Studies, 23(7), 819–836. https://doi. org/10.1080/13676261.2019.1636951 Moore, M., & Trommer, S. (2020). Critical Europeans in an Age of Crisis: Irish and Portuguese Protesters’ EU perceptions. Journal of Common Market Studies. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcms.13091 Sperling, J., Webber, M. (2019, February). Security Governance and collective securitization. West European Politics, 42(2), 228–260. Thiel, M. (2011). The limits of transnationalism: EU integration and collective identities. Palgrave. Thielemann, E. (2018). Why refugee burden-sharing initiatives fail: Public goods, free-riding and symbolic solidarity in the EU. Journal of Common Market Studies, 56(1), 63–82. Varoufakis, J., Halevi, J., & Theocarakis, N. (2011). Modern political economics making sense of the post-2008 world. Routledge. Voltolini, B., Natorski, M., & Hay, C. (2020). Introduction: The politicisation of permanent crisis in Europe. Journal of European Integration, 42(5), 609–624. https://doi.org/10.1080/07036337.2020.1792460 Wolff, S., & Ladi, S. (2020). European union responses to the Covid-19 pandemic: Adaptability in times of permanent emergency. Journal of European Integration, 42(8), 1025–1040. Zeitlin, J., Nicoli, F., & Laffan, B. (2019). Introduction: The European Union beyond the polycrisis? Integration and politicization in an age of shifting cleavages. Journal of European Public Policy, 26(7), 963–976.

CHAPTER 3

Identity Politics, Political Mobilization, and Social In/Exclusions

Introduction Identity Politics, varyingly defined as ‘political action oriented on the needs, values and interests of particular collective groups possessing a shared identity’ (Coate & Thiel, 2009: 1) and the political mobilizations by individuals and groups connected to it, have become major issues in contemporary European politics today. More than that, these types of political action are essential for the social inclusion of minorities, but at the same time have produced counter-reactions by political and societal opponents, which responded with their own forms of exclusionary identity politics. The latter ones contest the inclusive ideas that progressive identity politics aims to advance, and/or the special status these groups claim, as in need of protection or support for equal treatment. The term ‘identity politics’ was popularized in 1974 by Black feminist Barbara Smith and the Combahee River Collective to highlight the intersectional differences between African-American and White women within the larger emancipatory struggles of colored and/or homosexual women within the existing patriarchy (Garza, 2019). Today, political mobilizations based on shared identities and grievances are evident across the globe, from the ‘Black lives matter’ movement in the United States, to indigenous rights groups in Latin America, to gender and LGBT+ advocacy in Europe, to the ethnic minority politics present in Africa, the Middle East, or Asia. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Thiel et al., The Politics of Social In/Exclusion in the EU, Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31264-9_3

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While a collective identity and its public expression is characteristic of identity politics’ external face, it also reflects the actions and belief systems of individuals based on their identity, which may be a reason why it has become so powerful. Moreover, the increase in available information through media outlets, as well as the ease of connecting via internet-based and social media platforms has certainly aided in the political mobilization of identity politics. Political or social mobilization,1 then, can be described as the activation of individuals and groups to achieve common identitybased goals through various political strategies, such as voting, gatherings, demonstrations, boycotts, and other forms of political activism. Initially focused on the political mobilization of citizens through parties and other established political actors and also called mass mobilization limited to voting (Cameron, 1974), we consider it, in its reliance on identity-based aspects, largely as an expression of civic activism and contentious politics. In the following sections, we provide a conceptual introduction into the factors contributing to identity politics by sketching the development of individual and collective identities in Europe today, before showing how political mobilization by identity groups is embedded in, and influenced by, larger socio-political structures. Historically, political activism gained more attention and validity with the liberal democratic transformations occurring in European states in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This process also led to the women’s suffrage movement to emerge more vocally in the latter half of the nineteenth century, with many countries introducing voting rights for women after World War 1, given their essential contributions to the war efforts (Rubio Marin, 2014). Around the same time, refugee rights emerged based on the forced population movements caused by subsequent wars. A different situation, however, existed for migrants, which were for a long time considered more suspicious because of potential dual allegiances, while simultaneously being needed for the rebuilding of wartorn European cities and industries. After the restoration of European societies and markets in the 1960s, relative economic stability and prosperity led to varying degrees of ‘post-materialism’, i.e., an orientation toward self-expression over material security concerns (Inglehart & Welzel, 2005), across Western European countries. These post-materialist 1 The authors prefer the term political mobilization and use it throughout as it expresses overt political objectives, as opposed to predominantly social mobilizations, which could also include volunteering, for example.

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values prepared the ground for identity-based politics to emerge. To illustrate, in terms of our four case countries Germany, Poland, Sweden, and Spain that are representative of the EU’s geographical subregions, all of those except Poland are marked today by high self-expression values combined with secular-rational values (Ibid). These contrast with the previously existing survival and traditional values that were commonplace at the beginning of the twentieth century. This post-materialist societal change manifested in so-called ‘new social movements’, which starting in the late 1960s, collectively aimed at addressing emerging issues such as the ones related to Cold War conflict, environmental degradation, or human and gender rights, for example (Pichardo, 1997). These differentiated themselves from older movements that focused largely on labor and political issues. Hence the mobilization of residents and citizens to be active participants beyond periodic voting emerged, illustrated by an increase in demonstrations, boycotts, petitions, etc. In the context of this book’s framework, the recent Covid-19 pandemic, as well as other emergencies, are also said to have led to higher levels of mobilizations because of the anxieties that they caused. In a Lacanian interpretation, these may have either resulted in paralysis or more often, in action to address the root causes, for example as can be found in the ‘Black Lives Matter’ demonstrations during the pandemic (Zevnik, 2023). Relatedly, it seems that the mobility restrictions during this time also had the inadvertent effect of pushing individuals to reflect on their lives and values, and thus led especially younger generations to become more active in supporting minority causes (Estellés et al., 2022). Hence we postulate that the more recent phenomenon of identity politics in the twenty-first century, while still based on post-materialist orientations, is structurally different. For one because as Heyes (2020) states, ‘rather than organizing solely around belief systems, programmatic manifestos, or party affiliation, identity political formations typically aim to secure the political freedom of a specific constituency marginalized within its larger context’, meaning that there is a motivating, perceived grievance or injustice present. Yet this reasoning also implies, in line with post-materialism, a potential move away from socio-economic and class concerns, especially in a world that is perceived as being unchangeably neoliberal capitalist. Moreover, this motivation often also entails a wish to be recognized as different or in need of special provisions. This makes it distinct from earlier movement strategies that largely

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aimed at assimilationist inclusion and non-discrimination (Isin & Wood, 1999). Thus identity politics at its core is not necessarily concerned with broader common good issues—though strategic links with other social justice groups are often made—but generally aims to improve the sociopolitical standing of a particular collective group or similarly impacted collectivities. Other contributing structural factors also enabled the recent rise of identity politics, notably the technological transformations of the information age and the growing civil society sector. The aforementioned technological changes in media and communications technology provided individuals and groups with more opportunities to easily obtain and share information, connect with each other and spread their messages to various audiences. This also prepared the way for border-transcending identity politics in the EU, which were previously predominantly aimed at national audiences. On the receiving end, media portrayal of minorities is influenced by many societal, private, and governmental actors and thus can result in a forged identity that might be detrimental, for instance in the portrayal of refugees in host societies, or of LGBT+ individuals in their native societal environment. Moreover, the increase of civil society organizations (CSOs) in the post Cold War era further contributed to the political activism of identity politics, especially so in Central-and Eastern Europe after the end of the Cold War. Yet the diversity of potentially competitive CSOs operating in the same activity area in liberal democracies may also impede a dedicated focus on social inclusion as it increases competition and diversification (Kenny, 2004). Furthermore, some EU governments even try to reign in the political activism of (refugee and gender/LGBT+) advocacy groups they oppose, including in Hungary and Poland. Technology, awareness, and organizational structures diffused vertically and horizontally across the civil society spectrum, affecting especially organized civil society but also more ephemeral social movements. With respect to this diversity, identity politics groups should be distinguished from more established political activists and parties; these may exert identity politics but it is not their main motivating cause. In today’s European landscape, the EU itself as well as its impacts, have become a contributing factor for identity politics and the related political mobilization of those groups as will be explored in more detail below. First off, the EU created through its expanding political structures and power additional political opportunity structures for activists to pursue their goals. To illustrate, Brussels is by now home to hundreds of large

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transnational advocacy organizations representing their national member organizations vis-à-vis EU institutions and many of those are co-financed by the EU (Thiel, 2017). Major CSOs with access to the European Commission and the European Parliament, from the European Women’s Council to ILGA Europe to the European Council on Refugees and the European Network against Racism are engaged in advocacy politics based on gender and sexuality, and refugee and migration issues, respectively. Secondly, the EU has over time advanced a narrative of European integration and identity, which has led to a gradual collective identity shift by which majorities of Europeans have extended their political orientation to include a so-called ‘European’ identity, however thin and uneven in character (Cross, 2012). This homogenization process led to certain expectations toward political elites that rights and liberties according to a distinctive European societal order should be maintained and promoted accordingly. Relatedly, over the past decade, the EU itself has become subject to political polarization over issues that pertain to identity politics, such as immigration, gender and LGBT+, and human rights more generally (Thiel, 2021). This polarization, we posit, has furthered identity politics and political mobilization both in support of EU propagated liberal rights narratives, but also increasingly in opposition to the EU’s discourses and policies. Finally, as the previous chapter has evidenced, the EU itself has contributed to a transnationalization of risks (management strategies) in the sense of Beck’s ‘risk society’ (2015). It also unintentionally caused an increasing instability of socio-political structures through the (mis)handling of the various crises of the past decade. Hence all of these Europeanized factors catalyzed political mobilization of post-materialist minority groups across the EU.

Individual and Group Identities in Europe Today The identities underlying the political mobilizations of identity politics groups are varyingly constituted by political, cultural, religious, and social ideas, connections, and environments. In this sense, ‘they evolve out of socially engrained and reinforced group affinities’ (Coate & Thiel, 2009: 7). Initially limited to the exploration of the personal traits of individuals, the term now also includes collective and group identities (Abdelal et al., 2009). This section elaborates on those distinctions, especially as they apply to gender and sexual equality, as well as refugee and migrant right groups.

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In the atomized social structures of Global Northern societies caused by urbanization, family detachment, secularism, online media’s reinforcement of egocentrism and broader neoliberal shifts toward individual responsibility, individual identities are more fluid, but also left more exposed to self-definition than ever before. We refer here to the socially co-determined identity—in fact, identities—each person possesses in relation to their environment. Our overall identity is a composite of various identities we inhabit in different social institutions and in different private and public spheres of life. While in previous generations, an individual identity was often largely based on and connected to the surrounding societal class or socio-cultural environment, in European societies today, individual identities are by and large removed from such conformist group identity pressures. In this sense, individual identities are largely not pregiven societal corsets anymore but are actively shaped by dispositions, experiences, and belief systems of each person—though socio-economic class continues to be somewhat significant (Giddens, 1991). Yet it is through socialization forces that our identity is shaped and derived in a social context, be it in everyday encounters or through extraordinary events and interactions. Socializations agents range according to their impact from the parental unit to peer groups to larger collectives such as the school and the socio-economic class up to the nation. From a socio-psychological point of view ‘there is no psychological theory which precisely explains how to argue coherently from the individual to aggregate group or mass behavior, which explains political integration and mobilization’ (Swann, 1987: 51). Assumed to be rooted in liberalism’s anchoring of individual rights, collective identity politics then can be viewed as a societal extension of the affirmation of individual and collective rights. It is assumed that this identity expansion toward collective identities occurs through identification, negotiation, and (self)positioning. Hence individual identities are said to be fluid and (re)constructed collectively through interpersonal as well as class-based exchanges (Brubaker & Cooper, 2000). Moreover, in line with the aforementioned composite identity theory, each individual possesses a number of identities in relation to others: one can be simultaneously a family member, an employee, and a member of a religious group and nation, for instance. While this allows for a certain flexibility in the way identities can be lived and expressed, it can also become problematic when specific identity forms of a person may come into conflict with other

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identity expressions, for instance for many religious adherents who pursue non-traditional sexuality and gender expressions. In the context of this book, socially constructed notions such as ‘race’ or ‘gender’ ought to be carefully applied so as not to become fixed or essentialist labels; although they represent significant collective identities that advocacy groups use themselves. This is done to make their cause more easily comprehensible for the general public and political elites, and/or to elicit support by allies or donors. Moreover, these identity markers are often coupled with a certain positioning as societal in- or outsiders, which in turn may exaggerate their marginalization. Such volatile societal standing is further aggravated by exhibiting two or more minoritizing characteristics, for instance for the case of immigrant women, or disabled or refugee LGBT+ individuals. Hence an intersectional perspective is required that is cognizant of the postulated ‘matrix-system of intersecting oppressions’, that is, the reinforcing detrimental impacts of conjoining identity facets a person or collective inhabits (Hill Collins, 2000). By doing so, activists can become effective change agents through the incorporation of their multiply-structured identities and lived experiences (D’Agostino 2022). In terms of social inor exclusion, these multiply affected populations are often more exposed to discrimination and marginalization, yet often fall by the wayside because of the generalizing focus of most public policies. Only in recent years there has been more awareness among politicians for intersectional concerns, based largely on the pressure by advocacy groups themselves. The concept of collective identities posits that, besides having a repertoire of shared ideas, values, and expectations, social groups are in need of distinguishing themselves from other collectivities. Collective identity entails a core of attitudes, values, and orientations, which members of a group have in common, mentally and behaviorally. Just as an individual identity, a collective is in a continuous process of renegotiation and construction, and is co-constituted through both, individual identities as well as the overarching group identity. All defining identity aspects such as culture, social positioning, and other particularities are not assigned to the group as such, but have to be renegotiated and accepted as a common factor (Münch, 2001). Collectivities are also said to possess a so-called ‘in-group bias’, which tendentiously puts their own group above others. Conversely, it ‘others’ itself from the rest of society, which can increase the salience of the identity politics in societies, but also marginalize them.

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According to sociologist Melucci, collective identity is defined as ‘an interactive and shared definition produced by several interacting individuals who are concerned with the orientations of their actions as well as the field of opportunities and constraints in which their actions take place’ (Melucci, cited in: Guibernau, 1996: 75). This definition raises questions about equal rights for all members of a transnational society such as exists in the EU today in which competing collectives claim their rights. Such instances can be related to nationalism, or gender, or citizenship status. Yet liberal, pluralistic societies as they predominantly exist across the EU today should in theory be able to mitigate the tensions between inclusionary equality of all members of society and recognized difference of some, through political compromises and specific affirmative public policy provisions where needed. More concretely, identity politics are viewed in progressive political environments as mostly desirable to achieve equality and inclusion, though conservative circles see them rather negatively as a kind of stereotyping based on specific characteristics, and a particular political mobilization strategy by the ‘woke’ left or radical movements. Hence a debate exists about the potentially divisive as well as expression-limiting character of identity politics (Garza, 2019). Gender equality, or what opponents would likely call ‘gender ideology’ is one of the strongest progressive identity politics goals in Europe today and thus receives special attention in the next chapter, along with LGBT+ rights. While mainstream individuals and collectives, and societies at large perceive gender equality as a desirable objective across the EU—which has also been enshrined in EU treaties—religious-conservative and right-wing circles denounce the prominent status it has achieved today in politics and society. Similarly, LGBT+ politics, supported by progressive political and societal stakeholders, is viewed by opponents as having outsize visibility and constituting a decadent force in so-called ‘culture wars’ pitting traditional and progressive values against each other. Major EU supported organizations such as the European Women’s Lobby or the International Lesbian, Gay, Transgender & Intersex Association (ILGA Europe) face increasing pushback by religious groups as well as conservative politicians and public figures. Interestingly, identity politics has also been adopted or appropriated by the (extreme) right, especially where it concerns the protection of traditional values and national identities. These issues have come to the forefront over the past decade with the rise of refugee movements and immigration waves from outside of Europe, and thus

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will be treated in the following chapters as well. Right-wing nationalists increasingly proclaim that their way of life is under threat by immigration, secularization, and multiculturalism, and groups such as Germany’s Pegida (Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of Europe) movement with its racist and vocal assemblies, or Poland’s Ordo Iuris institute targeting Polish gender equality policies attest to the utilization of identity politics among European conservatives. Both, individual and collective identities contribute to a country’s political culture, i.e., the attitudes of citizens toward governance. The political culture of a country, in turn, determines the permissiveness of identity politics. Individual aspects of social identities (such as one’s age, gender, class, ethnicity, religion, or education level) collectively influence political cultures in domestic and regional clusters in Europe through political attitudes and actions. For instance, where majority–minority relations in terms of age, gender, ethnicity, religion, and education become more pronounced, one can expect more vocal identity politics based on identity characteristics to appear. Yet it is not only the collective identity marker that is important in the development of identity politics, but also the degree of individualism or collectivism that prevails in domestic societies. While individualist societies prioritize individual freedom (of expression) and responsibility, collectivist societies may be more conformist, cohesive, and community-oriented, so that a balance between both societal orientations is viewed as the best means to create social cohesion (Beilmann et al., 2018). Societal cohesion in turn crosscuts specific identity issues as it establishes what the publicly permissible degrees of equality, inclusion and differences may be. In more collectivist political cultures, identity politics may be viewed as less desirable and permitted, whereas in more individualistic societies it may well be supported and even expected. Hence one could classify the political cultures of the sub-regional EU country examples Germany, Poland, Spain, and Sweden used in this book along the individualist-collectivist spectrum. Dutch social psychologist Hofstede measured contributing factors in a comparative manner and situated countries along this spectrum. His classic study found that while most European countries are on average individualistic, of our four case countries Sweden was the most individualistic (with 76 out of 100 points) followed by Germany (67), whereas Poland (60) and Spain (51) were less so (2014). For comparison, the United States was categorized as the most highly individualistic country globally with a score of 91, followed by Australia with 90 and

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the Netherlands with 80. Only a handful of EU states including Romania, Portugal, or Greece were considered to be more collectivist than individualistic (Beilmann et al., 2018). While the details of these country-level distinctions are debated in the prevailing literature, as a general tendency they remain valid and used as primary distinguishing markers between political cultures. Similarly, the linkage between identity politics and institutional politics within representative democracies as we find them across the EU today is noteworthy: classic concerns for political representation and participation, such as socio-economic class, welfare distribution, and state intervention, have historically been channeled into existing multiparty structures over time. The post-materialist identity issues prevalent in today’s identity politics however may not have been sufficiently captured on a national level, and as such they are primarily articulated by advocacy groups and movements through the use of public campaigns (Verloo, 2006). Moreover, another linkage exists in the recognition that an individual’s identity markers, for example in terms of gender or ethnicity, may determine in large part their access to and standing in the political structures of a state. While it is our conviction that Europe’s democracies enable to a greater degree the formation of identity-based groups because of the existence of pluralistic public spheres and the presence of CSOs consisting of a variety of actors and causes, the absence of such guarantors also provokes political activity in more authoritarian settings. In that sense, identity politics are prevalent and active in both, democratic and autocratic countries, but they face different challenges from state governments depending on the political ideology. This is also true of EU states, which more recently have diverged in the degree of democratic quality they inhabit, with Hungary even having been declared a non-democracy by a European Parliament resolution of 2022. Hence it can also be expected that there are differences among the four case countries depending on their democratic quality, which ranges from a high level of 9.76 out of 10 points for Sweden as per the Economist’s Democracy Index, to Germany’s 8.67, Spain’s 7.94 to 6.80 for Poland (Economist, 2021). These tend to remain relatively stable over years, though Poland and Hungary have more recently shown authoritarian governance issues, with a mix of corresponding civic protest but also a mix of repression and cooptation by the state.

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In sum, individual as well as collective political mobilizations based on identities are said to be tightly connected and augmented by educational and technological advances. At the same time, the emergence of identity politics as a significant force in European politics also causes insecurities of and contestations by majority populations. These processes are embedded in domestic political cultures where its standing on the individualism-collectivism spectrum determines the permissibility of such political action.

Political Mobilization and Participation In terms of situating identity politics groups within states, political mobilization and participation are primary vehicles for social in/exclusion advocacy. In theory, ideal political participation in the EU is judged according to the presence and degree of six criteria: visibility (issue salience), representativeness (of the public), transnationality (cross-border activities), accessibility (by all), deliberativeness (debate and reflection), and, finally, political impact (on national and EU levels) (Hierlemann et al., 2022). All of these are similarly important for political mobilization, although the last criteria, political impact, is likely the most difficult to achieve as well as the most subjective. Moving from activist criteria to the type of actors involved, Almond (1960) differentiated four main types of structures involved: institutional groups, non-associational groups, associational groups, and anomic groups (33). Whereas institutional groups are political insiders and non-associational ones marked by religion or kinship, today’s identity politics occur mostly by associational groups as represented by (organized) civil society, or anomic groups that resemble social movements. As the following chapters show, most of these types are present in EU member states, though with different implications for the social in/exclusion of minorities. Schneider and Ingram (2005) go further than Almond and discern two different kinds of membership that are important for this work: ‘affinal’ collectives that have a common interest or ideology, such as in our case seeking asylum, and ‘structural’ groups whose shared bond is a result of conditions beyond their choice: gender, sexual orientation, etc. Aside from the general vibrancy and pluralism of CSOs in and through the EU (institutions), national differences in the strength of identity politics depend on the aforementioned aspects of political culture, governance, and issue salience. Hence more conformist countries such as Spain or Poland, which are different

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in their democratic credentials, can have strong identity politics groups based on their late democratization and their predominant types of actors involved. Conversely, individualistic Sweden and Germany may be more complacent or channel issues more easily into their multiparty systems or exhibit more movement-based activity. One overarching goal of groups pursuing identity politics consists in the recognition as a particular group. Recognition often has redistributive consequences as well (Fraser, 1998), and as such can advance inclusion. At a minimum this means protection from discrimination, which can be extended to include compensatory affirmative action to further the social inclusion of those affected in all areas of public life. Here, ‘anti-discrimination measures, culturally sensitive interpretations and applications of laws, exemptions from certain rules, groups-sensitive application of public policy, additional rights and resources, fostering public respect for marginalized identities, ensuring their adequate representation in public institutions’ (Parekh, 2008: 42) are viewed as primary political strategies to achieve inclusion and protection. These policies affect especially the legal-political sector, but are also more broadly conceived so as to change societal ‘hearts and minds’. Such promotion, however, can lead to exclusionary contestation by opposing elites and the public, as becomes evident for instance with the current pan-European debate about gender quotas in the public and private sectors—for a constituency that at least demographically is far from marginal. Moreover, social inclusion into mainstream society may not be the preferred objective by advocacy groups themselves, as inclusion also entails assimilation into prevailing patriarchal/heteronormative/neoliberal/nationalistic structures. The latter reflects the open debate if social inclusion into existing societal structures is a primary objective, or a change of the system’s features that causes exclusion in the first place is needed. Importantly, the way in which various political mobilizations play out are determining the politics of social in/exclusion. Of all available ways to get engaged and participate in the political process, voting represents traditionally the most widely used and impactful option. Voting in national (and to a lesser extent, in European Parliament) elections constitutes the main avenue of political engagement and correspondingly, strategy for political mobilization. While national electoral participation is consistently and with 20+% significantly above EU elections in terms of voter turnout, since the 1980s a marked decrease in voting participation, for national elections of about 13%, for EU elections of ca. 19%, began

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(Belley, 2019). Intuitively, this suggests that alternative ways of political mobilization and participation may become more important, as will be detailed below. In terms of our case countries, Swedish electoral participation remained consistently high from the early 1990s to the late 2010s with 82% voting in general elections, whereas in Germany and Poland a slight drop became evident from 73 to 69% in Germany and from 55 to 53% in Poland over the same period. Spanish citizens, however, voted in a more limited fashion in recent years, where electoral participation dropped from 77% in 1993 to 61% in 2016 (OECD, 2019). Not only is the variability among EU countries obvious, but it also signals the degree to which established participation structures are perceived as being (ir)relevant for voters in specific domestic settings. Given the overall decrease in voting patterns, especially among younger cohorts and an increasing number of immigrant voters (OECD, 2019), it illustrates the need as well as opportunity for alternative modes of mobilization. Despite a decline in traditional political participation through voting, alternative ways of being politically active have more strongly emerged in recent years and been advocated for by established political forces to ‘activate’ the citizen (DeBardeleben & Pammett, 2009). But also post-materialistic as well as socio-economic concerns, especially in light of more frequently occurring crises, have augmented citizen involvement, political mobilization, and contentious politics (Giugni & Grasso, 2019). Moreover, in addition to the activation of citizens, we contend that in the EU, nowadays substantial numbers of residents without legal citizenship are present with the prospect for and entitlement of active social citizenship providing for alternatives to the voting process. These include, but are not limited to petitions, boycotts, demonstrations, meetings, fundraisers as well as media/internet use for campaigns and public discourse. Digital media in particular have become essential sites of activism and connection for minorities whose hypervisibility may elicit contestation in physical settings (Pain, 2022). Using these as political participation tools aside from voting, it appears that of our case countries only Sweden seems to display active multiple-activity clusters by individuals, whereas Germany, Spain, and Poland evidence less participation (Pammett, 2009). As mentioned previously, younger generations grow up with a different understanding of being political than just supporting the formal political institutions, and more often prefer ‘loosely networked activism that reflect personal values’ (Bennett, 2007: 4)—another indication for the salience of contemporary identity politics. Often rejecting

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constricting political activism that involves party politics because of its perceived rigid and opportunistic structures, they tend to be more individualistic and embrace online or social movement activism. Adding to that, the past turbulent decade in European and EU politics, from the financial crisis to the refugee streams to Brexit, Corona, and Russia’s Ukraine invasion, have led to a more pronounced use of political protest measures to express discontent with the status quo (Vasallo, 2016). Hence younger and more marginalized demographics tend to embrace forms of political engagement other than, or in addition to, voting. Going beyond political mobilization and engagement, protest activities are especially relevant for European identity politics based on preexisting grievances that a collective group may hold. Hence these types of ‘contentious politics’ (Della Porta & Tarrow, 2005) are particularly pronounced among those collectivities. In general, social movements prefer those tactics in contrast to organized civil society, which is equally focused on service delivery or public policy campaigns. These types of protests, however, are still largely nationally anchored, rather than becoming genuine transnational (European) protest movements, especially if they manifest physically rather than virtually. Another factor that may impact on the extent of protest mobilizations are on the one hand the need to be sufficiently able to channel claims to political power holders including political elites and parties. The latter prefer constructive, expertise-based input, and avoid risks that come with a confrontational or too close association with stakeholders, as it may discredit mutual legitimacy and accountability (Thiel, 2017). Especially NGOs need to appeal to political gatekeepers and funders and thus are rather cautious regarding protest actions, thus at times self-censoring their contentious action repertoire. Furthermore, the move toward online activism, while easier to conduct and more conducive to transnational campaigns, may lead to a somewhat limited engagement within social media’s logarithmbased echo chambers connecting primarily like-minded individuals and groups. Lastly, the use of vocal and visible protest activities by progressive activists has also engendered a rightwing (un)civil response contesting possible advances by identity politics groups (Lang, 2021). Hence despite their utility as alternative pathways for political mobilization, contentious political strategies have their limits as well. A closer examination of political or social mobilization patterns across Europe shows that differences in the extent of such activities exist among the four country cases. Based on two European social surveys (2008 and

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2014) that inquire about the most important political activities outside voting, a differentiated picture appears that is in line with other political data points mentioned above. The most active country in this respect is Sweden, where 43.6% signed a petition in 2014 (down from 2008 where 47.2% did so), 11% took part in a demonstration (up from 2008: 6.4%), and 47.5% boycotted certain products (up from 2008: 37.3%). The country with the second highest level of self-expressed political mobilization is Germany, where 36.4% signed a petition in 2014 (up from 2008: 30.8%), 9.6% participated in a demonstration (remaining constant in 2008: 8.1%), and 36.6% boycotted products (up from 2008: 31.1%). On the other hand, Spain exhibits lower levels of political engagement, where in 2008 17.0% signed a petition, 15.9 participated in a demonstration and 7.9% took part in boycotts As a post-communist state, Poland shows the lowest level with corresponding 13.1% of the population having signed a petition, 2.5% participated in a protest march and 5.7% boycotted products. The EU averages for 2014 for the three activities were 26.2% (18.6% in 2008), 6.6% (6.3%), and 21.7% (16.5%), respectively (European Social Surveys 2008, 2014 as quoted in Vassallo, 2016). These figures seem to indicate that the more recently democratized states such as Spain or Poland have lower levels of political mobilization and participation than the ones who had more time to consolidate their political cultures as in Germany and particularly, Sweden. As one can see from the above information, identity politics of social in/exclusion can be supply-led by governments providing recognition of minorities and accordingly, some redistributive support for inclusion. More importantly, however, political mobilization through bottom-up demand by associational groups and individuals who become politically active outside the limited voting arena, can contribute to impactful public policy changes.

The Structural Characteristics of the Politics of In/Exclusion Two of the most important structural characteristics for the social in- or exclusion of minorities in the EU are for one the neoliberal structure of Europe’s social welfare states, as well as the related impact that the EU as an institutional framework has on social in/exclusion within its single market.

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The previously cherished European welfare states that were somewhat generalizing termed ‘the European social model’—even though there were significant differences among states—have come under increased pressure and either been partially dismantled or ‘reformed’ over the past few decades. After the World Wars, rudimentary welfare policies (such as retirement pension, health care, and unemployment insurance) spread across Europe, in part as a reaction to the devastating impact the wars had. A number of nationally distinct variations in welfare coverage emerged. In the Scandinavian model exemplified in Sweden, the social democratic model combined high taxation with generous and expansive redistributive benefits, whereas the Anglo-Saxon model was more restrained, and the continental one such as can be found in Germany heavily contributionbased (Esping Anderson, 1991). More recently, the Southern European model of which Spain is a representative of, with its reliance on family support, as well as the more limited post-communist Central-and Eastern European variety such as can be found in Poland, have added to the diversity of social systems. Therefore, while national distinctions in welfare state configuration exist, in terms of political economy, European states by and large can be considered social market economies or coordinated market economies. These types of ‘third way economies’ are known to rely to a significant degree on the intervention by governments, unions, or workers participation in setting labor, wage, and social policies. Both of these major policy areas, welfare state and labor market policies, determine in significant part the inclusion of minorities into the prevailing socioeconomic national structures. For instance, the threatened sustainability of European welfare states, which are under demographic pressure as they rely on high tax receipts by the working population, provides political entryways for more inclusive refugee and immigration policies, e.g., in Sweden or Germany, although this comes with political costs and risks for incumbent governments. With the EU’s Single Market creation in 1992, national economies across Europe currently are not necessarily being anymore regulated by governments, but the state is said to have become embedded in the regionalized market, thus reversing the original post-war structural linkage (Streek, 2000). In order to maintain global competitiveness and the strength of the Euro, government budgets are under review by the European Commission, which aims to keep public deficits and debts under control. While the Covid pandemic and its economic aftershocks have softened some of the ordoliberal market orientation of EU politics,

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it is still a fundamental characteristic of regional integration in Europe. As a tendency, this ideology materializes in the neoliberal, governmentrestricting effects of welfare and wage policies, the privatizing outsourcing of previously state-owned public services, and related social and labor policies including the ones to support minorities. Hence there exists a debate over the ambiguous role of the EU in embedding neoliberalism while simultaneously safeguarding social rights. Some argue that it maintains a balance between markets and societies through regulation, yet others view the EU as a protector of markets and transnational companies against national protections, with an associated weakening impact on social policies across the EU (Thiel, 2013). Conversely, on the domestic level welfare reform is ‘translated and mediated differently in each country according to the domestic institutional and historical context and to the interests of the actors’ (Graziano et al., 2011: 316). Adding to these national prerogatives, social rights and policies are national competencies in the EU, which means that Brussels can only provide supplementary funds and benchmarks to aid member states. For instance, the European Social Fund is one of the largest EU compensation funds providing member states with funds to combat poverty and aims at the inclusion of marginalized individuals. Many member states under the EU umbrella, which is developing its own evolving rights agenda, allowed for unprecedented minority rights as showcased by activists, judges, and interest group representatives. Yet the EU’s largely neoliberal orientation means that equality provisions, in whatever form perceived, are largely evaluated on market-based terms prioritizing efficiency and competition, or at a minimum juxtaposing it to social welfare. This puts women in a higher hierarchical status followed by LGBT+ populations, and finally refugees and immigrants that may be harder to integrate into labor markets. In this sense, the broader socio-economic structures affect everyone, but social and ethno-cultural minorities are the ones most exposed to precarious living situations, not least because they have fewer options to seek redress or improvement of their situation based on their residency, employability, or socio-legal status. In addition, social discrimination adds to the volatile political standing of women and sexual minorities or refugees and migrants. No matter how successful the politics of inclusion are in rectifying structural disadvantages in European social market systems, they represent part of the privatizing retreat of governments in welfare sectors, thereby shifting responsibility from governments to individuals. The increased use of the

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concept of ‘resilience’ by CSOs as a marker of individualized self-care and flexibility is illustrative of this welfare-eroding trend. In terms of the EU’s linkage to CSOs, it allowed for cross-national exchanges and diffusion effects that may have accelerated the crossfertilization of various identity politics. This despite the fact that outside actors such as civil society or public interest groups are faced with multiple EU access points and veto players stratified according to institution, nationality, and political ideology. Overall, the EU encouraged more civil society input by allowing for open dialogue, online consultations, etc. (Thiel, 2017). However, this is counteracted by the EU institutions’ own agendas and their use of political advocacy to justify and legitimize their policy proposals, and thus an increase in transnational advocacy may be rather an unintended consequence of EU institutional calculation (Kohler-Koch, 2007). Finally, one ought to consider that while there might be far-reaching attempts by the EU and its governments to prohibit discrimination on a number of minoritizing grounds as significantly expanded with the coming into effect of the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights in 2009, societal biases and the ensuing social, political, and economic inequality cannot be prevented by governmental regulation alone. Women, LGBT+ populations, and refugees and immigrants are especially, even if differently, affected by discrimination and biases in private and public sectors. These structural determinants of civic inclusion of minorities in Europe evidence that social in/exclusions is not only a question of advocacy groups relying on identity politics, but that broader aspects such as the sustainability of the European social model and its associated rights provisions, democratic practices within the EU multilevel governance system, and transnational social justice activism equally play a role.

Conclusion Identity politics as ‘recognition of difference’ remains an ambiguous issue in European societies that by and large aim at assimilation and social cohesion. But beyond encouraging the self-actualization of a specific group, it can contribute to a more pluralistic society, which in turn strengthens participatory rights for everyone. Connected to this activism, social rights and inclusion policies provided by the EU institutions and the member states are not just remedies for the disadvantaged in the regionalized and globalized European markets, but these policies are fundamentally

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connected to the EU’s legitimacy, particularly in its current technocratic and neoliberal configuration. How the EU institutions, together with member state input, react to the increasing challenges posed by more diverse and vocal social justice activists, will in turn determine its own future legitimacy. On the contrary, a move away from voting as primary political mobilization avenue toward other strategies may augment more anomic and liquid activism in European societies, but may not sufficiently change the political structures that are expected to advance social inclusion. Thus following chapters examine in detail the complex politics of in/exclusion in four representative country cases to make the case that inclusion is often partial, and accompanied by exclusions.

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CHAPTER 4

The Politics of In/Exclusion in the EU: Gender and LGBT+

Introduction European societies are today more diverse than ever before. In terms of unprecedented levels of migrant and refugee populations, Europeans with migratory family backgrounds, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression and sex characteristics (SOGIESC) minorities, and other identity-based demographics, the EU contains societal multitudes. While this may be viewed as a beneficial enrichment of European dynamism and pluralism in an unsettling globalized era, it also produces a certain amount of insecurity about the degree to which Europe is able to integrate all of these populations without substantial political and societal backlash. Some of these have materialized in the rise of far-right and far-left populisms, social unrest and attacks on minorities, and vicious online campaigns that are reflective of an assumed socio-political ‘diversity crisis’ in the EU. This issue does not only affect European states and societies, but the EU as well as the predominant institutional framework for regional coordination, including on social policies. Given the rise in diversity within the EU, socio-political pressure grows to appropriately respond to these societal challenges. As Pruegl and Thiel (2009) stated already over a decade ago, ‘questions about further enlargement, immigration, and the EU’s democratic deficit have generated a profound crisis in the European integration project, a crisis that not only has affected © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Thiel et al., The Politics of Social In/Exclusion in the EU, Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31264-9_4

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the effectiveness of European institutions but also has raised larger questions of European identity and the nature of the European polity’ (4). As this quote expresses, a perceived unwillingness or inability to handle these integrative challenges may not only affect the legitimacy of the EU institutions, but may have more far-reaching detrimental effects on the future of the pan-European regional integration project. Given that women are the largest, and LGBT+ individuals are some of the most visible minorities in the EU today, the question emerges how gender and LGBT+ rights are confronted by societies and governments under the impact of perceived and real crises. Hence this chapter focuses on two specific aspects of societal diversity that have become more noticeable but also instrumentalized in the EU context in recent years, gender and LGBT+ equality, and conceptualizes the socio-political issues arising from their heightened salience. The following sections define those two concepts as they relate to inclusion and equality, taking into account emerging socio-political tensions, and describe how the claims of gender and LGBT+ politics have or have not been addressed on domestic and EU levels. Highlighting the actors and the structures they are embedded in, together with their normative, discursive, and political contexts illustrates the lack of substantive equality evident in residual gender violence, inadequate family and welfare policies, and insufficient representative and socio-economic equality in labor markets. Similarly, LGBT+ rights still vary substantially across Europe and have received outsize visibility as a new ground for contesting Europe’s liberalism by more conservative factions. Concludingly, we posit that the augmented salience of SOGIESC issues evidence an increase in actordriven identity politics to address shortcomings, but also show that societal inclusion and equality are accompanied by certain exclusions. This hypothesis will then be examined in detail in the following chapter focusing on the four case countries Poland, Germany, Spain, and Sweden. As detailed in Chapter 2, in today’s ‘risk societies’ (Beck, 2015), a number of crises ranging from governance breakdowns to economicfinancial, environmental, or public health emergencies to mention a few, impact ambivalently on gender and LGBT+ politics. On the one hand, crises often come with attendant states of emergency and cuts in apparently expendable programs. Public policies including social inclusion and welfare ones are often the first ones to be impacted. These are not only some of the most cherished ones by EU citizens, but also disproportionately affect social minorities (Martinelli et al., 2017). On the other

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hand, crises also provide an opportunity for a reevaluation of existing policies, in order to appropriately respond to challenges; the EU’s massive, multi-year post-pandemic recovery funds are an example of this type of aspirationally inclusive reform. The subsequent occurrence of various crises and risks in the EU means that they have become part of the ‘new normal’, understood to be embedded in what Bauman (2000) calls ‘liquid modernity’. Recall that Bauman coined the phrase to describe the nearconstant impermanence and uncertainty of relationships, identities, and institutions. Characterized by the related processes of globalization and individualization, liquid modernity emphasizes the transition from a solid modernity, with more rigid or stable ideas and institutional structures, to a more liquid form of social life that is pervasive in all aspects of human life (Bauman, 2000). Such fluidity and instability of the sociopolitical environment may provide opportunities for political advocacy by minorities, but it also causes widespread insecurity, possibly leading societies to become less equality minded given concerns about the availability and resiliency of one’s own rights and privileges. While these pivotal theories have become significant sociological descriptors of our twentyfirst-century era, they also have been criticized by feminist scholars for the way in which they naturalize female/male power relations and privilege heteronormative family patterns (Mulinari & Sandell, 2009). Hence it is important to keep in mind that ‘women and girls are not intrinsically vulnerable but their social, economic and political conditions make them susceptible to risks and vulnerabilities’ (Bagasao, 2016). Considering these aspects, the concept of risk societies still powerfully renders the volatility of women and LGBT+ individuals and groups apparent in today’s European governance contexts. It is notoriously difficult to define what either ‘gender’ or ‘LGBT+’ as substantive categories stand for, as they include a number of overlapping but also competing aspects, as pointed out below. Similarly, their manifestation as gender and LGBT+ equality and inclusion claims aimed at obtaining rights is similarly multifaceted on domestic and EU levels, and (sometimes mutually) contested. Hence the following is a non-exhaustive attempt at defining the primary characteristics of gender and LGBT+ issues in European socio-political contexts so that the subsequent political implications can be appropriately investigated and better understood in relation to the country cases examined in the following chapter.

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Gender (Equality) Claims and Policies in the EU The EU still has a long way to go to achieve comprehensive and substantive gender equality in private and public sectors as some selected data points evidence: In terms of the most basic objectives of social inclusion, females are still at significantly greater risk of poverty in the EU (34%) compared to single men-led households, and women spend 20% more time on average on often uncompensated care work or household chores. Similarly, the gender(ed) gap in pensions across EU states is depressingly high, with a 35% difference between men and women (European Gender Equality Institute, 2021). Across the EU, 35% of women attested to violence at home, and 39% expressed that they had been harassed (European Gender Equality Institute, 2021). At the same time, reproductive rights seem to be largely available, with 95% of women across the EU stating that their needs are met in this regard, albeit with distinct national variations and with barriers to abortion present in almost all member states (European Gender Equality Institute, 2021), testifying to ambivalent and uneven social in/exclusions existing throughout. When talking about the social inclusion of gender minorities, gender as an analytical concept has different emphases depending on the viewpoint chosen. The European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE), the EU’s foremost expert agency on the matter, defines the term as the social attributes and opportunities associated with being male and female and the relationships between women and men and girls and boys, as well as the relations between women and those between men. These attributes, opportunities and relationships are socially constructed and are learned through socialization processes. They are context/ time-specific and changeable. Gender determines what is expected, allowed and valued in a woman or a man in a given context. In most societies there are differences and inequalities between women and men in responsibilities assigned, activities undertaken, access to and control over resources, as well as decision-making opportunities. Source: https://eige.europa.eu/gender-mainstreaming/concepts-and-def initions

A slightly more contingent and intersectional definition is advanced by the Council of Europe:

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Gender refers to the socially-constructed set of expectations, behaviors and activities of women and men which are attributed to them on the basis of their sex. Social expectations regarding any given set of gender roles depend on a particular socio-economic, political and cultural context and are affected by other factors including race, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation and age. Gender roles are learned and vary widely within and between different human societies, and change over time. Source: https://www.coe.int/en/web/compass/gender

At first sight, both definitions distinguish the societally constructed nature of gender as a social group from the often binary conceived biological sex differences between genders. While the binary gender construction is somewhat unavoidable given the prevailing male–female dichotomy, its biological determinism and the corresponding lack of intersectional inclusivity is problematic if used extensively in policy development. And while sex and gender are distinct, there is an ongoing dispute over the extent to which sex-based physical characteristics and social gender identifications and expressions overlap, for instance in intra-feminist debates over the validity of trans* belonging and recognition as ‘female’ or ‘male’. Hence the concepts of gender and sex are ambiguously related, with ensuing political implications for feminist and LGBT+ advocacy groups. These have to carefully negotiate the potential contradictions between a ‘born this way’ biological determinist approach highlighting gendered inequalities and a socially constructed anti-discrimination approach that aims to be gender ‘blind’ or neutral. Given that gender is a fundamental, crosscutting concept including a whole host of gender and sex identity and expressions ranging from the private sphere to the public one, terminological complexity abounds and a certain conceptual impreciseness is unavoidable. This also opens the door for misinformation, manipulation, and securitization of those groups. A similar complexity arises when referring to gender equality in terms of policy development. For instance, the EU institution’s preference for an inclusive SOGIESC focus under the heading of ‘gender equality’ is met by conservative governments such as Poland and Hungary with criticism. Similarly, many Global South counterparts prefer an emphasis on ‘women and girls’ instead (Knoll & Mucchi, 2020). Moreover, in our own policy experience as implementers of EU grants, the EU’s emphasis on ‘gender equality’ in its programs has at times been reduced to binary gender measurements for reporting purposes. In addition, the many

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achievements within the EU gender equality regime that women have made contrast with other gender identity groups that have not enjoyed the same success, such as transgender individuals (van den Brink & Dunne, 2018). This highlights the variety of notions inherent in gender equality, which is often narrowly understood as ‘achieving equal political, economic, personal and social rights for women (emphasis added)’ (Engberg-Pedersen et al., 2019: 3). Invariably, all-encompassing terms such as gender equality put different social, economic, cultural, or political emphases on the implications of gender in gendered societies. Therefore, the gender equality norm has even been considered an ‘empty signifier’ (Verloo & Lombardo, 2007: 22), standing in for a number of diverging attempts to include gender minorities more strongly in private and public life. Walby (2004), focusing on the gender equality regime in Europe, posited that in this context, it is often primarily perceived as a socioeconomic issue concerned with changes to androcentric standards rather than with more substantial structural changes in Europe’s political and economic systems. This becomes evident in the EU’s approach toward inclusion through soft law rather than stricter but more narrow legislative action. Even in the few instances where the EU issued directives such as the equal pay one as a legally binding instrument, it still allows governments some flexibility in the process of transposing the EU-issued legislation into national law. Although more recently, the EU institutions have issued additional directives to increase pay transparency in an effort to pressure the private sector to implement pay equality (Euractiv, 2022). In addition to the varieties of meanings by which gender and gender equality are conceived in theory and political practice, they are viewed to contain a prescriptive norm status as ‘acknowledged, but not necessarily accepted, understandings of collective ambitions’ (EngbergPedersen et al., 2019: 7). The contested status of gender politics can then further be exploited by right-wing activists and parties across Europe with their own nationalist, sexist, homophobe, and racial exclusionary agendas (Koettig et al., 2017). All these conceptual ambiguities weigh on the social and political recognition of gender equality claims within the EU and its member states. The EU enshrined gender equality from the 1957 Rome Treaty onward as it relates to equal pay (Kantola, 2010) and early on promoted feminist ideas alongside the UN from the late 1980s onward. Based on an initially narrow labor policy focus, the EU’s legal and political instruments expanded over time to include combating gender violence

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and promoting women in other, related policy areas. Historically, one can trace the EU’s gender equality policy from a legal pursuit of the reduction of inequalities to the recognition of gendered differences and affirmative actions, to a broader gender mainstreaming approach aiming to construct equality across all policy areas. Having become a ‘victim of its own success’, however, gender equality policies have lost some of their dedicated foci through those transformations, and suffered from shocks including austerity policies (Jacquot, 2015). The current European Commission developed a Gender Equality Strategy 2020–2025 with a focus on improving women’s position in labor markets, promoting women’s decision-making power, combating gender violence and appropriating 85% of all global aid and development expenditures toward gender equality (European Commission, 2022). To move this agenda along, in late 2022, the European Parliament together with the European Council adopted after a 10 year debate a legally binding ‘Women on Boards’ directive to boost the presence of women in private sector directorial posts (European Parliament, 2022). Europe is also the region with the most women in politics globally (UN Women, 2022), though they may not always advance feminist goals as leaders from France’s farright Marie LePen to Italy’s ‘post-fascist’ Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni illustrate. In many ways, the EU institutions constitute some of the strongest gender equality norm entrepreneurs globally. Yet the cross-cutting linkages and implications of gender across politics, trade, development, and foreign policy in a system with 27 members result in a patchwork of norms and laws across states with resulting implementation gaps (Lombardo et al., 2012). These include a multiplicity of EU policies ranging from gender mainstreaming focused on making gender equality a cross-sectoral policy issue to impact assessments charting the gendered repercussions of proposed legislation, to index creation so as to operationalize goals and track improvements over time. Still, gender-affirming policies in one area can have unintended negative consequences in another, for instance in the linkage of gendered emphases in development and security policies. This institutional complexity, coupled with increasing contestation of legislative gender initiatives through the European Parliament’s strengthened populist factions, have led to less than optimal outcomes (Ahrens, 2018). In this sense, gender issues ‘travel’ transnationally within Europe and are translated and rearticulated in specific domestic contexts (Zwingel, 2016),

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with the EU aiming to exert a converging dynamic through the assistive framework policies described above. Hence the EU engages civil society organizations (CSOs) to legitimize their own policy development and to obtain the necessary expertise through public consultations (Lang, 2021). While the agency of feminist actors is important, a comprehensive theorization needs to include structural as well as institutional aspects, of which political institutions are preeminent ones. This recognition led to a substantial activity focus on feminist institutionalism aiming to advance women’s rights in political institutions, and to a lesser degree, structural or Marxist feminism attempting to alter the socio-economic environment in which women’s rights are violated (Baehr, 2021). These approaches, while different from each other, contrast in their substantive political emphasis with more theoretical critical, social constructivist, or post-structuralist approaches that are more sociological or cultural in nature. Despite the range of feminist approaches, they all recognize gender as a fundamental category, view agency by ‘femocrats’, i.e., feminist bureaucrats and movements, as significant, and acknowledge the public-political nature of the personal (Abels & McRae, 2020; Locher & Prügl, 2009). Hence, in their diversity, gender approaches constitute useful ways of thinking about the multifaceted gendered constitution of European societies, markets, and political structures, while reflecting on and intersecting with the existing societal diversity that exists across Europe. Here, the intersectionality of gender equality claims in relation to other minoritizing social categories (of race, age, sexual orientation, etc.) is deemed essential to break away from a narrow Euro-centric feminist conception concerned predominantly with aiding ‘white European women’. More recently, intersectional solidarity, i.e., the ‘ongoing political process of building cooperation by altering power asymmetries within and between organizations and groups located at different intersections’ (Ciccia et al., 2021: 175) of race, gender, etc., has received more attention in feminist theory and practice. Thus it becomes evident that gender advocacy is as diverse as the concept of gender equality. Despite the perplexing diversity of approaches, policies, and activists, or maybe because of it, the EU has arguably become the world’s gender equality ‘champion’. Given the EU’s defined membership scope, its normative core and its supranational legal character, gender advocates and policies have thus far been relatively successful (Van der Vleuten, 2012). EU institutions are pressured and supported by active women’s

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rights organizations that are at times financially supported by the EU and have privileged access to decision-makers. The Brussels-based umbrella NGO European Women’s Lobby for instance, formed in the late 1980s, represents over 2700 domestic women’s rights associations in over 30 European countries. It thus constitutes some of the most powerful national NGOs in the EU, advises the EU institutions on gender matters, and has transformed over time to include more intersectional issues based on race, disability, and sexuality (European Parliament Research Service, 2021). Other feminist social movements and CSOs vary in goals and effectiveness, from the European Women’s Alliance representing women that are active in gender policy, to development-focused Women in Development Europe (WIDE+), to more radical movements such as Femen or broad-based campaigns such as #metoo. Such diversity illustrates the need to tackle multifaceted gendered challenges, but it also evidences power differentials, competition, and inter-movement debates that are present, yet unavoidable, in today’s feminist alliances (Ciccia et al., 2021). Despite this healthy activism, a disregard for new societal challenges arising from a diversifying continent may leave EU and domestic governance institutions unable to adapt—or adopt—feminist policy, or to respond quickly to evolving emergencies such as the Covid-19 pandemic. Chappell and Guerrina (2020) critically analyze the EU gender regime under familiar conditions of multiple crises, from the multi-year financial Euro Crisis with its retrenchment of social policies augmented by the EU’s neoliberalism to the racialized and gendered repercussions for gender equality in the wake of the refugee streams of the past decade. In terms of their detrimental policy impact, ‘these strains and attendant political reactions have led to cost-cutting, backsliding, downgrading, and even dismantling of certain aspects of the existing gender equality architecture’ (von Wahl, 2021: 34). This happens largely through recourse to austerity policies and cuts to supposedly expendable programs, increased competition for resources among stakeholders, and a shift from incapacitated governmental to private responsibility and civil society welfarism as replacement for state welfare. If the recent pandemic and the crisis of liberal democracy with the ensuing emergence of populist politics are added, the conditions for the social in- or exclusion of gendered minorities become more pressing but simultaneously more challenged. Not only because of the culturally based conservative chauvinism many of those opponents display but also more indirectly because they agitate against the EU, which in its regulatory activity aims to promote gender equality.

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Thus existing gender equality issues become more pronounced in an era of risks, some of which the EU contributes to through its own policies. At the same time, critical scholars such as Fraser (2013) posited that the inequalities women face in the EU’s neoliberal, patriarchal labor market, with its pay and career imbalances and often limited family provisions, creates a structural marginalization and thus represents a permanent state of crisis. This is even more intersectionally pronounced for women of color or with asylum status, disabilities, or non-heteronormative sexual identities (von Wahl, 2021). In response, the EU institutions themselves have subsequently been developing a more ambitious gender equality agenda, for instance, through the activities of the European Parliament’s women’s rights and gender equality committee, or the EU’s executive with its current gender equality strategy devised under Commission President Ursula van der Leyen, who took office in 2019. Yet it remains to be seen how much of that agenda can be implemented given structural limitations (Abels & Mushaben, 2020), in terms of moving from plans to substantive policies and from the EU-level diffusion to national implementation. Adding to these institutional multilevel governance issues, the stated priorities in the 2021–2025 gender action plan include additional mainstreaming objectives such as ‘taking account of the gender dimension in major climate change and digitisation initiatives and in specific sectors such as transport, energy and agriculture; introducing an intersectional approach across EU policies; and ensuring dedicated funding for a gender equal future’ (European Parliament Research Service, 2021). These are ambitious issues to address on top of already existing equality issues. Yet the European Parliament’s own analysis of the measures thus far finds that there is a lack of coherence between the different policy arenas, between EU institutions as well as between the EU and the implementing member states (ibid). This signifies that even when EU institutions aim to regulate the single market in gender-neutral ways and improve their own institutional performance on this matter, policy gaps, structural constraints, and veto players persist that make substantive improvements more challenging.

LGBT+ Claims and Policies in the EU The classification of ‘LGBT+’ is similarly multifaceted and contains a multitude of sexual as well as gender identities and expressions. For one, the use of LGBT+ aims to be inclusive to a whole host of different

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SOGIESC expressions that are often lumped together but may not be quite compatible, such as gender identification, expression or sexual orientation. As Thiel (2021: 30) states, these issues have been increasingly parsed out between LGB (Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual) issues concerned primarily with sexuality, and T(rans*) issues focusing on gendered aspects. Yet the joint categorization of individual identities under an expansive group label such as ‘LGBTTIQQ2SAA’ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transsexual, Transgender, Intersex, Queer, Questioning, 2-spirited, Asexual, and Ally) also comes with added complexity in terms of promoting awareness and may not always sufficiently describe the lived, often fluid experiences of such individuals. This occurs not least because of the misperception that exists in many European societies about the distinctiveness in terms of sexuality and gender emphases. Heteronormativity is the prevailing societal structure prioritizing gendered, heterosexual private and public institutions such as marriage and child-bearing, and non-heteronormative or homo-normative societal alternatives are only slowly emerging. Finally, originating in the 1990s in the US context, the categorical label LGBT, similar to Queer, is increasingly disputed as an Anglo-Western-centric concept, with less resonance in dissimilar contexts even though it may be used as a discursive shortcut in order to facilitate public engagement and support. Thus it is important to remember that these terms also give meaning and, to a certain degree, cohesion to activists and CSOs aiming to rectify past injustices. The EU institutions use ‘LGBTI’ or more recently, ‘LGBTIQ’ as a dominant frame, although its usage has also evolved over time, and has become more inclusive. For instance, the ‘I’ for Intersex was added after the 2013 Council guidelines for foreign diplomats included it, and in 2020 the Commission presented its first-ever ‘LGBTIQ’ strategy adding the ‘Q’ for Queer issues. Yet it is unclear to what extent radical-transgressive or amorphous queer claims for equality can be coopted by EU institutions given that queer represents a non-assimilative stance. In terms of political orientation, tensions exist between mainstream proponents of LGBT+ politics seeking equality and inclusion and more critical queer advocates who often contest such adaptation to existing power structures as conforming to heteronormative politics. Yet both claim rights and equality in terms of non-conforming identities and expressions, albeit with different strategies and with varying degrees of success. Queer activists and movements do not align comfortably with the political claims advanced by transnational LGBT rights advocacy in

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Europe, as they contest many existing socio-political institutions, such as the EU’s neoliberal capitalism or its regulatory legalism. While queer tactics often subvert assimilationist heteronormative policies, conventional LGBT advocacy work is aimed at inclusion within existing forms of representation rather than the appreciation of difference and thus appears often ‘de-queered’ for political purposes (Beger, 2009; Thiel, 2014). Similarly, the emphasis on societal adaptation and inclusion is supposed to make it easier to be recognized legally and politically within dominant human rights discourses, and to be included under the human rights umbrella. This often necessitates politically identifiable identity categories, to the detriment of complex sexual and gender relations and experiences. LGBT+ issues became more prominent in EU politics in the 1990s alongside the UN’s output on women’s rights and the EU’s own formulation of human rights standards for aspirant candidate states wanting to join the Union. The connection between gender equality and LGBT+ rights is well documented, as feminist movements allied early on with related equality movements intersectionally to gain more leverage (Caglar et al., 2013). However, there are also divisive issues between both on issues such as sex work and the inclusion of trans women in feminist movements (Ammaturo, 2015). As early as 1994, the European Parliament pushed the EU’s agenda with its landmark ‘Resolution on Equal Rights for Lesbian and Homosexuals’. Today, the European Parliament’s largest cross-party interest ‘intergroup’ with currently 156 members works on related issues in the so-called LGBTI Intergroup (https://lgbtiep.eu). The EU introduced the first internationally binding legislation protecting lesbians and gay men from workplace discrimination in the 1999 Amsterdam Treaty (Ayoub & Paternotte, 2020: 154–55). Meanwhile, the EU’s Fundamental Rights Charter of 2000 explicitly includes Article 21 prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation, as well as on other grounds. The Charter, however, does only apply to EUlevel and national institutions when they implement EU law and thus has a limited application scope bounded by national constitutional boundaries. Adding to those constraints, the EU’s body of gender equality legislation has led the way in testing the validity of gender claims for sexual rights in Europe’s courts, although this deduction is not always universally accepted. The EU’s patchwork of national legislations and the rights limitations derived from the EU’s single market reference point makes the pursuit of LGBT+ equality a complex and simultaneously constrained affair (Ellman, 2009). In 2015, the EU’s executive,

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the European Commission, drew up an initial ‘list of actions’ to include LGBT+ minorities more strongly in European societies, which from 2020 onward became an official EU LGBTI strategy. It comprises several policy actions, such as exchanging best practices and supporting advocacy CSOs. Although more than 20 states are on track to implement the majority of the strategy benchmarks, a handful of Central and Eastern European states stand out for their under-performance (Thiel, 2021). This shows that while there has been significant support for LGBT+ sexual equality claims among almost all EU institutions, progress across member states is non-linear, elicits norm contestation, and manifests unevenly. Hence despite ‘it getting better’ as a prominent LGBT+ rights slogan posits, exclusion and inequality on the basis of sexual orientation and gender continue to remain prevalent across Europe. As the EU’s Fundamental Rights Agency survey points out, as late as 2020 two out of five LGBT+ individuals felt harassed in the previous year and one out of three state that they are economically disadvantaged, with double those numbers for trans* people (Fundamental Rights Agency, 2020). LGBT+ people suffer from above average rates of homelessness, including an estimated 25–40% of young LGBT+ identifying people who have experienced homelessness. Trans* individuals are also more at risk of poverty than LGB individuals, especially if they conduct sex work or are of different ethnic origin, and 4% of trans* and intersex individuals have had to seek shelter in a public space at least once (Fundamental Rights Agency, 2020). Recognizing that the ‘personal is political’, questions of patriarchal and heteronormative family structures, gender and homophobic violence, and reproductive and sexual health become just as important as equality in the public or private sectors. These multilayered contexts necessitate a number of available policy prescriptions, from changing the required retirement contributions for women to providing free contraceptives and HIV medication and decriminalizing abortion to fighting gender and homophobic violence through all legal means as well as public awareness campaigns, to name a few. However, for LGBT+ populations, health disparities are more evident, for instance, with a quarter of trans* identifying individuals expressing discrimination in the healthcare sector and the exclusion of same-sex partners from medical procedures (Fundamental Rights Agency, 2020). Moreover, especially homophobic violence is still prevalent, ranging from homophobic attacks to harassment in various forms. Across the EU, over a quarter of LGBT+ individuals experienced homophobic violence, and over half expressed that they had been

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harassed in one way or another (Fundamental Rights Agency, 2013). One ought to keep in mind that some increases noted in the past years might be attributable to a stronger focus on specific discrimination patterns and more awareness, but especially for LGBTI people, homophobia is still often a secretly endured reality because of a fear of publicity. More recently, some populist EU governments have made public authorities part of the oppressive governance structure for native LGBT+ individuals as well as increasingly for migrants and asylum seekers (Fundamental Rights Agency, 2020). Societal as well as political-institutional homophobia has been challenged by activists, with the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA) Europe being the most powerful CSO campaigning for LGBT+ rights. Whereas gays and lesbians found a receptive ear by the EU institutions for the past few decades (Ayoub & Paternotte, 2014), bisexuals, intersex, and transgender people are gaining recognition only recently and within limits. The demands for equal treatment and non-discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and identity expression continue to be challenged by societal and governmental entities who consider heterosexuality as ordained by God and nature, for instance, in Italy, Hungary, and Poland, where the Catholic church still holds significant symbolic and political power. On the other hand, LGBT+ advocacy organizations have become more visible at the EU level and focus especially on the more virulent contestations of sexual equality in Central and Eastern Europe. Explained by a number of differentiating structural political, socio-economic, and demographic factors between older, West European, and newer, East European member states, LGBT+ claims in Central and Eastern Europe states often became securitized matters of national identity and relations to Europe (Thiel, 2021). Thus umbrella organizations such as ILGA-Europe have expanded their activity focus from the EU to now include East European and Central Asian states in an effort to proactively promote LGBT+ issues in less receptive environments. ILGA was founded in 1978 in the United Kingdom, and ILGA Europe’s regional chapter was established in 1996 when the globalization of LGBT+ activism necessitated a more region-specific response (Ayoub & Paternotte, 2014). ILGA Europe had its first meeting with the EU’s executive Commission in the mid-1990s and, since then, has been well linked up with the main EU institutions, be it through periodic consultations or policy input into draft legislation. As Europe’s largest

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transnational umbrella CSO, it represents over 600 civil society organizations in 54 countries in Europe and Central Asia (ILGA Europe, 2022). The eastward expansion of its activity scope brought about a productive tension between the more advanced rights claims in Western Europe and the more fundamental non-discrimination and hate crime issues that Central and Eastern European countries have to deal with. It works with smaller as well as leading domestic organizations, as well as with other transnational organizations such as Transgender Europe (TGEU). Especially with regard to its legal output, Woodward (2004) calls the multi-actor triangular interaction of CSOs such as ILGA-Europe with the legal-political institutions and academia Europe’s ‘velvet triangle’ as best representing the informal exchanges among advocacy and policy elites in the service of LGBT+ rights. Similarly to feminist CSOs, the legal strategy of strategic litigation provides an opportunity for activists to use the legal system(s) as an alternative to the legislative-political arenas. At the same time, a focus on political and legal campaigns may come at the expense of localizing engagement with societal actors on the ground. Thus despite the relative success of European LGBT+ CSOs with respect to their agenda-setting capabilities with EU institutions, their agency is in several ways jeopardized. The prevailing ‘rainbow curtain’ running between West and Central- and Eastern Europe in terms of domestic LGBT+ policy recognition and implementation compromises their activities. In addition, numerous ‘anti-LGBT+’ political forces, from homophobe nationalist movements to religious organizations, have arisen across Europe alongside far-right political parties. These groups express gender and sexual rights backlashes to the strong EU promotion of those rights, thus adding additional pressure to an already volatile situation. Moreover, while many of the larger CSOs are dependent on EU funding in these countries, smaller ones do not even have the capacity to obtain such. This leads to a (self)selection of already more Europeanized and privileged CSOs that receive funding, which then run the danger of being considered ‘foreign agents’ by nationalist governments responding with more control and exclusion. Furthermore, given the EU’s single market emphasis, funding needs to be justified under a social inclusion theme that prioritizes labor market and socio-economic inclusion, often at the expense of non-commodified ‘private’ rights of sex and gender expression. At the same time, this funding prioritization reorients and reshapes LGBT+ advocacy and coincides with a retreat of governments in the social and welfare sectors. It hence diminishes the potential for contesting

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existing structural neoliberal policies that may cause discrimination in the first place (Thiel, 2015). In terms of how LGBT+ rights claims are impacted by crises and emergencies, one ought to keep in mind that the ambivalent visibility of LGBT+ people results in specific issues during such contentious times. A lack of concern of governments for an unrecognized ‘absent demographic’, or a politicized hypervisibility of those in homophobe contexts can equally produce added vulnerabilities through governmental exposure and securitization. For instance, analyzing the EU’s othering processes related to emerging contestations over the acceptance of LGBTI rights among its member and applicant states in the Balkans, Slootmaeckers (2020) makes the case that exclusionary policies emerge as a reaction to apparent crises and more broadly, morality panics regarding changing sexuality and gender conceptions. At the same time, the EU’s rights promotion politics simultaneously causes or advances such crises through their normative, liberal, yet conditional rights promotion policies in enlargement and other associational policies (Thiel, 2021). The exclusionary impacts of real and manufactured crises are often exacerbated by governments that may use emergency powers to limit domestic public activities with the aim of concentrating control over the populace. Some of the most visible governance changes with respect to LGBT+ politics consist in the narrowing of the actionable ‘civil society space’ that advocacy and human rights organizations experience in rights-adverse state settings such as in Hungary or Poland (Korolczuk, 2020). Without an intersectional understanding that includes a recognition of other impacting characteristics based on race and ethnicity, legal or socioeconomic status, for instance, or the deconstruction of the monolithic LGBT+ category through the recognition of differential vulnerabilities depending on the prevailing SOGIESC, an analysis of crises impacts might be falling short intellectually and could result in harmful political actions. To illustrate, as Reid and Ritholtz (2020) point out in their comparative analysis of LGBT+ vulnerability during the Covid pandemic, transgender people of color were particularly affected due to gendered mobility restrictions. Yet while an intersectional outlook is essential for a meaningful politics of inclusion, pressure on resources during crises can make a broader, intersectional approach more difficult to achieve. As Ayoub (2019) finds in his research on European LGBTI organizations, while crises make the public, CSOs, and governance actors more aware of challenges for marginalized individuals, it also increases various resource

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pressures. This leads to less intersectional awareness for domestic CSOs and conversely, to a more intersectional strategic outlook for transnational ones with ensuing detrimental consequences for alliance building. Similarly, a rise of other excluded minorities may compete with, or in the worst case, oppose equality for all, for instance, in the trans*-TERF (trans exclusionary radical feminists) dispute or some immigrant groups’ opposing reaction to gender and LGBT+ advocacy. It becomes evident that LGBT+ inclusion is not linear, but contingent on agents and structures with their own idiosyncrasies that lead to limited levels of socio-political inclusion with corresponding exclusions, as the next chapter will show in case studies.

Conclusion Contestations over claims for social inclusion of various minorities differ according to the socio-political fields in which they are embedded in, and the agency of CSOs and political institutions. Some newer minorities, including migrants and LGTB+ individuals, have been able to obtain rights of non-discrimination at the EU level, but not sufficient policies guaranteeing social and legal protection in the absence of legally mandated and implemented policies domestically. In addition, their visibility and agency is more often contested by opposing actors. In terms of achieving gender equality, which is often more narrowly conceived as women’s equality, the EU has developed a significant body of legislation and policies over a longer period, though, given its structural limitations, existing measures are still insufficiently implemented across member states and policy areas. An inclusive policy perspective recognizes the need to frame gender and sexual inclusion not only as an intersectional human rights issue, but also as a socio-economic social justice concern (in its focus on labor and welfare policies) and a public health issue (in terms of reproductive health and sexual justice). While this broad conceptual framework is articulated by CSOs across Europe, the EU and especially national government institutions do not sufficiently recognize the interconnectedness of these policy fields. Over the past few years, a politicization of gender and sexuality emerged by populist right-wing actors across the EU, which has more recently spread to a widespread contestation of feminist and LGBT+

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institutions, policies and activists (Abou-Chadi et al., 2021). While it is more pronounced through state-led homophobia in Central and Eastern Europe, the politicization and even securitization of inclusionary gender and sexuality policies as threat to prevailing patriarchal, traditional, and ethno-religious structures has been mainstreamed across Europe. The engagement of the EU with its increasing societal gender and sex-based diversity is clearly not a story of linear progress but of competition and contestation with powerful socio-cultural and political opponents that have activated political interests and mobilized political forces, as will be shown in the following chapter.

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CHAPTER 5

Political Mobilizations Regarding Gender and LGBT+: Poland, Germany, Spain, and Sweden

Introduction Although inequalities remain, the EU has made significant progress in the societal inclusion of various social minorities over the past decades. Over time, women’s equality and LGBT+ inclusion in the EU have been strengthened by equal treatment legislation, gender mainstreaming, and specific measures for the advancement of women and LGBT+ individuals. This chapter provides an overview of the state of Europe’s gender and LGBT+ (in)equality and then analyzes in more detail the politics of inclusion for those constituents in four case studies: Poland, Germany, Spain, and Sweden. These large countries and powerful EU member states are chosen for their representative role in their respective subregions. Below, the various political mobilization patterns of in- and exclusion of gender and LGBT+ individuals with a particular focus on the notions of ‘risks’ and ‘threats’ will be analyzed and compared in the four countries to contrast their developments and explore their connecting points.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Thiel et al., The Politics of Social In/Exclusion in the EU, Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31264-9_5

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Gender and LGBT+ In/Exclusions in the EU: An Overview As detailed in the previous chapter, in their early formulation, gender equality claims emanated from liberal feminism, which argued that women need to be more equitably represented in public life. This approach seeks to rectify gendered household inequalities and to allow women to pursue a family and a career, but also to break glass ceilings in the private sector, including board representation, and to increase participation in public and political leadership roles (Baehr, 2021). Equality between women and men has been pronounced a European norm since the early days of European integration. Starting in 1957, the Treaty of Rome established the principle of equal pay for work of equal value within what was then the European Economic Community. Since then the EU has made significant progress in gender equality due to equal treatment legislation, gender mainstreaming, integration of the gender perspective into all other policies, and other auxiliary measures (European Commission, 2020a, see also Chapter 4). In recent years, the issue of gender equality was brought back onto the EU’s political agenda in 2019 after the first-ever female European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen took office and the subsequent creation of the EU’s first Commissioner post for Equality. In 2020 the European Commission published its first Gender Equality Strategy 2020–2025, which aims at ‘achieving a gender equal Europe where gender-based violence, sex discrimination and structural inequality between women and men are a thing of the past. A Europe where women and men, girls and boys, in all their diversity, are equal’ (European Commission, 2020a: 2). The advance of LGBT+ equality has followed similar steps. The institutional incorporation of LGBT+ rights within EU policies, which is exemplary in global comparison, occurred largely in response to movement and activist calls for greater recognition within a set of European pioneer states. Later on, the supranational terrain of European intergovernmental organizations provided fertile ground for auxiliary inclusion measures. Since the late 1970s, the collaboration between European LGBT+ movements and European institutions increased, and legal-political support materialized early on, for example, in the Council of Europe’s European Court of Human Rights with the 1981 case ‘Dudgeon vs. the United Kingdom’. It ruled that the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 criminalizing homosexual relationships in England, Wales, and

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Northern Ireland violated the European Convention on Human Rights. More tangible effects soon arrived regarding gays and lesbians’ legal standing with the subsequent decriminalization of same-sex relations and the introduction of national and EU-level anti-discrimination legislation (Ayoub & Paternotte, 2020: 154–155). Another milestone of the LGBT+ movement’s achievements in Europe came about in 2001 when the Netherlands became the first country in the world to institute civil marriage for same-sex couples, followed by other countries of the Union.1 In 2020, the European Commission also presented the firstever EU Strategy for LGBT+ equality. The largely aspirational ‘Union of Equality: LGBTIQ Equality Strategy 2020–2025’ document ‘addresses the inequalities and challenges affecting LGBTIQ people in order to move towards a Union of Equality’ (European Commission, 2020c). Hence the EU has been an early adopter of gender and LGBT+ equality norms and can be considered a global multilateral leader in gender equality, broadly speaking. Yet, while 14 of the top 20 most gender-equal countries worldwide are EU member states, ‘no member state has achieved full gender equality and progress is slow’ (European Commission, 2020a: 2). Similarly, in a 2019 survey, the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) found that perceived discrimination on the grounds of SOGIESC had increased in the EU, with 43% of LGBT+ individuals feeling discriminated against in 2019, compared to 37% in 2012 (European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, 2020). Therefore, inequalities continue to be experienced by individuals at diverse levels, and several studies show that the Covid-19 crisis has only exacerbated those. Consequently, cumulative indicators of the EU’s gender equality regime evidence a mixed picture, as seen in Fig. 5.1, which shows the evolution of the EU Gender Equality Index score contrasted against the different indicators, according to the European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE, 2022). Although the figure shows slow but incremental progress in almost all indicators including the overall gender index scores, inequalities remain 1 Belgium in 2003, Spain in 2005, Norway and Sweden in 2009, Portugal and Iceland in 2010, Denmark in 2012, France in 2013, England and Wales in 2013, Scotland in 2014, Luxembourg and Ireland in 2015, Finland, Malta, and Germany in 2017, Austria in 2019, and Northern Ireland in 2020. It is worth mentioning that Poland does not legally recognize same-sex marriage or civil unions. Yet, in 2012, the Polish Supreme Court ruled that same-sex couples have limited legal rights in regard to the tenancy of a shared household.

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EU Gender Equality Index 100.0 90.0

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Fig. 5.1 EU gender equality index scores (columns) and indicators scores (lines); 2013–2021 (0–100) (Source Own elaboration based on EIGE, 2022)

pervasive, prompting sustained political mobilization. For instance, despite the early adoption of the equal pay directive in the 1950s, a wage differential of 14% still exists in the EU today, forcing EU institutions and activists to push for more powerful assistive legal instruments (European Commission, 2020b). While women have achieved more substantial participation in the labor market alongside progress in securing better education and training, gender gaps remain since women are still over-represented in lower-paid sectors and under-represented in decision-making positions (European Commission, 2020a). In terms of company board representation, about 30% of women are on maledominated boards, prompting the European Commission to revive a 10-year-old contested legislative proposal stipulating a 40% women’s quota on those (Reuters, 2022). Conversely, among the LGBT+ community, 21% felt discriminated against at work, and 10% felt discriminated against when searching for employment. Trans* people experience 15% higher employment discrimination (39%) than LGB individuals (European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, 2020). In terms of public roles, parliamentary women’s representation in the EU is, on average, 33%, with significant variances among member states ranging

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from Belgium with 42% to Malta or Hungary with 13% (World Bank, 2022). Political representation of sexual minorities is even more limited, with only 0.1–0.2% of European elected officials known to be LGBT+ (Rainbow Platform, 2022). These data points, in addition to the ones mentioned in the previous chapter, evidence the partial and uneven inclusion of gender and sexual minorities across member states.

Gender and LGBT+ In/Exclusions and Political Mobilizations in Germany, Spain, Poland, and Sweden The everyday lived experiences of women and LGBT+ people vary significantly across the EU. Despite the rise of social acceptance of sexual minorities within the EU from 71% in 2015 to 76% in 2019, tolerance decreased in nine member states, including Bulgaria, Czechia, Denmark, Ireland, Croatia, Italy, Hungary, Malta, and Slovakia. Encouragingly, almost all respondents in Sweden (98%) and the Netherlands (97%) agreed that LGBT+ people should have the same rights as heterosexual people. Similarly, Spain (90%) and Germany (88%) show high social acceptance rates. In contrast, only less than half of the population in Slovakia (31%), Romania (38%), Bulgaria (39%), Croatia (44%), Hungary (48%), Latvia (49%), and Poland (49%) think the same way (Eurobarometer, 2019). As for gender equality, in 2021 Sweden (83.9) and Denmark (77.8) were again the top performers in the EU Gender Equality Index, followed by the Netherlands (75.9), France (75.5), and Finland (75.3). Considering the other side of the spectrum, the least gender-equal countries appear to be Greece (52.5), Hungary (53.4), Romania (54.5), Slovakia (56), and Poland (56.6) (EIGE, 2022). These substantial deviations are evidence of considerable variations in gender and LGBT+ equality between EU countries. The following sections in this chapter study these differences further as they materialize over time in the cases of Poland, Germany, Spain, and Sweden. The four figures below contextualize the subsequent country analyses (DE indicating Germany, ES Spain, PL Poland, and SE Sweden). In all cases, the analysis covers data from 2013–2021, depending on the information available. Figure 5.2 shows the EU Gender Equality Index Score trend contrasted against the countries under study based on EIGE data. EIGE was established in 2006 by the EU as a functional agency that aims

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to support gender equality across Europe. As a knowledge center and networking body, it promotes gender expertise and best practices among member states. The EIGE’s country index contains seven indicators: (1) Work (employment rate and career prospects), (2) Power (political, economic, and social representation), (3) Time (spent on care work and volunteering), (4) Money (income and % at risk of poverty), (5) Knowledge (tertiary education, especially in non-STEM fields), (6) Health (life expectancy and access to providers) and (7) Violence (physical/sexual violence, harassment, etc.). However, no comparable data has been able to be recorded for the latter, so gender violence is omitted from the figure, though it is expected to be published in the near future. The lack of data provision from member states already points to some of the shortcomings of attempts at gender (in)equality measurements, aside from the somewhat reductionist, essentialist indicators for what is taken as ‘progress’. Yet they serve as the currently best empirical data available, and are widely used in academia and policy-making. By combining index data analysis with policy and political mobilization tracing, we hope to provide more contextualized case studies.

Gender Equality Index: EU and Case Studies 90.0 82.6

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Fig. 5.2 EU gender equality index scores per case study (lines) and the EU (columns), 2013–2021 (0–100) (Source Own elaboration based on EIGE, 2022)

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As can be seen below, there are significant differences between the four countries in overall gender equality achieved over time, though with relatively stable overall scores. While Sweden has kept outstanding scores, albeit with room for improvement, Poland exhibits a mixed performance, increasing only 1.1 points from an already low position. Notably, Spain and Germany have consistently improved their scores (+7.3 and +6 points, respectively). However, in both cases, progress is far from optimal. While the EIGE score measures the progress of gender equality practices in EU countries, Fig. 5.3 complements that information with the attitudes toward Gender Equality in the cases. Drawing on Eurobarometer data (2014, 2017), the figure summarizes the answers in agreement with the statement: “Tackling inequality is necessary for a fairer society.” Although a change in the survey does not allow us to track previous data, we use the response to this question as an indicator of attitudes toward gender equality. Overall, a high degree of gender equality support exists across the EU, with only slight variations recognizable. Sweden maintains a high level of gender equality endorsement, while Poland is at the bottom of the list with a score below the EU average of 91 points, being one of the few countries where opposition to gender equality has grown somewhat. Meanwhile, Germany is the only country showing an improvement in attitudes, and the decline in Spain could be explained based on the social tensions resulting from the efforts of the government to improve gender equality, as will be analyzed later in this chapter. Eurobarometer Gender equality attitudes 2014–2017 Referring to LGBT+ rights, Fig. 5.4 below aggregates the four country scores of ILGA-Europe’s Rainbow Index, which ranks 49 European countries on their legal and policy practices for LGBT+ people, from 0 to 100% (with 100% being optimal). In order to create the ranking, ILGA-Europe examines the laws and policies in 49 countries using a set of criteria divided into seven thematic categories: Equality and NonDiscrimination, Family, Hate Crime and Hate Speech, Legal Gender Recognition, Intersex Bodily Integrity, Civil Society Space, and Asylum (ILGA-Europe, 2022). Here, the low performance of Poland stands out, and year-over-year variations become noticeable. Figure 5.5 complements ILGA-Europe’s policy-based Rainbow Index by providing the Global Acceptance Index scores per case country collected by the Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Law and Public Policy (Flores, 2019, 2021). This index seeks to measure the perceived acceptance of LGBT+ people and issues in each

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Fig. 5.3 Eurobarometer gender equality attitudes 2014–2017 (Source Own elaboration based on Eurobarometer, 2014, 2017)

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country during a specific period. Again, Poland is a low-performance outlier, although the trend in all cases is upwards. In a nutshell, Fig. 5.2 illustrates how gender biases vary from country to country, from an outstanding performance in Sweden to an unsatisfactory one in Poland. The latter has experienced limited progress combined with setbacks, has never exceeded 60 points, and has maintained a gender equality index consistently below the EU average. Similarly, Figs. 5.4 and 5.5 highlight two improved cases regarding LGBT+ legal protection and acceptance: Sweden and Spain. Spain, however, evidences a progressive deterioration in its values despite remaining overall a good performer. On the contrary, Poland’s gap with the rest of the countries on LGBT+ issues is remarkable, although acceptance seems to improve in recent years. For its part, Germany maintains its performance very close to the average gender equality scores of the EU, with periodic ups and downs, and also compares similarly with the rest of the countries under study for the Rainbow Index. Using a mix of EIGE and ILGA data and policy tracing, LGBT+ Acceptance Index per Case Study 10.0

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Fig. 5.5 Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law’s LGBT+ Acceptance index score per case study, 2013–2021 (0–10) (Source Own elaboration based on Flores, 2019, 2021)

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the following sections look at each case in detail to understand the relationship between gender and LGBT+ equality and political mobilization in these countries.

Poland On October 3, 2016, thousands of protesters filled the streets across Poland. The ruling conservative Law and Justice party (Prawo i Sprawiedliwo´sc´ , PiS) had attempted to enact a total abortion ban, even though Poland’s abortion laws were, and continue to be, among the EU’s strictest. Tens of thousands of people called for reproductive freedom under the rallying cry of #StrajkKobiet (Women’s Strike) and, thus, were able to defeat the ultra-conservative party’s anti-abortion initiative later on when the parliament rejected such a ban. Despite the ‘partial triumph’ of this political mobilization, women’s rights and activist organizations fighting for gender equality remain jeopardized. Indeed, in January 2021, a near-total abortion ban was signed into law, preceding some of the largest protests in Polish history and empowering an active civil society led by women’s and LGBT+ rights activists (Chmielewska-Szlajfer & DuninW˛asowicz, 2020). The social tensions surrounding gender and LGBT+ equality continue to mobilize Polish gender activists and their opponents, and they also have politicized Polish politics to a hitherto unknown degree. Figure 5.2 shows that, in 2013, there was not as much difference between Poland and the other countries as in 2021. Notably, 2016– 2017 marks an inflection point and a decrease in the values of both the Gender Equality Index and the Rainbow Index, although the LGBT+ acceptance index shows an inverse behavior. To complete the picture, Fig. 5.6 below provides a detailed illustration of the gender equality index and its six indicators for Poland over time. The post-2017 deterioration is even more evident here, especially regarding women’s public representation. In general, while Poland fares well in terms of health, work, and notably financial equality, these indicators contrast with women’s power/representation as it stagnated at 31 points over the nine years from 2013 onwards. In addition, Figs. 5.4 and 5.5 demonstrate that throughout the last decade, Polish indicators regarding LGBT+ in/exclusion remain well below the other countries under study. Poland constitutes one of the most (state) homophobic countries in the EU, although according to the

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Fig. 5.6 EU gender equality index scores (columns) and indicators scores (lines) for Poland, 2013–2021 (0–100) (Source Own elaboration based on EIGE, 2022)

William Institute, social acceptance of LGBT+ has slightly improved from 4.8 to 5.2 out of 10 points in recent years. In contrast, legal provisions and policy practices for LGBT+ people have progressively worsened in the country, and in 2021, its overall LGBT+ human rights record attained only 13%. Poland ranks 44th among 49 European countries in ILGAEurope’s index, and last in the EU in terms of LGBT+ legal inclusion. The breakdown by category in 2021 is alarming. As shown in Fig. 5.7, LGBT+ individuals are not granted any rights regarding Intersex Bodily Integrity, Hate Crime and Hate Speech, and Family Provisions (signified by blank spaces). The country is moving backward as existing laws and policies are changed or dismantled. For example, since 2015, the government does not include sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, or sex characteristics (SOGIESC) in its action plans, and since 2018, Poland no longer provides access to medically assisted reproduction for single women. As for asylum laws and regulations (17%), the 2008 amendment of the Law on Granting Protection to Aliens within the Territory of the Republic of Poland includes sexual orientation among the qualifications

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Poland: Rainbow Index 2021 Asylum

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Fig. 5.7 ILGA-Europe’s overall rainbow index score and criteria scores for Poland in 2021 (0–100) (Source Own elaboration based on ILGA Europe, 2022)

to be regarded as a particularly vulnerable social group. This area has been critical to the country as it experienced increased refugee inflows in the past few years. At the same time, an escalation in demagogic statements by the Polish government and the threat of physical violence on the streets triggered an exodus of LGBT+ people to other European countries. In addition, in 2022, more than 6 million refugees crossed into Poland fleeing the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and as of December 2022, more than 1.5 million Ukrainians registered for temporary protection in Poland (UNHCR, 2023). Therefore, substantial changes are expected in refugee and asylum legislation, although it is not certain that LGBT+ issues will be explicitly integrated. The rest of the categories, namely Equality and NonDiscrimination, Legal Gender Recognition, and Civil Society Space, score a few points due to some basic legislation and case law against discrimination in the workplace or because of legal or administrative obstacles based on SOGIESC for blood donations, and legal, judicial, and administrative issues regarding legal gender recognition and name change.

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Once instrumental in ending Soviet domination through its vibrant civil society together with the early legal decriminalization of homosexuality back in 1932 and a leapfrogging in terms of gender policies during EU accession in 2004, the country’s leadership has more recently become a focal point for anti-gender campaigners in the EU (Wesolovsky, 2021). When joining the EU, Poland had to fully implement legislation on anti-discrimination, including a ban on discrimination against employees based on their SOGIESC. Thus EU membership provided incentives and pressures toward improvements in implementing norms that benefited gender equality. These materialized in the long-awaited ‘anti-discrimination’ law introduced in 2010 along with setting up the governmental office of Plenipotentiary for Equal Treatment, the introduction of the electoral gender quota system in 2011, and the Programme for the Prevention of Domestic Violence for the period 2014–2020, together with the signing and ratification of the Istanbul Convention combating gender violence in 2015. Contrastingly, political advocacy for LGBT+ equality from the 1980s onwards by groups such as the Warsaw Gay Movement, Lambda, and informal groups cooperating with ILGA, was unable to sustainably impact the Polish political and legal systems (Bielska, 2021). However, social mobilizations increased from the first large-scale protest against homosexual discrimination, the Equality Parade held in Warsaw in 2001 and attended by over 300 people, to growing gay pride events in the following years including the hosting of Europride in 2010, which elicited counter-demonstrations and bans. Regarding the legal situation of LGBT+ individuals, bills on registered same-sex partnerships were proposed by various liberal government-affiliated parties but rejected by Parliament in 2007 and 2008. In 2012, the Supreme Court ruled that same-sex couples have limited legal rights concerning the tenancy of a shared household. Notably, in the 2011 election, Poland elected its first out LGBT+ members of parliament, including Robert Biedron, ´ an out gay man, and Anna Grodzka, a transgender woman. This relative improvement in gender and LGBT+ visibility was followed by a shift toward a more hostile political context after the conservative nationalist PiS took office in 2015. The newly elected government quickly began dismantling gender and LGBT+ equality infrastructures and substituting those with traditionalistic reforms (Gwiazda, 2021). Although the socialist roots of Polish equality were reinforced through EU accession in the early 2000s and continued during the tenure of the pro-EU centrist

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Civic Platform governments in the early 2010s, the subsequent rightwing governments renamed and demoted the Equality Plenipotentiary’s office in an indication of the government’s contestation of gender equality (Gaweda, 2021). The Polish sociological context explains the two opposing sides of political mobilization in the country. Gwiazda (2021) argues that while politically a wide range of ideologies is represented in public life, the majority in parliament is held by the right-wing populist PiS and its allies, winners of the 2015 and 2019 elections. Culturally, the Polish Catholic Church, rooted in a conservative tradition, plays a significant role in society and politics by strongly favoring patriarchal gender roles and the traditional family model, and by supporting the government. Historically, communism advocated women’s education, employment, and other women’s rights but severely limited their political rights. Furthermore, during the socialist Polish People’s Republic (1947–1989), the ruling communist government censored information about the sexual behavior of LGBT+ individuals, spread misinformation, and instructed police forces to investigate gay subculture to determine whether sexual orientation was a factor in criminal activity. While a drastic case, Poland serves as an emblematic example of many Central- and Eastern European postcommunist countries that are culturally and religiously conservative but had to adapt to Western liberal democratic norms together with a rapid transformation to a market economy in the process of EU accession, with resulting shortcomings in the consolidation of their pluralistic political cultures. Similar processes in terms of an increasing exclusion of sex and gender minorities and a related rights deterioration post-accession have become evident elsewhere in Central- and Eastern Europe, most notably in Hungary, but also in Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Croatia, and Lithuania. The construction of nationalist anti-gender discourses was crucial to far-right political mobilization. The ruling PiS party has turned gender and LGBT in/exclusion into an electoral battleground topic since 2015, when they described LGBT+ rights as a foreign import threatening Polish identity. The slogan of ‘the defense of the traditional family’, a central part of the right-wing narratives, made it possible to manipulate the public regarding the so-called ‘gender ideology’, a divisive term that denigrates gender and LGBT+ equality promotion. This concept is widespread and envisioned as a hazard to the traditional family, to conservative values, and to national identity. Thus, anti-gender and anti-LGBT+ claims are

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associated with the Polish identity in a narrative that equates Poles with Catholics and, therefore, emphasizes an incompatibility of Polish culture with the so-called ‘murderers of the unborn’ and ‘sexual degenerates’, ˙ including feminists, the LGBT+ community, and their defenders (Zuk & ˙Zuk, 2020). Consequently, in terms of reproductive rights, the current Polish government has, together with the Hungarian one, undermined the Istanbul Convention against Gender Violence because of their opposition to abortions. In fact, Poland was the only EU state that signed an international counter-declaration, supported by ca. 20 other global South states (Pet˝ o, 2022). Moreover, the Polish parliament has begun to introduce legislation to eventually withdraw from the Istanbul Convention, arguing that it does not respect religion and promotes too broad of a notion of ‘gender’ (Amiel, 2021). The first wave of protests against the banning of abortion in 2016 started as a response to right-wing CSOs supported by the Catholic Church, such as the ‘Life and Family’ foundation, which, among others, collected more than 400 thousand signatures in just three months under the campaign ‘Stop Abortion’ (Szczygielska, 2019). Similarly, in 2019, private initiatives emerged that were aimed at combating alleged LGBT ideology, including the promotion of ‘LGBT-Free Zone’ stickers distributed with Gazeta Polska, a national-conservative weekly. As a result, in 2019 and 2020, about 100 municipalities and districts in the South-Eastern part of Poland declared themselves ‘LGBT- free’, which led to the threat of funding withdrawal by the European Commission. The surprising 0% of LGBT+ rights in the indexed areas of Hate Crime and Hate Speech, Family, and Intersex Bodily Integrity, together with the low score in Civil Society Space in Fig. 5.7, can be understood in this context of increasing discrimination. Notably, the control of state media has been a crucial tool for spreading anti-gender and anti-LGBT+ perspectives within Polish society. Notwithstanding, PiS has accommodated gender claims that derive from traditional liberal feminism. Conservative factions accept EUmandated gender equality policies in the private sector, mostly limited to employment and labor markets, which explains the upward trend of the Money indicator and a decent performance regarding Work in Fig. 5.6. In the public sphere, however, they exclude equal political representation within their claims, as it is linked to leftist claims. This point elucidates the dramatic change in the power indicator’s trend until 2017. Contrastingly, the private sphere is not accounted for in this variant of feminism,

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including abortion, reproductive rights, and education, which is partly contained in some other indicators, such as Knowledge and Time. In addition, the government-allied circles within the Catholic Church condemn feminism and ‘the rainbow plague’, allegedly imported from Western Europe and the EU: ‘this new plague is not Marxist, Bolshevik, but born of the same spirit, neo-Marxist. Not red, but rainbow’, stated the Archbishop of Krakow in 2019 (Chadwick, 2019). In elevating LGBT+ rights to a threat comparable to communism, as claimed by President Andrzej Duda, the government uses moral panics against ‘gender ideology’ to mobilize voters and preemptively distract from a focus on other pertinent issues, such as its contested role in the EU. There, it caused sanctions proceedings for dismantling the rule of law. Those sanctions are currently ‘paused’ because of Polish assistance to the millions of Ukrainian refugees. Poland has also used its voice in the EU Council in line with its declared gendered emphasis on ‘women and children’ to oppose more inclusive EU gender policies (Thiel, 2021). Thus, following the logic of their narrative, gender, and LGBT+ equality are conceptualized as an externally imposed threat alien to national traditions, stoking anti-EU sentiments and constraining the civic space of CSOs promoting women’s rights and LGBT rights (Gwiazda, 2021). A similar EU-directed externalization of culpability had already been advanced in the run-up to the elections in 2015 when PiS scared citizens with an image of impending EU-enforced refugee waves (Szulc, 2018), as will be analyzed in Chapter 7. In terms of political actions against those right-wing mobilizations, the role of Rafał Trzaskowski, mayor of Warsaw, stands out. In 2019, as a form of contesting the ‘LGBT-Free Zone’ campaign, he signed the first-ever declaration to protect LGBT+ rights in Poland. The declaration aims to guarantee the basic needs of the LGBT+ community in the capital city, including the promise of an LGBT+ community center, a local crisis intervention system, and access to anti-discrimination and sex education at city schools. Although he had received backlash from the conservative sectors and the ruling party in Poland, he also gained recognition from other societal sectors. On the other hand, political mobilization in favor of gender equality draws from other feminist activists, such as the Women’s movements related to International Women’s Day on March 8, which supports lowpaid, disadvantaged, and marginalized women. Historically, women were granted rights to vote, education, employment, and abortion during

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communism. However, this top-down emancipation came with communist control of women’s political activism, even during the democratic transition (Waylen, 2014). The institutionalization of feminism within Polish civil society took place in the early 2000s and is now followed by less formal grassroots responses to democratic backsliding. The most visible strategies in this regard were the massive protests in 2016 and 2017 in response to the proposed further restriction of the anti-abortion law. Political decisions affecting women, backlash against anti-gender activism, and a more general process of democratic backsliding formed a vital background for further mobilization. Another influential factor was the use of social media and other online platforms that emerged outside the formal CSOs’ networks and contributed to the inclusivity and scope of mobilization. With regard to political mobilizations of LGBT+ and related social movements in Poland, O’Dwyer (2018) argues that the far right’s reaction is a critical domestic factor that has helped to motivate the LGBT+ community. It allowed Polish activists to find resonant frames, build internal solidarity, and gain allies, even when social movement resources are minimal. Bielska (2021) asserts that the LGBT+ movement has become a recognizable political actor. However, bottom-up civic activism has not achieved any major legislative goals related to civil unions, marriage equality, adoption, homophobic and transphobic hate crimes, and gender recognition. This is illustrated by the low ILGA-Europe score, which has dropped from 28/100 in 2013 to only 13 in 2021. However, the strengthening of the movement through contestation by the far right, and the notable recognition as a political actor seem to be impacting public opinion. This explains the rise of the LGBT+ Acceptance Score from 2017 onwards, according to Fig. 5.5. In view of this, the struggle for societal in/exclusions has an uncertain future trajectory depending on the capacity of political mobilizers to more directly impact domestic political institutions so that the government may reverse several years of backsliding.

Germany In an effort to account for past injustices, post-war Germany has developed an extensive societal and legal liberalism. Together with its active civil society, this has helped propel gender and LGBT+ claims slowly but surely. This gradual progress occurred despite its corporatist economic

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structure and the long tenure of socially conservative Christian Democratic chancellors, which somewhat retarded equality achievements in comparison to other West European states (Bayrakdar & King, 2021). The fact that Germany is a federal state where gender and LGBT+ policy implementation occurs at the sub-state level makes domestic inclusion more complex and geographically uneven. Despite its historical exceptionalism, Germany thus is similar to other Western and Central European countries in which European integration processes have helped solidify inclusionary policies and attitudes regarding gender and sexuality inconsistently but slowly over time, including France, the Benelux countries, and Austria. Germany’s performance in gender equality has been assessed as ‘mediocre’ in 2015 in a study commissioned by the European Parliament’s Women’s Rights and Gender Equality Committee (Botsch, 2015: 5). As seen in Fig. 5.2, the EIGE attests that Germany scored 68.6 out of 100 points in 2021, ranking as the 10th country in the EU in the Gender Equality Index. Since 2013, Germany’s score has risen by 6 points and increased from 0.5 points below to 0.6 points above the EU’s average score, marking a steady, albeit slight, positive trend. Figure 5.8 below shows that the country does particularly well with regard to health policies, in which it scores 90.7 points. The country performs best in the sub-domain of Access to Health Services, where it is ranked second among all EU member states. The country also scores high in the domain of Money (84.9 points), but there is room for improvement regarding Knowledge/Education (54 points) and Time spent on household chores (65 points). In contrast, Germany’s score in the Power domain has climbed the most, rising by 24.5 points since 2013, especially due to developments in economic decision-making. Despite these advances, the indicator still scores low compared to other domains. Even if in actuality women fill 29.4% of leadership positions in Germany, the higher the position, the lower their representation. For instance, women are represented in supervisory boards with 32%, on general boards with 12,3%, but they lead only 3.75% of all companies. Furthermore, all major German companies were headed by men until May 2021, when Belén Garijo was promoted to CEO at Merck KGaA, making her the first woman to run a major stock-listed company in Germany (Healthcare Businesswomen’s Association, 2021). As for LGBT+ in/exclusion, Germany ranked 15th among 49 European countries and 11th among EU members in ILGA’s country ranking

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Fig. 5.8 EU gender equality index scores (columns) and indicators scores (lines) for Germany, 2013–2021 (0–100) (Source Own elaboration based on EIGE, 2022)

in 2021, although it was slightly better positioned in 12th place in 2013. As seen in Fig. 5.4, from 2013 to 2016, the country’s overall score dropped by 3% and never crossed over the 60% line. The best performance (59%) was recorded in 2017 when the Marriage Equality Act was passed. In 2021, starting from a higher overall score of 53%, the breakdown by criteria in Fig. 5.9 shows strengths and weaknesses at different levels. The country fares well in the areas of civil society freedoms (100%), as well as legal gender recognition (64%) and asylum procedures (67%). The latter indicator scores well based on the recent immigration pressures that foster meaningful, albeit not sufficient, legal and judicial progress in the country after the 2015/2016 migration influx. The weakest policy sector appears to be the area of Hate Crime Laws (22%), given the only recently passed, minimalist hate crime bill. Furthermore, the reform of the as of spring 2023 not yet approved Legal Gender Recognition law provoked anti-trans* articles in the media. Moreover, the Ministry of Interior’s annual report registered a 39% increase in anti-LGBT+ hate crimes in 2020 compared to the previous year. The area of equality and non-discrimination also illustrates the uneven federal implementation marked by state-level differences: while in Dresden, a court refused

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to record the homophobic nature of a murder where a gay couple was killed, a victim of police abuse at the Cologne CSD was granted e15,000 compensation for pain and suffering in a settlement with the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia. To further investigate these advances and setbacks, one needs to delve deeper into the country’s dynamics after German reunification in 1989– 1990, which was ultimately a catalyst for a sustained, albeit slow, extension of civil rights to women and sexual minorities. These achievements result from a process shaped by four main political factors: Christian Democratic governments showing little commitment to gender and LGBT+ inclusion, international actors such as the EU, the political mobilization of social movements, and the domestic far-right populist sectors (Davidson-Schmich, 2017). How the process has been shaped can be synthesized in a double dynamic that includes ‘prestige and pincers’. Faced with the negative national identity produced by the Nazi regime, Germany derives prestige from the protection of the fundamental rights of its citizens. Therefore, when supranational actors challenge Germany’s Germany: Rainbow Index 2021 Asylum

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commitment to human rights, the country tends to save its international prestige by taking some, mostly rhetoric, action to defend its reputation. When domestic organized actors, often with the support of transnational activists, act as a pincer that squeezes the government by exerting pressure and pushing for policy change, policy concessions are likely to be obtained even from uncommitted or reluctant parties (van der Vleuten, 2005). These dynamics take place in a context shaped by the contrasting experiences of the two Germanies between the end of the Nazi regime in 1945 and German reunification in 1989/1990. That period set the basis for cultural and political differences that still persist today. The socialist (East) German Democratic Republic (GDR) advanced an intellectual and ideological framework that implied the perception of women as a workforce in a socialist state that focused on women as mothers and/or workers, with 89% of them active in the labor market. In contrast, the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) supported a more traditional Kinder-Küche-Kirche (children-kitchen-church) model for women together with a male breadwinner model in which only 56% of women worked (Boelmann et al., 2021; Kranz, 2005). As for LGBT+ issues, the two German states retained Paragraph 175 of the 1871 Strafgesetzbuch—the German Criminal Code—criminalizing homosexual acts between males. In the late 1980s, the GDR took some steps to end legal prejudice and discrimination against LGBT+. However, in West Germany, the Christian Democratic governments (Christian Democratic Union of Germany, CDU, and the Christian Social Union in Bavaria, CSU) held on to Paragraph 175 until 1994. In a nutshell, reunification implied that East Germany was forced to adapt to the West German institutions resulting in women being affected the most. The domesticated female role model of the Christian Democratic governments caused a gender imbalance in the private sector, resulting in many women losing their job or turning into part-time workers given the closing of day-care facilities (Bonin & Zimmermann, 2001). This explains the low score in the EIGE’s Time domain in Fig. 5.8: women still spend more time on childcare and education, housework, and charitable activities than men. Yet, the legacy of East Germany’s gender dynamics within the labor market helped many women overcome these setbacks. In the Western state of Nordrhein-Westfalen, for example, only 32.4% of mothers were working in 2021, while in the East’s Brandenburg state, the figure rises to 51.8% (Healthcare Businesswomen’s

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Association, 2021). It is often women in Eastern states who hold primary jobs. They occupy around 50% of the senior positions, significantly more than the portion among West German women. In addition, of the 17 former East Germans who have been ministers in the federal government since 1991, ten have been women, including Chancellor Angela Merkel, and of eleven former East Germans who have been party leaders during the same period, eight have been women. Similar patterns prevail when it comes to businesses. However, social policy reforms under socially conservative Christian Democratic governments in the last decades of the twentieth century reinforced patriarchal, heteronormative social policies, for example, in the enactment of male-dependent pension rights for mothers. By the turn of the twenty-first century, conservative social policies and gender-segmented labor markets were still upholding the strong male breadwinner model, which is reflected in Fig. 5.8, for instance, in Germany’s lowest score in the domain of Knowledge (54.7 points), due to significant shortcomings in the sub-domains of Gender Segregation in Education and Tertiary Education Attainment. In the new millennium, the leadership of the CDU and the role of Angela Merkel, Germany’s first ‘Eastern’ female chancellor, were pivotal to both in- and exclusion of gender and LGBT+ in Germany. From a gender perspective, the mere rise of Merkel to power is a milestone that indicates the progress of women’s presence in German political culture. Whereas Merkel’s East-to-West re-acculturation exerts some influence over her ambivalent social policies, her upbringing as a pastor’s daughter in a ‘godless’ state drove a strong declarative commitment to human rights. Merkel’s four-term tenure as chancellor from 2005 to 2021 also mirrors an international environment in which women globally were increasingly gaining positions in governments over the past three decades. She is doubtless an icon of the ‘symbolic empowerment’ of women that have inspired generations worldwide (Alexander & Jalalzai, 2020; Mushaben, 2018). Thus, her legacy on actual policy output on gender and LGBT+ issues has been shaped, on the one hand, by the reluctance of the CDU party that she led and her role in advancing equality despite her complicated relationship with feminism and queer perspectives (Ahrens et al., 2022: 2). Moreover, coalitional dynamics with the main center-left opposition party augmented these contradictory tendencies. For instance, a comprehensive national gender equality strategy focusing on nine activity areas similar to EIGE’s seven was only passed in 2020, after it was introduced and promoted by the Social Democratic Party of

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Germany (SPD) Women’s Minister Franziska Giffey. On the other hand, the process of Europeanization and Germany’s leading role in the EU were conducive to the pursuit of leadership and prestige. To that end, advancing women and LGBT+ equality was critical. Furthermore, pincers that squeezed out changes from the government included CSOs and other intergovernmental organizations (notably the European Court of Human Rights), internal pressures from coalition partners (particularly the SPD), and domestic political mobilization of diverse actors. The rise in power scores for women and the modest progress in LGBT+ rights under Merkel’s tenure occurred in a context of a limited increase in political representation for female and LGBT+ people. Therefore, the rise in the indicators is attributable to gender, family, and LGBT+ policies institutionalized during her grand coalition government with the main center-left party SPD. Such joint policies implied Merkel challenging her party’s traditional conservatism (Mushaben, 2018) and included implementing a corporate board quota, instituting a minimum wage, introducing family care leave, and adopting the Marriage Equality Act (Ahrens et al., 2022). In all these achievements, Merkel’s leadership was at stake. For instance, when the 2017 Marriage Equality Act was passed, the conservative reluctance of her CDU party was counteracted by the coalition government that included the SDP and the Green Party. Both parties had set same-sex marriage as a condition for the coalition before the elections. Eventually, Merkel let the CDU parliamentarians vote according to their conscience rather than tied to the party line on this issue. A quarter of the CDU and all other parties voted in favor; thus, the right to marry was granted to same-sex couples. Notably, Merkel voted against it. Political mobilization by activists was crucial in all those achievements. Indeed, Germany pioneered women’s and LGBT+ movements from the late nineteenth century onwards. However, the Nazi regime and the experiences during the post-war East and West German regimes and their subsequent reunification slowed and complexified civil society’s political will. The 1919 Weimar constitution granted women equal rights at several levels, and a women’s right to vote had been enacted in the same year when thirty-seven women were elected, making up 9% of a parliament ruled by Social Democrats (Shire & Nemoto, 2020). However, the appointment of Hitler as Chancellor of the German Reich in 1933 marked the end of women’s political rights during Nazism. In the post-war period, political mobilization of women did not progress

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in either of the two Germanys for distinct reasons: in East Germany, because of the repressive state policies and well-structured security police, and in West Germany, due to the influence of the Cold War that suppressed leftist movements, including more critical and proletarian feminist movements. The bourgeois women’s movements in West Germany consolidated partial political rights, while the labor movement ultimately opted for a moderate social policy that solidified the division of labor between the male breadwinner and the female housewife (Kranz, 2005; Shire & Nemoto, 2020). After reunification, feminist advocacy strengthened, but the unity of the movement and the consequent political mobilization was jeopardized by the fact that perspectives differed significantly, including anti-fascist, anti-capitalist, pro-socialist, and liberal feminisms. An intersectional approach to feminist advocacy to subvert the traditional roles placed upon women’s bodies and livelihoods was crucial to address feminist issues in Germany, such as gender-based violence, traditional female gender roles, and healthcare and reproductive autonomy. With growing political mobilization, in 2006 the Bundestag eventually outlawed discrimination based on gender, race, ethnicity, age, disability, and religion, after the Court of Justice of the EU found Germany guilty of failing to fully implement EU regulations aimed at fighting discrimination. Germany’s illiberal governance periods implied a setback for incipient LGBT+ rights efforts that started at the end of the nineteenth century to challenge the infamous Paragraph 175 criminalizing homosexuality. In those years, Germany became home to the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, the world’s first overtly political gay group. The Committee worked for the abolition of Paragraph 175, and, failing that, they succeeded in preventing the proposed expansion to include lesbians. While the two German states retained this legislation, in the last years of the Cold War separation, the GDR held a series of conferences to end prejudice and discrimination against LGBT+. By doing so, the socialist government could weaken the Lutheran Church, which had created working groups for gays and lesbians that proliferated throughout the country, and ultimately asserted greater control over East Germany’s emerging LGBT+ movement. By the time the Wall fell, gays and lesbians there had formed relatively well-networked groups that, given the repressive nature of the socialist regime, had little political influence (Davidson-Schmich, 2017). In West Germany, the influence of the Christian Democrats and the Catholic Church remained strong in the post-war

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period, and LGBT+ individuals continued to be prosecuted under Paragraph 175 until societal attitudes began to change in the 1960s. The fact that they were no longer criminalized but the homophobe law was not abolished, and the influence of the American gay liberation movement and European-level organizations such as ILGA sparked the mobilization of new LGBT+ groups. These, however, focused more on gaining public visibility than political lobbying. In an effort to completely repeal Paragraph 175, political mobilization emerged nationwide in West Germany in the 1980s with distinct associations formed for lesbians and gays. Although the objective was not reached then, these movements gained the support of the newly created Green Party, with the first openly gay and lesbian members of the Bundestag elected in 1985 and 1987, respectively. The CDU/FDP coalition and parts of the SPD continued to oppose LGBT+ rights, and thus, by the end of the 1980s, the FRG offered fewer freedoms to gay men than East Germany did. Lesbian, gay, and transgender citizens have acquired many legal protections since unification. Much of the credit can be attributed to the political mobilization of pan-German activist groups that emerged in the wake of reunification, including the LSVD (Lesbian and Gay Federation in Germany), ILSE (Initiative Lesbian and Gay Parents), which helped to form the Network of European LGBT Family Associations (NEFLA), and the German Society for Transidentity and Intersexuality (DGTI) (Davidson-Schmich, 2017). In the twenty-first century, meaningful advances in LGBT+ rights occurred as a result of intersex and trans* activism, including the 2011 amendment of the Transsexual Act to no longer require sterilization and surgery for legal gender recognition and the 2014 amendment to include an ‘indeterminate’ option for registering sex in public documents and registers. In 2018, Germany became the first country in the EU to introduce a nonbinary option for registering legal sex (von Wahl, 2021). Thus, when the Bundestag passed the Marriage Equality Act in 2017, the ILGA index reached the highest score (59%) in the country’s history, as shown in Fig. 5.4. Interestingly, the index dropped by 12% points the following year, reaching its lowest score (47%). While the increase in the number of categories evaluated by ILGA may partially explain this drop, it also stems, based on ILGA’s annual country review, from a host of other shortcomings related to hate crime laws and pending legislation related to trans* and intersex recognition as shown in Fig. 5.9. The far-right Alternative

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for Germany (AfD)’s vocal opposition, the last actor in our analysis, is also critical. In the 2017 German federal election, the AfD won seats in 14 of 16 state parliaments and became the third-largest party in the federal parliament. Unlike Poland, the German far-right populist forces have articulated relatively progressive positions on LGBT+ equality, with one of their party leaders, Alice Weidel, being an out lesbian herself. They have created homonationalist frames as markers of national identity, delineating the difference between the tolerant German and a homophobic immigrant ‘other’ society (Lancaster, 2020; Wekker, 2016). Thus, framing LGBTI rights as universal human rights offers a language for criticizing Islam and multiculturalism (Schotel, 2022). This unorthodox approach, which is understandable given the growing LGBT+ acceptance shown in Fig. 5.5, has generated positive electoral returns (Duina & Carson, 2020). As for anti-gender perspectives, the ‘traditional family’ is one of the guiding principles of the AfD’s gender agenda, a party that is predominantly led and elected by men. However, this new formulation of ‘traditional family’ does not simply involve the Kinder-Küche-Kirche program but is intersected by race and religion in their narrative on the so-called ‘demographic crisis’ that Germany is going through, linked to increased migrant and refugee influxes. Topics that involve women’s bodies such as birth rate, birth control, burdens on the social security system, and economic competitiveness, are crossed by this gender agenda (Hajek, 2020). This electorally successful political mobilization of the far right is also attributable to the dominant centrist consensus in German politics, which allows the AfD to pose as a ‘real alternative’. Mainstream media, conservative political sectors, religious movements, and other conservative and liberal milieus are part of this construction which slows down gender and LGBT+ inclusion in Germany.2 Yet despite the affirmation of a demographic or even governance crisis by the far right, Germany has overall integrated the various demographic, far right, Islamophobic, sexist, and homophobe challenges into its socio-political framework rather frequently, albeit with stagnation and progress being intertwined. 2 From women’s rights to immigration to support for the EU, far-right forces have shaped governmental programs and priorities. They have also forced parties from the center to veer to the right to retain voters. Chancellor Angela Merkel’s reversal of her 2015 open-door immigration policy for Germany offers a good example.

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Spain In 2021, Spain ranked 6th in the EU on gender equality with 73.7 out of 100 points, according to the EIGE’s data shown in Fig. 5.2. Its score is 5.7 points above the EU’s average score. From 2013 to 2021, Spain’s score increased by 7.3 points, driven mainly by improvements in the domain of Power. Contrastingly, the ILGA-Europe’s Rainbow Index in Fig. 5.4 shows that the country has suffered a drop of more than 10 points in the respective legal and policy practices for LGBT+ people falling from 73 points in 2013 to 62 points in 2021. However, Fig. 5.5 is evidence that the societal LGBT+ acceptance has notably improved in the country in the same period. How did a once traditionally Catholic society that spent almost four decades under a socially repressive dictatorship until 1975 become a leader in promoting gender equality and a highly accepting society for the LGBT+ community? The status of women and LGBT+ individuals in Spain has evolved significantly since the late twentieth century, when Spain underwent a transition from General Franco’s dictatorship (1939–1975), during which rights were severely restricted, to a democratic society where inclusion is viewed as a fundamental principle. In this sense, Spain is similar in religious as well as political culture to the fellow Mediterranean states with recent democratization experiences, such as Portugal or Greece, and possibly Italy. In all these countries, political mobilization of social movements and activists has been critical in shaping more egalitarian and inclusive societies. As for Gender Equality, Spain scores 76.9 points in the domain of Power, and thus, the country ranks third in the EU. Its performance has been mainly driven by an increase in gender-balanced decision-making in the political sphere and improvements in economic leadership. This has been the domain in which Spain has improved the most (24.3 points) since 2013, establishing itself as a European authority in fighting gender discrimination. The performance in the Health sector (90.3 points) is also remarkable. Despite this progress, gender inequality is most pronounced in two domains: Time and Knowledge. Spain scored 64.0 points in Time in 2021, almost one point below the EU’s score, where it ranks 14th. This is due to persistent gender inequality in the time spent on care work and housework. As for Knowledge, although Spain scores 67.9 (more than 5 points above the EU average), there is room for improvement. Similar to the sector Knowledge, the improvements in the domains of Work (+1.3) and Money (+1.9) have shown little progress since 2013,

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meaning that Spain has been able to maintain good gender inclusion levels achieved during decades of democratic consolidation but has not managed to improve much in recent years. Indeed, in relative terms, Spain has dropped by one place in both domains compared to the EU average since 2013. More worryingly, Spain shows a downward trend in ILGA-Europe’s Rainbow Index, as shown in Fig. 5.4. The country has dropped nine places in the European ranking, given that at the beginning of the 2010s, it occupied the second place. While in 2019 and 2020, it ranked 6th, in 2021, it dropped to 11th place out of 49 countries, indicating that the progress of LGBT+ rights in the Spanish territory is slowing down. This is particularly serious if we consider that Spain has been a benchmark state in LGTBI+ rights, and the average LGBT+ acceptance rate has been growing steadily, albeit slowly, as shown in Fig. 5.5. As seen in Fig. 5.11, one of the criteria that lowers the score is the non-recognition of nonbinary people and gender self-determination. In addition, the requirement of a diagnosis of gender identity disorder and mandatory medical intervention for trans people imply that it is still considered a medical/psychological pathology. By the end of 2022, these topics were being discussed in the Spanish Parliament, with a fair likelihood of passing a new law soon. The ILGA report also identifies needs for improvements, such as a statewide ban on conversion therapies and the implementation of public policies on asylum that contain express mention of all SOGIESC grounds (ILGA-Europe, 2022). Some historical and socio-political characteristics of the country account for this inconsistent, contrasting performance in gender and LGBT+ in/exclusion. In terms of political culture, Franco based his idea of a New Spain mainly on the idea of a national Catholicism. His regime began with the annihilation of the so-called Second Spanish Republic (1931–1936), which had allowed women to formally enter the public and cultural spheres through significant improvements in women’s rights, including the right to vote, divorce, and access to higher education. In the last preceding elections of 1931, 1933, and 1936, women could run in all three and vote in the last two. Some of the most prominent women in that period are considered pioneers of Spanish feminism. In addition, during the Second Republic, homosexuality was taken out of the Spanish Criminal Code in 1932, and thus for the LGBT+ community, a period of increasing cultural awareness, intellectualism, and advocacy emerged in

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Spain. The famous poet Federico Garcia Lorca is an icon of such a movement, exploring the taboo topics of classism and homoeroticism during that time. In many ways, Garcia Lorca is also a symbol of the detrimental situation women and LGBT+ individuals experienced in the years of the Franco regime. He was killed during the Spanish Civil war in 1936, and his remains have not been found to this day. The leftovers of that early Spanish progress on gender and LGBT+ inclusion similarly disappeared in the socio-political, economic, and cultural Francoist worldview. Under Franco’s regime, Catholic nationalism in Spain led to a marginalization of LGBT+ individuals and an extreme deterioration in women’s rights, which compares worse to the repression of German women in the Nazi period. Franco privileged the global institution of heterosexual marriage through the Catholic Church and reinforced male cultural superiority (Hochschild, 2017; Martinez & Dodge, 2010). Thus, Spanish women had little autonomy, making them dependent on their husbands, fathers, or the state. But they did have moral obligations, and women were severely punished for transgressions (Gómez Fernández, 2010). The Francoist code of morality for women restricted opportunities for professional careers, honored them as wives and mothers, and prohibited divorce, contraception, and abortion but permitted prostitution. Similarly, LGBT+ people were ferociously persecuted under Franco’s dictatorship, resulting in numerous LGBT+ people being sent into internment camps, imprisoned, or killed. Homosexuality was made illegal in 1954 through the reform of a previously existing ‘vagrancy act’ (Gahete Muñoz, 2021). The perceived threat of the harsh Franco regime provided a breeding ground for countercultural feminist and LGBT+ movements contesting the official idea of Spain based on patriarchal state authority and national Catholicism. Strong state control of public and private forms of masculinity and femininity reinforced a sexist domestic household and heteronormative family model as part of the Spanish national identity. In the interior of Spain, women played a very important role in the resistance to the dictatorship from the beginning by rebuilding the clandestine Spanish Communist Party and playing a central role in the anti-Francoist guerrilla as guerrilla liaisons and, occasionally, as guerrilla fighters. Two factors had a decisive influence on the solidification of the feminist struggle: the 1960s ‘Spanish miracle’—a period of exceptionally rapid economic development and growth in the country—and the fact that the only area of civic life that had not been closed to women was

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education, which was used as a tool for indoctrination. With the opening of the country to the international arena based on economic development and the consequent need for industrialization, the dictatorship had to relax some of the patriarchal impositions to facilitate women’s access to the labor market. From the 1960s onwards, opposition to Franco’s dictatorship grew, especially in industry and universities. After Franco died in 1975, Spain’s many feminist groups reconnected with Western feminism and began to mobilize to achieve the advances in gender issues that positioned Spain among the world leaders in this regard. In comparison, in the context of the Spanish economic miracle, in which tourism represented one of the key development factors, countercultural LGBT+ scenes emerged in Spain’s urban areas. Furthermore, the echoes of the Stonewall Revolt and the May’68 protests reverberated through secret publications and meetings in the last years of the dictatorship, which followed the anti-capitalist line of the Homosexual Liberation Movements that emerged in the Western Hemisphere and Western Europe. Thus, in 1970, the Agrupación Homófila para la Igualdad Sexual (AGHOIS) was founded in Barcelona, which a year later would be renamed Movimiento Español de Liberación Homosexual (MELH). The primary demand was the release of homosexual prisoners and other political prisoners. In the second half of the 1970s, other movements emerged in the Basque Country and Madrid. However, after the end of the dictatorship in 1975, homosexuality continued to remain illegal. In December 1978, the Spanish Constitution was approved, establishing gender equality before the law (Art 14) and religious freedom (Art 16) with the consequent separation of Church and state. Days after the approval of the new Constitution, Congress put an end to the illegality of homosexuality with 278 votes in favor and six abstentions. Yet LGBT+ movements were not legalized until 1981. The political mobilization of social movements in Spain, together with the support of progressive political parties, reconfigured the anti-gender and anti-LGBT policy of Francoism that had also permeated the Spanish social matrix. After EU accession in 1986, inclusion significantly advanced starting in 2004, with the rise to power of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) under PM Jose Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. Several factors were critical to these achievements, including the vigor of the organized women’s movement, feminist mobilization within the PSOE, a certain convergence of the People´s Party (PP) toward the positions of the PSOE on gender equality, the albeit imperfect separation of the

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Catholic Church and the State, and the influence of equality bodies and the EU (Valiente, 2007). In December 2004, the government passed the Organic Act on Integrated Protection Measures against Gender Violence which included numerous provisions on education, training, prevention, and awareness-raising with support measures for gender-based violence victims. Previously, several campaigns were carried out in the 1990s with the Socialist Party (PS) inviting women’s organizations to prepare a draft, which was rejected due to the majority of the ruling PP. That led to the creation of the Feminist Network against gender violence by several national and local associations in 2002 (Duran Febrer, 2005). In the first term of Socialist prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero (2004– 2008), the law was finally passed, and in 2007, the Gender Equality Law put Spain at the forefront of gender equality policymaking in the EU (Calvo & Martín, 2009; Lombardo, 2009). However, Zapatero’s second term (2008–2011) was more modest in legislative output. While many women were appointed to political decision-making positions and parliament passed significant legislation, abortion decriminalization, and domestic work were not considered pathbreaking (Valiente, 2013). The Spanish feminist philosopher Amelia Valcarcel coined the term ‘equality mirage’ to refer to the widespread idea that equality between men and women is already a reality in Spain, which resulted in a displacement of feminism from the public agenda (Valcárcel, 2008). Together with the 2008 crisis, the loss of strength of the feminist movement led to a slowdown in the advancement of gender equality in Spain. As seen in Fig. 5.10, educational gender equality has been at a standstill since 2013, weighed down by the fact that segregation in the choice of studies for men and women has not improved in the last two decades. Similarly, labor equality has been at a standstill, marked both by the scant progress in labor market participation and by the different occupations held by women and men. Only the power indicator appears to grow over time, as there are high levels of equality in the political-administrative sphere due to the evolving presence of women in senior positions in government administration (GutiérrezBarroso et al., 2022). Spanish Equality Law established that women must hold at least 40% of leadership positions in organizations (Terjesen et al., 2015), and the EIGE shows that in 2021 the three analyzed categories are above that average though they do not get parity: share of ministers (47%), share of members of parliament (42%), and share of members of regional assemblies (47%) (EIGE, 2022). In 2018, socialist Prime

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Minister Pedro Sánchez’s government appointed eleven women in the seventeen ministries, making Spain the country with the most female ministers in the world. Despite these achievements in the public sphere, there is a clear delay in women assuming managerial responsibilities in private companies, given that women held 36% of management positions in 2022 (Grant Thornton, 2022). In recent years, the movement has been revitalized, and proof of this has been the rise in participation in the 8M (March 8, International Women’s Day) mobilizations. In fact, in 2000, the call gathered 1,000 people in Madrid, and the figures remained below 10,000 until 2017. In 2016, after a gang rape at a festival in Pamplona, the country witnessed massive protests, and the 2017 8M demonstration assembled 40,000 protesters. In 2019, the 8M reached the historic peak of 375,000 people participating in Madrid, in addition to mass rallies in other cities (Garrido, 2022). However, divisions within feminist movements and the Podemos and PSOE parties, as well as the Covid pandemic demobilized the 8M movement, as only 56,000 people attended the Madrid marches in 2022. Two issues divide the broader movement: prostitution and the ‘Trans* Spain: Gender Equality Index 100.0 90.0

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Law’. On the first point, feminists are divided between those who aim to abolish prostitution and those who propose regulation. Multiple layers of partisan interests complicate the debate even more with the progressive Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez from PSOE pledging to ban prostitution with the aim to see sex workers treated as victims to be protected rather than criminalized, in line with the rise of ‘neo-abolitionism’ in several countries in Europe, such as the UK, France, and Ireland (Rubio Grundell, 2022). Adding complexity to the issue is the fact that the vast majority of sex workers today are immigrants with irregular residence status. The controversial initiative has split the women’s rights movement (Encarnación, 2021). To illustrate this, the 2022 demobilized 8M protests included two marches in Madrid, one promoting the abolition of prostitution and the other aiming for its regulation, with severe criticism between the two sectors. As for the so-called Trans* Law proposed by the equality minister Irene Montero from the leftist Podemos party, the debate is also challenging the unity of feminism in the country, as will be explained below. In fact, LGBT+ equality issues are more hotly contested than women’s equality in the country. In the first part of the twenty-first century, the political mobilization of LGBT+ that had been growingly pressing for equality since the return to democracy began to achieve major goals. Egalitarian marriage and other civil unions were regulated in 2005 through Law 13/2005, which amends the Civil Code regarding the right to marry, thus Spain becoming the first overwhelmingly Catholic nation to legalize same-sex marriage, ahead of Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Full adoption rights were also granted that year. In addition, arts. 22.4 and 510 of the Criminal Code increase penalties for crimes when they have occurred for reasons of sexual orientation and/or gender identity or expression. Law 3/2007, concerning the registry rectification of the sex of a person, represented an advance in the rights of trans* people by allowing them to change their registered sex on the basis of their gender assigned at birth. It also allows the person’s name to be changed to match their gender (Córdoba, 2021). Factors influencing such developments were related to the fact that Spaniards have become more open-minded when it comes to same-sex relationships, and LGBT+ acceptance had notably increased together with public support for rights recognition (Fig. 5.5). Some features of the party system also contributed, most notably the prioritization of civil rights. In the early 2000s, conservative Spanish political parties did not dispute the association between LGBT+ rights and

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human rights. Therefore, while the conservative PP stands against samesex marriage in their narratives, the party finally accepted, at least for the sake of public discourse, that same-sex couples deserve equal rights (Calvo & Trujillo, 2011). After these years of legal advancement, Spain dropped from second place in the 2011 ILGA-Europe ranking to 10th in 2021, indicating that progress in LGBT+ equality started to slow at that moment, as Fig. 5.4 shows. One of the criteria that lowered the score, as seen in Fig. 5.11, is the non-recognition of nonbinary people and self-determination. In addition, the requirements in Law 3/2007 for a person to be able to change their registered sex and name are controversial. These requirements include that the person presents a diagnosis of gender dysphoria and has been under medical treatment for at least two years, implying the pathologization of trans* people (Córdoba, 2021). It is worth noting how the role of medicine and public health is reenacted in the debates on these issues. Room for improvements also includes a statewide ban on conversion therapies and the implementation of public policies on asylum that contain express mention of all SOGIESC grounds. Spain: Rainbow Index 2021 Asylum

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In this context, the State Federation of Lesbians, Gays, Trans, Bisexuals, Intersex, and more (FELGTBI+ has pointed out that also the legislative inequality between Spain’s quasi-federal regions worsens the ranking in the annual index; hence, the need for a country-wide Trans* and LGBT+ Law in line with the LGBTIQ Strategy 2020–2025 of the European Commission (FELGTBI+, 2022). However, the ongoing debate on the Ley Trans (Trans* Law), has created several points of conflict between the governing alliance led by PSOE and the conservative PP and the far-right Vox party. While the core of all tensions is gender self-determination—that a person can change their name and sex in the ID only with their will—claims arise from various sectors ranging from the explicit inclusion of trans* immigrants in the law to the complete denial of rights for trans* people. The law has put a dent in the heart of political mobilization and social movements. While most feminists support the general spirit of the law, trans* phobe sectors within the movement used the 2022 8M mobilization to reject the proposal of the Minister of Equality Montero with banners that claimed, ‘Being a woman is not a feeling’ or ‘My oppression is not your identity’ (Garrido, 2022). While negotiations are currently ongoing, some leaders within the LGBT+ movement have expressed discomfort, adding tension to the debates. Notably, the socialist politician Carla Antonelli, the first trans* deputy of the Spanish democracy, left the PSOE in October 2022 after 45 years due to a ‘deep disappointment’ with the delay of the trans law (Antonelli, 2022). On December 2022, the Spanish Congress of Deputies Plenary approved the Trans* Law and referred it to the Senate for final approval in 2023. As in the other case studies in this book, the rise of the far right adds layers of complexity to this scenario. Unlike most Western European party systems in the last decades, Spanish radical right parties failed to gain representation after the Franco regime until the success of Vox in the Andalusian regional elections in 2018 and in the Spanish and European elections in 2019, when the party established itself as the third-largest party in Spain’s parliament (Schwörer et al., 2020). Therefore, during the leftist Zapatero administration in the first decade of the 2000s, the Catholic Church led political contestation of the various progressive policies introduced by the government. However, while the Church remains an influential institutional actor in Spain, the cultural gap between Catholics and the Church hierarchy paved the way for diverse and ambiguous perspectives within the institution, including the rise of

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right-wing groups that led to anti-gender and anti-LGBT+ political mobilization, such as Hazte Oir (Make Yourself Heard) and the Foro Español de la Familia (Spanish Family Forum) (Cornejo & Pichardo Galán, 2017). In this context, Vox gained power not only as a political mobilizer but also as an influential political decision-maker, especially due to its close relation and alliances with the conservative PP. The main features of this radical right party are not different from others in Europe: the link between national identity and anti-gender, anti-LGBT+, and antimigration sentiments has proved to be successful in Spain. Thus, while Vox is not a religious party, they refer to a Christian culture for strategic reasons in order to exclude gender and sexual minorities and emphasize ‘national values’ regarding family, abortion, same-sex marriage, and the so-called ‘crisis of gender ideology’. These stances have granted the party the support of conservative Catholic sectors and the attention of a broad conservative audience in a majority-Catholic country. Notably, a particular characteristic of the extreme right sector in Spain is the combination of anti-gender and anti-LGBT+ discourses linked to medicine and health issues which actualize the pre-Francoist perspectives on the topic. The intervention of the VOX deputy Mercedes Jara Moreno when discussing Madrid Pride 2022 illustrates the point: ‘We would like you to explain to us Spaniards […] what the Government is going to do so that the LGTBI Pride Day is not the trigger date of the monkeypox epidemic, as it was March 8 (demonstrations) for COVID-19’ (El Español, 2022) The link between social health, drugs, and mental illness is pervasive to most of the discussions is Spain, including conversion therapy to ‘cure’ homosexuality and the pathologization of trans* people. While political mobilization from opponents advancing moral-national panics creates tensions in the inclusion of gender and sexual minorities in the country, Spain has become a leader in the EU in terms of gender equality. It also has evolved into an even more accepting society regarding LGBT+ individuals although the past few years are marked by stagnation. Even though full inclusion has not been achieved, and several dimensions still need to be improved as evidenced above, Spain has used its experience in overcoming authoritarianism to benefit gender and LGBT+ inclusion in the social, political, and economic spheres.

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Sweden The five Nordic countries—Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden—are well known for implementing politics to foster inclusive societies. Among those countries, Sweden is considered one of the most gender-equal countries in the world. The so-called ‘Swedish exceptionalism’ has resulted from the dominance of social democracy, near-full employment conditions, and a welfare state redistributing income and creating an exceptionally high level of equality in the country (Pierre, 2016). This model entails the welfare state taking a leading part in gradually abolishing the traditional gender roles and taking steps to ensure that the LGBT+ community enjoys the same rights and opportunities as everyone else. In international comparisons, Sweden is often viewed as a top performer regarding gender and LGBT+ inclusion, although voices claim that there still is a long way to go (Bergqvist, 2016; Martinsson et al., 2016). Indeed, as shown in Figs. 5.2 and 5.4, Sweden ranks first in the EU on the EIGE’s Index with 83.9 out of 100 points and places 6th, with 68 out of 100 points, in ILGA-Europe’s Rainbow Index. The exceptional performance in gender equality places Sweden 15.9 points above the EU’s average score. Sweden consistently occupied first place in EIGE’s rankings, and Fig. 5.12 shows that since 2013, its score has increased by 3.8 points. However, since 2019, Sweden’s score has remained almost the same, with an increase of only 0.3 points. The more volatile domains are two: Knowledge and Money. Gender inequalities are most pronounced, however, in the Knowledge sector (75.2 points). Although Sweden ranks first in the EU in this domain and shows slow but steady progress in the index, improvements could be made in the sub-domain of Educational Attainment, including the percentage of graduates of tertiary education and the percentage of people participating in formal or non-formal education. Money is the only sector that experienced a drop. Since 2017, Sweden’s score has decreased by 2.1 points in this area. This change is caused by deteriorations in the sub-domains that measure income distribution and the percentage of +16 individuals at risk of poverty. On the contrary, the outstanding performance in the Health domain places the country at the top among all EU states with 94.6 points. It is also noteworthy that Sweden’s score has increased by 6.7 points since 2013 in the domain of Power, having had the largest improvement in this domain. With a score of 84.5 points, Sweden remains first among all EU countries in that area as a result of improvements in

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the sub-domain of Economic Decision-Making, which measures the share of members of boards in the largest quoted companies and the share of board members of the central bank. Attitudes toward LGBT+ people have been consistently improving in Sweden, as shown in Fig. 5.5. The country performs significantly better than most EU countries when it comes to LGBT+ acceptance, with the Swedish acceptance score increasing from 7.4/10 points in 2013 to 9.2 in 2020. Regarding legal developments, the ILGA-Europe Rainbow Index in Fig. 5.4 shows a fluctuating record, with the best performance recorded in 2014 with 72 points. After significantly declining to around 60 points in 2016 and 2017, Sweden has been on an upward trend to achieve 68 points in 2021. The temporary drop can be partially explained by the broadening of categories assessed by ILGA, which relativizes countries’ achievements by adding new targets. However, it also stems from deficiencies related to the lack of SOGIESC inclusion in a national strategy tackling hate speech. As for hate crime legislation, only sexual orientation was explicitly considered an aggravating factor. Similarly, while sexual Sweden: Gender Equality Index 100.0 90.0

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orientation was expressly included in asylum law as a qualification criterion, gender identity, intersex status, or sex characteristics were not, and there was no specific mention of SOGIESC in policy, instructions, or other positive measures related to asylum. Some of those legal shortcomings have been eventually addressed; therefore, the index shows a progressive recovery in recent years. Based on the breakdown of the 2021 Rainbow Index in Fig. 5.13, Sweden meets all the requirements related to Civil Society Space, including no state obstruction and protection of LGBT+ public events by public authorities. Also, 100% of the ILGA-Europe’s goals are met in the area of Family, including marriage equality, registered partnership, and adoption, among other rights. Although advances in asylum law include considering the whole spectrum of SOGIESC, the regulatory policies, instructions, and other measures on asylum lack sufficient consideration of these categories. There is also room for improvement in two other categories, namely legal gender recognition and, mainly, intersex bodily integrity. Sweden: Rainbow Index 2021 Asylum

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The reasons why Sweden is generally considered one of the countries with the most gender and LGBT+ equality worldwide are numerous, including not only the political institutions and actors but also the solid political mobilization of a civil society that continues to fight for further improvements. Moreover, some particular historical and cultural characteristics are also significant. However, in the past few years, rightwing forces seem to jeopardize the continuity of Sweden’s ‘exceptional’ inclusivity. The perception that Nordic societies are exceptional when it comes to gender equality is not novel. Indeed, inclusivity stretches back centuries before the development of the modern welfare state and originates from ancient Nordic culture, creating optimal societal conditions for egalitarianism in the twenty-first century. In ancestral Viking societies, women had comparatively more rights and influence than women in other cultures. They were warriors, could inherit property, and participated in the public sphere. Although these cultures were patriarchal, their legal systems were not based on the idea that women are the property of men and their rights depend on their fathers or husbands. Those cultural characteristics also shaped Sweden’s historical development throughout its absolutist monarchical period, which included notable female rulers. During the rise of capitalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, women had a more beneficial legal situation than in other countries. Swedish women could manage their businesses since the second half of the eighteenth century. Furthermore, business freedom was granted to unmarried adult women and men in 1864 (Sanandaji, 2018). These ideas also shaped women’s political mobilization from early on, and, in contrast to other European countries, feminism promoting women’s dual roles as mothers and workers and highlighting equal rights between women and men rather than gender differences was emphasized in all private and public areas. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Swedish gender equality solidified thanks to legal developments toward gender equality in the labor market. In the context of the 1930s economic crisis, the issue of married women’s employment arose. In contrast to proponents of a male breadwinner perspective, women’s organizations, including national housewives associations, defended their right to work (Sainsbury, 2001). In their discourse, workers’ rights were not linked to gender differences but to universalistic frames of citizenship (Hobson, 2003). Consequently, the parliament’s anti-discrimination legislation as early as 1938 protected the right to work for married and pregnant women and single mothers

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(Bergqvist, 2016). The idea of a gender-neutral earner-carer model was present in the country from the 1960s onward and influenced the development of the Swedish welfare state with policies regarding parental leave, individual taxation of married couples, and public childcare in the 1970s. A taxation reform was introduced in 1971, encouraging individuals to engage in paid labor, and, therefore, women’s labor market participation notably increased (Gunnarsson, 2016). Consequently, the demand for child care that allowed women to work led to the strong expansion of that right during the mid-1970s and 1980s. A law on parental leave was introduced in 1974, with Sweden becoming the first country in the world to give fathers the right to paid parental leave, thereby expanding the maternal leave legislation. Thus Sweden entered the twenty-first century with a robust and consolidated legal framework that has helped solidify gender equality. Indeed, gender mainstreaming has been a central strategy of Swedish gender policies since 1994, meaning that decisions in all policy areas must be permeated by a gender equality perspective (NumhauserHenning, 2015). Thus, for example, in 2014, the Swedish leftist-green government at the time adopted a distinctively feminist foreign policy that entails applying a systematic gender equality perspective throughout foreign policy organized around three Rs: Rights, Representation, and Resources. The starting point being that gender equality is an objective in itself, but it is also essential for achieving the government’s other overall objectives, such as peace, security, and sustainable development (Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs, 2018). Thus, Sweden was the first country in the world to pursue a feminist foreign policy, and an action plan was relaunched for a new four-year period after the general elections of 2018 (Government Offices of Sweden, 2018). This contributed to the international reputation of Sweden as a pioneer in gender equality by recognizing that the gender perspective is crucial for broader foreign policy objectives, including security and prosperity. Countries like Canada, France, and Mexico have followed suit, although Sweden’s incoming right-wing government distanced itself from the concept in late 2022, as will be detailed below. While historical and cultural characteristics of Swedish society and politics regarding basic values of gender equality facilitate such an inclusive legal framework, significant factors at the basis of such laws are the Swedish type of universal and egalitarian welfare state regime, together with a strong labor movement and the presence of Social Democratic governments that pursued gender equality as a goal since the 1960s.

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Importantly, the mobilization of women’s movements was pivotal to advancing women’s rights and political participation. In the 1960s, when some of the legislation that benefited the participation of women in the labor market was introduced, women were already highly influential in political debates and parliamentary decisions. Furthermore, a remarkable level of political agreement concerning gender equality among political parties from the whole ideological spectrum favored the continuity of these policies even when the Social Democrats were not in the government. Although there were opposing voices, they were never strong enough to change the course of policies that promoted the inclusion of women in the labor market and other social dimensions. And when some Liberal/Conservative governments came into power and entered into gender-contesting legislative debates, such policies were immediately corrected by the subsequent Social Democratic government, as was the case in 1994 with a patriarchal child care allowance law that was previously introduced by the right-wing populist party New Democracy. The latter succeeded in securing a parliamentary mandate in 1991 within a center-right coalition including the Centre Party, the People’s Party, the Moderates, and the Christian Democrats. However, after winning the 1994 elections, the Social Democrats abolished the childcare allowance in the autumn of that same year. Lastly, it is also notable that men were brought into the debate regarding gender equality and parenthood in the 1990s. They took a more active role in the discussion of parental leave, and the so-called ‘fathers’ group’ was of central importance in the debates about the low utilization of such a right by fathers (Bergqvist, 2016). Although this exceptional gender egalitarianism places Sweden as a world leader in gender equality, gender segregation, domestic violence, and political tensions contribute to the so-called Nordic ‘gender equality paradox’. This term was coined to describe social traits that conflict with gender equality as a widely, but not universally, accepted value in Sweden. Indeed, the Swedish government statistics agency of the Ministry of Finance reported that in 2022, the business sector continues to remain male-dominated in Sweden. Vertical gender segregation implies that female representation on publicly traded corporate and state-owned enterprise boards of directors is low. Few women are in top positions, with only 10% of the companies listed on the Stockholm Stock Exchange having women chairpersons and 36% of board members being women. Furthermore, only 13% of companies had female CEOs (Statistics Sweden, 2022; Terjesen et al., 2015). Horizontal segregation entails an unequal

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gender division of labor in disciplines such as science, technology, engineering, and mathematics in research and education as well as in start-ups (AllBright Foundation, 2020; Corneliussen, 2021; Stoet & Geary, 2018). Moreover, while specific results vary, a range of surveys indicate high rates of intimate partner violence against women (IPVAW) in Sweden (Wemrell et al., 2019, 2020). While no score is given to Sweden in the domain of Violence by the EIGE due to a lack of EU-wide data, the institute reports a sharp increase in the demand for services for female victims of violence based on reports by women’s organizations. It is also presumed that the Covid-19 pandemic has worsened the situation given the curfews and other private restrictions on mobility. The Gender Equality Index 2024 will add the domain of Violence; therefore, we expect to see another dimension of the equality paradox in Sweden, where the gender perspective in public discussion on IPVAW has been taking place since the 1970s. The Swedish gender equality discourse has also been closely connected to nationalism; therefore, gender equality rights appear to be consensually formed and for the most part, free of controversy. They are described as gradually achieved in a historical linear development process from the Vikings’ onwards, and therefore, as an essential part of Swedishness. This discourse creates ‘a particular idea of the Swedish nation and fantasies about a great and gender-equal future, but also recreates a hierarchical order between an imagined modern, highly developed “we” and a less developed “other” that lacks those attributes, an imaginary map of a Swedish modern territory and “the rest”’ (Martinsson et al., 2016: 6). Thus, being Swedish is linked to gender equality and, more implicitly, native-born whiteness. The consequences of this discourse are multiple. For instance, Wemrell et al. show that IPVAW is often assumed to be perpetuated by and against ‘others’. The victim is imaged as weak, helpless, and unrelated to the gender-equal Swedish woman, and the perpetrator as a deviant or foreign ‘other’ to the Swedish man, although this imagination does not fit with the realities of IPVAW in Sweden (Wemrell et al., 2019). The Sweden Democrats (SD), a right-wing political party currently in a government coalition with aligned center-right parties, and other (un)civic groups and organizations draw from these chauvinistic and nationalist arguments for limiting migration based on gender equality as a Swedish cultural characteristic. At the same time, they threaten gender equality legislation, given the pre-eminence of equality as part of Swedish culture. The SD party, with its historical roots in Nazi

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and fascist organizations, is strongly anti-feminist, but they use gender equality in its agenda when targeting migrants and discussing multiculturalism. Hence, in their worldview, Swedishness implies a special status not open to non-Swedes: ‘in the construction of Swedishness and its stance against migrants, the SD at times ends up highlighting positive aspects of gender equality, arguing that (a soft version of) gender equality is culturally Swedish and thus antithetical to migrants’ (Mulinari, 2016: 154). So much so that the new government that took office in October 2022, as a result of an agreement among the right-wing block after the general elections, immediately abandoned the feminist foreign policy that had gained an international reputation for the country. In the announcement, the brand new Minister for Foreign Affairs, Tobias Billström, said: ‘Gender equality is a fundamental value in Sweden and also for this government. But we’re not going to continue with a feminist foreign policy because the label obscures the fact the Swedish foreign policy must be based on Swedish values and Swedish interests’ (Walfidsoon, 2022). It remains to be seen what this rhetorical shift will imply in practice. LGBT+ equality started from a slightly different point, given that LGBT+ individuals did not enjoy the status women had in Swedish history and culture. However, the country progressively included LGBT+ topics in its agenda, and currently, Sweden’s LGBT+ legislation is regarded as one of the most progressive in Europe and the world. It was not until 1944 that Sweden decriminalized same-sex sexual relationships, or fornication against nature, as it had been referred to in Swedish law since 1864. Decriminalization followed a public debate that redefined homosexuals as mentally ill rather than criminals. Consequently, while the 1944 legislation stopped prosecution, homosexuality was still considered immoral and harmful, with homophobia prevalent in the 1950s. Therefore, the age of consent was 18 years, as opposed to 15 years for heterosexual relationships (Sundevall & Persson, 2016). While visibility increased, particularly in the press when in March 1950 a Swedish Lutheran pastor, published an article in a newspaper claiming that a homosexual mafia of wealthy gay men patronized rampant gay prostitution in Stockholm. The so-called ‘Kejne affair’ escalated by including accusations against the police, the attorney, and the cabinet minister. The 1944 decriminalization law and the Kejne affair sparked the reaction of a group of homosexuals who started to organize in 1950. That first initiative was under the umbrella of the Danish organization ‘Förbundet af 1948’ (‘The Association of 1948’), and in 1952 became independent

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and was named ‘Riksförbundet för sexuellt likaberättigande’ (the National Organization for Sexual Equality), better known by its acronym RFSL. The RFSL, the nation’s largest and most influential LGBT+ rights activist organization to date, worked politically to lower the age of consent for same-sex sexual acts and to have the right to enter into marriage. While those attempts were unsuccessful, they focused on creating closed spaces for social events for its members. In 1957–1958, the RFSL was reorganized with three divisions: ‘Kretsen’ for male members, ‘Diana’ for female members, and ‘Albatross’ for members outside of Stockholm (RFSL, n.d.). Entering the 1970s, RFSL became politicized and intensified its fight against discrimination, shaping Sweden’s first wave of legal change. The organization’s political mobilization was driven by a new generation of Swedish gays and lesbians influenced by the international movements of the 1960s and mainly the Stonewall riot of 1969. The younger members advocated for ‘gay liberation’, openness of the organization, and active advocacy. As a direct result of the RFSL’s efforts, the parliament agreed in 1973 on a principal statement that a relationship between two persons of the same sex is an entirely acceptable form of living together. Notably, the 1972 Legal Gender Recognition Act allowed individuals to change their legal gender identity after medical review, and Sweden became the first country in the world to enshrine that right. Furthermore, the age of consent was equalized to that of heterosexual activity (15 years old) in 1978, although homosexuality was still considered a mental illness (Sundevall & Persson, 2016). In 1979, lesbian and gay political mobilization escalated when the RFSL took a ‘reverse discourse’ strategy: the federation encouraged people to ‘call in sick’ to the Social Insurance Agency and claim that they were unable to work because they were homosexuals, that is to say, because they had a societally attributed mental disorder. ‘Calling in gay’ was part of a broader protest from the RFSL that included letter and phone campaigns and the occupation of the National Board building as a demonstration against pathologizing homosexuality in August 1979. By gay people employing and taking advantage of the same categories by which they were labeled, the National Board declassified homosexuality as a disease in late October 1979, and it was finally de-medicalized (Baaz & Lilja, 2022). A second turn in LGBT+ rights policy started in the new millennium, after two decades of incremental progress and equality. Yet in those years, Sweden’s vibrant LGBT+ advocacy was overshadowed by the residual

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shadow of HIV/AIDS and the consequent stigma of the gay population. Policy development began again in the 2000s due to external and internal pressure to address formal and informal discrimination within the ranks. Doubtless, Sweden’s entry as a member of the EU in 1995 put pressure on the country to comply with the Union’s requirements. In addition, LGBT+ political mobilization on a national and international scale created the conditions for the Swedish welfare state to move forward decisively with fundamental rights for the LGBT+ community. Thus, the 1998 Homosexual Cohabitees Act and the 2003 Cohabitation Act included same-sex partners and gave them equal rights to those in heterosexual relationships. Also, in 2003, Sweden recognized the adoption and legal custody rights of children of same-sex couples. In addition, the Prohibition of Discrimination Act came into force, banning discrimination linked to sexual orientation in several areas, including labor market policy activities, starting or running a business, pursuing a profession or occupation, participation in labor organizations or professional bodies, and housing. Throughout all this time, RFSL had been one of Sweden’s primary lobbyists for legalizing gender-neutral marriage. Although same-sex domestic partnerships have been legal since 1995, political mobilization continued, and in 2009, the Swedish parliament passed the Marriage Act, a genderneutral law that equalizes the rights and obligations of all married couples, regardless of their sexual orientation (van Doorn, n.d.) As discussed above in the explanation of Fig. 5.13, it is important to emphasize that, at present, many of these laws apply to sexual orientation but not gender identity. The transgender community is, at best, indirectly included in this legislation, and therefore, many of their rights may be jeopardized. Despite the importance of the 1972 Legal Gender Recognition Act that allowed individuals to change their legal gender identity, no legal improvements were observed until amendments in the Legal Recognition Act entered into force in 2013, allowing legal gender changes without hormone replacement therapy and sex reassignment surgery. Furthermore, in 2022, a reform to the legal gender recognition law was proposed, including separating the requirements for changing one’s legal gender marker in identity documents and those for accessing gender-affirming surgery. However, both the 2019 amendment and the 2022 proposal include a medical diagnosis and a decision made by the National Board of Health and Welfare as preconditions for undergoing legal gender recognition procedures, thus reinforcing a pathologization of the legal gender recognition procedures. In the same vein, the RFSL

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claims that ‘[f]or non-binary people, legal gender recognition is presently impossible, since Sweden does not recognise more than the two binary genders’. Consequently, the federation recommends that ‘[t]he Government should consider introducing a third legal gender or completely abolishing legal gender to make legal gender recognition available for everyone’ (Orre, 2017: 35). Failure to facilitate depathologizing legal gender recognition procedures and binarism in gender recognition are two factors that explain the low performance on the Legal Gender Recognition and Intersex Bodily Integrity criteria assessed by ILGA in Fig. 5.13. Moreover, new challenges to LGBT+ equality arise when considering some concepts brought into play in the new political climate during the last decades in which conservative and populist parties such as the Christian Democrats and SDs have grown in power. The SD has repeatedly vocalized its support for LGBT+ rights and gender equality, but the logic has pivoted around a construction of Swedishness that includes those values as part of an exclusive national identity (Duina & Carson, 2020). Thus, right-wing actors increasingly enlist LGBT+ equality in nationalist, xenophobic, and racist projects that exclude racialized and Islamic residents as risks or threats. The construction of homonationalism that reproduces notions of ‘enlightened, tolerant and progressive “Swedishness” opposed to a patriarchal, traditional and oppressive Islamic other’ (Kehl, 2018: 28) situates white LGBT+ people as the ‘right’ kind of people as opposed to racialized ‘others’, who are depicted as adversaries of equality, intolerant, and perpetrators of violence. The consequences of these discourses for equality and non-discrimination are multiple, especially with the rise of populist far-right actors such as the SD.

Conclusion As these case studies have evidenced, the political mobilization of both national and international civil society actors and their, albeit limited, capacity to influence ruling political parties has had a significant impact on social in-exclusions in the four countries. Therefore, social in/exclusions emanate not only from implementation gaps within EU member states based on social and political advocacy at any given time but also reflect a more substantial normative negotiation and contestation within countries. While implementation gaps have been visible in all of the four member states, Poland stands out for its recent EU-mandated inclusion attempts

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and now, for its governmental exclusion of gender and sex minorities. On the other hand, Spain and Sweden have made consistent improvements as a result of political mobilization among social and political actors while increasing political gender and sexual equality in both countries. Germany with its gradualist approach toward inclusion has more recently elicited societal and political pushback by opposing forces. Hence political mobilization is often advanced at ‘critical’, i.e., crisis-related junctures that motivates the mobilization of social movements and CSOs. The comparative examination of those constituencies showed that an increase in women’s rights can co-occur with stagnation or even a decrease in LGBT+ rights, as happened in Spain or Germany. Finally, on a policy level, the EIGE index illustrates how advances in any of the seven measured policy domains contrast with regressions in related domains in the same country. For instance, while in Poland, the domains of Work and Money indicators show improvements in socio-economic gender equality over time, the Power domain, measuring political, economic, and social representation, declined. And Germany has improved in the latter area but paradoxically shows stagnation and slight regressions in related areas of Knowledge (education) and Time (spent on uncompensated chores). Overall, our in-depth analysis leads us to hypothesize that inclusion policies and strategies are accompanied by exclusions in other areas of private and public life. In this regard, the agenda of conservative nationalist sociopolitical forces that includes some limited aspects of gender and LGBT+ equality and excludes others, such as migrants and refugees, seems critical, particularly given the electoral success they had in recent years. Accordingly, the following two chapters examine the politics of in/exclusion for migrants and refugees.

References Ahrens, P., Ayoub, P. M., & Lang, S. (2022). Leading from behind? Gender equality in Germany during the Merkel era. German Politics, 31(1), 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/09644008.2021.1986009 Alexander, A. C., & Jalalzai, F. (2020). Symbolic empowerment and female heads of states and government: A global, multilevel analysis. Politics, Groups, and Identities, 8(1), 24–43. https://doi.org/10.1080/21565503.2018.1441034 AllBright Foundation. (2020, May). Tech dudes caught in their own myth (p. 18). Retrieved December 12, 2022, from https://www.allbright.se/s/TECH_D UDES_2020_WEB.pdf

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CHAPTER 6

The Politics of In/Exclusion in the EU: Refugees and Migrants

Introduction Immigration and Asylum are politically loaded terms and a central topic at the heart of European policy construction and consensus-building. While it is widely accepted that migration produces a net benefit if appropriately managed (Jaumotte et al., 2016; Mallaby, 2015), the dynamics of migration globally have changed rather considerably in that the EU is experiencing unprecedented levels of individuals seeking protection. Despite all member states being party to the UN’s Geneva Convention guaranteeing asylum for refugees, the recent past was marked by domestic and EU-level contestation over the region’s refugee policy. This discord stems in part from the fact that the region had not received considerable levels of refugees from outside of their borders until the 1990s. With heightened attention paid to it, migration is often securitized, especially with regard to those coming from the Mideast (Huysmans, 2000; Iov & Bogdan, 2017). In addition, since the 1970s labor migration has increasingly become a political issue in domestic politics in Europe, and in the twenty-first century, for the EU as well. In the following, the main characteristics of political in/exclusion of migrants and refugees will be detailed, especially with regard to the EU’s arduous task of developing an effective policy that is amenable to most member states and at the same time fulfills the human rights standard the bloc has set for itself. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Thiel et al., The Politics of Social In/Exclusion in the EU, Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31264-9_6

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While protection-seeking is front and center in those debates, it is important to distinguish two main types of migration: First, human mobility, when migration results from the relatively free choice of the person or group who migrates. Economic migrants, those who are not fleeing direct physical harm or political repression but are instead in search of greater economic stability, opportunity, and survival, are included in this group. This movement of persons may take place within the confines of the law. However, this type may also result in irregular migration when it takes place outside the laws, regulations, or international agreements governing the entry into or exit from the State of origin, transit, or destination (IOM, n.d.). The second type consists of forced migration when the movement is forced by natural disasters, conflict, persecution, discrimination, and deportation. In this group, asylum seekers (those seeking refugee status) are those who have fled war, violence, or persecution in their home country, according to the Geneva Convention, ‘owing to [a] well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership [in] a particular social group, or political opinion’ (UNHCR, 2016). The distinction between voluntary migration and seeking refuge is important mainly because the legal status of an individual arriving in Europe is assessed case by case. Within the European legal refugee regime and the UN Convention relating to the status of refugees, newcomers not fleeing persecution are to be returned to their point of origin unless they arrive as recruited guest workers. In contrast, those seeking protection will enter the murky waters of obtaining refugee status, resettlement, and integration in Europe. With regard to the latter category, there is considerable discord over how asylum and protection status are determined and differentially applied across demographic, as well as across member states, exemplified by the different experiences of Ukrainians versus migrants from non-European countries entering the EU. Immigration to the EU gained momentum after the end of the Cold War, with migrants coming predominantly from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. A new era was ushered in 1992 with the first Balkan war and the ensuing surge of refugees from Bosnia, as approximately 1.2 million Bosnians fled in the 1990s to Western Europe and further afield to Canada and the United States. These population movements impacted a relatively homogenous socio-economic polity as Bosnia is considered a future EU member state, similar to Ukraine. The then15 West European member states, despite socio-economic South-North

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wealth disparities, had somewhat similar political and normative stances on migration and asylum. Their experience of European integration in this regard was built on a premise of economic prosperity that included early on labor mobility within its single market and limited guest-worker recruitment but was not designed for migratory pressures from outside. Over the past decade, the most recent population movements into Europe are characterized by individuals coming from war-torn countries such as Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and surrounding states throughout the Gulf, as well as from Northern Africa, and the Sahel region. In recent years, the worsening social, political, and economic conditions in some Latin American countries have substantially impacted the number of asylum seekers in Europe as well. Thus, Venezuela and Colombia are among the top 5 countries with the highest number of first-time asylum applicants in the EU (Eurostat, 2021). With those arrivals, several issues materialized, such as the securitization of migration (Bourbeau, 2017), and the problems in converging on an adequate, jointly designed EU policy on refugees. Furthermore, Islamist terrorist attacks beginning with the 9/11 ones in the United States, followed by several more across Europe, have resulted in substantial resistance to allowing undocumented individuals in. The EU’s process for reception and integration is contested and not up to the task of adequately receiving and processing migrants and refugees, though it seems that some intuitive alterations are being made, such as, for instance, reforming the Dublin agreement and eliminating a quota-based system, as will be pointed out below. However, objections to these policies are still far from resolved, and sustained disapproval from the Visegrad Four Central European states (the ‘V4’, consisting of Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and Hungary) creates ongoing tensions within the EU. In terms of the impact of global risks and threats on these issues, the global financial crisis stemming from the 2008 meltdown with the subsequent Euro-crisis, and the surge of destabilization throughout the Middle East including the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, and the civil war in Syria as well as the unfulfilled promises of North Africa’s Arab Spring in 2011 created instability and conflict at Europe’s borders. As a result, increased numbers of individuals from these regions have been trying to reach Europe’s shores for the past decade. European citizens have taken notice and this influx has been politicized as threatening to European socio-economic structures, sparking social strife and political

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backlash across the continent. More recently, push factors to leave countries were triggered by the socio-economic repercussions of the Covid-19 pandemic in the EU’s neighborhood. The EU itself is a diver of migration as well, as it uses its trade leverage and agricultural subsidies in ways that contribute to the destruction of livelihoods in the Global South (Magassy, 2020). Given its easily accessible location and bounded principles relating to human and fundamental rights, the EU is one of the most desirable places for displaced persons to travel to. Importantly, the political conflicts causing these population movements are not resolved yet. Rather, they continue, and new migrant and refugee streams are emerging at an unabated rate, resulting in human trafficking from the Middle East, Southeast and Central Asia and Africa, and Latin America, among others. In other words, as communications and transportation technologies advance, growing human rights abuses and underdevelopment are motivating more individuals to leave their home country, often with the help of rights-abusing traffickers. If there is going to be lasting protection, the EU is challenged to become a central actor in these various root causes as well. The 1990s saw the emergence of a common EU approach with the formulation of an initial migration policy focusing on migration management, fair treatment of refugees and migrants, and cooperation with the countries of origin, subsequently formulated through the Tampere (1999–2004), Hague (2005–2009) and Stockholm (2010– 2014) programs with respective action plans (Papagianni, 2006). Importantly, the so-called Dublin Regulation of 1990 specifying a rule-based system for the processing of asylum requests started the ongoing debate as to how to meet the present challenges of forced migration to Europe. 2015, the start of the so-called refugee ‘crisis’, constituted a watershed moment demarcating a new era of mass migration and an ensuing debate on the topic across the EU. The Common European Asylum System (CEAS) has existed on paper since 1999 but has not been solidified or ratified for the last two-and-a-half decades (Lavenex, 2018). This is because each state’s policy is informed by a mix of economic, political, and cultural considerations—customs and beliefs shared over generations by locals, whether religious or otherwise—and migration is arguably one of the most prominent topics challenging broader regional cohesion in the EU today (Kentmen-Cin & Erisen, 2017). Populist, anti-migrant forces have sprung up across the continent, though the clearest divide exists between Central Europe and its Western neighbors.

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To establish a foundation for analyzing and interpreting the present situation in the EU and move beyond an oversimplification of migration and resettlement debates in the EU, this chapter addresses primarily the first central question of this book: what effects did the structural changes caused by crises in the EU had on the in/exclusions of migrants and refugees in the EU? Here, the main EU-level challenges are detailed whereas in the following chapter, the impact of those leading to a rise of political mobilization and identity politics in the four case countries are detailed. To comprehensively grasp the issues faced by Europe’s sociopolitical agents and structures, the following analysis provides a discussion of where migration and asylum policy development began, how it has evolved, the socio-political and economic challenges to consensus (i.e., Western Europe versus the V4), and considerable ethical issues related to the inclusion of forced and informal migrants, for the EU.

Europe’s Migration Roadmap: Post-War Resettlement to the New Pact on Migration and Asylum The refugee policy at the supranational level has long been in flux. The European approach to asylum, enshrined in both national legal provisions, international humanitarian law, and the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), has been an ongoing post-war project, though it has yet to achieve a Union-wide resolution (Heijer et al., 2016). In the period directly following World War II, Europe was tasked with protecting ca. 10 million refugees displaced by the shifting of borders in the aftermath of the war (Antons, 2014). While the sheer number of refugees was formidable, they were not entirely diverse. In other words, those seeking asylum throughout Europe were almost entirely from Northern, Central, and Eastern Europe. After Finland, the largest group of asylum seekers in European countries came from Germany. The phenomenon, however, did not remain only an internal European problem. In the postWorld War II period, the Americas received the last waves of European emigrants, which originated mainly in the Mediterranean countries. These Europeans joined the 13 million who had already migrated to the region between 1870 and 1930 (Sanchez-Alonso, 2019). Moreover, while asylum is a major part of the immigration debate today, migration from former colonies made up the lion’s share to Europe

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in post-war times, in particular to France, the United Kingdom, and Spain. The European migration platform was not built upon the presentday understanding of asylum, as it did not come into being until the 1990s with the signing of the Dublin Convention in 1990. Instead, migration was largely conceived of as a return of residents from former colonies. Protection was typically not the reason provided for allowing their migration. Instead, these were economic migrants seeking stability in the colonial ‘homeland’. Following its independence in 1962, roughly 950,000 Algerians, many of which were Maghrebi migrants arriving under the Social Action Fund (1958) to shore up a dearth of labor in post-war France, immigrated there throughout the 1960s. Similarly, the largest number of migrants to the United Kingdom came from former colonies, first with the Windrush generation from the West Indies, followed by roughly 300,000 from India, 140,000 from Pakistan, and 170,000 from various parts of Africa over the next 20 years (Lowe, 2020). Refugees did arrive throughout the Cold War, including those fleeing war-torn Vietnam; however, their numbers were relatively small when compared to those coming for reasons other than protection. This trend was similar for most of Western Europe, though given their respective colonial footprints, the preferred destination for many was the former colonial powers. These days, only a few countries such as Spain or Portugal receive a large number of migrants from former colonies. Spain is also experiencing the return of the second and third generation of Spanish emigrants that migrated or fled to Latin America in post-colonial times. Many of them even inherited the Iberian nationality from their (great-grand)parents. Countries such as Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Argentina, and Peru which had received Spanish emigrants several decades ago, are now the origin of immigrants and refugees that seek asylum in Spain. Cultural proximity is crucial in this case. Moreover, the geographical proximity to the North of Africa also implies a flow of non-Hispanic refugees through the Mediterranean, specifically to the Andalusian coasts and through the Atlantic in the Canary Islands. This situation is similar for many other Mediterranean EU countries. When looking at the present-day European migration policy construction, two things become evident. First, as noted above, immigration patterns are dynamic and fluid. Immediately after the Second World War, the primary concern was internally displaced persons, shortly thereafter migration resulting from the dissolution of colonial empires and the need to shore up the local labor markets became more important later

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on. Germany signed a number of temporary guest working agreements; first with Italy in 1955, then with Spain in 1960, and later in 1968 for residents coming from Yugoslavia. Though in contemporary parlance, none are as central to the German debate on migration as the guestworker exchange program first launched with Turkey in 1961. Roughly 2.5 million people with a Turkish background live in Germany today, making Turks the largest migrant community in the country (Prevezanos, 2011). Asylum and protection became more prevalent in the 1970s and 1980s, though the numbers of those seeking refuge were rather limited when compared to other prevailing migrant groups. The new era of immigration in Europe began in the 1990s and was in large part spurred by the Balkan wars. Since the 2000s, the numbers of displaced persons and asylum seekers have increased significantly and arguably, the last two decades were a watershed moment for asylum protection in Europe. The last decade alone has seen peak numbers of individuals seeking protection. 2015 marks an inflection point, when 1.3 million asylum seekers made their way to mainland Europe. This immense increase has led states to search for joint reception policies. To better understand how Europe has tried to address an issue of extreme consequence for social in/exclusions in member states, the following provides a snapshot of how the EU has aimed to address asylum and protection from a policy perspective. To develop a comprehensive framework for the process of asylum, the Dublin Regulation was instantiated with the jointly agreed upon Dublin Convention of 1990. In 2003, a new iteration of the regulation, Dublin II came about, and later in 2013 Dublin III was formulated, adding iterative improvements but maintaining the controversial rule that asylum seekers have to be processed in the first country they arrive in; thus heavily impacting the Mediterranean border states. The recent fractures stemming from the most recent refugee crisis, more specifically the challenge of establishing consensus on burden-sharing, effectively ended the Dublin process. An updated CEAS was the next step in the project to provide legislative framing to standardize a more formalized approach to asylum law throughout the EU with the primary objective to establish. a clear and workable determination of the state responsible for the examination of an asylum application. [Implement] common standards for a fair and efficient asylum procedure. [Establish] common minimum conditions of reception of asylum seekers. [And provide an] approximation of rules on the recognition and content of the refugee status. (EASO, 2016)

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The system’s inadequacies, albeit, became self-evident in its inability to formulate a rapid and sufficient response to the substantial increase of individuals seeking refuge in 2015 and after (Beirens, 2018). The configuration of the existing scheme seemed problematic but was well-regarded among many member states that were far removed from the SouthEastern border entry points to the EU. Hence after the ratification of the Amsterdam Treaty in 1999, the Europeanisation of migration and asylum policies expanded swiftly. Mandates relating to refugee status, third country nationals (TCN) and asylum seekers (including the Dublin Convention and regulations therein), along with the establishment of the EU’s FRONTEX border agency and the 2005 Global Approach to Migration Management (GAMM) formed a comprehensive approach; albeit one, in the post-9/11 realm, that ‘established migration as a phenomenon that poses risks’ (Karamanidou, 2015: 38). Under the EU’s current Lisbon Treaty, the blueprint of the new comprehensive approach is outlined under Article 3(2), as: Freedom, security and justice without internal frontiers, in which the free movement of persons is ensured in conjunction with appropriate measures with respect to external border controls, asylum, immigration and the prevention and combating of crime. (European Union, 2016a: 19)

These externally focused measures, however, have proved both inappropriate and ineffective. While policies on migration, borders and the neighborhood ‘are often articulated at the national level, the EU has been the locus of both discourses and practices securitizing migration in the European context, with Europeanizing dynamics capable of magnifying rather than actually managing national imagery and perceptions of external and internal threat” (Costea & Costea, 2015). Thus, despite progress toward the construction of a joint asylum system, attendant structures to deal with neighborhood-derived migration remain weak. The Migration Policy Institute observed in June 2014 that: The evolving global context of conflict and displacement, highlighted by the Syria crisis, failures by many states to protect their citizens, and mixed migration more broadly will continue to throw up new challenges in the asylum domain in the years ahead for the EU and member states, requiring robust systems and policies that can be adapted to meet them. (Garlick, 2014: 1)

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2015 marked the beginning of Europe’s steepest migration challenge, as by one estimate by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) 1,011,700 migrants arrived by sea and 34,900 by land. Another estimate from FRONTEX, the EU’s external border force placed the figure even higher, at 1,800,000 (BBC, 2016). The seemingly insurmountable scale of the crisis emanating across the Mediterranean required a swift yet comprehensive response. The tragic, highly publicized death of Alan Kudri, a two-year-old Syrian boy was emblematic of the sheer scale of the challenge facing the EU’s southern borders. With mounting pressure to enact a more robust response to the crisis in the Mediterranean, the EU launched its European Agenda on Migration (EAM) emergency response, which was comprised of 4 key components: (1) reducing incentives for irregular migration, (2) a strong asylum policy, (3) saving lives and securing the external borders and (4) a new policy on legal migration (European Commission, 2015c). The rapid responses’ included additional funding for the EU’s border agency FRONTEX, tripled capacities for two FRONTEX Joint operations (Triton and Poseidon), and an additional e60 million for ‘frontline’ member states—primarily used for the constructing and staffing reception centers. The planned redistribution of 20,000 migrants across Europe was another cornerstone of the response. Member states were given e50 million to subsidize the safe distribution alongside an increase in European Migration Officers in transit countries. The EU Commission has since released its New Pact on Migration and Asylum. One fundamental alteration of the 2020 plan is the planned retraction of the Dublin Regulation. The new pact replaces it with the Asylum and Migration Management Regulation, which is said to completely reform the system with a more comprehensive approach to migration and refugee matters. The new framework contains guidelines for the next steps in implementing the pact. A series of initiatives are expected to be introduced by 2024 including an Action Plan on Integration and Inclusion, a Strategy on the future of the borderless Schengen area, a Strategy on Voluntary Returns and Reintegration, an Operational Strategy on Returns, as well as an EU Action Plan against Migrant Smuggling, and a Skills and Talent package. As in previous negotiations among the member governments, the V4 group of Central European states is pushing back against the increasing centralization of migration policies. One of their primary claims is that V4 countries have limited experience with and resources for admitting and resettling large numbers of refugees, as compared to their Western neighbors. But also right-wing

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governments such as can be found in Italy or Sweden are pushing back. The Common European Asylum System is currently the subject of fractious debate. Europe supports allowing refugees to resettle within the boundaries of the EU, but V4 members aim to return to a fortress-style Europe by categorically denying migrants and refugee seekers access to their states (Cymbranowicz, 2018), as will be detailed below. While the EU’s approach to asylum and redistribution has not sufficiently met the needs of all of its members, especially its most impacted states along the southern border, the project is malleable and in constant transition (Guild et al., 2015). Understanding these tensions, the European Commission abandoned the idea of mandatory refugee quotas, attempting to reform Europe’s asylum and migration rules after more than four years of deadlock on the topic. In a break from the previous mandate, no country will be obligated to provide shelter. To incentivize countries to provide asylum, however, the EU budget will provide 10,000 euros for each resettled adult. Solidarity ‘of the willing’ will be used to break the stalemate over the 2015 initiative that required European members to bring in a quota of refugees. The voluntary solidarity mechanism of 2021 with a target goal of 8000 relocations from Greece and other pressure points, however, is not backed by all member states and has, as of Spring 2023, led to a relocation of only 435 individuals (Liboreiro, 2023). In the meantime, millions of people continue to leave their homeland due to precarious living situations. Access is facilitated by information regarding European destinations, both via the internet and by word of mouth (Dekker et al., 2018). After all, in each EU member state, there are expat communities and legacy individuals from places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Venezuela, Colombia, Somalia, and other states throughout North Africa, the Mideast, and Latin America creating further ‘pull’ effects, but also constituting integration aids, for new arrivals. An additional challenge on asylum in Europe is that many are now considered economic migrants or undocumented arrivals. ‘The European commissioner for home affairs, Ylva Johansson, said the emphasis on returns reflected the changed reality since 2015. “We need to deal with the real situation and not deal with the situation that people have in their heads,” she told a group of reporters. “Most [arrivals] are not refugees: two-thirds of irregular arrivals will have a negative decision”’ (Rankin, 2020). Regardless of the internal debate by EU states on this policy, each of its members is considerably diverse in its economic, political, and social makeup. To explore this divergence further, the EU can be divided

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into two competing facets when it comes to migration and asylum: Western Europe and Central & Eastern Europe (CEE including the V4). Approaching the issue in this way is not done to deny any internal divide existing between the West European states or to downplay tensions between Northern and Southern member states, but rather to highlight the extreme difference between the expectations of the European Commission when devising their approach to migration and the different conditions affecting the V4 when configuring their general approach, in particular as it relates to asylum and resettlement.

Asylum in Europe---Overcoming the Safe-Third Country Policy With the rise of asylum seekers, burden-sharing has become a recurring focus of Europe’s mitigating agenda. Without a unified framework to meet this challenge, the EU has designed a practical solution now deemed the ‘safe third country’ approach (or ‘safe host country’, indicating EU-external protection elsewhere). In November 1992, the European ministers responsible for immigration adopted a ‘Resolution on a Harmonized Approach to Questions Concerning Host Third Countries’ (ECRE, 2006). Critical to the institutionalization of the mandate was the challenge of how to best determine if a country sufficiently met the requirements of being hospitable, and when the measure should be applied. At the crux of the problem are questions regarding the duty of care and how it relates to burden-sharing. For example, what is the best practice for deeming responsibility for the care of an individual traveling from Somalia to Hungary, who then travels overland to Germany? Or for someone who is trafficked across the Mediterranean to Italy, and then proceeds to Sweden by land? To use the example of one of our case countries, while Article 16(a) of Germany’s Basic Law still affirms that ‘politically persecuted [individuals] enjoy the right to asylum’, it also states that entrance to Germany is not assured to those who enter from a ‘safe’ country, as defined as a nation where the 1951 Convention relating to the status of refugees and the European Human Rights Convention, is applicable. Every state surrounding Germany meets these requirements, and thus can be considered a safe third country, meaning refugees could be sent back to their first EU entry point. Though there are numerous examples of how the safe third country strategy went awry, two are particularly salient: the inability of Greece to

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process a large number of refugees coming directly across the Mediterranean, and the French ‘Jungle’ in the coastal town of Calais. At the start of 2016, in the middle of winter, it was thought that the overall flow of refugees coming to the EU would slow down. Greece was still experiencing the lingering effects of an economic depression stemming from the Euro Crisis and had paltry resources for dealing with even a portion of those arriving. Yet they were supposed to assume responsibility for assisting, registering, and distributing arrivals to the rest of the EU member states. Even in the dead of winter, some 2000–3000 people per day crossed from Turkey to Lesbos, Chios, and a handful of other islands as a first step in their journey to Europe. Greece fundamentally could not afford to receive, assist, and process them all (Mavridis & Mouratidou, 2019). Lesbos, the largest island in the eastern Aegean and where a large part of Syrian refugees initially landed, did not have the necessities required to process tens of thousands of asylum applications. It became immediately clear that the third country policy was not sustainable. To alleviate the flow of protection seekers, the EU awarded e816.4 million in emergency response to buttress Greek authorities and (I)NGOs operating in Greece, as well as struck an arrangement with Turkey. In exchange for 3 billion euros, Turkish authorities agreed to slow the flow of refugees to Greece. Several critics, however, have highlighted how this agreement was exclusionary in nature and was never honored in full (Lehner, 2019). Beyond the limited sovereign capabilities of Greece, a fundamental lack of oversight and funding from the side of the EU existed. Moreover, an underwhelming level of coordination between the EU and UNHCR, not to mention a dearth of willingness to find a viable solution by EU member states became apparent. When the safe third country policy was authored, numerous sovereign and geographical constraints were overlooked (Trauner, 2016). The strategy, developed on the supranational level, lacked practicality when applied to a crisis that was global in scale but disproportionately affected few particular states within the EU. Greece remains a primary entry point for those seeking protection after entering the EU and pressure remains high on the Greek islands. In early 2020, EU Home Affairs Commissioner Ylva Johansson even announced a scheme to pay migrants in overcrowded camps e2000 each to return home. This was problematic given that anti-refoulment, a principle in international law that prohibits any country that receives asylum seekers from returning them to any country where they face the risk of persecution based on race, nationality, membership of a particular social

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group or political opinion, is one of the official normative cornerstones of Europe’s migration project. And many of those living in these camps are unable to return home for a variety of reasons. The journey may be still too dangerous, and in cases such as Syria, home is no longer inhabitable. By March 2020, the Greek islands housed nearly 42,000 asylum seekers, though they were originally designated to take only 6000 (BBC, March 2020). The result of the safe third country policy and the considerable burden placed on Greece is abhorrent. Greece, one of Europe’s weakest economies and a nation that has endured years of austerity measures, was tasked with the documentation and well-being of the majority of refugees arriving in Europe. In this sense, Greece’s issues stemming from the refugee waves were exacerbated by the EU (member states), and its problems became emblematic of one of the most wayward inclusion debates in contemporary European memory. It should be noted that when a plan was devised to meet the new era of emergency migration, considerations regarding the geographic reality of its member states and their economic conditions should have been taken into account. The necessary steps to ensure that the appropriate redistribution mechanisms and funding required were in place before a challenge of this considerable proportion were not taken. The imminent fiscal retraction from the Covid-19 pandemic will most certainly have an additional negative impact on how refugees are received and managed, whether it be in Greece or somewhere else along the Mediterranean (Bussetta et al., 2019; Economou et al., 2018). Issues surrounding the safe third country policy were not exclusive to Greece. The challenges there were in part the result of geographic and political conditions. Defiance of the program, however, became most pronounced in northwestern Europe, particularly in Calais, France. In line with the EU’s policy, a refugee is not permitted to enter any country they choose, but instead, the individual must register and claim asylum in the first country they reach where it is possible to claim asylum. However, due to dismal conditions in the Mediterranean, a considerable portion of refugees made their way through open borders across mainland Europe, where they proceeded to countries where they had access to social networks, family, and informal access to employment. Many of those became stranded in Calais on the Northern French coast and attempted to reach the UK shores across the channel to connect with other migrants residing there. Thus hundreds, if not thousands of

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refugees ended up in territorial limbo (Connor, 2017). When they arrive at European shores, many do not have proper documentation. This is often the case for individuals coming from war-torn countries and why the UNHCR initiated the refugee passport program (Article 28 of the 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees), which mandates states to issue travel documents to registered refugees: The Contracting States shall issue to refugees lawfully staying in their territory travel documents for the purpose of travel outside their territory unless compelling reasons of national security or public order otherwise require, and the provisions of the Schedule to this Convention shall apply with respect to such documents. (UNCHR 30 August 1978)

Unfortunately, the scheme has not been as effective as intended and many of those who entered Europe between 2011 and 2015 did not have, nor were offered proper documentation (Chai Yun Liew, 2019). The residual effects of the Covid pandemic, as well as the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine still affect every member’s economy across the EU, including Greece. To put this in real terms, the EU Commission’s report projects that the potential recovery will reduce unemployment in Greece to 16.5%—the average for the EU-27 is 7.5% as of 2020 (Eurostat, n.d.). Thus we should expect volatility for refugee reception to remain high in the Mediterranean EU member states. Many who had made their way across the Mediterranean soon found ways of their own to expedite their journey onwards, before receiving official approval (Roberts et al., 2016). One repercussion of this was the migrant camp on the border of Calais referred to as ‘the Jungle’. The area is notorious for being home to those who are not formally recognized as refugees by France because of a different entry point, and have escaped repatriation measures with no access to Great Britain. The result is hundreds of attempts to illegally traverse the channel to make their way to the British Isles, either in the back of a lorry or by boat. What ensued was a tense political dispute between territorially adjoining EU states, which in the Calais case contributed to exaggerated migration fears leading to a Brexit vote to leave the EU. Adding to these issues, in 2022, France and the United Kingdom signed a border agreement whereby France received millions of Euros in exchange for the prevention of migrant crossings to the United Kingdom.

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The safe third country policy has since come to pass, at least in practice. The Dublin agreement is no longer the cornerstone of the EU’s refugee management. The refugee experience, however, does not end with migration, which has often been overlooked in the greater scheme of things. Long-term socio-economic integration, defined as obtaining long-term stable employment and socio-cultural integration including language acquisition and political participation, is difficult to achieve. Part of the issue is that integration models vary significantly among member states despite the EU’s ‘common basic principles for immigrant integration policy’ adopted in 2005—but they also apply differently according to the type of societal newcomer (Papagianni, 2006). Migrant capacities vary, and so too do the countries hosting refugees. Populism, nationalism, and conservatism, advanced by extreme radical right political parties are on the rise throughout Western Europe, as will be pointed out in the next chapter. While a clear divide exists between the West and Central European governments in their approaches to immigration, new polling data suggests that a reduced tolerance for accepting refugees is becoming commonplace throughout the continent. To gauge consensus, a Gallup poll asked residents across the globe if they were open to having migrants as their neighbors and marrying into their families. With a score of 5.92 (the highest possible outcome being 9), EU countries collectively rank in the middle globally. Yet it is concerning that only two countries in Europe—Sweden and Ireland—remain in the top ten most welcoming ones, while out of the 10 least welcoming ones across the world, 9 are in Central- and Eastern Europe (Gallup, 2019). Western European members are divided on how to approach the question of asylum reception in the EU. Germany and Sweden had initially accepted the challenge with open arms, with both taking in the largest number of refugees (roughly 890,000 arrived in Germany) in 2015, and the greatest number when comparing it to the size of their population (190,000 or roughly 2% of Sweden’s population), respectively. The response remains divided among other EU members, based on the aforementioned limited acceptance of migrants and refugees. Approval for Brussels and the EU policies is not as clear-cut as we might expect. A 2019 study conducted by the Pew Research Center obtained mixed findings when asking people in 10 EU member countries (Poland, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, France, Sweden, Italy, Hungary, the United Kingdom and Greece) that do not align as neatly as one would expect when looking at Western Europe versus the V4 Group. Concerning

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refugees, most Europeans think the EU has not handled the issue well. The Dutch were the most supportive, with 37% believing the EU has organized refugee policy well. In Germany, 27% approve of the EU’s role in this issue, while in Greece, only 7% do so. Finally, half of the respondents said their countries should reduce the number of immigrants or take in none at all. Greece had the highest level of disapproval (82%) and Spain the lowest (30%). Of note, 58% of those in Germany would like to further limit its immigration quota or have no immigration whatsoever, compared to 52% in Sweden and 41% in France (Gherke, 2020). This data evidences the public legitimization challenges the EU and its member governments face when developing and implementing asylum and refugee policies. Yet consensus-building is key to the functioning of the EU. Resettlement and protection have long been central to Europe’s integration project, though the sheer number of those in need of protection is indicative of a need for the EU to recalibrate its regional approach. It would be remiss and misleading to not acknowledge the incremental steps that have been taken to facilitate the process in Europe. But as this chapter argues, to improve the present conditions faced by asylum seekers, economic migrants, and refugee communities throughout the EU, researchers and policymakers alike must work to understand and interpret the structural transitions, constraints, and risks and how they are affecting Europe’s migration project. Policy and practice are by and large shaped by its original member Western states, and are still dominated by those. Postcommunist member states such as those in Central and Eastern Europe, which had little post-war experience with migrants and have only of late begun to achieve economic prominence have had little say about the process. Below, the challenges for the V4 members are highlighted that further endanger a unified approach to asylum. The Great Divergence: EU Solidarity Versus the Visegrad 4 Group The V4 group of states is at loggerheads with the EU institutions, as well as with other member states, over its approach to asylum and resettlement. The debate surrounding relocation began in 2015 when the European Commission requested that 160,000 refugees be redistributed proportionately throughout the EU (European Commission 2016). While there was much controversy around the quotas based on national economic capacities and population, the four Central European countries outright rejected the proposed scheme. Since the onset

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of the refugee surge, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia have been opposed to the EU mandate laid forth primarily by Germany. Though in contrast to the latter, which would have to take in 18% of all resettled refugees, Poland would only have had to take in 5%, the Czech Republic 3%, and Hungary and Slovakia close to 2% of the overall number of refugees (European Commission, 2016). Each of the V4 members has had a different level of participation in the planned relocation scheme, though none have directly met the thresholds requested of them by the European Council. For instance, Poland and Hungary rejected the scheme completely, though they argued that they have permitted a number of refugees in need of protection access (Stockemer et al., 2020). Hungary has not admitted a single asylum seeker who falls under the EU relocation scheme; however, the Fidesz government granted international protection to around 1300 asylum seekers in 2017. Slovakia accepted 16 refugees, not because of the EU-advocated scheme, but on a purely voluntary basis. Moreover, in December 2015, the state did resettle 115 Assyrian Christians from Iraq. Poland sits at the center of the debate, as it is the most politically, demographically, and economically significant member of the group of four (Fredriksson, 2019). Beyond V4’s geographic challenges, CEE countries face a more structural challenge that is not equally shared with its Western partners. Their socio-economic structures including demographic outlook are only recently becoming more economically robust, and with it, culturally diverse. It would be remiss, to omit the significant impact the Warsaw Pact had on the social, political, and economic isolation in the past. Despite their economic growth, most notably in Poland, which is now one of the most economically successful member states buoyed by EU Structural funds (Cienski, 2017), the CEE region remains somewhat insular and generally opposed to immigration, despite its demographic decline. In a 2019 poll conducted throughout the EU, roughly 50% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that migrants contributed positively. Comparatively, only 39% of respondents in Poland, 19% in Hungary, 16% in Slovakia, and 10% in the Czech Republic, felt similarly (Clark, 2020). Therefore, it should come without surprise that Central European members remain staunchly opposed to Europe’s mandate on asylum. The New Pact on Migration and Asylum eliminates a quota scheme and is now orchestrated on a more voluntary footing. Yet conditions and capabilities on the ground that would facilitate such a large-scale relocation, remain vastly different from those of other Western Members.

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Geographic and political economy challenges aside, an ideological divide over who is considered a refugee remains a controversial topic between the Commission and V4 member states. This is most pronounced in Poland, which at the same time is currently impacted by the Ukrainian refugee influx, as will be detailed in the country case in the next chapter. As evidenced throughout this chapter, the EU is facing a new, though, less defined challenge to migration. Similar to the transformation that has taken place regarding asylum, stemming from the 1990s onward, the EU is on the precipice of a new dawn of migration. Reformulating a common approach to migration and asylum is complex and is now, in many ways, a challenge more focused on (required) informal migration than it is for providing primarily refugee status. Who should be allowed access to the EU potentially pits irregular economic migrants against those seeking protection from persecution. To overcome the tensions between EU members and pave the way toward regional consensus, a new approach to not only asylum but also meeting the needs of those fleeing dire economic conditions is needed. The EU Trust Fund for Africa was created in 2015 and endowed with 5 billion Euros to support countries of origin, but its purpose has been muddled in the politicization of a rather restrictive migration-development-security nexus (Lauwers et al., 2021).

Conclusion Over the last three decades, the EU has devised and altered its structural and legislative processes, trying to meet the demands of increased migration pressures. The Dublin Convention was initiated in the 1990s to aid displaced persons in the wake of the war in the Balkans. As migration expanded in originating factors and sky-rocketed in scale, the last twenty years have been marked by subsequent regulations, which have sought to advance a supranational resolution to disperse and share the burden of providing refuge. The destabilization of the Mideast coupled with sustained conflicts and environmental challenges throughout the African continent has displaced tens of millions, forcing them to start anew elsewhere. And the EU’s geographic proximity and economic, political, and social status has made it the most desired location for migrants from Europe’s Southern and Eastern neighborhood as well. Despite the immediate need to provide protection for the most marginalized communities

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and the intent of goodwill harbored within the EU, innumerable challenges prevent the bloc from reaching a consensus on matters relating to protection and migration. Forced and informal migration is accelerating at an unprecedented rate, caused by prevailing and rapidly emerging threats and risks indicative of the ‘global risk society’ (Beck, 2015). These are likely to have a direct effect on European affairs, both at home and abroad. How Europe navigates the resettlement of the most recent arrivals from 2015 onward, as well as finds a solution for the large numbers of those arriving who do not directly meet the requirements laid out in the UN Refugee Convention or Article 18 of the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights will be telling for how we can better understand future challenges related to migration. It is important to understand that the issues facing the Union are not only related to conflicts emanating from neighboring countries or those across the Mediterranean. Civil war continues to rage in Syria and Libya, and the trend of migrants traveling through Africa and across the Mediterranean remains steady; moreover, new large-scale issues of displacement are emerging around the globe, from Latin America to Central Asia. If the European Commission is going to continue to advocate for protection and lead by example, then solutions for accommodating those fleeing some of the most densely populated countries in the world will need to be found. Key dividing factors for a workable common approach are economic and demographic in nature—there is a clear divide not only between East and Western Europe but also between North and Southern Europe. Favorability for right-of-center political parties is on the rise across the EU. New challenges presented by the ongoing pandemic—health security, crises beyond surrounding regions, the fear of more instability caused by geopolitical challengers such as China or Russia—highlight the supposition of liquid modernity that change is increasingly accelerated in the modern world. Regardless of conditions on the ground in sending countries, there is a strong, uncontrollable pull drawing migrants from around the world to Europe. It is not a question of if or when, but instead of how the EU can establish an adequate consensus to assist those most in need. To rectify the structural issues associated with meeting the needs of refugees and increasingly informal migrants, the EU needs to recognize localized constraints among its members. Scrapping the Dublin Regulation and inculcating Europe’s New Pact on Migration and Asylum is a first step toward bringing about a supranational consensus; however, in

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domestic societies, there are increasing signs of more pronounced societal in/exclusions, as will be demonstrated with the help of regional case studies in the following chapter.

Works Cited Antons, J. H. (2014). Displaced persons in postwar Germany: Parallel societies in a hostile environment. Journal of Contemporary History, 49(1), 92–114. BBC. (2016). Migrant crisis: Migration to Europe explained in seven charts. Retrieved November 20, 2020, from https://www.bbc.com/news/world-eur ope-34131911 Beck, U. (2015). Global risk society. In G. Ritzer (Ed.), The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Globalization (1st ed.). Wiley. Beirens, H. (2018). Cracked foundation, uncertain future: Structural weaknesses in the common European asylum system, from http://aei.pitt.edu/102715/1/ migration_policy.pdf Bourbeau, P. (Ed.). (2017). Handbook on migration and security. Edward Elgar Publishing. Busetta, A., Mendola, D., Wilson, B., & Cetorelli, V. (2019). Measuring vulnerability of asylum seekers and refugees in Italy. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 1–20. Chai Yun, J. (2019). The law’s broken promises to stateless persons. Brown Journal of World Affairs, 26, 87. Cienski, J. (2017). Why Poland doesn’t want refugee. Politico EU . Retrieved November 10, 2020, from https://www.politico.eu/article/politics-nation alism-and-religion-explain-why-poland-doesnt-want-refugees/ Clark, D. (2020). To what extent to do you agree or disagree that immigrants contribute a lot to your country? Statista. Retrieved October 10, 2020, from https://www.statista.com/statistics/1011116/contribution-ofimmigrants-to-visegrad-countries/ Connor, P. (2017, September 20). Still in Limbo: About a million asylum seekers await word on whether they can call Europe home. Pew Research Center. Cymbranowicz, K. (2018). “Fortress Europe” or “Open door policy”–Attempts to solve the refugee and migration crisis in the European Union in 2011– 2017. International Business and Global Economy, 37 (1), 53–70. Dekker, R., Engbersen, G., Klaver, J., & Vonk, H. (2018). Smart refugees: How Syrian asylum migrants use social media information in migration decisionmaking. Social Media+Society, 4(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/205630511 8764439

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Economou, M., Dieti, E., & Lazaratou, H. (2018). Alternative versions of stigma: Attitudes of the Greek public toward refugees amid economic recession. European Archives of Psychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience, 268(2), 213–214. ELENA. (2006). Report on the application of the Dublin II regulation in Europe. European Legal Network on Asylum. Retrieved November 12, 2022, from https://ecre.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/ECRE-ELENA-Reporton-the-Application-of-the-Dublin-II-Regulation-in-Europe-_March-2006.pdf European Commission. (2016). Press release: EU relocation and resettlement: Member states need to deliver. Retrieved January 5, 2022, from https://ec. europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_16_829 Eurostat. (2021). Asylum statistics. Retrieved November 10, 2021, from https:/ /ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Asylum_statistics# Citizenship_of_first-time_applicants:_largest_numbers_from_Syria.2C_Afghan istan.2C_Venezuela_and_Colombia Eurostat. (n.d.). Unemployment statistics. Eurostat. Retrieved February 14, 2023, from https://ec.europa.u/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php? title=Unemployment_statistics Fredriksson, E. (2019). How Poland’s ‘golden age’ of economic growth is going unreported | View. Euronews. Retrieved November 20, 2020, from https://www.euronews.com/2019/06/25/how-poland-s-golden-ageof-economic-growth-is-going-unreported-view Gallup. (2019). Revisiting the most and least accepting countries for migrants, Poll report. Retrieved November 10, 2020, from https://news.gallup.com/ opinion/gallup/245528/revisiting-least-accepting-countries-migrants.aspx Gherke, L. (2020). EU citizens’ verdict on Brussels: Good for peace but out of touch. Politico. Retrieved December 2, 2020, from https://www.politico.eu/ article/eu-approval-rating-survey-democracy-refugees-brexit/ Guild, E., Costello, C., Garlick, M., Moreno-Lax, V., & Carrera, S. (2015). Enhancing the common European asylum system and alternatives to Dublin. Study for the European Parliament, LIBE Committee. Heijer, M., Rijpma, J., & Spijkerboer, T. (2016). Coercion, prohibition, and great expectations: The continuing failure of the common European asylum system. Common Market Law Review, 53, 607. Huysmans, J. (2000). The European union and the securitization of migration. JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies, 38(5), 751–777. https://doi.org/ 10.1111/1468-5965.00263 International Association of Refugee Law Judges European Chapter under contract to EASO. (2016). An introduction to the common European asylum system for courts and tribunals a judicial analysis. EASO.

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IOM. (n.d.). Key migration terms. International Organization for Migration. Retrieved September 14, 2022, from https://www.iom.int/key-migrationterms Iov, C., & Bogdan, M. C. (2017). Securitization of migrants in the European Union. Research & Science Today, 1(13). Jaumotte, F., Koloskova, K., & Saxena, S. (2016). Migrants bring economic benefits for advanced economies. International Monetary Fund. Retrieved November 14, 2022, from https://www.imf.org/en/Blogs/Articles/2016/ 10/24/migrants-bring-economic-benefits-for-advanced-economies Karamanidou, L. (2015). The securitisation of European migration policies: Perceptions of threat and management of risk. In G. Lazaridis & K. Wadia (Eds.), The securitisation of migration in the EU: Debates Since 9/11 (pp. 37–61). Palgrave Macmillan. Kentmen-Cin, C., & Erisen, C. (2017). Anti-immigration attitudes and the opposition to European integration: A critical assessment. European Union Politics, 18(1), 3–25. Lauwers, N., Orbie, J., & Delputte, S. (2021). The politicization of the migration-development nexus: Parliamentary discourse on the European Union trust fund on migration. Journal of Common Market Studies, 59(1), 72–90. Lavenex, S. (2018). Failing forward’towards which Europe? Organized hypocrisy in the common European asylum system. JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies, 56(5), 1195–1212. Lazaridis, G., & Wadia, K. (Eds.). (2015). The securitisation of migration in the EU: Debates since 9/11. Palgrave Macmillan. Lehner, R. (2019). The EU-Turkey-‘deal’: Legal challenges and pitfalls. International Migration, 57 (2), 176–185. Liboreiro, J. (2023, February 8). Only 435 asylum-seekers have been relocated under a voluntary EU scheme. Euronews. Retrieved February 9, 2023, from https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2023/02/08/only-435-asylum-see kers-have-been-relocated-across-the-eu-since-june-under-a-new-voluntary? Lowe, K. (2020). Five times immigration changed the UK. BBC. Retrieved November 20, 2020, from https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-511 34644 Magassy, M. (2020). The EU is fuelling hunger in Africa. Project Syndicate. Retrieved January 11, 2023, from https://www.project-syndicate.org/ commentary/eu-common-agricultural-policy-hurts-africa-covid19-by-muh ammed-magassy-2020-08 Mallaby, S. (2015). Net benefits: How to understand the economic impact of migration. Foreign Affairs, 28.

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Mavridis, S., & Mouratidou, S. (2019). Living in refugee camps in northern Greece. Multilingual Academic Journal of Education and Social Sciences, 7 (1), 29–51. Papagianni, G. (2006). Institutional and policy dynamics of EU migration law. Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. Prevezanos, K. (2011). Turkish guest workers transformed German society. Deutsche Welle. Retrieved November 20, 2020, from https://www.dw. com/en/turkish-guest-workers-transformed-german-society/a-15489210. Accessed November 23, 2020. Rankin, J. (2020). EU proposes to ditch refugee quotas for member states. The Guardian. Retrieved November 20, 2020, from https://www.thegua rdian.com/world/2020/sep/23/eu-proposes-to-ditch-refugee-quotas-formember-states Roberts, B., Murphy, A., & McKee, M. (2016). Europe’s collective failure to address the refugee crisis. Public Health Reviews, 37 (1). https://doi.org/10. 1186/s40985-016-0015-6 Sánchez-Alonso, B. (2019). The age of mass migration in Latin America. The Economic History Review, 72(1), 3–31. https://doi.org/10.1111/ehr.12787 Stockemer, D., Niemann, A., Unger, D., & Speyer, J. (2020). The “refugee crisis”, immigration attitudes, and euroscepticism. International Migration Review, 54(3), 883–912. Trauner, F. (2016). Asylum policy: The EU’s ‘crises’ and the looming policy regime failure. Journal of European Integration, 38(3), 311–325. UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). (2016). UNHCR viewpoint: ‘migrant’ or ‘refugee’—Which is right? Retrieved January 17, 2022, from https://www.unhcr.org/en-us/news/latest/2016/7/55df0e 556/unhcr-viewpoint-refugee-migrant-right.html

CHAPTER 7

Political Mobilizations Regarding Refugees and Migrants: Poland, Germany, Spain, and Sweden

Introduction As the previous chapter has shown, migrants, as well as refugees and asylum seekers, have moved to the center of political discussions in Europe, despite their comparatively limited numbers and societal marginalization. The inflow of people will, however, not abate, and as in 2015/6, the last few years have again seen higher numbers of asylum seekers, with close to 1 million arriving in the EU in 2022, leading EU officials to pursue a more restrictive approach (DaSilva, 2023). Not only the EU institutions as steering bodies for reception and resettlement, but also individual member states have been criticized in the treatment of refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants. At the same time, populist and farright parties have publicly securitized those to restrict any further influx and to increase their electoral gains. The narrative of a ‘refugee crisis’ was associated with the Europe-wide migratory movements of 2015/6, as declaring a crisis allows for more authoritarian forms of government intervention and the delegitimation of specific actors (Kallius et al., 2016). With reference to the depiction of this extraordinary situation, the then UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon critically noted, ‘this is not a crisis of numbers, it is a crisis of solidarity’ (United Nations, 2016). All the while progressive civil society and political actors significantly advanced © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Thiel et al., The Politics of Social In/Exclusion in the EU, Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31264-9_7

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the socio-political inclusion of migrants and refugees and highlighted their contributions rather than depicting them as risks. The Platform for International Cooperation on Undocumented Migrants (PICUM), as well as the European Council on Refugees and Exiles (ECRE) represent over 100 member organizations each across EU member states, and collaborate transnationally to promote refugee and migrant rights. In fact, Feischmidt et al. (2019) argue that during the events of 2015/6, civil society substituted for the ‘organized non-responsibility’ of most member state governments and that CSOs transnational coordination, as well as their recognition as experts and reception infrastructure, was exceptional and indispensable. Hence there is a need to more deeply examine the politics of in/exclusion with reference to this cross-national societal cleavage, so that the following sections analyze the political mobilizations by civil society and political actors, as well as the state of inclusion in the four representative case studies Poland, Germany, Spain, and Sweden.

Migrant, Refugee, and Asylum Seeker Integration in the EU On a theoretical level, migrants face different opportunities as well as challenges for socio-political inclusion in European societies than more recently arrived refugees and asylum seekers with their immediate needs for protection. Yet, in political practice, they are exposed to the same kind of exclusive discourse and policies without sufficient differentiation as to their background, their classification, or their rights and duties. Depending on their pedigree, migrants might have come to Europe long ago as colonial subjects, as incentivized labor migrants needed to rebuild Europe after World War 2, or more recently because of economic considerations, family reunification, etc. Most of these populations are regularized, legal residents or naturalized citizens, i.e., they have received official government authorization in the form of residency and work permits. This despite the fact that some, for instance, guest workers, were initially expected to only remain for a few years before returning ‘back home’. Thus migrants are more likely to be self-sufficient, thereby able to actualize their human and social capital when integrating into society, be it through language acquisition, schooling, or public representation. The cases of (accepted) refugees and those still going through the process of obtaining asylum are different. As pointed out in the previous chapter, these arrived in significant numbers only starting in the 1990s, with the

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exception of the extraordinary European post-war refugee displacements. While they are protected under the UN’s Geneva convention offering humanitarian protection in states that are party to the treaty, for refugees as well as for asylum-seeking individuals the general expectation is that they return to their country of origin when the conditions there have improved. Aside from their more temporary placement, the legal limbo of individuals without (yet) an approved asylum request further complicates and delays their inclusion into European societies. Asylum acceptance rates vary significantly across EU member states, based on origin and the administrative and political culture of the processing country, with an annual EU average of over 35% for the period 2017–2019. Yet an Afghan applicant could face a 94% acceptance rate in Italy but only a 4% chance in Bulgaria, with countries such as Sweden or Germany lying in the middle with about 40% (European Council on Refugees and Exiles, 2021). Given these issues, periodically implemented regularization programs by governments have helped to normalize residency statuses and to include over 3.5 million individuals in countries ranging from Spain to Poland (McGovern, 2014). This, however, has not necessarily aided the process of social inclusion, as these newcomers are more often viewed as exceptional outsiders and are not provided with sufficient support or receive public acceptance to become socio-politically and economically integrated, unlike naturalized migrants. Hence the reception and integration of migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers are not only complex but fraught with temporal, spatial, and political uncertainties. More recently, however, the notion of European ‘post-migration’ societies has been raised in order to contest the exclusionary discourse relegating migrants and refugees to the margins of ‘host societies’: ‘The post-migration paradigm deconstructs migration as a dominant marker of difference by stressing the normality of migration and mobility in a globalized world’ (Foroutan, 2019: 144). While there is analytical and normative value in this approach, not least because of the EU’s Europeanization of migration and mobility regimes, substantial exclusions continue to persist for migrants and refugees based on the aforementioned contingencies. In contrast to the integration of gender and sexual minorities, who have rights based on their citizenship, the socio-political and legal standing of migrants and refugees depends on the willingness of states to provide specific measures that go beyond legal recognition of their respective statuses. Until the millennium, EU leaders

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have also not been overly concerned with what is now referred to as integration or inclusion. Instead, the process was regarded as less important in that societal newcomers would have to assimilate socio-culturally and find employment to achieve self-sufficiency. Yet the politicization of migrants and refugees and their volatile socio-cultural and economic integration has led to governments paying more attention to integration issues. This is also reflected in the EU’s newly upgraded ‘Action Plan on Integration and Inclusion 2021–2027’, which recognizes the significantly higher risk if social exclusion and poverty for migrants, and provides additional multi-billion Euro funding for inclusion from various social EU funds, including the Asylum, Migration & Integration Fund, and the European Social Fund (European Commission, 2021). In order to track state policies on integration, the Migration Integration Policy Index (MIPEX) traces the performance of various governments in eight major integration categories that are supposed to be comprehensively measure basic rights, equal opportunities, and means to secure a future. These eight criteria are: Access to Nationality (conditions for and stability of status and rights), Permanent Residence (conditions for and stability of residency status), Family Reunification (conditions for and stability of reunification statuses), Education (access to schooling, support, and intercultural services), Anti-Discrimination (scope and enforcement of application), Labor Market Mobility (labor rights and access to employment services), Health (access and services), and Political Participation (electoral rights, political representation, etc.) (MIPEX, 2020a). These eight are, in turn, composite criteria made up of over 150 individual policy indicators covering all aspects related to these eight criteria. Created originally in 2004 as a UK-based project, MIPEX now has scientific collaborators across the globe, covers all EU member states, and is associated with the EU co-funded ‘Cross Migration Project’. As Fig. 7.1 shows, of our four representative case countries, only Sweden (shown as SE in the figure below) is listed in the latest 2019 edition as a top performer globally, with a summary score of 86. Of the four, Spain (ES) comes in second with 60/100 points and exhibits ‘comprehensive integration’, while Germany (DE) with 58 points is already classified as a ‘temporary integration’ country, and Poland (PL) receives an unfavorable ‘equality on paper’ only status with 42 points. In the period between 2010 and 2019, the countries under study did not make a significant improvement in their migrant integration policy. While Sweden and Germany stagnated, Poland exhibited minor improvements

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MIPEX Indicator Scores per Case Study 100 86

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from an already low starting point. Spain is the country that has experienced the most considerable increase (+7 points), from 53 points in 2010 to 60 in 2019, mainly as a consequence of the policies enacted around the massive arrival of migrants in 2015. Overall, the 15 Western EU member states have an average score of 58/100 while the EU 28 with the United Kingdom still included, receive 49 points on average. In terms of a comparison of various index components across OECD states, states fared best in the areas of Anti-Discrimination (70 points), followed by Permanent Residency provisions (58), and Family Reunification (58). Significantly, the bottom integration markers are Political Participation, with only 25 points, trailed by Education, with 40 points (MIPEX, 2020a).1

1 We included the overall country scores without the ‘health’ criteria as results over time were only available for summary scores without health, see: https://www.mipex.eu/ download-pdf. We did chose the major survey waves of 2010, 2014, and 2019, as there was no reporting on either health or Education previously.

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While these are significant quantitative indicators measuring concrete social and political-legal integration policies, as with the gender and LGBT+ populations analyzed earlier, another index is provided as a useful measurement of the expressed acceptance of migrants. Public opinion company Gallup conducted two waves of this survey in 2016 and 2019, which covered 140 countries. It is based on large (1000+ ) sample sizes in each country and asked respondents a number of questions that inquired about their support for migrants in the country, as neighbors, or as potential in-laws that led to a possible summary score of 10 points per country (migrants and refugees are often conflated in public discourse and opinion polls, hence we reference a single poll here). At first sight, it is noticeable that the global acceptance of migrants declined from an average of 5.34 to 5.21 points over the three years. As shown in Fig. 7.2, in the EU, a remarkable split in tolerance exists, with Western EU states scoring collectively 6.73, while Central and Eastern European ones only score 2.77. Both sub-regional aggregate scores lead to a composite EU score of 5.92, which aligns with the global average of 5.29. As for our case studies, Sweden is among the top 10 performers in 2019 with 7.92 points, whereas most East European countries were among the least welcoming ones globally. Spain also ranks highly with 7.44 points, as does Germany with 7.09 points. Although Poland showed some of the biggest increases over time, from 3.31 in 2016 to 4.21 in 2019, it still is less accepting than all other case countries, though slightly more tolerant than the average Central- and East European countries (Gallup, 2020). These data points provide an indication of the extent to which the inclusion of migrants and refugees is a publicly discussed and accepted goal, with corresponding effects on political mobilizations in each country. Although each of the member states implements its own migration and asylum policies, EU migration and refugee policy, however, is not developed in isolation. Based on the EU’s Dublin regulation, which specifies that the first country to receive asylum seekers ought to process the requests and receive those, questions of redistribution, resettlement, returns, and overall ‘burden sharing’ have become Europeanized. As pointed out previously, significant policy differences and attitudes exist between member states regarding the recognition of asylum seekers, the take-in of refugees, as well as common external border management, where such processes are increasingly outsourced to (Thiel, 2017). This

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Migrant Acceptance Index 10 9 7.93

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Fig. 7.2 Gallup’s migrant acceptance index scores, 2019 (0–10) (Source Own elaboration based on Gallup, 2020)

divergence exists not only between Western and Central- and East European countries but also between the Nordic ones such as the Netherlands or Sweden, and the Mediterranean ones, which are the most affected. Nordic countries aim to delimit further migration to their borders, while states with moderate governments, such as Spain and Greece, request more aid to deal with the volumes of refugees arriving at their shores, and Italy, under its current far-right government, aims to pressure for more solidarity and restrictive policies by threatening to send more refugees up north (Politico EU, 2023). Although cross-regional ad-hoc country coalitions exist as well, for instance, with the 12 member states from Denmark, Hungary, to Bulgaria who are pressuring the Commission to provide funds for fences to keep would-be migrants and asylum seekers out. It becomes evident that despite years of joint policy development and negotiations, a common EU response to those challenges has been insufficiently planned and implemented. The following country analysis traces the in/exclusions of migrants and refugees by (non)state actors in our four case countries to show how the aforementioned conditions and risk perceptions impact on domestic political mobilizations.

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Poland Similarly to other European nations, Poland used to be considered an emigration country. Hundreds of thousands of Polish citizens left their homeland in the eighteenth century for France, the United States, and other countries when Poland was carved up between Prussia, Austria, and Russia. Prospects of economic prosperity and political freedom led to extended emigration waves before and after the world wars as well. Cut off during the Communist era, Poland did not experience the kind of labor migration that resembled Western European migration patterns, with only a small contingent of Vietnamese and other socialist refugees arriving in the country. During the relatively difficult transformation to a capitalist economy after the end of the Cold War, Poland again registered high numbers of outflows, with hundreds of thousands moving to neighboring Western countries, especially to Germany and the United Kingdom, in pursuit of better wages. Polish labor emigration was facilitated by the conclusion of short-term labor migration agreements with other states. Although like other migrants entering Western Europe, the type of employment secured there was often below previous educational attainment or acquired skills, yet increased competitive pressures on West European labor markets. At the same time, tens of thousands of Ukrainians, Belarussians, and Moldovans moved to Poland in search of better job prospects and were tolerated without official work permits, and Poland also started to devise migration and asylum policies modeled after Western European standards. Two million Ukrainians lived already in Poland before the outbreak of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and they are integrating rather expeditiously given the cultural proximity between both nations (Polkowska & Filipek, 2020). Approximately 500,000 of long-term Ukrainian migrants are reportedly on stable long-term work contracts, with others filling gaps in less desirable, low-skilled/low-paid positions throughout the country (Walker, 2019). An additional 1.5 million have been admitted into the country since the start of the war. This represents a marked increase in demarcating a clear transition of the country from an emigrant state to an immigration destination. To highlight this, according to available estimates, Poland’s immigrant population increased from around 100,000 in 2011 to more than two million in 2019 (Duszczyk & Kaczmarczyk, 2022). Poland has had a system allowing short-term workers to procure a visa, but since 2017, with the EU

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granting visa-free access to Ukrainians, the level of those fleeing Ukraine, whether from persecution on the South-Eastern fronts or those seeking better economic perspectives and stability, have continued to increase. Poland is also receiving those fleeing persecution in Belarus. After the hotly contested re-election of Lukashenka in Belarus in 2020, hundreds of Belarussian activists have been granted refugee status in Poland. While the Ukrainian migration is an amalgam of asylum seekers and economic migrants, and the size of the pool of those coming from Belarus is minuscule when compared to those fleeing conflict zones, these distinctions are central to the domestic debate over migration and asylum. Importantly, after EU accession in 2004 ca. 1.5 million Poles moved to the United Kingdom and Ireland, one of the few EU states at the time allowing for full labor mobility. Hence the most influential actor in the development of Polish migration, asylum, and integration policy was in fact the EU, which conditioned membership upon fulfillment of minimum reception requirements but also funded various policy instruments and advocated for a pluralistic-tolerant society (Kicinger & Korys, 2011). Politically, Poland experienced an alternating succession of either center-left or center-right governments in the late 1990s and early 2000s, which, together with the limited migrant and asylum pressures, led to a gradual, adaptive development of policies in these areas. The decisions on how to best regulate and integrate fellow Europeans and, later, non-Europeans were in part determined by the necessities of EU accession conditions. Once these disappeared with membership, the politics of Polish migration and asylum inclusion became more polarized. From 2005 to 2007, the national-conservative Law and Justice party (PIS) came into government for the first time, favoring restrictive migration and asylum policies. During the following 8 years under the liberal-centrist Civic Platform government coalition, limited numbers of immigrants made it possible for the government to follow EU-advocated reception and integration plans. Poland’s Schengen area accession in 2007 provided a further concentration on its own border control, which also constitutes part of the EU’s external border, with Warsaw hosting the contentious EU’s external border agency Frontex. But with the uptick of migrants and asylum seekers in Western Europe after the Arab Spring and the breakout of the Syrian civil war starting in 2011, Polish people and the government became more hesitant to emulate fellow member states’ policies and adhere to EU proposals. Fears of an ‘Arabization’ of Europe, in part due to Polish Catholic nationalism, coupled with economic anxieties

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and demographic decline, led subsequently to an inward-looking political mobilization of rightist forces. Public security fears based on high-profile terrorist attacks in Western EU states in 2015/6 reinforced the impression that a ‘law and order’ approach was required (Iglicka & ZiolekSkrzypczak, 2010). Manufacturing uncertainties, manipulating fear, and constructing risky enemies through narratives resembles the same political mobilization method as the campaign against ‘gender ideology’ and LGBT+ groups, and the resistance against the EU in the name of national ˙ ˙ & Zuk, 2020). In the case identity (Thiel, 2021; Witold, 2017; Zuk of the Polish nationalist right, the narratives that equate Poles with Catholics also comprise a racist and anti-migrant component that emphasizes the incompatibility of Polish Identity with migrants and refugees from Muslim countries, and securitizes marginalized communities even further. After a contentious electoral campaign during the refugee surge of 2015, Law and Justice got reelected and started to reverse the previous government’s moderate policies in these areas, thus contesting the harmonization of the EU’s refugee and asylum policies. During the campaign, Schetyna, the leader of the opposition party Civic Platform, told a reporter that his party was also against accepting refugees. This posed a problem since it was his previous Civic Platform government, in which Schetyna served as foreign minister, that agreed to accept 6200 asylum seekers from the EU pool. In this sense, there seemed to be populist consensus by all major parties that Poland would not accept an EUmandated top-down allocation of refugees, asserting instead the age-old sovereign boundaries argument that countries should be in full control over whom they accept and whom they do not. In terms of the risk contexts highlighted in this book, the incoming rightist government focused on events such as the 2015/6 terrorist attacks in Western Europe, conflated security and asylum, and thus securitized an issue that in reality had few to no negative repercussions for Poland. This is especially so as the number of asylum seekers in Poland, for instance, from Syria, was a minuscule 300 in 2016, compared to over 250,000 Syrians arriving in Germany (Pasamonik, 2017). The dearth of migrants and refugees within Poland led to a narrative and discursive shift addressing instead the ‘European collaborators’, i.e., Western European member states and the EU institutions. As with the emergence of Polish migration and asylum policies, the EU and its Western member states became focal points for socio-political action, yet this time in opposition, rather than emulation,

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of the EU. This became particularly evident in the immediate aftermath of the 2015/6 refugee waves when Poland and other Visegrad 4 countries (see previous chapter) began to obstruct any joint refugee redistribution and resettlement proposals by member states or by Brussels. The government criminalized migration, including through an antiterrorist act, and only after an initial outright refusal, accepted to take in a relatively small number of 7000 refugees in 2016. Moreover, the independence of media and courts was contested, and progressive CSOs were labeled foreign agents. When in 2021 hundreds of non-European migrants and refugees were pushed into Polish territory at the border with Belarus—alluding to a destabilization attempt by Russia—the Polish government began to push those back, erect fences, and seal off the territory to media and civil society, thus running afoul of international humanitarian law and eliciting negative feedback from the international community (PoliticoEU, 2021). Hence the country is representative of other restrictive countries such as the Visegrad 4 group of CEE states, where the increasing exclusion of migrants and asylum seekers is accompanied by authoritarian politics and a contestation of the EU more generally. As is evident in the comparatively low MIPEX scores in Fig. 7.1, given its emigration-focused history, Poland did until recently not have an integration policy to speak of. This changed with the small but consistent increases of asylum seekers in the 2000s, and Poland also received funds from the EU’s fund for the integration of Third-Country Nationals as well as from international foundations (Iglicka & Ziolek-Skrzypczak, 2010). Polish civic actors received previously more support than under the current nationalist government. Those aiding newly arriving immigrants and refugees consist of church-based organizations like Caritas and larger NGOs such as the Polish Red Cross, the Poland-based Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights or Polish Humanitarian Action, as well as smaller organizations made up of refugees and migrants themselves. Even within the church-affiliated groups, a split exists as some of the official clergy support the Catholic nationalism of the current administration. Most of the CSOs, however, tend to be primarily concerned with service provisions in terms of reception and integration, as material benefits for affected individuals are comparatively low when compared to other West European nations (Dusczyk & Gora, 2012). On the other hand, movement strategies, including street protests, became more frequent in response to the securitization of women, LGBT+ individuals,

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or refugees, and organizers are increasingly working together as a progressive street alliance. Muslim activists, small in numbers as they are, are also relying on more visibility campaigns on the streets and in TV studios to get their voices heard (Narkowicz, 2018). Broadly conceived CSO tasks of awareness raising or campaigning are more difficult because of a lack of funding for those activities and the somewhat challenging public discourse with regard to non-European migrants and refugees. In fact, Pasamonik (2017) posits that the government’s elicitation of moral panics over migrants and refugees was designed to divide the country into ‘defenders of homeland and faith’ and naïve ‘good samaritans’, thereby further stoking societal divisions among the Polish native population. Progressive CSOs, however, are aware of the political agenda of PiS and its allies and use their networks to countermobilize. For instance, 10 days before the 2015 elections, they, together with cultural institutions and allied media, convened a national ‘Refugee Solidarity Day’, publicly calling out racist actors and reminding Poles of their own history of being welcomed as emigrants in other countries. Yet these interventions were countered by demonstrations by the AllPolish Youth and the National Movement in early 2016, campaigning against Muslims, Jews, and Roma, and Sinti, with similar racist demonstrations held in other European capitals. At one anti-Muslim protest march, an effigy of George Soros holding an EU flag was burned, in effect combining racist, anti-semitic, and Eurosceptic tropes (Ibid). With the arrival of over 1.5 million Ukrainian refugees displaced by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, progressive CSOs and civil initiatives have had to scale up their reception activities quickly and also connect those newcomers to already established Ukrainians in the country. It remains to be seen if the Ukrainian refugee reception leads to improvements in Polish migration and asylum CSOs or to more inclusive policies for those affected, though it may also reinforce a two class-system of European and non-European refugees and migrants. The opposing forces, both within civil society and political factions, that ultimately have constrained migrants’ rights and possibilities explain Poland’s poor performance in the MIPEX, with 42 points in 2019, and the classification of the country as having ‘equality on paper’ only. The government’s manufacturing of risk narratives that securitize migrants by depicting them as a threat resulted in insufficient Polish integration policies that are below average for the EU. Thus, non-EU citizens face many obstacles and barriers to inclusion that are indicative of the region’s

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Poland: MIPEX Index 63 63 63

Anti-Discrimination

13

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50 50 69 69

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26 26

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44 42

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Fig. 7.3 Overall MIPEX index and criteria scores for Poland, 2010–2019 (0– 100) (Source Own elaboration based on MIPEX, 2020)

restrictive attitudes and policies. The indicator overview in Fig. 7.3 exposes some critical areas, namely Labor Market, Education, and Political Participation, thus creating a ‘vicious circle of exclusion that reinforces fear and separation’ (MIPEX, 2020c). Immigrants have few opportunities to participate in public life in Poland, as foreign citizens face restrictive public access and linguistic issues. Integration through education remains weak as well, with an educational system that is not equipped to address intercultural education and does not include the specific needs of foreign children. However, Poland has made positive changes in the last years

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by adopting teacher training to implement language support programs, which are at the base of the 7-point increase from 2014 (26 points) to 2019 (33 points). Similarly, slight improvement can be seen in Labor Market Mobility (26 points in 2010 to 31 points in 2014 and 1019). Poland has begun to open up to labor migrants, and according to statistics, non-EU newcomers can increasingly find jobs and start businesses. However, they receive neither targeted support nor the same benefits as Polish citizens to improve their skills and careers. Notably, access to citizenship (13 points in 2010 to 50 points in 2014 and 2019) has experienced the most significant progress (37 points) since the 2012 Act on Polish Citizenship entered into force. The new provisions allow the president to grant citizenship to all foreigners, regardless of whether and how long they have been residing in Poland, including foreigners who resided in Poland for at least three years as permanent residents, have a regular income and rent or own an apartment in Poland, and know the Polish language (Global Trade Alert, 2012). While this constitutes progress related to the very restrictive previous law, the residence, language, and economic requirements are set high. In contrast, policies on Permanent Residence show a reversal (−19 points), given the restrictive economic and language requirements imposed on non-EU newcomers since 2018. Finally, it is worth mentioning that the migrant landscape of Poland has been dramatically transformed by the massive arrival of Ukrainian refugees, and it is still uncertain how this crisis will impact migratory policies and related social in/exclusions in Poland in the long term.

Germany Similar to the in/exclusions of gender and sexual minorities in Germany, the country’s particular history has shaped its response to migration and asylum challenges in influential ways. Based on the experience of the fascist Nazi-regime, post-war German migration and refugee policy were conceived rather liberally, even if societal attitudes and citizenship policies remained rather restrictive. After the wars, Germany needed workers to rebuild their cities and economies, and while close to 5 million ethnic Germans from its Eastern provinces helped, additional human capital was required. Hence, foreign workers were actively recruited from Italy, Spain, Greece, and Turkey from the 1950s onwards. These were expected to return after a few years, however most remained and established a new home for themselves and their families. After reunification in 1990/1991,

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asylum seekers and refugees were the primary drivers of net migration to Germany, with individuals from former Yugoslavia, the Middle East, and the EU’s neighborhood arriving at significant numbers of over 300,000 annually (Bosswick, 2000). Realizing the demographic needs emerging from reunification and European integration, German naturalization law was reformed under Chancellor Kohl’s center-right government to allow for the acquisition of citizenship under specific conditions. Yet these gradual changes toward a more liberal and inclusive migration policy did not necessarily apply to its refugee and asylum policy, which was hotly debated in the 1990s as the country struggled with its own reunification efforts. Since former East German states had little experience with migration from fellow socialist states, their adaptation to more multicultural settings has been difficult, to say the least, with higher numbers of xenophobic attacks as well as more pronounced support for the farright Alternative for Germany (AfD) in Germany’s eastern states. The notions of a drastic demographic shift engendering periodic attacks on asylum accommodations in the early 1990s provide evidence of the threat narratives at the time, as it later did with concerns about the decreasing scholarly attainment of school children or the alleged rise of criminal activities through asylum seekers and irregular migrants coming from Central- and Eastern Europe. Henceforth, repatriation, expulsions, and the conclusion of readmission agreements with third countries (of origin) were implemented as mitigation strategies to deal with the constant inflow of would-be refugees and irregular migrants. Even the center-left government of Social Democrats and Greens (1998–2005) was unable to significantly alter some of the restrictions of Germany’s strict asylum laws and practices, given the pushback by more conservative state governments in Germany’s federal system. Rather, European integration provided a push factor for continuous modernization of Germany’s laws. This change was in part based on the realization that Germany has de-facto become an immigration country and the required paradigm change to view migrants and refugees as a potential resource for Germany’s aging labor markets and welfare systems, rather than a burden. This despite the fact that, unlike Sweden, Germany as well as many other EU states require asylum seekers to obtain official refugee status in order to access legal employment, which delays inclusion and makes asylum seekers dependent on the state. Hence refugees participate at a lower rate in the German labor market, with an overall employment rate across the EU of 56%, but with only 49% of refugees employed in the country after

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five years (EU FactCheck, 2023). Given these challenges, conservative circles advanced publicly the notion that ‘Germany is not an immigration country’ and coined the much-debated racist slogan ‘children instead of Indians’ (Kinder statt Inder) in 2000. Even as late as 2010, center-right Chancellor Angela Merkel herself pronounced that ‘German multiculturalism has failed’ in order to assure her party’s leadership (Weaver, 2010). After much negotiation and cross-state and cross-party compromises, the 2005 immigration law provided more legal pathways to residency and naturalization, as well as support in terms of integration measures and language courses (Borkert & Bosswick, 2007). At the same time, it also sharpened some legislative provisions with regard to suspected welfare system abusers, foreign criminals, and terrorists. It also required testing basic German language skills and passing integration courses in a ‘carrot and stick’ approach officially termed ‘supporting and requiring’ (foerdern und fordern). As Borkert and Bosswick state, ‘Similar to several other European countries and the European Commission, Germany follows a clear trend: shifting competences to the Ministry of Interior as well as emphasizing traditional security policy approaches in dealing with migration and integration’ (2007: 116). This provides further evidence of our hypothesized mixing of inclusive with exclusive policies in dealing with late modernity’s challenges and risks. In the case of Germany, a notable difference between a ‘slightly favorable’ temporary integration approach toward immigrants and refugees and the barriers to securing their future in the country becomes apparent, as will be further analyzed in Fig. 7.4 (MIPEX, 2020b). Christian Democratic Chancellor Angela Merkel did not only significantly influence Germany as well as the EU during her 16-year chancellorship that lasted from 2005 to 2021, but she also mirrored and, at times, pushed Germany’s inclusion of refugees and migrants forward. While she had to promote her conservative party’s restrictive guidelines on immigration and asylum, her humanist ethics and analytical capabilities led her to pursue a sometimes contradictory and often instrumental strategy when it came to Germany’s policies in this area. As previously stated, initially she was rather skeptical of a German liberalization of related laws and policies, but when unprecedented numbers of irregular migrants and refugees from North Africa and the Middle East crossed various EU borders including Germany’s in 2015, she stated in a press conference that ‘Germany is a strong country’ and ‘we have already managed so much, we’ll manage this (wir schaffen das )’ (Oltermann, 2020). Yet this openness was not

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Germany: MIPEX Index 70 70 70

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41 42 42

Citizenship

54 54 54

Perm Residency

55

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60 60 45

Education

48 55

42 42 42

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76

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81 81 55 57 58

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0

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30 2010

40 2014

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Fig. 7.4 Overall MIPEX index and criteria scores for Germany, 2010–2019 (0–100) (Source Own elaboration based on MIPEX, 2020)

simply humanitarianism but rather a spillover resulting from a previous reorientation in terms of accepting immigrants to proactive changes to immigration, integration, and labor policies (Laubenthal, 2019). This may have motivated civic actors across the country to aid with volunteer service and promoted a temporary generalized public ‘welcome culture’ in 2015/6. But it also led to the strengthening of the far-right AfD party founded two years earlier as an economically nationalist party during the Euro-crises. Further politicization of the issue occurred when a number of attacks took place in the following years in Cologne and Berlin, but also in Paris and Brussels. The AfD had now found a more compelling motive

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for public campaigning and, as a result, has become the main far-right opposition to Germany’s centrist main parties, represented with significant contingents in the national as well as state parliaments. The ensuing public and political shift to the right subsequently led Merkel to try to limit the population influx by declaring more neighboring countries safe enough to return and by outsourcing the asylum processing, including to Turkey with the contentious EU-Turkey readmission deal that she was instrumental in negotiating. Other direct measures consisted of the abolishing of family reunification for people with limited protection status and the collection of asylum seekers’ mobile phone data (Hermann, 2020). Moreover, German far-right activism has drastically increased in Germany since 2015, making Germany the leading country for extremist far-right violence in Europe in 2019 (Laubenthal, 2019). More recently, there seems to be a paradigmatic shift occurring with the realization that 400,000 immigrants are needed annually to tackle labor shortages in Germany’s significant economic sectors. The current government, made up of the center-left Social Democrats and Greens and the centrist Liberals under Social Democrat Chancellor Scholz, thus began to reform German policies by moving to a more need and skillsbased immigration policy while at the same time regularizing individuals that are in tolerated or temporary status and are considered ‘well integrated’ so that they can receive eventually permanent residence (German Federal Government, 2022). This change, however, seems also to imply that returns to ‘safe countries’ and readmission agreements for rejected asylum seekers will be strengthened in the future, as pronounced by the Liberal coalition partners. In reference to the trade-offs of inclusion and crises treated in this book, their speaker suggested that German foreign aid to ‘safe countries’ could be tied to receiving funds to combat climate change (Euractiv, 2023a), thus directly but also conditionally linking both these politicized issues. This makes it seem as if Germany would aim to reward countries of origin who cooperate in Germany’s exclusionary return policy to supposed ‘safe countries’ that are still largely nationally determined. The previous German government aimed at expanding the list of ‘safe countries’ to Northern Mediterranean ones, though CSOs and church groups have publicly contested this expansion based on the volatile situation of women and LGBT+ individuals in many of these countries. Progressive CSOs thus have consistently favored and supported a more inclusive migration and, especially, asylum policy. They run the gamut from church-based organizations such as Caritas to large NGOs such

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as the German Red Cross to grassroots civic associations such as the Forum against racism. Yet while these are regularly consulted by government agencies and departments based on their expertise, they are also viewed primarily as service providers and less as political advocacy groups. A remarkable, if temporal, civic mobilization took place in 2015/6, when about 10% of the German population was involved in volunteering in refugee reception settings, and over 2/3 of these were not connected to organized civil society (Herrmann, 2020). These spontaneous expressions of solidarity, connecting needy refugees with hosts, volunteering at reception centers, and giving cooking and language classes, originated in ‘a widespread movement to address social challenges collectively’ that also ‘energized new forms of dialogue involving citizens and their democratic representatives’ (Bock & MacDonald, 2016: 6). Given the disintegration of this civic activism over time, Fleischmann and Steinhilper (2017) question the apolitical German ‘welcome culture’ of citizen volunteers, claiming that it avoids an explicit political stance to combat increasing governmental refugee exclusions and restrictions. Yet while this may have been a valid assessment for the majority of volunteers, documented evidence exists that shows how citizens influenced local administrations and citizen assemblies to be more inclusive (Herrmann, 2020). This is more true of the spontaneous civil action that materialized after the refugee waves of 2015/6 than for professionalized CSOs, as the latter experienced bureaucratic-administrative constraints and are often underfunded and thus have to focus on their core work. Nevertheless, a recent study of aiding associations showed that these could significantly improve the integration of refugees and recommend more support for civil society and closer coordination between CSOs and government agencies (Barreto et al., 2022). Moreover, German federal ministries still seem to adhere to a rather restrictive-exclusive vision of migration and asylum management rather than one that allows these societal newcomers to fully integrate sociopolitically, as Fig. 7.4 shows. The MIPEX scores highlight that Germany’s integration policies are insufficient to close the gaps in Political Participation (60 points in 2019). Unsurprisingly, municipal officials confronted with the realities of the situation are often more receptive to CSOs, as they are more flexible and need civic organizations to maintain integration efforts (Borkert & Bosswick, 2007). Local governments collaborate with CSOs in adapting existing integration measures to the needs of the asylum seekers, although federal regulations such as required language

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tests or professional re-qualifications are impediments to a more speedy and successful integration (Mehta, 2018). Therefore, as shown in Fig. 7.1 above, Germany was overtaken by other European countries, such as Ireland, Luxemburg, and importantly to this study, Spain (55 points in 2014 and 60 points in 2019). These countries have made more significant improvements in recent years by adopting a more comprehensive approach than Germany. Interestingly, major leadership positions in the German Federal office for Migration (BAMF) and other migration and asylum agencies have been taken up by (descendants of) migrants themselves. For instance, the current government’s Commissioner for Migration, Refugees and Integration and Anti-Racism, Minister Reem Alabali-Radovan’s parents were refugees themselves. While Germany’s support for equal opportunities is similar to the average Western European/OECD country according to MIPEX, its policies on Family Reunification, Permanent Residence, Access to Nationality, and Anti-discrimination leave non-EU immigrants unfavorably insecure about their future. However, the temporary integration approach that the country has taken provides short-term possibilities for newcomers, particularly in the labor market, as is clear in Fig. 7.4. Thus, with a score of 58 points, Germany’s integration policies are ranked as ‘slightly favorable’ since they only go halfway to include non-EU immigrants socio-politically (MIPEX, 2020b). This ‘temporary integration’ approach is similar to its neighboring Western European countries, such as Austria, Denmark, and Switzerland. The most critical areas in Germany are the obstacles to reuniting families and accessing justice as victims of discrimination. Germany’s Family Reunification policies are more restrictive than most Western European/OECD countries in terms of delays, eligibility restrictions for sponsors, and language testing abroad. Thus, with 42 points, Germany ranks in the international bottom ten in the MIPEX in terms of reunifications. Furthermore, Germany’s anti-discrimination policies are slightly weaker than the average European country. Even though the legal framework has continued to improve over time, its laws are ineffective because potential discrimination victims are less likely to report their cases to authorities than immigrants in other EU countries because they do not get the support they need from the system. Another problematic criterion is Citizenship (42 points in 2019). Germany is the last major destination country that still applies a general ban on dual citizenship— though a liberalizing change is being discussed by the current coalition—, unlike Poland, where restrictions were eased in the last reform, as well as

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in Denmark, Norway, and the Czech Republic. Furthermore, Germany makes citizenship conditional upon the income and economic situation of the applicant. The sense of insecurity created by all these factors explains the country’s below-average naturalization rates. Contrastingly, Germany ranks in the top ten in Labor Market Mobility (81 points in 2019). In line with its ‘temporary integration’ approach, Germany is performing well in terms of recognizing foreign qualifications and skills- once refugee status has been obtained. Overall, however, Germany’s uneven performance in inclusion results in an average record out of line with its leadership status in the EU. Similar ambivalent trends are recognizable in the sociopolitical mobilization of civil society and political stakeholders, with a majority of those actors bringing about a more inclusive domestic society, while a vocal minority successfully advances an exclusive, threat-based narrative.

Spain Immigration is a relatively recent phenomenon in Spain. From the nineteenth century until the 1990s, Spain was primarily an emigration country, with Spaniards fleeing their country mainly to South America but also Central and North America. Multiple reasons contributed to a reversal in migration flows, including the socio-political and economic stability after the Franco regime, aided by the accession of Spain to the European Community in 1986, access to the EU’s open labor market, and preferential visa options for citizens of former colonies in Latin America (Mazza, 2022; Ortega Pérez, 2003). The foreign-born population in the country has grown more than sixfold since 1998, so much so that, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, Spain experienced the fastest immigrant population growth within the EU, with a foreign population of more than 5.5 million. While Morocco and Romania lead the number of foreign residents in Spain, in relative terms, the most notable growth over the first half of 2022 is for nationals from Ukraine (45.8% increase), Peru (20.1%), and Colombia (19.1%). Immigrants from the United Kingdom, Italy, and Venezuela complete the list of the most numerous groups in Spain (Instituto Nacional de Estadística, 2022). The reasons why people choose Spain as a place to migrate vary from one population to another and range from fleeing socio-economic political crises in the countries of origin (e.g., North Africa, Venezuela, Colombia, and Peru) to wars and conflicts (e.g., the Russian invasion of Ukraine)

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to Spain’s reputation as a retirement destination for fellow Europeans and Americans. Spain’s situation thus resembles other Mediterranean ‘first arrival’ states such as Portugal, Italy, or Greece, although its policy is more idiosyncratic in its liberal-pluralistic character as compared to its more restrictive neighbors. The rapid pace of immigration and the various transformations that Spain underwent after the Franco regime has challenged the government’s ability to respond and devise long-term immigration policies, particularly when it comes to asylum claimants and other forcibly displaced people arriving from countries outside the EU. Two features stand out in the political, social, and economic treatment of the in/exclusion of immigrants and asylum seekers: the tensions between the political agendas of the main parties, the center-right Popular Party (PP) and the center-left Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), which alternately governed the country since the 1980s, as well as the decentralization of the Spanish immigration system, which implies that local policies lead the way to integration. As a result, despite some legislation and strategic planning in the years since, there remains no national immigrant integration program to date (Mazza, 2022). It was not until 1985 that Spain passed the first law addressing the issue of immigration when congress approved the 7/1985 Ley de Extranjería, or the law on the Rights and Freedoms of Foreigners in Spain. The law was enacted during the administration of Felipe González, leader of the leftist PSOE, with two goals: addressing the situation of the increasing, albeit small, number of immigrants mainly as a precondition for entering the European Community. On the one hand, the law lacked perspective, given that it considered immigration a temporary phenomenon. Therefore the law was very restrictive in terms of foreigners’ rights: it considered only foreigners who were legally present in Spain, and therefore changed the administrative situation of thousands of foreigners who thus became ‘irregular’ migrants. Furthermore, the rights of free movement (art. 6), assembly (art. 7), association (art. 8), education (art. 9), and freedom of unionization (art. 10) were also limited for irregular immigrants, for which the Spanish Ombudsman filed an appeal of unconstitutionality against. The Constitutional Court declared several of them unconstitutional in 1987, although it maintained the possibility of detention for forty days for those awaiting expulsion. Conceived as a solution to a temporary problem, the law ultimately set the precedent of practices that would remain in the Spanish system, such as combining residence and

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work permits in a single document. More importantly, it introduced the principle of national preference (art. 0.18), which foresees the granting of those permits based on the number of unemployed Spanish workers in specific sectors and geographical areas and the reciprocity regime in the foreigner’s country of origin. On the other hand, the law is another example of the political will for Spain’s inclusion into the regional markets and the necessity of rebuilding prestige after the Franco regime, which turns supranational actors into significant steering agents. While immigration became part of the Spanish government’s agenda with EU accession, it was not until the mid-1990s that it became relevant to political elites and Spanish society, given the increase in the number of migrants and asylum claimants arriving in Spain. The decade witnessed a series of laws intended to shape a national immigration policy, such as the authorization of ‘irregular’ immigrants to obtain a work and residence permit, an extraordinary regularization period in 1991, the abolition of visa suppression agreements with the Arab Maghreb and Northwest African countries and the Dominican Republic, and the plan for the social integration of immigrants. Law 7/1985 was updated in 1996 with a regulation that reflected the growing recognition that immigration in Spain was more than a temporary phenomenon. It provided greater legal certainty by incorporating new European regulations, such as return orders or transit visas. That same year, the country held general elections resulting in the first PSOE defeat since 1982. The winning PP succeeded in imposing José María Aznar as Prime Minister from a minority centerright cabinet, marking the end of more than a decade of Socialist rule. Very soon, a debate opened on a new immigration law. The legislative process resulted in law 4/2000, or the Law concerning the rights and liberties of foreigners in Spain and their social integration, which supposed a redefinition of Spain’s model of migratory management. The inclusion of the phrase ‘their social integration’ in the title of the law marks a difference representing an improvement, as it expanded the list of the rights and liberties of foreign nationals residing in Spain, including those in an irregular situation, and established a general principle of equality with Spanish citizens. Furthermore, the law and the accompanying decree introduced provisions related to the social integration of migrants, including a comprehensive framework for ‘normalizing’ undocumented workers and the regularization of irregular individuals. The law also addressed coordination between public authorities throughout the country at every level and established three entities that play an

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important role in decision-making and policymaking in this sphere: the Forum for the Social Integration of Immigrants, the Tripartite Labor Commission, and the Spanish Observatory on Racism and Xenophobia (Pinyol-Jiménez, 2018). The law passed with the opposition of the ruling PP, whose members claimed that the text was contrary to the spirit of the recent EU Summit in Tampere and went too far in granting rights to foreigners. This law is often recognized as an example of good practice in the management of immigration at the international level. However, it was subsequently reformed in the following years, depending on the ruling party. In February 2004, general elections were held one month after the law passed, and the PP obtained an absolute majority. After its electoral success, the PP initiated a reform of the Ley de Extranjería (8/2000), returning to a restrictive system of rights very similar to that of 1985. Paradoxically, Law 4/1985, enacted by the PSOE to meet the requirements for entry into the European Community, turned into the legal framework that the PP promoted as a national framework in its political agenda. Understanding the tensions between the two models embodied in the laws 7/1985 and 4/2000 is crucial because Spanish migration policy during the first decades of the 2000s has fluctuated from one framework to the other according to the governing party. It is worth noting that the conditional linking of residence to Spain’s labor needs was not modified throughout. In the 2000s, the country saw one of the biggest hikes in immigration in the world, with its foreign-born population increasing from 2% in 2000 to 11% in 2007. The 2008 economic crisis slowed this trend, and the percentage of foreigners in Spain remained somewhat stable over the following years at around 12–13%. In 2015, the country returned to a positive net migration rate, which has been growing steadily since then, albeit with a two-year slowdown during the Covid-19 crisis (European Commission, 2023). Asylum became a political issue at that moment, firstly as a complaint about the EU’s relocation quota. However, as a result of domestic and external pressure, in the fall of 2015, Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy of the PP announced his willingness to ‘constructively’ and ‘flexibly’ accept the quota proposed by Brussels. Two days before, the publication of the photo of Aylan, the Syrian child who died on a beach in Turkey, had shocked the world. These crises, and the more recent one resulting from the Russian invasion of Ukraine, implied fluctuation in the migratory waves to Spain, in which the right to asylum and international protection became more politicized domestically. But it also

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reflected a change in the demographics of arrivals: while in 2015, 61% of asylum seekers in Spain were from Syria and Ukraine, in 2017, 53% came from Venezuela, Colombia, and other Latin American countries, a percentage that rose to 77% in 2019 (Gabrielli et al., 2022). In the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, the number of new asylum applications in 2022 increased by 88% compared to 2021, amounting to 110,147 new applications. Venezuela led the number of applicants (42%), followed by Colombia (30%), Peru (7%), Morocco, and Honduras (3% each). Moreover, 156,314 Ukrainians applied for temporary protection (UNHCR, 2022). Aside from the particulars of specific demographics, the situation of refugees and asylum seekers in Spain was also influenced by the decentralization of the Spanish immigration system. According to the Spanish Constitution, the competencies regarding immigration and asylum belong to the state administration, while autonomous communities in Spain have integration competencies. Thus, the current institutional framework for the integration of foreigners from 2009 introduced multilevel governance based on cooperation among central administration, local government, and civil society at various reception and inclusion stages. Furthermore, the Spanish humanitarian refugee system is made up of a network of public refugee reception centers, and programs for the care of applicants managed by specialized non-profit entities, subsidized by the General Directorate of Migration. In practice, the organizations that manage the initial reception of asylum seekers consist of CSOs such as CEAR (Spanish Commission for Refugee Aid), ACCEM (Spanish Catholic Migration Commission Association), and the Red Cross, together with a specific list of other CSOs that complete the reception and integration system. This localized multilevel system has brought many benefits to the system but also resulted in tensions that merit to be analyzed. The reception system is highly centralized by the national state, which relies upon CSOs for its maintenance, without the participation of regional and local administrations (Garcés Mascareñas & Moreno Amador, 2019). In contrast, the role of CSOs has been solely to implement state policy regarding the reception of asylum claimants, but they have little influence over the policy itself (Garcés Mascareñas & Moreno Amador, 2019; Gabrielli et al., 2022). This ‘joint management’ formula has shaped negotiations and (dis)agreements between the state and civil society that have resulted in concerted action but also fueled an intense debate ‘regarding

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the levels of collaboration, coopting, and (in)dependence of these organizations’ (López-Sala & Godenau, 2019: 1). The heavy reliance of many CSOs on public funds limits their critical advocacy and jeopardizes their accountability. Unlike the social movements analyzed in Chapter 5, the CSOs working in the reception and integration of asylum seekers and forcibly displaced people remain ambiguously semi-institutionalized ‘between discipline and neglect’ (Gabrielli et al., 2022) and ‘between protection and profit’ (López-Sala & Godenau, 2019). While the central government centralizes the reception and decisionmaking process, the integration in the host societies, including social services, education, health, housing, employment, and sports, is under the competencies of Spain’s 17 autonomous communities (European Commission, 2023). In the absence of national guidance, autonomous communities have developed their own approaches to migrants and asylum seekers living within their borders. This provides for a flexible adaptation of inclusion programs for the particular cultural diversity of the country. Thus, for example, Barcelona’s 2016 Refuge City plan focused on migrants lacking legal status, who often encounter unique barriers and therefore require the most integration support (Mazza, 2022). On the other hand, Spain’s decentralized system leaves room for the ideological differences of political parties to play a crucial role in the in/exclusion of foreigners. In recent years, the rise of new conservative sectors and farright factions has added complexity to the issue. Madrid, the autonomous community that received by far the most asylum applications, with 40% of the country’s total in 2022, is a battlefield in this regard. CSOs reported that the Madrid government, led by Isabel Díaz Ayuso of the PP, continued to hinder migrants in an irregular situation from accessing public health care (Rozas, 2022). The PP and its far-right ally VOX, have been consistently reluctant to create better integration conditions for foreigners in Madrid. Vox, created in 2013 as a nationalist party in the aftermath of the Euro-crisis advocating for Spanish unity, is now the third largest party and has broadened its appeal with anti-immigration as well as anti-gender campaigns (Rama et al., 2021). While the PSOE rules at a national level over the reception of asylum claimants and exerts control over CSOs, it is incapable of making a significant impact at the local level if it does not have enough political capital there. Vice-versa, while the PP and VOX are successful in implementing a more restrictive agenda locally, they cannot discuss the general lines around migration and

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asylum because they do not have competencies in the Spanish mixed and multilevel system. Despite these contingencies, according to MIPEX Spain exhibits positive changes in its indicators, as shown in Fig. 7.1. In the last five years, legislative improvements have benefited immigrants, mainly in the naturalization and health sectors. The country’s MIPEX score increased by 7 points from 2009 to 2019 and 5 points from 2014 to 2019. One of the most notable changes is that naturalization in Spain now involves standardized testing rather than discretionary procedures, and economic means testing was removed in 2015. In 2018, access to health care was granted to both legal and undocumented immigrants; however, the administrative barriers at the autonomous community level vary from region to region. Figure 7.5 shows a breakdown of the scores, with Permanent Residence scoring most favorable since most non-EU citizens in Spain can benefit from an inclusive process for long-term residence after five years. Furthermore, permanent residents have access to social security and assistance. Also, Family Reunification and Labor Market Mobility score slightly favorably. As for the former, Spain’s inclusive policy allows many immigrants to reunite with their children and spouse after one year of residence. While work has been at the center of immigrant integration since 1985, non-EU residents have equal access to employment, self-employment, and general employment support. The weakest index areas are Political Participation, Education, and, significantly, Access to Nationality. Improvements in the two former categories are evident since immigrants are likely to participate politically, and a growing number of immigrant students can legally access the formal education system. Nevertheless, the limited funding for information campaigns regarding political rights and the limited support to learn the language and catch up academically jeopardize the country’s performance in these aspects. Even though naturalization requirements were eased slightly in 2015, this process remains the main weakness. Therefore, there is obvious room for improvement in Access to Nationality in a country where immigrants can become citizens only after ten years of residence, and dual citizenship is only granted to those from specific countries (MIPEX, 2020d). Spain scores 60 on the 2019 MIPEX, thus slightly higher than the average EU score of 58/100. The country promotes a comprehensive approach to integration, and immigrants can indeed enjoy many of the same fundamental rights as Spanish citizens, pushing Spain up the MIPEX rankings ahead of other EU members, including Germany. However,

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Spain: MIPEX Index 51

Anti-Discrimination

59 59 21

Citizenship

30 30 63

Perm Residency

75 75 55 55 55

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Fig. 7.5 Overall MIPEX index and criteria scores for Spain, 2010–2019 (0– 100) (Source Own elaboration based on MIPEX, 2020)

integration policies are insufficiently coordinated at the national level. Furthermore, bias related to race and ethnicity and augmented populist national discourses have made the inclusion of migrants and refugees more challenging. In this regard, it is essential that the country provides an updated legal framework. For instance, Spain needs to approve and allocate resources to a new Strategic Plan for Citizenship and Integration (PECI) since the last one ended in 2014, and no new action plans have been approved. Furthermore, the approval of the long-awaited antidiscrimination law would be very beneficial. Most importantly, improved

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coordination and cooperation between levels of government would entail a more effective and far-reaching policy for the integration of immigrants. In this sense, the effective involvement of civil society not only in the provision of services but also in the decision-making process is crucial (ibid).

Sweden Sweden, which was in the nineteenth century an emigration country just like Poland and Spain, and a traditionally welcoming country in terms of migration and asylum, has become much more restrictive in recent years. Sweden experienced its first major immigration waves in the late twentieth century, consisting mostly of political refugees fleeing oppressive regimes ranging from Chile to those escaping wars in the Middle East and the former Yugoslavia. With EU accession in 1995, not only did EU-internal migration increase but Sweden also got enmeshed in the bloc’s complex migration and asylum negotiations. During the long government periods of the center-left Swedish Democratic Party throughout the twentieth century, migration and especially asylum policies were rather generously devised in terms of access and benefits, indicative of national collective solidarity framed as ‘Swedish exceptionalism’. This solidarity, however, was initially built around ethnic homogeneity and has more recently been questioned with increased influxes and the perceived shortcomings of Swedish integration policies in terms of political participation or public security. For instance, in the early 1990s, when Sweden received over 200,000 refugees coming from the Balkans and the Mideast, Swedish legislation elected to grant those coming from the Balkans permanent residency automatically. To an extent, this same principle continued throughout the early 2000s, including for those coming from Iraq and Kurdistan after 9/11 and the American invasion of 2003. Sweden, however, adopted a more stringent approach to granting asylum at the end of 2015, although the country did not fundamentally change its existing approach to integration. Restrictions were introduced mainly on family reunification and health policies, leading to a -1- point decrease in its MIPEX score (87 points in 2014 to 86 points in 2019), as shown in Fig. 7.1. Notably, not only the traditionally restrictive center-right parties opt for such exclusive measures, center-left parties have also moved to the right in this regard, especially during times of duress. For instance, as in Germany, during the 2015/6 refugee waves, initially, the mediadepicted hardship of migrants and refugees dying in the Mediterranean

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or hiking toward Europe elicited general solidarity and civil society mobilization. But ‘following the construction of a narrative of crisis, the Social democratic/Green party government and the right wing opposition launched an initial migration political agreement in November 2015 that was followed by several interventions during 2016 that sought to restrict the possibilities to get permanent resident permits and to facilitate the expulsion of irregular migrants’ (Öberg & Sager, 2017, 2). There was talk of a societal collapse, and the center-left government justified its action by needing a ‘breathing space’ to deal with the sudden inflow of people. This governmental right shift and its simultaneous admittance of not being able to appropriately handle the situation came as a boon for the far right in Sweden, which was previously a small and politically isolated minority. The Sweden Democrats (SD), founded in 1988 and now de-facto part of the current center-right government coalition in all but name, pursue an expressedly nationalist and xenophobic immigration policy. Over the past twenty years, the SD has consistently improved its electoral share in each election cycle based on its construction of the Muslim ‘other’ as a threat to Swedish ethno-nationalism and social cohesion. At the same time, the Swedish political environment, with its decline of class and left– right voting and convergence of the mainstream parties’ agendas in part based on the constraints experienced with European integration, allowed the SD to gain salience and appear as a political alternative (Rydgren & van der Meiden, 2019). Now effectively being part of the new Swedish government having won 20.5% of votes in the last general elections, the government announced that it aims for a ‘paradigm shift’ in migration policy, with the SD having obtained concessions to limit any type of migration, be it legal or irregular. The increased electoral gains for the SD and the dramatic right shift in Swedish migration policy is caused in part because of the sustained arrival of more than 120,000 individuals each year after 2015/6 (Euractiv, 2023b). On the other hand, according to the MIPEX scores below, Non-EU citizens enjoy equal access to rights in the labor market and to the country’s social safety net (MIPEX, 2020e). However, migrants that reside longer in Sweden and possess residency and work permits still have, on average, a 13% higher unemployment rate than native-born Swedes (Guibourg, 2014). While not a major difference, it is a noteworthy one as Sweden is the only EU state that allows immediate employment for asylum seekers in an effort to promote self-sufficiency and integration. This inclusive policy is reflected in the

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exceptional 91 points in the MIPEX area of Labor Market Mobility (see Fig. 7.6), in which Sweden ranks second in the world. Yet in a country that pursues full employment and relies on high tax contributions to fund its costly welfare state, even a relatively small discrepancy in employment levels elicits the impression that societal newcomers may not be able to contribute sufficiently to the Swedish social model. Not only that, given the comparatively extensive asylum and integration benefits, migrants and asylum seekers are more easily accused of abusing the system. In this way, Sweden is also representative of a number of other Nordic countries that struggle with the loss of ethnically homogeneous populations and the resulting societal differentiation when it comes to labor market participation and welfare benefits. Other countries in the region, such as Denmark and Finland, have also seen the emergence of right-wing parties and have drastically changed their migration and asylum rules over the past decade. Not incidentally, these are also the ones having small populations and thus having taken in the most refugees per citizen, thus being more susceptible to perceiving those as risks or threats to social cohesion. The increasing political and, to a certain extent, social exclusions through more restrictive migration and refugee integration policies are said to be based on the one hand on EU integration with its joint policy development in this area, and the responsibilities of sharing a common ‘borderless’ Schengen space. The SD is considered Eurosceptic and, as such, has successfully positioned nationalist claims in opposition to (Muslim) immigrants and refugees, as well as the EU’s inclusive policies. On the other hand, the aforementioned risk narratives contributed to an exclusionary shift and a conflation of variously conceived fears. Confirming our theoretical premises, Khosravi already stated in 2009, with respect to the deteriorating situation of refugees and migrants in terms of Swedish deportation practices, that it ‘is a result of both the harmonization of migration and asylum policy within the EU as well as of the current security panic associated with migration’ (40). A particular Swedish inflection of its exclusionary policies consists in an idealized humanitarianism that makes Swedish detention and deportation practices appear to be beneficial for the concerned individual, yet materializes as a paternalistic attitude toward refugees that inhibits self-empowerment and -determination. Another influencing facet of Swedish political culture revolves around the expectation of active civic participation, as a voter, worker, or citizen more generally. Yet it appears that there is still room for improvement in that more interaction between societal newcomers

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Sweden: MIPEX Index 100 100 100

Anti-Discrimination

83 83 83

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90 90 90

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91 91 91

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Fig. 7.6 Overall MIPEX index and criteria scores for Sweden, 2010–2019 (0– 100) (Source Own elaboration based on MIPEX, 2020)

and natives, as well as more participation by migrants themselves, could facilitate social inclusion; Political Participation tends to be therefore the second ‘lowest’ inclusion area with 80/100 points. Moreover, with the rise of low-income, ethnically diverse urban areas, migrants residing there have been said to suffer from a ‘culture of exclusion’ in need of transformation through public policy (Darstedt & Neergaard, 2019). This racially motivated approach does not take into account the increasing neoliberal stratifications of Swedish society, including the use of immigrants for low-paid jobs, that create such societal differentiations in the first place.

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On the other hand, the heightened salience of migration and asylum in Sweden also invigorated Swedish human rights advocates and CSOs to combat the rights-adverse developments in this area. Sweden is globally known as a human rights defender, and civic activism in cooperation with state actors, as well as international ones (UNHCR, INGOs, etc.), is an essential component of Swedish values and political culture. CSOs and civic movements in this area are especially important as the national Migration Board negotiates with municipalities the volume of refugees to be received, thus, in principle, putting more weight on a localized bottom-up approach toward refugee reception and integration (Lidén & Nyhlén, 2014). Many humanitarian and church-based organizations not only provide essential volunteer services in these areas but also publicly advocate for a change in practices. They were, for instance, instrumental in pressing publicly for a regularization program in 2005/6 to allow irregular individuals to become authorized and thus, members of Swedish society (Khosravi, 2009). Hence they are said to be politically powerful actors opposing the rise of the far right (Dahlstedt & Neergaard, 2019), though the recent success of the SD may relativize this optimistic assessment. Furthermore, a certain differentiation in inclusion set in after the refugee waves of 2015/6, when citizens quickly assembled in civic initiatives such as ‘Refugees Welcome’ while more formal and governmental responses appeared later. Yet two years later, when the issue was still high on the political agenda and politicized in public, few people wanted to continue to volunteer in this initiative, in part because of the volunteers’ frustration with institutionalized inertia and generalized racism (Povrzanovi´c & Mäkelä, 2020). This split between more flexible but also more ephemeral civic initiatives and movements and more institutionalized, organized CSOs is also apparent in our other case countries. However, spontaneous civic activism is also evidence of the increased social and political mobilization hypothesized in this book. In this sense, it is a welcome sign of the vitality and pluralism of a democracy’s third pillar and a needed resource in the face of the complex and momentous challenges of migrant integration and refugee reception. Despite domestic tensions and politicization, Sweden has developed a comprehensive approach to the inclusion of migrants and refugees that placed the country within the top three globally in 2019, with an overall score of 86/100 points. It can therefore be said that for now, Swedish policies by and large guarantee equal rights, multiple inclusion opportunities, and long-term security, both for newcomers and citizens (MIPEX,

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2020e). In addition to its favorable Labor Market Mobility, Sweden ranks first for Anti-Discrimination since its laws protect everyone against ethnic, racial, religious, gender, sexual, and nationality-based discrimination in all areas of life. Furthermore, victims benefit from relatively strong lawenforcement mechanisms, receive information on their rights, and can open legal cases against perpetrators of discrimination. Also, the country ranks in first place for Education on the MIPEX scale by developing targeted policies that reach immigrant students and address many of their essential needs. Sweden offers a clear and stable path to Permanent Residency, with long-term security and immediate socio-economic opportunities for non-EU residents. As for Citizenship, the application process can be started once the applicant has lived there for five years, and new citizens are as secure in their status as Swedish-born. Thus, Non-EU citizens can vote and stand in local elections after three years of legal residence in Sweden, although Sweden does not provide an official structure for dialogue between immigrant associations and state authorities or politicians. Therefore, as is evident in Fig. 7.6, Sweden qualifies as a favorable country for integration in all the analyzed areas except for Family Reunification. Since 2016, all refugee sponsors must have secured a job with sufficient income and benefits to cover their and their family’s needs if applying for family reunification. This restrictive economic resource requirement delays or discourages newcomers from reuniting with their families. Unfortunately, the heightened securitization of refugees and migrants in Sweden, advanced by the SD with the support of the current center-right government, will likely lead to more detrimental policies for societal newcomers, but may also have an energizing effect on political mobilization.

Conclusion As evidenced in our socio-political tracing above, the politics of in/exclusion play out differently depending on the mobilizations in response to perceived and real challenges. In all of the countries, these initiatives have led to more civic grassroots, bottom-up responses, even in rights-adverse political contexts as in Poland. These might be more temporary and apolitical, but also more flexible than the inclusion strategies pursued by professionalized CSOs or governmental agencies. More problematically, while progressive actors are highlighting the need for

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inclusion in order to create more resilient and cohesive societies within the EU, far-right movements and parties are not only depicting migrants and refugees as unwanted outsiders in the face of transnational challenges and risks but securitize them as primary threats. Rather than just voicing an exclusive position in view of their country’s volatile economic and political situation, they declare these minorities in a xenophobic manner a threat in themselves for social cohesion or public security, to name a few narrative frames. And in countries where comparatively few refugees and migrants settle, as in Poland, a narrative shift toward combating other threats to the nation, including gender, LGBT+ or the EU more generally, occurred. Country-specific dispositions in terms of in/exclusions that are reflective of their political cultures are also noticeable: whereas in Sweden, a version of caring in/exclusions with paternalistic overtones ‘for the benefit of refugees and migrants’ becomes apparent, in Germany and Spain inclusion is largely related to these countries’ illiberal histories, and in Poland in/exclusions are often expressions of Catholic doctrine, either of the good Samaritan kind or an Islamophobe one. Though one ought to remember the domestic variations within each country, with more civic engagement noticeable in urban areas, but more exclusionary activism in rural areas. As with gender and LGBT+ in/exclusions, differences are not only noticeable between countries, but also within the various MIPEX integration criteria of each individual member state. For instance, states fared best in the areas of Anti-Discrimination, which is not surprising as it is a requirement for EU membership. But national differences become apparent in areas such as Citizenship or Family Reunification. For instance, in the latter area Poland outperforms Germany, despite its overall low MIPEX scores. And Sweden, with an already high overall score is doing exceptionally well in terms of Education, which appears to be a rather difficult challenge for the other case countries. Similarly, while Political Participation is limited in all cases, Poland’s relative inexperience as immigration country is marked by an extremely low score in this category. These results illustrate not only the diversity of European migrant and refugee in/exclusions, but also attest to our hypothesis that these processes are always contingent, meaning that inclusion in one area is accompanied by exclusion in others.

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Walker, S. (2019). A whole generation has left Ukraine. Guardian. Retrieved November 20, 2020, from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/ apr/18/whole-generation-has-gone-ukrainian-seek-better-life-poland-electpresidenthttps://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/apr/18/whole-genera tion-has-gone-ukrainian-seek-better-life-poland-elect-president Weaver, A. (2010, October 17). Angela Merkel: German multiculturalism has utterly failed. The Guardian. Retrieved January 25, 2023, from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/oct/17/angelamerkel-german-multiculturalism-failed Witold, K. (2017). Security first—New right-wing government in Poland and its policy towards immigrants and refugees. Surveillance & Society, 15(4), 523–528. ˙ ˙ Zuk, P., & Zuk, P. (2020). ‘Murderers of the unborn’ and ‘sexual degenerates’: Analysis of the ‘anti-gender’ discourse of the catholic church and the nationalist right in Poland. Critical Discourse Studies, 17 (5), 566–588. https://doi. org/10.1080/17405904.2019.1676808

CHAPTER 8

Conclusion: Social In/Exclusions of Minorities in an Uncertain European Future

Introduction As the previous chapters have evidenced, the efforts by states and the EU to advance the social inclusion of minorities often result in partial successes, in that certain socio-political inclusions are accompanied by exclusions through opposing actors. These exclusions can be on the basis of the particular demographic that is of concern for inclusion, the domestic political conditions and actors, or the external shocks which are ever present in the contemporary era of uncertainty and risk. Referring to the demographic aspect, social inclusion is not a ‘one-size-fits-all’ policy; supportive measures are designed by political elites according to the relative importance of a minority group for the political process. This is where the externally ascribed collective identity of minority groups, as well as the identity politics of CSOs play a co-determining role for inclusion (see Chapter 3). Related to this point, generalizing or mainstreaming policies can conflict with more particular strategies aimed at specific populations. Hence, women’s rights can end up being prioritized over LGBT+ inclusion claims, and those over policies for migrants and refugees. In addition, different domestic political configurations continue to exert significant influence over the way in which social inclusion efforts are pursued. These can range from the influence of political parties, especially far-right ones contesting broader social justice concerns, to the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Thiel et al., The Politics of Social In/Exclusion in the EU, Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31264-9_8

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limiting administrative and operational capacity of government agencies and CSOs in implementing social inclusion policies. Finally, the external shocks caused by various threats and risks as elaborated in Chapter 2 constrain the way in which social inclusion of minorities can be achieved in a more comprehensive and sustainable manner approximating social justice for all members of society. As risks and perceived threats become more salient, politicized, and eventually (de)securitized, there are fewer material and non-material (time, knowledge) resources on the EU and domestic governance levels available to guarantee proper planning and implementation of social inclusion policies. These conditioning variables are interlinked and reinforce each other in terms of the partial, ambivalent inclusion of minorities apparent in the EU today. The governments of the member states have a preeminent role to play in the process of in/exclusion, as neither the presence of minorities, nor the occurrence or probability of risks are factors that can be easily managed. Activists or CSOs, while central actors, should not have the main burden for minority inclusion, as they do not possess sufficient mandates or resources to be primary avenues for those efforts. Governments thus have an essential role and primary responsibility in addressing social inclusion issues. They develop and determine the political longterm framework in which social inclusion measures are implemented but also influence the broader public debate by promoting certain programmatic agendas in that respect, as our country analyses show. Left-of-center progressive parties tend to favor expanded social inclusion based on their ideological heritage, although this may not necessarily be the case, as they also need to keep public approval and electoral success in mind. This is compounded by the fact that many former left-wing supporters have embraced right-wing exclusionary ideologies based on grievances related to the left’s abandoning of labor rights as a central issue, as is evident in Sweden, Germany, Spain, and other EU states. Right-of-center parties across Europe generally insist on limited government intervention, an expanded role of the market in correcting social ills, and increased responsibilities of individuals for their own welfare, all of which constrain social inclusion for minorities. In European multiparty systems, governments have changed from left to right and have built coalitions with other parties that further influence their programmatic agendas, for better or for worse in respect to minority welfare and equality. The EU, in turn, exerts an ambivalent convergence effect over the various domestic social inclusion

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efforts of member states. This ambivalence results from its own marketemphasis, coupled with countervailing legitimization needs in the eyes of the broader public. Yet even a complementary EU social policy framework cannot approach the level of impact domestic governments have on social in/exclusions. Here, a more structural trend, in part related to the augmented role of crises and risks, independent of the politics of the day has emerged over the past few years. The widespread emergence of faror extreme right parties has significantly impacted the political agendas as well as policy implementation regarding social inclusion, welfare, and equality of minorities across European states today (Grindheim, 2019). No matter if in government, where inclusion policies can actively be delimited by those forces as currently in power in Poland or Sweden, or in opposition, where propaganda and pressure are utilized to advance exclusionary ‘inclusion for deserved populations’ as in Germany or Spain, far-right parties are present in every EU member state and are the fastest growing party family, making use of cultural grievances in order to obtain political power (Golder, 2016). This book has argued, however, that those far-right parties do not only or primarily rail against feminism, sexual deviance, or immigrants and refugees, but that there are broader cross-cutting impacts of a rightward shift among European states. Crosscutting effects of conservative or populist far-right governments are visible not only in terms of countervailing ones regarding gender and sex and refugee and migrant inclusion, but also other in other more or less related policy areas, including environment, health, education etc., as visible in rightist campaigns in Sweden, Poland, Germany or Spain. These are often justified with the pursuit of a lower tax burden, a restriction to focus on ‘deserving’ native populations, or, to use the book’s structural approach, the existence of crises themselves. For instance, after the pandemic-related governmental finance infusion into social systems, many European countries under rightist governments have cut spending citing the post-pandemic macro-economic conditions of their countries. These kinds of cuts in welfare not only diminish social inclusion of already vulnerable populations. They also contribute to more risks in the future, be it through diminished efforts to fight climate change, or the eradication of health infrastructures that could prevent deaths in global health crises. More broadly, welfare state retrenchment based on crises-related cuts and austerity policies affects social cohesion in that

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resources for social policies and inclusion become more limited, leading to a hierarchy of welfare populations to be supported. As a result, social minorities tend to be more exposed to such prioritizations.

What Can be Learned from the Preceding Analyses Our initial conceptual framework already highlighted the necessity to sufficiently individualize in terms of affected demographic, as well as member state, when analyzing social inclusion in the EU. Despite the assistive policies, programs, and funds the EU provides, a linear convergence among member states is absent, nor are consistent improvements within member states evident. To demonstrate this empirically, four case countries that are representative of the EU’s Southern, Northern, Western, and Central/East European subregions were chosen. In fact, each of the 27 member states pursues different inclusion objectives and strategies, with varying results. These are based on a host of domestic factors, including most importantly the prevailing political culture, the presence and salience of particular minority issues, the vibrancy of civil society activism, the robustness of the welfare state, and the democratic quality of the government in power. More structurally, we posited that in today’s EU, endogenous risks and external shocks significantly impact upon the political mobilization of voters, citizens, and activists, which in turn conditions the degree of in/exclusion as well. With regard to the in/exclusions of gender and LGBT+ minorities, our analysis of EU gender and sexuality policies (Chapter 4) together with the policy tracing of Poland, Germany, Sweden, and Spain (Chapter 5) evidenced a diversity of in/exclusions throughout. Not only do EU-level inclusion policies impact ambiguously on inclusion with its prioritization of market-related objectives, but they also suffer, despite their buildup over time, from implementation gaps on member state level, and at times from a more substantial normative contestation by certain governments. While implementation gaps have been visible in almost all of the four member states, the Polish right-wing government stands out for its longstanding exclusion of gender and sex minorities. And the side-by-side examination of those constituencies showed that an increase in women’s rights can occur simultaneously with a stagnation or even decrease in LGBT + rights, as occurred in Spain. Finally, on a more granular policy level, the EIGE index illustrates how advances in any of the

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seven measured policy sectors contrast with regressions in related sectors in the same country. For instance, while in Poland the sectors work and finances showed improvements in terms of gender equality over time, the power sector indicating greater public visibility declined. And Germany improved in the latter area, but paradoxically shows stagnation and slight regressions in related areas of knowledge/education, and time spent on uncompensated chores. Overall, our in-depth analyses leads us to hypothesize that inclusion policies and strategies invariably lead to exclusions in other areas of private and public life, often caused by opposing sociopolitical forces. Finally, our examinations show that it is not primarily the social minority at hand that causes in/exclusions, but the way in which political mobilizations based around perceived risks, moral panics and threats (to traditional culture, the patriarchy, religion, etc.) related to those, materialize. In terms of the in/exclusions of migrants and refugees, the analysis of related EU-level policies (Chapter 6) and the country studies (Chapter 7) show that substantial disagreements about reception and integration policies on an EU level exist that accordingly impact on the diversity of national reception and integration approaches as well. Chapter 7 highlights how the four country cases, while undergoing similar migratory pressures and subsequent in/exclusionary political mobilizations, exhibit distinct patterns of either securitization or inclusion. Civic political mobilization in all these countries has led to more civic grassroots, bottom-up responses that might be more temporary and apolitical, but also more flexible than the politics of inclusion pursued by professionalized CSOs. On the other side, while progressive actors are highlighting the need for inclusion in order to create more resilient and cohesive societies within the EU, far-right movements and parties are not only depicting migrants and refugees as unwanted outsiders in face of transnational challenges, but securitize them as primary risks. Country specific dispositions in terms of in/exclusions that are reflective of their political cultures are also noticeable. Their rankings on the MIPEX integration index reflect their positioning, with Sweden ranking highest globally, Germany and Spain exhibiting average scores, and Poland being the least performing case study, albeit with slight improvements over time. Whereas in Sweden, a supportive policy and civic environment coexists with paternalistic overtones ‘for the benefit of refugees and migrants’, at least until the new right-wing government effects changes, in Germany and Spain inclusion is maintained socially and politically based on these countries’ illiberal

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history. Poland in/exclusions are often expressions of Catholic doctrine, either of the good Samaritan kind or an Islamophobe one. The MIPEX index illustrates also limited commonalities, in that education and political participation, which are essential building blocks for socio-political inclusion, are challenging for almost every country except Sweden. In sum, the country analysis for both pairs of minorities evidences the contextual influences, country divergences as well as sectoral differences that make social inclusion an ideal tested by a number of idiosyncrasies, conditionalities, and contingencies.

The Future of Social In/Exclusions in Europe The analysis of the country cases has shown that in the EU’s subregions, there are divergent concerns, ideologies and approaches when it comes to the inclusion of various minorities. This evidences the uneven state of social inclusion in the EU, which is dependent on domestic politics, but which is also influenced by the broader political framework that the EU institutions can provide through auxiliary social policies and programs. The latter is different than the particularistic, limited inclusion strategies the EU pursues, such as the Gender Equality Strategy 2020–2025 focused on women’s rights or the Action Plan on Integration and Inclusion 2021– 2027 concentrating on migrants and refugees. The EU’s overarching social policy as a complementary policy consists of assistive programs and funds that aid governments, and specific population segments such as young adults or elderly, homeless, etc., to maintain social cohesion and a competitive European economy (European Commission, 2021a, 2021b). While the latter is important as a justifying criterion for EU competence in this area, it is also an expression of the EU’s neoliberal nature as a regional market. Copeland and Daly (2018) traced the development of EU social policy over the past decade and noted that it is ‘conditional and contingent’ on competing (non)state agents as well as different member states positions. Moreover, referring to our books conceptual background of crises as critical junctures for in/exclusions, Copeland (2020) found that the EU entrenched its neoliberally guided prescriptions for socio-economic issues only further in the past decade. With this in mind, a cornerstone of the current social policy approach consists of the EU pillars of social rights, 20 principles for guiding its future development (ranging from workplace rights to social protection) established in 2017 in a post-Euro crisis EU shaken by Brexit and the rise of far-right

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populism (Carella & Graziano, 2022). Importantly, no major focus on the inclusion of social minorities is recognizable among the 20 principles, as only two specifically reference gender equality and, albeit unspecific, equal opportunities (European Commission, 2018). Most of them are generalizing principles aiming at social inclusion in a mainstreaming manner. Moreover, a recognition of the dissimilar contextual conditions in which domestic minority activism and politics are embedded in, is of essence, as the EU’s often generalizing policy measures lack sufficient country-level differentiation, and peer-review mechanisms enable countries to avoid more stringent policy applications. Taking seriously the domestic politics of inclusion means to counteract hierarchies of inclusion in specific domestic contexts, where one minority may be prioritized over another out of political expediency, and to recognize other pertinent differentiating characteristics in the EU multi-actor, multilevel governance system. For instance, Hacker (2021) found that despite decades of EU social policy activism, substantial spatial socio-economic differences continue to exist across and within member states. More than just an urban–rural divide, geographic differences between domestic growth and peripheral regions lead to increased inequalities that often impact minorities more strongly in terms of socio-economic inclusion. Here, better designed cohesion funds that are more differentiated in terms of national conditions, and a stronger connection of those to social policy and inclusion objectives, could provide a way forward to enhance inclusion on domestic levels. After all, national politics determine in large part the objectives, strategies, and outcomes related to social inclusion on a national, and cumulatively on an EU level. This already relates to the next point, in that the EU should be cognizant of those differentiating characteristics in the European Commission’s domestic budget reviews to allow for the governmentrequested appropriation of welfare funds to capture the dynamics of each country better. While so-called country specific recommendations exist in EU social policy, the EU’s overarching market-centrism and the above mentioned contingencies limit the impact of EU social policy in relation to its country differentiation (Copeland & Daly, 2018). With the neoliberal UK having exited the bloc, a receptive EU institutional leadership together with the steering countries of France, Germany, and possibly Poland and Spain, could make use of a window of opportunity to stress the social character of the Union. The response to the Covid pandemic has shown that given the right leadership at critical moments, the EU

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can invest substantial amounts in recovery funds and even convince skeptical nations such as Germany or the Netherlands to issue joint debt, albeit temporarily, to finance emergency funds. The Covid recovery funds, including its resilience facility, were determined according to national need, including social impact, of the pandemic. Similarly, the EU began to review country budgets more closely in the aftermath of the Euro crisis in the so-called ‘European semester’ to monitor the macro-economic state of each members’ economic and fiscal health, although these are often more focused on recommending governments ‘fiscal prudence’ than welfare expansion. Thus a stand-alone social inclusion country budget review mechanism akin to the European semester of budgetary and fiscal overview through the Commission, the former which already contains at least nominally a socio-economic pillar to recognize the broader societal impacts of budgetary and public policies, would further the social inclusion policy agenda on the EU level. Tackling the issues of social in/exclusions on a national level has been recognized as essential by the current European Commission. The EU’s steering body did not only establish the first Equality Commissioner in the EU’s history in 2019, Helena Dalli who holds a doctorate in political sociology. It also initiated two draft directives, the EU’s strongest legally binding instrument, to strengthen the position of national equality bodies. With regard to the Commissioner for Equality, her portfolio comprises a number of inclusion issues ranging from the EU’s first gender equality strategy 2020–2025 to its first LGBTIQ strategy 2020– 2025, to the strategic framework for Roma inclusion. While these are to some extent particularistic measures focusing on specific demographics, a prominent inclusion of intersectional concerns is essential to transcend a narrowly conceived scope, despite the inherent tensions between an aspirational breadth of application in this transversal manner, and the required depth of policy intervention for a specific minority. Civil society and academics have early on recognized this and have more recently focused on the gendered dimension of migration and migrant labor (Ribas-Mateus & Sassen, 2022), and even developed a Gender-Migration Index tool to evaluate the gender-responsiveness within migrant inclusion and refugee reception settings (https://www.migrationgenderjus tice.com/gmi). As for the Commission’s equality draft directives, these are meant to bolster the position, independence, and competences of the national equality bodies so they can work more efficiently and without interference from governments or other actors. These are supposed

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to monitor, analyze and promote various rights issues and are slightly differently constituted in each member state, from the German AntiDiscrimination Agency to the Polish Commissioner for Human Rights, to the Swedish Equality Ombudsperson (Equinet, 2023). If passed by the European Parliament and more critically, the state-dominated Council, it would provide a stronger mandate for their work and indirect oversight by the EU (Collins, 2023). Despite the potential pitfalls and shortcomings of these two approaches, these Commission initiatives show that transversal, intersectional issues of inclusion and equality have become a priority for the EU. Importantly, however, similar efforts at inclusion of migrants and refugees are not recognizable by the EU institutions, which admittedly have to coordinate with member governments that, in the current era of increased migratory pressures and risks (from the pandemic to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine) are disinclined to develop a coherent or inclusive migration and asylum framework. Aside from these policy recommendations at the EU level, CSOs themselves are central actors for social inclusion across Europe. In fact, transnational umbrella CSOs were key informants and lobbyists for stronger protection in the EU’s public consultation preceding the publication of its pillars of social rights; though their recommendations were not always reflected in the pillar principles (Carella & Graziano, 2022). Moreover, many minority NGOs have already linked up with domestic policy makers and are also increasingly connecting with each other domestically as well as transnationally across the EU to augment visibility and increase impact. At the same time, competitive tendencies in terms of funding, access, and public visibility remain, including a differentiation between volunteers, affected minority members and professionals as well as between national and transnational, EU-level organizations (Thiel, 2017). Hence an all-inclusive social justice strategy needs to be cognizant of the potential challenges that an all-embracing and inclusive campaign strategy brings with it. Moreover, the contemporary information age with its surplus of (mis)information, often used by activists of in/ exclusion as well, brings about further challenges in managing the public image that minorities and their civil society representatives are exposed to. Especially under the impact of the Covid pandemic, established political institutions, public media, and other important emitters of information and expertise have suffered a generalized lack of public trust. Accordingly, misleading inflammatory information that is often rapidly shared on alternative social media outlets can be increasingly problematic for

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social inclusion attempts. Here, LGBT+ individuals and refugees are more heavily affected than women or migrants, for example. A more subtle structural issue that presents challenges for the future inclusion of the social minorities examined in this book, the demographic shifts related to the aging of European publics result in idiosyncratic forms of in/exclusion. Since the end of the Cold War, Europeans over time have had fewer children, and if so, at increasing later stages in life. While this is true of the EU average, with slight variations depending on, for instance, the impact of the Euro crisis, individual country results diverge as one would expect. None of the EU states, however, approximates the statistically required 2.1 life births per woman to guarantee population growth. Sweden, for instance, stabilized over the past three years at about 1.7 births, and Germany actually recovered from lower values to 1.5 births over the recent years, while Spain dealt with notoriously low birth rates at around 1.25 since its democratization in the 1980s, and Poland experienced a sharp drop after the end of the Cold War, stabilizing at around 1.4 births (European Commission, 2021c). Despite the need for more migrants to stem the graying of the population and maintain Europe’s intergenerationally funded welfare systems, life births by foreign-born mothers residing in the EU, while slowly increasing, are similarly nationally diverse ranging from ca. 30% of all births in Sweden, Germany, and Spain to less than 5% in Poland, for example (Ibid.). In terms of the impacts of those developments for social in/exclusions, an aging and diminishing population will, in general, put more emphasis on the societal roles of women, but may overall also cause a stagnation in economic growth, which in turn delimits social expenditures for states. But just as with the social inclusion of LGBT+ populations, which received more ambivalent salience in recent years in that auxiliary policy efforts increased with a mix of societal acceptance and socio-cultural resistance across Europe, a heightened emphasis on the centrality of women can result in either more ways to advance their positions in public life and the private sector, or in a neonatal policy push relegating their roles to the private sphere. Relatedly, the presence of migrants and refugees will become more politically salient, albeit in different ways. While governments slowly begin to publicly acknowledge the need for immigrants for their economies, as notably in Spain or Germany, refugees or asylum seekers will likely remain, despite their humanitarian needs, at the margins of societies. For one, because their stay may not yet be legally legitimized when waiting for their asylum request to be processed and tainted by

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suspicions of economic migrancy, but also because aging populations are more conservative, and often less open to socio-cultural diversity. A similarly drawn-out challenge consists in the migratory pressures caused by environmental degradation. While the linkage between migration and climate change has been recognized by scholars, intergovernmental organizations, and state governments are only beginning to take action in this admittedly complex area. But there is still hesitancy to recognize the detrimental impact of climate change on humanity, as the UNHCR and the EU in part as well still designates those as ‘environmental migrants’, rather than providing them protected refugee status (Podesta, 2019). Global climate change cannot be mitigated by the EU alone, but as a prosperous and stable region, it is a preferred destination for migrants whose environment, their ways to make a living or simply to survive, is deteriorating. The European Commission recognized the linkage between climate change in the early 2000s, yet in a 2013 published in-depth report, it projects that a relatively low probability that people in the Global South, which are more heavily affected and vulnerable because of limited mitigation resources, will move to EU shores. The report also suggests additional research and multilateral coordination to support more heavily affected countries. (European Commission, 2013). These examples are not only indicative of the relative novelty of the environment-migration linkage, and thus the inability to appropriately advance policy solutions, but also of the tendentiously exclusionary approach taken by states and international organizations. Yet with the documented acceleration of climate change, additional migratory as well as policy pressures will build up to more treat the issue, and the migrating individuals, appropriately. Another future challenge resides in the rapid growth of artificial intelligence (AI). The exponential increase in analytical capabilities does not only impact on European labor conditions with increased automatization, which in turn changes the gendered dynamics of the breadwinner model for families, but it also has a host of other repercussions for migrants and refugees, as well as for LGBT+ individuals. With regard to the former, some analysts posit that ‘AI in migration is increasingly used to make predictions, assessments, and evaluations based on racist assumptions it is programmed with’ (Smith et al., 2023), in addition to being used for surveillance purposes. Biometric data collection is similarly invasive, and opens the door for privacy rights violations. Other progressives have voiced, however, that AI could potentially assist in more neutral

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and improved decision-making about risk-assessments when processing asylum requests, especially as asylum decisions are highly idiosyncratic at this point (Cameron, 2021). Newer research, however, seems to be more critical and suggests that despite its potential benefit, AI thus far has been primarily used to facilitate immigration policies that jeopardize or violate human rights (Nalbandian, 2022). Similarly, the use of AI for gender determinations is fraught with uncertainties about the way binary and homophobe biometric assessments could be used to misidentify people when interacting with official government agencies, or even in the private sector (Hamidi et al., 2018). Aside from these direct AI implications, the resulting misinformation of social media and online algorithms has led to polarization over minorities as well. As the EU institutions are in the process of developing a comprehensive AI regulatory law (European Commission, 2021a, 2021b), CSOs, experts, and state actors are tasked with making sure that the most vulnerable individuals will not be further exposed. In terms of structural challenges for inclusion in which the agency of state and non-state actors is embedded in, the geopolitical fragmentation in Europe and beyond constitutes a more indirect test. Geopolitical or geostrategic politics in general denote strategic action aimed at enhancing political and geographic influence beyond one’s borders. Hence the geopolitical fragmentation in Europe may refer to different issues that similarly impact on social inclusion, from Brexit to the transnational linkages of far-right parties, to the illegitimate influence of Russia in the EU. The difficult process of the United Kingdom’s departure from the EU has on the one hand elevated voices among EU policy agenda setters aiming to use this juncture to reemphasize a more social and less neoliberally configured Union (Daly, 2019), but it also led the way to renewed discussions within Europe about the degree to which countries should pursue a national (chauvinist) agenda. Especially populist far-right forces have voiced such ambitions and are increasingly linking up across Europe to pursue their geopolitical goals in building up a transnational veto-bloc in the EU and projecting far-right ideologies beyond national borders. Evidence of this process can be found in the close collaboration and mutual support of far-right governments such as Italy, Hungary, and Poland in the European Council representing the member state positions in the EU. This differentiating process diminishing socio-political cohesion in the EU is subtly advanced by Russia’s geopolitical influence, which has supported those far-right governments, unduly influenced election

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campaigns across Europe, and interfered in EU relations with its neighborhood including in the Balkans. Moreover, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has pushed more than three million Ukrainians as refugees into the EU, with most (temporarily) relocating to Germany and especially, Poland. While more accepted than other non-European refugees, they put additional strains on reception systems that were already overburdened after 2015, and hence likely lead to more restrictive refugee policies in the future. Similarly, China has used its geopolitical influence to advance its policy goals, and even small states such as Qatar have been implicated in bribing selected Parliament officials, leading to a further legitimacy crisis for the EU. But it is not only the EU or governments that are exposed to or in some cases, instrumental in, the increased geopolitical influences coming from within as well as outside the EU. The enhanced significance of civil society in social inclusion has forced CSOs to adapt to geopolitical influences and pressures, be it in the way governments aim to control ‘foreign’ organizations or alternatively, build up their own government-organized NGOs (GONGOS), or force CSOs to seek alternative supporters or practices (Young, 2022). While these trends often have a global scope, in that an increased volatile ‘West’ including more fragile transatlantic relations are set in opposition to major powers such as Russia or China, the impact on social inclusion within the EU is more granular. No matter if in the delimiting of broadly conceived gender equality policies across the EU, or the securitization of migrants and asylum seekers, inclusionary policies are increasingly contested by forces that are located outside of the domestic realm as well. Thus in terms of the expected increase in human rights ‘culture wars’ caused in part by the augmented salience of minority inclusion, a corresponding contestation of social inclusion norms and policies might make it more difficult to pursue such a policy agenda in the EU. Culture wars usually consist of heated debates and splits within the public regarding moral-ethical issues that in the broadest sense have a link to a prevailing majority culture. Hence as the topic of inclusion of social minorities grows in importance, certain actors might be tempted to use this apparent crisis, sometimes also called moral panic, to incite exclusive rhetoric and practices. These regressive policies and reactions to the state and EU inclusion attempts however constitute a broader movement against democratic pluralism of various forms, be they SOGIESC or ethno-religious based. Thus the foregrounding of social inclusion issues in a contentious manner

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also serves to distract from larger political polarizations over pluralist societies and politics. The polarization over minority rights in many cases is not specifically about cultural protectionism, but manifests as a revisionist reaction to the larger post-modern changes that occurred in neoliberal societies, such as increased socio-cultural diversity and pluralism, gender equality, secularism, and a weakening of national identities as a result of globalization and European integration. As human rights culture wars are in large part generalized expressions of discontent with late modernity’s instability of socio-political structures and institutions (see Chapter 3), all of the minorities under examination here appear to be similarly impacted. No matter if gender or sexuality, or migration or asylum, the research presented here has evidenced a politicization of those in all case countries, which is unavoidable given the salience of rights issues in increasingly pluralistic and demographically diverse European societies. The EU might have a constraining effect in that member states are to adhere to the EU’s rights-based provisions, but in practice governments can use their national prerogatives and constitutional boundaries to advance exclusionary policies as evidenced in Poland, for instance. Hence these kinds of inclusion issues will similarly be dealt with in ambiguous ways across EU member states and across affected minority populations.

Conclusion The preceding analyses have evidenced the increased significance of social inclusion issues connected to the identity politics of minorities and civil society groups in the EU. This phenonomen, we contend is related, if not caused by, the augmented fluidity and instability of socio-political institutions in today’s ‘risk societies’. In almost all cases, an increase in social inclusion is accompanied by backlash and certain exclusions that can be political, social, economic, or cultural in nature. Moreover, the social inclusion of minorities manifests unevenly across EU member states depending on the demographic in question, is ambiguously promoted by the EU, and is contingent on a number of supportive actors and institutions. At the same time, the politicized salience and public awareness in the EU about the need to respond to increasing societal diversity has grown on elite and mass levels. While this may not have led to a more civic Europe in terms of a corresponding positive impact on the inclusion of social minorities across member states, it has galvanized affected groups themselves and sensibilized political elites to the needs of those.

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More than just a peripheral societal issue, the social inclusion of minorities is a significant normative and political marker of the EU’s legitimacy and normative power in an increasingly.

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Index

A Activism, 3, 4, 6, 8, 11–14, 16, 35, 36, 40, 42, 51, 52, 56, 57, 69, 74, 99, 107, 180, 181, 195, 197, 206, 209 Asylum, 4, 7, 14, 15, 27, 28, 49, 70, 93, 94, 101, 110, 116, 121, 139–151, 153–157, 163–166, 168–174, 176–178, 180–182, 184–189, 191–193, 195, 211, 212, 214, 216. See also Refugees B Brexit, 5, 27, 32, 33, 52, 152, 208, 214 C Church, 74, 96–98, 106, 111–113, 117, 180 Civil Society Organization (CSOs), 2, 3, 6, 12, 14, 15, 25, 42, 43, 48, 49, 56, 68, 69, 71, 73, 75–77,

97–99, 105, 130, 164, 173, 174, 180, 181, 187, 188, 195, 196, 203, 204, 207, 211, 214, 215 Climate change, 20, 34, 70, 180, 205, 213 Collective Identity/ies, 40, 43–47, 203 Contentious Politics, 5–8, 40, 51, 52 Covid-19 pandemic, 1, 21, 30, 31, 41, 69 Crises, 2, 3, 7, 8, 10, 12, 14, 19, 21–26, 28, 31, 32, 34, 35, 43, 51, 62, 63, 69, 76, 143, 157, 180, 183, 186, 205

D Discourse(s), 21–23, 28–30, 33, 43, 51, 72, 96, 116, 118, 122, 125, 129, 164, 165, 174, 190 Diversity, 1, 3, 13, 16, 42, 54, 61, 62, 68, 69, 78, 188, 197, 206, 207, 213, 216

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Thiel et al., The Politics of Social In/Exclusion in the EU, Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31264-9

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Dublin Regulation, 15, 28, 29, 142, 145, 147, 157, 168

E Equal pay, 66, 84, 86 Euro Crisis, 21, 69, 150, 208 European Commission, 2, 11, 22, 24, 26–31, 33, 43, 54, 67, 73, 84–86, 97, 117, 147–149, 154, 155, 157, 166, 186, 188, 208–210, 213, 214 European Council, 67, 155, 214 European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE), 64, 85, 87, 88, 91, 100, 103, 104, 109, 113, 119, 125, 130, 206 Europeanization, 5, 12, 13, 21, 23, 27, 105, 165 European Parliament, 31–33, 43, 48, 50, 67, 69, 70, 72, 100, 211 European Social Fund, 55, 166 European Women’s Lobby, 46, 69 Exclusion, 27, 33, 35, 36, 45, 49, 50, 53, 56, 57, 62, 64, 69, 73, 75, 77, 83, 92, 96, 99, 100, 104, 110, 129, 130, 139, 143, 145, 158, 164–166, 169, 173, 176, 181, 184, 188, 193, 196, 197, 203–208, 210–212, 216

F Franco, Francisco, 109–112, 117, 183–185 Fundamental Rights Agency, 73, 74

G Gender equality, 10, 14, 46, 47, 64–70, 72, 77, 84, 85, 87, 88, 91, 92, 95, 96, 98, 100, 104, 109, 112,

113, 118, 119, 122–126, 129, 130, 207, 209, 210, 215, 216 policies, 69, 95, 98, 123 rights, 41 violence, 14, 62, 66, 67, 88, 95, 97, 113 Germany, 6, 11, 14, 15, 26, 27, 33, 41, 47, 48, 50, 51, 53, 54, 62, 83, 85, 87, 91, 99, 100, 102, 104–108, 130, 143, 145, 149, 153–155, 164–166, 168, 170, 172, 176–178, 180–183, 189, 191, 197, 204–207, 209, 210, 212, 215 Globalization, 7, 12, 13, 19, 20, 23, 63, 74, 216 Greece, 11, 25–27, 33, 48, 87, 109, 148–154, 169, 176, 184 H Heteronormativity, 71 Homophobia, 2, 74, 78, 126 Human rights, 7, 14, 16, 29, 33, 43, 72, 76, 77, 93, 103, 104, 108, 116, 139, 142, 195, 214–216 I Identity politics, 5–9, 11, 13, 14, 16, 36, 39–43, 45–53, 56, 62, 143, 203, 216. See also Activism ILGA Europe, 43, 46, 74, 75, 89, 93, 110, 116 Inclusion, 2–5, 7–12, 14–16, 23, 24, 35, 39, 42, 46, 47, 50, 53–57, 62–64, 66, 71, 72, 75–77, 83, 84, 87, 93, 100, 102, 108–112, 117–120, 124, 129, 130, 143, 147, 151, 164–166, 168, 171, 174, 177, 178, 180, 183, 185, 187, 188, 190, 194–197, 203–212, 214–217

INDEX

Individualism, 47, 49 Intersectionality, 68 Intersex, 71, 73, 74, 93, 107, 121 Issue salience, 49 L LGBT+, 5, 6, 10, 11, 13, 14, 16, 39, 42, 43, 45, 46, 55, 56, 62, 63, 65, 70–77, 83–87, 89, 91–100, 102–112, 115, 117–122, 126–129, 168, 172, 173, 180, 197, 203, 206, 212, 213 discrimination, 45, 55, 56, 65, 72, 73, 76, 85, 103, 106 equality, 13, 62, 63, 72, 84, 85, 87, 92, 95, 96, 98, 108, 116, 126, 130 policies, 6, 13, 14, 78, 105 rights, 14, 15, 46, 62, 72–76, 84, 89, 92, 96–98, 105–107, 110, 115, 127, 129, 130, 206 Liquid modernity, 3, 5, 9, 12, 19, 20, 63, 157 M Media, 12, 28, 33, 40, 42, 44, 51, 52, 97, 99, 101, 108, 173, 174, 211, 214 Merkel, Angela, 104, 105, 108, 178, 180 Migrants, 1, 4, 5, 9–11, 13–15, 27–29, 40, 43, 55, 61, 74, 77, 108, 126, 130, 139–145, 147, 148, 150–157, 163–174, 176–178, 182, 184, 185, 188, 190–197, 203, 205, 207, 208, 210–213, 215 Minorities, 3–8, 11–13, 15, 16, 35, 39, 42, 49, 51, 53–56, 61–63, 73, 77, 197, 203–206, 208, 209, 211, 214, 216, 217

221

gender, 2, 64, 66, 69, 83, 96 sexual, 14, 55, 87, 102, 118, 130, 165, 176, 206 social, 2, 62, 206, 209, 212, 215, 216

N Nationalism, 5, 46, 111, 125, 153, 171, 173 Neoliberalism, 20, 55, 69

P Poland, 6, 14, 15, 31, 33, 41, 42, 47–49, 51, 53, 54, 62, 65, 74, 76, 83, 85, 87, 89, 91–99, 108, 129, 130, 141, 155, 156, 164–166, 168, 170–176, 182, 191, 196, 197, 205–207, 209, 212, 214–216 Polish, 208 Political culture, 5, 7, 12, 13, 23, 47–49, 53, 96, 104, 109, 110, 165, 193, 195, 197, 206, 207 Political mobilization, 3–6, 11, 14, 15, 19, 21, 25, 29, 35, 39, 40, 42, 43, 46, 49–53, 57, 86, 92, 96, 98, 99, 102, 105–109, 112, 115, 117, 118, 122, 127–130, 143, 164, 168, 169, 172, 195, 196, 206, 207 Political sociology, 4–9, 210 Politicization, 6, 7, 12, 13, 16, 21–24, 29, 32, 35, 77, 78, 156, 166, 179, 195, 216 Populism, 61, 153, 209 Private sector, 50, 66, 67, 73, 84, 97, 103, 212, 214 Protest, 31, 34, 48, 52, 53, 92, 95, 97, 99, 112, 114, 115, 127, 173, 174

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R Racism, 3, 15, 43, 181, 186, 195 Rainbow Europe Index, 89, 109, 110, 119, 120 Refugees, 5, 6, 10, 11, 14, 15, 27–29, 42, 55, 56, 94, 98, 130, 139–144, 147–155, 157, 163–166, 168–170, 172–174, 176–178, 181, 182, 187, 190, 191, 193, 195–197, 203, 205, 207, 208, 211–213, 215. See also Asylum Risk society, 3, 5, 20, 24, 43

S Schengen, 1, 27, 30, 147, 171, 193 Security, 2, 21, 23–25, 29, 30, 40, 67, 106, 108, 123, 157, 172, 189, 191, 195–197 Social movements, 6, 12, 24, 25, 35, 42, 49, 52, 69, 99, 102, 109, 112, 117, 130, 188 Spain, 6, 11, 14, 15, 25, 27, 31, 41, 47–49, 51, 53, 54, 62, 83, 85, 87, 91, 109–118, 130, 144, 145, 153, 154, 164–169, 176,

182–191, 197, 204–207, 209, 212 Sweden, 6, 14, 15, 31, 41, 47, 48, 50, 51, 53, 54, 62, 83, 85, 87, 91, 115, 119–128, 130, 148, 149, 153, 154, 164–166, 168, 169, 177, 191–193, 195–197, 204–208, 212 T Trans*, 65, 73, 77, 86, 107, 115–118 U United Nations (UN), 28, 34, 66, 67, 72, 139, 140, 152, 157, 163, 165 V Visegrad 4, 173 Voting, 11, 13, 40, 41, 50–53, 57, 192 W Welfare state, 13, 53, 54, 119, 122, 123, 128, 193, 205, 206