Preliminary Programme

Schengen, Fortress Europe, Brexit – Migration and its control have become a major topic in debates about Europe over the last decades. This has not always been the case, although migration has been elementary to European integration from its very beginning. The paper discusses changing regimes of free mobility in integrating Europe from the 1950s to the present, analysing the shift from labour mobility as an substantial part of the common market to the free movement of citizens as a tool to legitimize the European Project by elites to the normalisation of recent mobile European living experiences. Looking at the interactions between labour, capital, and state in forming the European migration regime it argues that contemporary Europe has grown out of its migration experiences by both controlling and enabling mobility. Who is acknowledged as “European” and who is not has been subject to these debates. This is why integrating Europe not only produced migration by enabling its citizen to move quite freely but migration also produced Europe as a social and political space. (Show less)

The presentation will discuss key changes in the policies, practices and attitudes of European governments, civil society organisations and citizens towards migration and migrants. It will assess the extent to which classical liberal humanitarianism, drawing on the perspectives of Henri Dunant in the 19th century, and based on the principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality and unity, are under threat. The paper argues that an understanding of the history of migration to, from and within Europe, from the birth of classical liberal humanitarianism in the late 19th century is vital if effective and equitable policies are to be formulated to integrate the current influx of migrants. It argues that although the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) at the OECD in Paris is providing some effective programmes aimed at integrating migrants into different European countries, a much more coherent, cohesive and historically sensitive approach is necessary. There is a disconnect between the provision of humanitarian aid – as a short term response to migration - and programmes and policies aimed at the long term integration of migrants. This is leading to division amongst European government and civil society organisations and inadequate – often chaotic – provision of assistance for migrants. A complicating factor is the rise of right-wing populism in influential European countries. This rise has stimulated a move to the provision of European aid for securitisation of donor states and borders. The securitisation of aid is also leading to the criminalisation of humanitarianism and solidarity with migrants in Europe. In overall terms, therefore, a harmonized direction from European governments and civil society organisations relating to migration and migrants is lacking. Different directions concerning migration policies are emerging. With the emergence of these different directions, the ideals of ‘classical’ European humanitarianism - based on humanity, neutrality, impartiality and unity - are threatened, as never before. European leaders have attempted to clarify aid policies for migration and migrants through a 2018 initiative named the Facilitation of Orderly, Safe, Regular and Responsible Migration and Mobility. This initiative aims to assist capacity building in migration and mobility policy, analysis, planning and management, including engagement with diaspora and programmes enhancing the development impact of remittances and/or their use for developmental projects in developing countries, to increase the development benefits of migration. The presentation will examine some of the key aspects of this initiative and examine its strengths and weaknesses. It argues that the initiative lacks historical sensitivity and this needs to be added to give it more chance of success. (Show less)

Migration is subject to what James Hollifield has called the “liberal paradox”: while liberalism pushes states towards the opening of their borders, especially for goods and capital, the same openness does not necessarily apply to people. In the European Union, the free movement of workers has developed into the free movement of citizens. On a global scale, people—both as a factor of production and as humans endowed with rights—have no similar freedom: while freedom of emigration is an established human right (Art. 13 UDHR), there is no corresponding right to immigration and establishment that would constitute a global freedom of movement.
This paper is going to deal with historical debates at United Nations level in the second half of the 1980s that dealt with a possible resolution on a comprehensive right to freedom of movement. While Western states were in favour of a resolution urging the states of the Eastern Bloc to grant freedom of emigration, they were opposed to the right to immigration that representatives of countries in the global south suggested. The latter were in turn concerned about the dangers of brain drain that such a liberal migration order might cause for their countries. The present analysis will discuss the problems and paradoxes of the related debates and hence bring into focus conceptions of a global migration order at the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the neoliberal age. (Show less)

In 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall marked the breakdown of the East-West demarcation and the reunification of the German Democratic Republic ( GDR) and Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). Consequently, thousands of predominantly Northern Vietnamese contract workers, who came to East Berlin under the bilateral agreement between the GDR and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, stayed in the reunified Germany alongside with thousands of Vietnamese boat people from South Vietnam, who were settled in West Berlin by the FRG. Therefore, Berlin became the host of two Vietnamese communities. Until today, significant tension continues to exist between the two communities of Vietnamese in Berlin due to the geographical and ideological divisions linked to the deterritorialization and consequently reterritorialization of the imagined homeland and host-land within diaspora as well as the cultural and socioeconomic segregation in the Vietnamese diaspora due to the differences in settlement policies. This paper focuses on the effects of the memories of the Vietnam War and the Cold War on the negotiation of the diasporic identity of Vietnamese in Berlin. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Berlin from 2016 to 2018, I argue that 44 years after the end of the Vietnam War and 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Vietnamese diasporic memories and identity are still constantly being negotiated in the remnants of these events in Berlin. (Show less)