Journal Article

Coherent Selves, Viable States: Eastern Europe and the “Migration/Refugee Crisis” (upcoming)

Published 23 May 2017 / By Dace Dzenovska

Back to Publications

This essay argues that what is at stake in arguments about the difference between Eastern and Western Europe in the context of migration and asylum politics is the definition of a politically and ethically acceptable threshold of “too many”, which takes on concrete contours in relation to historically formed understandings of coherent selves and viable polities. The argument derives from placing analysis of the alleged political and ethical failures of Eastern Europe alongside those limits of refugee/migrant intake that are considered politically legitimate and ethically justifiable from the mainstream liberal democratic perspective. The essay proposes that in order to understand the European political landscape in relation to migration it is necessary to undertake relational analysis of the different configurations of the Europe-wide tension between inclusion and exclusion, as well as analysis of the modes of power that differentiate between these configurations of inclusion and exclusion on moral grounds.

Citation

Dzenovska, D. (2017) 'Coherent Selves, Viable States: Eastern Europe and the “Migration/Refugee Crisis”' Slavic Review, vol.76 no.2