Master’s Thesis
European integration or disintegration?
The effects of the 2010 and 2015 refugee crises on the Greek
parliamentary debate
For the MSc
Crisis and Security Management
Name: Stavros Pagonidis
S/N: 1903551
Supervisor: A. Dimitrova
Second Reader: J. Koops
Wordcount: 14600
Date: 09/06/2019
Introduction 4
The phenomenon 4
Structure of the study 5
Significance of the study 6
Background to the case 7
The delicate Schengen Deal 7
The 2015 challenge 8
Relevant academic literature 10
Special types of crises 11
Timelines of a crisis 12
Political attention fades 14
How a crisis makes politics 15
Methodology 18
Scope and data collection 18
Hypotheses and method of analysis 19
Findings 20 Overview of 2010 20 Overview of 2015 21 Attribution of Responsibility 22 Conflict 25 Human Interest 27 Morality 28 Economic Consequences 28
A notable change in semantics 29
Discussion 31
Struggling with the European route 31
A not-necessarily-common problem 33
Migration as a choice between Coupling/ Decoupling 34
Lack of a clear result 35
Limitations of study and leads for future research 36
Quantitative peculiarities of studying Migration Crises 36
Difficult hermeneutics of studying Migration Crises 36
No human is illegal 37
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank the academic supervisor of this thesis, Prof. dr. A.L. Dimitrova of Leiden University, who identified the gaps in my understanding of research and gave me a late crash course on how to write a thesis.
The research design process was decisively aided by dr. J. Lindholm of Åbo Akademi University, who translated and sent me the coding scheme of her own research.
Finally, I am indebted to all my friends and colleagues who motivated me and gave me feedback, through three different attempts to write a thesis.
I. Introduction
A. The phenomenon
Some say that labeling the evolution of migration in Europe as a “crisis”, is already a choice of framing (Verhofstadt, 2018). It is already an admission that a situation is escaping beyond control and that some sort of sacrifice or monumental struggle is necessary to mitigate the effects. If an innovative outlook can take away the urgency of dealing with mass migration, one thing is evident: this outlook was not in the spirit of the Greek government on the 23rd of October 2010. That is when said government activated for the first time the European Union’s capabilities for an emergency border management operation. The phenomenon that prompted this reaction was a massive uncontrolled migration flow in the summer of 2010, with six to eight thousand migrants arriving to Greece every month. The Greek authorities and the European Union were alarmed by that event and they used, or they were forced to use it, as the first ever deployment of the FRONTEX Rapid Border Intervention Teams.
All of their concerned evaluation of the situation and all of their resolve to manage the crisis, would be seen as trivial when the same crisis happened in 2015. A lot had changed on the chess board this time. Greece was governed for the first time in history by a party that was styled as Radical Leftist. The societies within the European Union had started realization the repercussions of the Arab Spring and ISIS was rising as a staple piece of the daily news. A series of crises were starting to shake the comfort and the worldview of European societies. Some events, like the Lampedusa shipwreck of 2013, generated sympathy for the plight of migrants and disgust for the self-isolation of “Fortress Europe”. Before such sentiments could take effect, other events like the Bataclan terrorist attacks would strike their own blow and push the balance towards xenophobia and fear for the Europeans’ own lives.
Amid all that turbulent landscape, an increasingly numerous stream of people had been walking through Greece, into the Balkans and then through Central Europe to reach countries that were famous as economically robust and socially inclusive; France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden. For reasons that are not in the scope of the present document, that migration route through the Balkans was halted by the countries that comprised it. All of them had the means to block a stretch of their land border and significantly limit the incomers.
twenty times more migrants arriving in Greece. On the 3rd of December 2015, the RABITs were again deployed in Greece, but not at a region where they would arrest people for entering Greece illegally. This time they were around the Idomeni crossing point, a makeshift camp similar to the Jungle of Calais, where dozens of thousands of people were stacked in dire conditions, trying to force or sneak their way north.
The question that troubles the present research piece is whether the effect of the two crises described above had a rallying effect in favour of European integration, or whether it fueled centrifugal forces and deepened the divisions within the European Union; a Union that had already stretched its political capital through the financial troubles of the early 2010’s.
B. Structure of the study
Before conducting an analysis, this document begins by presenting the dynamics of the Schengen free movement zone and establishing it as the core value which will be jeopardized by a crisis. The smooth functioning of Schengen is a “notionally normal starting point” (Turner, 1976), one which will be put under doubts during the 2010 crisis and which will start to effectively fall apart in 2015.
The case starts being placed in an academic perspective through an overview of related literature. The life-cycle of crises and the actions of decision makers during crisis-management are laid out. The process of producing a narrative and broadcasting a meaning-making rhetoric is selected as the focus of the study. To examine what is taking place inside the political system of a country that has declared such an emergency, this study turns to the proceedings of the Hellenic Parliament during the critical days of October 2010 and December 2015.
For each of the two crises, one month’s worth of parliamentary debates is searched for keywords that relate to migration. The identified interventions can originate in debates where migration was the intended agenda item, or can be found in debates about other issues (crime, public health, public finances) where migration was brought into the discussion. Once all of the relevant interventions are collected into one body of data, they undergo a series of readings to conduct qualitative discourse analysis.
A toolbox collected by Lindholm (2018) and used in a similar study of the Finnish Parliament, is adapted for the needs of this research and used to codify the data. The main variables are the Frame used by the speaker and the outlook of Threat or Opportunity conveyed by the speaker. Afterwards, the codified data are read to identify themes and recurring arguments that are employed in the
debate. The findings are presented, supported with some quantitative data collected in a targeted manner, once the prominent themes had been named.
The significance of a national government declaring that the crisis has surpassed its means and officially asking for the RABITs, is of central role for this study. It is used as a reference point for the definition of the scope of analysis and it is a recurring theme in the presented findings.
C. Significance of the study
It is very rare to come across a mistake or a disaster that has never occurred before. So, one would wonder, why aren’t we constantly improving on our preparedness and our policies on all issues at all times? The answer is in the waning political attention afforded by voters and politicians to a crisis that has already been resolved. The 2010 crisis in the Evros borders attracted some attention, activated policy mechanisms, but then it faded behind other agenda items. If our attention on the matter did not dwindle, it could have been the early alert to show that Europe is not prepared to manage a transboundary crisis in migration.
Another effect that can be observed by the temporal differentiation (between 2010 and 2015) is the different reaction to similar policies. In those early policy documents and related scholarly analyses, one can find terminology and tools which are still considered novel and experimental almost 15 years later. At the same time, some policy solutions had been implemented without attracting much general attention, but a replication or enhancement of the same practices has been questioned when it takes place during a crisis. A characteristic example is the construction of border fences, which have existed in the Spanish exclaves since the 90s and in Greece since 2012 but they came to be vividly discussed in 2015 when the countries of central and eastern Europe decided to erect them, and of course in light of Donald Trump’s political ownership of the border fence agenda in the United States of America.
This study seeks to diagnose which way Greece was shook by the earthquake. It can be either closer to the EU, to seek assistance and to reiterate mutual commitment. It can be away from the EU, the institution that seems to be synonymous for everything that has caused Greek governments to lose an election the last decade. It could be a mixed effect, with some politicians tugging the line towards Europeanization and others vocalizing their Euroscepticism, a worldview that sometime during the decade stopped being limited to the political fringe.
II. Background to the case
This chapter offers a description of the political stakes and the urgency that was associated with the migration crises of 2010 and 2015. The process of European integration has constructed certain frameworks of cooperation that came to be taken for granted by a generation of citizens that are occupying more and more of the electorate. The security of this cooperation was put to the test by the migration crises.
A. The delicate Schengen Deal
A certain pattern of questions permeates many (if not all) sectors of European integration. If your ministry of Education is not holding the exams, how do you know a person has learned anything? If your food safety labs have not tested a drink, how do you know it’s safe to be consumed? The answer is the same; you need to trust your dear partners’ authorities to put a seal of approval on the subject. To make this political decision less staggering, the EU has maintained the strategy of producing a harmonized goal and mutually inspecting each other’s implementation mechanisms. This creates a set of rules and practices which gradually crystalize into the communitarian acquis, that can be taken for granted by all Member States. It would not be too much of a guess to claim that all sectors of cooperation within the EU have been accompanied by the creation of an EU agency or office, tasked with facilitating cooperation and efficiency in that particular sector.
This organizational and governance challenge cannot be overstated in the case of the Schengen Area of free movement. If you are not stopping and searching entrants to your territory, how do you know they are not a threat? In line with our previously mentioned principle, the authorities of one country have to trust that a police officer who has not graduated from their own academy, does not undergo their appraisal procedure and is not subject to their chain of command, is doing his or her job properly. To up the stakes of controversy, the authorities of our illustration have to trust that another country’s judge has correctly weighed the evidence and delivered a decision granting an asylum to a national from a third country. Each government has to present this arrangement to their respective security community, and even more importantly to their electorate, and assert that the country is as safe as it used to be, before the creation of the Schengen Area.
The system was as strong as its weakest link (Carrera, 2007, Collett & Le Coz 2018, Scipioni, 2018) so the sector of border management quickly became recognized as a sector worthy of common strategies and resource pooling. The Tampere Council (EC, 1999) offered momentum into this process and by 2004 the EU established a specialized agency to deal with border management. Frontex was born by Regulation No. 2007/2004 (Council, 2004) and since that moment the Agency expanded in
mandate and in budget multiple times (Council 2007, EU 2011, EU 2016). The process of course entered heavy academic examination (Carrera, 2007, Neal, 2009, Riekmann, 2016) and often drew negative criticism in the field of human rights (Ferrer-Gallardo & Albet-Mas 2016, Jeandesboz & Pallister-Wilkins, 2016).
The scope of this study is the challenge posed against the coherence and the viability of the Schengen Area of Free Movement. As early as the 1990s, the Member States understood that an effective control of the EU’s external borders was the only way to keep the Schengen project afloat. If all members are not convinced that a tag is being kept on all those transiting individuals, they cannot let down their national checks.
B. The 2015 challenge
A cacophony of policies and contradicting rhetorics has been observed during the efforts of European countries to deal with an increased influx of migrants over the past decade. The term “increased” is representative of the average numbers since 2009 but if we break down the monthly detections of illegal border crossings we see a very diverse picture, with spikes and dives. The most dramatic and impactful spike in the migration flows was the semester of August 2015 to January 2016. With a monthly average of 160.000 arrivals, 90% of which being registered at the islands of Greece, that period became widely reported as the “2015 European Refugee Crisis”. In the aftermath of that period, as arrival numbers were winding down, the problem of migration management created cracks in the image of European integration, an image that was actively recovering from the debt crisis of 2010.
At the core of the confusion was the design of the Dublin series of regulations, which posited that the countries of first reception had the responsibility to shelter the asylum seekers and deliver a judgement on their asylum application. But migrants tend to travel further into the heartland of western Europe, where there are more opportunities for employment and friendlier societal arrangements. Under the Dublin Regulation, asylum seekers who were found travelling to western Europe without a visa had to be deported to the country of first reception. Despite landing in Greece and Italy, virtually all of the migrants managed to head north up to a point, before being registered as asylum seekers. This meant that central European countries, such as Austria, Hungary and the Czechia were finding themselves being regarded as “countries of first reception” for asylum seekers, knowing very well that this was factually not true. However, they were forced to accept deported asylum
at least a decade around the periphery; that Greece (Kathimerini, 26-03-2015) had the option to bend its own rules and issue thousands of visas to migrants, essentially passing the buck up the route to Northern Europe. As a response, Greece was warned that it could be temporarily suspended from the Schengen area (Guardian, 26-03-2015). Things did not improve as the year progressed with increasing arrivals and Italy echoed the same threat to let everyone through (Guardian, 16-06-2015). Eventually, it was Hungary that threw the first punch, announcing (Reuters, 23-06-2015) that it will unilaterally stop accepting the return of asylum seekers from other European countries further to the north and west. The European Commission and other Member States were displeased with this move, as they were trying to reach a common strategy to deal with the escalating migrant inflow.
An ambiguous move was that of the German government, to unilaterally bypass the Dublin regulation (Deutsche Welle, 25-07-2015), but in a manner that was meant to de-escalate the situation. Germany was to accept Syrian asylum seekers, even if they had not initially entered the EU through a German entry point. This might have alienated the countries which were sceptical about accepting asylum seekers for political and cultural reasons (Heisbourg, 2015).
In September and October of 2015, there was a momentary rush in EU activity that attempted to save the face of EU cooperation. The Member States agreed (Council, 2015a, 2015b) to officially bypass the Dublin system and extract asylum seekers from the reception countries (Italy and Greece), to be relocated to all other Member States. The relocation scheme never materialized, as countries stalled their implementation of the scheme, prompting the Commission to move infringement procedures against Hungary, Poland and Czechia (Commission, 2016b).
At the peak of the crisis in December, Greece submitted a request for operational assistance by Frontex1, thus giving the chance to a European crisis management structure to step into play. However, these attempts were overpowered by the unprecedented migrant numbers over the winter of 2015-2016. The joint deployment of Greek border guards and Frontex teams could not render the situation under control (Trauner, 2016). The flow of undocumented migrants through Greece and up the path to Hungary and Austria continued. Finally, in March 2016, the countries along the Western Balkan route (EU members and non-members alike) tightened their border controls, under the tacit encouragement of Austria (Deutsche Welle, 10-03-2016).
Eventually, the crisis defused as the flows of migrants simply deflated in the spring of 2016, but it is unclear what the EU Member States have learned from the crisis. Some of the handlings were towards a common strategy, while many others were stray moves. The multitude of attempted solutions, with vivid opposition each time, give us a hint of increased political activity. A more careful
1 At the time officially titled the “European Agency for the Management of Operational Cooperation at
look is required to sort out which actors were more vocal and more assertive during the fray. This formulates the research question of the present thesis, wishing to know to what extent the EU migration crises hurt or bolster European integration.
III. Relevant academic literature
In this chapter, a groundwork is laid to understand how crises work and how the process of meaning making was selected as the phenomenon to analyse. Firstly, the reader is introduced to the notion of a transboundary crisis, which demands systemic cooperation, and the notion of an Integration crisis, which is a phenomenon particular to organizations that are still under formation, such as the EU. After that, different typologies of the crisis life-cycle are juxtaposed, to show how different functions happen side by side. The stage when a crisis has traversed its critical point and is moving towards meaning making, is underlined as the focus of this research.
A. Special types of crises
The above introduction describes two distinct types of crises, even if they seem entangled into one. The practical challenges of dealing with the arriving migrants was one crisis. It entailed an immediate threat to the lives of migrants at sea, followed disruptions to the life of local communities, issues about the deployment and safety of personnel which was dealing with the crisis, and more. When the Western Balkan Route was closed, the trapped migrants created a hectic bottleneck at the Idomeni border crossing point, cutting off the highway and rail connection from Greece to the Balkans and central Europe. A crisis which escalates beyond one locality and disrupts multiple systems at the same time, is a transboundary crisis (Boin & Rhinard, 2008). Their impact is multiplied every time they ripple out to disrupt another critical sector and they demand a joint response by all systems simultaneously to be resolved. Nevertheless, the EU is not mentioned only as a liability in the transboundary crisis literature. It can also be the only body that can absorb a transboundary crisis, where smaller actors would be swept away, and facilitate the much-needed joint response (Boin & Rhinard, 2008, Kuipers & Boin, 2015, Backman & Rhinard, 2018).
The second particular type of crisis that happens within the EU is the thought that joining our borders in the Schengen regime, might not be worth it. This is an integration crisis (Schimmelfennig, 2017), a challenge towards the idea of European integration in the first place. The involved actors are shocked to realize that they had interlocked their interests without setting a sound foundation. This sets the stage for a side-game which takes place during the aftermath of a large-scale crisis.
In the past decade, researchers have delved into the controversial response to the two major transboundary crises that plagued the EU. One was the financial meltdown of 2009-2011 and the other was the refugee crisis of 2015-2016 (Carrera et al., 2015, Collett & Le Coz, 2018, Scipioni, 2018). Parallels have been drawn between the two cases (Schimmelfennig, 2018, Biermann et al., 2019), sometimes detecting a similar pattern of reaction and others having inconclusive verdicts or negating there is a pattern.
By some peculiar coincidence, one Member State found itself in the spotlight of both these transboundary crises. Greece has become proverbially linked with financial hardship and bankruptcy, after becoming the impact point of the 2010 financial crisis. It also became the focal point of the migration flows during the 2015 unprecedented surge in migrant arrivals. The story is even more interesting when we take into account that Greece had experienced a migration crisis not too long ago, in 2010. That was the first instance when Greece requested the emergency help of Frontex, the first time that the mechanism was ever activated. However, the 2010 crisis was not followed by any of the impactful responses by other countries. Greece was stunned by the situation, but the numbers were not large enough to stun the whole of the EU. The factor of magnitude of the crisis becomes important in our discussion.
B. Timelines of a crisis
If during a discussion someone asks what a particular disaster was all about, the responder will most likely rush to describe only a fraction of the related events and information. Humans are inclined to describe the day that a ship sunk, the moment a bomb detonated, how many people got hurt, and consider that the crisis. The crisis management literature has picked up the threads that stem from these sensationalist moments of a crisis and unraveled a network of factors leading up to the crisis, as well as a set of long-lasting consequences. In his systematic review of the early disaster management literature, Turner (1976) observes that the science itself was falling victim to this tunnel vision. Many works were studying the technical reasons that caused a disaster and the best practices for the immediate response. But they didn’t do much to regard a crisis as an event that is rooted in societal phenomena and that affects society in more abstract ways than human and material casualties. To tell the full story, Turner (1976) requires six stages in a crisis, briefly described below:
1. A notionally normal starting point; the actors consider their situation to be secure and compliant with the expectations of society.
2. An incubation period; a situation aggravates without receiving the appropriate attention because there is a deluded confidence in the system’s ability to detect a problem if it ever arises.
3. A precipitating event; society suffers a blow contrary to the confidence of the precious stages and the problem is recognized for the first time (this is where the hypothetical story-teller of our introduction would pick up the narration).
4. The onset; the situation is understood as having escaped control, damage is furthered and the first reactions take place under a new sentiment of betrayed confidence and uncertainty. 5. Rescue and salvage; ad hoc solutions are devised to bring the situation under control and stop further damage (our story-teller would likely end the narration here, considering the crisis to be over)
6. Full cultural readjustment; an assessment is carried out and society assumes a new mix of beliefs, based on the recent experience.
A very large part of what makes a crisis can be seen in stages 1 and 6, which are actually the open end to a link with another past or future crisis in the same sector. These are also the more political stages of a crisis event. Before a crisis happens, the laws and oversight mechanisms, as well as the people who enact them, are a product of the political status quo. Complacency, distrust, efficiency or inefficiency, dereliction of duties, all stem from the greater picture around the location of the impact. Moreover, in the aftermath of a crisis, the interpretation is filtered through the political process and at the same time it shapes the political landscape and the actors’ conceptions for the future.
To better understand the political aspect of a crisis, we can read the same story, not through the perspective of entire organizations and societies as in Turner (1976), but through the perspective of individual leader figures. Boin, Kuipers & Overdijk (2013) offer a timeline of the tasks that a leader, of varying levels, can be seen doing during a crisis. These tasks can be performed well to ameliorate the event, or poorly to aggravate a crisis. During the beginning of the crisis, a leader can contribute to the early recognition of anomalies and the sensemaking from conflicting and shocking information. Immediately after, the leader has to make critical decisions, enable coordination, link together or abandon critical components and capabilities (coupling/decoupling) and maintain all-rounded communication. The framework by Boin et al. (2013) helps us perceive the blurring line between one crisis and the next, as the tasks of rendering accountability, resilience building, meaning making and learning are carried over from a previous crisis into the present, and are transformed by the present crisis to be carried into the future.
C. Political attention fades
When we look into all the above processes and we combine them with the knowledge that human lives, livelihoods and the public interest are at stake, we can imagine that dealing with the situation is a very strenuous ordeal. It is not strenuous just for the crisis managers, it is very much so for the observers. In the greater picture, the public (voters, stakeholders, and more) are called to participate in the decision making (by delegating to a designated decision maker), the learning and the resilience building, in preparation for future crises. This perpetuates the stress and the public is usually not eager to keep dealing with the problem. As soon as the immediate danger is staved off, their attention dwindles.
This mechanism was formulated in Anthony Downs’ vastly influential study about the issue attention cycle (1996). The cycle essentially follows the by now familiar chronology of a crisis, with a calm pre-problem stage, followed by an alarmed discovery of the problem. Probably the more nuanced contribution in Downs (1996, p 89) is the existence of a euphoric enthusiasm, simultaneously with the alarmed discovery. In the case of the 2015 crisis, the enthusiasm was the policy initiatives in August-September 2015 and the deployment of an existing coping mechanism under Frontex. Following this stage, the involved actors enter the stage of realizing the cost of significant progress. It is no longer a walk in the park and the person, organization or society is failing to deal with the crisis. After the actor succeeds or fails in dealing with the crisis, Downs (1996) notices that their attention in this particular issue starts fading, thus completing the issue attention cycle. Most probably, the public will become occupied by the next issue that is causing a crisis and presenting a threat.
Table 1 demonstrates a temporal parallel among Turner’s stages, the tasks of leadership by Boin et al. (2013) and Downs’ (1996) issue attention cycle. The numbers of the leadership tasks have intentionally been kept in the order they appear in Boin et al. (2013).
Table 1 Turner (1976)
Organizational development of crises
Boin, Kuipers & Overdijk (2013) Leadership in times of crisis
Downs (1976) Issue attention cycle
1. Normal starting point 2. Incubation period
3. Precipitating event
4. Onset
5. Rescue and Salvage
6. Cultural readjustment
10. Building resilience
1. Early recognition
2. Sensemaking
3. Making critical decisions 4. Orchestrating coordination 5. Coupling and decoupling 7. Communication 6. Meaning making 8. Rendering accountability 9. Learning 10. Building resilience 1. Pre-Problem Stage
2. Alarmed discovery and euphoric enthusiasm stage 3. Realizing the cost of significant progress stage
4. Gradual decline of intense public interest stage
5. The Post-Problem Stage
D. How a crisis makes politics
The crisis-related literature describe above can be inserted into the domain of political deliberations and policy making, by matching it with a famous agenda setting theory by Kingdon (1984). In his so-termed “Multiple Streams Approach” (MSA) the author depicts that several factors are required to bring about a policy change. They may exist independently without significant effect, but when they coincide they prop a topic into the public agenda.
Among the components is a policy stream, which means that some actor is envisioning a policy, develops a hypothetical plan for it, works out as many of the details as possible and keeps this
policy in their own specialized agenda. This policy can be chosen as an appropriate course of action by the political stream. That is the decision-making mechanism that is in place each time. It can be an executive with operative powers, a parliamentary assembly or even a plebiscite. But both of those streams may spend years being in mutual understanding, before they find the urgency to implement a policy. This urgency is brought about by the problem stream, the realization that a certain topic that has been discussed is now transcending from the domain of a hypothetical discussion into the domain of a current, pressing problem.
In the work of Kingdon (1984), the problem stream is mentioned first but I feel when we list it at the end, it helps us see the connection with the crisis phenomenon. Turner (1976), Boin et al. (2013) and Downs (1996) find that the components of a problem lay dormant somewhere in the pre-problem stage. The MSA finds that the components of a solution also exist, disconnected, before the crisis and during the early phase of the crisis management. It is the crisis itself that embodies the problem stream and completes the trio of policy change.
It is in that moment that we must look. When the urgency created by the Problem has prompted the decision makers to make a Political choice. In our case, the choices are either to roll back integration and reinstate internal borders, or to push forward with radical EU solutions. An organization can be unprepared to deal with a situation, but end up obtaining a new capability as it survives the crisis. This seemingly lucky outcome is called “failing forward” and if we allow ourselves to peek forward into the present paper, we will see that it is a proposed model for the hesitant European integration (Scipioni, 2018, Schimmelfennig, 2018).
To top it all off, the decision maker and the policy entrepreneur have to keep in mind the public’s limited attention span (Downs, 1996). They have limited time to lobby their policy draft, localize it, implement it and showcase the hopefully impressive results. If the results are disappointing, they have to diffuse responsibility and wait it out, until the attention dwindles. On the other side of the bargain, the opposition has just as a limited time to scrutinize the mistakes and call for policy change. That is why a pressure group has an interest to become very vocal and persistent to reap some gains while they last.
These formulations seem somewhat cynical, but they don’t have to be. Gaining ground in terms of agenda setting and policy making does not tell us anything about the motivation or the morals of a policy entrepreneur. You could be a doctor who knows it’s their only chance to get funding for cancer research. You could be an environmentalist raising awareness for global warming or a human rights group seeking to end slavery. As noble and rational as the cause may be, the chance to secure
The task of meaning making, as a tool to elicit a favourable political outcome, will be central to the present thesis’ methodology. During the meaning making phase, the involved actors try to assign their preferred frame to the crisis that has unfolded. Researchers try to read through the lines and match these frames to sentiments and likely different policy outcomes. In a similar study about the framing of crises in the Finnish Parliament, Lindholm (2018) uses two major framing categories; the Threat and the Opportunity. Her coding scheme measures four variables, which comprise the Threat or the Opportunity behaviours. Those variables are the framing, the blame attribution, the emotions invoked and the solutions proposed. If a group of politicians is tending to use Opportunity frames, it means they are trying to use the crisis as leverage to promote their preferred policies.
IV. Methodology
A. Scope and data collection
The purpose of this study is to detect how the refugee crises of 2010 and 2015 were framed by the pro-EU and the anti-EU sides. The study uses the two critical moments of the RABIT activation as bookmarks, to study the meaning making that was taking place within the Hellenic Parliament in Athens. This is the political arena where the political actors must have conducted the critical political blame game that is described in the theory of Boin et al. (2013). The period of data collection is 30 days after the activation of the RABIT intervention for each case.
The Parliament minutes are accessed on the official website of the institution (https://www.hellenicparliament.gr). There the search function of the record was used to find plenary sessions where any of six different noun forms were spoken., seen in table 2.
The use of grammatical cases and accent diacritics in Greek, warranted a separate search for the nominative and the genitive form of three different nouns. Although it is highly likely that every session containing the word “[..]refugees[..]” would also contain the genitive form “[..]of refugees[..]”, one speaker’s words within the session might reference only one of the noun forms under consideration.
Furthermore, the Greek language does not employ in this context2 a single word for “migrant”. Therefore, the two separate words for “immigrant” and “refugee” were used. The third search word is that denoting an illegal immigrant and in the latter part of this decade it has come to be considered inappropriate and derogatory. However, I choose to include it because in the 2010 context it was still used by mainstream conservative politicians and even in 2015 there may be conservative or far-right speakers who use exclusively this term, to reiterate their opinion that the individuals referenced are not refugees.
The minutes of sessions that were downloaded multiple times, as testified by the filename automatically augmented with “(1)”, were eliminated from the data collection at this stage. After collecting 12 documents from the 2010 crisis and 13 documents from the 2015 crisis, each document was opened and searched for each of the six terms. Whenever the search term occurred, the entire intervention was cut from the original document and pasted into the final Body of Data document.
This way the researcher avoided including an excerpt two or more times, if it mentioned more than one of the six terms.
Table 2 - Search terms
Greek script Latinized script English meaning
μετανάστες metanastes immigrants
μεταναστών metanaston of immigrants
πρόσφυγες prosfyges refugees
προσφύγων prosfygon of refugees
λαθρομετανάστες lathrometanastes illegal immigrants
λαθρομεταναστών lathrometanaston of illegal immigrants
B. Hypotheses and method of analysis
Once the body of relevant data was collected, it was read and codified for the identification of five different framing devices. The typology developed by Semetko et al (2000) and used by Lindholm (2018), was adapted to analyse the data. A coding scheme can be found at the appendix.
Once the body of data had been highlighted for the different frames, a second reading took place to assign to each intervention a value of Threat or Opportunity. Lindholm (2018) uses a more detailed array of sentiments and policy suggestions, but for the needs of this study a binary characterization of Threat/Opportunity was deemed appropriate.
Lastly, the data that had been coded into the different frames, were isolated in five different documents. This permitted a reading that focused on revealing repetitive arguments in each frame separately and further facilitated a quantitative analysis of the text. The percentage of coverage for each frame was measured, as a fraction of the total words of the debate. Once arguments and patterns had been identified, word frequencies were used to complement the researcher’s image of those issues and tell if there were differences between the two different time periods.
The hypotheses to be tested will be alternative to each other:
2. The Opportunity framing strategy is dominated by anti-EU politicians.
V. Findings
In this chapter the collected data and the trends emerging from the analysis are presented. The chapter begins with two parts which introduce the general profile for the two points in time, 2010 and 2015. The dominant traits for each time slot are highlighted and complimented by a representative excerpt. The prevalence of frames was coded, and is being presented, using the proportion of words spoken under said frame as a proportion of the total words spoken that month (table 3). The frame percentages do not add up to 100% because a significant part of the text was deemed relevant enough to the topic of migration, but not as targeted as to be coded under a frame.
Subsequently, there are five parts, one for each framing device, which explain how the five coded frames were represented in the data. The frames of the typology by Semetko & Valkenburg (2000) were found to be versatile analytical tools, able to cover speeches that conveyed either sentiments of Threat or sentiments of Opportunity. Therefore, each part that describes one frame can be broken down to the analysis of optimistic and pessimistic meaning making strategies. The variable of Threat/Opportunity was coded by assigning one prevailing value to each complete speech, so any percentages cited for this variable signify the number of interventions divided by the total population of interventions for that month.
A. Overview of 2010
The issue of migration was referenced in 24 interventions across 3 different sessions in the period between 24/10/2010 and 24/11/2010. The daily agenda was not occupied with the management of the migration crisis per se, any of the three times. The issue came up on the sidelines of budgetary debates and most prominently as a factor in a debate about crime rates. The majority of the interventions come from the populist right party of LAOS, followed by responses given to the representatives of LAOS by the governing party of PASOK. The KKE and SYRIZA parties used migration in their debates only one time each, throughout the month and the party of ND did not make any mention to migration. This last point was an unexpected shortcoming and it will be further discussed in the chapter dedicated to the limitations of the study.
mention of the migration crisis were both balanced in their use of meaning making frames. All five frames were represented in the questions posed by LAOS representatives and in the responses provided by the PASOK ministers and members of Parliament.
Each intervention was assigned an overarching Threat of Opportunity value, signifying if they were painting a negative view for the handling of the crisis or a positive view, in terms of praise for the handling of the crisis and optimistic outlook for the outcome of the crisis. Most of the interventions in 2010 (79.2% of interventions) were conveying a threatening message. This was almost entirely articulated by the conservative representatives of LAOS who identified negative repercussions in a series of topics. The most frequently cited negative effect was a crime wave, which, according to LAOS, was about to get worse and was entirely orchestrated by illegal migrants. Concerns were also raised against the country’s European obligations, summarized in the Dublin II Regulation which forced Greece to host and process the arriving migrants. The fear that “Greece is becoming a human storage area”, underscoring that illegal immigrants are becoming trapped in Greece which wasn’t their intended destination.
The remaining (20.8%) interventions were either defending the Government’s handling or showcasing Greece’s role as a protector of vulnerable displaced populations. Some speculation was noted regarding the impact of the Greek conduct in migration matters towards the EU’s attitude in matters of public finances. This line of thought was still nascent in 2010 but it re-emerges in 2015, opening the possibility for an interesting comparison.
B. Overview of 2015
As expected, the data were more ample for the higher-intensity crisis of 2015, with 73 interventions across 8 different sessions between 03/12/2015 and 03/01/2016. This time, the management of the crisis was discussed in its own merit, as well as mentioned in the sidelines of debates concerning budgetary affairs, public health policy and an anti-racism bill. The elections of October 2015 had just elected the most fragmented House in the history of the modern Greek state, with 8 parties being represented and all of them being proportionally vocal in the debate. Moreover, the party dynamics were complicated because SYRIZA was partnered with ANEL in a coalition government that bridged radical left and conservative right.
The framing landscape was more concentrated, with Conflict (28.8% of words) and Attribution (26% of words) dominating the argumentation, followed by Human Interest (9.9% of words) and Economic Consequences (5% of words) being diminished along with Morality frames (2.2% of words). The Governmental line of argumentation was dominated by the Conflict frame, while the opposition
parties spread variably across the other frames. One notable exception that will be further discussed is the far-right party of Chrysi Avgi (XA) which was heavily focused on the Human Interest frame.
The nexus of Threat and Opportunity remained largely the same. The overwhelming majority of interventions (84.9% of interventions) were conveying a threatening message. More parties meant a more diverse range of described threats but the most prominent was a rumoured eviction of Greece from the Schengen zone (GREXIT). This discussion was coming only months after a GREXIT from the Eurozone had been narrowly averted and the opposition’s rhetoric was often coupling these two matters, framing the Schengen GREXIT as a nightmarish repetition of last year’s uncertainty. The Greek word for “Schengen” (“Σένγκεν”) was encountered once every 712 words, while back in 2010 the frequency was only once in 4049 words. The Dublin Regulation was again referenced but very scarcely, once every 9685 words, compared to once in 2249 words back in 2010.
The diversity of the data becomes visible again when we analyse the opportune interventions of 2015 (15.1% of interventions), which were more spread out among governmental and opposition parties. Of course, the governmental parties ventured to frame more of their interventions with optimism (31.3% of SYRIZA interventions and 25% of ANEL interventions) but there was limited praise and optimistic suggestions by two opposition parties (18.2% of DISI and 9.1% of Nea Dimokratia). The Government was investing a lot heavier in the argument of protecting vulnerable refugees and being the most humane of all the involved European countries. The positive comments of the opposition parties were posed as attempts to political entrepreneurship, highlighting a suggestion or a policy package that had been drafted by the speaker’s party.
Table 3 Prevalence of the five Frames
Attribution Conflict Human Int. Morality Economic
October 2010 21.9% 17.7% 15.9% 13.2% 12.7%
December 2015 26% 28.8% 9.9% 2.2% 5%
The coverage of each frame expressed as a percentage of the total words spoken in relation to migration, during each observation period.
Both crises occurred soon after a change in government for Greece. The 2010 crisis manifested itself exactly one year after the restoration of a centrist PASOK government, preceded by six years of the right-wing Nea Dimokratia government. Up to that year, Greek governments had been principally single-party majority governments. Therefore, the opposition was not eager to frame omissions and negligence as the cause of the crisis. In fact, the leader of the minor opposition party LAOS went as far as courteously exempting the responsible minister from the blame
“Mr Minister, I cannot condemn you or denounce you, at least personally, because you are new in this Ministry…” - Georgios Karatzaferis, LAOS, 19 Nov 2010
Of course, the government was not free of scrutiny. Problems were framed in terms of qualitative choices as well as the quantitative proportion of the government’s actions. As far as quality is concerned, the enquiring LAOS representatives were calling for the government to reject multiculturalism and to check the activity of NGO’s which were assisting the arriving migrants.
“The plan for an open society, with many NGO’s, self-styled as “protectors of human rights”, with deep links to the Babylonia3, they want to import the so called “multiculturalism” and manufacture minorities which will be registered in our society and our country. We are indeed an open society, but this is where we draw the line!” - Alexandros Chrysanthakopoulos, LAOS, 19 Nov 2010.
In terms of quantity, the response of the government was framed as underwhelming. There was repeated mention to the service of hundreds of officers which are nominally under the Border Guard corps but execute special duties in the capital of Athens. Their immediate relocation to the land border with Turkey was suggested as a mitigating action by LAOS. Furthermore, there was reserved praise for the use of the RABIT operation conducted by FRONTEX.
“We had to spend nine months of inactivity, during which thousands of illegal immigrants entered Greece through the Evros river, before the police dogs and the German patrol cars of FRONTEX were deployed to arrest the illegal immigrants.” - Konstantinos Aivaliotis, LAOS, 19 Nov 2010.
However, right after the recognition of the reduction in uncontrolled crossings, achieved by the RABIT operation, the same element was framed with concerns regarding national sovereignty. More on this will be presented in the section of this chapter about the Conflict frame. Of course, the governmental interventions were unequivocal in framing the presence of FRONTEX as a victory and as a premonition of more policy changes that would assist Greece in the management of the border. In
3 A leftist collective group
fact, European cooperation and its beneficial impact on the balance between Greece and Turkey, occupied all of the positive (Opportunity) meaning making conducted by the PASOK speakers in 2010. “I believe that the framework which is being shaped with the presence of FRONTEX and with the enhancement of our own guarding measures and infrastructure at the borders, we will eventually achieve a European agreement with Turkey, in order to work out a more secure collaboration network. I insist in the more secure collaboration because there is more than the collaboration regarding migrant returns.” - Christos Papoutsis, PASOK, 19 Nov 2010.
By 2015 the Attribution of Responsibility had shifted to a more urgent and critical approach, with different demands being raised by different parties. The SYRIZA government was again nearing its one-year mark, but this time the opposition was concentrating the accusations on the paradigm shift which was openly claimed by SYRIZA. This was the governmental history of advocating for open borders and internationalism. This was identified as a pull factor by the representatives of the right-wing ND and the far-right XA.
“... and the Government was not caught off-guard. They followed a rhetoric, a policy of open borders and now the migratory flows that used to take a different path to Northern Europe are choosing our country as the best, the safest, the nearest corridor. The Government’s rhetoric sent a clear message not only to refugees and immigrants. It was a clear message to the people smugglers, who took advantage if this.” - Panagiotis Mitarakis, ND, 11 Dec 2015.
Centrist representatives were following a line of argumentation more similar to that of 2010, highlighting the sub-optimal distribution of Border Guard and Coast Guard personnel, as well as inquiring why the emergency assistance of FRONTEX was not used earlier. This was again connected to the activist past of SYRIZA politicians, citing statements by them when they condemned the European Union and FRONTEX as enemies of the refugees. The most frequent fear expressed by the mainstream of the speakers, was the rumoured intention of the European Union to elicit a Greek exit from the Schengen zone. As mentioned in the findings overview, this fear was represented by a clear quantitative increase in references to the word “Schengen”.
“We even have the threat of the country exiting Schengen. You can realize that merely getting to the point where this is being discussed constitutes a deep, a heavy national misstep.” - Ioannis Maniatis, DISI, 03 Dec 2015.
book. The asylum seekers were let in, according to international law, and subsequently they were prevented from continuing towards northern Europe, according to the EU law4.
The Government exhibited some reserved assumption of responsibility, mainly by accepting that there were unjustifiable delays in the implementation of policies and commitments. However, the governmental line was that the migration crisis was caused by events way above the reach and the will of the SYRIZA policies. This was largely recognized by centrist and moderate right-wing representatives, with the hardline right-wingers attributing the responsibility as described earlier in this part.
D. Conflict
At least three conflictual framing patterns emerged in the 2010 debate. The first was a conflict between nationalism and globalism. The conservative representatives of LAOS were raising the issue of criminality and their interventions were almost entirely covered by the argument that a multicultural society is not viable and that the presence of migrants is causing a crime wave. This argument has not been coded as an Attribution of Responsibility, because the unit of analysis is not the purported crisis of a crime wave. As far as the migration debate was concerned, the frame was that of Conflict, with one side criticizing the character and the worldview of the other.
This is closely related, but not inseparable, with the second Conflict that was represented. The problem was framed as part of the strategic rivalry between Greece and Turkey. This time not as criticism to a naive western multiculturalism, but as a forced influence by Turkey. The fact that the EU had invited Turkey into the management of the problem, was described as a failure of Greece to confidently claim control over the waters between Greece and Turkey. Furthermore, there were speculations that Turkey is intentionally facilitating, if not eliciting, the flow of migrants towards Greece, in order to strain the resources and the security apparatus of Greece.
“Turkey is using illegal immigration as a strategic weapon against our country. They are doing this deliberately because they want to alter the ethnic cohesion of the Greek population.” - Asterios Rontoulis, LAOS, 19 Nov 2010
The third Conflict that was identified, and mentioned in the overview, was the distrust towards the European orientation of Greece. There were negative evaluations for the effects of the Dublin II regulation, which was binding Greece as the entry point, to host the arriving migrants and
4This last element was in the process of becoming abandoned, as the EU realized the extent of the migration flows. The Dublin regulation was de facto suspended and asylum seekers were relocated, with varying efficiency, to countries other than their first country of entry.
receive their asylum applications locally. FRONTEX and the idea of a border managed by non-national agents, was seen as an immediate relief in terms of operational means, but as a threat in terms of long-term politics. So, the combined argument was that FRONTEX was deployed at the Greek borders by the EU, to make sure that every arriving migrant was registered and trapped in Greece, while they would certainly prefer to reach western Europe and submit their asylum application there.
“The task of the well-advertised FRONTEX is even worse. Its officers register the names, biometrics, nationalities [...] to be readmitted back to Greece, as the country of first entry. Some people have signed the notorious Dublin Agreement [...] turning Greece from a transit country to a destination country.” - Aggelos Kolokotronis, LAOS, 19 Oct 2010
The same argument was framed from a different point of view, that of the KKE. According to the anti-imperialist worldview of the party, Greece was being exploited as a guard dog by inhumane Western elites.
“Why doesn’t the Government go against the Dublin II Regulation to facilitate those who wish to move further into Europe, who must be 80% (of the migrants).” - Spyridon Chalvatzis, KKE, 16 Nov 2010
Even the minister of the PASOK government, a staunch Europeanist, recognized the will of migrants to reach Western Europe, maintaining nonetheless that Greece was playing by the book and refusing to turn a blind eye on the Dublin Agreement.
“...together with the French Minister [...] and Commissioner Ms Malmström, who insisted to find some detained migrants able to communicate in French. And they asked them “Isn’t Greece a nice country? Wouldn’t you like to stay here?”. The response was “no, we didn’t want to come here. We want to go to Germany, France, Italy”. The French Minister said “Well, you cannot go there, because now you have been detained, there are Schengen rules, there is a European policy on asylum[...]” The migrant replied “Yeah, right. See you in Paris.” - Christos Papoutsis, PASOK, 19 Nov 2010
In the data from 2015, the frame of Conflict was maintained and reinforced in intensity. The Conflict frame ranked as the most prominent in 2015, covering 28.8% of all words, compared to 17.7% of the words in 2010. Both the rivalry with Turkey and the doubts about European solidarity are represented. In fact, “Turkey” receives considerably more attention with one mention in every 461 words for 2015, compared to one in 1191 words in 2010.
“It is a fact that there is a Turkish threat and it is also a fact that Turkey is responsible for violating our airspace, as well as for the so-called, according to your terminology “refugee issue”.” - Nikolaos Michaloliakos, XA, 05 Dec 2015.
The Conflict among European countries reappeared, but this time painted as an Opportunity for Greece to set the good example. The SYRIZA government was directing criticism towards Central European countries for blocking the migration routes. In 2010 there was no mention to Central European countries, while in 2015 one of the “Hungary”/ “Slovenia”/ “Slovakia” is encountered every 2106 words.
“This topic (the Schengen GREXIT) is not brought up by Europe as a whole, it is brought up by specific countries and groups within Europe. It is Hungary. It is countries who treat refugees and migrants in a manner that is condemned by Europe.” - Ioannis Mouzalas, SYRIZA, 03 Dec 2015
E. Human Interest
The interventions coded under the Human Interest frame offer a very interesting dual observation. In the 2015 debates, the human interest frame was employed the most by speakers of the Golden Dawn and then by SYRIZA, two parties who occupy the opposite ends of the political spectrum and whose proponents would be frenzied to even be compared with each other. To avoid potential misunderstandings, this finding is not along the lines of the standard horseshoe theory (Taylor, J.,2006) which posits that far-left and far-right politics are similar in their populism. Firstly, because the Human Interest frame has not been linked to populism in this study or in the cited literature (Semetko & Valkenburg, 2000, Lindholm, 2018). Secondly, because the thematic analysis of the interventions by SYRIZA and Golden Dawn easily reveal the difference; they are referring to the interest of different groups of humans.
The representatives of SYRIZA advocate for the protection of vulnerable migrants, often calling them by the title of refugees. Their Human Interest references are comprised by sentiments of compassion, fears for loss of life at sea and the inhumane conditions at the detention centres. This is also present in the data from the limited interventions of the PASOK government in 2010, the interventions of centrist parties in 2015 and consistently in the KKE interventions for both periods.
Human Interest is understood entirely differently by the representatives of LAOS in 2010 and those of XA, who claim overwhelming ownership over the frame in 2015. For the far-right, the only victims of the crisis are the Greeks who have to live with the presence of migrants. The plight of the migrants themselves is either denied as an exaggeration or dismissed as self-inflicted by their choice to enter the country illegally.
F. Morality
The frame of morality didn’t offer many interesting findings. Most of the references were in relation to the different religion of the arriving migrants and the threat posed by this to the identity of the Greek population. However, most of the time this was overpowered by fears in terms of Human Interest and therefore the excerpts were coded as such. We can notice a decline even for this limited rhetoric, from 13.2% of all words in 2010 down to 2.2% of all words in 2015.
Morality was used on the other hand as a signal of praise, or at least as an unavoidable obligation, for the government’s protection towards refugees in both periods. Again, this was often incorporated in excerpts that were dominated by other frames, but sometimes there was an independent string of
“We will insist in this policy of humanitarianism, solidarity and international law, no matter how hard it is at this day. This is a moral obligation for Greece but it is also a legal obligation towards international law and we mean to honour it.” - Alexis Tsipras, SYRIZA, 15 Dec 2015.
G. Economic Consequences
Economy was detected in many points of the debate, in 2010 as well as 2015, but it does not emerge as a dominant frame as far as migration is concerned. In 2010 there is a more substantial use of the frame, but this could be due to the fact that one of the coded sessions had the state budget as the agenda item. In this sense, migration was being framed as a factor within the financial crisis, and not the other way around. Nonetheless, the expected adverse effects of mass migration to the faltering Greek economy of 2010 were indeed cited multiple times. The most referenced damage was that to the touristic profile of the Greek islands, which had then just started to look crowded with migrants. This was employed as a push factor, against a policy that would welcome and facilitate the arrival of migrants.
In 2015, even this rhetoric had largely diminished, from 12.7% of words in 2010 to 5% of words in 2015. There were fewer mentions, with the most clearly defined being the disruption to rail and highway traffic caused by the uncontrolled Idomeni camp and a continuation of the rhetoric about damage to the tourism sector. The reasons behind this decline in Economic Consequences framing can be speculated in the discussion chapter but would require further research to be determined.
“Greece receives as you say 75%, potentially up to 90%, of the asylum applications in the European Union. How much money do we request, do we claim and receive from the European Union? Is there such an endeavor? And what is the response we get, since Greece is called to deal with a problem that is no longer Greek, but European?” - Spyridon-Adonis Georgiadis, LAOS, 26 Nov 2010
The same logic, of coupling economic and migratory policy was mentioned in 2015 but this time with two diverging opinions. Some arguments still suggested that Greece should request financial support to deal with migration. At the same time, other representatives thought that the Greek government had acted rashly in connecting migration to economy, and this had provoked the Europeans to show a strict attitude in the rumoured eviction from the Schengen zone. The presence of two contradictory evaluations hints to the co-existence of the Conflict frame, and this becomes indeed visible by the structure of these interventions. In the case of interventions that convey Opportunity, namely the attraction of funding, the coder opted to consider Economic Consequences as being the dominant frame. The arguments which suggested that this same policy was alienating the Europeans, were coded as arguments of the Conflict frame, but they are presented in this part about Economic Consequences for the sake of comparison. It is worth noting that both of the excerpts cited below come from representatives of the same party.
“Are you aware that there is a very serious discourse in Europe, that the cost of dealing with the refugees should not count against the public deficit and the public expenditure? If we are able to do that and we do not, that is a crime.” - Spyridon-Adonis Georgiadis, ND, 03 Dec 2015.
“I will be blunt, Mr Minister, you might recall that at some point the Government tried unsuccessfully to connect the refugee issue with the economic problem the country faces. Now the danger is reversed. If you don’t act ahead of the developments, the danger is precisely the opposite. The Europeans can turn the refugee issue into a part of the economic problem of Greece.” - Ioannis Kefalogiannis, ND, 11 Dec 2015
H. A notable change in semantics
This last part concerns the difference in the vocabulary used between 2010 and 2015. This change does not correlate with the use of framing devices, but it is notable in its own merit and in retrospect it can be linked to elements that are discussed in this paper as part of the Attribution of Responsibility.
The change in vocabulary refers to the title used for the migrants who arrive to Greece. As explained in the methodology chapter, the Greek public discourse does not employ an umbrella term that would describe all migrants. There is a word for the refugee and a word for the immigrant, with
the two becoming associated with a point of view that the speaker wants to signal. Strictly speaking, one would have to utter the phrase “refugees and immigrants” every time, in order to be accurate. If the speaker wishes to highlight the obligation to protect the incoming migrants, they include the word refugee(s). The word for immigrant(s) is the most used, sometimes standing in as a passe-partout without connotations, sometimes coupled with the specification “economic” immigrants, to signal that the population under discussion is not threatened by war and its reception is not mandatory. The term that proved to be controversial and was turned into a flag issue by the Left in Greece was the cluster word that means “illegal immigrant”. That is the word “lathrometanastis” (λαθρομετανάστης), which shares etymology with illicit trade and stowaway passengers. Sometimes the word is shortened in only the first component “lathro”, in which case it is clearly and exclusively used as a slur directed to migrants.
The interesting finding is that in 2010, the term for “illegal immigrant” was being used widely in the parliamentary discussion, from anyone but the representatives of SYRIZA and KKE. Even the minister of the moderate PASOK government in 2010 would use the term, side by side with arguments in the Human Interest frame, aimed to highlight the need to protect said migrants. The word was considered inconspicuous.
By 2015, the term became marginalized, being encountered once out of every 1794 words, compared to once every 247 words in 2010. On the other hand, the word for “refugee” which was almost ignored in 2010 (once every 5061 words) became the most frequent word in 2015 (once every 314 words), even more frequent than the acceptable word for “immigrant” (once every 332 words in 2015). See table 4 for the summary of the word frequency.
Table 4 Frequency of key terms for migration
Occurrence of term every X number of words [absolute value in brackets]
Immigrant(s) Refugee(s) Illegal immigrant(s)
October 2010 689 [29] 5061 [4] 247 [82]
VI. Discussion
In this chapter, the findings of the research are combined and compared with past research on the topic to extract valuable conclusions. The main premise of this study is addressed, which is whether the refugee crisis acted as a catalyst or as an obstacle to the European project. Furthermore, the element of coupling or decoupling systems is isolated and discussed, to show how the strategy of the Greek government is explained by crisis management and policy cycle theories.
A. Struggling with the European route
The examined debate on migration shows the internal doubts that permeate Greek politics, regarding the country’s European orientation. This is in line with the findings of Triandafyllidou (2014) who noted that migration policies were (forcibly) going the way of Europeanization but the rhetoric of the Parliament was critical towards the EU.
The existence of a Conflict between Greek interests and interests of other EU countries is notable throughout the debates, in both observation periods. The actors who keep Greece bound to unpleasant obligations are often bundled under the name “the Europeans”. However, in 2015 there is a tendency to make more specific references. The December 2015 debate came after the formation of a dissident group of Central European governments who wished to stop the influx of migration, legally as well as physically. This gave the SYRIZA government a low-value target to take aim at. Making accusations against Central European governments is not as severe as doing the same against the EU Commission or against Western European countries who wield the most influence in EU politics.
A major anti-EU argument, which remained largely unaltered between the two periods, was the controversial deployment of the FRONTEX officers. In 2010 their presence was suspected as a guarantor of the unpopular Dublin commitments, but at the very least the RABIT assistance was deployed at the same location where the Greek border guard sought to increase capabilities; the Evros river. By 2015, the Aegean had been established as a permanent deployment space for the long-term operations of FRONTEX. The ad hoc deployment of the RABIT was not directed towards the Greek islands but to the point of exit from Greece; the Idomeni border crossing. This was not leaving much room for doubt for extremist Greek representatives who were framing the deployment as a breach of national sovereignty.
“(The European Commission) has gone as far as saying that FRONTEX will be guarding the Greek border, as if we are some kind of protectorate and we are not an independent state. And they insult all Greeks by saying that our borders are reminiscent of swiss cheese.” - Ilias Kasidiaris, XA, 03 Dec 2015.
“We are in favour of disbanding FRONTEX and other suppression mechanisms of the European Union.” - Christos Katsotis, KKE, 11 Dec, 2015.
However, more mainstream representatives were accusing the government of repelling the European assistance, due to the not-so-distant past of SYRIZA as a vocal party of activists, who were criticizing FRONTEX as a component of the “Fortress Europe” plan. One representative, with law enforcement background himself, framed the crisis as an opportunity. He urged the government to use the inevitable implication of Greece in the migratory situation, as a lever to assume a leading role and attract investments in related activities.
“Instead of repelling FRONTEX of the European Union, we should be increasing its presence, turning the Evros and Thrace into a training centre for border guarding agencies from across Europe.” - Anastasios Dimoschakis, ND, 03 Dec 2015.
The SYRIZA minister was put under pressure on the one hand to pledge that SYRIZA was not denouncing FRONTEX and on the other hand to showcase that the Greek services were remaining at the helm of the migration management business and were not commandeered by FRONTEX. This prompted somewhat inconsistent statements from the minister. While praising the increased capabilities and stressing that Greece was seeking resources and personnel from FRONTEX, the minister was also expressing discomfort for the agendas that were promoted by the Agency, according to him.
“Already since July we had requested additional RABITs [...] There is an important difference here. We don’t want the RABITs on our land border with FYROM, as we don’t want FRONTEX in general on our land borders with FYROM [...] contrary, we want them at sea, on the islands. We want the RABITs as well on the islands and we are requesting so.” - Ioannis Mouzalas, SYRIZA, 03 Dec 2015
(different intervention from the above)
“We wrote a letter to Mr Avramopoulos5, where after stating our good will to setup an identification station at the border, we also tell him that as the political overseer of FRONTEX he should get a grip on them.” - Ioannis Mouzalas, SYRIZA, 03 Dec 2015
For the record, we can note that both FRONTEX deployments took place. The controversial deployment at the Idomeni point, which is used as the reference point for this thesis, was being
