Over the past few months there has been a distinct change in many EU countries in their approach to immigration. From new admissions rules and harsher clampdowns on illegal immigration to Sweden increasing its repatriation payments, the mood around immigration policy is shifting. Since the EU Migration Pact was finalised in the spring, more and more countries are looking for ways to opt out of the pact to impose stricter measures. And as the EU consensus shifts, recent elections show a continent divided, with more voters being drawn towards the extremes. In any of those nice conversational political podcasts you will find public enemy number one and the cause of all our woes: polarisation.
These moves are happening only months after the European elections where left and centre-left groups pledged that they would not work with the far-right in the parliament despite projected electoral gains. For the past few years, anti-immigration sentiment has been on the rise, largely chalked up to run-away populism and online misinformation. The reaction against it has been similarly passionate, from the protests after the early victories of Le Pen’s Rassemblement National to clampdowns on online speech.
But curiously, it seems the changes in policy are happening in spite, not because of the heated debates around immigration. Denmark set the tone – going harder on immigration is advertised not as a vision but a necessary measure to keep out the far-right. This keeps the cosy middle class centrist base happy on the assurance that it is almost against their will, as if to say “you may not like what we’re doing, but trust us, it could be way worse”, while it appeals to what is increasingly becoming popular policy. After years of hand wringing about the far-right, the more sanitised style of Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and Denmark’s Mette Frederiksen seem to have broken the cordon sanitaire, making stricter immigration policies possible within the EU line. The plebs remain uneducated and not to be trusted, even as hard-line immigration stances are reimagined as the sensible centre.
In a political climate where every issue is a crisis, from climate change to covid and now immigration, enter the new and improved way of doing politics, where the goal is not winning over the public at the ballot box, but depoliticising the issue as crisis management. The effort pays off – the rhetoric shifts what could be a political battle over priorities, morals, and culture to a purely administrative problem, of a sort that the EU was built to accommodate. Any sight of heated ideological battles in the public square are swept away with references to the dangers of polarisation, and in swoop the experts to solve all our problems. The chummy consensus of Northern Europe was maintained when the EU line was focused on human rights and the climate crisis, but what happens now as the managerial focus slowly shifts towards closing off the borders?
The bureaucratic turn not only renders politics dull, but marks the victory of those who maintain that the biggest problem we face in modern politics is this vague threat of polarisation, as if nothing real lurks behind the perceived political differences between left and right. Fundamentally, the most contentious issues are the ones that people really care about. When the temperature of the debate becomes the main problem, the result is a depoliticisation of the issues that really matter, with free rein to pursue policy as you please – as long as you use the right language. From Palestine to climate change and immigration, decrying polarisation is often just an attempt at maintaining the status quo, or worse, redefining what would be seen as radical policy five minutes ago as common sense.
Because what is covered up by the dull EU bureaucracy is the fundamental truth that these issues are political and that they should be, even if that recognition makes the public square more rowdy. Perhaps polarisation is not just caused by rhetorical flourishes, but by the fact that we are living through a time of real political upheaval, that can’t all be boiled down to bad language and the serious overuse of the terms ‘Marxist’ and ‘Fascist’.
The population is actually divided – and perhaps instead of fearing or denying it we should recognise it as the state of the game. When every issue is a crisis, the only solution is competent, technocratic administration, where power is best kept out of the hands of the public; God forbid we believe anything radical, that our votes could actually change the world we live in for the better. But perhaps we should be a bit more sceptical of this framing, and not shun polarisation just because it’s not sufficiently cuddly. When we recognise things as political questions, we bring some agency back into politics.
