The Ideological Deadlock of The Refugee Crisis

Since the middle of 2015, the European community has been struggling to find political solutions to what has come to be known as ‘the refugee crisis’. As tens of thousands of refugees from primarily Syria began crossing the Mediterranean Sea and entering Europe at either Lespos or Lampedusa, and as pictures of some of the thousands of refugees who drowned in the attempt started showing up in papers and on TV, the pressure on the national and European politicians increased.
Applying a knowledge-archaeological and dispositif-analytical approach, drawing on the works of among others Michel Foucault, Reiner Keller, Norman Fairclough, Niklas Luhmann and Zygmunt Bauman, this article will describe the formation of the discourse and the constitution of the dispositif on the refugee crisis, in order to uncover the mechanisms and procedures regulating the handling of the crisis in Denmark, that seemed not to aim at solving it, but rather to avoid it from becoming an issue of national concern. What understandings, perceptions, opinions, norms and values does the discourse imbue the individual with, and which actions does as a result hereof become meaningful, and thus more likely than others? What were for example the mechanisms which were able to suspend, what is otherwise considered to be one of the most reliable, stable and indispensable elements of a range of dispositifs, namely the national legislation – in this case, The Danish Visa Executive Order – so that the refugees travelled through (for the most part to Sweden), instead of taking residence in, Denmark? The article will contribute to the understanding of the mechanisms of power in relation to the refugee-problem. Data comprises of more than 1300 Danish newspaper articles from between January 1st. 2015 and June 30th. 2016.