Othering the sovereign host: Welsh responses to the British politics of asylum and resettlement after the 2015 European refugee ‘crisis’

Abstract

In response to the large number of refugees and asylum seekers arriving in Europe in 2015, the devolved Welsh government committed that Wales should become the world’s first Nation of Sanctuary through building a ‘culture of welcome and hospitality’. This article compares the discursive responses of the sovereign British and devolved Welsh government to this summer of migration in 2015. It argues that such a comparison provides new theoretical ways of revisiting the metaphor of hospitality and its role in discursive framings of the phenomenon of migration. While the literature on migration and the sanctuary movement has explored the limits of hospitality as a frame and response to the exclusionary politics of asylum, this article argues that this new sanctuary discourse is also used to challenge the sovereign nation state on the expectations of what moral responsibilities it entails to be a ‘host’ to refugees and asylum seekers. Drawing on interview material and official documents from the Welsh and British administrations on the ‘Syrian Vulnerable Persons Resettlement Programme’, this article argues that while this challenge on moral expectations is still entangled with uneven relations to migrants, it creates a double othering. There, a subnational and devolved territorial unit constructs national self-imaginaries against the sovereign nation state, through a discursive politics of differentiation aimed at the exclusionary politics of asylum.