The Second Other- Sovereignty, Separatism and the Exclusionary Politics of Asylum in the UK and Europe

In response to what has been called the European 'refugee crisis' in 2015, the Welsh Government committed that Wales should become the world's first Nation of Sanctuary through building a culture of welcome and hospitality. The PhD thesis examined what the idea of a Welsh Nation of Sanctuary means, what it does, and how the discourses and narratives of a 'Nation of Sanctuary' provide new ways of revisiting the metaphor of hospitality, and its role in sovereign framings of migration.
Indeed, the critical literature on migration had long established that the metaphor of a 'generous' hospitality, often used to describe the relation between a territorial nation-state and migrants (Derrida 2000), entails the categorisation of the stranger as the identifiable guest, which is critical to the politics of securitisation of migration. But while the British governments response to the long summer of migration was indeed framed through those securitising logics of categorisation and classification, my thesis found that the response of the Welsh government, using this imaginary of Wales as a 'welcoming nation' was also a means to create national self-imaginaries through a discursive politics of differentiation from the British sovereign nation-state. This response involved what I have conceptualised as a second othering (Bernhardt 2021, forthcoming). Theoretically, this means the discursive framing of responses to migration through the metaphor of hospitality is sometimes used in a way that not only creates a binary relationship between the sovereign nation-state (host) and the migrant 'other' (guest). Instead, government or civil society actors within a subnational or devolved territorial unit create 'new' national self-imaginaries against the 'old' sovereign nation-state through a discursive politics of differentiation aimed at the exclusionary politics of asylum. But ambivalences remained to what extent such a new national discourse is still "set against and built at the expense of the immigrant Other" (Hill 2016), perpetuating unequal subject relations. With these potential ambiguities of new subnational discourses regarding asylum in mind, the postdoctoral fellowship would develop the thesis conceptually further, in asking: How does the political strive for national independence effects attitudes towards migration and the politics of asylum of the sovereign nation-state? The goal is to develop a first conceptual and then (limited) empirical engagement with the question of how the political strive for separatism and (national) independence effects attitudes towards the exclusionary politics of asylum- an issue that hitherto has not been examined in the critical literature on migration. The postdoctoral research project is intended to conceptualise this intersection between discourses of sovereignty, separatism and the politics and discourses of migration and asylum. It proposes to proposes to empirically and theoretically built on the findings from the case study in Wales, and compare them with the discursive politics of asylum taking place in Scotland, where the Scottish National Party (SNP), striving for independence, is leading the current devolved Scottish government. Following from that, the empirical case study of Catalonia would also be uniquely beneficial to be compared to the situation in Wales and Scotland. This is because the city of Barcelona has a long and contuning history as a 'solidarity city' for asylum seekers and refugees (see Agustin and Jorgensen 2019). Yet, it is also the central place of the Catalan separatist movement. The conceptual goal of this comparison would be then to find out if the discourse of a second other is necessarily built at the expense of refugees being framed as 'guests', or if it could also enable new, horizontal forms of solidarity between new arrivals and more settled residents, for example through shared experiences of being "treated as a guest in their own home".