Sovereign Capability: Refugees

Since the Arab Spring the question of refugees has become increasingly stressed in domestic, nation-state politics in the European Union. Being a driving force behind the rise of far-right political parties throughout the European Union that hold xenophobia as a principle. On 21 May 2015 data was extracted and published by Eurostat, the department of statistics for the European Commission, about the asylum applications and decisions in the European Union in 2014. The following graphs present a quantitative analysis of Eurostat's data coupled with and crossed by other data collected from various public national sources.

Figure 1: Sovereign Capabilities: Refugees

In political discussions about the refugee question facing the EU today, a position of helplessness is taken by the sovereign power in saying something along the lines of "we just can't". The reasons why the asylum status of so many refugees is rejected are excessively complex and not the subject of analysis here. Instead of resorting to political ideology, a new logic is sought.

There is an intricate line between 'capacity' and 'capability'. The former largely purports an objective frame of analysis, whereas the latter shifts from the realm of technical possibility to that of awareness, agency and ultimately, politics. The analysis conducted here seeks to shed light on the frontier between these two concepts by devising a metric, entitled here as 'relative capability', that is the result of a basic formulaic operation between national population, sovereign land area, and GDP.

Figure 2: Sovereign Capabilities: Refugees

This project seeks to call into question the relation between demographic, geographic and economic prosperity with the sovereign distribution of rights to others. By bringing national policy to the fore, it is ultimately two forms of absolute politics – ideology and opportunity – that becomes visible.

Figure 3: Sovereign Capabilities: Refugees

Download high-resolution versions of the images here.

List of sources:
http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Asylum_statistics
http://www.theguardian.com/world/datablog/2015/may/11/which-eu-countries-receive-the-most-asylum-seekers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_European_Union
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_population