This book is motivated, to a large extent, by some recent troubling developments in public discourse, namely the developments in information and disinformation practices. From the beginning of history, various and diverse means or channels of communication have been used to inform, misinform (unintentionally) and disinform (deliberately). However, in recent decades, the emergence and development of new information and communications technologies (ICT), combined with the ever-increasing digitalisation and globalisation of almost every aspect of modern life, among others, have opened up new and uncharted avenues to that end. This book therefore focuses on disinformation practices occurring with the help of digital media as these practices bring to the fore profound negative ramifications for the functioning of a democratic polity.

In particular, disinformation – nowadays frequently yet not uncontroversially labelled ‘fake news’ , ‘alternative facts’ or ‘post-truth’ in English (and imported therefrom to many other languages), ‘nepnieuws’ in Dutch or ‘infox’ in French – affects the values and principles on which many democratic polities, including the European integration project, have been built, namely democracy sensu largo , the rule of law ( Rechtsstaat ) and the respect for fundamental rights. (This classical ‘constellation of ideals that dominate our political morality’ will be referred to, in this Introduction, simply as ‘democracy’.) Disinformation further affects many other aspects of public life, e.g. political and journalistic practices, all over the world – a development that appears to transcend cultural and political contexts.

From a cursory look at recent history, the 2016 referendum on the departure of the United Kingdom (UK) from the European Union (EU) (the so-called ‘Brexit’ ) and the presidential elections that took place the same year in the United States (US) – and related alleged disinformation practices – have been perhaps the strongest reminder of the importance and the power of disinformation in society, sparking debates in academic, political and artistic circles, and beyond.

INTRODUCTION

The influx of migrants seeking protection in the European Union (EU), at levels unprecedented since the Second World War, has given rise to a question about the capability of EU Member States to host them. According to prevailing opinions, the majority of incoming migrants cannot be granted refugee status in the light of the Geneva Convention of 1951 because they are ‘economic refugees’, i.e. individuals who do not arrive in order to find shelter but, rather, to improve their economic situation. The purpose of this chapter is to explain who economic refugees are and why they should not be identified with economic migrants. This is especially important as, in the view of the authors, the term ‘economic refugee ’ has been wrongly and incorrectly applied both in the political discourse and media as a synonym of economic migration.

Although many scholars deal with the issue of economic migration, relatively few works have been devoted to the phenomenon of economic refugees taking place in parallel to economic migrants. Economic migrants are persons who migrate in order to improve their economic status by finding employment in a host country. It should be emphasised that economic migrations are voluntary and unconstrained and such migrants are free to return to their country of origin. Economic migrants migrate not because they have a bad life but because they want a better one. On the other hand, an economic refugee is defined in the relevant literature as a person who treats migration as an escape from economic oppression. They are persons who escape from their country because the immense poverty they live in prevents them from satisfying their basic human needs. This situation concerns people who leave their countries due to threats that can be assimilated to those encountered by political refugees. The latter may flee due to terror, whereas economic refugees fiee due to hunger. Toilsome conditions that frequently imply mental and physical suffering make economic refugees leave. However, the threat they experience is not individual in its nature, and that is why they cannot be granted political refugee status. The ensuing conclusion is that an economic refugee can be granted neither economic nor political refugee status within the meaning of the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees.

To what extent does the status quo of irregular migration to Europe pose a challenge for democracy? The surge of people moving, predominantly from war-torn, repressed and impoverished countries in the Middle East and Africa to the outer borders of Europe, which started in the early 2010s and which intensified in the summer of 2015 – and the implications for the Old Continent that this massive fiow of people has caused – gave an impetus to the present book. It seeks to contribute to the contextualisation, better understanding of and drawing of lessons from the status quo of irregular migration to Europe and its relation to the values and principles on which Europe has been built.

Migration in Europe (i.e. within, to and away from), as anywhere in the world, is by no means a novel phenomenon. Immigration to the Old Continent once again gained its momentum and – consequently – public attention in the aftermath of the so-called Arab Spring. A sequence of protests against authoritarian political regimes in Africa and the Middle East that broke out on 17 December 2010 in Tunisia resulted in democratisation for some of them, but in others led to political unrest and even civil war. The latter caused an intensified emigration therefrom, largely towards Europe. The Italian island of Lampedusa – located less than 120 km from the Tunisian shore – and the vessels that have sunk around that island have become symbolic. Lampedusa perhaps marked the first sign that this influx of people constituted a serious problem and hence people started naming it a ‘crisis’. Subsequent events only magnified the problem: perhaps the biggest mark has been left by the ongoing Syrian civil war.