Military Review English Edition November December 2016 | Page 28

extension of central government control may be compromised even at the best of times, where essential resources
are limited and consensus on the legitimacy of the political regime is shaky at best, a large influx can present a real
and persuasive threat. For instance, in early 2014, Russia
threatened to expel many of its Central Asian guest
workers if those states supported the United Nations
resolution condemning the annexation of Crimea.17
(Support of said resolution was not forthcoming.)
Capacity swamping can also be an effective strategy
in the developed world, or “the West,” broadly defined.
This is particularly true if the incipient crisis is large
and sudden, since even highly industrialized states need
time to gear up to effectively deal with disasters, be they
natural or manmade, as the ongoing European migration crisis dramatically illustrates.18 That said, advanced
industrial societies tend to have greater resources they
can bring to bear in a crisis, making it much more difficult—if not impossible—to overwhelm their physical
ability to cope with such an exigency.
In the developed world, therefore, political agitating often supplants capacity swamping as the linchpin
of coercion. Challengers on the international level seek
to influence target behavior on the domestic level by
engaging in a kind of norms-enhanced political blackmail that relies on exploiting and exacerbating what
Robert Putnam has called the “heterogeneity” of political and social interests within polities.19 Exploitation of
heterogeneity within Western states is possible because
population influxes, such as those created in migration
and refugee crises, tend to engender diverse and highly
divisive responses within the societies expected to bear
the brunt of their consequences, as electoral campaign
rhetoric both at home and abroad makes clear. As
Marc Rosenblum puts it, “efforts to bend immigration
policy to the national interest compete with pluralistic
policy demands originating at the party, subnational
(local and state), and sector- or class-specific levels.”20
Like immigration and refugee policy more generally, real and threatened migration crises tend to split
societies into (at least) two mutually exclusive and
often highly mobilized groups: the pro-refugee/migrant
camp and the anti-refugee/migrant camp.
What it means to be pro- or anti-refugee/migrant
will perforce vary across targets and across crises.
Depending on circumstances, pro-refugee/migrant
camps may call for relatively limited, short-term
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responses, such as accepting financial responsibility for
settling the migrant or refugee group in a third country,
or far more significant—even permanent—commitments, like offering asylum or citizenship. Conversely,
anti-refugee/migrant groups may demand that requests
for financial assistance be rejected or, more radically,
that migrants be interdicted, refugees refused asylum,
or even, in extreme cases, forcibly repatriated.
The bottom line is that because targets cannot simultaneously satisfy demands both to accept and reject
a given group of migrants or refugees, leaders facing
highly mobilized and highly polarized interests on both
sides of the divide can find themselves on the horns of
a real dilemma in which it is impossible to satisfy the
demands of one camp without alienating the other.
Thus, it is not heterogeneity per se that makes targets
vulnerable. Instead, strategies of political agitation can
succeed because these two competing groups tend to
have mutually incompatible interests that they may be
highly committed to defending, and target leaderships
may have compelling political, legal, or moral reasons
to avoid conflicting with either group.
Under such conditions, leaders may face strong
domestic incentives to concede to coercers’ international-level demands—particularly if doing so can make
real or potential migration crises cease or disappear,
thereby freeing target leaderships from the proverbial
trap between a rock and a hard place. As Marco Scalvini
aptly put it in the middle of the 2011 Libyan crisis, after
Gaddhafi had once more threatened to “turn Europe
black,” “the anxiety over a refugee invasion from Africa
reveals the contradictions present in Europe today,
where, on the one hand, the moral imperative of universal
emancipation is proclaimed, but on the other, policies
and practice continue the trend of refusing a safe haven to
the very refugees they have helped to create.”21
In short, challengers aim to influence targets by what
is, in traditional coercion, known as force majeure—a
choice dictated by overwhelming circumstances. Targets
of course always have a choice, but one that is skewed if
they believe the consequences of noncompliance will be a
denial of future choices.22 Thus, coercers seek to narrow a
target’s range of domestic policy responses to an outflow
such that concession begins to appear more attractive, at
least relative to the possibility that the future will hold
fewer, still less-auspicious choices. This is not to suggest
that concession is cost-free, only that, in the face of a
November-December 2016  MILITARY REVIEW