A question of values?
While comprehensive data on refugee support volunteers’ political opinions and normative outlooks are lacking, the Allensbach Institute for Public Opinion Research has collected representative data on 2017 volunteers’ values. The data indicate that Germany’s new pro-refugee volunteers hold stronger altruistic values than volunteers in other areas, and decidedly stronger altruistic values than the rest of the population (Allensbach 2017: 24). They are a lot more likely than other Germans to name ‘helping those in need’ and an orientation towards ‘social justice’ among their value priorities, and a lot less likely than other Germans to prioritize materialist values such as ‘a high income, material prosperity.' But to what extent can an understanding of volunteers’ values yield insights into their self-understandings and their political positions on questions of migration?
Values, as measured by the Allensbach Institute, are understood as a someone’s personal ideas of what is ethically good or worth striving for in their own lives (Allensbach 2013: 10). They do not immediately reflect political opinions: a person might be strongly religious in private, but might still agree with the principle of separating church and state politically. To mark the difference, we would have to look beyond a person’s value set to find out where she situates her own identity within her views on society’s wider goals and the norms by which it should be governed.5
Moreover, even where correlations between values and political attitudes have been measured, values are understood as describing a person’s longterm commitments as opposed to their short-term political judgments (Inglehart 1977). Most scholars are of the view that values are acquired through childhood and rarely change throughout a person’s adult life (Inglehart 1977; Joas 2001). To explain sudden shifts in an actor’s practices or political attitudes, empirical studies on values must, therefore, take into account additional factors that can make sense of the fact that someone previously not particularly concerned with a specific political view or practice, starts taking to it now, rather than before. Germany’s 2015 to 2017 leap in pro-refugee volunteering is a case in point. A more situational analysis is required to explain why members of previously unsupportive strata of society came out volunteering for refugees in 2015.
The Allensbach volunteer survey did not only collect data on volunteers’ personal values, but also on the motives and triggers that brought them to volunteering. Triggers are understood as the external factors that contribute to causing a person to act in a particular situation rather than in another. Values and motives, on the other hand, both describe internal drivers of action. But while values describe a person’s long-term ideas of what is worth striving for in her own life, motives describe the reason a person gives in justifying a particular action (Vorstenbosch 2006) - in this case, starting to volunteer for refugees. Motives, then, include a judgment on the kind of situation a person found herself confronted with before acting, whilevalues do not. Therefore, the content of values and motives can, but need not be the same. Religious values, again, make for a good example. Various studies have shown that adherents to religious faiths are overrepresented among refugee support volunteers, with Islam being especially significant (Ahrens 2017: 45; El-Menouar &. Nagel 2017). However, the data also indicate that religious volunteers tended not to think of their faith as an important reason for volunteering (Ahrens 2017: 47; see also Karakayali & Kleist 2016: 14-15).
In this context, I argue that three aspects stand out when contrasting volunteers' motives in refugee support with the motives volunteers in other areas of society have cited. First, pro-refugee volunteers cited a general altruistic orientation as their prime motive, thereby framing refugee support as a question of humanitarian values. Second, volunteers also understood refugee support as a general duty, not as an activity aligning with their particular interests. Third, volunteers often cited a concern for Germany’s future as a motive for their activities, offering a surprisingly civic outlook. 1 will briefly elaborate on these motives and how they might fit together, before going on to consider criticisms of humanitarianism in the context of refugee and migrant support.
When asked about their motives for getting involved in supporting refugees, pro-refugee volunteers who have started their work since 2015 most often replied ‘Because, as a basic principle, 1 want to do something for others, help them’ (Allensbach 2017: 26; see also Pfundmair et al. 2017), thereby re-iterating the altruistic orientation most had already cited as a value.4 In my reading, the coincidence of refugee support volunteers’ values and motives is not trivial. It implies that volunteers understood the events associated with the ‘refugee crisis' as the kinds of situations where their values become important in volunteering. This contrasts with volunteers in other areas, whose most prominent motive - by a margin of almost 20 points - has been enjoying their activities, with specific concern for the group in question and maintaining social networks also featuring prominently (Allensbach 2013: 15). Making volunteering for refugees a case where personal altruistic values matter frames this activity in a particular, humanitarian way. Refugee support volunteers clearly imply that, in doing what they do, they are going out of their normal way to sacrifice time for those they understand to need help.
At the same time, framing helping others as a personal value rather than, say, a duty that simply arose from a given situation relates one’s humanitarian behavior back to one’s own identity. Obeying duties need not be a question of values. The sight of a drowning person equally obliges all passers-by to do their best to help, independent of what they value personally. It would indeed be strange if the person eventually throwing in a lifebelt would point to her humanitarian values as the motivation to do so, rather than some form of obligation arising from the simple facts of the situation. Explaining the reasons for one’s actions in terms of one’s personal values, then, gives the situation at hand a subjective touch, it implies that someone else might have acted differently if confronted with the same situation (Wils 2006). One acted as one did, on this view, because the basic dispositions of one’s personal identity brought one to understand a specific situation as significant.
Apart from linking refugee support to humanitarian values, the motives and triggers most important to refugee support volunteers frame refugee support as a general concern, not as an activity that aligns with their particular interests. Volunteers in refugee support are a lot less likely than volunteers in other areas, such as animal support or music education, to identify their area of volunteering as a single issue focus, that is, a concern they take to be important for themselves, but not necessarily for others (Allensbach 2017: 26).5 That Germany’s 2015 refugee support volunteers were not motivated by any particular interests to come out in support of refugees is confirmed if one considers the list of triggers that volunteers named. Less than a third indicate that value-specific or issue-specific affiliations, such as being part of a church group or an NGO with a prior focus on refugees, prompted them to start volunteering (Allensbach 2017: 27). Instead, the majority replied either that they became active on their own initiative, often after seeing media reports, or that personal encounters with refugees triggered them to volunteer (Allensbach 2017: 27). The importance of media reporting underlines the event character the ‘refugee crisis1 took in the eyes of volunteers. It seems like a substantial proportion of volunteers was prompted to start in 2015, not because of group affiliation or slowly-building peer pressure, but by the impression that something exceptional was happening.
Lastly, 1 suggest that refugee support volunteers reveal a surprisingly civic perspective on their activities, with many of them stating that they are ‘convinced that it is important for Germany’s future that the [sic] refugees’ integration works well’ (Allensbach 2017: 26).6 Among the three motives named most often by pro-refugee volunteers, this answer has no equivalent in Allensbach Institute’s earlier questionnaire on general volunteers’ motives (see Allensbach 2013). It describes volunteering in refugee support as a civic duty rather than a duty immediately held towards refugees. It seems like volunteers who gave this answer espouse a version of the communitarian argument that, in order to function properly, state institutions need some degree of social cohesion at its base, which ensures that there is trust and solidarity among the members of a given society (Miller 2016; Walzer 1984). Moreover, a number of studies confirm that volunteers seem to think, at least partly, that bringing about the kind of social cohesion needed is a task for civil society (Karakayali &. Kleist 2016: 29; Allensbach 2017: 38), rather than just a question of adequate legal provisions. Even though, in this reading, the volunteers’ aim was primarily to ensure the functioning of state institutions in the future, their means of doing so were cultural, by advancing refugees’ integration to generate what they seem to have taken as the necessary amount of social cohesion at the state’s basis.
Read like this, the data on refugee support volunteers’ values and motives suggest that the volunteers combined a focus on humanitarian values with a degree of civic identification. They expressed the latter as a concern for the role played by the refugees’ integration in the proper functioning of state institutions. That a combination of humanitarianism and civic identification was a major motive for the volunteers seems to be confirmed by what a number of commentators had critically highlighted when Germany’s volunteer movement made headlines in 2015 and 2016. Whereas earlier cohorts of refugee supporters emphasized solidarity and common anti-statist political interests as important themes, some commentators highlight that the volunteers’ humanitarian outlooks in 2015 and 2016 were politically useful to reinforce statist policies, marking the influx of refugees as a national state of exception (Graf 2017; Steinhilper &. Fleischmann 2017; van Dyk & Misbach 2016; Ratfisch &. Schwiertz 2015). In the following section, I take up this discussion and set it in the context of quantitative data on pro-refugee volunteers’ more concrete activities and forms of organization as well as qualitative data on refugee support groups’ self-understandings and interactions with refugees. Introducing the framework of care ethics as an alternative to humanitarianism, I argue that, on the ground, interactions more often took the form of care relations rather than mere humanitarianism.
