Capital Matters: Middle Class between Welcome Culture and Ukrainian Refugee Crisis

Confused between their insatiable hunger for ‘self-realization,’ their enjoyment of petit bonheurs of life and an aggressive will to preserve their welfare position, for not going downhill and joining the 50% of the world population who own nothing, today’s middle-class individual seems to choose one of two ‘fronts of worldviews,’ of which the attitude toward ‘refugees’ constitutes a new ‘battlefield.’ So, with the flow of Ukrainian refugees after the Russian aggression against Ukraine, one of the most worrying questions in Germany has been if the experience of the ‘welcome culture’ of 2015, that is a severe shift from hospitality to hostility, would repeat. Statistics show that so far, it has not been the case. This paper addresses the question of what might differ in the experience of ‘the Ukrainian refugee wave’ from the ‘welcome culture’ of 2015. Tracing both hospitality and then the shift to hostility in 2015 back to its middle-class dynamics, the paper tries to conceptualize a difference in attitudes within the middle-class toward both ‘refugee crises.