How to Approach the “Other”? Historical Arguments in the Slovak Debate on Asylum
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In Slovakia as in other Visegrád countries, the question of whether to accept asylum seekers polarized the public sphere in 2015 and continues to cause controversy, with proponents and opponents standing irreconcilably against each other. This article focuses on historical encounters with otherness that are recounted and utilized argumentatively in this debate, examining the diverging cultural approaches to difference that underlie the two positions. Building on ethnographic fieldwork in the Slovak asylum system, and taking a close look at public discourse, the article analyzes the four historical references that are deployed most frequently in such arguments: the Ottoman conquest, the social situation of Roma, Slovak emigration, and multiculturalism in the interwar period. The interpretations of history generated from these episodes differ: not only in their moral evaluation of difference as something desirable or dangerous but also in their base assumption with respect to whether diversity is normal or an anomaly and whether it is something that can be prevented or reversed, as opposed to something that must be acknowledged and managed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".