Quiet Solidarity: How Lithuania Practices Hospitality

By Dainius Genys* & Dmytro Mamaiev**

* TThe author is a member of The Migration and Intercultural Diasporic Life Laboratory, a research platform within the VMU Lithuanian Emigration Institute. The Laboratory brings together an interdisciplinary team of scholars in the social sciences, political science, and the humanities, united by a shared interest in diaspora and migration processes, particularly the micro-level dynamics of intercultural relations in the post-Soviet Central and Eastern European region.

** The author is a PhD Candidate in the sociology of migration at the Lithuanian Centre for Social Sciences (Institute of Sociology). The author works largely with the topic of Ukrainian community immigration experiences in Lithuania. Dmytro has applied experience in academia, policy, and consultancy in the field of migration that was acquired in Ukraine, Italy, Malta, and Lithuania. Author resides in Lithuania since December 2021. 

 

Sociologically speaking, hospitality is never a one-sided virtue. As Alfred Schutz once observed in his essay on “The Stranger,” integration is not a smooth moral achievement but a relational tension – a test not only for those who arrive, but for those who receive. The presence of the newcomer unsettles the quiet certainties of the host society, exposing the fragile distance between proclaimed solidarity and practiced belonging. We may imagine ourselves cohesive, generous, morally prepared – until history knocks on our door. When misfortune strikes our neighbors, hospitality ceases to be an abstract value and becomes a concrete choice. It is then that societies discover not who they claim to be, but who they are willing to become.

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Lithuania has found itself in precisely such a moment of testing. The arrival of thousands of Ukrainian refugees has transformed the country into a laboratory of hospitality, where moral codes, institutional habits, and emotional styles are put to work under pressure. Blue and yellow flags draped over balconies, rapidly opened institutions, and widespread declarations of solidarity have formed a public theater of welcome. Much of this solidarity has been genuine, immediate, and deeply felt.

Yet beneath these visible gestures lies a quieter terrain – one less easily captured by images or slogans. It is the terrain of procedures, routines, and everyday encounters; of offices and classrooms; of promises kept without ceremony. It is here, in this understated space, that Lithuanian hospitality acquires its particular texture.

This text is written from within that terrain, by two sociologists who live and work in Lithuania, yet inhabit different positions within the same encounter. One writes from within the host society, attentive to how Lithuanian moral habits, institutional practices, and emotional restraint shape responses to those who arrive. The other writes as a Ukrainian, personally experiencing these structures not as abstractions but as lived realities. Their perspectives do not compete; they mirror and unsettle one another. What follows is not a unified voice, but a dialogical reflection on hospitality as it is organized, practiced, and morally justified.

At stake is a simple but demanding question: what does it mean to be hospitable when solidarity must last, rather than merely appear?

Hospitality as a Test

For many Lithuanians, the early months of the war were marked by an intense sense of moral clarity. Helping Ukrainians felt not only necessary but self-evident. History, geography, and shared vulnerability converged. Yet even in this moment of consensus, hospitality quickly revealed itself as something more complex than emotional alignment.

Schutz reminds us that the stranger is never simply absorbed into an existing order. Their presence makes visible the unspoken assumptions of social life: how closeness is negotiated, how trust is earned, how care is distributed. Hospitality, in this sense, is not an act of generosity alone, but a mirror held up to the host society. 

In Lithuania, this mirror reflected a familiar self-image: calm, reliable, restrained, ethically serious. These qualities are often understood as virtues forged through historical endurance – a moral style shaped by scarcity, occupation, and the need to survive without excess. The encounter with Ukrainians did not invent these traits; it activated them.

At the same time, it revealed their limits. Solidarity had to be translated into practices that could endure beyond the first wave of emotion. Warmth alone would not suffice. What mattered was whether care could be organized, sustained, and made reliable.

Seen from the outside, Lithuania’s response to Ukrainian refugees has often been described as exemplary. Institutions were mobilized quickly; legal protections were extended; civil society responded with remarkable energy. Yet to understand how hospitality actually works here, one must look less at declarations and more at structures.

For most Ukrainians, welcome begins not in private homes but in institutions: refugee reception centers, NGOs, municipal offices, employment agencies, language schools. These are the spaces where safety acquires form. Hospitality here is procedural, almost architectural. It has deadlines, registration numbers, queues, and rules. To be welcomed is first to be processed.

Hospitality institutionalization

Across our experiences, two elements of Lithuanian hospitality repeatedly surface as structurally decisive: language and bureaucracy. Neither operates merely as a technical instrument. Lithuanian language functions as a moral threshold, while bureaucratic procedures act as a grammar of care. Together, they shape a specific mode of inclusion in which belonging is not produced through emotional proximity, but through competence, orientation, and compliance with shared rules. What for newcomers may initially appear as obstacles – linguistic difficulty, procedural density – constitute, for the host society, the very conditions under which care can be distributed fairly, predictably, and without exhaustion. Hospitality here is not mediated by intimacy, but by access to codes.

From a sociological perspective, this reveals a deeper affinity between language and bureaucracy as immigration governing technologies. Both translate concern into form: language into communicability, bureaucracy into governability. Learning the language becomes a way of entering the social order; navigating institutions becomes a way of proving reliability. In this sense, care is not withdrawn from the interpersonal sphere, but displaced into structured practices that minimize arbitrariness and emotional volatility. For Ukrainians, this creates an ambivalent experiential reality. Safety is tangible, rules are clear, promises are kept, yet recognition arrives conditionally, through demonstrated adaptation rather than spontaneous acceptance. What emerges is a regime of hospitality in which solidarity is expressed not by warmth, but by endurance; not by closeness, but by the steady functioning of systems that do not fail.

Reliability as a virtue? Or convenience? 

This twofold sociological reflection allows Lithuania’s response to the arrival of Ukrainians to be understood not so much as an emotional state of society, but as an expression of its moral structure. Hospitality here operates not as a spontaneous gesture of closeness, but as an institutionalized duty grounded in reliability, procedure, and self-discipline. Solidarity takes shape not through intense emotional sharing, but through the capacity to maintain order under crisis conditions.

From the Ukrainian perspective, this structure of hospitality reveals itself not only as a cultural particularity, but as a regime of experience into which one must enter. Most Ukrainians arrived in Lithuania not as a result of deliberate choice, but through contingent trajectories, via existing social networks, prior connections, or accidental opportunities. In Ukrainian public imagination prior to 2022, Lithuania was not an obvious migration destination; it became a refuge not because it was desired, but because it was accessible. This element of contingency shaped the relationship with the host society from the outset as temporary, conditional, and cautious.

Thus, in Ukrainian experience, the Lithuanian structure of hospitality appears first and foremost as a functional system rather than a social bond. We, the host society, hope that access to safety, employment, and information in Lithuania is mediated primarily through institutions and procedures. However, Ukrainian experience shows, informal networks and personal connections (Ukrainian-Ukrainian) still play a tremendous role in information access and in some cases employment opportunities.  In this way, integration emerges at the intersection of two logics: from the host society’s perspective, it is framed as functional adaptation to institutional rules, discipline, and linguistic capital; from the Ukrainian perspective, it is simultaneously sustained by informal networks, personal trust, and community-based channels of support. Hospitality thus operates not as a single social bond, but as a layered regime in which formal inclusion and lived belonging do not fully overlap. 

Taken together, these dynamics allow us to speak of a specific regime of hospitality, one in which care is organized so that it can be sustained over time. Gradually, assistance detaches itself from enthusiastic public impulsiveness: it is quietly transferred to institutions, transformed into work, routine, and professional responsibility. This transformation is not accidental. It reflects a historical experience in which dense social ties and the capacity for long-term autonomous collective action were disrupted, giving way to formalized, bureaucratized modes of operation. Today, we console ourselves with the belief that stability and reliability have become our country’s response to a complex challenge. Yet at the same time, this reveals certain conditions of our society, in which emotional openness is increasingly replaced by institutionalized forms of action. From this perspective, it can be argued that Lithuania offered Ukrainians not closeness, but safety. Not emotional inclusion, but a predictable environment in which rules apply and promises are kept.

However, this quiet order comes at a cost. Professionalized empathy, while effective, inevitably limits spontaneous connection. Procedural care, though reliable, can be experienced as emotionally restrained. What for some constitutes a public virtue – restraint, control, unhurriedness – may appear to others as distance or a form of coldness. Within this tension lies the central paradox of hospitality: that which allows care to endure does not necessarily allow it to become intimate.

Sociologically, this means that in the face of a prolonged challenge, Lithuanian society has shifted from active agency to a model of managed care. It is a model in which solidarity is subordinated to durability, and emotions to order. It enables responses to large-scale challenges, but simultaneously creates space for asymmetries of experience between those who care and those who are cared for.

It is precisely here that a question emerges – one that cannot be answered at the level of institutions or policy. How is this form of hospitality experienced in everyday life? What does it mean to live in a society that cares reliably, but reservedly? How does this moral style shape feelings of belonging, closeness, and foreignness? But that is a matter for another commentary.