by Nick Thorpe
John Berger1
The western Balkans have always acted as a gateway to Central and Northern Europe for refugees, migrants, traders, soldiers and adventurers. The flow of humanity along that route from 2014 to 2016 was simply noticeably larger, and reported on in much more, dramatic detail. By 2018 it had been reduced to its usual steady trickle. Confronted by the new reality of the Hungarian fence, asylum seekers branch west through Albania and Bosnia, or east through Romania, with all the potential dangers depicted in chapter 14.
The traffic on the other main entry point into Europe from the south, the central Mediterranean route across the sea from North Africa to Italy, also diminished considerably. Future migration can be expected to follow a similar pattern – a slow, steady influx, interrupted by sudden surges provoked by man-made disasters like war and climate change. As one route closes, another opens.
In its attempts to impose more control over that process, Europe has become more of a fortress, and will continue to bolster its defences. In June 2018, the European Commission announced that it would triple its annual budget for combatting illegal migration to €5 billion in the next seven-year budget period (2021–8).2 The funding, the Commission declared, would be aimed at ‘ensuring proper control of borders, not closing them. The commission has never financed fences and will not do so under the new EU budget either.’ The money will be spent largely on continuing the transformation of Frontex into a 10,000-strong standing police force along the land and sea borders of the bloc, and on all the technical gadgetry that force and the twenty-seven national police forces would need.
In the summer of 2018, one could almost speak about a ‘lull’ in migration in Europe. The deals struck between the EU and the Turkish government, and the EU and the Libyan warlords, were relatively effective. Only 1,000 Africans a month attempted the desperate journey north across the Sahara from the city of Agadez in Niger, compared to more than 10,000 a month in 2016.3
Politicians across the political spectrum, from far right to left, agreed that sudden mass movements of people should be prevented at source. Money is being ploughed into sub-Saharan countries in Africa. At best, this will help create work and better conditions, so fewer people feel the necessity to leave. At its worst, it will function as little more than a bribe to the governments of the region, to build their own fences to keep their people in and line their own pockets. Three rival governments in Libya, and up to a thousand militias, control the fate of up to a million migrants who have crossed the Sahara. Around one-fifth of these attempt the journey across the Mediterranean, while the majority try to find work in Libya.
International diplomacy failed to prevent or stop a spate of wars in the Middle East and has so far failed to find a solution in Libya. Europe remains an attractive place of refuge, despite its internal problems, which have been exacerbated by the impact of asylum seekers.
The much-maligned Iron Curtain served the interests of democratic West Europeans, as well as dictatorial East European ones. It conveniently cut off the poorer, more quarrelsome cousins in the east, and allowed Western Europe to develop faster. The new Iron Curtains are designed to defend Europe from the ‘impoverished’ other arriving from the south – or his or her cartoon image. The irony is that Western Europe would not grow richer without immigrants, it would undoubtedly grow poorer.
The tens of thousands of refugees stuck in Greece and the thousands stranded in the Balkans are resting, nursing their wounds. Turkey’s 828-kilometre wall on the Syrian border is nearly complete.4
The war in Syria goes on. Of a pre-war population of 23 million, 6 million Syrians are still displaced inside their country, 5 million are refugees in the neighbouring countries of Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon, while around 1 million Syrians have reached Europe. That leaves a further 11 million Syrians still living in their own homes. Syrians constitute about a third of those who came to Europe in the years covered by my book. Half of them, according to one estimate, have a university education, and will be sorely missed if they do not return home, one day, when the war is over.
With the military defeat of IS in Syria and Iraq, some people have bravely attempted to go home – but face an uncertain future in towns and cities without water, electricity and jobs, alongside the danger of unexploded devices. If they return too soon, they may have to flee again.5
The war in both countries continues to uproot more people, while Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey are impatient for the refugees they have generously hosted so far, to go home. The war in Afghanistan is close to its fortieth anniversary. It began when I was a second-year student at university. I fear it will still be under way when I retire.
The war in Yemen, in fact a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran, takes a heavy toll of human life and inflicts misery every day. The world, as ever, is in a sorry state.
Even as the numbers of new arrivals shrink, the political backlash provoked by the newcomers is growing. The peoples of Europe, confused by the impact of technology and globalisation, are looking around for someone to blame. The ‘liberal elites’ are one target, the migrants and asylum seekers the elites are accused of allowing into Europe are another.
According to one estimate, new fences stretching around 1,200 kilometres have been erected along the borders of Europe.6 Populist, nationalist and nativist parties are growing in influence. According to one definition: ‘Populism is not a deep ideology but rather a logic of political organisation. At its core lies a sharp distinction between friend and enemy, in which populists’ supporters are portrayed as the legitimate people, and all opposition is painted as illegitimate.’
In Germany in September 2017, Angela Merkel’s CDU won a third consecutive election victory, with 12.5 million votes, 27 per cent of the electorate.7 Her party were down 2.5 million votes compared to the previous federal election in 2013. The number of CDU seats in the federal parliament fell from 254 to 200. Together with the CSU, the CDU’s sister party in Bavaria, the two parties won 33 per cent. The Social Democrats were a distant second with 20 per cent, followed by the far-right, anti-immigration party, the AfD with 12.6 per cent. Close behind the AfD were the liberal FDP, the Left and the Greens.
Immigration, and Angela Merkel’s handling of the refugee influx into Germany, was the single biggest issue. Her victory, though smaller than before, gave her a fourth consecutive term in office – she has ruled her country since 2005. Her open-door policy to refugees was partially vindicated. More than 87 per cent of the German electorate – all except the AfD voters – expressed their support for controlled immigration.
In the post-election period, as the chancellor struggled to find coalition partners, she finally accepted the need to cap the number of asylum seekers Germany could accept at between 180,000 and 200,000 a year. This corresponded closely to the number who actually sought asylum in Germany in 2017 – 189,000, an average of 548 a day. In the first few months of 2018, 333 new asylum seekers were registered a day, suggesting another decrease for 2018. The new interior minister was Horst Seehofer, leader of the CSU in Bavaria, and a sharp critic of Angela Merkel’s immigration policies.
A few weeks after her election victory, Angela Merkel met Viktor Orbán at an EU summit. ‘Viktor, help me, I have a problem!’ she joked, according to one Hungarian government source. ‘The CSU want to admit 200,000 refugees a year. What shall I do?’ The joke illustrates the distance that still exists between East European governments which refuse to take in any asylum seekers from Italy and Greece, and those who continue to take in many, while insisting that European solidarity means sharing that burden.When, in the spring of 2018, Horst Seehofer provoked a crisis in the German coalition government by threatening Angela Merkel with a deadline to close the German-Austrian border, she called his bluff.
The argument of the Visegrád Four countries, that ‘solidarity’ includes building fences to strengthen the external borders, is not accepted in Europe. Viktor Orbán may have been among the first to loudly proclaim that external borders ne
ed to be strengthened. But this is seen across Europe as a law and order issue, to preserve the Schengen system, separate from the political question of EU solidarity, and the moral necessity to help fellow human beings in distress.
In Austria, thirty-one-year-old Sebastian Kurz led his Austrian Peoples’ Party to victory in the November 2017 elections with 32 per cent of the vote, and immediately forged an alliance with the far-right Freedom Party of Heinz-Christian Strache, which won 26 per cent. Strache became vice-chancellor. Strache’s anti-Islamic sentiments are summed up in his catch-phrase Pummerin statt Muezzin. The Pummerin is the name of the main bell in St Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna. Sebastian Kurz rose to the top in Austria by promising to close the Balkan route. In June 2016, still as foreign minister, Kurz was quoted in Der Spiegel:
We in Austria have always had lots of immigration. But when one starts, as happened in Europe last year, to open the borders and to transport people northwards as fast as possible, then of course it’s not just Syrians who come. People from all around the world then see their chance to quickly come to Europe.
It is we in Europe, and not the human traffickers, who decide whom we take in. Whoever wants to enter illegally has forfeited their chance.
At the same time, countries like Austria and Germany declare themselves willing to bring some of the poorest of the poor to Europe through resettlement programs. The decision cannot merely benefit the young men who are fit enough to withstand the journey.8
Seehofer’s scheme to close the border between Bavaria and Austria collapsed in June 2018, just as it had in September 2015 when the Austrian government declared that they would not accept failed asylum seekers back from Germany.
Italy granted 120,000 asylum requests from 2014 to 2017. At the end of 2017, a further 200,000 were living in camps and shelters, awaiting a response.9 They have proved a heavy burden on Italian society. Many Italians feel let down both by their politicians, for allowing this to happen, and by the failure of many countries, especially in Eastern Europe, to show their solidarity by accepting some of them. These would not have been ‘illegal immigrants’ as some governments have alleged, but vulnerable people pre-screened before departure, and rescreened by the host country before they were accepted. By EU and UNHCR criteria, they should stand a good chance of getting international protection.
In March 2018, in the Italian general election, two populist, anti-immigrant parties, Matteo Salvini’s League and the Five Star movement of Luigi di Maio came first and second, with a combined total of 23 million votes, compared to 7 million for the centre left alliance led by Matteo Renzi.10 In June 2018, they formed a coalition government, led by a fifty-three-year-old lawyer, Giuseppe Conte.11
The new hard-line governments in Western Europe teamed up with old hard-line governments in Eastern Europe, to devise new policies to limit irregular migration. A central plank of their policies will be to actually carry out the deportation of those whose asylum requests have been rejected. Each theft, rape, or murder is blamed on the whole refugee community. ‘Gypsy crime’ has been replaced by ‘migrant crime’ in the slogans of far-right leaders and the tabloid media they foster. This happens at a time when crime figures in Germany are falling steadily, including the number of crimes carried out by those granted or applying for some degree of protection.
In June 2018, the Italian government refused to allow the Aquarius, a ship run by the French NGO SOS Méditerranée with 629 migrants rescued off the coast of Libya on board, to dock in Sicily. Nevertheless, Prime Minister Conte was at pains to emphasise how many migrants Italy had already taken in, and the fact that the country would continue to accept more. To illustrate his point, another ship with over 700 souls on board could dock the next day. A week later, the Aquarius and two others landed in Valencia in Spain, courtesy of the new Spanish Socialist prime minister Pedro Sánchez. Meanwhile the French president Emmanuel Macron offered to accept those on board who wished to continue to France.12
‘This offer shows that this is the framework of cooperation with which Europe must respond, with a spirit of European solidarity and real content,’ Sánchez wrote to Macron. But the happy resolution of the highly symbolic Aquarius affair highlighted the general lack of agreement on all future boats. For many people in Africa, a journey to Europe, despite all the risks, still appears the main hope of a better life.
As Bulgarian political scientist Ivan Krastev wrote:
For a growing number of people the idea of change signifies changing one’s country, not one’s government. The problem with the migration revolution – as in any revolution, really – is that it contains within itself the capacity to inspire counter-revolution. In this case, the revolution has inspired the rise of threatened majorities as a major force in European politics. These anxious majorities fear that foreigners are taking over their countries and jeopardising their way of life, and they are convinced that the current crisis is brought on by a conspiracy between cosmopolitan-minded elites and tribal-minded immigrants.13
But perhaps the situation is not so dire. One backlash inspires another. To continue Krastev’s analogy, the counter-revolution is already provoking a revolution. The danger of Brexit reminded many Britons, especially among the young, how ‘European’ they actually feel. And by the summer of 2018, the national mood had swung back, in favour of measured, controlled immigration. In Germany, public alarm about criminal acts committed by immigrants rose, even as the statistics showed a clear fall.14
The new nationalists in Europe may delight in one another’s attempts to paint the ‘foreign devils’ on the walls, but they provoke ordinary decent citizens to stand up for an open, tolerant Europe. And nationalists, by definition, are opposed to one another. The glory of the Hungarian national myth sits uncomfortably with the glorious myths of the Slovaks, Croats and Romanians. And the memory of the meltdown caused by German and Italian nationalism in the 1930s is still fresh enough to warn people away from a new nationalist experiment. A more nationalist Western Europe will mean less money in structural and cohesion funds for Eastern Europe. Politicians in Budapest, Bratislava, Prague and Warsaw may yet rue the spread of their own rhetoric.
What has been learnt in the past four years? How can the refugee and migration issues facing the European continent be resolved? Are we any the wiser?
First, we have a moral duty and legal obligation to help genuine refugees. This principle remains true, despite the strains caused by the arrival of between 1 and 2 million genuine refugees, and despite the attempts of populist politicians to turn public sentiment against them. And despite the fear and dislocation caused by a small number of fanatics, who besmirch the good name of Islam with acts of terror. The temporary care of so many traumatised people, or their permanent integration, will be a massive challenge.
Second, the flow of refugees and migrants must be controlled, and the public reassured that this is indeed the case. The media share an enormous responsibility for this. Work visa programmes should be expanded, as should resettlement programmes.
The current self-selection process, whereby mainly the better-off or toughest people reach Europe, should change in favour of the more vulnerable.
Third, the EU needs to reach broad agreement on the reform of its asylum system, in particular to ease the burden on front-line states like Greece and Italy. A system for the relocation of asylum seekers should be established, which is neither compulsory nor voluntary, but automatic. Only in this way can it be depoliticised. If certain countries choose to opt out of that system, let them contribute more in other ways. Future East European governments may finally realise the value of immigration too.
Fourth, there is an urgent need to expand our concept of who exactly a refugee is, to include environmental refugees. The rich North, which caused climate change with its profligate use of carbon fuels, has a moral duty to help its victims in the poor South – just as much as the former slave states and colonial powers had a duty to help the descendants of their former subjects
. As Pope Francis wrote in his 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’ – On care for our common home:
There has been a tragic rise in the number of migrants seeking to flee from the growing poverty caused by environmental degradation. They are not recognized by international conventions as refugees; they bear the loss of the lives they have left behind, without enjoying any legal protection whatsoever.15
Fifth, European countries continue to need the energy and skills of migrants. It is intolerable that migrants should continue to depend on the expensive, life-threatening services of criminal gangs. Much more efficient and fairer forms of legal migration, including circular migration, which allows people to go home safely after a time, need to be found.
Sixth, refugees need to be recognised as a development issue, as well as a humanitarian one. Ways must be found to integrate them into local economies and help them find more permanent accommodation, work and education. This is one of the cornerstones of the UN Compacts on Migration and Refugees. Working groups are edging towards agreement on both definitions and solutions, based on international good practice. An important part of this recognition is long-term thinking which prepares refugees to return home. Most of the Syrians I met while researching this book told me they would be willing to return home to rebuild their country when they felt safe to do so. There is a contradiction between the efforts of countries, led by Germany, to ‘integrate’ the newcomers, and the newcomers’ own daydreams of return. But the resolution of that contradiction should not be beyond our intelligence and organising skills.
Finally, seven decades of immigration to Europe have changed the continent, but they have also enriched it. National cultures are surprisingly resilient and we should beware of politicians who exaggerate their fragility for their own electoral gain.
I have tried in this book to refute the arguments of those who, either accidentally or on purpose, muddle Islam and terrorism. I hear the arguments of those who raise the spectre of the ‘submission’ of Europe to a young and vigorous Islamic minority, but I believe there is a far greater danger of that minority being scapegoated by right-wing extremists than of them ‘taking over’. We have already seen many incidents in West European cities, of blind acts of hatred against Muslims. Islamophobia comes from the same wellsprings as anti-Semitism. At the same time, there is no excuse for anti-Semitism among the new immigrants. European values cannot be cherry-picked by newcomers any more than they can by already established communities.
