The flood of Syrian refugees pouring over the frontiers of eastern and central Europe seems to offer a handy moral for anyone who wishes to draw a lesson from it.
If you’re a vicious populist, like Hungary’s Victor Orban, then you can point at the homeless refugees, who are risking life and family to make the dangerous sea crossing from Lebanon, and call them liars. After all, some are fleeing refugee camps in Lebanon, not Syria directly, so surely they do not need asylum.
If you’re a Maltese populist, then you can bask in schadenfreude. Having, over the years, frayed your two index fingers thumping the keyboards to post comments about how Malta is ‘full up’ and cannot take any more refugees, you can now point one of those prophetic fingers at Germany: “See! Germany is now saying that it’s full up and is closing its borders!”
However, reserve the other finger for a friendly jab at the Slovakian foreign minister, who has said that his country cannot take in refugees because it has no tradition of taking in people of a different culture. “There isn’t a single mosque in Slovakia.” Besides, he says, the refugees would really want to go toSweden or Germany.
This crisis has something in it for you even if you’ve been speaking yourself hoarse, all these years, from those distant Lawrence Gonzi days, about the need to welcome refugees but with a system of equitable burden-sharing across Europe.
You can enjoy a double whammy. On the one hand, you were once mocked in Malta – by the then Labour Opposition – that you were obviously hopeless at negotiating hard enough to obtain a mandatory burden-sharing mechanism. Now you can point at Germany, which is insisting on mandatory burden-sharing based on quotas, with the full support of the Commission President, Jean-Claude Juncker: even mighty Germany is unable to obtain anything more than voluntary sharing, and not for a few weeks, yet.
On the other hand, you can also take just a little private satisfaction at Germany’s predicament. How quickly it has moved, once it felt the sudden weight of a flood of refugees, to a position urging burden-sharing.
At the root cause of the humanitarian explosion lies Europe’s security policy in its immediate neighbourhood
So the crisis offers something for everyone. When a crisis is rich in such pickings – confirming everyone’s conventional wisdom – you can be sure that we are not talking about a single crisis. It’s rather a set of many crises, superimposed oneach other.
What Europe is facing today is, indeed, a humanitarian crisis but also much more than that. It is, at the very least, also a security crisis and an identity crisis.
The constellation of all three kinds of crises can be seen whether we’re discussing Orban’s cynicism, Slovakia’s sincere but wrong-headed position, or Germany’s temporary exit from Schengen.
Orban is factually correct to say that many (by no means all) of the Syrian refugees pouring into Europe are coming from refugee camps, mainly in Jordan and Lebanon. But it is utterly mistaken to think that they would be safe there.
The numbers go part of the way to explaining why. Half of Syria’s population of 22 million is displaced. Around seven million are still caught in the war-torn country, while four million have managed to get out.
In other words, the few hundred thousand crowding the national frontiers of Europe are a fraction of the whole. Even so, they have created confusion and unprecedented stress on the infrastructure of affluent countries.
The refugee camps, hosting many more people, are in even more dire straits. In Lebanon, they are unsafe. One major camp is the site of a violent power-struggle (involving rockets, not just guns) between warlord factions. Another has been bombed by the Syrian regime in an attempt to weed out rebels.
In Jordan, some 90 per cent of Syrian refugees are said to live outside the camps. They face spiralling rents and have children whom they cannot send to school. It’s a situation ripe for social disruption in one of the stable countries in the region.
In either case, simply to ignore the refugees because they come from Lebanon or Syria is not a credible option. It would destroy Europe’s claim to stand for humanitarian values – Orban doesn’t care but we should.
It is also naïve since it kicks down the road what is an evident security problem. It is a problem, first for the Middle East, but, given also a serious problem in Europe’s neighbourhood. Whether we like it or not, we will become involved. Scratch that: we already are, given the readiness of Daesh to bring the battle to our doorsteps and train stations.
The Slovakian position, if taken seriously, would effectively preclude Europe from taking in any refugees from war zones.
If cultural similarity is the criterion that should guide acceptance of asylum seekers, then rest assured that there is nothing like war to change a culture radically. The disruption of schooling and work means that economic skills are destroyed for an entire generation. The violence does not just maim physically; itstraumas and scars mark an entire attitude towards political institutions.
Such a position – no asylum seekers – would destroy Europe’s identity not merely because it makes the union seem like (Donald) Trumpland.
It would effectively unravel Europe’s claims to be a pioneer in 21st-century cooperative governance.
By shutting its borders like that, Europe would be escaping from the real world, opting out of leadership. With no vision to hold it together, how long can Europe cohere as a union?
Which brings us to Germany. Its temporary exit from Schengen is dramatic but should not be overblown. The treaty actually envisages instances when a member can suspend free movement and institute border controls. Security is one of them.
Germany, then, is doing things by the book. And its behaviour has been honest. When the authorities in Bavaria claimed their federal state was “full up”, it was only after the infrastructure had come under tremendous pressure. The equivalent of a German small town’s population had been taken in every day, for several days.
In the north, stadiums and sports halls have been taken over to house refugees. Scheduled trains were reserved to transport them, leaving ordinary commuters to make do with alternative transport. With refugees sleeping wherever they could find shelter, some train stations became almost inoperable.
When a crisis assumes such dimensions, it ceases to be simply a humanitarian crisis and becomes a security one.
And it’s not just Germany’s security. Nor is it just a matter of internal security.
At the root cause of the humanitarian explosion lies Europe’s security policy in its immediate neighbourhood. There is its reluctance to assume real leadership. There is the individual responsibility (by action or inaction) of some member states in the Syrian tragedy.
Solving the humanitarian aspects of the crisis will require agreement on quotas. But solving the causes of this crisis – that is, addressing the other crises swirling not too deeply beneath the surface – will require far more. Otherwise, within 10 years we might well see the effective downgrading of the union into a looser free-trade zone.
ranierfsadni@europe.com