Few readers need persuading that Matteo Salvini – Italy’s far-right, migrant-baiting, Malta-taunting, interior minister – is a passionately racist bigot. But rational? Yes, because rational doesn’t have to mean reasonable, let alone nice.
To think rationally is to process logically what you perceive. (If you think the evil eye is real, being nervous about sharing good news with an envious aunt is rational.) To behave rationally is to behave strategically in the light of what you want. Everyone knows – from three-year-olds to Donald Trump – that extreme unreasonableness is sometimes more strategically effective than sweetness and light.
To understand Salvini’s strategic behaviour, we first need to come to terms with a puzzle to do with migrant numbers from North Africa. They’re down – radically.
International Organisation for Migration figures show that numbers (up till beginning June) are the lowest in four years: two-thirds down on 2017, which itself saw a halving of the 2016 arrivals.
The puzzle: why were Salvini’s party, La Lega, and the populist Cinque Stelle movement, elected on the strength of an anti-migrant platform? Why has Italian resentment risen even as migrant arrivals were falling?
A popular explanation is that the far-right is peddling myths and that voters are duped. That may be part of it but it is seriously incomplete.
Global numbers of migrants arriving in Italy may have been falling. But it remains to be seen whether migrant numbers in Italy also fell. There are reasons to believe they may have risen.
That’s not a contradiction. The falling numbers refer to primary migration (from outside the EU). But the numbers of migrants returned to Italy from other EU countries may have risen.
An open border would lead to more far-right parties winning power in the EU, with closed borders to follow
For Italy has spent the last few years keeping one side of a bargain that the rest of the EU did not keep. Initially, migrants arriving from outside the EU were largely not fingerprinted; if they migrated to another EU country, it was difficult to ascertain where (in Europe) they had come from.
Italy was requested to be more systemic with fingerprinting, on the understanding that the rest of Europe would help out with sharing the burden. Fingerprinting went up from 20 to 85 per cent.
The result? Not greater burden-sharing but a greater ease, for the rest of Europe, of returning secondary migrants to Italy. The current rules assign all responsibility – for processing asylum claims and returning economic migrants to their country of origin – to the country that first received the asylum seekers.
That’s a rational basis for resenting the rest of the EU as free-riders. But isn’t Salvini being crazy when he effectively threatens to wreck the EU – by provoking the dismantling of Schengen and return of national border controls? The dismantling of Schengen is what Germany is debating right now. Angela Merkel has had to face down a coalition ally who wants just that. She’s kicked the problem down the road but she’s likely to provoke problems with Austria. A cascade of other countries reintroducing national border controls is not far-fetched.
Merkel knows the economic cost of dismantling Schengen. The price of national border controls is checking every container truck that crosses a border. In 2016, the last time asylum seekers were putting pressure on the Schengen area, there were several calculations of the economic cost for Europe. A conservative worst-scenario estimate was €230 billion over 10 years; another estimate put it at up to €63 billion per year.
Paying such a price would make Europe review the cost-benefit analysis of not participating in burden-sharing. It would address the free-rider problem. Salvini’s dancing on the edge of the cliff may lead to Europe plunging into the abyss; but the fear of that happening might get Europe to give what Italy is owed.
In this respect, his behaviour is rational. In another, it’s not – the obvious short-termism, the racist language that damages the social and cultural fabric, the gambling with human lives.
Is there a rational political alternative? Not if it’s an argument for, effectively, open borders – with Europe being held to an obligation to accept all migrants leaving from Libya, even if they’re economic migrants (as most are now), because to return them to Libya would be ‘inhuman’ (to quote the UN Commissioner for Human Rights).
That’s an irrational alternative because it ends up destroying itself. An open border would lead to more far-right parties winning power in the EU, with closed borders to follow.
More than that, it destroys the EU by dumping one of its foundational principles. Its internally open borders come as part of a package of rights and duties. To award free movement without the rest of the package is to cheat the EU citizens who have to pay for its upkeep.
Such indifference to social inequality plays into the hands of far-right parties. Currently, they have momentum because they speak a language of fairness and equality. They are blind to racial inequality but they sound as though they care about rising social inequalities in Europe (which are then blamed on migrants).
That sums up Europe’s predicament. A humane alternative to bigotry has to begin by recognising that, currently, it’s the bigots who sound rational and fair.
ranierfsadni@europe.com