Asylum seekers are crowding Europe's borders in escalating and unprecedented numbers. Conflict in Syria and turbulence in North Africa are the main immediate driving forces, but as we shall see, there are broader forces at work. Vast numbers of people require help. Can Europe provide for them all? Are those arriving also those most in need of help? What should Europeans sacrifice to accommodate the arrivals? Sweden's pensioners have now seen one of their two hot meals per day taken away from them as part of the effort to handle the cost of the influx of immigrants. A banal example, perhaps, but also a stark illustration.
World poverty is supposedly declining. I find it hard to believe, given the increasing waves of atrocious events that take place in the world around us every day. Though I am not a religious person, I see endless self-gratification - in high places and low, endless greed, and endless grasping for power. So what's new? Check Gregoire de Tours or the decline of the Roman Republic. The most obvious news is that I am getting old, and the world is changing very fast.
World poverty is supposedly declining. I find it hard to believe, given the increasing waves of atrocious events that take place in the world around us every day. Though I am not a religious person, I see endless self-gratification - in high places and low, endless greed, and endless grasping for power. So what's new? Check Gregoire de Tours or the decline of the Roman Republic. The most obvious news is that I am getting old, and the world is changing very fast.
The world changes in myriad ways, of course, but the
changes need to be recognized above all in their grand - global - patterns.
The adage used to be “think globally, act locally” - and maybe it
still is. But my first point is that the message from the local level
these days is getting garbled – locally. Global thinking is messed
up by cultural barriers, increasingly impenetrable. Local action can
only have global effects if it can be repeated all around the globe. Now we have to recognize that the “globally thinking”
Egyptians who started the Egyptian revolution were only a small
minority. The rest of their compatriots are not looking for global
values, but for their own parochial ones to be installed. The same is
true of the “creationists” of the United States, to take another
example, showing how widespread the regression of basic knowledge
actually is by now.
Moreover, the West is slowly realizing that its
values, enshrined in great declarations of the United Nations (in
particular, Human Rights, the Rights of Children, the Rights of
Women), are not only being ignored, but actively opposed. Local
action has a better foundation if locally anchored. Parochialism wins
out. And the parochial is all over the news.
Current affairs used to be about understanding the
general through the particular, the news. Of course, we can still
make sense of our own local world and what is happening there. But
the larger condition the human race is in can less than before be
grasped by our paying attention to events of the day, or what happens
in particular places. If we want to gain some deeper level of
understanding we must therefore try to grasp things on a grander
scale, the way we do when we link the ravages of the weather to
climate change (with the disaster of the Philippines, November 2013 fresh in our minds as the most compelling current example). Curiously, we are quick to
see the connection when it comes to nature, but less so when it has
to do with people.
This is my second point. Runaway self-gratification –
acts which have become legion and to most of us utterly abhorrent
(mass rapes, violent mass demonstrations with killings, religious
massacres), needs to be recognized as linked to broader underlying
causes: rapid population growth, poverty, illiteracy, information
flooding stripped of context. Some of these violent events are said to be justified as a form of retribution for acts of oppression, but the
determined vanguard action of masked individuals in many of them
shows how easy it is for vandals with a different agenda to take over
and redirect a protest. Organized crime infiltrates and profits from
these events wherever possible.
Since the 1980s, there has not been much talk about
world population growth as a problem. Nevertheless, it is
predominantly the effects of this overarching problem we are living
with today. It may be too close to us to recognize, but the chief
underlying causes that I can see of our present chaotic world is the combined population growth and economic stagnation in parts of the developing world.* Notable also, as a motivating force, is the wide dissemination of
electronic images globally, beyond any context understandable to the
majority of people exposed to them. Images are captivating and
disturbing beyond anything that texts alone can do. Here I believe
globalization is a curse as much as it is a blessing.
No wonder a better life in the West – conveyed in
electronic images - is seen as THE dream for them to realize. No
wonder kind individuals in the West want to help them share that
better life; it is "their right". No wonder thousands and thousands of migrants are
knocking on Europe's doors, thousands more every year. Unrealistic
politicians from all over the EU push well-intentioned immigration
policies that are bound to crash against hard realities, just as
overloaded migrants' boats founder at the northern shores of the
Mediterranean. The available resources are way short.
The profiteering of “helpers” along the way keeps
the migrants business at a healthy rate of growth. Organizers of
rickety truck transports across the Sahara get richer by the day.
Middlemen on the southern Mediterranean shores, peddling rides in
boats that should long since have been condemned, see their little
fortunes grow. At the end of the line, in Sweden, smart private
“consultants” are on hand to help the new arrivals find their way
in the jungle of welfare benefits and rules. And believe it or not: the consultants' fees
are paid by the generous Swedish government (source: Swedish TV, November 15, 2013).
The migrant clients of this long line of scavengers
are not the poorest; they are people who have been able to save up or
otherwise mobilize the sizable funds needed to make that long transit
to the promised EU-land. Their poorer sisters and brothers have no
chance of making the trip.
And the EU and its member states keep pushing their
policy of increased immigration. Critics, like myself, are accused of
racism and xenophobia.
The solution to the developing world's woes is not to
bring all their inhabitants into the Western world. It is certainly
not to help their middle class before helping the poorest. The
solution is not either to continue the flow of development aid that
in Africa has kept corrupt regimes in power – or competing
violently for power – since the 1960s.
Robert Cooper is by many regarded as too controversial to touch. Check his analysis. I find it even more convincing today than when I first saw it, since the trends I have described are much more compelling now, and the dangers to the EU of staying on course with immigration without integration are steadily increasing.
Improvement of life in the countries of the migrants' origin is the only way those who need help the most can receive it, and the scavenging industry can be brought to a halt. Those efforts can only be successful if they are handled and fully controlled by the EU member states who bear the cost. The recipient states are unlikely to accept this unless their payoff is considerable (more corruption?). The EU and its member states are unlikely to be so venturesome. We need a recognized EU “immigration crisis” on a much greater scale than the current moderate unpleasantness before even a debate of the requirements for change can get started.
I have little illusion that we shall ever get there.
*Text changed from previous reference to "population explosion", see comments below.
