There are two key, related, and little-remarked dimensions of the current Middle Eastern migration crisis. These are, on the one hand, the almost complete economic and political collapse of the Muslim societies and states furnishing the millions of desperate refugees. The second dimension of the phenomenon is the immense strains the millions of Moslem refugees are putting on the European Union countries and the notion of a unified Europe and, indeed, on the much-vexed question of a ”European” identify itself.
The migrants are coming above all from a disintegrating Syria, but also from Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Eritrea, Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, and other countries. Millions of refugees are already in under-funded camps in Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon, and hundreds of thousands of people fleeing Muslim failed states are risking their lives to reach Europe. For the latter (generally with more money than the refugee camp residents) their first stops after Turkey are in southern Europe (Greece, Italy, southern France, followed by journeys to points northwest(through Macedonia, Serbia, Croatia and Hungary to the promised lands of Germany, Sweden, and Austria. (Another route winds from Libya to France to Belgium, the Netherlands and (via Calais) to Great Britain.)
These desperate people—almost 440,000 so far this year, according to the UN–, largely young adult males but also including whole families and young couples with infants, cross treacherous waters from Turkey and North Africa to reach Italian, Greek and French ports, on flimsy boats and inflatable dinghies, often capsizing before reaching safety (almost 3,000 have already died this year). Western consciences, long dormant in regard to the refugees—in Syria, the civil war and its refugee tide is, after all, now in its fifth year–have finally been touched by the recent, tragic pictures of Ayan Kurdi, the three-year-old who drowned off Turkey with his five-year-old brother and mother.
The European Union states, wholly unprepared for the onslaught and without a common policy or enforcement mechanism, are overwhelmed. UN refugee funding this year is only 37% of the estimated $4.5 billion need; its World Food Program is 63% underfunded, and available monies for Syrian relief are only 43% of requirement; the World Health Organization stands at only 27% of need. These figures are somewhat offset by Germany, which has said it would budget $4.5 billion in 2015, and by the EU, which is asking member-=states to allocate $1.1 billion for 160,000 refugees. Even so, needs are immense and increasing, and total available funds are scarce.
Already concerned with ever-increasing and partially unassimilated domestic Muslim populations, all but Germany and Sweden have resisted taking in additional tens of thousands of migrants. (The recent emergency European Union conference, called by Angela Merkel, to spread responsibility around by assigning shared quotas to all EU states, has failed over Hungarian-led eastern European resistance.)
Remarkably, Germany, the major exception, initially announced it would admit over 800,000 migrants this year alone (1% of its population). Berlin’s motives are variously attributed, to an inherited, compensatory guilt over the Nazi period, to a sense as Europe’s most powerful state, of economic and political noblesse oblige, to an aging population’s less-than-replacement rate and desperate need for young skilled and semi-skilled labor.
Indeed, Germany’s readiness to violate the EU’s “Dublin regulations” for the orderly processing of refugee claims (registration, processing, and internment in the first country of refuge) was denounced by Prime Minister Orban of Hungary. Quickly putting up razor-wire fences to block access to the tens of thousands of migrants, even as he pronounced the need to preserve Hungary’s (and Europe’s) “Christian heritage” from being swamped by the Muslim tidal-wave, Orban blamed Berlin’s open-door policy for creating the crisis in the first place.)
While the total world refugee population has been estimated at ca.37 million, Europe currently is looking at a potential flow of several million predominantly Muslim people annually (currently, Syrian refugees constitute the lion’s share, 51%, with Afghans second at 15%, followed by Iraqis and others). When tens of thousands piled up in and around Budapest, the conservative-nationalist regime there built its razor-wire walls to shut off the flow across its territory to Austria. (Now Croatia, which initially announced it would allow transit, connecting the flow to Slovenia and hence to northern Europe, has also reneged and closed its borders, creating a crisis in the formerly “borderless” (Schengen Agreement) European Union.
Some years ago French-Jewish scholar Bat Ye’or wrote a study of Muslim immigration to France and Europe called "Eurabia". She argued that a kind of deal, explicit and implicit, between Western states and Arab regimes—acceptance of large-scale Muslim immigration in Europe in return for Western investment in the Middle East states—would change the face of the Old Continent. The result would be increasingly culturally mixed, and increasingly antisemitic and anti-Israel, European societies.
That vision has largely been realized, and in some ways even Bat Ye’or probably could not have envisioned. Who could have foreseen the total failure of the so-called “Arab Spring”, and the terrible ensuing, and ongoing, civil wars in Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Libya, and Somalia (not to mention conflicts in Nigeria [Boko Haram], Mali, Kenya, Algeria, and so on)? And how have predicted the further destabilizing impacts of the American pull-out from the region (engineered by Obama, Kerry and Hillary Clinton, and concretely sealed by the recent nuclear “deal” with Iran); of the Russian intervention in support of Assad in Syria (now radicalized by the introduction of jet fighters and tanks); and of Iran’s intervention in Syria (using Hezbollah proxies) and in Yemen.
What is truly remarkable in all this, and again rarely remarked upon, is the evident attraction of Western secular (and formally/formerly Christian) Europe to the Muslim-world migrants and refugees. It is largely the relatively educated and fairly comfortable Syrian and other middle-class migrants, who have the money for travel, food, illegal smugglers, and the cellphones which keep them in touch with one another and the families left behind.
Europe is the magnet for these relatively well-off people seeking safety, stability and, as some say, liberty. And some, according to news reports, are even ready to convert to Christianity to assure their access to European status. (The poorer Syrians, Iraqis, Afghans, Eritreans, Somalis, Libyans and others, pushed out by or fleeing from civil war and chaos, from ISIS, al-Nusra Front, the Taliban and the Shabab, remain in squalid conditions and under-funded Lebanese, Jordanian and Turkish refugee camps (2½ million in Turkey alone). Despite shared Muslim religious, and linguistic, identity, they are—as is usual in Arab lands—-excluded by their Arab “host” countries from education, job training, and becoming permanent citizens. Nor have the wealthiest, and sparsely inhabited, Arab states—Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates—yet to accept a single Syrian or other refugee.
This crisis, like the socio-political collapse of the Arab states which is its primary motor, shows no signs of letting up. In Syria, now approaching 300,000 war-related deaths, there are 12 million refugees, over 4 million of them external (some of this is a kind of ethnic cleansing, of Alawite Assad forcing millions of Sunni antagonists out). No meaningful Western intervention is in the offing, no “boots on the ground” to stiffen Arab resistance to ISIS and compensate for the weak air campaigns so far launched, no prospect of a political deal which alone might end the civil war and stem the flood of migrants.
The size and implications of this modern version of the late classical and early medieval Voelkerwanderungen, the large-scale movement of peoples, whole Germanic tribes, across Europe, east to west, are staggering. There is no way contemporary Europe, either western, or less developed eastern, can enforce a general, shared policy. Hungary, Croatia and Slovakia are closing their borders; Denmark’s and Poland’s are already shut. Britain and France are resisting (indeed Britain may exit the European Union altogether in a coming referendum). And Germany—which already excludes Balkan immigrants (some of whom now are masquerading as Syrians)—is, faced with growing opposition within and without Chancellor Merkel’s own Christian Democratic party, closing the open doors of her earlier, high-mindedly moral, policy.
Europe’s record of being able to assimilate earlier Muslim immigrants is not good. Arab, Turkish, and African immigration, though smaller in annual scale, totalled over time hundreds of thousands, had already engendered rising national opposition and, increasingly, restrictive legislation.
Much of the marked rise in recent years of European antisemitic incidents and suburban violence and murder issues from Islamist immigrants and radicalized European-born Muslim youth (from the Charlie Hebdo murders to the attacks on synagogues and the Supermarché Kasher, to the killing of an anti-Islamist film-maker in Holland and the beheading of a British soldier in London) It reflects unsuccessful assimilation tied to the influence of Islamist sharia activism and terrorist infiltration, worsened by the weak European economies’ inability to create sufficient jobs and social mobility.
(Indeed, several observers of the recent wave of Muslim migrants in Greece, Macedonia and Hungary have noted a tendency—despite the fact that they are being pushed out of their own Arab-Muslim countries by the violence and oppression of Arab regimes and the indifference of fellow Muslims—to blame “the Jews” or “Israel” for their predicament.
This should call to mind the largely-forgotten violent oppression and eviction of 800,000 Jews from Arab lands after 1948. In this regard, what warrant is there to think that the addition of millions of Muslims to European states already marked by existing tensions will not in fact worsen them?(What will many of the newcomers drawn to “Mother Merkel”’s Germany make of their new homeland’s “sacred relationship” of support for Jewish Israel?)
It is beyond Europe’s capacity, and the Europeans’ will, wholly to absorb this massive migration. And even if it were possible it could, when added to Europe’s already large and growing Muslim populations, well unbalance the European Union’s current populations. (Hungary’s Prime Minister Orban’s protest–mirrored by the views of Polish, Croatian, Slovakian and other officials–that the nature of “Christian Europe” demands limits on Muslim immigrants, may be politically incorrect, but it expresses a genuine and growing European concern. If ignored by current political elites, this could lead to an ultra-right-wing and nationalist reaction.)
This deep crisis reveals deep cracks in European cultural identity and “unity”. It is far more threatening than Greece’s potential bankruptcy and threatened turn from the euro to the drachma, and may well shatter, politically as well as culturally, the already-fragile European Union, It raises difficult questions about the limits of globalism and “diversity”, and the continuing role of national political and cultural identities, in Europe as much as in the Middle East.
And even as the post- or trans-national identity of “Europe” is being called into question, with a possible strengthening of national-traditional elements, the Arab states’ collapse means the end of “national” post-Ottoman Empire political constructs (“Iraq”, “Syria”, “Libya”) imposed by the West European powers in the early twentieth century (the Sykes-Picot treaty). However precarious and artificial such colonialist-era identities in fact were, they nevertheless created order and survived a hundred years–what will replace them now? Al-Baghdadi’s bloody ISIS Caliphate? semi-anarchical local-regional tribal sheikhdoms?
As long as these failing Muslim states are wracked by civil war and unending violence and bloodshed–and no end is yet in sight–the desperate migrants, driven across dark seas and rivers and hostile lands like a whirling crowd of lost souls out of Dante’s Inferno, will, ironically, seek their future in a once-Christian Europe. Where will they go, who will accept them, and with what consequences? And when will it end?
(Professor Frederick Krantz is Director of
the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research)
