For months the refugee issue has held Europe in suspense. None of the offered solutions have convinced. The contributions of the strategy expert Professor Albert Stahel and of Thierry Meyssan make blatantly obvious: the solutions so far have not made the problems smaller – on the contrary. It is equally clear: we have to develop solutions, and this needs to be done soon, because the unresolved conflicts in Europe, West Asia and Africa have the potential for a bigger disaster.
At the very least helpful is the polarization, fuelled by the media, between “hardliners” and “humanitarians” – this pigeonholing is wrong anyway, as it is politically motivated and serves a specific policy that never deserved the name ‘humanitarian’: with the argument that it was necessary to free people from their dictators this policy is simply catastrophic as it bombs functioning states – in which people found a livelihood, were socially protected and could plan their lives with their families and friends – back to the Stone age, bulldozes their infrastructure and plunges them into chaos, which provides the ideal breeding ground for the undisturbed propagation of terrorist groups.
It is not humanitarian, when countless victims of globalization in these countries are called to Europe in order to advance with cheap labour the European “liberalisation of the labour market”. Neither is it humanitarian when Europe – instead of educating enough well-trained graduates in our countries with a reasonable education policy – draws such professionals from the oppressed countries, in which they would be urgently needed for the reconstruction of their country at all levels.
Moreover, the world has been fed up with the double standards: The US-NATO-led policy has always collaborated with dictators, as long as this served their own interests. Saudi Arabia’s war on Yemen is not worth an outcry, and the general repression of the media and the recent crackdown on the Kurds in Turkey do not prevent Europe to see in the Turkish government the main ally of the “solution” to the refugee issue.
An honest humane solution would have to take into account the benefit of the people of all countries concerned. We will inevitably have to question an economic policy of deregulation, liberalisation and alleged “market opening”, propagated under the label of “globalisation”, whose result is not the raising of global prosperity, but an increasing wealth gap, in which a few multiply their wealth obscenely, while the youth of many countries is left without perspective on education, work and hence integration into society, and thus has also no basis for their own self-determined life. It is understandable that young people leave their home, their family and friends, to buy the way to other countries by selling their last possessions, with the hope to find there a perspective. But it is not understandable that Europe does not manage to provide them with a dignified life in Europe.
It would be more humane to provide these countries with a real chance to develop their economy – an approach the OSCE already had at the beginning of the 1990s, because certain trends were already foreseeable at that time. The US stalled this – according to a German politician who witnessed the process in the OSCE. Europe has yet more to offer than the current idea of chaos and self-abandonment in the field of law, self-determination and social justice. Europe would really have to offer something else, rather than surrender their cultural, political and legal substance to gamblers.
Or, who serves a policy that opens the floodgates for terrorist networks with the dummy argument of humanity? The fact that people flows and visa facilitation do not only help young people who are willing to work but also terror prone groupings, is a concern of all European border guards, police forces and intelligence services. Cui bono?
Nobody is served with the gradual abolition of European law and its social fabric: Law is – given that it is based on reason and human rights – codified human dignity which is founded on state fundaments. First and foremost task of the state is to provide protection for that.
Erika Vögeli
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