by ETIENNE BALIBAR
The wrinkled sea PHOTO/Flickr/jenny downing/Some rights reserved
We tend to think that the external limits of the European Union define the ‘real’ borders of Europe, which is a mistake.
Confronted with the violent and obscene images that have been reaching us ever since the influx of refugees entered new dimensions this summer, we may wonder: Why is it that Merkel addresses the issue much better than Hollande does, and Sigmar Gabriel much better than Manuel Valls?
Why is it that – all things considered – Germany behaves with much more dignity and efficiency than France, let alone the UK or Hungary? Surely, because in the long term Germany is in need of the migratory input while France is not (or so she thinks).
Surely also because a majority of Germans have learned a lesson from fascism and from the Cold War, which the French still haven’t learned from colonial and neo-colonial history.
But all this only alludes to an issue which has now become impossible to ignore: namely, the relationship between European construction (or de-construction) and the new reality of human migration engendered by underlying catastrophes such as sweeping terrorism (including state terrorism) and unfettered globalization in the circummediterranean region. Hence, we need to restart from the structural data, we need to measure the changes that have since occurred and to ask once again what politics can contribute in this context.
Tens of thousands of ‘migrants’ – men, women and children – from Africa and the Middle East (Syria in particular) are flooding the systems of control and admission of European member states – first those of riparian states in the Mediterranean region, then those of other states further north. Robbed, deported, tucked into transit camps or left in the no man’s land of harbour or railway areas, sometimes strafed or sunk with their makeshift vessels, they die or fail in front of such or such barrier, but they persist and are now here. What will we do about them? What are the governments doing, now that not only militant human rights associations and people in charge of registration or emergency relief operations, but even European officials are speaking of the biggest wave of refugees and the biggest sum of misfortune on the continent since World War II?
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