MIGRATION AND THE EUROPEAN UNION: EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
On 31 August last year Chancellor Merkel said publicly– “wir schaffen das” – Germany could cope with more than one million refugees, mainly from war torn Syria. Two days later the body of a three-year-old Syrian Kurdish boy washed up on a Turkish beach, drowned while attempting to reach a Greek island. This tragedy had dramatic media impact, including in countries such as the UK, remote from the Syrian refugee crisis. Something had to be done – but what?
Germany mastered a far greater refugee crisis when it lay in ruins after the Second World War. But now public opinion in Germany and throughout the EU is sharply divided on how to cope with mainly Muslim refugees. Anti immigrant parties are on the rise everywhere. People in countries such as the Czech Republic, cut off by 40 years of communist dictatorship from democratic peace building, respect for human rights, and mass immigration from countries such as Turkey and Pakistan, welcomed EU membership as a passport to prosperity and their own freedom to travel, not as opening their doors to immigration by people with an alien religion and culture. France Germany and the UK, between them are now home to 12 million Muslims. For existing Member States (MS) enlargement in 2004-07 – the EU’s greatest success since the end of the Cold War – had meant extending the zone of peace, prosperity and security to include former Soviet satellites.
My first personal encounter with the tensions arising from mass migration was in 1966, as a student teacher in the south of France. The million European settlers who had fled to France after the war of independence, were very hostile to Arab Algerians, who were doing the dirty jobs in cities such as Toulon where I was based. My wife, whom I met in 1967, had been a refugee from Czechoslovakia, ethnically cleansed like three million other Germans between 1945-47.
My professional involvement began with Chinese “boat people” fleeing South Vietnam after the communist take over in 1975 to Hong Kong – British territory – and Muslim countries such as Indonesia where they were not welcome. Then came Romania. By 1989 Ceausescu had sold 250,000 ethnic Germans to West Germany. In East Germany I witnessed a mass exodus of 880,000 economic migrants after the Berlin Wall fell. During the Cold War the West did not distinguish between economic migrants and refugees fleeing Soviet and communist oppression in Czechoslovakia and Hungary. The war (1992-95) in Bosnia and Herzegovina instigated by aggressive nationalists such as Slobodan Milosevic, uprooted almost 90% of the population. As Deputy High Representative based in Mostar in 2001, I found helping refugees and internally displaced persons to return home, to be among my most difficult tasks.
The countries bearing the brunt of the refugee flow now – Italy and Greece where they arrive, Germany, Austria, and Sweden where the want to settle – seek relief. The European Commission has proposed reform of the system, which requires refugees to seek asylum in the first EU country that they reach. There should be burden sharing among MS in the Schengen free travel zone, and visa free travel to reward Turkey, if it prevents further mass movement to the EU, continues to host the largest number of Syrian refugees, and meets EU standards on democracy, media freedom, and the rule of law. (Proportionate to its population Lebanon bears the greatest burden.) The deal is also designed to stop people smuggling. Human rights organisations meanwhile, doubt if these measures are fully compatible with the Geneva Refugee Convention (1951) or the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (1954).
The refugee crisis will prove even more difficult to solve than the Euro zone crisis. Immigration is a hot political potato everywhere. But UK departure from the EU – the “BREXIT” referendum is on 23 June – could prove to be the most serious crisis of all.