The images of desperate people held behind barricades and barbed wire in Macedonia and Greece are nothing but the predictable and shameful outcome of the absence of a concrete and humane European refugee policy. Policy-makers attempt to push the problem to the South, hoping that it will disappear out of sight.
At the end of it all, as the Greek Minister of Foreign Affairs said sarcastically, perhaps Greece should just let the refugees drown en masse in the Mediterranean. This would protect the European borders. One should promote the Austrian Interior Minister Mikl-Leitner to captain of a military organization that has the task of controlling these borders, so that she could witness the inhumanity and the despair of the refugees first-hand. Then, perhaps, her endless complaints about the failure of the Greeks to contain the problem would stop.
Source Al-Jazeera (‘The World is Failing’). Syrian refugees trying to cross the border with Serbia.
The problem would be solved, so goes the Kindergarten logic of a certain class of politicians, if we could only close the borders. Two or even three million refugees in Turkey or at the border with Turkey do not really constitute a problem in this view. Give the Turks or the United Nations some money, so that they can help these people to survive. We do not care if this means that people are being locked up in camps and are forced to vegetate there without future prospects. What counts is that we no longer see them and that our own citizens are not being disturbed.
The repetition of senseless demands has almost become a symbol of this crisis. The extreme right ‘Party of the State’ of the German ‘Free State of Bavaria’ does nothing else than repeating that we have to close the borders. It is clear that within this party thinking is considered a harmful activity, to be avoided at all cost. After us the deluge. How much beer do you have to drink every day so that you can stand yourself?
The cynicism of those who hold that the harrowing images of desperate refugees help to solve the problem because they prevent new refugees from making their way into Europe is also beyond belief. Clearly, such pictures makes those hear the bombs detonate in Syria behind their backs think twice. Perhaps it is better to die at home than to flee to Greece and confront the barbed wire. I do not want to comment on those who argue that that the ‘floodgates’ must be ‘sealed,’ without firearms if possible and with firearms ‘if necessary’ or about those who set refugee homes on fire or those who demonstrate their ‘We are the people’ nonsense on the streets. It has always been clear that there is a significant stratum in German society – in particular after the German unification – that has been systematically denied full participation in the success of the system. It has been denied to them by their own people, but because they do not want to recognise this, they take their anger out on the ‘foreigners.’ It saves them the trouble of confronting the real culprits at home and their own failure.
It is now time to be honest with oneself and to make a simple decision. We must either say clearly that, in order to save our ideal little world, it is acceptable to let hundreds of thousands of people in the South perish and become victims of their radical hatred for many generations. Or we have to make clear that this cannot go on and that we in the rich North cannot look away when millions of people in the South are ultimately running for their lives. Choosing the second option will certainly entail making some changes in our countries. But we will have to try, because everything else is much worse. Angela Merkel rightly decided upon the latter course. The problem is that she does not know how to implement certain necessary policy changes. The ignorants within her own ranks prevent her from proceeding.
The biggest problem is not even the Bavarian conservative Horst Seehofer, it is Minister of Finance Wolfgang Schäuble. Not only obstructs Schäuble, with all his might, any critical thinking on how we can change European economic policy so that the European economy can return to growth, although it is of course clear that if the economic outlook would improve the readiness in the neighbouring countries to integrate refugees would undoubtedly increase. Schäuble’s delusional obsession with saving is still worse. It is impossible to integrate two million people who come with nothing and simultaneously try to hold on to the absurd goal of achieving a government surplus. Schäuble’s stubbornness defies logic. That today local governments all over Germany are forced to save on everything imaginable in order to accommodate more or less humanly the refugees that are assigned to them is a sick joke. Meanwhile, even the interest rate for long-term government bonds evolves to zero. Even the loudest signals of the markets are inaudible to the ignorants.
The refugee crisis shows how our party democracy is being dismantled. Some think that it very clever of the Christian Democrats to gamble on several horses at once – Angel Merkel is the humanitarian universalist, Horst Seehofer the Völkisch protectionist. The goal is to keep as many voters as possible within the range of the political centre. But this is a big mistake. A society allowing the repetition of meaningless slogans to keep mainstream political parties in power, it has already lost. Repeating and accommodating senseless demands from the political fringes, instead of fiercely rejecting them, creates the impression to significant parts of the population that it is possible to avoid the hard choice between inhumanity and humanity because ‘decent politicians’ from the middle also argue that it can be avoided. But if we go down this road, why should the population not prefer the nationalist original over the copy – not that those have a solution, they are just more consistent in their lunacy?