OPINION
Spare
a thought for Hungary
Europe’s
emotional response to the migrant crisis is fraught with terrible
danger.
By MELIK KAYLAN
9/15/15, 5:30 AM CET Updated 9/15/15, 7:21 AM CET /
http://www.politico.eu/article/spare-a-thought-for-hungary-migration-crisis-east-west-divide/
The feverish rancor
and self-loathing among Europeans over the migrant crisis should
alert us to a potential catastrophe that would eclipse even the
Syrian boat people’s suffering: the danger of instability within
Europe itself.
Under constant
pressure from recurrent crises — the great recession, Ukraine,
Greece, Islamist terror — the EU’s fabric is showing signs of
acute stress. And now the picture of young Aylan Kurdi, dead on a
beach, has set off a firestorm of acrimony across and within European
national borders, with ugly accusations of racism and fascism,
avowals of shame at being European, and name-calling between
countries.
The old familiar
hostilities are beginning to resurface: the continent threatening to
ostracize the U.K. for not taking enough refugees; Greece and Italy
sick of bearing the burden for others; and Hungary resenting Germany
and Austria for inducing migrant chaos inside its borders.
We mustn’t forget
that Europe itself lay in ruins within living memory of many
citizens, and many more remember the continent more recently divided
by tanks and walls and barbed wire backed by nuclear weapons. No
doubt this should make Europeans especially sensitive to the plight
of refugees fleeing from similar horrors. But it should make
Europeans even more sensitive to their own survival foremost.
* * *
The first point to
understand, one that cannot be emphasized enough, is that Europe’s
resistance to uncontrolled inflows of migrants stems not from a sense
of superiority or strength, or racial snobbery, but from a fraught
sense of weakness, an abiding fear of itself and its own history of
fragmentation and strife. The EU’s leaders know what a creaky and
contrary architecture of nationalities they’re upholding. They know
how constantly it cracks, threatening increasingly to do so
irreparably. They know where it might lead. Moral outrage at their
caution, so evident in recent days, only adds to the strain. Sir Bob
Geldof calling the U.K. “a f—–g disgrace” is a typical, and
typically nauseating, example.
All of this might
seem like whining when thousands risk death on the high seas. But it
will hardly reward their ordeal if their seat of refuge becomes
unstable. Witness the plight of Turkey, housing over a million Syrian
refugees, hurtling towards a civil war in part triggered by the
Syrian conflict which aggravated its ethnic tensions. Now consider
the pressures on Europe, already troubled by problems with
assimilating a large Muslim population. Can we not imagine how
Charlie Hebdo haunts the conscience of EU leaders poised to take in
migrants by the thousands, perhaps ultimately millions, with no end
in sight to the numbers? In the case of Germany, its Vice-Chancellor,
Sigmar Gabriel, has now said that it could take 500,000 a year, no
doubt goaded by ubiquitous reminders of its Nazi past. One wonders
what the recently reunited, formerly East German, citizens make of
this declaration.
The East-West divide
in Europe is one of its many tectonic flaws. Countries that finally
escaped from decades of imposed Marxist internationalism and gained
their right to unfettered nation-statehood by joining the West now
find themselves shackled to another supranational system enforcing
its own rules of diversity and multiculturalism. They thought they
were finally allowed to recover their own identity, traditions and
customs, their sense of “ethnos,” of being a cohesive “people.”
Instead, Hungarians get roundly abused by one and all, not least by
another of their former tormentors, Germany, for insisting on their
national inviolability. Indeed, they have to suffer moral shame for
harboring such aspirations at all, now equated with ethnic elitism,
racism, nativism and the like.
* * *
The outcome of this
drift is not hard to foresee. As the EU’s dominant capitals demand
that all constituent members fall in line with migrant-intake numbers
and distribution, the Eastern bloc of populations from Poland to
Romania will want to resist. They never invaded anybody; they don’t
have sins to expiate, but are dictated to by the guilt of others. Who
knows what percentages of total population make for proper
assimilation? Europe has shown no real talent in making that
calculation up to now and the consequences are not pretty.
The intake will
reach whatever arbitrary limit was dreamed up under global media
pressure, at which point the same disorderly farce of recent weeks
will recur — repeatedly — until the Union turns against itself
for this and other reasons as it did three times last century. If you
think the scenario too fanciful, consider the indigenous popular
support for the Orbáns and Le Pens, and how we legitimize them by
driving decent patriotic folk into their camp. Consider Vladimir
Putin waiting in the wings, acting as their champion. Consider
Europe’s past and its likely future.
Melik Kaylan, an
Anglo-Turkish writer based in New York, is the co-author of “The
Russia-China Axis: The New Cold War and America’s Crisis of
Leadership” (Encounter Books, 2014). He tweets at @melkayan
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