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Peter Fabricius Correspondent
The stream of migrants flowing out of the Middle East and Africa and arriving in Europe has clearly taxed the decision-making capabilities of the EU and the wider world. As Paola Subacchi, research director of international economics at Chatham House, asked in an article in the journal Foreign Policy this
week: “Why won’t the G20 address the refugee crisis?”
She noted that the finance ministers and central bank governors of the G20 – the group of countries that represent about 85 percent of the world’s gross domestic product – had met in Turkey, without even mentioning the refugee crisis, at least in their communiqué.
Subacchi acknowledged that the crisis did not strictly fall within the G20’s mandate, which is to address global economics and finance.
Nonetheless, it was obvious that the crisis was not just a domestic issue for each of the European countries receiving inflows of refugees, but an international problem.
The G20, representing so many of the countries affected, should be deliberating how the world should tackle the problem collectively.
Perhaps it should look for suggestions to French economist Thomas Piketty, who proposes that Europe seize the inflow as an economic opportunity rather than a problem.
“The plight of the refugees is an opportunity for Europeans to jump-start the continent’s economy. Germany’s attitude is a model to follow,” Piketty, the author of Capital in the 21st Century, an analysis of inequality, wrote in a column in the French journal Liberation.
He noted that Germany, which is experiencing perhaps the greatest decline in population in Europe, had shown the way by welcoming the immigrants – even as others, like Macedonia and Hungary, continued to beat them back with trudgeons or erect tall fences to try to keep them out.
“Our continent can and must become a great land of immigration in the 21st century,” Piketty writes.
“All conspires to that end: our self-destructive ageing imposes it, our social model allows it, and the combination of global warming and Africa’s demographic explosion will increasingly require it.”
Piketty said Europe had been open to immigration before the financial crisis began in 2007, causing job losses and leading to xenophobia and closure of the continent’s borders.
The Europeans could restore their prosperity and employment levels by using the tragedy of the refugees as an opportunity “to rise out of their petty disputes and navel-gazing. . . by opening themselves up to the world, by jump-starting the economy and investments (housing, schools, infrastructure), by fighting off deflationary risk”.
It is true that the EU, with a population of more than half a billion, could easily absorb the refugees, who have numbered about 330 000.
This is a bold, counter-intuitive economic prescription indeed from a bold and original economic thinker.
Whether it has any reasonable chance of political success is another matter. It would need to prevail against the right-wing backlash in most European countries.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, with his strident warnings about an assault on the West’s “Christian roots” by Muslims, epitomises the obstacles that a rational solution would have to overcome.
To the extent that the backlash is fuelled by economic hardship, the economic recovery that Piketty assures us would follow from absorbing the immigrants, should address the backlash too.
It would clearly require great political skill for European leaders to sell that sophisticated argument to their anxious and sceptical voters.
The reactions by EU countries have been shaped in part by their histories and their understanding of the causes of the crisis, which has become the subject of a fierce debate.
Some officials of former Soviet bloc countries now in the EU, such as Hungary, Slovakia and Romania, say they should not provide homes for the refugees.
James Paul, former executive director of the New York-based Global Policy Forum, was quoted by IPS as describing the migrants as “regime change refugees”.
He said the military interventions by Western countries in dictatorships such as Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya had destroyed those countries, forcing their people to flee.
Most of the refugees are fleeing Syria, where the US and other Western countries have had little effect on the war.
They are fleeing for their lives and seeking freedom, the very values denied them in Syria. – Sunday Independent.
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