The current European ‘problem’ of the mass immigration of people from countries beset by war and poverty has dominated the mainstream media of late. The truth is that this has been going on for many years now, albeit on a more slender and certainly less publicised scale.
There is talk of a European crisis, now that the numbers concerned have tipped the scales and awakened us all to dilemma until now largely unexamined. The western democracies have achieved a moral and economic superiority in the world that attracts those of us who have not benefited from such and who are desperately seeking our help. Mere compassion, if not a sense of responsibility, should be enough to force us to consider our options in trying to deal with the current issues.
If we reject these people through our own self-interest, how valid will our claim then become to be the moral arbiters we sometimes claim to be? It is easy to pretend that the problems are insurmountable, that we cannot deal with such an influx of people, no matter how desperate. Is that really true? Of course not. These are the very people who have left their homeland in the hope that all we said was true, that here we treat every human being as a person with rights and with a place in the world, deserving of freedom and safety. If we let these people down we gift those still in their home countries to the mindlessly faithful and the theocratic fascists that we must in the end defeat if the world is not to fall into a new Dark Age.
The crisis is really one of Europe’s own. Is the EU really capable of responding as it should, according to its founding principles? Or is Europe really a convenient amalgam of essentially self-interested nation states?