Migrants and France will break the EU – or make it: Francesco Sisci
http://www.settimananews.it/italia-europa-mondo/migranti-francia-la-ue/
It is France—not Germany, Italy, or any other country on the old continent—that can decide today what will happen to the young but already troubled European Union. The EU is under siege.
There is a medium-term threat to the EU which is about the future of the single currency, endangered on a thousand fronts. Even though it is not in the eurozone, with the Brexit, Britain will shake the single market and the single currency; Italy poses the problem of reforming the economic and financial institutions of the EU; Germany and its northern partners are pulled by isolationist drives.
But these are medium-term issues, which will come to the fore next year after the Brexit becomes official and the elections of the European Parliament in 2019. In the short term, it is the urgent issue of migration that is breaking the continent asunder, and here perhaps it is France that has many of the solutions. And the vote on Brexit was about migrants not about the single market or the single currency.
The wave of migration from Africa arrives in Europe mainly via Libya, but also from Morocco and Algeria. In the last two countries, there is still a strong French influence, and in Libya France and Italy compete over influence.
From here, the northern shores of Africa, the migrants make the last leap, the least dangerous one, crossing the Mediterranean to land in Malta, Italy, Spain, or Portugal, and from there they may move further north. However, the migrants have already made most the dangerous and difficult jump, through a path of death and slavery in the Sahara desert. It is in Mali, Niger, and Chad that the black African migrants converge. These countries are historically under French influence, and even though recently a new Italian presence has arrived, it has not undermined the French one.
This is where the wave of migrants should stop, before they try to cross the Sahara in caravans led sometimes by Egyptians. Today the migrants’ guides follow the path of the slave traders a thousand or two thousand years ago, the first to move the “black gold.”
In Italy the former minister of Interior Marco Minniti decided to organize “hot spots” that regulate the flows—that is, address questions of emigration and welcome migrants in the right way and at the right time. The same policy, in a sign of continuity, has been embraced by his successor, Matteo Salvini. Here, therefore, there is no right or left; there is continuity of a national policy.
The problem, however, is not national but European, and these countries of passage are France’s sphere. It would be crazy for Italy to try to have a national policy there in competition with France, and vice versa for France to see Italy as a competitor. Here, in the heart of Africa, is the real frontier of migration.
Conversely, if migrants are acknowledged as such just at the end of the their journey, once landed in Europe, the policy on migrants becomes just a buck passed to those who last have migrants in their territory. Then each country is against its neighbor as it fights to push more migrants to the next country, and then the EU is already over, long before the euro disputes or anything else. In fact the migrants may be a long term endowment to the host country, but in the short term there are a strain to already weakened economies and a massive social burden. Then in passing the buck around nobody wins or can win: this game only creates, as it is creating today, conflicts between the various European countries.
This is also ancient history. World War I was also the offspring of the fact that Germany had been partially excluded from colonial expansion in Africa. The tensions between Italy and France before World War I, erupted when France occupied Tunisia, which Italy considered Sicily’s extension in Africa.
Today, the euro is certainly a hot topic, but Africa and its migrants are an even hotter topic.
If France renounces a European policy on migrants and puts its national interests before those of the union, it splits the union and does not save itself. Today France is protected from the wave of migrants from French-speaking Africa by the Italian and Iberian barrier. If barrier countries do not cooperate, France is more alone and then either is invaded by migrants or begins a civil and foreign war against migrants. It’s a choice essentially between Scylla and Charybdis.
The solution can only be political, and the choices seem compulsory.
In the short term, France must bless and support a body of European (non-national) cooperation for the control of migrants in the Mediterranean and in sub-Saharan Africa. Europe should also admit and deal with Egypt for its greater cooperation in Africa, and perhaps recognize Cyrenaica as her protectorate, in exchange for reducing certain African trafficking of its citizens or residents. This means a European security and intelligence force, the first nucleus of a true European military force and the only thing that can regulate and accommodate migratory flows.
Furthermore, it is necessary to think of a new political arrangement that gives stability to Libya and perhaps encourages areas of influence for Egyptians, Algerians, and Tunisians in a territory that is otherwise disputed by 60 tribes in permanent war among themselves.
In the medium term, France should perhaps promote a European political unification plan that supports this security commitment in Africa and in the Mediterranean, yielding its permanent seat at the UN to the EU. In this, Brexit (with the UK also holding a permanent seat at the UN) simplifies many things. This transfer could give real political leadership to the EU. All this must be done in close contact with the USA, which has been, is, and must remain the political godfather of Europe.
In the medium to long term, as former EU chairman Romano Prodi already suggested, we need an African infrastructure development plan. It should not be the case that in Africa there are no intercontinental railways and highways, or that there are fewer direct flights between African countries than with Paris or London.
The key to Chinese success has so far been coordinating and implementing short-, medium- and long-term plans at the same time. If the EU does not do the same, it is damned. Today China is investing and is interested in investing heavily in Africa. To a lesser extent, Turkey is doing so as well, in search of its ancient destiny as some kind of new Muslim caliphate. The EU as such cannot forget to be a presence in Africa, under penalty of its marginalization as individual states.
On the other hand, the current migratory flow might only be the beginning of an unstoppable tide if it is not channeled and controlled in time. By 2040, the population of Africa could be close to two billion, perhaps more than four times that of Europe, but with the level of wealth reversed. That is, despite the creeping crisis in the old continent, a European could be on average about ten times richer than an African[1].
See chart below:
These two simple data, the increase in population and difference in wealth, indicate that the problem must be dealt head on and that there are no shortcuts. These people will not want to go to Turkey or China but to Europe.
In each of these phases, it is France that has a nodal role. In exchange for this transfer of interest from the nation to the European Union, France can and ought to play a leading role in the union. In this, France, with a stronger state structure than other EU states, can play a special role.
If this does not happen, migrants may overwhelm all individual European countries, causing concern not just for social issues, but also for criminal matters. The traffic of migrants is not a spontaneous movement of desperate people who land in Lampedusa island without any knowledge of reality. Migrants are recruited from villages in half of Africa by “agents” who are paid directly or by holding the remaining family hostage.
Migrants are the “middle class” of the continent, those who pay or are willing to pay (with their work once in Europe) the “travel ticket.” They need guides and transport to bring Africans from Nigeria to Mali. They need even more expert guides, better relations, and reliable transport to cross the deadly Sahara desert. Finally, they need boats and relationships to get to Lampedusa.
Traces prima facie of the complication of this modern criminal traffic of new slaves are found with some NGOs ships, which do not save the shipwrecked at sea (complicated and dangerous maneuvers that only trained military sailors can do). Migrants are delivered those NGOs by often shady figures. Traces of trafficking are found in mobile phones and in the contacts of some (not all) of the migrants that have just landed. These are all hints of a non-transparent network of interests that moves behind the despair of most.
In this, the Pope has shown great merit in raising the human and humanitarian problem that is the first engine of this migration. But paying attention to the appeal of the leader of Christendom cannot be a contest of flattery in easy piety and in beach goodness. We need to deal in a cold and comprehensive way with a phenomenon that will grow more and spin out of control unless we have short-, medium-, and long-term linked solutions.
Only comprehensive solutions, coming from France, in fact will not deliver Europe to the neo-fascist and neo-Nazi waves that today are shaking the continent. But it is puerile and deleterious to accuse the populists of being such: it is necessary to face the problems that fascists or supposed fascists pose. This was also the idea of Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci in his notebooks from jail, considering the mistakes of the Communist Party in dealing with the fascist rise.
For French president Emmanuel Macron the problem is clear: he will either succeed in taking the lead of the EU and building consensus on the continent (particularly with Italy and Germany, on migrants, and on the reform of the euro), or he will deliver France and Europe to conservative Marine Le Pen.
To avoid this possible head-on collision with the long-term African tide, these African migrants must be integrated and “Europeanized,” something that European countries are doing differently today with different levels of success. An integration of the various policies will also be necessary to avoid increasing the tensions between European countries. This actually should be the only migrant policy conducted in the European territory. The rest, as we said, should happen in Africa, otherwise we are all done for, both Europeans and Africans.
[1] See https://www.paulchefurka.ca/Africa/Africa.html and
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