(Certain) refugees welcome
There goes the neighborhood
By some estimates, Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine could send at least one million refugees towards the European Union in search of safety. This number stands out because it is the same ballpark figure that arrived from Syria and other ravaged regions in 2015. The period is referred to, rather awkwardly, as the refugee “crisis.”
Most of them ended up in Germany, by the grace of then Chancellor Angela Merkel’s three famous words: “Wir schaffen das” (roughly, we can do it — trust me, it sounds much snappier in German). It’s important to remember that was only a few weeks after she made a Palestinian girl cry by saying literally the exact opposite.
Any “crisis” was a political one coming out of Brussels and member state capitals, caught off guard by the consequences of not-that-faraway traumas years, if not decades, in the making, which with only a small dose of foresight would have been obvious. That they weren’t is perhaps due to the bloc’s own internal crises happening at the same time, its regular struggle to understand itself as a power in the world with a role to play, or just the good ol’ fashioned political expedience of ignoring issues until you absolutely can’t anymore.
Whatever the case, Germany figured out — rather commendably and acharacteristically — how to process and settle huge numbers of newcomers largely on the fly and under fairly chaotic circumstances. Without wanting to gloss over some serious obstacles still in the way of otherwise ambitious and educated refugees, the experience has been largely successful.
Yet the nativist backlash was enough to pull political discourse to the right, and Germany’s initial generosity quickly got rolled back. Merkel’s government played a central role in the EU’s cash-for-containment deal with Turkey, which handed billions to increasingly illiberal President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in exchange for keeping asylum seekers from crossing the bloc’s external borders. A similar arrangement was struck with Libya.
The EU’s border agency, Frontex, has seen its budget nearly quadruple since 2015. Germany carried out deportations, including legally questionable ones that sent asylum seekers back to war zones. Its European neighbors put up fences and — sometimes with Brussels’ aloof backing — have been accused of returning (in some cases, pushing back) refugees to unsavory fates.
In so doing, the EU may not have “solved” the refugee “problem,” but at least it neutralized its political potency by pushing it out of sight. One-trick ponies like Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) have had little else to run on.
So what a turnaround it’s been to hear EU and member state officials say in recent days and weeks that not only are all Ukrainian refugees welcome, but that they are actually preparing to receive them. Countries such as Austria, Hungary and Poland, which raised hell over the prospect of Syrians on their soil, are now clamoring over each other in a race to be the first to unlock the door. Germany may for the first time ever try to trigger a legal clause that would grant arrivals protection without them having to apply for it.
Even Germany’s train company, Deutsche Bahn, is throwing out its typically customer unfriendly persona by offering anyone with a Ukrainian ID free onward travel from Poland.
This may all seem like a searing double standard. It is, albeit with some caveats: Ukrainians enjoy visa-free travel to the EU. Those who make the once safe and simple journey can pretty much just stay for 90 days.
There is also a history of openness towards those fleeing crises in eastern and southern Europe — anyone throwing around superlatives about this being the “first shooting war in Europe since WWII” seem to have forgotten the horrific mess in the Balkans in the 1990s — so it isn’t as if a country like Poland is anti-migrant per se. It just depends on the migrant.
A big reason President Vladimir Putin went ahead with invasion appears to be his calculation that letting Ukraine drift ever westwards was a bigger risk for him than forcibly keeping the country in his grasp. It’s an easy and ethical counterpunch, then, for the EU to welcome in those it is anyway eager to define as fellow Europeans.
“It fits within a broader narrative of disapproving of Russian actions and the kind of solidarity in different kinds of dimensions with the Ukraine,” the director of Migration Policy Institute Europe told Al Jazeera.
What I find more difficult to believe is that the EU actually learned anything from its experience in 2015, and is applying those lessons now. If that were true, there would not have been the fear of a renewed refugee onslaught just six months ago, when the U.S.-led mission in Afghanistan collapsed. Exactly six years since wir schaffen das and just weeks before general elections, German officials made clear they would do just about whatever necessary to ensure refugees stayed over there. They even dragged their feet on helping Afghans who helped German agencies and NGOs.
Only a few months ago Poland, with EU backing, was throwing up barbed wire and deploying its army against a few thousand Middle Eastern migrants who, lured by should-be ex-President Alexander Lukashenko, turned up on the EU’s border with Belarus. Journalists and aid workers were barred from keeping an eye on things, and migrants froze in the woody no man's land between the two countries. Some of them died.
The EU framed the incident as “blackmail,” and the whole thing turned into a full-blown international crisis requiring great resolve and unity to overcome — and pressuring airlines not to board people from certain Middle Eastern countries. For Poland, the “crisis” was surely an effective, albeit temporary circling-the-wagons distraction from its rule-of-law dispute with the bloc.
Then, as now, the endgame was standing up to the same Putin magic act (and the Lukashenko sideshow), but with diametrically opposing outcomes: a few thousand Iraqis kept out lest they threaten to unravel the EU, versus the prospect of more than a million Ukrainians welcomed in on the notion that they strengthen it.
Both groups are ultimately turned into political fodder. One of them benefits.
The unity in the face of Russian aggression has been astounding to observe, and support for the country and the people of Ukraine is hitting the right notes, even if some of it is coming in late. However, it’s foremost the geographic proximity and fortuitous political winds prompting the sense of moral responsibility to Ukraine, which people suffering similarly but further away could only dream of.
There is more than a hint of Orientalism going on here, even if unwitting. Europe is not where war happens (the exception); war is for less developed places (the rule). That assumption is the bedrock of the “postwar, rules-based order” we hear so much about. It makes the threshold for tolerating state violence here far lower than elsewhere, which helps explain the rapid, history-changing response we’ve seen from Western powers, and especially Germany, while scenes of inhumanity elsewhere rarely move the needle. If anything, the security assumption exacerabtes them.
Conflict hasn’t ended; it’s been shifted. Military adventurism in Syria, Yemen, Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan — coming on top of decades of Cold War jockeying and Great Power colonial competition before that — have all been efforts to preserve this sense of exceptionalism. Fight them there so we don’t have to fight them here. And “here” is relative; within the European context alone, that has long been the message to Ukraine.
Putin’s brazen, and hopefully ultimately foolish and failed invasion of Ukraine is not only an actual threat to European security, but it also bursts the illusion of the prerogative of security. In reality, the inverse is true: Eighty years of postwar European tranquility is an outlier, both in terms of human history and realities happening elsewhere.
I’m hardly one to knock this so-called peace dividend, as a direct beneficiary of it. Yet the sadness and consternation evoked by scenes of brutality in Ukraine are mixed with the moral disquiet evoked by a reluctant admission: The plight of Ukrainians is little different from that in many parts of the world. The response, however, very much is.
Wagging a finger at Russia for breaking the rules and throwing its might around is the right thing, made harder by a history of the U.S. and a rotating cast of allies doing similar, often based on fearful intelligence that gives us good reason to be skeptical of comparable claims since. When European powers turn a boat of African migrants around, they are engaging in a sort of historical revisionism and selective moralism that makes admonishing others hard to do with a straight face. When they keep importing gas and oil from Russia to keep us warm for cheap now, we pay for it in other ways later, as we do by exporting violence sold as “defense.”
War and strife have long been on Europe’s doorstep. The danger is now in Europe’s house. The impulse to throw stones at the aggressive neighbor next door is the right and reasonable reaction — even if our house is made of glass.