The fear of voter anger is pushing European leaders to step back from saving people. Indeed, Europe's heads of state shot big holes in the European Commission's immigration plan concerning refugees in the Mediterranean. Yet however much they may wish it, there is no way to solve the refugee crisis without accepting some electoral risk.
"Last night went to the flicks. All war films. One very good one of a ship full of refugees being bombed somewhere in the Mediterranean. Audience much amused by a shot of a fat man trying to swim away with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopter gunsights, then he was full of holes and the sea around him turned pink and he sank as suddenly as though the holes had let in the water, audience shouting with laughter while he sank."
Thus wrote George Orwell in his famous novel 1984, describing a civilization utterly desensitized to scenes of pain and hardship thrown onto other people.
One could be forgiven for thinking that this desensitization has taken hold in Europe as well. As was written here, the EU heads of state considered a plan put forward by the European Commission. The plan on one hand would have dispersed a number of refugees among various EU member states, while on the other hand bombing boats presumably used by people smugglers as they sit empty in Libyan ports.
The 20,000 refugees the Commission proposed be taken in were just 10 percent of the total 200,000 expected to make it to Europe's southern shores this year. Among a European population of about 500 million souls, 20,000 seems insignificant. It translates to 0.004 percent. Yet some countries went ballistic in reaction to the plan. Spain, Hungary, the United Kingdom, France and Poland, among other nations, outright refused to take on their share of refugees.
In some of these nations, refugees from the Third World are not looked upon kindly by voters. In certain Eastern European countries, discrimination against foreigners is rife. Other nations were offended by what they perceived to be an effort by the European Commission to circumvent existing national veto rights on asylum policy, setting a precedent.
Whatever the reasons, it is clear that Europe doesn't want the refugees, even though every statistic shows that most European nations are headed for demographic disaster. Too many people are getting older and are soon leaving the labor force, while not enough people are being born to replace them.
Futhermore, having jet fighters strafe dinghies and fishing boats in civilian ports in Libya is a fool's errand. As a Libyan coast guard officer said this week on Dutch television, it would cause more havoc without solving anything. People smugglers would simply fan out to other, smaller ports and use even more dangerous boats. The money is simply too good.
The coast guard officer proposed a far simpler and less deadly plan: Have the European Union buy all unused boats in Libyan ports and then have them destroyed or towed to Europe. There is no doubt that this would probably be a boon to the Libyan boat-building industry and to the officer himself, who helpfully suggested that he could seize the boats in his port and sell them to the Europeans personally.
Nonetheless, it was a plan worth considering. The current Australian prime minister actually proposed the same plan to combat the influx of refugees who come over on boats from Indonesia; but Indonesia would have none of it. There is no doubt about what Jakarta's reaction would have been had Australia proposed strafing boats in Indonesian ports.
It is not yet clear whether the scrapping of the refugee quota proposal now means that the entire plan by the European Commission is off the table. If so, good riddance, because it was a bad plan brought on by a desire to shirk responsibilities - responsibilities such as carrying out true, force-backed nationbuilding in Libya. The European Commission mulled this option over as well, but astonishingly, the idea was politically dead on arrival. The heads of state of the EU member nations - the real power in the union - refused even to discuss it.
And so Europe stumbles on, impotent in the eyes of all the world, while its future lies in the Mediterranean.
(AP photo)
