Without Borders in Europe, There is No Hope of Ending This Migrant Crisis
The lesson of the past week is that a picture of a dead child can move a continent and overturn the stance of a government – but only, it seems, if that picture suits the politics of influential voices in the public dialogue. For some reason, the appalling photographs of the bodies of children who had been deliberately gassed by the Assad regime, laid out on a concrete floor in Syria two years ago, were not sufficiently moving to compel the world to take action. Are dead children only a moral outrage when they are on the beaches of Europe? Or is it just easier to use the image of that single drowned child to support the notion of Western guilt, whereas an indictment of Assad and the intervention that would logically follow from it would have invited all the recrimination which self-loathing Western opinion delights in?
The two things are joined fatally together. Europe (and America too) does have a moral obligation to those who have been misled and abandoned by its past irresponsibility. The failure to act against the Assad regime and against the Isil forces which have benefited from that failure, has created the conditions for a crisis which has no solution. Having largely ignored the problem through the summer – perhaps because most of the EU high command was on holiday – European leaders have suddenly sprung into incoherent and contradictory action. So the original irresponsibility has now been compounded by a desperate frenzy of implausible policy-making to deal with the migrant influx. Demands for a properly managed consistent programme to be agreed between member states were almost immediately undermined by unilateral pronouncements: Germany, clearly believing it owed the world restitution for its historical crimes, summarily announced that it was prepared to take 800,000 refugees.
Read the article “Without Borders in Europe, There is No Hope of Ending This Migrant Crisis” on telegraph.co.uk.
