On the continental shelf: Europe's migrant crisis

Commenting on the migrant crisis which is now convulsing Europe, Jeremy Seabrook says that 'the golden shores of Mediterranean Europe', where tourists 'share the pellucid waters with the corpses of people fleeing persecution and war', also constitute the stage for 'the next act in the interminable historical drama - the story of colonialism, its consequences of economic dominance and globalisation - a sequence which shows that colonialism was not an event but a process, with which we are far from finished'.

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THIS has been the year in which refugees have called the bluff of a Europe which never ceases to congratulate itself on its 'humanitarianism', which, ever eager to inflate its own benevolence, it promotes as though more exalted than mere 'humanity'. The horror images have chased each other across the screens of the world this summer: the fragile craft sinking off Libya, people suffocated in the hold, the abandoned truck belonging to a chicken processing company in Slovakia, from which liquid from decomposing bodies stained the Austrian highway, and most recently, the body of the three-year-old Syrian, face-down in the shallow waters of the Turkish coast.

The development fable

In the wake of the multiple tragedies arising from the flight of people seeking escape from war, persecution and poverty, European leaders now say they will work with representatives of African and Middle Eastern countries to ensure prosperity and well-being, which will make it unnecessary for people to leave their native lands. While dehumanising terminology is freely used for home consumption, ('invasion', 'marauders', 'influx', 'tide', 'menace to law and order', 'swarms'), international pieties demand the promise to increase aid and ensure an acceleration of development in the sites of misery from which hundreds of thousands have this year sought refuge in Europe.

With the urgent rhetoric of developmentalism, the ruling classes of Europe implicitly acknowledge their own miscalculation when they so clamorously welcomed and underwrote globalisation and all its consequences. For their rhapsodies on 'global integration' were in fact a victory dance of the Western way of life; boastful and incontinent, they projected its supremacy everywhere with uninhibited energy. Too late, the British government is now anxious to spread the message that Britain is not 'a land of milk and honey', and that the streets of London are not paved with gold (metaphors originally referring, with unnoticed irony, to the Holy Land and the USA). This represents a dramatic reversal of the imagery the West has exported with such unanticipated success in recent years.

For it was not supposed to be like this. With the fall of the Soviet Union and the 'unity' of practically the whole world in commitment to a single global economic model, each country was expected to develop, much as the rich Western economies had done; provide growing wealth, opportunity and hope to the poor, to former victims of imperialism and more recently, to those oppressed by militarism, dictatorship and kleptocratic dynasties. Economic growth would lead to the emergence of a vigorous and wealth-creating middle class, which would insist on the rule of law and establish a vibrant civil society to hold governments to account. The nations of the world would follow the pattern pioneered in the West, and would emerge - eventually - into the sunny uplands of peaceable plenty.

In order to reinforce the lesson that this model was as felicitous as it was inevitable, the West relentlessly poured into the eyes and ears of the world a gaudy, insistent iconography of what might be expected at the end of their arduous journey - a life of comfort and ease, images of wealth and luxury, all the most colourful products of its publicity and advertising industries which saturated the world with promises of an easy tomorrow. In the process, the West gave the impression that, in its own heartland, poverty had been abolished, want and scarcity overcome; even sorrow and loss had been ended and life expectancy indefinitely extended. Anyone who has even the most casual familiarity with poor people in the Global South must be aware of the overwhelming success of this fable: they simply do not believe that deprivation exists in the rich countries, and cannot understand why we are less than eager to share our good fortune with them.

In many of the countries in which 'development' was scheduled to take place, people saw only evictions, upheaval, violence and civil war, squalor and shortages and a growing gulf between rich and poor. The rewards proved elusive and slow to materialise - as people reached out for them, like the water which tormented Tantalus, these receded from their grasp. That it took six or seven generations of industrial misery, as well as centuries of exploitation and spoliation of an imperial hinterland, for the people of the West to achieve their social and economic eminence, was elided in the window-dressing for export of Western consumerism.

The West, exuberant and self-confident after the eclipse of socialism, justified its triumphalism in a world in which the word 'developing' now meant only one thing - becoming like us, objects of emulation and envy. What could go wrong, when most countries on earth, with only one or two eccentric exceptions, were obediently embarked on a known journey towards the prosperity and self-fulfilment which existed, not in theory, not in an afterlife, but here and now on earth?

Of course, countries which failed to adapt to the genial necessities of globalism risked coercive regime change, the consequences of which have sent whole populations to live on the dwindling compassion of refugee camps, where heat, dust, lack of water, hunger, sickness and inactivity condemn them to a lengthening future of flimsy tents and corrugated metal shelters; conditions to which no able and energetic human being will passively consent.

Europe's response

This year has already seen more than 300,000 people, principally from Syria, but also from Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia and Eritrea, reach the shores of Europe. The three principal routes have been across the Mediterranean from Libya (where the lawless aftermath of the ousting by NATO-backed rebels of Gaddafi has left what are euphemistically called 'ungoverned spaces'); across the Aegean from Turkey, to the Greek islands of Kos and Lesbos; and even more dramatically, through Serbia into Hungary: the hardline government has constructed a wall, a kind of replica iron-curtain, to keep them out. Hungary has been the scene of clashes between police and refugees; people sleeping in railway stations and on the streets, reminiscent of the great displacement of population that last took place in Europe during and after World War Two. No refugees want to be 'processed' (as though they were an industrial product) in Hungary, where only 9% of applications for asylum are successful.

Angela Merkel, Germany's Chancellor, is the only figure to have emerged with dignity and credit in a Europe where a majority of the leaders are competing with each other to show how tough they can be in excluding the most desperate people fleeing conflict and oppression. Germany expects to grant asylum to more than 800,000 refugees - mostly from Syria - this year; and her insistence that the rest of Europe must also admit its share has illuminated the pusillanimity and parochialism of the other countries of the EU.

'Public opinion' has been invoked to justify the hardened heart and calloused imagination; yet the publication of the image of the dead three-year-old on the beach of Bodrum was enough to soften the apparently flinty resolution of the people of Europe, and led even British premier David Cameron, staunch opponent of opening up the doors to this 'overcrowded island', to accept an increased number of refugees. This is both inspiring and alarming: it is good to see that people can be kinder than politicians understand; and the crowds in Munich who greeted the refugees from Hungary with applause, food and offers of hospitality showed how much in advance people can be of elites who project their own self-interest on those they are supposed to lead. But this also illustrates the mutability of public opinion and its capacity for swift reversals.

Cameron announced that 'thousands' more Syrians would be admitted to Britain; he has promised to take in 20,000 over the next five years. This plan was announced with characteristic self-congratulation on our celebrated 'compassion', a quality hard to discern in the government's treatment of its own poor. These will not be people already in Europe. Britain will pluck the most needy, especially 'children and orphans', from existing camps in Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon. Cameron wishes to dissociate himself from any European Union allocation of 'quotas'. This may go down well with Conservative Europhobes, but is unlikely to earn him much goodwill in his 'renegotiation' of Britain's relationship with Europe before his proposed referendum next year on EU membership.

Bodies of migrants washed up on the golden shores of Mediterranean Europe exercise an hallucinatory fascination over the people. Here, not only do tourists from the chill and clouded north of Europe seeking sun, sand and Vitamin D share the pellucid waters with the corpses of people fleeing persecution and war, but here also is played out the next act in the interminable historical drama - the story of colonialism, its consequences of economic dominance and globalisation - a sequence which shows that colonialism was not an event but a process, with which we are far from finished.

David Cameron's initial reluctance to admit refugees, and his volte-face ('Britain is a moral nation and we will live up to our moral responsibilities'), perpetuate the ancient ambivalence of a country that never asked permission of anyone in its own promiscuous invasive excursions into an entire world. Even today, British 'expats' rarely question their right to live in the country of their choice.

While in the 19th century some political and social refugees made their way to Britain - mainly lascars, domestic servants and intellectuals (including Karl Marx) - their presence was easily containable. The first real test for Britain came not from people escaping the British Empire but from Jewish refugees escaping Tsarist pogroms in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; a movement which transformed the East End of London. It seems incredible now, that no papers were required to travel between countries until 1914, when the Nationality and Status of Aliens Act introduced the modern passport. Within a century, the question of who may cross which borders and who must be deterred or turned back, has become an obsession.

Only when the Empire was on the point of dissolution, just after World War Two, the British saw in their overseas possessions a possible source of cheap labour. In France, this was already well established, since from the late 1920s at least 100,000 Algerians arrived annually, mainly as male factory labour. In the 1930s, France was second only to the USA as a destination for migrants, both from North Africa and from the impoverished south of Europe.

In Germany, labour shortages gave rise to the concept of 'guest workers' (mainly from Turkey) between the late 1950s and 1970s. The Swiss writer Max Frisch made his famous sardonic observation 'We asked for guest workers, but human beings came.' The fiction of the temporary sojourn had to be abandoned. Despite increasingly stringent conditions on which new arrivals, family members and dependants were admitted to Europe, the barring of legal entry only tested the ingenuity of desperate people in finding other channels. The number of illegal immigrants in the continent is, by definition, unquantifiable; estimates vary between three and six million.

Dependency and underdevelopment

The unresolved relationship between Europe and its former overseas territories - and indeed the power of France and Britain over the fragments of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War - was carried forward into an ostensibly post-imperial age by an economic system which ensured that newly 'liberated' countries continued to provide raw materials and natural products, as well as labour, for Europe. This stunted many countries - formerly but no longer referred to as 'Third World' - in dependency, underdevelopment and debt.

With the end of the Soviet Union, 'globalisation' set in movement great waves of people in search of the 'better life' embodied by Europe, North America and Australia. This further complicated the skein of human scatterings: persecution and political oppression merged with poverty and hopelessness so that it became less easy to sustain the distinction between refugees and 'economic migrants'.

Another aspect of this volatility was the opportunistic emergence of 'people smugglers', against whom Europe inveighs with such intemperance - these are, after all, only entrepreneurs for whom social justice and inequality represent one of those business opportunities which are the bedrock of the Western way of life. In any case, for Western governments to blanch at the traffic in human beings is itself an act of breathtaking hypocrisy, since such trade was part and parcel of their mercantile and slave-owning past, not to mention the transport of people as indentured labour and other forms of forcible subjection from the Indian subcontinent to the Caribbean, Mauritius, Fiji and all the other dead-ends of despair created by the genius of dominance.

In 2013 there were 232 million migrants in the world. The scale of today's upheavals is greater than anything seen before, but the death-ships in the Mediterranean are no new phenomenon. During the Irish potato famine in 1846 and 1847, as hunger devastated the country, tens of thousands of refugees from starvation embarked - sometimes at the expense of landlords who had evicted them from their small patch of earth - in unseaworthy boats to the eastern seaboard of Canada. The high number of fatalities during these voyages earned them the name of 'coffin-ships'. In some vessels, a third of the migrants, weakened by malnutrition and disease (the 'bloody flux' that was dysentery), died. Even some of the three-quarters of a million who crossed the Irish Sea to Liverpool were dead on arrival. Under provisions of the Poor Law Removal Act in Britain, anyone in receipt of poor relief could be taken to the Irish steamer and placed on board. It was estimated that 40,000 people were liable to removal; in the event, about 15,000 were returned to Ireland. The swift response of the British government to the presence of Irish starvelings in 1847 is repeated in 2015 by a Europe determined to evade responsibility to many of those to whose destitution it has been a significant, and scarcely unconscious, contributor. Britain forcibly removed, deported or pressured to depart more than 50,000 people in 2013.

By the end of 2014, the United Nations' refugee agency knew of a record 59.5 million people exiled from their home. In the same year, 19.5 million were cross-border refugees. Eighty-six percent of these lodged in the countries closest to that they had fled. For the first time, more than half of these were under 18. The widening global abyss between the rich and the poor of the earth, the secure and the precarious, is enacted in the playground/graveyard which the Mediterranean has become; in its haunted waters, global privilege has a fateful tryst with its own victims.

Jeremy Seabrook is a freelance journalist based in the UK. His latest book is The Song of the Shirt (published by Navayana).

*Third World Resurgence No. 300, August 2015, pp 25-27