But since last summer, the tribulations and consequences of Mideast and African refugees arrival into Europe are coming into focus in Western media, and they are not pretty. The outcome is mainly what can be expected from a clash of civilizations on the local town level as well as in major cities in Germany, Sweden, and other places with large numbers of newcomers. Backlash from ordinary citizens in Europe is now a major factor in the political and social arena.
In Germany, blame is directed at the ruling coalition of Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has been committed to accepting more than a million migrants last year, and now is desperately trying to find the means of stemming the tide, including to convince Turkey’s authoritarian president to accept more refugees from Syria (a reported tentative deal is not working).
The refugee crisis continues and has acquired the attributes of an invasion, with a real possibility of the ouster of Merkel from power and collapse of the European Union. As a Ukrainian proverb could explain, this would be nothing less than water stream on “President Putin’s water-mill”.
“If Merkel is ousted, Europe will unravel,” wrote Philip Stephens in the Financial Times last year. Remarkably, not much attention is paid in Ukrainian media to Europe’s immigration issues, although the goal of visa-free travel from Ukraine is not simply separable from larger problem network.
There is no mystery that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Syria connection has been and continues to be stimulus for war in that country and its refugee exodus. However, war alone in Syria and elsewhere is not the underlying cause of migration avalanche into Europe.
Global population growth goes hand-in-hand with global growth of the economy and the resulting man-made global warming. The consequences are droughts, rising sea levels, food and drinking water shortages and violent conflicts that compel third-world “economic migrants” to leave their countries and seek refuge in Europe.
Even if the use of fossil fuels is curtailed, climate warming is stimulated by deforestation with expansion of land use for agriculture, as the carbon-dioxide absorbing forests are cut down in vast tropical regions.
The encyclical of Pope Francis last summer about consequences of man-made global warming and its social implications have triggered the reflexes of politicians worldwide, although most of it was sporadic and without direct reference to dramatic population increase in the last 70 years, from 2 billion to over 7 billion.
Gideon Rachman puts it straight in “Mass migration into Europe is unstoppable” (Financial Times, 12 January 2016): “Population pressures in Africa and the Middle East will drive immigration far into the future”.
Wrote Peter Spiegel in the Financial Times: “Stem flow of migrants to EU or risk fate of the Roman empire.” He could add: If the EU falls apart, the Russian empire wins and makes its citizens proud as always when their own borders are safe as in Katiusha song.
It is difficult to see how the United States cannot lose its influence in Europe, as it is unable to guard its own borders.
Signals of population explosion in the developing countries and in some parts of the Western world have been evidenced for at least half of the last century.
In contrast, in Ukraine the numbers hovered between 40 and 50 million throughout the 20th century — a testimony to the Soviet genocide and deportations, especially the terror-famine Holodomor in the 1930s. For Ukraine today to be relatively safe from Russian aggression, political partnership between the US and the EU is a practical necessity, as is the existence of the European Union itself.
The encyclical from Pope Francis (June 18 2015), while blaming man-made climate change, is expanding the narrative to pointing at the rich developed nations as the main culprits and at the poor Third World countries as the principal victims of climate change as well as of income inequality. But the facts are that in the year 1900 European countries represented 25 percent of the world’s population, while today the EU’s roughly 500 million people are about 7 percent of the world’s total.
Some advocates from academia take a boisterous attitude. “We (in the West) have a responsibility to create the conditions for societies to prosper worldwide within the finite resources of the planet. Otherwise, Fortress Europe will remain under siege — and all fortresses eventually fail.” (letter in the Financial Tines, 19 June 2015). Recognition of the limits of the planet’s resources is a plus. But blaming the West for worldwide poverty and ignoring the Third World’s age-old realities as the main factor is not helpful.
Pope Francis attributes environmental pollution and climate change to greed of Western corporate elites. “The idea of infinite growth, which proves so attractive to economists, financiers and experts in technology ….. is based on the lie that there is an infinite supply of the earth’s goods”, he wrote.
Yes, excessive consumption in the West is deplorable, especially since it has been moving up and up into the upscale social strata in the last 30 years, while more families are falling below poverty line. But the defining factor for climate change that leads to a global catastrophe is the overall economic growth, stimulated worldwide by the increasing population regardless of social class inequities and income gap.
The Global economy has stalled in the last several years for reasons variously explained in the media. Capital flight from developing countries is blamed by some. Martin Wolf, respected economist, connects capital flight and stock market gyrations in January 2016 to the US central bank’s decision to increase the prime money lending rate by half a point last fall (“The turmoil is the result of Fed’s blunder”, Financial Times, January 13, 2016). This doesn’t sound convincing.
The pundits are usually reluctant to mention that — since economic growth is correlated with global warming — it is becoming more difficult for investment strategists to find profitable locations for existing piles of corporate cash, other than in the overvalued stock market.
