Europe from Lampedusa to Zaporizhia | EUROtoday
VShis time, the Americans is not going to be there. If Europe managed to preserve its unity in the course of the invasion of Ukraine, it’s largely as a result of Washington confirmed the best way. In the migration disaster that the continent is experiencing at the moment, and of which the Italian island of Lampedusa is the epicenter, Europe is alone going through itself. The massive check has begun.
Nothing on this matter is trivial. No want to get into the battles of numbers right here. Certainly, competent and acknowledged demographers typically qualify essentially the most alarmist analyzes and forecasts on this space. There are, nevertheless, different numerical indicators: the electoral breakthroughs lately of the RN in France, the AfD in Germany, Vox in Spain, the Lega and Fratelli d’Italia in Italy, not to point out, nicely Of course, the bloc within the East, made up particularly of Hungary and Poland, could be very virulent on these points. The pressure on the continent is a reality. Ignoring it is mindless.
Imposters and cynics. The marketing campaign for the 2024 European elections has simply began in Lampedusa, and there’s no doubt that the events to the proper of the proper are rubbing their fingers. Not with out some hypocrisy, furthermore. Gérald Darmanin identified (1), rightly, that the RN didn’t assist within the European Parliament the provisions which make it attainable to look at asylum requests upon arrival, and due to this fact to instantly return those that could be refused. According to the well-known formulation attributed to Bossuet, “God laughs at men who deplore the effects whose causes they cherish”. God, maybe, however the voters are much less sure…
The topic of immigration, ultra-complex, because it raises questions of a demographic, political, cultural and financial order, is not going to, in any case, evaporate. And those that declare to have easy options are impostors. Or cynics: the activists of the No Border pattern are on this story the target allies of the “identitarians” with the bottom ceilings, for the reason that rise of the latter reinforces their place.
What to do then? The idiot’s sport performed by European states, the place we proclaim our solidarity with out placing it into apply, the place we criticize our neighbors whereas behaving in the identical approach, is sufficient to make us pessimistic. If Giorgia Meloni’s Italy, which is enjoying the European card right here, discovered itself deserted by its neighbors, the sign could be calamitous.
Challenge and problem. Because the one excellent news, for the second, is that individuals are getting used to this topic being handled on the European degree, the one actually related one. A pleasant paradox: it’s round immigration, a preferred theme for sovereignists, {that a} European political house is most clearly manifested…
Perhaps, too, realities are taking up. The nice Spanish mental José Ortega y Gasset affirmed in 1949 that “Europe is neither only nor really a future, but something that has been there since a distant past; even more, which existed before the nations” (2). The historic argument is clearly topic to infinite controversy, however the geography is indeniable. And by way of immigration, the statement of the absence of bodily limitations inside the continent, like that of the relative small measurement of the Mediterranean to the south, requires a typical coverage.
The problem isn’t any much less gigantic. Especially on this period of migratory blackmail, already practiced lately by Erdogan’s Turkey, and even by Putin’s Russia, which in 2021 had 1000’s of Syrians transit via Belarus so as to destabilize Poland.
Will Europe be up to the duty? Euro-optimists cite, as well as to the response to the invasion of Ukraine, the profitable administration of vaccines in the course of the pandemic, underneath the management of Thierry Breton. Even if, within the latter case, some observers level out that, well being not being a Community competence, the same old bureaucratic procedures couldn’t decelerate the initiative… Here is the problem of Lampedusa: capability – politics – for Europe to adapt to a world that strikes quicker than it §
1. On Europe 1.
2. “ A meditation on Europe ». Has simply been republished by Bartillat editions.
https://www.lepoint.fr/editos-du-point/l-europe-de-lampedusa-a-zaporijia-21-09-2023-2536296_32.php#xtor=RSS-221