Mass Migration: The View from Germany

The current daily horror is only the beginning. History is on the move again, and the waves of unrest will not subside any time soon. They will not leave European civilization unchanged and will, no doubt, send shock waves into Russia, via the North Caucasus and Tatarstan.

An additional 6 billion euros in next year’s budget, 3,000 more federal police officers: the political class in Germany is slowly beginning to wonder whether all the young able-bodied men arriving at the gates are genuine refugees, pushed by the threat of imminent death, or are they attracted by the prospect of European life of plenty, or perhaps are they Islamic State recruits, anxious, when the time comes, to promote their version oft the Islamic caliphate by fire and sword?

There is still no deeper understanding that there is another side to the conspicuous euphoria which greeted the first waves of refugees last month. Meanwhile, the political authorities, while there is still a somewhat artificial over-optimism at work in the media, are beginning to realize that this is not a short-term irregularity but a wave of poverty, trauma, homelessness and despair – not excluding some of the more extremist and militant elements of the drama currently devastating what was, until a few years ago, the fertile crescent of the Arab world and is now the theatre of mass killing, religious persecution, civil war and other assorted horrors.

What we are currently witnessing may well be only the beginning of population shifts that have no parallel in the recent history of the Greater Middle East. What we observe right across from the shores oft the Eastern Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf and on to the rugged wastelands of Afghanistan is the breakdown of political order, social organization and equilibrium. While there is no chance of a speedy recovery, the map of the Arab world will not be redrawn soon. While Turkey and the state of Israel, possibly even Egypt under general Sisi and his men, remain islands of stability in a sea of troubles, the Sunni-Shia divide will for a long time set Iran and Saudi Arabia against each other – with a blood-soaked battlefield in the war-torn Yemen on the southern side of the Saudi Kingdom.

The roots of this secular disaster are older than the fateful return of the Ayatollah to Iran in 1979, or the ill-advised US invasion of Iraq 2003, or the misnamed Arab Spring of 2011, or the recent surge of wars and civil wars. They go right back to what historian David Fromkin called “the peace to end all peace”, meaning the treaties of 1918-1919, which carved up what had for the best part of a millennium been the Ottoman Empire. The Turks, led by their war hero Kemal Pasha, later named Atatürk, were the first to challenge the new European order imposed by the victors. But the rest of the region was carved up to suit Paris and London, without much regard for regional and local traditions, religious beliefs or political balance. After World War II, as part of the decolonization process, home-grown military dictatorships took over, like Syria and Iraq, or family firms posing as a state, such as Saudi Arabia. The Cold War and the Israel-Arab stand-off lent a sort of stability to the region and a deceptive order that has now all but disappeared.

The current daily horror is only the beginning. History is on the move again, and the waves of unrest will not subside any time soon. They will not leave European civilization unchanged and will, no doubt, send shock waves into Russia, via the North Caucasus and Tatarstan. It is time to realize a simple truth: The Europeans, whatever else stands between them, are in this together – and should act accordingly.

Views expressed are of individual Members and Contributors, rather than the Club's, unless explicitly stated otherwise.