Demonstration
by immigrants in Treviso, Italy, 28 May 2005.
by
Paul
Rogers
The
forces driving people's movement into Europe were already apparent in
a near forgotten incident of 1991.
In
August 1991, with the world’s media dominated by the chronic
instability in Russia and the aftermath of the violent eviction of
the Iraqi army from Kuwait earlier that year, a sequence of events in
the Adriatic Sea provides an uncanny foretaste of the current surge
of desperate people across the Mediterranean from north Africa, as
well as overland from Syria through Turkey, Greece and beyond.
One
consequence of the collapse of the Soviet bloc was the disintegration
of the already weakened Albanian
economy in the winter of 1990-91. The long-time leader Enver
Hoxha, who died in 1985, had bequeathed a stagnant and unstable
economy which, by the end of the decade, was ensuring increasing
poverty in an already poor country. In the early months of 1991, many
young Albanians were attempting
to get across the Adriatic to a better life in Italy. They had little
success.
Then,
in August, the situation had become so desperate that merchant ships
were hijacked by thousands of young people, especially in the port of
Durrës,
and the crews forced to set sail
for Italy. At least 10,000 of them were on the 8,000-tonne merchant
ship Vlora
- some reports said twice that number - when it made
the 200-kilometre crossing to the southern Italian port of Bari.
Caught by surprise, the police there tried and failed to stop the
refugees coming ashore; some even jumped overboard to swim towards
land. The incident
made news across Europe, at least for a couple of days, but then the
media moved on.
Faced
with this huge number of sudden arrivals,
the police rounded them up and detained them in the only place in the
city that could handle such a number securely, namely the local
football stadium. There, they started the process
of enforced repatriation to Albania. A few were allowed to stay; most
were forced home. But the Italians did at least provide substantial
financial aid to the faltering government in Tirana, and even
arranged for Italian army units to distribute food within the
country.
Within
a few months, Albania began to make a slow and tortuous recovery. All
that was left of the experience were images
of desperate people jumping off a ship and trying to get ashore.
Today, however, the resonance with people clambering ashore from
flimsy dinghies onto Greek islands - or facing police in the centre
of Budapest - is all too apparent.
The
long-term view
Over
the years since it began in 2001, this column
has on occasion highlighted
a prescient comment made in 1974 by the economic geographer Edwin
Brooks. This warned of a dystopic world that had to be avoided:
“a crowded glowering planet of massive inequalities of wealth
buttressed by stark force yet endlessly threatened by desperate
people in the global ghettoes” (see "The Implications of
Ecological Limits to Growth in Terms of Expectations and Aspirations
in Developed and Less Developed Countries", in Anthony Vann &
Paul Rogers (eds), Human
Ecology and World Development
[Plenum Press, 1974]).
This
is a forewarning of the experience of recent months:
namely, desperate people fleeing the war-zones of Syria, Afghanistan
and South Sudan and the repression of Eritrea; but also of the
millions more who face relative poverty and marginalisation, not
least across sub-Saharan Africa.
There
has been some humanitarian reaction
in Europe to these forces. But the more general response has been the
"securitisation" of the issue, whereby migrants are seen as
threats. One head of government, the UK’s David Cameron,
deliberately used the term “swarm” to describe
the few thousand migrants who had got as far as Calais - though these
actually form a tiny proportion of the hundreds of thousands of
people desperate to get into Europe (see "Mediterranean
dreams, climate realities", 23 April 2015).
It
may be that over the coming months, humanitarian concern will prevail
and European states will find ways to cooperate more effectively. But
the prognosis is not good. And in the longer term, an extension of
the securitising approach will be even more damaging as it is applied
not just to the movement
of people but to the closely related area
of climate change.
A
recent article by Nick Buxton and Ben Hayes focuses on this issue
(see "Ten
years on: Katrina, militarisation and climate change", 28
August 2015). It points to the manner in which the future effects of
climate change are being seen as threats to the wellbeing of
comfortable peoples in the west, implying that what is needed is to
put much more emphasis on maintaining security rather than preventing
the excesses of climate disruption.
Where
the two elements come together - current migration issues and future
climate disruption - will actually be in Europe. Around the continent
are large centres of population in the Middle East, south-west Asia,
north Africa and sub-Saharan Africa, where climate change, if not
prevented,
will lead to marked decreases in rainfall with declining food
production and consequent social and economic hardship. The
asymmetric nature of climate change as it is now being understood
means that these large regions surrounding one of the richest parts
of the world will have the greatest
difficulties. As a result, they are likely to become drivers of
migration to a far larger extent, with numbers measured not in the
hundreds of thousands but in millions.
In
these circumstances, the consequences of securitising
these issues will be huge, far greater than anything yet experienced.
For this reason alone, it is essential that the current crisis is
handled primarily with humanitarian concern, rather than by trying to
“close the castle gates” - which in any case is impossible in a
globalised system. What happened to the Vlora
nearly twenty-five years ago sharpens the choice over these possible
futures.
Paul
Rogers is professor in the department
of peace studies at
Bradford University, northern England. He is openDemocracy's
international-security editor, and has been writing a weekly column
on global security since 28 September 2001; he also writes a monthly
briefing for the Oxford
Research Group.
His books include Why
We’re Losing the War on Terror
(Polity,
2007), and Losing
Control: Global Security in the 21st Century
(Pluto
Press, 3rd edition, 2010). He is on twitter at: @ProfPRogers
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