Europe’s Other War...On The ‘Other’

Europe is at war, one that’s broader than Ukraine, and arguably more consequential. From the Baltic Sea to the shores of the Mediterranean, and even through to tiny post-Brexit Britain, there is hand-to-hand combat for the narrative, and it all revolves around the ‘other’, the foreign body.Battlefields of 2024 | Migration – both regular and irregular – is prominently on the agenda, with self-proclaimed patriots steadfast at the political barricades as the continent prepares for a clutch of elections. These range from picking its only directly elected supranational body, the European Parliament, to national polls in Portugal, Lithuania, Croatia, Belgium, Austria and Britain and key regional ballots in eastern Germany.Union of fear | Brexit or not, this really is Europe united, a genuine union of European nations over an issue close to the collective heart. But there is a decided element of absurdism in the way migration is making for political heavy weather across the continent. Consider this:Britain’s House of Lords, the unelected upper chamber of parliament, is scrutinising controversial legislation that blithely abandons the country’s commitment to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), a move that would put UK in the same category as Russia and Belarus.This is for the express purpose of despatching asylum seekers to Rwanda as Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s government wearily contemplates the so-called “small boats” crisis, which sees near-daily arrivals of uninvited migrants hitching a ride in inadequate vessels across the English Channel from France. Come, if you have money | The numbers aren’t huge, except in the political discourse, but Sunak’s Conservative Party continues to tear itself apart over soaring net legal migration despite seeking larger cohorts of lucrative fee-paying international students and workers to fill acute shortages.Pantomime kingdom | After Britain’s highest court ruled that Rwanda's plan breached international undertakings including ECHR, UN Refugee Convention and UN Convention against Torture and that the east African country could not possibly be classified as safe, a bizarre workaround was adopted. The British parliament simply legislated to declare Rwanda safe, an exercise in semantic juggling and the suspension of disbelief that reaches the heights prescribed by Hamlet: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so”.Fortress France’s setback | Across the waters, on the European mainland, France’s President Emmanuel Macron has just suffered a stinging rebuke from the country’s Constitutional Council over a hardline new immigration law that needed the support of Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally party to pass parliament. The Council, which reviews legislation to ensure it conforms to France’s Constitution, struck down controversial new measures that restrict foreigners’ access to government subsidies and limit reunification of migrant families, something that the far-right has claimed as an “ideological victory”. Ghosts of Nuremberg | In Germany, a wave of protests “against fascism” by millions in multiple cities is bound for the capital, Berlin. The protests began after revelations of a covert meeting between politicians of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, the main opposition centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), an extreme right Austrian ideologue from Identitarian Movement and assorted neo-Nazi activists. They discussed a sinister “masterplan” for planned mass deportations from Germany, one that would even expel German nationals of differing ethnicities for not being German enough. Over the past 18 months, the AfD – parts of which are deemed extremist by the German security service – has become Germany’s second most popular party and it is poised to do well in September’s elections in Saxony, Brandenburg and Thuringia, as well as European Parliament polls in June.Centrists retreat | Indeed, in the past two years, far-right or populist anti-immigration parties have displaced mainstream centrists and conservatives as the largest force on the right of the political spectrum in France, Italy, Sweden, Netherlands and Switzerland. Even the left is affected. Germany now has a new far-left, anti-immigrant party, set up by a half-Iranian woman famous throughout the country for her TV appearances, oratory and best-selling books.Mostly legal | And German chancellor Olaf Scholz of Social Democrats recently took a rightward tack on immigration, speaking, like Sunak, of the need to speed up deportation. EU officials acknowledge that irregular arrivals are only a fraction of overall migration and the vast majority of people reach the EU legally. The truth, as one EU official put it, is that in “long-term trends…of migration, there is not a huge crisis. There is a crisis of perception”. But in Europe’s ever closer union of fear, perception is reality.The writer is a London-based columnist