In a book published in 1990, the French demographer, Jean-Claude Chesnais, wrote that future historians would consider the geographic contiguity between the continent with the highest birth rate in the world (Africa) and one with the lowest birth rate in the world (Europe) separated only by the small strip of the Mediterranean Sea, as “one of the most important phenomena, if not the most important of the recent past and future decades.” In the paragraph entitled “Inevitable Migrations”, Chesnais specified that “the persistence of Europe’s low birth rate tends to validate the hypothesis of large migrations.”
Demographic studies address long and very long-term trends, and since they are based on generational calculations, predictions are far more reliable than those of any other discipline. Since 1990, exactly 25 years have passed, the time of one generation.
Politics, instead, almost always addresses such short-term tendencies that it is hard to even indicate them as such; they are at best temporary variations arising from electoral influences. At times, however, parliamentary short-sightedness is overtaken, and opposed, by far-sighted strategies, when politics takes into account long-term trends and is able to outline a broad-ranging project.
In 2011, there was one of those rare moments of truth, and juxtaposition, when the then European Commissioner for Social Affairs, Cecilia Malmström said, “When I meet ministers responsible for labour policies, they almost all speak of the need for immigrant workers – and it’s true, we need hundreds of thousands, millions in the long term.” Electoral needs, however, oppose this awareness, and Malmström added, “when the ministers go and speak in front of their national publics, this message is not to be heard at all”, because “The need for immigrants is hard to explain in a climate of high unemployment, riots in the streets, financial crisis and people in extreme difficulties.”
Now, those of hundreds of thousands of immigrants are arriving, and this massive exodus is an opportunity to attempt to put a strategic project back on track. This new attempt is being led by the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, the undisputed political protagonist of the summer of 2015.
In the Bundestag debate on the agreement with Greece, Merkel had described the European Union as a “community based on law” in which the laws of the individual states are subordinated to the continent’s common interests. Today that same principle appears to preside over the change of heart about immigration. Faced with quarrels concerning immigrants between Great Britain and France, between France and Italy, faced with walls and railway stations under siege in Hungary, and the tantrums of Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, the Iron Chancellor is effectively reproposing the “community based on law”, this time coloured with compassion and based on the principles of openness and hospitality.
Without waiting for their governments to react, the European media has fallen in line with Berlin. Instead of speaking of “barbarians at the gates”, as often happened in the past, the majority of newspapers and TV outlets have recently devoted themselves to the sensationalism of goodness, sending correspondents to travel on the trains of despair, at the borders where the police charge amidst screaming women and children, to makeshift camps, to beaches filled with debris and bodies, without even backing away from the most terrible of images, usually self-censored for a thousand good reasons.
In addition to the extraordinary number of people flowing into Europe, and their individual and collective tragedies, what impresses one most in the current situation is the change of attitude by Merkel and the media. It is a change that can be attributed either to a sudden (and collective) conversion, or to more profound reasons that are worth analyzing.
There is, after all, a lucky coincidence between the voids opening in Europe due to its “demographic winter” and the massive arrival from Africa and the Near East of a young, qualified, motivated and dynamic work force. It is a coincidence that Europe risks missing if the silence of ministers in front of their national publics were to prevail.
Others, instead, emphasize the fortunate coincidence between migratory flows and the possible rise in global GDP. According to the American economist Brian Caplan, the removal of borders would ultimately double global production. Michael Clemens, from the Center for Global Development in Washington, DC, presents the following hypothesis; if half of the 6 billion “poor” people were to emigrate to “rich” countries their average yearly income would increase from US$5,000 to US$7,500, thereby “generating” US$23 trillion, or 38% of the global GDP. According to Clemens, global production would increase by between 20% and 60%, although in “poor” countries average salaries would rise, while those in “rich” countries would inevitably fall.
Behind this do-good rhetoric of welcome, there are therefore those “trillion-dollar bills on the sidewalk” that Clemens speaks of. On the opposite front, however, there is the popularity among working classes of the Front National in France and the Northern League in Italy. There are refugee camps set on fire and Nazi marches with women and children following along in Germany. There is a Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orban, who builds walls and interns immigrants, criticized in Europe but acclaimed at home. There are the three other countries of the Visegrad group (Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia) ostensibly balking. There is David Cameron. There are other reticent European governments who dare not come out into the open, but entrust their opposition to the rebelliousness shown by Budapest, Warsaw, Prague and Bratislava.
Migrations are inevitable, as is known. It is also known that eventually they can remedy the problems caused by low birth rate and even be money-making. Angela Merkel, who has converted the media, must now also persuade recalcitrant Europeans. The Greek scenario has been repeated. This time, however, Angela has become “good.”
Article published on “La Voce di New York” on September 5th, 2015
Translated by Francesca Simmons
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Manlio Graziano teaches Geopolitics and Geopolitics of Religions at Paris IV, at the American Graduate School in Paris, at SKEMA Business School and at Geneva Institute of Geopolitical Studies. He collaborates with Corriere della Sera (Milan), Limes (Rome), Il Mulino (Bologna) and International Affairs Forum (Washington DC). He is writing a book about the role of Catholics in American politics (In Rome We Trust, working title), which will be published in 2016 by Stanford University Press. His more recent Holy War and Holy Alliance: Religions and Global Disorder in the 21st century was published in Italian by Il Mulino in January 2015 and is forthcoming by Columbia University Press.