It is doubtful that any, or many of the leaders of Europe Union thought, as they planned and executed, in 2011, the Nato bombing of Libya ridding that country of Gaddafi, that within a few years, thousands of Libyans would, like Gaddafi, now be fleeing from their country, anxious to reach Britain and other EU countries, in search of a more peaceful existence. And now their flight has been exacerbated by the movement of people out of Syria in particular, in the Middle East, as that country’s civil war rages on; and from states like Eritrea, Sudan and Yemen geographically close, like Libya, to the Middle East and continually unstable.
All of a sudden, therefore, a European Union unprepared for a mass exodus of persons and families has been scrambling to define a policy for mass entry that, in its view, will not upset the social equilibrium of the individual EU states, an issue which has already been of concern there prior to the present exodus.
Interestingly it is Germany, not a pre-World War Two colonial country, which has appeared to be most considerate and deliberate in indicating that the EU would have to take a positive attitude towards the mass migration. And Chancellor Merkel’s announcement that her country was prepared to accept up to 800,000 migrants, appears to have induced, if not forced, other EU states to take a more positive attitude to what is in effect a major crisis.
A little belatedly the two major EU former colonial powers, Britain in particular, and France as well, have dropped their initial hesitations about accepting Syrian refugees, though they were in the forefront of instigating, and then celebrating the removal of Gaddafi from Libya, leaving what still remains a certain power vacuum in that area as Libyans continue to exploit departure opportunities from their country. And it now appears that the attitude of Chancellor Merkel has led to their changed attitude.
The United States appears to have now also stepped into the breach, particularly in encouraging the Europeans to take the initiative of accepting large numbers of the refugees. For the fact of the matter is that Nato’s relatively hands-off approach to the civil war in Syria, in the apparent hope that a besieged Assad would eventually be forced to concede power to his opponent, has not been successful up to now. And indeed, instead, it is a non-European Nato country like Turkey, which has been insisting that Nato could maintain its hand-off posture, in the hope that the Syrian regime will collapse.
It seems that it is the last week’s events in Syria and surroundings, with the increased flow of refugees from the area and their determination to seek safe haven in Europe that has induced a more activist approach from the EU. For the pressure from migration has increased not so much on the UK and France as yet, but on other Nato states, in particular Hungary, Greece, Turkey and Italy, which have been feeling the brunt of the pressure.
The United Kingdom Prime Minister now appears to have come to realize that his government’s approach to immigration – an essentially negative one in the face of continuing opposition, in the last few years, from the breakaway United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) opposing migration to Britain, and which appears to have had an influence in the last general elections, cannot be sustained in the face of wider global pressure.
The suddenness and rapidity of the Syrian (and related East African countries) migration now appears to be a wake-up call for the Nato powers in their approach to the Syrian civil war. The United States has essentially had a hands-off approach , apparently believing that Assad’s resistance would not be sustained. And it has done this while its main Middle Eastern ally, Saudi Arabia, has continued to maintain support for the anti-Assad forces.
Instead, the US’s concern during Obama’s administration, has been to find a way of pacifying a newly-fractioned Iraq while, with the support of the Saudis, isolating Syria. But the IS intervention in Syria has virtually negated that strategy, that group insisting that it, and not the Saudis holds the truth about Islam. And in the meantime, it is notable that while it has always been claimed that Iran has been a persistent supporter and upholder of the Syrian regime, the US has placed, as its priority, the necessity to find a positive solution to the nuclear weapons matter, above that of ending the Syrian civil war.
It is, really, only after the fractioning of Iraq, that the US has given priority to the significance of the IS forces. In that sense, IS’s apparent further dominance in Syria has been a significant cause of the increased migration from Syria, which, in fact, takes priority over the more limited migration of persons from East and North Africa.
With the United States’ concern with resolving the nuclear weapons issue with Iran, it appears that it will be only after that matter is dealt with, in the sense of acceptance by the United States Congress, that the US will step up its diplomacy, under pressure from the European states providing refugees from the mass migration with a refuge, to deal with the present base problem of that issue – the civil war in Syria.
