Writing in Spiked Online Brendan O’Neill tackles the preening—and worse than preening— of those in the European elite now so keen to show that they #WelcomeTheRefugees.
An extract:
It isn’t only virtue signalling we’re witnessing; it’s moral differentiation, the creation of a new dividing line between those who care about refugees (Us) and those who don’t (Them). The migrants are being marshalled to the culture wars by European observers keen to distance themselves from sections of their own societies. This is why observers talk ominously of the problem of ‘public attitudes’, by which they mean the racism, as they see it, of the masses….
The refugee crisis is also being used to resuscitate the moral divide between civilised Western Europe and allegedly backward Eastern Europe. The Guardian calls on Brussels to ‘counter and denounce’ Hungary for its refusal to treat refugees fairly, warning that Hungary’s anti-refugee stance ‘enjoys support among other central European governments’. The attitudes of these nations are ‘a disgrace’. Both within individual nations and across the EU, the refugee crisis has been turned into an opportunity for moral differentiation. Increasingly, being ‘pro-migrant’ is a cynical means of advertising one’s own probity through handwringing over the attitudes of one’s own native masses and the ‘disgraceful’ policies of bovine Eastern nations. Thus are migrants made into fodder for a culture war…
Two snippets from Hungary:
CNN (on the Hungarian-Serbian border):
Dramatic scenes unfolded Tuesday as hundreds of frustrated migrants broke through police lines at a holding camp near the town of Roszke in Hungary.
Let us in, or else.
The Hungarian Islamic Community (Magyar Iszlám Közösség) called for a “haram” – i.e. religious – boycott against Viktor Orbán and the governing parties after the prime minister’s hostile statements about Muslims in his Friday radio interview, reports 24.hu.
The group, which represent the country’s Muslims and operates under a flag featuring the crescent and star superimposed over a Hungarian flag, agreed to call the boycott against the prime minister and his Fidesz-KDNP party after they held a meeting on Friday, said its leader, Zoltán Bolek. The boycott means that Hungarian Muslims who will observe the haram cannot support the governing parties or vote for them.
Hmmm
Politics.HU:
Orbán said in the interview that the makeup of Hungary’s population may change gradually and unperceived, but he would advise against following the example of France and Germany who chose to live together with sizable Muslim communities.
So, I suspect, might quite a few French and Germans.
Back to O’Neill (my emphasis added):
Most depressingly of all, the new narrative is explicitly about evading public engagement on this issue. A democratic discussion is the last thing Euro-officials want. But if Europe is to be turned into the new home for dispersed humanity, with hundreds of thousands coming here, surely publics should get to discuss it first? Seems not. After all, ‘public attitudes’ are bad. And so we have Angela Merkel, Francois Hollande and EU officials devising quotas for each EU nation, effectively instructing us on how many refugees we must take. This highly undemocratic solution to the refugee crisis shows how utterly distrusted European publics are. Indeed, through the refugee crisis EU officials are seeking to recover their moral authority, which was called into question during the Greek financial crisis of recent months, particularly their authority to impose on nations, and their publics, preordained political set-ups. The pseudo ‘open borders’ approach among European officials is not a genuinely liberal sentiment; it is the latest expression of the EU’s long-term project of weakening national and popular sovereignty and concentrating decision-making on important political matters in the hands of elites, far from ‘public attitudes’.
Spiked is about as open borders as you can get. But in Europe right now, there is a bigger problem than border control, and that is the cynical weakening of national borders, and of the popular sovereignty within those national borders, by an EU oligarchy not remotely interested in freedom and autonomy but rather determined to water down democracy itself in the name of allowing small cliques to set quotas, write regulations and determine national destinies. Here is the great tragedy of the refugee crisis: it’s being used to dilute democracy further…
O’Neill thus connects the dots between the post-democracy that has always been the essence of the EU project and the way that this approach is now being applied to the current crisis, a crisis made worse, as usual, by the supposedly cautious Angela Merkel, a smug, preachy authoritarian, whose famous caution, whether over this mess or over the operation of the euro zone, consists mostly of insisting that the walk over the cliff should be at a measured, orderly pace