By Barend ter Haar.
Never before, and possibly never after, has life been so close to heaven on earth as in the Netherlands and surrounding countries. People are free and safe. Housing, education and health care are provided to everybody and the food is so plentiful that the greatest threat to their life is eating too much.
At the same time for most people in Syria life is hell. Probably more than 1% of the population has been killed. About half the population has fled. Four million of them stay in overcrowded and underfunded camps in neighbouring countries.
A few percent of those Syrians are willing and able to pay thousands of Euros in order to reach the relative paradise of Western Europe. They know that, according to the Refugee Convention, these countries will have to grant them asylum status, if only they manage to reach their territory. However these countries are not facilitating their journey.
That opened interesting business opportunities for organized crime. For astronomical prices they offer an uncomfortable journey with a risk of drowning in the Mediterranean or suffocating in a lorry. So far this year 300.000 people accepted this offer, because the alternatives were worse. (This includes people from other countries such as Eritrea and Iraq.)
Three hundred thousand is only 0,5% of the total number of people worldwide that were forced to leave their house (about 60 million, of which 40 million remained in their own country), but the number is large enough to make clear that the current European policies have failed.
The crisis presents European governments with two key questions. The first is: will countries continue to shift the burden of the problem to their European neighbours, or will they go for a common European approach? The second key question is: will they limit themselves to fighting symptoms or will they address the underlying challenges?
The fundamental question underlying both is this: Will countries continue to pretend that they can maintain their small paradise by surrounding it with walls and barbed wire and sending some money and a few bombers to the outside world? Or will they confront the reality that their destiny is linked with that of the people on the other side of the border?
This is a question of self interest, because the future freedom, health, safety and prosperity of the people of Western Europe depends for a very large part on what happens outside their borders. To maintain their paradise for their children, they will have to accept their co-responsibility for what happens outside the borders of their countries.
Denying that the fate of the people of Western Europe is inextricably linked with the fate of the people outside, might bring some votes in the short run, but will eventually hurt the interests of everybody, both inside and outside the earthly paradises.
