Forced Migration – The Challenges for the Balkans
The now dominant tendency of economization and securitization of forced migration to our region of the Balkans and to the E
U as a whole is the subject of a critical analysis in the paper. It is a result of the war against global terrorism after 11/9 and is associated with the continued social and economic crisis of the Western world. The latest crisis with the terrorist attack against the yellow French magazine Charlie Hebdo, which has published provocative caricatures against Islam, is another confirmation of the present existing deepening process of internal war and the fundamental division of the West. It is a consequence of the brutal capitalist expansion and the social imbalances, which reached a new peak after the Cold War era.
The present-day capitalism could not provide normal living conditions to humankind at least at the level of elites and the people of the rich countries. Moreover, the world today is increasingly divided by regional and civil wars, by violent conflict redistribution of resources bringing huge misery for people, state destruction and forced migration floods. Global injustice, wars and poverty draws millions of people to search for better living conditions, work and better life chances toward rich countries.
How we could define the forced migration? There is a continuing trend of its growth by leaps and bonds. 2 years ago, Delgado Wise[1] has classified four types of forced migration:
Migration due to violence, conflict, and catastrophe (43 million refugees).
Smuggling and trafficking of persons (2.45 million victims)
Migration due to dispossession, exclusion, and unemployment (72 million migrants).
Migration due to over-qualification and lack of opportunities (25.9 million migrants).
According to the German magazine Der Spiegel and information of the UNHCR for 2013 year more than 50 million people have left their homes, which is a record achievement since the Second World War! 9 out of 10 immigrants are accepted by developing countries. 2,3 million people are immigrants from the war-revaged Syria – 1 million are living in Lebanon and 1 million in Turkey at present. For the last 14 years, more than 23 000 refugees have died trying to reach the rich countries in Europe. Applications for the EU countries for the 3-years period until 2013 are about 80 000 per year.[2] Illegal border-crossing along the EU’s external borders sharply increases from 2012 to 2013 with 48 %, and in 2014 doubled[3]. Therefore, the claim that refugees are in fact economic to the rich West is doubtful!
Now, there are more than 200 million forced migrants in the world: one could say that this chaotic process of displacement of huge masses of people looks like a rematch of the people from the peripheral countries for the inverted structure of our imbalanced and confused world. The response of the rich West is a politicization of migration as a threat to security on the basis of inventing a connection with global terrorism and organized crime. Especially in its nationalist expression, this response becomes more and more hysterical especially in the period of the deepening social and economic crisis of the ‘welfare state’. The Western nationalism as a degenerate successor of the Western imperialism from the first ages of the capitalist expansion imperceptibly become a very influential trend in the developed countries defining their policy as regards the rest of the world. A good symbol of this policy are the ‘Schengen barriers’ still impregnable for Romania and Bulgaria and the statements of some Western leaders (Merkel, Sarkozy) for the failure of the multiculturalism.
At present, 8 years ago the following words of J. Huysmans become more and more relevant:
“One of the striking characteristics of the contemporary discourse on migration in the European Union is the contrast between a negative portrayal of asylum seekers and illegal immigrants and talk about the necessity of increased economic migration to support growth and welfare provisions. Despite the obvious difference between repressive and permissive migration policy that plays out in this contrast, both policy positions share a desire to control population dynamics for the purpose of optimizing a society’s ‘well being’ by keeping the unwanted out and integrate the needed into the labour market.”[4] The “distribution of fear ant trust” became a tool for administration of social inclusion and exclusion and for assimilation of immigrants. This trend is presented by the right-wing parties in the rich EU-countries.
There are real facts to justify the thesis that the EU policy on refugees and asylum focuses on measures for their rejection of the territory of the rich countries. The aggressive elites of the rich West are assigned to the Balkans as a cordon sanitaire against refugee flows.
In 2014 the refugee pressure against the EU countries continues to grow rapidly. The 28 members of the EU 216 300 asylum claims during the first half of 2014 – a 23 % increase compared to the corresponding period of 2013 (176 200). Among the EU regions, the largest relative increase in mid-year asylum levels was reported by the countries of Southern Europe. These countries (Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey) received 60 800 asylum requests during the first half of 2014, a 73% increase compared to the first six months of 2013 (35 200).[5]
Bulgaria is the poorest country in the EU and its economic opportunities to ensure adequate intake of forced migrants are relatively limited. In 2013 unexpected flows of forced migrants from the conflicts in Syria and North Africa have caused great difficulties to our institutions and they had to seek help from the EU and the UNHCR[6]. Some of the emerging chronic problems are the following: resource insufficiency and lack of expertise and language skills of the border police and other involved institutions; poor living conditions at the points of accommodation of refugees and illegal migrants; slow processing of applications of refugees; social and cultural barriers to social integration into national society.
The EU is becoming now a fortress against the refugees with the help of the activity of the organization Frontex strictly guarding its borders and a common system for registration of refugee prints (Eurodac). According to the Dublin Convention (2004) each member-country which detects an immigrant with a legal status received in another country is obliged to return him to the first country. Following this corrupted mechanism, the Balkan countries become a concierge or a cordon sanitaire of the EU! The rich countries of the EU require us to accept the refugee flow from the Arab countries and Africa without restrictions. This is hypocrisy in action!
Forced migrants are innocent victims of conflicts in an unjust social and political order, with military aggressions, civil wars, tyrannical regimes and ethnic tension generated by them. In action, a social justice cosmopolitan view would assign duties to every individual in regard to social institutions – in order to make them work for the overcoming poverty and social imbalance, for guaranteeing the basic rights of forced immigrants and their integration in a given society, on the basis of humanism. The adequate solution of problems of forced migration and the overcoming of violence causing it could be a shared responsibility of humankind as a whole. Political and economic elites cannot resolve such problems – they can only exacerbate them. They are able only to wage wars, endless conflicts and to maintain tyrannical regimes of their collaborators.
The social institutions working for the promotion and realization of a humanist approach to forced migration should not be solely relying on activities of UNHCR or the EU elites. All countries and NGO’s, and the global civic society as a whole, should be drawn into activities of support for human rights observation everywhere.
We need to change in general our approach to the forced migration. It must be based on a communitarian approach to international relations presenting them as relationships and conflicts of historically formed communities – religious, social, political and cultural including nation states. This approach rejects the unification around the Western liberal values and accepts differences as promoting political and cultural diversity.
[1]Delgado Wise, R. (2013), The migration and labor question today: Imperialism, Unequal development, and Forced Migration, Monthly Review, Volume 64, Issue 09.
[2]Kak ES se prevurna v neprevzemaema krepost za bejancite [How the EU has become an impregnable fortress for the refugees] – in: Sega N 219, September 2014 (http://www.segabg.com/article. php?id=718078).
[3] Annual Risk Analysis Frontex, May 2014, Warsaw, p. 29.
[4] Huysmans, Jef (2006), The Politics of Insecurity. Fear, Migration and Asylum in the EU, UK: Routledge, p. 47.
[5] UNHCR Asylum Trends, First half of 2014. Levels and Trends in Indusrtrialized Countries, 2014.
[6] UNHCR Observations on the Current Situation on Asylum in Bulgaria, 2014 April.
