“What?” I answered cautiously.

The state representative, whom I met on a gray February day in early 1990 at the Swedish consulate in Zurich, where I studied at that time, became louder: “What color does the toothbrush have?”

I was surprised and a little bit intimidated by this question and responded, whispering, “The color of my toothbrush?”

“No sir,” he screamed back, “the one of your girlfriend!”

I do not remember the ending of this uneven conversation with the immigration officer, with its misunderstanding fueled by our different ways of speaking German. But I did get my permit to move to Sweden that year, to live together with my partner, who later became my wife.

At that time, Sweden, the biggest Nordic country, was not known as a cosmopolitan island of happy diversity and open borders. It was Switzerland—the country of my birth—that proudly fostered a multi-lingual, multi-cultural population. Sweden’s economic and societal success story after the Second World War was based on homogeneity; a foreign policy of keeping its distance from the world; and a welfare state project firmly embedded in a nationalistic idea of Swedishness.

When I arrived there, this “Swedish model” was starting to win attention all the over the world. Sweden’s powerful exports of consumer goods (cars, washing machines, Ikea stores, and Abba songs) had gained it notice, and its welfare state was becoming a reference point for politicians around the world, who either embraced it as a model or railed against it as a socialist danger.

But after passing the toothbrush test and beginning a life in Sweden that continues to this day, a quarter century later, I have discovered that, as with other national narratives, the “Swedish model” only covered part of the story.

My arrival in the early 1990s coincided with national transition and crisis, and the beginning of profound changes in the Swedish model, although I didn’t realize it at the time. The country had been run by one political party, the Social Democrats, for decades, but the economy, and that establishment, teetered and fell. A minority conservative government took over, and state funding rates reached as high as 500 percent. In just two years between 1990 and 1992 unemployment rose from less than 2 percent to more than 10 percent. One casualty of the turmoil would be Sweden’s introverted and isolationist policies.

To get back to power, the Social Democrats dramatically changed their foreign policy, suddenly embracing European Union membership. The party maintained its strong resistance to immigration as well, but that slowly changed over the next decade, as Swedish public opinion shifted around the Balkan Wars and the country began to embrace more refugees. I was no refugee, but I was fortunate to arrive at a time of greater acceptance of immigrants.

That acceptance would grow because of the Swedish passion for modernity. Swedes love to adapt to new and modern ideas, especially when it comes to technology. (The first mobile phone was invented in Sweden in the 1950s.) But the Swedes also have been early adapters when it comes to social innovations; generous parental leaves were introduced here in the early 1970s. In the regular World Value Surveys, Sweden is today the most extreme outlier, maintaining the planet’s strongest commitments to secularism and to self-expression.

That later passion for self-expression struck me immediately, in part because it is such a contrast to the stereotype of Swedes as moderate, stoic, and boring. Living here, it quickly became clear to me that the Swedes were anything but stolid centrists. And for that I was grateful. For my entire time here, I’ve worked as a press and broadcast correspondent for media organizations in German-speaking Europe. And this zeitgeist-defining Nordic country has offered me an endless supply of interesting and often contrasting stories to share.

Indeed, Sweden, collectively, has turned out to be a drama queen, full of political turnabouts, conflicting legislative turns, and unexpected dark shadows behind the well-kept surface of a peaceful, balanced, and super-modern society with equal opportunities for everyone.

Swedes’ darkness, unpredictability, and multiple contradictions explain their country’s growing cultural soft power globally. They’ve provided raw material for some of the world’s bestselling crime authors, including Henning Mankell (Wallander), Camilla Läckberg (Hidden Child) and Stieg Larsson, whose The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest was the bestselling fiction work in the United States in 2010.

Those and other authors have built their plots on hidden aspects of the shining Swedish welfare state. The dramatic tension flows from a well-concealed fact: Even in a country that guarantees its citizens a good life from cradle to grave, chance and the vagaries of human nature can pull people into the nastiest predicaments.

The biggest story I’ve covered over the past 25 years is how the “Swedish model,” which is used as ubiquitously here as the “American dream,” has been stressed and reshaped. Fundamentally, the model has lost its administrative muscles. Sweden no longer goes its own way entirely. It is a political and administrative entity deeply embedded in the multi-level structure of the European Union. The once very paternalistic nation-state has been democratized, and decentralized, work I’ve been involved with as both journalist and activist. Sweden has introduced direct democracy for its citizens, and devolved powers by letting the local levels of government take over the school system.

In the middle of the last decade, the 2000s, Sweden made its acceptance of foreigners more explicit, and profound. It happened, in a predictably unpredictable Swedish way, through an abrupt political transition. After the Social Democrats jettisoned their restrictive immigration policy, and very soon thereafter lost the election to a center-right government majority, the new majority—in a way reminiscent of the center-right government of German Chancellor Angela Merkel—surprised backers and opponents by pursuing openness to the world itself. And so in Sweden it was the conservative prime minister, Fredrik Reinfeldt, who finally opened up the remote Nordic country to people from across the globe.

His goals were twofold. First, he sought to make the country more dynamically 21st-century, a policy broadly supported by his nation of modernity lovers. And second, as Sweden watched the growing number of wars along Europe’s southeastern borders produce the biggest migration wave since World War II, Reinfeldt urged his compatriots “to open our hearts.” And Swedes did just that, in their typically dramatic, even extreme way. In just one year more than 160,000 individuals—mainly from Syria—requested asylum in Sweden, 16 times the number of asylum seekers to the United States.

This influx kept giving me flashbacks to my own arrival. The dynamic was similar. Newcomers here are met with curiosity and interest about why they’d come to this cool and remote northern outskirt of Europe. Those who learn Swedish, as I did, receive considerable appreciation. But foreigners’ opinions about Sweden, and what might be done to make it better, don’t receive much consideration. For at least 10 years, I was not supposed to have any opinions at all.

The changes in the population have made Sweden’s political parties and elected bodies increasingly unrepresentative, with a strong bias in favor of the older, middle-class layers of society. These newcomers deserve more of a voice, because they have been crucial contributors to revitalization, especially in smaller towns. One nearby small city in the north, a village of just 300 people, increased its population by 700 in just a couple of years, via the arrival of migrants. Empty houses got new inhabitants, shut-down soccer clubs got many new players, and mothballed schools were reopened.

Nothing stays the same in Sweden for long, and so the country’s openness to newcomers produced a fierce backlash, ahead of that experienced in much of the rest of the Western world and evidenced by the surprises of Brexit and Trump. As a consequence, Reinfeldt eventually lost power in the autumn of 2014 to both his left and his right. On the left, the Social Democrats won back the government. On the far right, the “Sverigedemokraterna” (Sweden Democrats), a post-fascist political party, gained representation by connecting successfully with the minority of Swedes who opposed the changes and openness of the past 25 years.

This has created a double and contradictory turnabout in Swedish politics in the last two years. On one side you have a Social Democratic government (where also a few Green ministers got a seat but little say) that has returned to the restrictive immigration policy of the early 1990s, with strict border controls. Recently, when I returned home from a trip to Germany by train, crossing the border from Denmark, I had to show my passport three times.

On the other side you have the angry Sweden Democrats, who attempt to justify their racist and discriminatory stance toward all non-Western immigrants by blaming them for organized crime in the suburbs of the main cities like Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Malmö. Those places have obvious problems with riots and shootings, but they are a consequence of social neglect by national and local governments.

This split—between the globalist center, a newly isolationist left, and a far-right—makes it hard to know what the Swedish model is anymore. So when President Trump referred to Sweden as a model to avoid, at a campaign-style rally in Florida, everybody here debated which model he might be talking about. The answer seemed to come when the White House started quoting dubious sources and experts close to the Sweden Democrats, which also have started to call Stockholm the world capital of rape.

That claim doesn’t square with the facts. And while Sweden faces new stresses that put it at the frontlines of major arguments about integration and migration and welfare around the world, Trump’s claim of a Swedish downfall is, at the very least, premature.

Indeed, Sweden has been doing quite well, with a strong economic upturn. The OECD (an intergovernmental organization composed of mostly western democracies) offered a very positive assessment of Sweden in its 2017 report. And Swedish democracy remains among the world’s strongest. The Economist Intelligence Unit put Sweden into the top three of modern democracies this year, while the United States was downgraded from a “full” to a “flawed” democracy.

To learn from Sweden does not mean to avoid immigration from certain countries; Sweden has prospered as it accepts immigrants from Muslim-majority nations. But as a Swede, I would suggest that the world learn the virtues of moderation in the midst of great turmoil. Because, contrary to my adopted country’s reputation, Sweden’s difficulties and conflicts stem from its extreme shifts. The Swedish model today means holding on for dear life as your roller coaster of a country twists and turns.

The post Refugees Are Changing the Land of Ikea and Abba appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Widespread protests against German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s generally welcoming policies toward refugees fleeing the wars in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan quickly followed. Germany has taken in more than a million people in the past year, many of them raised with a religion that the Western world has come to associate with extremism and violence. And, like most countries in Europe, Germany still hasn’t figured out the best way to bring them into the mainstream of society.

For some Europeans, the only solution is xenophobia: “Islam not welcome” and “Rapefugees not welcome” have become two popular slogans. But other Europeans recognize that the vast majority of incoming Muslims are not violent extremists or criminal threats, and policies cannot be based on those assumptions. So how can countries balance a need to protect the citizens who already live there and also make newcomers feel welcome and capable of contributing to their new homes?

In advance of the February 4 Zócalo/Alfred Herrhausen Gesellschaft/NPR Berlin event, “What Does Muslim Integration Look Like?,” we asked experts in European politics and culture: What changes in planning, policy, and attitude does Europe need to better integrate Muslims?

The post Europe Has a Problem With Immigrants, Not With Islam appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The cakes are becoming stronger political statements with each passing day.

The pastry shop is located in Ehrenfeld, a district of Cologne. The neighborhood of 100,000 has residents of many different backgrounds: workers and many former immigrants from Turkey, German bourgeois middle-class types, and various artists and creative people. Formerly a district known for metalworking, glass production, and electrical engineering, the area has been gentrifying for the past 15 years. There are traditional bars, old shops, and Turkish groceries next to newly opened galleries and cozy cafés. Cup Cakes Cologne is one of them.

This cake decorated with German Chancellor Angela Merkel as an angel in red (right) makes a political statement in Cologne.

 
I’m writing this in response to an American journalist’s invitation to provide a local perspective on Cologne in the wake of the highly publicized events at Cologne’s central train station. Local, national, and international media have reported that hundreds of migrants and asylum seekers robbed, groped, and sexually assaulted women at the station on New Year’s Eve. Today, nearly a month later, there is not yet complete and clear evidence of all that transpired. On January 18 came reports that the federal police have officially identified 33 suspects. Amongst those were nine Moroccans, nine Algerians, five Iranians, four Syrians, one Iraqi, one Serb, one American, and three Germans. Twenty-three of these men were asylum seekers.

I have experienced the aftermath of these events from Ehrenfeld, which is my neighborhood, just three kilometers west from the site of the events that have so sadly become world-famous. Ehrenfeld is nothing like the transitory and rushed railway station. Here, people are not always moving; there is space and time to live, meet, socialize and discuss things. And Ehrenfeld is a pretty good microcosm of German society’s welcoming culture, its confusion, and the many contradictions that stem from the huge and ongoing influx of refugees into Germany.

In these past few weeks, I have made notes and observations about what seems different for Cologne. And here are five of them.

1. “Moroccan” has suddenly emerged as a new stereotype.

In the club where I play a sport twice a week, a few people have started making jokes about Moroccans. Last week, one of my teammates in the club accidentally broke a glass window, which made a lot of noise. The first thing another teammate said to him: “Oh, you are a Moroccan? You are making trouble?”

There was irony in his tone, but his comment is indicative of what has changed: Moroccans are now perceived as “troublemakers” especially since media reported that Moroccans organized the crimes of New Year’s Eve. Before the Christmas break, I never heard jokes or comments like this. How swiftly stereotypes take root in people’s minds!

2. 
We have no choice but to be welcoming.

At the Forum of Welcoming Culture (Forum für Willkommenskultur), held in the Ehrenfeld district’s municipal hall every five weeks or so, less has changed. At the forum, residents from all walks of life volunteer to welcome refugees and present projects aimed at helping refugees. For example, there is one initiative that supports asylum seekers with official paperwork. Another organizes people to teach German, and still another brings together technicians to put up free wireless Internet in the asylum seekers’ shelters. At each forum, the mayor of Ehrenfeld makes a little speech.

On January 12, at the first forum of the new year, Ehrenfeld Mayor Josef Wirges spoke about the sexual assaults at the central station. According to the mayor, a Social Democrat, these attacks have changed things; many citizens of Cologne are concerned and feel frightened. He added that he assumed this would make it more difficult to get acceptance to open new asylum seekers’ homes in the neighborhood. But each week, about 300 refugees arrive in Cologne. And no female volunteer has ever experienced a sexual offense while helping refugees. So Mr. Wirges appealed to people: Carry on with welcoming refugees and explaining Germany’s values, including gender norms. There is no other alternative, he said.

A humanitarian tent greets refugees to Cologne.

 
3. People are talking, and you can hear them.

In Ehrenfeld you can’t walk around or sit in a bar without overhearing the words “refugees” or “New Year’s Eve.” Many people are articulating their opinions, forcefully. It is a new phenomenon to hear such frank and open talk about Angela Merkel’s refugee policy, which many hold responsible for the events of New Year’s Eve.

The opinions are all over the map—there is no “one” opinion. A female friend of mine, who works with the public sector, tells me she is afraid of German culture being overrun by Islam. A hairdresser, originally from the former East Germany, says she wants the Wall to be built again around the whole of Germany to stop the Islamic State from invading.

But then there is the acquaintance of mine who says she’s willing to give away a certain amount of her salary to finance the costs for refugees. And a couple in their mid-30s, parents of a 1-year-old child, think that every country of the world is morally obliged to take in refugees; they say that Germany has a special duty due to its Nazi past that made so many Germans homeless. Then a 45-year-old German of Turkish descent says that all asylum seekers should be required to leave the country after being convicted of a crime.
And these are just a few of the voices I happen to hear in Ehrenfeld.

4. In Ehrenfeld, the concerns are expressed alongside evidence of the successful integration of people from Turkey and of Turkish backgrounds.

The first generation of Turkish migrants came to Germany during the 1960s as “guest workers.” Today, Turkish people and institutions are seen as key ingredients of German culture and society. In Ehrenfeld, this is as plain to see as stone buildings. On the main street Venloer Straße, you find many Turkish grocery stores where you can buy olives, herbs, and fresh vegetables. There are Turkish bakeries that sell very sweet pastries. And now, still under construction, is Cologne’s Central Mosque, commissioned by the Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs. Residents of Ehrenfeld are accustomed to the two minarets and the big white dome designed in Ottoman style.

I note this, and remind myself how important it is to think long-term. Today, a Turkish presence is taken for granted. In a couple of years, why shouldn’t the same feeling allow us to consider Syrian people and Syrian culture as part of our own?

5. I have searched myself for changes, too.

I am a young, female resident of Cologne, and many acquaintances from abroad and Germany have contacted me. They want to know what I think about the New Year’s events and they ask if I am afraid of becoming a victim of crime now.

I respond that right now I am not any more anxious than before December 31, 2015. This is because everything still looks the same not only in Ehrenfeld but also at Cologne’s central station, where I often get off the train during the week. Yes, there are more police in and near the station. Maybe I am a bit more nervous when I’m on the street on dark winter evenings. But when I walk through the busy and bright train station, I find it hard to believe that this place now seems to be known to the whole world.

I think that the events occurred as a result of a very unlucky coincidence—of complete police failure, criminal gangs that planned the robberies, and the dynamics of alcoholized male groups. Without a doubt, these assaults must be condemned and criminals must be convicted. But the assaults must not be used as a pretext for xenophobic or anti-Muslim politics that victimize people who are already fleeing their homes and coming to Europe after long and dangerous journeys. Unfortunately, the sexual assaults have been used to advance populist, anti-Muslim politics here in Germany and around the world—including by critics of the European Union in Britain and Poland, and by the U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump.

I do not fear the refugees. I am much more afraid of something else: I am afraid that Germany, Europe, and the Western world will lose their human face as a result of prejudice and fear. I am afraid that the places where we live today (like my Ehrenfeld) will lose their tolerance, diversity, and openness.

We must not give into hysteria or fear. To borrow that famous British slogan, let’s all keep calm and carry on.

The post Why Cologne Will Keep Welcoming Refugees appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Basel had owned a bakery in the heart of Old Damascus, and he rarely charged me for my morning maamouls in another life, when I was an Arabic student in Syria. We’d chat through my very limited vocabulary while I waited for orange juice from the next stall. Now here he was on Sky News, standing in mud in what was once my country.

In Bosnia, we’ve been reliving our nightmare watching the Syrian war unfold. We’ve noted many similarities: mass displacement, loss, U.N. shortcomings, a recalcitrance to take refugees, a Russia-backed tyrant, a quiet international community. For me, following the recent crisis has been profoundly personal. Not only because I found a second home living in Damascus, but because what’s happening to the Syrian refugees is so disturbingly familiar.

We recently observed the 20th anniversary of the Dayton Accords. The agreement may have ended the Bosnian War, but it left us in a political limbo. Bosnia inherited a messy power-sharing agreement that institutionalized ethnic divisions and a countryside sown with signs reading, “Warning! Mines!” It is all a relentless reminder of our past, and a foreshadowing of Syria’s future.

In early spring of 1992, war crept quickly into our delightfully ordinary lives in Sarajevo. I first noticed that fewer and fewer of my classmates were coming to school. One day the teacher separated the few of us left by ethnicity: Bosniak and Croat kids were shoved to the back, and Serbs were to sit up front. Being of split parentage, I didn’t know where to sit. That was the last day I went to school. The shootings came closer every night in our suburban neighborhood, and we started sleeping in the bathroom, away from the windows. One shooting even happened in our building. It took days to wash all the blood off the walls and stairwell.

I remember some months into the violence when a parade of pristine white vehicles with their blue-helmeted passengers drove into Sarajevo. They honked, and we cheered in relief. My father knelt down so he was at my eye level, and pointed at them. “Look, Dragana,” he said to me, “That’s the United Nations. They’re here to stop the shootings. We’re safe now.”

On a particularly warm spring day, soon after the U.N. convoy arrived, I snuck out onto our balcony to play with my neighbor Zinka. I don’t know which she heard first, the shots or the glass shattering behind us, but she screamed “Sniper!” and sprinted across the long balcony back into the apartment. Instead of following, I froze. Even as everyone inside shouted at me to get up and run into the house, I couldn’t move. I was petrified. My father finally ran out and grabbed me.

Once we were inside, he shook me and yelled at me for going out. Others reasoned with him that I was in shock, and so was he. When you’re living under siege, it’s easy to forget that war is abnormal. People dying in barrel bomb attacks, and children washing up ashore are abnormal. Shooting at six-year-old girls is abnormal.

Not long after the balcony shooting, my mother, brother, and I escaped the siege. My parents put together all the money we had for the three of us to be smuggled out of Sarajevo on a cargo plane. My father stayed behind. I clung to him tightly at the airport and sobbed so hard that my whole face was wet. They lied to me, and to each other, that we would only be gone for a few weeks, just until the U.N. stopped the fighting.

We hung tightly onto each other as the cargo plane took off. We slid and screamed, and there was a loud explosion behind us once we were in the air. It was my first time on a plane, and I cried the whole time; everyone cried. Once we landed, we saw that the plane had been hit in the tail section by Serb forces during takeoff, and realized how close we had come to dying.

When our cargo plane landed, it was at a military base outside of Belgrade, much to my mother’s horror. No one knew where to go. A uniformed officer came out and walked sharply towards us carrying something in his hand, and a gun was visible in his holster. My mother held her breath and squeezed my hand tightly. My family is mixed—my father Bosnian Serb and my mother Bosnian Muslim. My name is a common name in Serbia, but my brother’s isn’t. We were too young to understand the significance of this.

“You just flew in from Sarajevo, didn’t you? I was informed a cargo plane was rerouted here,” he said in a way that made it sound like we were on holiday. He left out the part where his army nearly shot us down from the sky.

There is simply no way of lying when one is carrying two small children in pajamas, and a plastic bag full of documents, passports, diapers, and underwear. We could have passed for a homeless family if it weren’t for mom’s manicure and Ferragamos. Life, after all, was still somewhat normal until that afternoon, when we became refugees.

“Yes,” my mother said hesitantly.

The Serbian officer knelt down next to my brother and studied us. Which child would he talk to, and ask for our name? If we said too much, even if my brother just said his name or my mom’s name, we could be detained or attacked on the spot.

“I’m Dragana,” I volunteered, before he even asked. My mother audibly sighed and squeezed my hand twice in appreciation, a code not discussed but understood. The officer pinched my cheek and gave me the box of sweets he was carrying before walking away.

Like Basel from Damascus, even after fleeing the terror of war, we still were not safe. I remember the danger we faced as I see scenes of refugees like Basel desperately making their way across Europe. We had to deal with the legions of those eager to take advantage of our vulnerability—the smugglers, the criminals, the traffickers, and the violent xenophobes. Countries like Hungary also closed their borders to us, as they are doing now to Syrians. Others humiliated us to deter more refugees from coming. One of my cousins fled to Denmark, where she was denied freedom of movement and kept in a barracks for a year. Another two were held in long quarantine after they arrived in the Czech Republic, as if they might contaminate the population with their sense of loss. Even those who welcomed us did so only to a point. When the refugee population swelled, when we overstayed our welcome, we were blamed for everything from overcrowded schools to currency inflation.

At some point, refugees must make a definitive choice regarding their identity. Some adopt an Anglicized nickname, a new persona, a new history to be proud of, a new flag to pledge allegiance to, a new city to love. Others, like myself, continued to identify as a Sarajevan and a refugee, clinging to memories. I had to remember where I sat in my classroom, the name of the boy I liked, the lady at the newspaper stand downstairs. If I forgot, that meant giving up hope that we would go back one day. I would have given anything on this earth to wake up at home in Sarajevo on a dull day, watch my parents rush around getting ready for work, and run downstairs to get the paper and a pack of Walter Wolf cigarettes for my mother. Just one more time.

The most important part of being a refugee is being a good loser; it’s the only way to survive this. You learn to lose your nationality, your home to strangers with bigger guns, your father to mental illness, one aunt to genocide, and another to nationalism and ignorance. You learn to lose your kids, friends, dreams, neighbors, loves, diplomas, careers, photo albums, home movies, schools, museums, histories, landmarks, limbs, teeth, eyesight, sense of safety, sanity, and your sense of belonging in the world.

Basel, and all Syrian refugees, must master living with whatever is left of a person after everything is stripped away. Once he arrives where he’s going and sets his bags down, that’s when Basel will have to process everything, when he will count everything he’s had to leave behind. He will reflect on the past four years and wonder how the world watched and did nothing.

In 2014, I went back to Damascus as part of a UNICEF mission. Crossing the Lebanese border into Syria, in a sea of women carrying children and bags of clothes, I saw my mother everywhere. It was profoundly disturbing to put on a blue helmet every day before going out, and I struggled greatly to reconcile my U.N., refugee and survivor identities.

One morning in April 2014, I put on that blue helmet to tour the schools with a colleague in Damascus. We were about 30 meters from the school entrance when the mortar hit in front of us, and I fell to the ground. A guard shouted at me to get up and run inside before the next one hit, but I was too scared to move. That’s when I remembered Zinka and the balcony shooting. There is a low, soft whistle that is heard before a mortar hits very close. It happens just a fraction of a second before it hits, and somewhere deep inside, I had buried that sound and that memory.

The most difficult part of my journey as a refugee is the coming to terms with the fact that I can’t prevent this from happening to someone else. In Damascus, I often found myself telling displaced children whom I worked with that “schools and houses can be rebuilt when the war is over.” Perhaps I should have said something more pragmatic, told them they would never go home again, at least not to the place where they left their toys and friends, where they felt safe and loved. But instead, I said things like, “You’ll go back home when the war is over.” It’s obvious now that I not only lied to them, but also to myself. I only stopped identifying as a refugee when I stopped fighting, and I acknowledged that nothing will ever put my family and my life back together the way it was.

Despite these dark recollections, it’s generally not war that refugees choose to remember, but the people who help you. My mother’s colleague who snuck us out of Serbia, French volunteers who took refugee kids camping, and those who came to welcome us at the airport when we were resettled in Ohio; those are the people I think of daily. I hope Basel finds such people on his path too.

The post For Refugees, Home Is a Place Called Never appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The panelists, who appeared together at Deutsche Bank in Berlin, praised many welcoming efforts in Germany and in other parts of Europe, and said the greater attention, money to support refugees and countries taking them in, and more local volunteers assisting refugees were good signs. “I’m really excited we’re living in these times,” said Astrid Ziebarth, director of the German Marshall Fund’s Immigration and Integration Program. “We’ve seen an Airbnb for refugees looking for places to stay … We have seen online universities for refugees who want to continue their education … It’s the birth of a new society.”

But panelists tempered talk of progress with criticism of how refugees were being treated and calls for much broader changes in how refugees are treated in Europe and around the world. “The situation is terrible for the people who reach Europe and Germany. Having said that, they are in a much better place,” said Wenzel Michalski, Germany director of Human Rights Watch. He added that on a recent trip to Athens, he saw refugees camping on cardboard boxes in a park—but they were able to sleep and were safer than they had been in theaters of war.

The panelists took a dim view of “hot spots” for refugees that have been set up to register and relocate refugees. Moderator and Reuters global news editor Alessandra Galloni said that police in Italy can look the other way as people avoid registration. And efforts to relocate people to other countries have been insufficient, with only a handful of people relocated so far.

The panelists, along with one lawyer in the New York audience, also suggested that existing legal definitions distinguishing asylum seekers and migrants did not fit human realities. Syrian refugees can have different needs and motivations when they leave Syria and head to Turkey than when they leave to Turkey for Europe. There’s also what was called a “two-class system,” in which Syrians are treated better than refugees from Iraq, Afghanistan, and other countries.

“The idea that all EU countries need to play a role and they need to determine who will be responsible for asylum claims—establishing that principle has been very valuable,” said Susan Fratzke, policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute. “In practice, there’s a lot more to be done.”

Much of the conversation focused on the commitment by Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel to welcoming refugees. Panelists discussed whether the political culture and labor markets of Germany could handle 800,000 refugees or more over a long period of time. But the impact of Germany’s more open door policy should serve as an example for others.

“If she hadn’t said that refugees and asylum seekers are welcome in Germany, we would have seen people piling up on these tiny Greek islands,” said Michalski of Human Rights Watch. “Probably we would have seen more people dying.”

Naomi Steinberg, director of Refugee Council USA, said that Germany’s generosity offered a stark contrast with the far less welcoming response by the U.S. government. “I’m coming from a country where we have not seen leadership,” she said, noting that the U.S. has taken in fewer than 2,000 Syrian refugees, which represents a departure from more generous American responses in previous refugee crises. “The bottom line in the United States is: If we wanted to resettle more Syrian refugees, we could.”

NPR’s Jacki Lyden, who moderated with an audience watching a simulcast in New York for the Public Radio International program “America Abroad,” and CUNY professor Richard Alba, also in New York, raised questions about whether Germany could integrate so many refugees.

In response, Ziebarth and Michalski, the two Germans on the panel, were optimistic, while noting that it would take considerable work. They also argued that integration of and care for refugees are in Germany’s best interests—so that people who remain became productive members of society.

Michalski noted that he has a refugee living with him. “I have a young doctor living in my home,” he said. “My friend, the doctor, he needs another eight months or year at university, and then he can work as a doctor. There’s a lack of doctors here because our doctors tend to go to Norway or the United States because they make more money there.”

In response to a question from journalist Marcus Walker about how Germany became “the America of the E.U.” and whether it and other welcoming countries like Sweden could bear such a burden, Michalski noted that Germany has successfully welcomed Syrian refugees for many years “but the numbers were kept under the carpet.”

The panelists all said that the refugee question requires more European-wide and global policies—for the good of countries and refugees. Steinberg of the Refugee Council USA said the world needed to create more safe travel options and destinations for refugees. She also noted that very few refugees return to their home countries, which means their issues should be considered more in the context of resettlement.

Fratzke of the Migration Policy Institute said such conversations should include many more kinds of institutions and people, and must focus more on early interventions and on the 86 percent of global refugees who are hosted in developing countries.

“One of the lessons we can take is that migration and refugee crises aren’t just issues for migration policymakers or humanitarian agencies,” Fratzke said. “These are crises that need to be viewed from a foreign policy perspective, from a development perspective … from a global perspective.”

The post Learning in the Midst of a Humanitarian Crisis appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Now the crisis is forcing the people of Europe to decide not only the fate of millions of (mostly) Syrian refugees, but also the fate of their Union.

At the most prosaic level, the urgent question is how to alleviate the suffering of the approximately 4 million Syrians displaced from their homes by a horrific civil war. After initially overwhelming Syria’s neighbors, an increasing number have undertaken the arduous journey to Europe, seeking asylum.

These waves of Syrian refugees are coming ashore in a Europe still frayed from wrenching debates over its shared currency, the debts of its weakest member states, and the appropriate response to Russian aggression on its periphery. The refugees are like house guests arriving in the awkward aftermath of the continent’s family feud and threatening, through no fault of their own, to exacerbate it.

Under different circumstances, this should have been the European Union’s finest moment. The “European Project” of an ever closer union—as EU insiders are fond of describing it—is the most daring sovereignty-pooling, one-for-all-and-all-for-one cross-border experiment of modern times. The EU’s goal is nothing less than a harmonious and prosperous state of being in which individual member countries transcend their baser nationalistic impulses for the common good—and for their redemption after two world wars and the unparalleled misery they wrought. If humanitarianism and a fervent embrace of international law have a home, it should be in Europe.

In good times and in bad, the Union’s well-intentioned ruling technocracy likes to exude dispassionate competence and a penchant for proper process. So, in the anodyne eurospeak of Brussels, the Greek and other debt troubles were supposed to be governed by the “Maastricht criteria” (which established permissible debt and deficit ratios for countries adopting the euro). And the response to a flood of refugees was supposed to be governed by such technocratic shorthand as “Schengen” (the agreement under which member states lowered borders between them) and “Dublin” (the convention dictating that refugees are to be considered for asylum in the first EU country they arrive at) and the broader writ of the 1951 Convention on Refugees.

But occasionally, the pesky people themselves step in to be heard, resentful of how much sovereignty they have surrendered to their shared “project.” The architects of the 28-nation European Union have always paid lip service to the legal maxim of subsidiarity—the idea that decisions should be pushed down to the lowest possible level of government—but of course not everyone interprets the principle in the same way. European elites assume that matters of migration and refugees are for the Union to handle as a collective, but many people across Europe—indeed, many national governments also—disagree. For them, there is no more local and visceral question than who is to be counted as belonging to the club. And so we see the fierce pushback against centralized attempts to dictate quotas of refugees to be accepted by each member nation.

Europeans have long fretted about a so-called “democratic deficit” within Europe, as more and more decision-making power gets shipped from national capitals to the EU bureaucracy in Brussels. But Ivan Krastev, a perceptive observer of European politics who chairs the Center for Liberal Strategies in Sofia, Bulgaria, describes a more nuanced gap created by “the Europeanization of policymaking and the re-nationalization of politics.”

Krastev believes the European Union has shown more resilience than people acknowledge. Despite the fact that Germany had plenty of commercial reasons to continue coddling Vladimir Putin’s leadership in Russia, Angela Merkel stood firm with other EU members in imposing sanctions on Russia in response to Putin’s Ukrainian adventure. Then the euro/Greek debt crisis failed to undo the eurozone, contrary to most economists’ predictions.

Now Germany is showing leadership within the EU in addressing the refugee crisis, mindful of its historical debt to humanity. Berlin has agreed to take in more than its fair share of refugees, while berating reluctant countries to the east to do their part.

The heart of the European Union remains its founding steel-producing core encompassing the northeast of France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany’s western industrial heartland along the Ruhr and the Rhine. That’s the swath of Europe that hosted Waterloo, Verdun, and the D-Day landings and their aftermath. The periphery of the Union, by contrast, is feeling increasingly skeptical about how the EU is evolving, and about the price of membership.

Newer EU members to the east, like the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland, are shamefully balking at taking in their share of refugees. It’s as if this crisis, on top of the earlier Greek debt drama, punctured the eastern fantasy that membership in the European Union amounted to an affirmation, after so many years of enduring communist rule, that they had arrived at the end of history. For them, EU membership was about sharing dividends, not burdens, and certainly not the burden of being told what kind of people, and how many, to take into their relatively homogenous societies as refugees.

The ringleader for half-hearted Europeans remains the United Kingdom, perennially with one foot in and one foot out of the Union. It’s no surprise that this crisis and the ensuing hand-wringing about the state of Europe comes against the backdrop of British negotiations to reform the EU and seek more concessions and autonomy from Brussels. Prime Minister David Cameron has committed to a referendum on continued membership and is seeking the best possible deal for his country before he asks voters to weigh in on whether to stay or leave. More than ever, given the chaotic and divisive moment, the British may play a decisive rule in shaping Europe’s future.

Krastev believes that the future will bring more differentiation between the levels of engagement of Union members, which he considers healthy and necessary. But he doesn’t believe the peripheral members pose an existential threat to the idea or reality of a European Union. He’s studied the disintegration of the Soviet Union and other entities and found that historical collapses almost never occur because of some grand opposition scheme or from the poking of marginal members; they tend to happen as a result of complacency in the core of the region itself.

Krastev says the only thing harder to imagine than the Union’s continued viability after all these crises is the Union’s disintegration “There is a sense among some in Europe that it is time to go back,” he says. “But back to where? To 1936?”

What will the refugees do to Europe, its politics, and the continent’s historic integration? That’s the intriguing long-term question posed by the current crisis. The more immediate question is what Europeans are prepared to do for the refugees coming in need of asylum.

Answering that one shouldn’t be difficult.

The post What Does the Refugee Crisis Mean for the European Ideal? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This willingness to help, and to provide an emphatic response to Germany’s small but radical anti-immigration movement, points to a seismic shift in German society. A growing openness to immigrants can be observed in a country that for a long time clung to the illusion that it was somehow, by definition, not a nation of immigrants—regardless of the fact that around 20 percent of Germany’s current residents are born outside the country or have at least one foreign-born parent.

Merkel’s decision to follow a humanitarian rather than a legalistic approach is in part explained by these changed attitudes. It is also informed by the recent reform of Germany’s naturalization law. The new law, which was passed in 1999, allows for the integration of immigrants who no longer need to be of German descent or married to Germans to obtain citizenship.

Still, there are limits to the new openness, especially with the rising numbers of arrivals, and the exploding estimates of those yet to come. Merkel’s stance comes increasingly under attack, and her popularity is diminishing. The chancellor is accused of having encouraged even more people in the Middle East and northern Africa to hit the road and seek a better future in the wealthy countries of Europe, where they might eventually overwhelm the authorities’ capacity to accommodate them, not to mention societies’ willingness to accept them. After all, most of the refugees from war-torn countries like Syria, Iraq, or Afghanistan are unlikely ever to return. They may be asylum seekers when they arrive, but Germans see them as immigrants.

Postwar Germany has an instructive history when it comes to immigration. After all, no other European country in the period has been able to absorb as many refugees and immigrants—a total of some 25 million people.

The first wave of mass immigration hit Germany at a time when it was least prepared to integrate millions of people. With the military victory over Nazi Germany, the Allies decided not only to cede a quarter of the country’s prewar territory to Poland and the Soviet Union, but also to allow Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Romania to rid themselves of their ethnically German populations. As a consequence, what remained of Germany experienced a refugee crisis of epic dimensions. Between 1945 and 1948, about 12 million refugees and expellees poured into the war-devastated country from the east. They did not receive a warm welcome. In many cases, Allied military police had to make sure locals would not deny them shelter and support. Many of the refugees found themselves exploited by farmers, who offered poor accommodation and meager food in exchange for hard labor and their remaining valuables. Notwithstanding individual cases of solidarity and generosity, the Germans from the east felt for years like second-class citizens. It was only recently that German society at large began to take a real interest in their fate and publicly recognize the enormous contributions they had made to Germany’s postwar recovery. This awareness seems to inform the perception of the current refugees.

The second wave of immigration occurred in the 1960s, when West Germany’s booming industry experienced its first labor shortage. To square the circle of having to recruit foreign labor without opening the country to permanent immigration of people of non-German backgrounds, the government launched its “guest worker” program. In bilateral agreements with Mediterranean nations such as Italy, Spain, Morocco, Yugoslavia, Greece, and Turkey, Germany recruited millions of labor migrants with the understanding that they would eventually return home. No efforts were made to integrate them in German society. While many of the “guest workers” did eventually return, millions stayed for good, often because their adult children, born and raised in Germany, refused to “return” to a country they hardly knew. At the same time, Germany’s restrictive naturalization laws did not allow these children of immigrants born on German soil to obtain citizenship. Hence they often lived at the fringe of German society, with a sense of not being welcome, underperforming in the country’s school system, and exposed to various forms of discrimination on the job and housing markets. This reality discredited both the ethics and wisdom of the “guest worker” program, and led to the recent reform of the German naturalization law.

Yet before Germany was ready to fully embrace immigrants of diverse cultural backgrounds, the government would try one more time to fit a square peg into a round hole. In the late 1980s, the Federal Republic addressed its low birth rate by inviting ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe in as permanent immigrants. Within only a decade, more than 3 million people arrived, mostly from the Soviet Union and its successor states, but also from Poland and Romania. While they came officially as ethnic Germans, their presence led to a mushrooming of Russian-language newspapers, Russian television channels, and Russian food stores—frequented also by tens of thousands of Russian Jews who simultaneously immigrated to Germany.

Looking back, the country absorbed these three waves of immigration without falling apart, although none of them was handled in way that recommends itself as a model going forward. On the other hand, German society over time got not only used to the increased diversity, but in large part has also come to embrace what the immigrants brought with them. Among the customers of the Russian or Turkish food stores are also the “good old Germans,” who appreciate the greatly increased variety of vodkas and have for a long time preferred Mediterranean cuisine to Bratwurst and potatoes. Turkish filmmakers and Russian-born writers are the stars of the German cultural scene today, and nobody has a problem with the fact that a recent vice chancellor was born in Vietnam, or that among the recent stars of the beloved Mannschaft—the German national soccer team—we’ve had players with last names like Gomez, Özil, Boateng, and Podolski.

The German reaction to the current refugee crisis suggests that the lessons from the past waves of immigration have been learned, and that most Germans want to get it right this time. They are ready to show the current refugees the solidarity that they denied to the German expellees in 1945, and they are willing to embrace immigration that will further increase the country’s diversity. At the same time, Germans expect the immigrants to become part of their society, which includes accepting its liberal values and secular culture. Merkel, who in 2010 declared the concept of the multicultural society to have failed, is siding with those who advocate for a “welcoming culture” when it comes to refugees and immigrants. Simultaneously, her government is taking steps to facilitate a rapid integration of those who are likely to stay. The sheer number of refugees arriving today makes that an enormous challenge. But should Merkel’s government and German society succeed in integrating the newcomers, the implications will be far-reaching in redefining Germany, explicitly, as a nation of immigrants, and in undermining the credibility of Europe’s anti-immigration movements.

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One day not long ago, Rawia became one of the millions of Syrians who decided it was time to leave. Her reasons were complicated, and the decision broke her heart. She could see her country’s youth being swallowed by the hopelessness of war as schools closed and militias ballooned. “We are losing all sort of young people, I didn’t know how to support them,” she says from the safety of the United Arab Emirates. As much as she wanted to stay and help, her calculation boiled down to this: The safety net she had been relying upon to survive Syria’s conflict was stretched beyond its breaking point.

That safety net was overseas family, and their little-noticed, silent influx of financial support crossing borders over these years to keep millions of Syrians back home alive. Some 10 million people of Syrian origin lived in the diaspora by the time the uprising began, and their remittances have helped many families stave off the worst suffering. The diaspora paid rents, sent grocery money, shipped in medical supplies, and wired emergency funds. But after four years of extended families depleting their savings, and as the needs back home keep mounting, the math has stopped working. This is one of the explanations underlying the death-defying flight of hundreds of thousands of Syrians into neighboring countries, Europe, the Persian Gulf, and elsewhere.

For the past two years, I’ve met members of the Syrian diaspora across the Gulf, attended their fundraisers, and watched their businesses go bankrupt as revenues were re-routed to humanitarian aid. It is impossible to know just how much money they sent, and estimates vary widely—from $2 billion to $20 billion since 2011. But what is certain is that the sums kept millions of Syrian families afloat.

Four years into the conflict, however, the diaspora can’t keep up with the bills. “In the peaceful days, I was able to pay for my family in Syria even from my own pocket,” one Syrian expatriate worker in Dubai explains. “Now I cannot. I have a mother overseas, a brother abroad, an uncle who is not working, and his kid is injured. … To support them all used to be sustainable and now it’s not anymore.”

Rawia’s case is typical. The war took its time in reaching her. In 2012 and even early 2013, life continued as usual. Then slowly, the price of fuel climbed up; soon it wasn’t available at all. Food was costly. Thousands of impoverished, scared civilians started to arrive from the countryside with tales of horror that the city hadn’t yet seen. “The number of poor people increased so much,” she says.

The fighting itself grew closer too. Pro-government gangs known as the shabiha became the enforcers of life on the street. Rawia started staying home after 4 p.m., before the roving thugs came out. She is a Christian and a supporter of the opposition to Syrian President Bashar Al Assad, but in Tartus, she recalls, “I cannot open my mouth.”

Rawia’s lifeline had been her brothers, longtime expatriate professionals in the United Arab Emirates. They had sent money to pay for cooking gas when prices rose and helped her buy bread when it wasn’t safe to work anymore. By early 2014, however, the brothers were running out of cash and the prices in Syria were going up. Rawia left for Lebanon, and then took a flight abroad. She isn’t sure if she’ll ever go back.

Even if aid groups had been more active in Tartus, they likely wouldn’t have stopped Rawia from picking up to leave. What she lost wasn’t just a monetary amount, but the guarantee that there was something to fall back on. She lost stability, hope—a future that would lead somewhere. When family and friends told her she was on her own, the very idea of tomorrow in Syria evaporated.

Many refugees aspire to resettle in the very countries they blame for standing by as Syria has fallen apart. The West initially promised insurgent Syrians help; in 2011, after the government killed thousands of unarmed demonstrators, the European Union and the United States called on Assad to step down. But in the coming months and years, no one set up a no-fly zone, helped evacuate civilians, or did much of anything as the regime bombed breadlines and dropped chemical weapons.

Now with their blind hopes, the scores of civilians running to Europe offer the West one last opportunity to prove Syrian lives matter to them. If they are not cared for, integrated, and welcomed, Europe risks creating a new, marginalized class vulnerable to the very deprivation and even extremism they have fled from.

Most Syrians would likely prefer to have stayed in Syria or somewhere close by, where family, culture, and language are familiar. Indeed, the first to flee settled in neighboring countries close to the border, expecting to return quickly to their former lives. Arrivals to Jordan’s Zaatari camp pitched tents they thought would need to last them a few weeks. Four years later, those first inhabitants are still shocked to find themselves refugees.

In neighboring countries, too, Syrian refugees were dependent on the quiet lifeline of their wealthier relations and friends. Expatriates in the United Arab Emirates, for example, organized to send shipments of medicine, sanitary supplies, rice, and dates to the neighboring countries where many had displaced family. The vast majority of refugees in Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan live outside of the official refugee camps, which means they need to pay their own rent and living expenses. Legally barred from working in their new homes, refugees looked to overseas help.

Meanwhile, for reasons inexplicable to the millions of Syrians in need, the world hasn’t been galvanized by their heartbreak. Aid officials complain it is impossible to drum up public support for donations in the West. Even as the needs compound, international aid per person has actually fallen. In 2013, the UN recorded $4.6 billion in aid, compared to $5.1 billion in 2014—a rise of about 10 percent. But during the same period, the number of refugees Syria rose from 500,000 to 3.7 million, or 750 percent. With funds stretched so thin, every month brings a new announcement that relief groups will have to cut back their services. The only help for Syrians these last four years, it has often seemed, was from themselves.

The new Syrian diaspora will not be like the old one. Before the war, living in Europe was a dream reserved for rich; something doctors and lawyers could aspire to. Now, the dangerous escapade across the Mediterranean has become the last resort of the poor. They will arrive destitute and alone, fragile from living through years of atrocities and equipped only with their fading dreams.

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Powerful images selected for their depiction of extreme distress have the power to distort more than they reveal. They portray refugees as a mass of suffering humanity, as helpless flotsam and jetsam. It’s rare to find much in the way of context or explanation. Refugees are often made speechless, and people without history, by efforts to make them seem more pitiable and worthier recipients of our charity. The impulse is to portray refugees as victims, rather than protagonists.

To be sure, refugees have encountered grave danger, hardship, and deprivation. But it is also imperative to look beyond the headlines to think about how their experiences of forced departures, hazardous journeys, and arrival at some kind of destination have shaped their identity. Doing this draws attention to refugees as people who have negotiated often appalling hardship and danger, and whose determination and capability point to their potential contribution to the host society rather than to the burden they are often assumed to be.

Although the wish to resolve their present predicament—to find a place of safety for the foreseeable future—consumes refugees’ time and energy, it’s important to consider that the past too weighs heavily on their mind. This is a common human condition, but it exerts a particular influence on refugees. Having lost so much—family and friends they have left behind, homes and belongings abandoned—we might say that the past is a precious resource for refugees. Retaining a hold on history enables refugees to maintain a meaningful connection to the country they left behind, and holds out the possibility of being able to return when the time is right.

The past shapes so much of how and why refugees do what they do, including the choices they may be able to make about where to go. Refugees often trace the footsteps of earlier migrants. To take just a few examples: Exiles from the Spanish Civil War in 1936 tracked earlier generations of migrants who picked grapes and harvested sugar beets in nearby France; in 1948, well-to-do Palestinian refugees fled to Beirut because this enabled them to take advantage of the commercial contacts made by their forefathers; likewise, Bosnian Muslim women who were targeted by Serb militias during the early 1990s took refuge in Slovenia because their menfolk had traditionally sought temporary work in Ljubljana. Today’s monotonous reports about people-smuggling fundamentally miss the point that refugees often follow in the familiar footsteps of family members and friends who’ve already created diasporic communities.

And once they arrive, refugees have to “relive” the past in a very specific way. They are required to draw on personal experience of persecution in order to secure formal recognition as refugees; that is, they need to construct a credible narrative to convince legal tribunals of the validity of their claim to asylum. But these condensed narratives for official consumption are ultimately fragments. It’s easy to miss the rich texture of their history.

In their own homes, refugees may keep photographs and other mementoes such as books, jewelry, and embroidery to testify to a past life. Though it is impossible to return to their old homes, they hold on to keys that are not only a tangible reminder of an abandoned house but also convey a hope or expectation of being able one day to reclaim it. Memory books inscribe the names of neighbours, houses, and streets to recollect a world that has been lost: such books play an important part in the lives of Palestinian refugees, and are equally precious to Jewish survivors of the Holocaust and to the descendants of Armenians who survived terrible persecution during World War I. Like the key to one’s home, a memory book can also serve as a claim to restitution. They enable historians like myself to uncover a different and richer history than is available in official government records or in formulaic legal documents. They bring to life the historical experiences of refugees.

This is not to discount the fact that refugees’ efforts to memorialize their “roots” can be the cause of tension. The children of Vietnamese refugees installed a boat on a beach in Pulau Galang, Indonesia, much to the irritation of the government of Vietnam, to draw attention to the hazardous journeys made by their parents during the 1970s exodus.

Refugees’ engagement with the past is understandably related to ideas of catastrophe, as is clear from the history of Armenians, Jews, and Palestinians, and also the less well-known case of Serbia, where one-third of the population became refugees during World War I.

For refugee diasporas, the moment of departure, the triggering catastrophe, is a moment of rupture, an end to a way of life, but also a new beginning, the forging of a new group’s identity for generations to come in their new home. But an interesting question for historians assessing refugee diasporas and their past is whose past is being drawn upon and for what purpose? For instance, there are conflicting narratives about the defining flight of Tibetan refugees. Depending on whom you talk to, these Tibetan refugees were either victimized by the economic and cultural colonization of Tibet by ethnic Chinese and the People’s Republic, or duped into flight by those who endorsed the feudalism still prevailing in their remote province.

Historical narratives of displacement are intertwined with political agendas. Once flight becomes your only means of rescuing yourself from calamity, it becomes easier to rewrite history to suit current needs, which is why past good-neighborliness is often discounted. This happens in accounts of pre-partition India, inter-war Palestine, the former Yugoslavia, and pre-genocide Rwanda. Better, so to say, to recycle ideas of ethnic difference to explain conflict. This can help to fuel further conflict rather than contribute to reconciliation.

Does history suggest that there is something durable about “refugeeness?” That once a refugee, always a refugee? Understandably, the legacy of displacement lingers long in the mind of refugees and may carry over into later generations. It might be built into the material fabric of daily life, as with Greek and Turkish towns and villages that still carry traces of refugee settlement from the 1920s as the Ottoman Empire collapsed and European diplomats engineered a massive population exchange.

In sum, refugees are quite capable of living a life with many dimensions. The refugee past can be relived and commemorated, but it can also be accommodated and transcended. It’s worth remembering this next time your eyes are drawn to the images of refugees who aren’t allowed to speak.

The post Why We Shouldn’t See Refugees as Huddled Masses appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

What’s emerged in recent years is a chaotic Europe instead of a “German Europe.” And the most striking illustration of this is the sequel to this summer’s Greek drama—the ongoing migration crisis.

The migration crisis is the third in the last five years—after the euro crisis and the Ukraine crisis—to test the fortitude of the European Union and Germany’s leadership within it. That so many of the hundreds of thousands of refugees making their way to Europe from war-torn regions around the world—Syria, above all—want to come to Germany is itself an illustration of the reality of the new Europe. Since the euro crisis began, the European Union has been divided into a booming “core”—led by Germany—and an impoverished “periphery.” In this context, it is unsurprising that Germany is the destination of choice for so many refugees. But it is now overwhelmed by the 800,000 asylum seekers it expects to receive this year—1 percent of its population.

The influx of refugees is a consequence of a failure of foreign policy. For five years, Europeans remained passive as the conflict in Syria worsened. There is no consensus about whether a use of military force at an early stage would have helped stabilize Syria or made the situation worse. But Germany offered little in the way of alternatives to the air strikes undertaken by the United States and a few other E.U. member states. Now policymakers in Brussels and Berlin are forced to watch Vladimir Putin wade into a problem they were incapable of fixing.

In each of Europe’s three recent trials—Ukraine, Greek debt, refugees—there has been much talk among Union members of the need for “solidarity,” though the term has meant something different in each case. But the migration crisis reversed the dynamic of the previous two. In the euro crisis, it was the indebted southern member states that wanted Germany to show “solidarity.” In the Ukraine crisis, it was eastern member states such as the Baltic nations and Poland that felt threatened by Russia. Now, however, as hundreds of thousands of refugees seek to make their way to Germany, it is Germany that needs “solidarity” from other member states—for them to accept their “fair share” of asylum seekers.

In some ways, the refusal of other EU member states to share the burden in the migration crisis can be seen as a reaction to Germany’s reluctance to share the burden in the other two crises. In the euro crisis, it was the debtor counties that bore the burden of adjustment. In the Ukraine crisis, there was also much discussion of burden-sharing—both the economic costs of sanctions against Russia (officials talked about the principle of “equal pain”) and defense spending (there has long been a discussion about “burden sharing” between NATO members). What has emerged is an EU in which member states simply pursue their own narrowly defined national interests and leave others to deal with difficult problems if they are able to.

In the current crisis, under the EU’s Dublin Convention, refugees are required to claim asylum in the first EU member state in which they arrive, which puts disproportionate pressure on the countries on Europe’s eastern and southern external borders. Greece, in particular, has struggled to deal with the surge in the number of migrants who travel from Syria through Turkey. In May, the European Commission proposed a system of refugee quotas for member states based on population size and other factors, which Germany has supported. Perhaps unsurprisingly, other member states have been unreceptive to the idea. In particular, central European countries such as the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovakia flatly refused quotas of asylum seekers.

At the end of August, Germany announced it was itself suspending the application of the Dublin Convention and processing asylum seekers in Germany rather than sending them back to countries such as Greece. While this was widely seen as an act of generosity—just weeks after being widely criticized for threatening to eject Greece from the eurozone, Germany suddenly became a “moral beacon”—it may have also exacerbated the problem by encouraging yet more refugees to make their way to Europe and in particular to Germany.

Then, in mid-September, as the chaos in Europe worsened, Germany imposed controls on its border with Austria—which was seen as a unilateral suspension of the Union’s commitment to free, unfettered travel between member nations. As the central European countries dug in their heels in opposing taking more refugees, German Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière threatened to cut EU support funds to them. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán accused Germany of “moral imperialism”—an echo of criticisms of German “fiscal imperialism” during the euro crisis.

It is striking that the member states that most vehemently opposed quotas were central European countries such as Slovakia whose economies are deeply integrated with Germany’s and who just a few weeks earlier had supported Germany in debates over how to handle Greek debt. At its best, the European Union functions through grand bargains between its different member states that reconcile their interests across different issues. But Germany’s inability to persuade other countries to accept and integrate even a few thousand asylum seekers suggests that it lacks either the legitimacy or the capacity to get other Europeans to accept its lead. In short, the migration crisis shows once again that Europe cannot be run from Berlin.

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