The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam by Douglas Murray

Author:Douglas Murray [Murray, Douglas]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3, pdf
ISBN: 9781472942258
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2017-05-03T16:00:00+00:00

11

The pretence of repatriation

In 1795 Immanuel Kant wrote of his preference for states over ‘universal monarchy’. For as he recognised, ‘the wider the sphere of their jurisdiction, the more laws lose in force; and soulless despotism, when it has choked the seeds of good, at last sinks into anarchy.’1 This view was not shared by the politicians who ruled Europe over the last quarter of a century. ‘Borders,’ proclaimed the European Commission President, Jean-Claude Juncker, in August 2016, ‘are the worst invention ever made by politicians.’ If it was at least arguable whether politicians had actually ‘invented’ borders, by the time Juncker made this statement it was obvious that politicians were certainly able to make borders disappear.

In 2015, when Angela Merkel opened a door that was already ajar, the arrangements within the continent certainly favoured the views of Juncker over those of Kant. Anybody coming into Europe during that year would discover that once inside Europe there were no more borders. From 1995 onwards, twenty-six countries signed up to the Schengen Agreement that created a border-free zone. From Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece in the south all the way up to Sweden, Finland and Estonia in the north by way of Hungary, Slovakia, Austria, France and the Netherlands, this agreement meant that more than 400 million people within Europe had the right to move freely across the continent without even having to show a passport. One condition was that the member countries had common responsibility for policing the external borders. But otherwise – with the exception of the United Kingdom, and five other smaller EU states, which refused to involve themselves in Schengen – the continent became from 1995 onwards one vast, borderless zone. It was a dream of European harmonisation and integration.

The Schengen Agreement was intended to augur a new era of peace and unity. It seemed hard to imagine the disadvantages of such ‘free and unrestricted movement of people, goods, services and capital’. It was good for trade and it was good for a Frenchman who wanted to go to Brussels for the evening. Whatever the downsides, the Schengen Agreement was not just about the practical ease of travel that it ushered in but about the message it gave out. If ever there was a continent whose population could be persuaded that borders were the problem it would be Europe. One interpretation of the twentieth century is that twice in just twenty-five years the whole continent had gone to war over borders. In 1914 and again in the late 1930s the issue of borders had heralded the catastrophe of a continent. If these conflicts in which Europe twice lost a generation of its young men had indeed been caused by the existence of borders, then who would not wish to abolish them? In the same way that if the nation state is the cause of war, then who would not wish to get rid of the nation state?

Among the flaws in this argument are the misguided ideas that

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.