24 September 2015
The Only Lesson of History…
…is that we learn nothing from history.
by J R Thomas
In 1919, Woodrow Wilson, Georges Clemenceau, Vittorio Orlando and David Lloyd George, the leaders of the victorious powers in the War to End All Wars, sat down together to sort out Europe. It was a job that might have defeated the most determined and thoughtful of politicians, not one ideally suited to four aging men, two of whom were not in the best of health and all of whom were exhausted from four years of warfare on an unprecedented scale.
When we look now at what they faced, we might do well to be more sympathetic to them than history has generally been. They were faced with a Europe where the dominant ruling super powers had collapsed, where new political ideologies were well-armed and seizing control, where economies were destroyed and social certainties devastated. All the forces of nationalism which had been suppressed by strong (if undemocratic) centralised government had been released by the defeat or devastation of those very governments. The new nations were anxious to have ethnic coherence within their new boundaries, and were prepared in some cases to be pretty ruthless to make sure that they achieved it.
If those themes do not seem vaguely familiar to anybody making even a desultory study of current Middle Eastern politics (and the historicism of the last 100 years) which have led us to the present tragedies, then add another factor. Peter Gatrell, in his great study of the First World War, “A Whole Empire Walking” attempts to calculate the number of refugees in the middle years of the war, in 1916, as the German, Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires began the economic collapse brought by looming defeat, revolution and the ruinous costs of war. He estimates that in Europe there were four million refugees, people displaced by the battlefields, by the changes in the control of territories, by simple loss of livelihood. In Russia, he thinks there were a further three million refugees – about 5% of the Russian population. The end of the war and the final collapse of the three great central European empires brought a further vast increase in the numbers of uprooted people as they sought jobs, homes, and statehood.
Joseph Roth was born in that strangely confused borderland which abuts Poland, Ukraine and Austria, but which had become a safe haven for many Jewish families in the nineteenth century, under the shelter of the great Hapsburg wing which extended across central Europe. Like many of his compatriots, he sought for statehood and identity, searching for a sense of whom he now was. Polish was the eventual answer for many of his former neighbours – though not for Roth, who fought hard for Austrian citizenship (although having won it, he spent most of the rest of his life wandering around central European capitals and died in Paris). His novels and writings, mostly set in those tumultuous twenty years, deal endlessly with the theme of loss of fortune, of statehood, of loyalties, of certainties. They were themes which resonated strongly with the uprooted populations of eastern and central Europe.
And here we are again. The post Great War drawing by the victorious powers of almost arbitrary lines on Middle Eastern maps had little to do with the underlying tribes, religions and loyalties of those who lived there, but much more to do with straight lines, creating tidy states and areas of European influence. What perhaps is surprising is how long those artificially created countries – loose stones held together with hardly any mortar – have lasted. Through a combination of strong rulers with western support and small and mostly poverty-stricken populations, the new countries have cohered. Until now. The revival of Islam, and the conflicts between various branches of Islam, has made the rapidly growing and increasingly educated populations much more politically aware. The transition from relatively benign autocracy to simple and highly repressive dictatorships has fuelled that politicisation. When the right conditions were unleashed by the wars against Saddam Hussein, the genii of civil war were released; and the devastation of social and economic structures set the population who could – walking, driving, escaping however they might – fleeing from their failed nations of Syria, Iraq, Libya and (to a lesser extent) Tunisia and the Kurdish lands.
As has been frequently pointed out, those who are escaping tend to be the better educated, the younger, the fitter, the wealthier. They tend of course to be male; with or without young families. The future of these countries are on their feet and fleeing west.
How the problem of allocating the new arrivals is dealt with within Europe will no doubt emerge within the coming months. It seems likely to be an informal system based on resources and existing population, but with Germany taking a great deal more than her “fair” share, reflecting her wealth, her guilt from 70 years ago, and, to the cynics, her increasing need for a younger working population as the German birth rate drops well below replacement levels.
And the flood will almost certainly soon slow to a trickle. Already the most mobile – those healthy enough and wealthy enough to leave – are here or on their way. There are, in reality, not that many more able to make the trip. Certainly, if ISIS do take control of Syria, or if some Russian-assisted structure (with or without Mr Assad) gains the upper hand, it seems unlikely that any form of regime will allow people to continue to leave. The economy of those failed countries will need workers. The most energetic and productive may have gone, but those that remain will have to somehow operate their economy.
So perhaps the time has come for the West to calm down and start to assess more thoughtfully the scale of the movement. The numbers of refugees seem probably to turn out at around one million people, maybe up to a million and a half people. Extraordinary numbers indeed, but actually relatively modest compared with what happened within European borders after the First World War, and compared with the existing populations of Europe. If allocated pro rata the UK might be looking at perhaps 100,000 people, though a lot less if Germany does take the 800,000 people Mrs Merkl has suggested. And these are people who are young, energetic, determined and intelligent. After any initial dislocation, the new arrivals could become economic powerhouses in their new lands. Indeed, one of the future problems could be if they wanted to return to build their failed states; the effect on productivity in their host nations could be quite damaging.
One of the lessons of the years between the two great wars is that the refugee populations were relatively easily and quickly absorbed. This is not to downplay the social and economic problems which the dislocation of populations caused in mainland Europe (something which hardly affected the UK, of course), but it is remarkable how such appalling problems could be and were resolved. The recession did not help, and the growing rise of anti-Semitism was in some areas a dreadful side-effect of Jewish refugees trying to settle into new lives, but generally the homeless were received with kindness and settled into new lives (only for a far more terrible fate to overwhelm many of them during the Second World War).
With leadership and example and goodwill there seems no reason why Europe should not once again become a haven for people in terrible distress. It is little to give and a great boon to those welcomed, and a rich infusion, even if only for a while, of new impulses and cultures for Europe’s already rich and diverse heritage.
