2015 European refugee crisis

 2015 European refugee crisis (Migration,  open borders,  immigration,  Civil unrest/Preparation,  blowback,  deep event?)

Date	July 2015 - 2016
Type	•  Event •  migration
Interest of	European Stability Initiative
Description	Crisis in Europe over the escalating numbers of refugees from Middle-Eastern and North African countries.

The 2015 European refugee crisis or European migrant crisis arose through the rising number of refugees and migrants coming to the European Union, across the Mediterranean Sea or Southeast Europe, and applying for asylum.

Official Narrative

With most corporate media solely blaming the autocratic regimes in Arab countries, without mentioning who supported them in the first place, some tension in western countries began to develop regarding the lack of vetting. Most independent media and their narratives were focused on the demographic consequences of US/Exceptionalism and imperialism.

Amit Sengupta, European Migration Refugee Crisis Explained

Civil Unrest

ISGP Founder Joël van der Reijden warned against third world immigration with a concept to ban third world immigration citing views of the immigrants against homosexuals, women and a lack to adapt to European culture, arguing crimes rates sky-rocketed.

Brexit

The UK Brexit referendum took place on 23 June 2016, around nine months after peak of the refugee crisis. The UK was never a member of the Schengen Area and so experienced very few direct effects of the influx of migrants. Leave.EU, one of the two main groups campaigning in favour of Brexit, made the refugee crisis its defining issue (the other main pro-Leave group, Vote Leave, primarily focused on economic arguments).

Elections

In many European elections after 2014, anti-immigration parties surged to massive gains. The AFD party in Germany became the 3rd largest party. The French National Party of Marine Le Pen had their largest vote share in the National Assembly in 39 years in 2017 and their largest share of local council seats in 2015. In Italy, the Eurosceptic the Five Star Movement won the Italian General Election. Scholars have pained the electoral wins of the nationalistic parties in the European Parliament in 2019 as a result of the crisis.

Strategy of Tension

The refugee crisis caused polarized perspectives in the EU. In Western Europe, large majorities supported accepting refugees, while Eastern Europeans more 50/50. At the same time, scholars believe, the crisis and some several highly prolific incidents such as the 2015-11 Paris attacks and The 2015–16 New Year's Eve sexual assaults in Germany. Then US Pundit Donald Trump used the 2015 San Bernardino shooting to warn that the EU migrant crisis should not lead to the US accepting more Arab immigrants.

Deep politics

Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was one of the sole neighbouring countries accepting Syrian refugees, resulting in almost 5 million by 2020. During the first few years of the crisis, the Turkish president kept demanding money from the EU and European border agency FRONTEX to help set up living spaces for the migrants or promised to let them "into Europe", often threatening it as a bad thing, as if the migrants were all bad to begin with, seemingly creating a weird paradox.

The crisis also served geopolitical ends. It was an attempt to increase Western public support for a NATO intervention in Syria. The solution presented was the creation of a no-fly-zone, a tactic that had worked well in Libya, where such a zone was gradually expanded to a full-scale intervention. And by giving free visa to Syrian men of conscription and working age, the country was emptied of one of its most vital resources.

Along with the 2015-11 Paris Attacks, this national mass rape in Germany by asylum seekers was believed by scholars to have caused a massive shift in welcoming immigrants throughout Europe since 2015.

 

Related Quotations

Page	Quote	Author	Date
Stef Blok	“I don't think you'll ever be able to centrally organize the EU countries accepting refugees in equal amounts. Eastern-Europeans would never agree to that. Even if we would force them, hands on their back and they'd say "yes", even then, walk a week through Warsaw or Prague. There are no colored people there. They would be gone within a week. They would be literally beaten up. They don't have a life there.”	Stef Blok	2018
Vladimir Putin	“Western countries have been saying for centuries that they bring freedom and democracy to other nations. Nothing could be further from the truth. Instead of bringing democracy they suppressed and exploited, and instead of giving freedom they enslaved and oppressed. The unipolar world is inherently anti-democratic and unfree; it is false and hypocritical through and through. The United States is the only country in the world that has used nuclear weapons twice, destroying the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. And they created a precedent. Recall that during WWII the United States and Britain reduced Dresden, Hamburg, Cologne and many other German cities to rubble, without the least military necessity. It was done ostentatiously and, to repeat, without any military necessity. They had only one goal, as with the nuclear bombing of Japanese cities: to intimidate our country and the rest of the world. The United States left a deep scar in the memory of the people of Korea and Vietnam with their carpet bombings and use of napalm and chemical weapons. It actually continues to occupy Germany, Japan, the Republic of Korea and other countries, which they cynically refer to as equals and allies. Look now, what kind of alliance is that? The whole world knows that the top officials in these countries are being spied on and that their offices and homes are bugged. It is a disgrace, a disgrace for those who do this and for those who, like slaves, silently and meekly swallow this arrogant behaviour. They call the orders and threats they make to their vassals Euro-Atlantic solidarity, and the creation of biological weapons and the use of human test subjects, including in Ukraine, noble medical research. It is their destructive policies, wars and plunder that have unleashed today’s massive wave of migrants. Millions of people endure hardships and humiliation or die by the thousands trying to reach Europe.”	Vladimir Putin	2022

 

Related Documents

Title	Type	Publication date	Author(s)	Description
Document:Europe in free fall	article	28 August 2015	'The Saker'	An analysis of the European geo-political predicament illuminated by its burgeoning refugee crisis
Document:Refugee crisis-Brought to you by Western Imperialism	article	20 September 2015	André Vltchek	Home truths for European countries about their refugee crisis

 

An official example

Name
BBC coverage of the Calais Jungle

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