The Migration/Refugee Crisis and the (Un/Re) Making of Europe: Risks and Challenges for Greece /Goc/Multeci Krizi ve Avrupa'nin Donusumu: Yunanistan icin Riskler ve Zorluklar.

• Author: Keridis, Dimitris
• Position: Essay

Introduction

In 2015 Greece faced an unprecedented crisis when almost a million people crossed disorderly its borders from Turkey on their way to Europe. The crisis landed Greece with a humanitarian challenge at the peak of its own economic recession, while it threatened to overwhelm the Greek state's limited administrative capacity, destabilize the regional order by potentially igniting tensions with neighbouring Turkey and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM), marginalize Greece further within the European Union (EU), both politically and physically, and upend European integration at a time when Greece needed and depended the most on the solidarity of its EU partners.

At first, the incoming government of Alexis Tsipras exacerbated the problem by adopting an open-borders policy that reversed some of the border controls that its predecessors had struggled to introduce. Eventually, however, Athens proved flexible and realistic. It supported the emerging EU consensus on enhanced border protection and the controlled and measured flow of refugees into the EU. The Greek government abandoned its leftist proclamations and aligned itself closely with Germany in support of the EU-Turkey deal that drastically reduced the human flows from Turkey into the EU. Furthermore, the Greek government invited NATO naval forces to help monitor the flows in the Eastern Aegean Sea between Turkey and Greece. Finally, the Greek government buried away much of its populist euro-scepticism and turned into a champion of furthering integration, especially in the field of immigration and asylum policy that should be dealt with at the EU level rather by each state separately.

The crisis, however, weakened the EU as a whole as it seemed to confirm its geopolitical weakness while it strengthened the nationalist, euro-sceptic voices within many EU member-states and contributed to the Brexit vote in the British referendum of 2016. In Germany, the EU's core country, it allowed a xenophobic, right-wing party, named Alternative for Germany', to enter the federal parliament, coming third in the September 2017 elections, making the formation of a new governing coalition in Berlin a difficult political and numerical exercise.

The Schengen Area did hold together, as its dissolution would have been extremely costly, especially for the very open and inter-dependent economies of northern Europe. But the crisis, that followed a period of severe economic contraction after 2008, has had a deep political impact, turning Europe sharply rightwards. With the exception of France where, thanks to the electoral law and the daring charisma of Emmanuel Macron, a staunchly Europhile president and parliament were elected, the crisis accelerated the decline of Europe's most distinct political force, that of social democracy, and contributed to the rise of a group of nationalist and, occasionally authoritarian, leaders in Central Europe that view Brussels with increasing hostility. In fact, the crisis threatened to divide the EU along a Western mainstream and an Eastern alternative (plus an exiting Britain) that has come to resent the influence and the reforms propagated by the EU bureaucracy.

Moreover, it seems that there has been no permanent fix to the challenge of managing the influx of migrants and refugees and that a new crisis might occur with devastating consequences for the future cohesion of the European Union. There is still no administrative capacity in Greece to process in a timely manner the influx of people and return significant numbers of illegal immigrants to Turkey. Germany, with its fairly generous asylum policy and with an economy of full employment, continues to act as a gigantic magnet stimulating human flows that can undermine European integration and strengthen further the return to strict national border controls.

This paper is structured around two parts: the first part describes the immigration and refugee crisis itself, from a global, European and national-Greek perspective; the second part analyses the risks to and policy responses of Greece and how they relate to the country's overall geostrategic position, at a time when Europe is being redefined as it struggles to respond to a multitude of challenges.

The Crisis

With one person displaced every 3 seconds, there are more displaced people in the world today (circa 65 million) than during World War II. (1) Still, with armed conflicts becoming more protracted and environmental pressures mounting, the number of refugees is bound to increase. Despite the magnitude and the importance of this phenomenon, general perceptions and policy responses are often incorrect or inadequate and the gap between public opinion and the opinion of experts is vast and growing.

While recent wars in the Middle East and Northern Africa pushed a dramatic wave of asylum seekers and migrants toward Europe in 2015-2016, 84% of the displaced remain in low to middle-income countries and 8 out of 10 refugees are living in neighbouring countries. With more than 40% of refugees displaced for more than 10 years and 20% for more than 30, supporting alternative livelihoods and ensuring access to services and legal protection has never been so compelling.

The above short expose provides a concise picture of the refugee challenge from a global perspective. Zooming into Europe, before dealing with the specifics of the 2015 crisis, it is useful to bear the following facts in mind. The international regime protecting the refugees was put in place in the aftermath of World War II. The provisions of the regime are generous and mandate the full protection of refugees.

The regime was meant for the protection of the few political refugees escaping communism or military dictatorships during the Cold War, in other words for the protection of people coming from the First or the Second World, sharing the colour, religion and cultural outlook of Europeans and not for people from the impoverished and culturally alien global South. Indeed, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) was created in 1950 and came of age with the 1956 refugee crisis, caused by the failure of the Hungarian revolution and the invasion of Hungary by the Soviet army when, as a result, 200,000 Hungarians fled to the West. (2)

Moreover, some Western countries, including Germany and Greece, went further and introduced specific refugee-protection clauses into their constitution. The Greek constitution of 1975 provides a good example of that when it states that "The expulsion of an alien under persecution for his defence of liberty is forbidden." (article 5, paragraph 2).

However, things evolved differently. There has been an interesting but much understudied chain of developments during the post-war era. War between states became rare and war among great powers became obsolete, in part thanks to nuclear weapons. War has not disappeared but it has been 'domesticated'. The vast majority of wars in the post-war era have been civil wars. (3) Civil wars are very much associated with poverty and they occur, almost exclusively, in the global periphery or what used to be the Third World. (4) As a result, contrary to the experience of World War II, that gave birth to the current international regime for the protection of refugees, the vast majority of refugees and internally displaced people today come from poor, third-world nations engulfed in civil war.

As already mentioned above, traditionally, most of these people have remained either within their country of origin or in neighbouring countries. This has been the case with the millions of Palestinians festering in various Arab states, the millions of African refugees, as a result of the recurring sub-Saharan civil wars, surviving in the various African refugee camps or the millions of Afghans in neighbouring Pakistan and Iran. As long as these people remained far and away from the West, little attention was paid to them. They were a concern for the hosting countries and the international humanitarian agencies dedicated to dealing with these issues but they were not a concern for the leaders or the public opinion of the powerful nations of the world.

An exception in this 70-year long history was the forced displacement caused by the Yugoslav wars of succession in the 1990s. The violent disintegration of Yugoslavia produced an intra-European wave of refugees not seen...