By Thomas L. Friedman
ROME — I’ve found lately that I can ruin any dinner party. It’s like magic. Just get me going on Trump or Putin or climate change and I can put a frown on every face and a furrow in every brow. I do weddings and bar mitzvahs, too. So I thought I’d come to Italy for a little sun and risotto. I made the mistake, though, of spending a few days with Italian government and international experts trying to understand the refugee crisis that is fracturing the European Union, much of which originates in Italy. And guess what? Now I can ruin your dinner party — and breakfast! Because what you find when you take a close look at the situation here is something profoundly worrying. I was born in 1953 and have been living my entire life inside the community of democracies that came to be known as “the West” and eventually spread to include democracies around the world, such as Japan, Brazil, South Korea and India. At the core of this community were two pillars: the U.S. and the group of European democracies that became the European Union.
“The West” was not just a state of mind. It was an association of countries with shared interests, institutions and values — particularly the values of liberty, democracy, free markets and the rule of law — which made the post-World War II world, though far from perfect, a steadily more prosperous, free and decent place for more and more people. This community of democracies was also a beacon, a refuge and a magnet for those who wanted to embrace its values but were denied them where they lived.
But the European pillar of this community of democracies has never been more under assault — so much so that for the first time I wonder if this European pillar will actually crumble.
From Italy you can see all the lines of attack: Donald Trump coming from the West, Vladimir Putin from the East and environmental and political disorder from the south — from Africa and the Middle East, where the reckless 2011 French-British-U.S. decision to topple Libyan strongman Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, and not stay on to help build a new order in his place, now haunts Italy.
Toppling Qaddafi without building a new order may go down as the single dumbest action the NATO alliance ever took.
It took the lid off Africa, leading to some 600,000 asylum seekers and illegal migrants flocking to Italy’s shores in recent years, with 300,000 staying there and the rest filtering into other E.U. countries. This has created wrangles within the bloc over who should absorb how many migrants and has spawned nationalist-populist backlashes in almost every E.U. country.
Democracy was never the dominant driver of the uprising against Qaddafi. It was much more a revolt by anti-Qaddafi tribes in eastern Libya. But when you just let a tribal revolt rage in a country with few real institutions, you end up with what you have in Libya today: multiple tribes and militias all competing for power and control of oil, creating vast zones of disorder, which both African and Arab refugees and economic migrants can take advantage of to reach the Libyan coastline to try to catch a human trafficking boat to Italy.
Italian officials will tell you that Libya now really has only three effective institutions: a state-owned oil company; a central bank that distributes its proceeds to the government and indirectly to various tribal militias; and a coast guard that the Italians have propped up to help stop refugee boats from leaving Libya for Italy. Human trafficking is the second-largest industry in Libya today, after oil.
In 2017, the biggest migrant groups to arrive in Italy mostly via Libya were from Nigeria, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Bangladesh and Eritrea.
An Italian official expressed great disgust to me over the fact that Italy’s economy has lost hundreds of millions of euros by participating in E.U. sanctions on Russia — to help deter Russia from encroaching on Central Europe — while Central European E.U. countries, like Hungary, have refused to take a single one of the migrants who have sailed to Italy’s shores.
Italy has the anti-immigrant government it has, an Italian refugee expert explained, because the world and the rest of the E.U. “turned its back on Italy,” where unassimilated migrants are now visible in the streets, squares and train stations.
“There have to be shared E.U. migration quotas,” he added, consistent E.U. “legal pathways” for immigration and a strategy to improve effective and accountable governance in Africa, not just paying off warlords there to collar refugees.
“The movement of people will happen,” said another Italian official. “The question is: Do we manage it or not?”
That’s for sure. The total population of Europe/Russia today is about 740 million people, according to the United Nations, and Africa’s is 1.2 billion. By 2050, Europe-Russia will shrink to around 700 million and Africa will double to 2.4 billion. If disorder spreads in Africa, the current crisis will seem tame and manageable by comparison.
Mind you, countries like Italy actually need more workers and should welcome them. Some 60 percent of Africans are under age 24, while 27 percent of Europeans are. But the latest African/Arab flow has come faster than Italian and other European societies can absorb them culturally and politically, and politicians have risen up to take advantage of the backlash and create hysteria.
Meanwhile, it should come as no surprise that Putin, who has long had a foreign policy goal of weakening and discrediting the E.U. — in order to diminish it as a vibrant alternative to his kleptocratic, nationalist autocracy or as an inspiration for former Soviet satellites like Ukraine — has encouraged the rise of anti-E.U. parties in Italy as well as the U.K.’s Brexit.
In March, Italy’s annual security report warned of foreign online “influence campaigns” in its elections then. The vote brought to power the most pro-Putin, anti-immigrant, anti-E.U. coalition ever to rule Italy: the League and the Five-Star Movement.
As for Trump, he has no appreciation for how important the E.U.-U.S. partnership has been to catalyzing the global cooperation and rule-making that has made America, Europe and the world as a whole steadily freer, more stable and more prosperous since World War II.
Trump actually pressed British Prime Minister Theresa May to make a sharp Brexit from the E.U., if she wanted to have a free-trade agreement with the U.S., and he characterized the E.U. not as a partner on trade but as a “foe.” Trump seems to prefer that the E.U. fracture so he can try to strike better trade deals with the countries individually. How else to explain these irrational moves?
One of the first foreign visitors to come to Italy to high-five its new government of Euro- and NATO-skeptics and anti-immigrant populists was Trump’s former brain, Steve Bannon, who reportedly said of the ruling coalition: “If it works in Italy, it is going to work everywhere. … It is going to break the backs of the globalists.”
This is such foolish talk. It was the U.S. and what became the E.U. that took the lead in not only repelling communism but in shaping the rules and catalyzing institutions that managed the key global issues after W.W. II — like trade, migration, environment and human rights — helping more people around the globe grow out of poverty faster than ever before.
We need the U.S. and the E.U. — joined by the other Group of 20 nations — to play a similar role today. The change in the pace of change in the climate, globalization and technology has thrown up a whole set of new challenges very fast — extreme weather, cybercrime, crypto-currencies, social networks, deepfake technologies, self-driving vehicles, artificial intelligence, biological design tools and questions of how to distinguish among refugees, economic migrants and asylum seekers. These can be managed only through global cooperation and new rules.
If the community of democracies fractures, and we return to a more 19th- and 20th-century great power competition, who will write the new rules for the 21st century? Who will help Libya or the struggling countries of sub-Saharan Africa create governance and nurture their human capital to escape disorder, so their people don’t feel the need to emigrate to survive or thrive. Russia? China? I don’t think so. There will be a global leadership vacuum, a free-for-all, with terrible consequences.
It will be hard enough dealing with these issues with a community of democracies leading the way again, but it will be impossible to do so if Trump, Bannon and Putin, and their fellow travelers, succeed in breaking it up. So sorry to ruin your breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Thomas L. Friedman is the foreign affairs Op-Ed columnist. He joined the paper in 1981, and has won three Pulitzer Prizes. He is the author of seven books, including “From Beirut to Jerusalem,” which won the National Book Award.
No comments:
Post a Comment