Fullofbias

Last night we left our car at the port in Chios town. In the morning the car park was filled with people – exhausted, poorly dressed people sitting on the gravel surface and drinking broth dispensed by American volunteers in uniform red jackets. The migrants crossed the narrow straits separating the Greek island from Turkey overnight, in two boats that made landfall right near the port. There were some people who could be Syrians and Somalians, but most were clearly from Sub-Saharan Africa.

Later during the day, the news arrived about 40 migrants who died of thirst in Niger while traversing Sahara desert on the way to Libyan coast. Many of them appeared to be Ghana and Nigeria – not the most destitute of African countries, especially the former.

In my opinion, what drives these people is more than destitution or fear of violence. It is a dream as well as a rational calculation. Western countries enjoy standards of living, which these people have no hope of achieving within their lifespan. Risking their lives to reach the lands, where these standards are realistically achievable, is therefore a rational gamble. This dream of better life is capable of possessing millions of young minds all around the world in the way it possessed the minds of the participants in earlier historic and prehistoric mass migrations, including those that brought the ancestors of contemporary Europeans and Americans to their promised lands.

The West is vulnerable to both unsustainable migration and violent hatred from the rest of the world because it is too little. There is not enough West to accommodate everyone for whom it serves as beacon, a lifetime goal.

This is why the West and Western supranational structures should relentlessly expand, salvaging more and more people and territories from poverty trap and degrading revolution/dictatorship cycles. Not in the imperialist manner, but using political and economic leverages, as well as conflict-preventing interventions. It is a matter of survival for clearly the best political and economic model humanity has created so far.

Mired in self-defeating nationalism, contemporary Western political elites are certainly not up to this task. The way they alienated dozens of millions of once eagerly pro-Western people in Turkey and Russia, while nurturing extreme forms of – ultimately anti-Western – nationalism in Eastern Europe, speaks volumes about their profanity and their lack of vision. But then it is the same people who allowed such disastrous and potentially suicidal events as Brexit and Trump election in countries we believed to be the pillars of modern liberal democracy.
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Will these senile patricians see the Western world all the way to the new Attila, or a new generation of visionary politicians will emerge out of this crisis? I have no answer to this one.