EUROPE: IMMIGRANTS SCAPEGOATED FOR ECONOMIC CRISIS

By Ignacio Ramonet and - - Reprint | | Print |

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PARIS, Jan 3 2011 (IPS) - On November 28, a referendum in Switzerland was approved by 53 percent of voters authorising the expulsion of all foreigners convicted of serious crimes (homicide, burglary, procuring, drug trafficking, armed robbery) after serving their sentences. The measure was organised by the country’s main party, the Democratic Union of the Centre (also known as the Swiss People’s Party), which in 2009 succeeded in banning by referendum the building of minarets in mosques. Elsewhere in Europe there has been a rise in xenophobia as the economic crisis has grown more intense.

This new victory of the far right in Switzerland creates the risk that other similar parties in the rest of Europe will harden their opposition to foreigners, Muslims especially. This will have consequences for the European Union (EU), which Switzerland did not join, though it did sign a 2002 agreement guaranteeing the free passage of EU citizens to and from the country. What will European governments do when Bern expels their citizens, thus subjecting them to double jeopardy?

At bottom, the Swiss referendum is a reflection of a growing concern with immigration, which is blamed for all problems. It is clear that each country has the right to define what it allows or forbids in its public space. The guest country is certainly under no obligation to change its laws to accommodate recent arrivals; rather it is the latter that must adapt to the former. Yet on the basis of the two changes brought, which have widespread support, the new right wing parties are building an Islamophobic platform, extending their circle of influence, and generating acceptance of all of their extremist positions.

It is true that in the name of “modernisation”, abstract and imperious, European societies have been subjected for about twenty years to a series of upsets and traumas of considerable violence. The logic of competition, the expansion of the EU, the creation of the euro, the elimination of borders, the massive influx of immigrants, multiculturalism and the dismantling of the welfare state have all provoked among many Europeans a loss of elements of their identity. Moreover, this has all taken place in the context of a financial, economic, and social crisis that has had massive and unacceptable social repercussions (25 million laid off workers, and 85 million poor in the heart of the EU) that have brought about an increase of violence at every level.

In this context, a new wave of demagogues has surfaced blaming foreigners, Muslims, Jews, and blacks for all recent disorder and forms of insecurity. The immigrants are the easiest scapegoats, symbolising social disturbance and representing to the less well-off Europeans unwanted competition on the labour market.

The far right has always tried to address crises by blaming a single cause: foreigners. It is deplorable that this approach is now being helped along by the contortions of the democratic parties, which have been reduced to asking themselves how much xenophobia is acceptable in their own discourse.

In France, the National Front (FN) of Jean-Marie Le Pen has long proposed the cult of blood and earth, ie, restoration of the nation (in the ethnic sense of the term), establishment of an authoritarian regime to battle insecurity, a return to economic protectionism, to the idea that a woman’s place is in the home, the and the expulsion of three million foreigners, which would -it is claimed- instantly open up that many jobs for “pure blooded” French workers. However malevolent, this idea has long seduced “more than one in four French people”.

President Nicholas Sarkozy, in turn, in order to win over voters, launched in the summer of 2010 a campaign against the Romanian gypsies present in France. Although EU law bars the expulsion of EU citizens, the French government had no qualms about expelling 8601 gypsies between October 1-17, 2010 -7447 “voluntarily” and 1154 by force.

Italy’s Silvo Berlusconi is following suit. Gypsy camps are frequently vacated. In Milan, for example, the Roma population has been reduced from 10,000 to 1200. Other EU countries do the same, only more discreetly. In Denmark, the mayor of Copenhagen, Frank Jensen, a social democrat, bemoaned the number of gypsies “dedicated to stealing”. The result: the government threw out ten gypsies at the beginning of September after expelling twenty in early July.

These xenophobic acts have been roundly denounced by the international organisations. The European Tribunal for Human Rights holds the treatment of gypsies by two EU members -Greece and the Czech Republic- amounts to a violation of human rights. The United Nations Committee charged with implementation of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD) pointed out the existence of similar expulsions in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Greece, Lithuania, and Rumania.

In 2010, throughout the EU there has been a noticeable increase in extremist “decidedly anti-democratic and racist” positions and the acceptance of social Darwinism. At present, the “anti-democratic potential” of a society can be measured by its degree of Islamophobia.

According to a study by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation issued on October 13, 2010, the current economic crisis is “driving the European political climate to the right” and placing extremist positions at the centre of electoral debate. Xenophobia can now show it face without worry. There is every reason to fear that “just as happened with the Tea Party in the US”, the political spectrum in Europe will shift towards the far right, which will place democracy itself in jeopardy. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Ignacio Ramonet is director of “Le Monde diplomatique en español”.

[i] Le Monde, Paris, 27 November, 2010.