Of Niall Ferguson

Source: Paolo Becchi

One hundred and ten years ago the British author Israel Zangwill completed the play The Melting Pot. First performed in Washington in October 1908 — where it was enthusiastically applauded by President Theodore Roosevelt — it celebrates the United States as a gigantic melting pot that fuses together “Celts and Latins, Slavs and Teutons, Greeks and Syrians — blacks and yellows — Jews and Gentiles” to form a single people.

"Yes", declares the hero of the play (like Zangwill's father, a Jewish immigrant from Russia), “Est e Ovest, and North and South, the palm and the pine, the pole and the equator, the crescent and the cross... Here everyone will unite to build the Republic of Man and the Kingdom of God".

It is rather difficult to imagine a similar play written about the European Union at the beginning of the 21st century. Or rather, one could easily imagine a very different one. In it, the influx of migrants from all over the world would have exactly the opposite effect to that imagined by Zangwill. Far from leading to fusion, the European migration crisis is leading to fission. The play could be called The Meltdown Pot.

I believe more and more that the issue of migration will be seen by future historians as the fatal solvent of the European Union. In their considerations, Brexit will simply appear as the first symptom of the crisis. Their thesis will be that a massive Migration of peoples [migration of peoples, NdT] overwhelmed the project of European integration, revealing the weakness of the European Union as an institution and bringing voters back to national politics to find solutions.

Let's start with the size of the influx. Only in 2016 circa 2,4 millions of migrants arrived in 28 EU member states from non-EU countries, bringing the total population of the Union born abroad to 36,9 millions, beyond 7% of the total.

This could just be the beginning. According to economists Gordon Hanson and Craig McIntosh, “the number of first-generation migrants born in Africa aged between 15 e 64 years outside of sub-Saharan Africa will grow from 4,6 a 13,4 million between 2010 and 2050". The vast majority of these will certainly head towards Europe.

The problem is unsolvable. The population of continental Europe is aging and shrinking, but European labor markets perform poorly when it comes to integrating unskilled migrants. Furthermore, most European immigrants are Muslims. Liberals insist that it should be possible for Christians and Muslims to coexist peacefully in a secular, post-Christian Europe. In practice, the combination of historically rooted suspicions and modern differences in mentality — in particular on the status and role of women — is making assimilation difficult. (Compare the situation of Moroccans in Belgium to that of Mexicans in California if you don't believe me).

In the end, there is a practical problem. Europe's southern border is almost impossible to defend against migrant flotillas, unless European leaders are willing to let many people drown.

Politically, the problem of migration seems to be fatal for that broad alliance between moderate and conservative social democrats / Christian moderate democrats on which the latter were based 70 years of European integration.

European centrists are deeply confused about immigration. Many, especially those of the center left, they want to have open borders and welfare states. But the evidence suggests that it is difficult to be Denmark with a multicultural society. The lack of social solidarity makes high levels of taxation and redistribution unsustainable.

In Italy we see a possible future: left-wing populists (the Five Star Movement) and right-wing populists (the League) they joined forces to form a government. Their coalition will focus on two things: consolidate the old welfare regulations (plans to reverse a recent pension reform) and exclude migrants. Last week, receiving much popular applause, the interior minister, Matteo Salvini, he pushed back a boat he was carrying 629 migrants rescued from the sea off the coast of Libya. The Aquarius is now en route to Spain, whose new socialist minority government offered to accept its human burden.

Where else can populists come to power? They are already in government in some form in six EU member states: Austria, Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary, Italy and Poland. But throughout the European Union there are a total of 11 populist parties with popular support of 20% or more, which implies that the number of populist governments could almost double. It's just that few countries can match Italy for political flexibility. Imagine, if you can, l’Alternative for Germany (AfD) rightists sit with the German leftists (The left) for sausages and beer in Berlin. Impossible. Consequentially, as the Germans discovered after their last round of elections, there is in fact no alternative other than for the old grand coalition of centre-right and centre-left to limp forward.

Claucare è la parola. Last week the chancellor, Angela Merkel, clashed with Horst Seehofer, his Interior Minister, which wants to remove from the borders of Germany any migrant already registered in other EU states. According to the Dublin Regulation, the country where an immigrant first arrives is in theory responsible for his asylum request. But in practice migrants can shop around for the most favorable destination, thanks to the Schengen border-free travel system to which Germany belongs.

In Merkel's eyes, Germany cannot give up Schengen without risking the collapse of the entire free movement system. His hope is that he can put together some kind of pan-European immigration package at the EU summit in Brussels later this month. But it is not yet clear whether its coalition partner, the Bavarian Christian Social Union (that Seehofer drives), can accept this. The CSU has state elections coming up in October and fears losses to the AfD on the immigration issue. In any case, the chances of a coherent pan-European migration strategy seem remote. National borders appear to be a simpler solution.

I have been skeptical of the argument that Brexit was about leaving a sinking ship. Now I'm reevaluating my opinion. Even if the impossibility of reconciling the Conservatives for Remain with those for Brexit becomes an existential threat for Theresa May, events in Europe are moving in directions that seemed inconceivable just a few years ago.

In his next book on US immigration, my brilliant friend Reihan Salam — himself the son of Bangladeshi immigrants — makes a bold case: America must either limit immigration or risk civil war as growing inequality and racial tension combine.

I hope Salam is right when he says that the melting pot American can somehow be saved. But I have no such hope for Europe. No one who has spent time in Germany since Merkel's 2015–2016 big gamble can honestly believe that a melting pot. Anyone who visits Italy today can see that the policies of the last decade — austerity plus open borders — have produced a political collapse.

Fusion may still be an option for the United States. For Europe, theme, the future is one of fission — a process potentially so explosive that it could relegate Brexit to the footnotes of future history.

Article by Niall Ferguson, historian and professor at Stanford University (formerly Harvard), published on The Sunday Times il 17 June 2018. Translation by Donato Mancuso