European Policy Analysis Volume 2, Number 1, Spring 2016 | Page 14

European Policy Analysis - Volume 2, Number 1 - Spring 2016

Immigrants, ISIS, the Refugee Crisis, and Integration
in Europe: A Response to Klaus von Beyme
Randall HansenA
1. Postcolonial Policies and Their longstanding American/Western support
Consequences in the Field of for autocratic regimes and more recent
Western support for democracy and
Migrati on

democratization are at fault. I am not
a Middle Eastern expert, but I would
suggest that we need to distinguish clearly
two periods in American policy toward
the Middle East: the realist period and
the neoconservative/responsibility-toprotect (R2P) period. During the former,
which obtained from the end of World
War II until the disastrous presidency of
George W. Bush, the prevailing objectives
of the US State Department were to
contain Communism (the Cold War gets
little mention in von Beyme’s historical
summary) and to ensure regime stability in
the Middle East supporting authoritarian
regimes with often appalling human rights
records (though Jordan, for instance,
is far less extreme than Saudi Arabia or
Syria). The second involved active efforts
to reconfigure Middle Eastern politics
through the invasion of Iraq, the toppling
of Ghaddafi, and the support, if at least
rhetorical, for the Arab Spring.

The distinction is important
because it was only the second set of
interventions that caused the great
refugee surge that we have seen since the
middle of the 2000s. Refugee movements
have long been a structural feature of
the Middle East (Chatty 2010), but
current outflow is greater than anything

K

laus von Beyme has written
an ambitious, subtle, and
provocative article on Middle
Eastern, Russian/Central Asian, and
refugee politics. It divides into roughly
two sections: (i) a discussion of the
background causes of state breakdown
and refugee outflows in the Middle East
and (ii) an analysis of refugee policy and
its relationship to broader immigration
policy in contemporary Germany and
Europe.

Let me begin with von Beyme’s
argument: “There were [in 2015]
calculated to be around 60 million
migrants throughout the world, most of
them approaching Europe and not the
USA, the country which by its unwise
interventions in the Third World had
caused the collapse of some of the
artificial states as products of colonialism
and post-colonialism.” Few would dispute
that Western, and above all American,
intervention in the Middle East lies at
the root of most contemporary refugee
outflows (though only a small minority
of the total 60 million forced migrants
are making their way to Europe). Von
Beyme nonetheless paints with too
broad a brush. In his analysis, both
A

University of Toronto
doi: 10.18278/epa.2.1.3
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