European Policy Analysis Volume 2, Number 1, Spring 2016 | Page 7

European Policy Analysis - Volume 2, Number 1 - Spring 2016 Refugees and Migration in Europe Klaus von BeymeA 1. Postcolonial Policies and Their Consequences in the Field of Migration 2) To protect Israel. It was the second target, the protection of Israel, which caused a permanent priority over the Palestinian Arabs and a decline of reputation for Europe and the United States in the whole Arab world. Maybe Daniel Barenboim’s statement “the USA could solve the conflicts between Israelis and Palestinians in three days if they wanted to do so” is probably a political exaggeration of an artist. But certainly pressure from the United States and Europe could contribute to smooth down the conflict which was one of the problems in the Arab world and which caused mass emigration. The West had forgotten that Syria had turned to the Soviet Union for friendship when the Golan Heights were conquered by Israel in the Six-Day War in 1967, and the United States as well as the European States were not ready to put pressure on Israel to give back the annexed area to the Syrian State. In the long run, this became one of the reasons for supporting Israel against Assad’s system which contributed to the mass emigration of Syrians. Only recently, a compromise with Russia concerning the toleration of Assad’s regime became possible. Unfortunately, this chance has been abandoned because of new conflicts between Russia and the West. The conflict between Western Europe and Putin’s Russia has some influence T he year 2015 for most European countries seemed to be the year of a historical disaster. Around 60 million migrants were forcibly displaced worldwide, with most of them approaching Europe and not the United States, 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. This awful intervention started more than half a century ago by the toppling of Mosaddegh in Iran in 1953 with the help of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). In the long run, it contributed to the establishment of a religious dogmatic system under Khomeini. The Islamic Revolution in Iran was a belated answer to the coup d’état of 1953 (Lüders 2015, 20). The politics of intervention in the Near East was based on two problems: 1) To support democracy and security. The propaganda for the legal state (Rechtsstaat) and democratic antiauthoritarian politics among Western politicians frequently obscured the economic interests of securing the supply with oil and gas. A University of Bielefeld, Germany doi: 10.18278/epa.2.1.2 7