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
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