Realism and the Refugee Crisis
The picture last week of the little Syrian boy Aylan Kurdi dead on the beach in Turkey is one of those iconic pictures whose intense human face forces deeper reflection, especially upon publics for whom distant tragedies tend to be statistics rather than specific human stories.
I wrote about the refugee crisis last April at the time when the media was filled with pictures of precarious boats on the high seas, being commandeered by European officials, or rescued from capsizing. I commented at that time that while a very real crisis is at hand for Europe, attention has been riveted almost exclusively upon the immediate situation.
That is natural enough — the situation cries out for immediate treatment. But this comes perhaps at the cost of longer-range analysis of the deeper sources of such problems; that is where the long-term heavy lifting by the international community will need to be done. There should be no doubt — this is a very real national security issue and thus should draw upon a significant portion of national security budgets, to much better end.
Europe, of course, is the immediate destination of this stream of refugees, and why not? For the Middle East and North Africa, Europe is the nearest region that possesses the wealth as well as functioning humanitarian values and institutional structure that can offer refuge. Europe has not had a whole lot of choice in the matter, but it is praiseworthy that many countries there, especially Germany, take this moral and humanitarian responsibility seriously.
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