Writing in the Weekly Standard, Christopher Caldwell:
[Hungarian prime minister] Orbán’s decision to enforce border controls changed everything, although one should note that Orbán has not acted in a rash or undemocratic way—the legal changes at the border were announced well in advance, and his changes to state of emergency laws were passed through parliament, not asserted by decree. One can, if one wishes, fault Orbán for irrealism, to the extent he believes Hungary’s maintenance of its traditional culture and demography is consistent with EU membership. The EU aims to do away with such considerations.
Indeed it does.
Here’s the BBC reporting on some comments from Peter Sutherland, the UN’s “special representative for international migration” and, before that, an EU commissioner, speaking to the UK’s House of Lords in 2012:
The EU should “do its best to undermine” the “homogeneity” of its member states, the UN’s special representative for migration has said. Peter Sutherland told peers the future prosperity of many EU states depended on them becoming multicultural.
And Sutherland’s evidence for that was what?
In reality, of course, Sutherland’s ambitions for the EU have next to nothing to do with “prosperity” and a great deal to do with an attempt redefine how the nations of Europe see themselves. His hope, quite clearly, is that, the multicultural will be more inclined to submit to the supranational.
Just the other day the remarkably smug Alex Stubb, Finland’s finance minister (a former prime minister and former foreign minister too: I blogged about him back in 2013 here) tweeted this in response to an attack on multiculturalism by a MP for the populist Finns Party:
Monikulttuurisuus on rikkaus. Ei mulla muuta.
It reads more lyrically–all those vowels– in Finnish, particularly if (like me) you don’t speak the language.
In translation, Stubb’s comments are prosaic, pious and formulaic, assertion, not argument:
“Multiculturalism is an asset. That’s all I have to say.”
Hmmm
Speaking of which, the Norwegian paper Aftenpostenis reporting that a Finnish high school has recommended that its female students dress more conservatively so as not to disturb its male Muslim students.
Just one school, but even so.
Back to Caldwell:
But it was Merkel’s rash invitation that forced Orbán’s hand. Merkel may wind up a kind of twenty-first-century equivalent of Günter Schabowski, the East German functionary who, at a press conference in 1989, misread a list of instructions he had been given and incited the stampede of East Germans who broke through the Berlin Wall. One can blame Merkel for setting millions of migrants on the road to Europe to redeem promises that Europe cannot possibly keep.
Merkel is, it seems, no more adroit than her somewhat less over-promoted countryman, but with far less benign consequences.
Meanwhile Austria’s Der Standard has published a new poll showing that the populist right Freedom Party now stands at 33 percent in the polls (up from around 20 percent in the country’s 2013 election). What, I wonder, can account for that?