It is reckoned that the total African population will double in the next three decades to some 2.5 billion people. That presents European leaders with a formidable headache of worsening migration flows. Already in the last two years, there is estimated to have been 1.5 million refugees entering the EU, many of them from Africa. That phenomenon has, in turn, fueled anti-immigrant political parties across Europe who blame the EU political establishment for the problem. The populist backlash poses a threat to the cohesiveness of the EU. It was one of the issues that drove the British electorate to vote last year for leaving the bloc.
Rather than sniffing at "populist" politics in Austria, Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Denmark, France, Italy, Netherlands and Germany -- and denigrating it as "fascist" -- European leaders need to question their own responsibility. It is understandable that European communities can feel unnerved by the sudden influx of foreigners into their country. Given the relentless socio-economic austerity imposed on communities by Neo-Liberal capitalist governments, the anxieties over scarce public resources are accentuated, and understandable.
Moreover, the European members of the US-led NATO military alliance bear direct responsibility for opening the migration floodgates when they destroyed the state of Libya in an illegal war for regime change in 2011. France, Italy, Britain and Germany, among others, were complicit in that criminal war.
France too went on an illegal military expedition in Mali in 2013 to "defeat terrorism" -- and its forces remain in that country today. The real reason for that French intervention may likely have been securing uranium ore mines in Mali and Niger.
All those illegal military interventions by the Europeans in Northwest Africa unleashed militants, migration and human trafficking on a massive scale.
A report last week by Amnesty International also openly condemned European governments for colluding with human traffickers in Libya by forcibly sending would-be migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean back into the clutches of the traffickers on land.
Europe is so desperate to stem the flow of migrants because it is destabilizing the internal politics of the EU. So desperate is Europe that it is willing to force refugees back into the human trafficking networks to a fate of slavery in order to impede the flow into Europe.
Macron's military "solution" for the Sahel is part of the same futile problem-solving. The French president, with the support of Germany, Italy and the rest of the EU, is using military force to combat "terrorism and human trafficking" which he equates as the same.
Furthermore, Macron and the EU are trying to do it on the cheap, by getting the Saudis and Emiratis to pay a large part of the budget.
This militarist policy is nothing short of a Neo-imperialist agenda in Europe, which can only make matters much, much worse.
European powers, as with the Americans, must stop interfering militarily in the affairs of Africa.
What is needed is a radical new economic and political model of massive public investment in Africa and Europe. The money is there, from the trillions of dollars that European corporations have stashed away in global tax havens. In short, what is required is a repudiation of neoliberal capitalism and the militarism that goes with it.
But there can be no solution under the current political leadership in Europe, as epitomized by French President Emmanuel Macron. Under the cynical guise of being a "liberal progressive," he is offering the same old destructive policies that end up digging ever deeper holes for societies and the wider world. So much for his recent corny slogan copying Trump, "Make the Planet Great Again."
The false solution of dealing with European migration as a military problem of "terrorism" and "human traffickers" only lets the real perpetrators of the problems off the hook. France and the other European NATO powers have created their own problems from illegal wars and predatory economic policies. Now they want to "solve" those problems by adding more of the same problems. Make the Planet Groan Again.
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