It has been for decades the world wide religion of the supranational socialists and profit seeking corporatists that the nation states and their parliamentary democracies are just not “fit for purpose” (they talk like that!). Only the big supranational states like the European Union or the African Union can deal with the “big issues” which go across borders.
Despite the chaos and unemployment those ideas have created they insist the nations must surrender more power. Angela Merkel, for instance, in the face of a collapsing Euro, mass bankruptcies and record unemployment wants “more Europe”. Obama, faced with his bankrupt corporatist State, wants to spread its joys across the Atlantic and the Pacific!
But today we see, in the worst migrant crisis since the Second World War, which “crosses more borders” than any other, that it is the democratic nation states who, by asserting their will over the hopeless, chaotic supranational EU, have stemmed the tide of migrants from the Middle East and Africa.
An excellent short article by Alex Barker in the “FT Brussels briefing” of 26th May shows how the real power behind the halt in the thousands of migrants crossing to Greece and the Greek Islands was not the EU (and its fawning, spineless kow-towing to the Jihadist leadership of Turkey with its own urge to return to the supranational Ottoman Empire) but the nation states in South East Europe who abandoned Merkel’s “German EU policy” of inviting millions of refugees and just shut their borders.
Barker’s chart see below (“inspired by some conversations with officials in Brussels”)
shows that long before the coming into force of the EU Turkey agreement on March 20th migration had plummeted.
It was when, faced with social and economic anarchy Sweden, having previously welcomed all refugees, then applied quotas, when Denmark closed its border (except to through traffic to Sweden) when Austria started imposing quotas, when Hungary built its wall and Serbia and Croatia stopped the flows – only then in early March 2016 did the numbers arriving on the Greek islands drop like a stone – from nearly 20,000 a week to about 4,000 a week.
By contrast the fall of another 4,000 after the EU Turkey deal, was small. And even then that deal allows Turkey to send back Africans and Afghans to their own countries, choose which refugees it wants to keep and send the rest back not to the Middle East but to the EU superstate! (In fact the EU is accusing Turkey of cherry picking the most highly educated professionals and sending the illiterate and sick to Europe!)
The EU supranational “Government” – for want of a better word for this unelected Brussels autocracy with its strings pulled by Berlin – has no land, no nation, no voters it needs to listen to (only 35% of the electorate vote in EU elections to its powerless parliament) and can therefore “welcome” refugees to other peoples’ land and education, housing and welfare systems! The 50,000 migrants now stuck in Greece are a burden on the Greeks – themselves bankrupted by the Euro-state.
That is the true cost of supranationalism – power with no responsibility. A flag but no people. A Government but no voters. An anthem but no loyalty. A recipe for international chaos.
Rodney Atkinson 26th May 2016
