NOTHING exposes the hypocrisy of Western governments posing as the planet’s saviours at Cop27 like their treatment of refugees.
The standoff as Italy seeks to flaunt its anti-immigrant credentials by denying safe haven to asylum-seekers rescued at sea might be blamed on its new far-right government. Yet the attitude is common to the whole European Union — and Britain too.
Last month the EU’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell — a corporate crook convicted and fined for insider trading in 2018, but such trivialities are no barrier to a Brussels career — waxed lyrical as he expressed the prejudice behind cruelty like that shown by Rome to the luckless refugees.
“Europe is a garden,” he trilled. “Most of the rest of the world is a jungle, and the jungle could invade the garden.” Borrell was not talking specifically about shutting out refugees — his main theme was that “the gardeners must go to the jungle” and civilise the barbarian hordes — but the outlook is exactly that which built Fortress Europe and turned the Mediterranean into the deadliest border in the world.
Borrell’s insistence that the West occupies a position of natural global leadership shows a wilful blindness to the social, economic and environmental crisis rooted in the imperialist world order.
And in consequence Western politicians cannot address the causes of a crisis they cannot understand.
For Borrell, refugees come to Europe because they admire our political systems.
For Giorgia Meloni in Rome, Suella Braverman or for that matter Keir Starmer in London, they do so as the passive victims of trafficking gangs. Starmer says that he would stop people crossing the channel by dealing with the problem “upstream,” by working with France to target traffickers.
But the refugee crisis is down to wars in which Britain is a key player, such as those in Iraq, Libya or Afghanistan, and climate chaos for which the first industrialised country also bears disproportionate responsibility. The refugee crisis provides an opportunity for trafficking gangs — but trafficking gangs did not cause the refugee crisis.
Reluctantly demands from global South countries that the climate summit at least debate compensation for “loss and damage” caused by global warming were agreed yesterday, though only a tiny number of developed countries have actually pledged funding and the sums involved remain so small as to be largely irrelevant.
Climate campaigner Rupert Read’s observation that the Cop (Conference of the Parties) summits continue to lack teeth is compounded by the blanket rejection of proposals that some of the most obvious culprits for rising temperatures — the oil and gas giants currently deriving obscene profits from the energy crisis — ought to have their coffers raided to help poor countries cope with worsening droughts and floods.
Earmarked funding to “help” the global South deal with the consequences of the global North’s despoliation of world resources would be subject to all the weaknesses of foreign aid — frequently used to advance the foreign policy interests of the donor state — or indeed the financial assistance on offer from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, which always comes with neoliberal strings attached.
It is hard to see how such funding could be shielded from manipulation for political purposes, as we saw too often with Covid vaccine diplomacy — such as when Lithuania withdrew a vaccine shipment to Bangladesh because it abstained on a UN vote on the Ukraine war.
But the problem remains hypothetical, since it is clearer than ever that the imperialist powers are determined both to maintain the economic system driving climate breakdown and to avoid shelling out for the consequences.
Politicians’ double standards must be challenged. No-one turning their backs on the refugees seeking safety here should be allowed to pretend to care about the impact of global warming on developing countries.
And all the angst over climate change will count for nothing unless the economic system responsible is confronted.
