THE European Union was yesterday reeling, split and divided over the issue of taking quotas of refugees from the masses flooding into Europe.
These masses are determined to settle in Europe and their determination is the product of four major imperialist wars. Prime Minister David Cameron has immediately recognised them as part of the enemy without, and has called on European leaders to deport them and many more ‘economic migrants’ who don’t have a ‘genuine claim’ to asylum.
His call came during a meeting at Chequers with French President, Francois Hollande. The Prime Minister then joined other European leaders at an emergency summit in Brussels where a deal agreed yesterday to relocate 120,000 people across the EU is already creating huge rifts among member states.
A Downing Street spokesman said Cameron and Hollande spoke for an hour about the refugee crisis, the situation in Syria and the force that is driving refugees to march on Europe, determined that they will not be kept out. In fact, the millions that are now marching westward are the result of over 12 years of imperialist slaughter that have now exposed the fault lines of the European Union.
The Afghan war, which is still continuing, failed to dislodge and defeat the Taleban, but destroyed the country. The 2003 invasion of Iraq destroyed the advanced infrastructure of that country, killed over 100,000 Iraqis, forced millions to flee to Syria and other countries, and saw Al-Qaeda and then the ISIS movement rise up as its major products.
The imperialists not only greeted the Iraq slaughter as a victory, they set out to emulate it first of all in Libya and then Syria. Syria however refused to die, is still fighting back, and has proved to be one colonial war too far for the imperialist powers. In fact, the colossal resistance to these imperialist wars, and the developing crisis of capitalism has already exposed the EU as a reactionary attempt to preserve capitalism by creating a fake ‘united entity’ dominated by Germany.
The reactionary EU has already put Greece on bread-and-water rations, and is running it like a conquered territory, as a warning to the other ‘weak links’ in the EU chain. Now the influx of refugees who refuse to respect the frontiers have revealed the essence of the right-wing regimes that the EU has brought to power in Hungary, Romania, Slovakia and the Czech Republic plus Poland, who are now fearful that Europe is to be Islamicised, and its ‘Christian culture’, exhibited at its height from 1939-45, is lost for ever.
The British ruling class has in fact led the right-wing gang with its reference to ‘swarms’ of refugees and its urgings that they be turned back, and its opting out of any quotas of refugees for the UK. The refugee crisis is further exposing the reactionary essence of the EU. This first appeared with the drive to turn the Greeks into a subject people accepting massive austerity, then it continued with its intervention into the Ukraine and its decision to help organise the coup that overthrew its elected president Yanukovych, that has cost thousands of lives, and also produced millions of refugees, including Ukrainians fleeing into Russia.
In Eastern Europe, the right wing is now on the march fighting against the ‘Islamification of Europe’, while in the UK, bankrupt British capitalism is building up its own police state complete with new anti-union laws, vicious austerity cuts and massive state spying on the people. The essence of the EU is now emerging as a reactionary attempt to avoid the death agony of the capitalist system by constructing a superstate to be dominated by German imperialism.
The EU has been split and divided from the start and now the enormous financial crisis that is developing is driving forward intense class struggles. The EU is being ripped apart – it is breaking at its weakest links!
The refugees of the Middle East and Afghanistan are the allies of the workers of Europe. Their struggles will rip up the frontiers and create a Socialist United States of Europe as a huge step forward to a frontierless world socialist republic.
