The crisis has erupted in the United Kingdom, particularly in the deindustrialised regions of the North. It’s a return to the 1970s, without the IRA, but with an even greater potential for inter-community conflict, due to the growth of parallel societies, the result of half a century of reckless immigration policies, in line with the current economic paradigm, orientated solely towards quick profits and the concentration of wealth.
Resurgence of Social Unrest
The same is likely to happen throughout Western Europe, all of which are facing the same problems to some degree. The worst thing is that there is no solution in sight for a problem for which only superficial, demagogic recipes are offered, barricaded in two radicalised poles. Here, the responsibility and discernment of the third position is needed more than ever.
What we saw this weekend in the UK is only the tip of the veil of what we may see. Three children were stabbed to death by a minor (17 years old), a British national and the son of immigrants from Rwanda. He wasn’t a Muslim, as was widely publicised on Twitter, but neither was he British according to the perception of the majority of the country’s population. The killer is category B2 (black African), according to the list of 19 ethnic definitions by the Britsih Home Office.
Scenes of clashes between the police and hundreds of young grassroots Britons (category W1) and Northern Irish (category W2), with shops being looted, police stations set on fire, and attempts to burn down mosques and immigrant accommodation centers, were matched by gatherings of equally radicalised Muslims, shouting “Takbir, Allahu Akbar!”, ready for war on the streets of England. Anyone who has read about the secret operations of NATO’s Gladio network since the 1970s can easily assume that the intelligence agencies are hiding behind this, with third-party intentions.
The episode highlights a deep economic, political and social crisis, with the country in recession and four governments in the space of two and a half years. In the case of the EU, the potential for problems related to immigration and the crisis that is already being felt is exacerbated by Russia’s methodically organised exclusion from the European concert and the continent’s security architecture. Without further delay, at Washington’s request, Western Europe decided to remove from its relations the country on which it depended to a large extent, not only for energy, fertilisers, grain and minerals, but also for exports and tourism to and from a market of 150 million people.
Historical and Geopolitical Context
The geopolitical origins of the crisis that has just erupted in the UK is another matter because immigration, which has become a problem, also corresponds to London’s neocolonial policy with the countries from which these masses of people come. The outbreak of these tensions doesn’t come without warning: the country had already experienced serious civil unrest in 2011, with the epicentre being people of immigrant origin, just like France in 2007 and last year.
Both London and Paris, immediately after the Second World War, pretended to stop exploiting their former colonies, granting them formal independences, while at the same time getting rid of an expensive military and administrative presence, delegating to the new elites – sometimes violently confronted in terrible civil wars –the future of those lands in Asia and especially Africa, without ever abandoning the extraction of their raw materials. This mutually corrupt relationship guaranteed European manufacturing industries another half-century of competitive advantage over the South through a series of mechanisms to control and manipulate raw material prices. The highly industrialised Germany also benefited from this type of scheme, more or less along the same lines. All this followed a logic, first within the framework of the Bretton Woods agreements, and then with the repeal of the gold-dollar standard in the early 1970s and the advent of the neoliberal model.
The counterpart to this dominance of the North over the economies of a third world that wanted to prosper outside the constraints of the West and its global institutions, on which it depended, was the opening of Europe’s doors to millions of refugees from conflicts and crises in the Third World in which European elites had clear responsibility. A similar process took place in the US.
The number of immigrants to the North is minimal compared to all those who still aspire to achieve the European dream, but it is nevertheless enough to generate social tensions in the host countries. Even though many immigrants have integrated over the decades and some have even returned to their homelands, the extra-European communities in general have reproduced at notably higher levels than the native Europeans, unbalancing the demographics and changing uses and values of daily life on the host continent. To this must be added the deliberate opening of Germany’s borders under the Merkel government, which reached its peak in 2015-17, coinciding with the war in Syria, for which London, Paris and Berlin made a strong case for the withdrawal of the legitimate government.
The Immigration Dilemma and Future Outlook
The current crisis has only worsened since the financial crisis of 2007-08, then with the sovereign debt crisis, and later with Covid-19 and the current conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East. The easily foreseeable proletarianisation, impoverishment and unemployment of vast swathes of the population also predicts an increase in delinquency and violent crime. Under these conditions, mutual blaming between communities that coexist but don’t mix, as is the case with many on the European continent, is a fertile breeding ground.
This episode of confrontation between communities, crudely divided into “autochthonous-Christian” and “exogenous-Muslim”, follows Israel’s war in Gaza, which exposed the Zionist regime’s most brutal face to the eyes of the world. The European political classes were unable or unwilling to demand compliance with international law and preferred to align themselves quite clearly but in a clumsy way with a notably extremist government and a genocide broadcast live around the world.
The European Union, and Germany in particular, have lost almost all the credit for seriousness they have earned over decades in the eyes of the global majority. The Muslim populations in Europe, but not only them, also saw the malicious role of the European elites.
In fact, this is where the problems on the streets began, with the repression of the German authorities and the misinformation in the mainstream press over actions of sympathy for the Palestinian cause and against the ongoing genocide, often categorised in bad faith as “anti-Semitic”. In addition to these demonstrations, others of the opposite sign have already begun to appear, waving Israeli flags, confusing the public in an erroneous dichotomy that imports into Europe a conflict that doesn’t belong to Europeans.
The current crisis situation reveals the bankruptcy of the neoliberal model on which Europe, and firstly the United Kingdom, bet for decades, while continuing to insist on geopolitical games to force the predominance of the dollar around which their speculative economies orbit. The current framework threatens to collapse completely if the West (the US, we must admit) doesn’t realise that the world has changed and that there’s no point in confronting the new reality, but rather facing up to its challenges.
Do these mistakes by European elites mean that their people have to tolerate seeing their neighbourhoods change their essence for some form of charity for people fleeing conflict zones? On the contrary, Europeans have the right to choose who they take into their own countries, and the current immigration situation must be reversed; otherwise Europeans will lose control of their future and their societies will be de-characterised forever. Europeans, including the British, regardless of past mistakes, have the right to rule their lands, just as the Palestinians or any other indigenous people in their territory do.
This is a time of great angst, when we are seeing things that we thought were impossible to see, but also of great possibilities for a better future. In a fairer, more equitable world, conflicts, persecutions and, therefore, large-scale migrations won’t even have to exist.
Ricardo Nuno Costa ‒ geopolitical expert, writer, columnist, and editor-in-chief of geopol.pt, especially for «New Eastern Outlook»
