Hungarian Review September 2015 [antikvár]

HUNGARY AND EUROPE UNDER SIEGEEditorial NoieJohn O'SullivanSometimes a political topic forces itself on our editorial attention and will brook no rival. Though we covered the topic of immigration fully in our last issue with articles by Mark Almond, László Földi and Ronald Majláth on its growing significance, augmented by an editorial on how the world solved an earlier refugee crisis in the late 1950s and early 1960s, we cannot cite our prescience then to ignore its dramatic upsurge in the last two months.Migrants of every kind - refugees from wars in Syria and Iraq, Christians fleeing persecution throughout the Middle East, ordinary people from the Third World seeking a better life in the freer societies of Europe, criminals and terrorists hiding in these human waves for their own nefarious purposes - have suddenly laid siege to Hungary in huge numbers. They climb fences, hide in cars or under trains, swim across rivers, commandeer boats and sail for European beaches, buy places in the lorries of people-smuggling operations, fight with police, and in general seek to overwhelm the land and sea barriers that protect the frontiers of Hungary and Europe against the threats of illegal migration and invasion.We must ask indeed: Are these two threats not really the same threat? Are these human waves not a form of invasion? It sounds harsh and exaggerated to say so. After all, most of the migrants (excepting the terrorists and criminals) are simply trying to escape from poverty and oppression into a better life. If we were facing thousands or tens of thousands of such desperate people, we would surely sit down and work out some humane and realistic way of accommodating them in our world - as we did with World Refugee Year fifty-five years ago.Given the instability, wars, kleptocratic governments, and economic failure of many countries in Asia and Africa, however, the number of potential migrants from there mns into the billions. For practical purposes there is a limitless pool of migrants. If the conditions in which they live don't improve (which is not something a post-imperial Europe can determine), and if they believe that their arrival will not be resisted, they are likely to arrive in such large numbers as to overwhelm our capacity to help them, to impose hardship on our own poorer citizens, to ratchet up social divisions in our own societies, and to weaken the bonds of national cohesion.HUNGARY AND EUROPE UNDER SIEGE3I ' Ur:. I