Julien Reszka
In 2011, I wrote about the war in Libya and who stood to gain from it. France, the United Kingdom, Italy, and the United States led the NATO intervention that toppled Gaddafi. Central European countries had no vote, no troops in the operation, and no say in the decision. And ordinary French, British, Italian, and American citizens had very little say either.
Four years later, people crossing the Mediterranean were doing so in large part because Libya no longer had a functioning state. The intervention created a power vacuum. A power vacuum creates the conditions for mass displacement.
On September 4, 2015, the leaders of Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia met in Prague and issued a joint declaration rejecting the European Commission's mandatory relocation mechanism. The EU Commission was proposing to distribute 120,000 asylum seekers across member states by quota. The V4 said no.
The moral case against mandatory quotas has two parts. The first is geopolitical: countries that did not participate in destabilizing Libya owe nothing for the consequences. The second is demographic: native European populations are already below replacement rate. They are shrinking. The UN itself called this replacement migration in a 2001 report that framed mass immigration as the policy tool to offset population decline. The UN Genocide Convention defines genocide as including measures intended to destroy a group "in part" and imposing conditions that prevent a group from sustaining itself. Deliberately engineering the demographic replacement of a native population without their consent fits that definition more closely than most people are willing to say out loud.
The mandatory quota argument ignores both:
- Countries that had no role in the Libya intervention carry no obligation for the displacement it caused
- Native populations who never consented to mass immigration have a legitimate interest in their own demographic continuity
Italy signed a Treaty of Friendship with Gaddafi in 2008, agreeing to cooperate on migration control and pay billions in reparations. Then Italy participated in the bombing that removed him. The same country that dismantled its own migration firewall then demanded that others absorb the resulting flow.
A people has a right to decide the future composition of their own society. It is the most basic form of self-determination. European governments that ignore that are not being moral. They are abdicating their duty to the people they claim they represent.
The V4 governments did not abdicate. That is why they were called selfish. The accusation reveals more about those making it than those receiving it.
Discussion