Economics and politics - comment and analysis
24. March 2016 I Heiner Flassbeck I Europe, General Politics

The attacks in Brussels and the endless failure of politics

Policy-makers respond to attacks like the ones in Brussels two days ago with a reflex. It is the wrong reflex. The same old lines are being repeated ad verbatim, as if by hypnotised robots: we must stand together and permanently defeat terrorism. No kidding.

Exactly the same happened after the attacks in Paris of November 2015. Most politicians most likely want go to war now again although they have not yet answered the most important question: a war against who? Against an enemy who does not exist. The terrorism we are facing cannot be defeated by the military, the police or by intelligence because the places where the terrorists hit are arbitrary and their sources will never run dry as long as the policies of the West do not radically change.

I said the same already after the attacks in Paris and it is still true: no government is able to protect its citizens from such attacks. It is simple impossible to check every person who ends up at your front door. Perhaps he carries weapons or explosives, perhaps not. You can, of course, try to control what everyone is saying, who everyone is calling, who everyone befriends on social media and so on and the net result is that you destroy civil and political liberties that are essential to a functioning democracy as opposed to one on paper.

Meanwhile, the real determinants of anger and hatred remain in our hands. How many of the young people who find themselves now behind fences in Idomeni in Greece in the midst of cold, dirt and mud will be traumatised? How many will remain untouched by the obvious disdain of the West for the plight of tens of thousands of people in this refugee ‘camp’?

How many of those who are now locked up in Turkish refugee ‘camps’ which have in the meantime been compared by UN officials to WWII prisoner camps are drifting into a world of hatred towards those in Europe who celebrate the deal with Turkey as a ‘decisive breakthrough’ in European refugee policy with their regulars in their beer gardens? Prosit. You can almost touch the resentment with your hands.

Three million people are crammed into refugee ‘camps’ in Turkey. They live in confined spaces, are supplied only with survival rations, the children cannot go to school, they can’t study, the adults can’t work, there is no future, they are being pushed from one state to another like cattle, now they are at the mercy and the arbitrariness of a despotic state, close to a negative image of a safe third country. How many of them will eventually radicalise? Ten percent? One percent?

Even if only one in thousand eventually radicalises, it will still be more than enough to cause the death of many innocent people in Europe and elsewhere in the coming years. The victims of the terror pay the price for the inability of policy-makers in Europe and other places to approach the refugee crisis in an intelligent, principled and humane manner.

Instead, after the second severe event in a short time, Western politicians once again seek refuge into in their predictable meaningless rituals. They are boldly reading empty statements from a sheet of paper: more police and more military on the streets, closing the borders while emphasising that this time it will all be different. Nothing is different and the next attack is only a matter of time.

It is with terrorism as it is with the refugee problem itself: those who do not have the courage to question their own core beliefs and those who are unwilling to look in an unprejudiced manner at the effects of their own actions in the countries of origin of the refugees actually do not need to do anything else. It is fine. That is the reason why not one single politician has said: This cannot go on! We have failed! We declared a false war and we lost!