It was a small body lying on the sand. As in The sleeper of the valley, he seemed to be resting peacefully. But as in Rimbaud’s poem, in reality he was dead. Barely six years ago, the photo of little Aylan stranded on a Greek beach when his father tried to cross the European border imposed an image of migration that has haunted us ever since.
For the past two weeks, the photos of these migrants massed at the border of Belarus and Poland have been sending us another image. Of course, there are those families who wander in the forest without food or warm clothes and who must be helped. But there are also these young men who stone the soldiers and try to cut the barbed wire with the help of shears. We know that some have paid up to 10,000 euros (almost the Polish average annual salary) to travel from the Middle East to Belarus and attempt to cross illegally into Poland to reach Germany.
Suddenly, the reality of these migrations appeared to us from a different angle than the humanitarian filter favored by the media. This angle is that of migratory blackmail which uses these populations as a geopolitical weapon. Instead of provoking gunfire at the border as he would have done a few decades earlier, the Belarusian despot has found something better. On Aeroflot and Turkish Airlines, Alexander Lukashenko had migrants from the Middle East and the Maghreb transported to dump these human tides at the Polish border. The result is the same. It consists in destabilizing European countries in revenge for the sanctions taken against Belarus. All under the watchful eye of Vladimir Putin.
Military or not, “a deliberate act of a state to violate the borders of another state is an act of war”, recalled in Le Figaro American political scientist Andrew Michta. This is what the Poles understood perfectly when they sent 12,000 soldiers to the border. Unlike the bureaucrats in Brussels who live in a kind of humanitarian bliss, the Poles know what a border is. Above all, they know what it costs not to have, them whose country was torn up for two centuries to the point of being erased from the face of Europe.
The Poles therefore undertook the construction of a wall. Because, what is a border if not a wall? It does not matter whether it is concrete, iron or symbolic as long as it guarantees the democratic choice of a people to let whoever they want into their territory. Without it, no sovereignty! We have been witnessing a strange turnaround in recent days. Banned from the European Union and treated as a reactionary, Poland suddenly became the sentinel of the continent.
The weeping virgins referred to the Berlin Wall, which, unlike the one in question here, did not protect anyone but imprisoned millions of Europeans. They claimed that in Europe we do not build a wall. We know the chorus. This is precisely how, since 2015, Europe has become the useful idiot of migratory blackmail. Lukashenko only rushed into the breach opened in 2015 by Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Angela Merkel. The first never ceased to blackmail the second by dumping its migrants on the Greek coasts and by taking control of the Libyan migration network.
Abandoned by Brussels, small nations like Lithuania, Latvia and Poland understood well that they could only count on their own means. They took note of this vast enterprise of diversion of the right of asylum and modified their laws in order to authorize refoulements. Countries like Sweden and Lithuania have even reinstated military service. Their inhabitants have known for a long time that the great European dream of a world without borders has lived. And that he could be suicidal in a time when empires and rivalries are making a comeback.
This is how reality reclaims its rights over the post-national European mirage. An ideology founded on the sole dogma of the free movement of capital, goods and people. Barely a month ago, nearly half of EU member countries, including a large number of Eastern European countries, called on Brussels to change migration policy. Their only answer was an end of inadmissibility. Because, in Brussels, we are still not out of the mirage of the 1980s, that of ” The end of the story ” and of ” Happy globalization ”, to use the titles of two books written by the American Francis Fukuyama and the French Alain Minc. When we see ourselves as a vague multicultural mosaic that refuses even to recognize our Christian roots, how could we feel threatened by a migratory invasion?
It is different for the nations which, for their part, have an identity, a culture and a demographic balance to protect. Today, humanitarian glasses alone are no longer enough. They have even become an obstacle to thinking politics.