Adam Tooze: prediction

Transcript context

…As of late, as you know, there’s been a deal where Turkey essentially keeps many North African refugees bottled up, so to speak, and they’re paid off by the European Union. There were signs that deal may be collapsing, possibly on both sides. If that deal collapses, how does the European Union respond, and what does that world then look like? What stops the massive flow of refugees coming up through Eastern Europe? Especially because that then hits two of the very weak members of the eurozone, Greece and Italy. One of the major sources of resentment in Italy is the sense that they were left on their own with the refugee problem, with this extraordinary Dublin agreement providing, again, the kind of fig leaf for various types of nationalist selfishness on the part of Northern European states, which were in a position to absorb migrants much more easily than Italy was. The Dublin rules are, basically, if they come to your country, they stay there. There’s no formula for redistribution within the EU. I agree, that is part of a poly crisis scenario, which is what we saw in ’15. If you think back to 2015, it’s this remarkable moment where we see the Chinese economy under pressure — we talked about that earlier — the Greek crisis blowing up, the Ukraine crisis still very hot in ’15, and the refugee crisis. We know how explosive that combination was for European politics. We could indeed be heading back to a scenario which is every bit as bad as that. And that’s one of the reasons why I say worry about Algeria, because that could produce a huge new flow of migrants from an economically distressed North African country, which France would be ill equipped to deal with. It’s not obvious that we did anything more than stick a sticking plaster on it. And the Europeans will defend themselves — I think quite reasonably — and say they move from crisis to crisis and they do improvisations. They move incrementally, and they move trap-wise, and Europe is forged in crisis — all of those clichés of a kind of EU pragmatism. The question one has to ask, of course, is, when do you reach the limit? When do you hit an obstacle which is too big, which is too difficult, and which exposes your fundamental failure to come to terms with the basic issues that need to be addressed and the legacy of bitterness, which is built up in the series of makeshifts that you’ve adopted? What I worry about, and many other people worry about, is whether we’re at that point now on several definitions on COVID-19 itself, the long-standing immiseration of the Italian economy, and, as you say, a refugee crisis that might crop up. And if Turkey is one of the fragile EMs [emerging markets], then, of course, all bets are off, if you like. But there are, again, always possibilities for negotiation. Maybe a sweetheart deal for Erdoğan is precisely the thing that will open the door to some sort of refugee fix. Let’s say five years from now, when the immediacies of the coronavirus crisis probably have passed, how much cross-border mobility do you think there will be within the European Union?…

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