Diari De Les Idees
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Diari de les idees Núm. 103 (25-29 de juny 2018) RESUM D’IDEES Migration is back at the top of the political agenda in Europe. The issue is threatening to bring down the government of the EU’s richest country and tear through the European Council summit next week, but leaders seem further than ever from a solution. Jacopo Barigazzi & James Randerson, “What is Europe’s migration fight about?”, Politico, 22 de juny de 2018 Catalan separatists also recently abandoned their historical reluctance to issue a formal declaration of independence, which stemmed from a fear that doing so would be received poorly abroad. That reticence made it surprising when the Catalan leader Carles Puigdemont decided to declare independence after the Catalans voted to leave Spain in a referendum in October 2017 Tanisha M. Fazal, “Go Your Own Way. Why Rising Separatism Might Lead to More Conflict”, Foreign Affairs, July/August issue 2018 Quand le fact-checking ne parvient pas à éteindre une intox, que faire ? Le linguiste George Lakoff, professeur émérite de l'université de Berkeley, a un conseil pour les journalistes : remontez le fil de la fake news pour la prendre en étau Alexandra Saviana, “Pour combattre les fake news, un linguiste propose la méthode du ‘sandwich de vérité’”, Marianne, 25 de juny de 2018 Seeing group members prosper seems to activate our brains’ “reward centers” even if we receive no benefit ourselves Amy Chua, “Tribal World. Group Identity is All”, Foreign Affairs, July/August Issue 2018 Som minoritaris. També a casa nostra. I aquest és el perill més gros que veig en relació amb la supervivència de la llengua: la transmissió generacional. Mila Segarra, “La societat catalana és prou adulta per a fer passos lingüístics arriscats”, Vilaweb, 24 de juny de 2018 1 Migration is back at the top of the political agenda in Europe. The issue is threatening to bring down the government of the EU’s richest country and tear through the European Council summit next week, but leaders seem further than ever from a solution. Jacopo Barigazzi & James Randerson, “What is Europe’s migration fight about?”, Politico, 22 de juny de 2018, https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-migration-crisis- fight-explained/ Here’s POLITICO’s guide to Europe’s boiling political crisis. Why is this news now? Two main reasons — Italy and Germany. Italy’s coalition government — made up of the far-right League and populist 5Star Movement — has pushed the issue to the top of their country’s, and hence the EU’s, agenda. Italy has been the landing point for the majority of migrants and its government wants more help from the rest of the Continent. It has also adopted a harder line on arrivals. The country’s interior minister, League leader Matteo Salvini, has closed ports to the arrival of NGO vessels carrying migrants picked up in the Mediterranean Sea. One vessel, the Aquarius, which was carrying 629 migrants, was prevented from docking at Italian ports last week but eventually landed its human cargo in Spain. The second reason is that the political marriage between Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats and her Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, which has sustained Germany’s chancellor in power since 2005 is on the rocks over the issue — with tensions even threatening to bring down the government. The CSU wants to turn back asylum seekers arriving at the country’s southern border who have registered in another European country from entering Germany. Such a move would reverse Merkel’s 2015 open-door policy on refugees and undermine her authority. But more importantly, by acting unilaterally, it risks a domino effect across Europe with other states opting to do the same. Merkel wants the issue to be solved at the EU level and has persuaded her CSU partners to hold off until leaders meet at the European Council summit on Thursday and Friday next week. Leaders from countries most affected by the migration crisis will also attempt to make progress at a “mini summit” on Sunday that was called by the European Commission at Merkel’s request. This is all in response to the migration crisis, right? Yes and no. Call it a delayed political reaction to the migration crisis in 2015. The numbers of migrants reaching Europe’s shores is actually much lower now as a result of moves to close the route through the Balkans as well as deals with Turkey and Libya. Applications for asylum fell by 44 percent across the EU in 2017 compared to the previous year, 2 according to a report by the European Asylum Support Office (EASO) released earlier this month. In the first four months of 2018, asylum applications dropped further, according to provisional data from EASO, with about 197,000 people seeking protection in the EU, fewer than during the same period in each of the last three years, though still higher that the pre-crisis levels in 2014. Data from the Italian interior ministry show that arrivals by sea have decreased by 77 percent in the first months of the year compared to the same period in 2017. More generally, as of May, data collected by the Council show that almost 26,000 migrants entered Europe by sea so far in 2018. The total number for the same period in 2017 was more than 50,000 arrivals and around 200,000 in 2016. Where are the migrants from? Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan are the top three countries of origin for asylum applicants in the EU. What happens to people when they arrive? That depends. Refugees from repressive regimes or war zones are entitled to asylum. According to EASO data, in 2017 around half of asylum claimants were successful in first instance decisions (462,355 out of 996,685). In the first quarter of 2018, 26 percent (34,400) of all first time asylum applicants in EU made their claim in Germany, followed by 19 percent in France, 14 percent in Italy, 10 percent in Greece and 7 percent in Spain, according to statistics from Eurostat. Back in September 2015, EU states committed to relocating up to 160,000 people who had arrived in Italy and Greece around the Continent within two years. By May the following year only a few thousand had been relocated with some countries not taking any at all. Dimitris Avramopoulos, the European commissioner for migration, told the European Parliament at the time: “Relocation is vital to the success of our migration and asylum policies based on solidarity and responsibility … For this, one element remains critical for the success of the scheme: the political will and the mutual cooperation and trust between member states.” In the end, the EU managed to relocate almost 35,000 refuges and since the quota system expired in September 2017 no permanent relocation system, voluntary or mandatory, has been introduced. Other migrants who are not entitled to protection are returned to their country of origin. In some cases there are bilateral agreements with those countries and in others there are EU-wide agreements. Until May 2016 the EU had concluded 17 EU readmission agreements with different countries (Hong Kong, Macao, Sri Lanka, Albania, Russia, Ukraine, Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Montenegro, Serbia, Moldova, Pakistan, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkey, Cape Verde) plus new 3 arrangements agreed in the last two years (Afghanistan, Guinea, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Gambia, Ivory Coast). For some countries, including Nigeria and Tunisia, there are no readmission agreements. In other cases, it is not possible to identify a migrant’s nationality or their country of origin refuses to recognize a migrant as one of their citizens. As a result, just over a third of migrants (36.6 percent in 2017 according to Commission data) who are not entitled to asylum are returned home. According to an EU official, each return costs between €3,000 and €5,000. Which other countries are worried about migration? Hungary under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and Austria under Chancellor Sebastian Kurz have taken a hard line on migration. The Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia have also resisted taking in refugees. So they’re on Italy’s side? Not exactly. They agree that they don’t want migrants coming into Europe and all want to strengthen the EU’s external borders, but Italy believes other EU nations are not taking their fair share of the burden. It wants other countries to take more refugees — something Hungary, Austria and others are refusing to do. Orbán’s position that the EU should do everything possible to prevent arrivals combined with no obligation for internal states to take in asylum seekers is now gaining traction in the European Council. “We have seen that Hungary’s position, which was previously condemned, is now gaining increasing acceptance,” Horst Seehofer, Germany’s interior minister (from the Bavarian CSU), said in a speech last Saturday. But the EU has a system for dealing with asylum seekers right? Yes, it’s called the Dublin System, but it is creaking. The cornerstone of Dublin is that the country where a migrant first enters the EU is responsible for their asylum claim. The original idea was that it would prevent migrants from lodging claims in multiple countries and also avoid asylum seekers being shuttled from state to state. It was conceived as a measure to compensate for the loss of controls that arose from the lifting of internal borders with the introduction of the borderless Schengen area. But frontline states on the Mediterranean coast argue that this places an unfair burden on them since they have become responsible for almost all asylum seekers (even though many of those who arrive on Greek or Italian shores see Germany or the U.K.