India’s Republic Day celebrations this year were unusually representative of its state of affairs. Last year, US president Barack Obama had been the chief guest and there had been fanfare about the resolution of the nuclear liability deadlock; 12 months on, there has been little to show for it on the ground. French president François Hollande’s visit – the guest of honour this year – has been relatively subdued by comparison. Despite 19 deals – including 13 memoranda of understanding – being signed between India and France in several sectors such as space cooperation, food safety, smart cities, renewable energy, and railways, the two big ticket items – the 126 Rafale Medium Multi Role Combat Aircraft contract (downgraded to 36 in 2014) and the six EPR reactors for Jaitapur – are still stuck in negotiations.
Much like the promised reforms under the Modi government, progress on the Rafale and Jaitapur deals has followed salami tactics – slice by slice – rather than whole hog. The Jaitapur project was approved in December 2010 and the Rafale deal announced in January 2012 – neither are close to conclusion, let alone fruition. After his meeting with Indian officials, Hollande announced that he hoped the nuclear sale would be concluded by the year’s end. By way of contrast, the Iranian nuclear negotiations started clandestinely in Muscat, Oman, in March 2013 and a Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was concluded in July 2015. It is worth bearing in mind that the JCPOA was was conducted between six countries, some hostile to each other, on a matter of grave disagreement. By contrast, the Rafale and Jaitapur deals are between two friendly countries with strategic relations working towards similar goals.
It is true that foreign relations are not built on big ticket item deals alone. Strong and sustainable ties are built only through a greater enmeshing of economies, institutions, and people. However, it is the major deals that act as beacons of intent – sophisticated technologies, particularly in advanced weapons systems, are not traded on a purely pecuniary calculus or Western relations with China and the Gulf countries would have been very much different today. Similarly, the 2008 Indo-US nuclear deal was a landmark more for what it heralded politically than its dollar value alone – which has not yet added up to much. India’s relations with Japan have blossomed but are still viewed as incomplete because the two states are yet to establish firm nuclear and defence relations. And had Australia refused to sell uranium to India until the latter signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty, relations would have been much frostier.
The high symbolic value of certain sectors is sometimes pooh-poohed by some analysts. Particularly in nuclear cooperation, they say, it is this mindset that contributes to more proliferation. This is ridiculous, of course: the symbolism accrued to certain sectors like nuclear and defence does not come from a postmodern construction of values but from an implicit expression of trust between states. A clear example is the US position on potential nuclear proliferation by Iran and the alleged proliferation by Israel. Perhaps something that is genuinely pure symbolism is the Indian contingent marching in France’s Bastille Day celebrations in 2009 and French soldiers returning the honour in the Republic Day parade this year.
What ails the discussions between Paris and Delhi is not apparent either. India’s hypersensitivity to an informed public sphere means that only sanitised tidbits from bureaucrats of either side are available: basically, it is rumoured to boil down to cost. No matter, the Rafale and Jaitapur deals are important to India for reasons beyond mere symbolism. Indian Air Force readiness hangs precariously and country-wide energy shortages are apparent.
One can admonish the government, suggest steps required to remedy its hurdles, or point out the economic and other losses incurred by its lethargic pace but that has been of little use for the past four years. Delhi needs to realise that it is not just important that reforms and agreements move forward but it is crucial that they do so in a timely manner. In its own neighbourhood, China’s rapid rise while India dilly-dallied over core reforms should have been a lesson to Delhi that power is not absolute but relative; there is a cost to the slow and steady approach as the Bharatiya Janata Party gets its house in order…one citizens might not want to pay.
The most famous notes in musical history are perhaps the two E-flats that powerfully punctuate the beginning of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Sinfonia Napoleonica, or the Eroica, as it is now known. Two hundred years ago today, the French forces under Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor of the French, were defeated near the small Belgian town of Waterloo by the combined forces of Britain and Prussia in the “damn nearest-run thing” of battles. With this defeat ended the Age of Napoleon, 16 years of war and reform. The powers of Europe, arrayed against France as the Seventh Coalition, heaved a sigh of relief – the Corsican tyrant would trouble them no more.
Indisputably one of the greatest military generals in history, Napoleon has had more books written about him than any other world historical figure except Jesus. His personality evoked powerful emotions then as his memory does even today, a hero for many and a warmonger for others. Beethoven saw Napoleon as the embodiment of the Enlightenment and almost dedicated a symphony to him, changing his mind at the last moment after Napoleon crowned himself emperor in December 1804. Dedicated to the heroic endeavour instead, the Eroica would come to be considered as the most pivotal symphonic composition in Western music and a high point in the German musical maestro’s own career. In many ways a metonym for the Napoleonic era, the symphony’s interpretation has rarely been agreed upon and the bitter debates between musicians, historians, and other academicians are themselves worth a quick dekko. Later in life, Beethoven declared the Third Symphony as his best work and by far his personal favourite among his creations.
The Eroica is a grand composition that captures the personality Napoleon and Beethoven’s narrative ambitions very well. Just as its original subject changed the face of Europe, the Eroica changed our idea of what a symphony was. Bold and iconoclastic, Beethoven’s music violated almost every musical convention considered in good taste until then and marked, again like its intended subject, the beginning of a new period. Eroica has four movements, the Allegro con brio, the Marcia funebre: Adagio assai, the Scherzo: Allegro vivace, and the Finale: Allegro molto. As the Italian suggests, the first movement is fast with spirit and vigour, the second is slow and stately, the third is playful and picks up tempo again, and the symphony ends with a fast and cheerful movement. The energy of the Eroica is immediately apparent – three of the four movements are allegro, indicating a fast and stormy tempo that are cheerful, frisky, brisk, and spirited.
Why Beethoven wrote such a composition is itself a mystery. The maestro began jotting down notes for what would become his magnum opus some time in 1802 when he was recovering from depression in Heiligenstadt. Beethoven had even contemplated suicide at a point and written a will, which was found on his person upon his death. In it, he explains why he had thought of suicide but the love for his art eventually prevented him from taking the extreme measure. By October, he was feeling better and returned to Vienna and took up in a theatre to work on his opera while Emanuel Schikaneder produced a libretto for him as he had done for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte. When spring came and Schikaneder failed to deliver, Beethoven moved to a small village near Wienerwald called Döbling on the Danube Canal. Here, he would compose his famous work through the spring and summer of 1803.
According to Anton Schindler, personal secretary and friend to Beethoven, the idea of dedicating a symphony to the French leader – Napoleon was First Consul then – came from Marshal Jean Bernadotte. As ambassador to the Austrian court, he frequently held salons that were frequented by the elite and distinguished of Vienna among whom Beethoven was one. In one of these salons, Bernadotte allegedly suggested that Beethoven compose the greatest symphony in honour of the greatest leader of the world. It is a nice tale but there are grievous doubts of its veracity for the simple fact that Bernadotte had been asked to leave Vienna within a few months of his arrival in 1798, a full five years before Beethoven even began work on the Eroica.
The Allegro con brio is the longest opening movement of any symphony written to date and dispenses with violins to carry the melody in favour of cellos. It can be interpreted to symbolise Napoleon’s highly successful early career, lasting until the invasion of Spain in 1806 for some and until the Russian misadventure in 1812 for others. This movement would, then, tell the stories of Auerstadt and Austerlitz, Friedland and Marengo, Rivoli and Wagram, and of Toulon and Vendémiaire. Over most of his career, it seemed that the Little Corporal could do no wrong – in the 63 engagements that spanned his career, Napoleon lost only seven.
While it breaks with tradition is some ways, the allegro con brio is also influenced by that which came before it. For example, the similarity between the opening intervals of Beethoven’s Eroica and Mozart’s operetta Bastien et Bastienne are hard to miss. Yet the dissonant shifts Beethoven uses and Mozart avoids are also quite evident. The standard interpretation of these gritty shifts, particularly the horns that appear to come in early, is that they represent the tension and struggle in Napoleon’s early life. Bonaparte hailed from minor Italian nobility and never mastered the French language; his father had supported the Corsican revolutionaries against the French takeover of the island in 1765 and was out of favour after their defeat. Napoleon was given the opportunity to attend school first at École de Brienne and later at the École Militaire through French acquaintances of his mother, and ironically, on a royal scholarship. Although Napoleon’s star had been on the rise since his lifting of the siege of Toulon in 1793, it was not until 1796 and the Italian campaign that it had truly ascended. We see this development of the bold and ambitious yet still unassuming subject in the beginning characterised by fortissimo as the movement progresses.
Perhaps the most powerful musical play comes in the recapitulation section of the sonata – traditional sonata have three basic subdivisions, exposition, development, and recapitulation, though they may have an introduction or coda present too. Oftentimes, the recapitulation is a verbatim reproduction of the exposition and even Beethoven follows this rule in his first two symphonies. In the Eroica, however, subtle variations remove the earlier anxiety, aggression, and destruction to replace them with an assuredness and stability – the heroic, if you will. These bars could be interpreted to represent the string of successes Napoleon had in Italy, Egypt, back in France, and finally Europe. Napoleon was more established and secure now and he spent much time trying to rule and bring about reforms in addition to winning dashing victories.
Another theory behind why Beethoven might have dedicated a symphony to Napoleon is that the great German composer was considering a move to Paris. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Paris was the jewel of Western civilisation, unequalled in art, literature, music, fashion, cuisine, and splendour. It was only normal that someone of Beethoven’s talent would be drawn to such a bright constellation of talented artists. However, Napoleon’s self-coronation dampened Beethoven’s enthusiasm for the French emperor and he decided to remain in Vienna. This obviated the need of any grand gesture on his part towards the emperor for entry into the Paris elite. Furthermore, the outbreak of war between France and the Third Coalition, of which Austria was a part, in 1805 made the political climate inconducive to dedicating anything to Napoleon.
Still, this does not explain why Beethoven thought highly of Napoleon at all and some historians contend that it was at best an ambivalent relationship. This seems unlikely for several reasons. First, Beethoven’s use of “Luigi” on the coversheet of his symphony indicates a certain warmth and affection for the ruler of the French who was of Italian blood and could not speak French properly and even then with a strong Corsican accent. Napoleon’s parents were both minor Italian nobility, his father of Milanese ancestry and his mother from Florence. Second, Beethoven was heavily influenced by Enlightenment philosophy as a teenager and the French Revolution with its Declaration of Universal Human Rights seemed the fruition of that philosophy. Napoleon was the apotheosis of the French Revolution, bringing the Enlightenment to France and to Europe at the tip of a bayonet in line with the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Third, Beethoven was personally struck by the Revolutionary promise of equality. He had fallen in love with Josephine Brunsvik, the younger daughter of the Hungarian Countess Anna Brunsvik, in the process of teaching her and her sister piano. Despite Beethoven’s acclaim, European society was not ready to accept the marriage of a noblewoman with a commoner and Josephine was married off to another nobleman, Josef Deym. Upon his sudden death in 1804, Beethoven approached Josephine once more and was rebuffed yet again.
The second movement is a drastic change from the first: sombre and restrained, it leaves the carefree and spontaneous air of the first movement behind. Close your eyes, and with the sedate tone of the funeral march, it is almost difficult not to visualise a rag-tag and humbled army marching back from the snowy depths of Russia. A funeral march in the middle of a symphony, though not unique, was certainly rare and raised a few eyebrows among the audience. This movement announces the death of the heroism of the previous movement, or at least its irredeemable and tragic costs. The march opens with a mournful oboe solo, which is then carried out by other sections. Beethoven has the string instruments replicate the drumbeats of a regular funeral march and thereby completely changed the texture of the piece. The string instruments playing sotto voce and the oboe together create a more emotional and personal expression of grief, as if to tell the listener that something dear to him, too, has been lost.
Some historians have suggested that the writing of his movement corresponds closest with Beethoven’s days in Heiligenstadt, reflecting these dark days and moods in the life of the composer as much as the fall of Napoleon, at least in Beethoven’s eyes. It is coincidental – inevitable? – that the Emperor’s trajectory eventually matched Beethoven’s music – his Spanish ulcer, the defeat of his Grand Armée in Russia and then in Leipzig, his exile to Elba, his return and eventual defeat at Waterloo, and his demise at St. Helena in May 1821. The timing of the composition and its correspondence with Napoleon’s career seems to imply that Beethoven had already written the movement even before Napoleon became emperor. This might explain why the funeral march does not sound disappointed, betrayed, or angry but sedate and stately. For Beethoven, his much admired Napoleon was still only a pawn in the grand narrative of History who could only show the way that others would have to tread for themselves.
After Beethoven’s disappointment with Napoleon in 1804, he decided to dedicate the symphony to his patron, Prince Joseph Franz Maximilian Lobkowicz. At the first playing, a small, private gathering, the orchestra was as shocked as the audience with the tempo, intensity, and the several other peculiarities of the composition. Beethoven had to reassure them, telling them that they are fine musicians trained to produce beautiful sounds but that is not what he wanted for the Eroica. Beethoven wanted intensity and urgency, struggle, emotion, and harshness. The performances at the Lobkowicz manor allowed the maestro to make several changes and try out other bold ideas before the symphony was opened to the public. These trials did not always go well and often left the musicians and audiences quite confused. During the first performance, for example, Ferdinand Ries, Beethoven’s student, interrupted the playing to scold the horn player because it appeared that he had counted wrong and come in too early. Beethoven nearly boxed his ears and did not speak to him for a while after that!
The third and fourth movements are again upbeat and leaves the listeners wondering what is left to celebrate if the great Napoleon is dead. We must remember that the Eroica was first performed for a public audience in April 1805 and our interpretation of the second movement as the fall of Napoleon is post facto. Contemporarily, the funeral march represented only the death of an idea and so the joyous third movement was to announce the optimisitic message that ideas cannot be slain. This bears a parallel to the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars in that many of the laws that the French emperor had enacted were retained by his former subjects, particularly in the smaller German states. The idea of liberty lived on, as did the notion of human rights and the struggle to preserve those could be fought individually as well as institutionally. We were all subjects of Beethoven’s Eroica, we were all heroes. Hardly revolutionary to 21st century ears, but the Eroica‘s artist-as-hero militated against the artist-as-craftsman order of 19th century Europe.
The symphony was heard by the public for the first time in April 1805. The public reaction was as confused and mixed as that of the little private audiences at the Lobkowicz manor before whom Beethoven had perfected the symphony. Franz Joseph Haydn, Beethoven’s teacher, was far more tolerant of the breaks with classical musical theory but thought the Eroica was too long, too bombastic, and would never become popular. Yet both teacher and student had a history of making acerbic comments about each other’s work and it is difficult to know how seriously to take Haydn’s comments. There is no doubt that Beethoven respected his teacher and Haydn saw great promise in his student despite their barbs at each other.
At Waterloo, the French experiment was stopped or at least delayed for a few years. Yet had Napoleon not been defeated at Waterloo, there would have been another coalition and another battle until he was removed from Europe’s political stage. It is impossible to constantly fight every Great Power in the world singlehandedly for over two decades and come out the victor. At the time when the pace of a horse was the fastest a man cold travel, Napoleon constantly surprised his opponents with his speed and impeccable use of artillery and deception. Europe’s monarchs and generals watched and learned, paying the price in blood and obliterated egos. That fateful day in Belgium, Napoleon faced his enemies with inadequately trained soldiers, weak internal lines of communications, a severe shortage of cavalry, poor positioning, and bad weather – and came within a whisker of carrying the day.
To his critics, he will always be the Ogre of Corsica, the warmonger. Yet Napoleon Bonaparte waged peace as well as he waged war. He gave France the Louvre, the civil code that informally bore his name – the Code Napoléon – and instituted a meritocracy in France that saw talent rise from unexpected sections of society. Most of Napoleon’s generals came from humble backgrounds as did many of the civil servants, parliamentarians, and new intellectuals. Discriminatory trade guilds were abolished and equal rights of Jews was recognised. He brought reforms even in the lands he conquered, many of which lived long after he was gone. Napoleon was an excellent civil administrator too. He would surround himself with intelligent people and see their better ideas to fruition. He would himself constantly create drawings of streets, buildings, and neighbourhoods and send them to his engineers for consideration. A man of boundless energy, it is rumoured that the Emperor slept barely four hours a day. He was intensely curious too, and took along with him an enormous scientific team to Egypt in 1798. The results of the research done by the French on that trip alone put French scholarship a the forefront of Egyptology for decades.
The Eroica aptly describes Napoleon – bold, striving, curious, intelligent, and with a sense of urgency around him. It is of little wonder that a whole era is named after the French emperor, an honour of History that not even the mightiest of Roman princeps received. Like Napoleon, the Eroica lives on in admiration long after its creation. Beethoven would have been happy – as he always said, art must look to eternity.
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Napoleon in media:
Film and TV –Napoléon (2002). A mini-series by A&E consisting of four episodes, each approximately 90 minutes in length.
–Austerlitz (1960). This is an approximately 150-minute long French film that covers Napoleon’s greatest victory – Austerlitz in December 1805, against the Austrians and the Russians. The first half focuses on Napoleon’s coronation and his reasons for becoming a monarch after the Revolution had just overthrown one noble house. The second half covers the preparations for war and battle itself. This is not a movie for those not well-versed in Napoleonic history already or those who do not understand French!
–Waterloo (1970). As the name suggests, this movie is about Napoleon’s final days as emperor and last three battles. On June 16, French forces engaged with the Prussians and English at Ligny and Quatre Bras, defeating them both. Two days later, the forces meet at a small Belgian town called Waterloo.
–Eroica (2003). This is a movie that focuses solely on Beethoven’s first private performance of the Napoleonica at the Lobkowicz manor about an hour and a half from Vienna.
–Immortal Beloved (1994). An excellent movie about the life of Ludwig van Beethoven, though some of the history is disputed.
Podcast –The Napoleon Bonaparte Podcast. A 59-episode, 60-hour podcast with J. David Markham, an amateur historian and president of the International Napoleon Society, and Cameron Reilly, founder of The Podcast Network and a Napoleon Bonaparte enthusiast.
Books –Napoleon Bonaparte. An essential reading list for those further interested in the Emperor and his times.
The Mediterranean Sea is no stranger to maritime deaths, particularly of irregular migrants from North Africa and the Middle East who seek to enter the European Union for purposes of employment illegally. However, the number of casualties has spiked astronomically in the last four years as have the number of people trying to cross the sea. Interestingly, European newspapers have so far portrayed the stories of the tragedies at sea as the usual tale of irregular migrants seeking a better life in Europe. The overwhelming conformity to this terminology, especially in light of the events of the past four years, is suspect.
Migration to Europe from Africa across the Mare Nostrum is a complex story yet no different from many other similar situations such as across the Mexican border with the United States. In both cases, the prosperous states do not take into account the factors responsible for illegal immigration while formulating their immigration policies. Consequently, these policies are found to be ineffective to stem the human tide of the neighbouring poor. Historically, irregular migrants have tried to enter Europe through four points – the Spanish Canary Islands in the Atlantic Ocean, the Spanish territories of Ceuta and Melilla in North Africa, Malta and the Italian islands of Sicily and Lampedusa, and Greece and the Balkans.
Soon after World War II, Europe was desperately short of labour to rebuild a shattered continent. The Marshall Plan fuelled the economic miracles, usually known as the golden decade, in several countries and there was a free flow of labour from Africa and the Middle East into Europe. During this first wave of migration, the European destinations of choice had been France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Belgium. However, this situation began to change after the Energy Crisis of 1973 and European countries began to have increasingly strict restrictions on visa issuances. The 1985 Schengen Treaty, for example, made it difficult for workers from the eastern and southern Mediterranean rim countries to seek employment in its member states – France, Germany, and the Benelux countries (Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg). In response to the demand for low-skilled labour in southern Europe and the closed markets of the traditional destinations, Spain and Italy saw an increase in immigration until the early 1990s when they too introduced visa requirements for immigrants from the Maghreb.
Despite the tightening of visa controls, there has always been a demand for unskilled labour in the informal sector in Europe; this has kept the flow of migrants going. Contrary to the common perception of irregular migrants, most are fairly well-educated and from middle class families. However, their qualifications are often not recognised in Europe and migrants therefore fulfill the demand in domestic service, agriculture, fisheries, and janitorial work. This is an advantage for their employers, who find semi-skilled workers for lower salaries. Again, contrary to common perception, the majority of irregular migrants do not enter Europe via the Mediterranean. Many overstay their legal visas, others travel with false documentation, and some hide away in vehicles and containers.
The crises that erupted in the Middle East and North Africa around 2011 augmented the usual flow of people into Europe. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the number of people fleeing to Italy in 2009 was 9,573; this had rocketed to 61,000 by 2011. Similarly, Greece, which had seen about 10,000 people attempt to reach its shores in 2005 saw the number climb up to 60,000 in 2011. For whatever reason, Italy seems to be bearing the brunt of this immigration surge – in 2010, some 4,500 migrants left Libya for Italy but by 2014, that number had soared to 170,000. By contrast, the land route into Greece and the Balkans from Turkey saw about 51,000 people smuggle across in 2008, approximately the same number as in 2014. According to UNHCR estimates, some 219,000 people crossed the Mediterranean into Europe last year and 3,419 died at sea. By March this year, some 36,000 are expected to have entered Europe and the casualties already number 1,750.
Many blame Europe for the deaths. One immediate reason is that the EU scaled down maritime patrol operations in the Mediterranean which saved thousands of lives. In response to the drowning of over 300 people off the coast of Lampedusa in October 2013, Rome had launched Operation Mare Nostrum, a series of extended patrols and devotion of military assets to rescue operations. Funded at slightly over $12 million per month, it is estimated to have saved some 150,000 people in its short duration of a year. In the midst of a financial crisis itself, Italy could not afford to fund the efforts alone and asked for support from its EU partners. Additionally, the EU’s Dublin Regulation puts the cost of processing of illegal migrants entirely upon the country of first arrival, making border states of the federation more vulnerable. However, the EU refused to support Rome by arguing that Mare Nostrum had made the central Mediterranean route safer and hence encouraged even greater migration. Instead, Operation Triton was was launched, a programme that receives barely a third of the funding of Mare Nostrum and patrols only close to European waters rather than the entire Mediterranean. This, however, has not dissuaded people from attempting to cross the Mediterranean and given that most of the shipwrecks occur near Libyan waters, only increased casualties. Another reason Europe is blamed for the exacerbated irregular migration crisis is that European capitals encouraged or conducted operations in North Africa and the Levant that toppled local governments and sent the region into paroxysms of violence that has caused the dislocation.
To be fair, there are reasons beyond Europe’s control for the tragedies. Human traffickers crowd boats beyond the safety limit and deploy unseaworthy vessels to ferry irregular migrants across the Mediterranean. If the boats capsize or are wrecked, under maritime law, it is the legal obligation of anyone who sees the castaways to rescue them. Thus, traffickers shirk their responsibilities for safe passage onto European navies. Furthermore, the sheer number of boats put to sea at a time means that Italian naval vessels operating in the region have received over a dozen distress calls at a time. Underfunded and undermanned as the patrol operations are, it is simply impossible to rescue everyone. While the entire focus and blame as been on Europe, it is also a fact that African governments and media have remained silent and indifferent to the regular tragedies in the Mediterranean except to blame their northern neighbours across the sea. Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte asked that Africa must also collectively pick up its share of the responsibility; “Last time I checked Libya was in Africa, not Europe,” he said.
If Europe is to blame, however, it is not for the quotidian failures of its naval officers but for its refusal to acknowledge the realities of the problem it faces. Like the proverbial ostrich that buries its head in the sand, European governments have not cared to distinguish between the the regular inflow of illegal labour across their southern sea and the significant increase of migration in the last four years. European media and government still refer to the rescued and the victims as migrants rather than refugees, as if the primary motive of the Syrians and Libyans flooding into Europe now is gainful employment and remittance back home rather than physical safety. Yet the word ‘refugee’ is rarely seen in the discussion of the deaths in the Mediterranean.
The probable reason for this is that there are legal implications in the choice between these two words. Rooted in the horrors of the Holocaust and the denial of immigration to ships carrying Jewish refugees, the 1951 United Nations Convention on Refugees and its 1967 Protocol governs how the dislocated may be treated. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights also guarantees a right to seek asylum from political crimes. Activists have tried to expand this to include economic deprivation but that would be so broad as to render the convention meaningless. It has become a basic principle of international law that countries are obligated to take in refugees of political violence and conflict and the treaty prohibits refoulement – forcing a refugee to return to a country where his life is threatened. The onus of proof of persecution is upon the refugee and asylum may be denied under specific circumstances. However, it is difficult to argue that Syrians and Libyans in particular do not have legitimate grounds for asylum presently.
Attaining the ‘refugee’ tag hardly guarantees a life of comfort – usually, it is followed by life in massive government camps awaiting resettlement. Some refugees are indeed given the opportunity to stay and work in their host country but this is a minuscule number. For example, of the 2.5 million refugees of the Syrian civil war in 2013, the United States accepted 36 for resettlement. Nevertheless, even such a life of rations and make-shift homes is preferable to the hundreds of thousands fleeing the Levant and North Africa. Of course, many try to escape the camp and disappear into the country, finding employment and lodging below the state’s net. This leaves them vulnerable to exploitation but few of the dislocated have anything left to lose and the even the leaking boats on the Mediterranean offer more hope than life back at home.
European law does give special consideration to certain categories of refugees – minors, the elderly, the disabled, pregnant women, single parents accompanied by minors, and victims of torture and sexual violence. Beyond non-refoulement, these include the right to information in a language they understand, a renewable residence permit valid for at least three years, travel within and outside the country that granted refugee status, employment, education and vocational training, access to medical care, access to appropriate accommodation, and access to programmes facilitating integration into the host society. An irregular migrant, on the other hand, receives no such benefits; he may be deported and employment is forbidden.
It is ironic that the continent that led the charge on the Right to Protect (R2P) now even refuses to acknowledge refugees. The humanitarian rhetoric of R2P is reserved for justifying the bombardment of other states but does not seem to apply to one’s own immigration policies. One can take this blame game even further back in history to the era of imperialism and blame the white man’s rapacity in the colonies but that does hardly any good at present. The humanitarian crisis in genuine and Europe needs all the international support it can get to alleviate the depressing and gut-wrenching plight of the refugees from the conflict zones in the Levant and Africa.
It must also be recognised that Europe does have legitimate grievances about its inability to handle the entire influx of refugees from the Greater Middle East. One possible approach to the Mediterranean crisis is an international commitment to resettle the refugees. Preference might be given to stable neighbours first, the countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development next, and finally the rest of the world. Those unwilling to take people may contribute by way of financial assistance. Even if some of the refugees are dispatched through this programme, it will reduce the burden on the camps in Turkey, Jordan, and elsewhere. It is unlikely that the conflict in Libya or Syria/Iraq will be resolved soon by diplomacy or by force and though efforts should be made towards that end, the future of the dislocated cannot be pinned on such hopes in the short term.
International affairs is filled with rhetoric about our mutual obligations to one another. One such duty might perhaps be not to let the refugee protection system collapse for those are the neediest among us. Let too many institutions and ideals wither away on economic and “practical” grounds and eventually there will be nothing left to preserve in an anomic world. The first step, however, is for Europe to accept that the thousands of people risking life to cross the Mediterranean Sea are refugees and not irregular migrants.
Much like the promised reforms under the Modi government, progress on the Rafale and Jaitapur deals has followed salami tactics – slice by slice – rather than whole hog. The Jaitapur project was approved in December 2010 and the Rafale deal announced in January 2012 – neither are close to conclusion, let alone fruition. After his meeting with Indian officials, Hollande announced that he hoped the nuclear sale would be concluded by the year’s end. By way of contrast, the Iranian nuclear negotiations started clandestinely in Muscat, Oman, in March 2013 and a Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was concluded in July 2015. It is worth bearing in mind that the JCPOA was was conducted between six countries, some hostile to each other, on a matter of grave disagreement. By contrast, the Rafale and Jaitapur deals are between two friendly countries with strategic relations working towards similar goals.
