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rfmcdonaldOver at Newropean Magazine, contributor Walter Hunziker has proposed (1, 2) the establishment, by the European Union, of transnational regions on its frontiers, as destinations for illegal immigrants seeking access to European prosperity outside of metropolitan Europe. Immigration trends, he argues, are such that Europe is unlikely to acquiesce in a continued influx.
With all due respects to Mr. Hunziker, this is an unworkable idea. The prospects of Russia abandoning either the Karelian territories that it won from Finland in the Second World War or the city of Ivangorod taken from Estonia are distant. The Estonians are just not going to cede the city of Narva to a transnational authority aimed at bringing the European Union closer to the Russian Federation. The transformation of Gaza into a cosmopolitan state, with additions of Egyptian and Israeli territory, isn't going to work in an age of radical Palestinian nationalism. The sheer mechanics behind a merger of British Gibraltar on the north shore of the Straits of Gibraltar and Spanish Ceuta and Melilla on the south shore and Moroccan Tangiers in between into a single trans-strait entity would be immensely prohibitive. As for Cyprus, if an island of one million people can't be unified at all why would a transnational authority work (and whose transnational authority)?
More to the point, these enclaves seem to be morally flawed. These extraterritorial enclaves under multinational authority remind me of nothing so much as the treaty ports of East Asia. Closed in Japan by Japan's successful modernization and closed in Korea by Japan's conquest of the Korean peninsula, the treaty ports remained viable institutions--under foreign administration with some local input, protected harbours for foreign investment and involvement with the beckoning Chinese market--only because the Chinese state was so terribly fragile. Admittedly, Shanghai prospered as the main place for encounters between Western investments and Chinese markets, enjoying a period of hothouse prosperity. That was possible only because China couldn't function. Similarly, Tangiers' autonomy under multinational administration occurred only after the partition of the impotent Sultanate of Morocco into French and Spanish zones.
Treaty ports, and Hunziker's proposed entities, do look somewhat like the Special Economic Zones established by the People's Republic in the 1980s. The SEZs were singled out by the Chinese government as zones with liberalized and stable systems of law and government, specially designed to attract foreign investment (not for export to Chinese, not, but as low-cost export platforms to the West). They differ critically in that the SEZs owed the entirety of their existence to the Chinese government; foreign governments were relevant only inasmuch as they might petition the Chinese government for special consideration of their investors. The Chinese state is a strong state, and, thankfully for the Chinese and the entire world, a rather functional state. Giving sovereignty over Shanghai to a foreign government not only would outrage Chinese nationalists, but it would make no economic sense. Why would the People's Republic deprive itself of control of the source of one-quarter of China's tax revenues? Even Morocco, a rather weaker country than China, was quick to absorb Tangiers and then the Western Sahara as soon as it was reunified as an independent state. Treaty ports would be a step backwards for any state.
I doubt very much that these zones would work for the European Union's frontiers. Take Russia, Turkey, even Ukraine. These three countries do have significant problems, and quite probably many Russians, Ukrainians, and Turks would flood into the EU-25 if restrictions on their immigration were lifted (though Turkey's emigration potential is, as I noted in January, often overestimated), but they are all more-or-less functional states. I suspect that the same would be true for the European Union's neighbours in the southern and eastern Mediterranean, all of which have remained functioning states in the face of often extreme violence by dissidents, as in Algeria over the 1990s. These zones, administered jointly by the European Union and local governments as places where European capital could meet--I'm tempted to say exploit--desperate immigrants on terms most advantageous to capital, could emerge only in the context of the collapse of these states.
Hunziker's zones, though interesting at a first glance, are not viable solutions. They may yet appear. I can imagine them evolving from the immigration detention camps set up last year by Italy in Libya. These zones will not be augurs of a pleasant new future. Far better suited to our potential cyberpunk future than to anything enjoyable, these zones, founded amidst anarchy and governed without necessarily bothering to acquire consent from an unwanted population, will be the first signs that the developed world has given up on the idea of human rights as a concept universally applicable to all human beings. Here's hoping that, as seductive as these enclaves might seem to people terrified by all immigration, any immigration, they'll never come about.
With imagination and far-sight, the EU should create special buffer zones designed to neutralize or reduce this problem, and, going a step further, in a joint economic and political venture with neighbour countries, such border territories, covering lands on both sides of the border line, could become dynamic growth and transfer platforms ( like Hong-Kong or Singapore), that would organize the expected influx of people and merchandise in an orderly and legal way and thereby create employment, production and wealth . Such a process would permit expanding present small cities or build new cities along the EU borders. These transition zones would have "tax-free status" and as many attractive EU freedom features as politically feasible. The territories would be administered jointly by the EU and the concerned border countries.
With all due respects to Mr. Hunziker, this is an unworkable idea. The prospects of Russia abandoning either the Karelian territories that it won from Finland in the Second World War or the city of Ivangorod taken from Estonia are distant. The Estonians are just not going to cede the city of Narva to a transnational authority aimed at bringing the European Union closer to the Russian Federation. The transformation of Gaza into a cosmopolitan state, with additions of Egyptian and Israeli territory, isn't going to work in an age of radical Palestinian nationalism. The sheer mechanics behind a merger of British Gibraltar on the north shore of the Straits of Gibraltar and Spanish Ceuta and Melilla on the south shore and Moroccan Tangiers in between into a single trans-strait entity would be immensely prohibitive. As for Cyprus, if an island of one million people can't be unified at all why would a transnational authority work (and whose transnational authority)?
More to the point, these enclaves seem to be morally flawed. These extraterritorial enclaves under multinational authority remind me of nothing so much as the treaty ports of East Asia. Closed in Japan by Japan's successful modernization and closed in Korea by Japan's conquest of the Korean peninsula, the treaty ports remained viable institutions--under foreign administration with some local input, protected harbours for foreign investment and involvement with the beckoning Chinese market--only because the Chinese state was so terribly fragile. Admittedly, Shanghai prospered as the main place for encounters between Western investments and Chinese markets, enjoying a period of hothouse prosperity. That was possible only because China couldn't function. Similarly, Tangiers' autonomy under multinational administration occurred only after the partition of the impotent Sultanate of Morocco into French and Spanish zones.
Treaty ports, and Hunziker's proposed entities, do look somewhat like the Special Economic Zones established by the People's Republic in the 1980s. The SEZs were singled out by the Chinese government as zones with liberalized and stable systems of law and government, specially designed to attract foreign investment (not for export to Chinese, not, but as low-cost export platforms to the West). They differ critically in that the SEZs owed the entirety of their existence to the Chinese government; foreign governments were relevant only inasmuch as they might petition the Chinese government for special consideration of their investors. The Chinese state is a strong state, and, thankfully for the Chinese and the entire world, a rather functional state. Giving sovereignty over Shanghai to a foreign government not only would outrage Chinese nationalists, but it would make no economic sense. Why would the People's Republic deprive itself of control of the source of one-quarter of China's tax revenues? Even Morocco, a rather weaker country than China, was quick to absorb Tangiers and then the Western Sahara as soon as it was reunified as an independent state. Treaty ports would be a step backwards for any state.
I doubt very much that these zones would work for the European Union's frontiers. Take Russia, Turkey, even Ukraine. These three countries do have significant problems, and quite probably many Russians, Ukrainians, and Turks would flood into the EU-25 if restrictions on their immigration were lifted (though Turkey's emigration potential is, as I noted in January, often overestimated), but they are all more-or-less functional states. I suspect that the same would be true for the European Union's neighbours in the southern and eastern Mediterranean, all of which have remained functioning states in the face of often extreme violence by dissidents, as in Algeria over the 1990s. These zones, administered jointly by the European Union and local governments as places where European capital could meet--I'm tempted to say exploit--desperate immigrants on terms most advantageous to capital, could emerge only in the context of the collapse of these states.
Hunziker's zones, though interesting at a first glance, are not viable solutions. They may yet appear. I can imagine them evolving from the immigration detention camps set up last year by Italy in Libya. These zones will not be augurs of a pleasant new future. Far better suited to our potential cyberpunk future than to anything enjoyable, these zones, founded amidst anarchy and governed without necessarily bothering to acquire consent from an unwanted population, will be the first signs that the developed world has given up on the idea of human rights as a concept universally applicable to all human beings. Here's hoping that, as seductive as these enclaves might seem to people terrified by all immigration, any immigration, they'll never come about.
