Jamie Howell
   Staff Writer

On Wednesday March 30, Dr. Markus M.L. Crepaz hosted a lecture called “Refugees, the future of the European Union and the limits of community.”

Dr. Crepaz is a professor of Political Science and head of the Department of International Affairs at the University of Georgia; his lecture was based on the refugee crises from the perspective of the European Union.

Dr. Crepaz started his lecture with the story of Alan Kurdi, a three-year-old boy who died

when his boat capsized off the coast of Bodrum because it was carrying 16 people when it was

made to carry half that many.

“It really brought the refugee crisis into sharp relief,” Dr. Crepaz said.

Dr. Crepaz spoke of the desensitizing effects of numbers and statistics.

“Often times with statistics we forget that we are actually talking about people,” Dr. Crepaz said. “Children, women, babies, men.”

In Germany, stated Dr. Crepaz, Angela Merkel started to create a culture of welcome

toward refugees, but a hard line developed between people who want to welcome refugees and

people who want to keep them out.

According to Dr. Crepaz, the stream of robberies and sexual assaults in Cologne on New

Years’ was used as a way to harden people against welcoming refugees into the country, and

although more and more evidence is suggesting that the perpetrators were not Syrian refugees, the damage has been done.

Markel and others originally suggested, noted Dr. Crepaz, that the EU should come up

with some kind of agreement about the number of refugees each country should take in, but after the attack on Brussels, the EU came up with an entirely different kind of plan.

According to Dr. Crepaz, as of March 19, all refugees arriving in Greece will be sent back to Turkey.

Dr. Crepaz stated that part of this new plan is called a “one for one” deal, meaning that for every refugee sent back to Turkey, a Syrian refugee in Turkey will be given a home in Europe. Dr. Crepaz stated that another part of the new deal is that Turkey will receive € 3 billion to help them handle the refugees.

According to Dr. Crepaz, that isn’t as much money as it seems; Germany spends twice that amount on chocolate every year.

According to Dr. Crepaz, many organizations such as United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Save the Children and the Norwegian refugee council have said that they won’t work with the EU because of this new plan, and Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF, or, Doctors without Borders) called the plan “unfair and inhumane.”

Dr. Crepaz expressed that he believes the very foundations of the EU may be crumbling.

According to Dr. Crepaz, the Schengen agreement, which originally kept the countries in the EU from putting up their own borders, has been violated by multiple states within the EU. Because of this, movement within the EU is restricted even for its own members, noted Crepaz.

Another thing destabilizing the EU, said Dr. Crepaz, is that the UK is threatening to abandon it.

According to the professor from the University of Georgia, the possibility of a

fractured EU grows with the continuing pressure on leaders from radical right wing parties.

Dr. Crepaz discussed the transition towards a more right-wing style of power.

“[There has been] an explosion of support for radical right wing parties,” Dr. Crepaz said.

He also noted that left-wing parties tend to support the welfare state and immigrants. Dr. Crepaz said that it could be difficult to redistribute enough funds to a new influx of people.

“Radical right-wing parties are gaining and at the same time social democratic parties or

socialist parties are losing,” Dr. Crepaz said.

One of the radical right wing parties Dr. Crepaz mentioned is called Lega Nord, and one of their posters is of a Native American in traditional dress that says in Italian, “they suffered

immigration, now they live in reserves. Think.”

One of the many questions facing Europe because of the refugee crisis, stated Dr. Crepaz, involved issues around “othering,” what what implications “othering” could have.

“Will the public continue funding the welfare state with their taxes if they perceive that some of their tax monies are going to people who are different from themselves?” Crepaz asked.

Dr. Crepaz quoted a British Journalist named David Goodhart who said, “[People] argue that we feel more comfortable with, and are readier to share with and sacrifice for, those with whom we have shared histories and similar values. To put it bluntly — most of us prefer our own kind.”

Dr. Crepaz went on to explain that there are two types of trust: primordial and cosmopolitan.

According to Dr. Crepaz, people with primordial trust only trust people who are the same as them. He defined cosmopolitan trust as “trust beyond borders.”

This means, said Dr. Crepaz, that people with cosmopolitan trust are able to trust peopleoutside of their own group. According to Dr. Crepaz, cosmopolitan trust leads to the view that immigrants are people who enrich lives — they are not seen as just an economic threat.