Dateline: Cahors, France – Arriving in France and sampling European media again has been a jolt for me, in part because of dates. It’s the week of World Refugee Day and also of Juneteenth, celebrating the day (June 19th, 1865) when slavery’s abolition-order eventually found its way to deep in America’s still obdurate slave-state of Texas.
I’m settled for a few weeks now in the country that made an extraordinary gift to the USA, inspired by both slavery’s end and the grand notion of an open haven for refugees — a gift that soon became a worldwide symbol of America’s own generosity and idealism.
I mean of course the Statue of Liberty, which was shipped from Paris in 1885 and in time gained its heroic inscription – now sounding so horribly ironic:
Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
Is it any wonder, then, that here in Europe in 2018, the senders of that 225-ton adornment for New York Harbor are reassessing more deeply than ever their one-time admiration of ‘America The Beautiful’?
The French media are reverberating this week like a shuddering tuning-fork in response to a pretty stunning pronouncement from President Emmanuel Macron’s chief spokesman, Benjamin Griveaux. He was commenting for the state-owned France 2 television channel on American developments – specifically the Donald Trump Administration’s so-called ‘zero-tolerance’ of undocumented immigrants heading into the US, and the wholesale criminal prosecution of such border-crossers that led to the splitting-up of families with children.
“These images are shocking,” said Griveaux, referring to the pictures of separated children, some in wire cages (pictured right) and crying out for their parents, pictures that flooded through American media and of course Europe’s too – along with an especially grueling 7-minute audio-recording acquired by ProPublica from inside one of the fast-growing, sometimes tented, young people’s detention centers (photographed from the air, below left).
Such shock in Paris might cause little surprise, echoing as it does media coverage of US Democrats who decried the family-splitting as ‘barbaric” … all four living First Ladies, two from each party, who condemned it as “immoral,” “disgraceful” and “a humanitarian crisis” … the current First Lady, who according to her spokesperson “hates to see children separated from their families” and wanted the US to be “a country that governs with heart” … and even a conservative maven like the syndicated radio-host Hugh Hewitt who proclaimed “it is 100% wrong to separate border-crossing families, especially infants, toddlers, and young children”.
What was unexpected from spokesman Griveaux – as he addressed his audience of an estimated 5 million French viewers, and more across Europe – was that he went even further. He moved on to announce a sweeping end to Franco-American friendship and bonds that were recently and so notably trumpeted as “unbreakable”. (Remember that claim? It was a scant two months ago, during Macron’s state visit to Washington, marked also by a seemingly interminable reprise of the two Presidents’ clenching, ‘power’ hand-shakes that originally debuted last year in Paris.) No, much has suddenly changed – and Macron’s mouthpiece now categorically says just this:
“We don’t have the same model of civilization. Clearly we do not share certain values. And obviously our job is to defend a European ideal, an ideal of peace, of freedom.”
WE ALL KNOW that European media outlets, as much as European governments, can sometimes (or is it often?) indulge in a degree of sanctimony, especially when they look askance toward the ‘New World’. Griveaux’s across-the-board condemnation of the US for betraying civilized ideals, it should be said, came during a journalistic scene-setter for a summit not involving the US at all, one taking place solely between his boss Macron and Germany’s Angela Merkel in the baroque splendor of the Chancellor’s Schloss Meseberg retreat north of Berlin. And the leaders were confronting a dark side to Europe not so different from what the US faces.
Within Europe’s overall perimeter, after all – within what Eurocrats call the Frontex (exterior frontiers) – that ideal of a welcoming golden door is not being universally held aloft. At Meseberg, Macron was at great pains to reach a common platform with Merkel on immigration policy, and so help her to resist mounting pressure from more conservative Bavarian partners in her coalition government. They, the Christian Social Union party, sound more and more like the so-called populists of Italy, and are demanding a harsh roll-back of the previous fairly open immigration and asylum policies that Merkel boldly introduced in 2015.
Such nativist, xenophobic militancy was sharply demonstrated only this week on the more southerly Frontex, when Italy’s new populist-labeled government created its own Euro-wide media storm. Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte’s coalition, I’ve discovered, has provided Italian commentators with a great chance to employ their language’s exquisite capacity for devising fresh multi-syllabic word-endings that express added dismissiveness … and they’ve described this administration exquisitely as “Trumpazzaccio” in nature.
The far-rightist interior minister Matteo Salvini more than earned that sobriquet when he refused docking permission to the humanitarian ship Aquarius filled with over 600 refugees and asylum-seekers from 31 non-European countries. It was left to Spain to finally welcome these particular huddled masses into Valencia harbor – and Spanish media gave the migrants and their caretakers, Doctors Without Borders and SOS Méditerranée, a glorious heroes’ welcome.
No-one can seriously think the rich Western world’s rising anti-immigration tide can easily be countered – but this week has displayed some strong European dedication to doing so. A dedication that’s stronger, arguably, than any in the US.
Macron and Merkel, a year or more now since starting to discuss a rescue for the idealistic but threatened European Union project, have now – in this week’s “Meseberg Declaration” – delivered the makings of a practical plan that is subtle and multifaceted. It acknowledges populist grievances, but also aims to keep the golden door of immigration open, and even speed up the processing of would-be New Europeans – conducting it in large measure well before such migrants even reach the Frontex – perhaps at satellite centers in North Africa for instance.
This itinerant transatlantic observer, for one, is finding all this a lot more promising than the pitched “It’s your fault – No, it’s yours” battle that’s been raging in Washington.
But I do get some small (long-distance) cheer from President Trump demonstrating finally, through an Executive Order to stop separating families, that he’s capable of making a U-turn. Even if it’s not very effective – not effective at all, in fact, in remedying the harm already done.
In other words, he may be capable of having a change of … what’s that word again? Oh yes … of heart.
