The Dutch government collapsed yesterday after the withdrawal of a critical right-wing coalition partner purportedly over disagreement about immigration policy.
It is mind-blowing to see that disagreements about immigration can have such disastrous consequences. Excessive immigration is a fabricated problem.
What follows is a cartoon version of reality. The reason is that reality is complicated and essays about reality are over-simplifications. They must be, because they are brief. There are literally books written about the West’s relationship to the third world. This is not secret information.
If Western countries want a relationship with third world countries, it is this: the West wants those countries to be democratic and they want them integrated into the free market. Except that democracy is optional. Here, there is talk of Realpolitik. Economic integration is more important, because that leads to democracy, at least, this is the claim. What it means to be integrated into the free market is to provide Western corporations access to natural and labour resources. Countries that take this advice end up with the same consequences that we do when corporations get everything they want, except in the third world, there are few safety nets, and rule of law of small countries is affected more obviously by the deep pockets of those corporations. The result is political unrest. Although hardly the first manifestation of that unrest, the “Arab Spring” of 2011 is a recent and recognised example.
With such a relationship, pro-West leaders have a problem. The solution? Protect their power with increased military and police spending. One wonders whether this is actually why democracy is optional. No matter. From where do the weapons come? Western defense companies. From where does the money for the increased military spending come? After all, what it means to be well-behaved is to not tax Western corporations too much. The answer is loans. Who provides the loans? Western banks.
It’s clear that Western countries were hardly saints when they ended formal colonialisation. The current system has all the benefits and none of the bother. Whatever bother there is is self-funding and self-administrating.
The next issue is debt service. How do these countries pay interest on their loans when their potential revenue sources have been hijacked by the West? By cutting public spending — which aggravates existing inequality and discontentment. Sadly, this is rarely enough. Some third-world governments have debt service, after decades of borrowing and debt restructuring, of up to 40% of their government budgets. There is only one affordable response: more repression and more borrowing. It is a vicious circle.
We end up with a situation in which citizens of their third world face chronic poverty and repression; they can only dream of emigrating to countries with less poverty and less repression. Emigration is a solution to (some) problems that have been imposed on them.
There is yet another aspect of the system: the drug war. One needn’t look beyond America’s experiment with alcohol prohibition to see the effect of prohibition: gangland violence. In major US cities, drug lords that trafficked in alcohol, like Al Capone, contributed to government corruption through gracious bribes. They also terrorised the population with gun battles on the streets. All that came to a sudden end when alcohol was legalised. In retrospect, it seemed that prohibition itself had been the problem.
There is still drug-related street violence in the West, but much of the battle for market dominance happens in third world countries. That is where international cartels are formed and jostle for power. In central America, the result has been devastating. Gangland violence has become the top priority for those governments. Who can supply weapons to deal with this problem? Western companies. Who can supply the loans? Western banks. What economic opportunities are there in such devastated countries? The drug trade. Where can citizens go to escape this nightmare? Western countries.
Again, this is a overly-simplified presentation, because there are causes of poverty and repression that have nothing to do with the West. However, the question is, would the citizens of third world countries be so powerless to help themselves if they did not have this particular relationship with the West?
Corporate propaganda has been wildly successful in the West. Anyone posting on social media about immigration door-closing or door-opening is in service of the banks and corporations that are dependent on deflected attention. Sadly, the political climate in the West is not as good as the political climate was in the USSR. In the USSR, even if people had limited access to facts, they at least had the intuition that they were being misled.
