The self-inflicted migrant crisis threatens to destroy the European Union, and illegal migrants, their enablers, and political activists will resist deportation efforts so hard it would plunge Germany into “civil war”, a security researcher has warned.
The ongoing migrant crisis is pulling the European political project apart because the Union has no answers to border control problems, this is driving political polarisation, and the crisis has been left to fester so long any attempt to claw the situation back will spiral into violence, a German newspaper has been told.
Former German Federal Police Captain Jan Solwyn, who has published books on his experience on the front line as a forward-deployed European “border police expert” during the European Migrant Crisis, and on the damage mass migration is doing to European society, told Die Welt that “European borders have become a political and social fault line… illegal migration has the potential to destroy the EU.”
Solwyn, who is now a security researcher and author at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) in Tel Aviv, told the paper that enforcing the law and deporting illegal migrants is essential to protect Europe, its people, and even the European Union itself, but warned that to do so would be tough because migrants and their enablers would likely use violence to oppose such measures. In terms of actually deporting the hundreds of thousands of migrants in Germany, alone, who have been ordered to leave but decided to ignore these instructions, the security expert said the police would face fights with illegal migrants themselves, who “would do everything they can to stay in Germany”.
He went on to say the police and security services would also be bogged down in “dealing with very well-organized NGOs and private individuals who would engage in street battles with the riot police. We saw what happened in the US when ICE started arresting illegal immigrants. Then we’d have a civil war in major German cities.”
The former Federal Police officer went on to warn that Europe is vulnerable to a repeat of the 2015 migrant crisis, as little has changed to prevent migrants from remaining in the bloc once they reach EU territory.
“People will want to come to Germany, and the asylum system is as dysfunctional as ever… I have seen on the front lines of the migration crisis – both at the external borders and in Germany’s cities – how the problem is not being solved. The EU cannot exist in the long term under these conditions. The unresolved migration crisis is the sure path back to nation-states. But that is the path to a fragmentation of the continent, which will then inevitably become a pawn of external powers.”
There should be no expectation on asylum seekers to integrate into European society, he added, because the default must be that asylum is a temporary act of charity towards the needy who should eventually return home to rebuild, not simply be transformed into economic migrants who stay in Europe on a long enough timescale.
Former top cop Solwyn is not by far the first security thinker to warn that limitless open borders and their downstream effects could plunge formerly stable European societies into civil-war-like states. Former British Army Colonel Richard Kemp, who fought counter-insurgencies in Northern Ireland and Bosnia and led troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, warned last year that short-sighted European governments are putting off difficult decisions because they believe it is easier to appease and avoid minor conflict today, even if it means bigger trouble tomorrow.
This, he said, is because governments are only really interested in the electoral cycle and keeping a lid on things until they next face the voters. He remarked: “They want to keep a state of equilibrium for that time, they want to do what they can to make sure they win the next election. They don’t want to take the radical sort of action that might be necessary to address these sorts of problems”.
The Colonel said Western nations face a “primary threat” made up of a coalition of “hard left and Islamist extremists who have, together with other causes, come together to threaten the cohesion and the culture, the entire culture and political existence of the West”. In follow-up comments made this year, Kemp said no government “has the guts to stop” these issues and the inevitable end-point of “Islamification” is “civil war”.
Perhaps the highest-profile establishment-adjacent thinker on Europe’s exposure to civil war — something that was well out of the bounds of mainstream discussion until just a year ago — is King’s College London’s Professor David Betz. His research asserts that the preconditions for potential civil war are already present in Western European states such as Ireland, the United Kingdom, and France, and that they may already be past the ‘tipping point’ of a slow-motion descent into Chaos.
As reported, Betz has said:
…it now appears to be too late to actually prevent things getting “very much worse”, and urged decision-makers to act to at least cushion the blow.
In a chilling warning, the academic said, “I would probably avoid big cities. I would suggest you reduce your exposure to big cities if you are able”. The coming violence, he believes, has been made inevitable by decades of government ineptitude and can’t be totally avoided.
… there isn’t anything they can do, it’s baked in. We’re already past the tipping point, is my estimation… we are past the point at which there is a political offramp. We are past the point at which normal politics is able to solve the problem… almost every plausible way forward from here involves some kind of violence in my view.
Anything the government tries to do at this point… you can solve one kind of problem, but it will aggravate another kind of problem in doing so, and you get back to violence. The question really is about mitigating the costs, to my mind, not about preventing the outcome, I’m sorry to say… I have not heard a credible political way forward and I don’t see a single political figure who is credible in the role of national saviour, or even inclined to do so.
… “the bottom line is I don’t think there is now a political solution to this which takes the form of everything just working out OK after some period of difficulty. Things are bad now, but they are going to get very much worse. Hopefully after they will get better, but you will have to go through the period of very much worse before you get there.
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