Two recent decisions by European official bodies indicate that the answer to the question posed in the title of this article may be “yes”.
The court of the European Union has ruled that no member country has the right to close its borders to illegal immigrants if doing that is contrary to EU policy. I can’t think of anything the court could have done that would be more likely to trigger more withdrawals from the Union.
Every member country knew that by joining the EU it would be giving up part of its sovereignty, but the primordial duty of any government is to protect the state and its citizens, and if a member country is denied the fulfillment of that duty it will have no choice but to refuse to accept that ruling, and if necessary, withdraw from the Union. Poland and Hungary have already declared that they will not recognize the ruling and it remains to be seen if other countries will follow suit and, if they do, what the bureaucrats in Brussels will do about it.
In the meantime, the official electoral body in Germany has declared that the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) is eligible to run candidates in the upcoming elections for the Bundestag. This is a decision that borders on the psychotic.
The PFLP is a terrorist organization that does not and never has had anything whatever to do with Germany or its institutions. For the PFLP to apply for the right to run candidates in the German elections is a clear indication that it expects to get the votes of legal Muslim voters in Germany, as well as any illegal voters who can get away with it. Given that political correctness in Germany has reached avalanche proportions, many election officials might be intimidated into allowing such illegal voting. For the PFLP to get into the Bundestag would be a stunning propaganda victory for Islamists of all stripes.
Retired Lieutenant-Colonel Dr Mordechai Kedar of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies (BESA) at Bar-Ilan University in Israel has published a paper demonstrating that once some semblance of peace has been imposed in Syria, the Alawite leadership is unlikely to permit any substantial number of Sunni refugees to re-enter the country from Turkey, Lebanon or Jordan. Meanwhile, those countries will refuse to let them integrate into their societies, just as they and other countries of the region have refused to allow the Arabs who fled newly independent Israel in 1948-49 or their descendants to integrate.
This situation will encourage the continuation of mass attempts to infiltrate Europe by whatever means possible, which in turn will alienate even further those countries that refuse to be overwhelmed by them. It will also exacerbate extremist political movements in Europe.
Taken together, along with such other developments as the spread of sharia law and of areas of Muslim dominance in some European cities, the decisions on the part of the electoral authorities in Germany and the EU court can only hasten the disintegration of Europe, which indeed would probably be diagnosed by a Freudian psychiatrist as having a death wish.
If such insanities are not opposed firmly and effectively by political, economic and social leaders in the subcontinent, the future is indeed bleak. In such a case, who will gain?
Not the US, which is undergoing its own crises and withdrawing from much of its once-dominant world leadership. Russia? Perhaps, and President Vladimir Putin is certainly working to that end, but he rules a country weak economically and financially and with a major demographic crisis.
China? Though the country has established naval bases in the Indian Ocean (Gwadar) and the entrance to the Red Sea (Djibouti) and Chinese warships have entered the Mediterranean for the first time in its multi-millennial history, but it still seems a very unlikely development.
If the pending power vacuum is filled by no one, the result will be chaos, and if that happens, the Europeans will have no one to blame but themselves.
*This commentary was published by Asia Times, on September 13, 2017.