Grim Fairy Tales

For the past few days I have been haunted by nightmares. The stomp of boots in the middle of the night, banging on the door, men in the uniforms of the Slovenian Guard. “Gruden? We have a search warrant for your apartment.” Scared to the bone, I try to keep calm. The guardsmen ransack the apartment with practiced routine; evidently it is not the first time. “Aha,” one of them shouts. He shoves a yellowed piece of paper in front of my eyes and spells out gleefully: “Matjaž Gruden, student at the Faculty of Law of the University of Ljubljana, is hereby awarded a prize for his thesis entitled The European Union as a Party to the European Convention on Human Rights.” “Not the European Union, the European Communities,” I object feebly, “I graduated before the Maastricht Treaty.” His look tells me that facts these days count for nothing, not even in dreams. Undeterred, he reads on, then his eyes bulge and he roars: “The prize is awarded by the Slovenian United Nations Association.” Red with rage, he cocks his pistol and holds it to my temple. “The United Nations, you treacherous dog…”

The belief that the United Nations is an enemy of the people is not new. For many years it has been part of rural folklore in the remote hills of the American Northwest, where armed village eccentrics with a distinctly unpatriotic attitude to paying taxes dig bunkers and swap recipes for squirrel stew while waiting for an attack by black-clad commandos of a conspiratorial organization headquartered on the East River. From a safe distance, stories about guys living underground and eating rodents because they fear the United Nations will steal their freedom, take away their sovereignty and change their way of life always seemed funny and thrillingly romantic to me. Now there is no safe distance anymore. More and more countries, using rhetoric rarely heard since Germany and Japan left the League of Nations, are raising their voices against the hegemony of international cooperation over the sovereign right of nations to harm themselves and others. In Slovenia, too, the fighters against the United Nations are not hiding in bunkers but pontificating on the evening news.

Among people who respect facts and value reason, there would be no need to waste words on the nonsense that self-appointed defenders of Western civilization spout about the Marrakesh agreement, the UN Global Compact for Migration. But we live in times when lies have their not-so-short legs propped up on the desk of the Oval Office. It doesn’t help that every Grimm fairy tale contains more verifiable facts than the agitation against an initiative for the international community to respond rationally and effectively to the challenges of migration. Populism has recognized in migration an opportunity to undermine international stability and the institutions that democratic societies established in response to their last historical experience of unbridled sovereignty and rampant nationalism. Critics accuse the Marrakesh agreement of everything possible and impossible, without a shred of shame at the idiocy of the lies they spread. But the main thorn in the populist heel is the fact that the agreement does not condemn migration as such; it seeks, on the basis of agreed standards and cooperation between states, to regulate migration flows so as to protect both the economic, social and security interests of the participating states and respect for international humanitarian law, human dignity and basic human rights. For politics that builds its power on fear and hatred of migration as the source of all evil, this is of course unacceptable. As a substitute for a global solution to a global problem, they offer the illusion that migration flows must and can be stopped with nationalist rhetoric, ostrich-like unilateralism and walls on the borders. Such undermining of multilateral efforts to find a common response to migration challenges in fact increases the risk that the response will remain chaotic, hysterical and ineffective, with all the security, humanitarian, political and economic consequences we will all eventually suffer.

The campaign against the Marrakesh agreement is a symptom of the bottom we are racing towards. Cooperation, rationality and humanity have become obstacles to achieving political goals. But not to lay all the blame on the populists: an even greater responsibility lies with those politicians who are full of talk about democracy and humanism at the declaratory level but, in concrete situations, lack the resolve to stand up for their own values. This is not just an ethical lapse; it is sawing off the branch they are sitting on. Instead of opposing demagogic manipulation and lies without hesitation, they legitimize them and give them weight with statements about “changed circumstances.” A rational and effective migration policy requires moral integrity, authority and the courage to stand up to populists. It also requires a positive and proactive policy, not limp excuses that the agreement is “acceptable” because it is not legally binding. When politics and society no longer have a critical mass of individuals and institutions firmly and convincingly defending rational and humane approaches to migration, people will of course come to believe that the best leader is the one who is most hostile and unyielding towards migrants.

Once that happens, wishy-washy, a-bit-here-a-bit-there politics is doomed. I fully understand that people who have been convinced that refugees pose a mortal threat to the survival of the Slovenian nation—or, as the foreign minister would put it, “to the preservation of our way of life”—prefer to vote for uncompromising nationalists rather than their half-hearted sotto voce imitators. And with their ethical limpness, the latter are putting at stake not only their own political credibility and fate but also our future. For small countries like Slovenia, international institutions, law and cooperation are especially important, and crucial from a security point of view as well. Populist fairy tales have no happy ending. If you don’t fancy life in a bunker, the stomp of military boots in the middle of the night and squirrel stew, stick to the Brothers Grimm.