Book Review: The Scramble for Europe by Stephen Smith
Europe's migrant crisis is only getting started.
When future historians examine the opening decades of the 21st century, they will see with total clarity that the most consequential event of these years was not the September 11th terrorist attacks, nor the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan, nor the COVID-19 pandemic, nor Putin’s annexation of Crimea or invasion of Ukraine, but the mass migration of human beings out of the Global South.
Should you seek for the most concise possible explanation for why Donald Trump became President of the United States, or Britain exited the European Union, or once-moribund political parties like France’s National Rally (formerly National Front) and Germany’s AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) are now the main opposition in their respective countries, you could do no better than pointing to their critical stance towards mass migration. But while the sturm und drang of party politics and the spectacle of huddled masses arriving in leaky boats has understandably preoccupied the public consciousness, we’ve lacked a thorough and clear-eyed discussion of the source and scope of the problem.
Stephen Smith’s La Ruée Vers L’Europe was the talk of Paris upon its publication in France in 2018, but the English translation, The Scramble For Europe, hasn’t reached the wide audience it deserves. Smith is presently a “Professor of the Practice of African and African American Studies” at Duke University, but he cut his teeth as the Africa correspondent for Le Monde, Libération and Reuters for a combined 30 years, during which time he authored some sixteen books on African countries, and served as a consultant to the United Nations. These credentials serve not only to establish his authority but also to indemnify him – to the extent that that is still possible – from the calumny inevitably visited upon anyone who dares to take up the subject of human migration in a critical light. The thesis of The Scramble For Europe is a simple one: the coming population explosion in Africa, the world’s youngest continent, will dramatically increase the migratory pressures on Europe, to a scale heretofore unseen. And though he aspires to examine his thesis dispassionately, to “provide a factual basis on which others can come to an informed view,” his chosen title – an inversion of the infamous description of European colonialism as a “scramble for Africa” – gives some hint as to the consequences, or at least the stakes, of human migration on this scale.
Let’s begin, as Smith does, with the numbers, for these are staggering, and give some scope to the challenges facing Africa – and likely Europe – in the years to come. There are, at present, some 510 million people living in the European Union (including the United Kingdom) and some 1.3 billion people in Africa. Europe’s population, however, is rapidly aging, and its fertility rate at an unprecedented low, while Africa is remarkably young and fecund. In 35 years, the population of Europe is projected to decline to 450 million, while Africa’s will nearly double, to 2.5 billion – two-thirds of whom will be under 35 years of age. It is sub-Saharan Africa, in particular, that is driving this boom:
[…] between now and 2050, twenty-eight sub-Saharan countries will see their populations double, while nine others – Angola, Burundi, Malawi, Niger, Somalia, Uganda, Tanzania and Zambia – will see their populations quintuple. As a result, between now and 2100, three out of every four newborns in the world will be born in sub-Saharan Africa.
Astoundingly, a significant decline in child mortality rates in sub-Saharan Africa, achieved between 1990 and today, has not resulted in a corresponding decline in fertility. There are, naturally, cultural explanations for this fecundity that deserve mention: in much of Nigeria, for example, “the percentage of women who use modern contraceptives is closer to 5 per cent than 10, and women can only visit family planning clinics accompanied by a man – their husband, father, an uncle or a brother.” And while the average Nigerian fertility rate has declined, from 6.8 children per woman in 1975 to 5.5 today, the birthrate of Muslim women in Nigeria has increased, to 7.3. The most salient consequence of this fertility explosion is youthfulness, to a degree that would astound the aging West. In France, for example, the average citizen is 41 years old; in Nigeria, the average citizen is just 18. These figures are even more stark in the cities, where Africa’s young flock to find what work they can. In Lagos, for example, “the proportion of under-thirties is nearly 95 per cent.” Lagos today is Africa’s most populous city, and yet it seems hard to imagine a city of such youth:
The percentage of inhabitants less than fifteen years old surpassed 25 per cent in 1930, rose to near 40 per cent at independence, and today oscillates around 60 per cent, a figure that makes Lagos the unquestioned world citadel of youth. A comparison with inner London or downtown Paris puts its youthfulness into perspective, just as it throws the ageing – even the mummification – of European capitals into stark relief: in London and Paris, the proportion of inhabitants who are under fifteen is, respectively, 18 and 14 per cent.
This explosion in population, driven also by urbanization and intra-continental migration, has totally overwhelmed Lagos’ already modest infrastructure, where, in 2006, “just 0.4 per cent of the city’s toilets were connected to a central sewage system.”
Taken by itself, this massive increase in population and population density would pose a challenge, but not an insurmountable one. The difficulties, however, are compounded by the political and institutional failures of so many African countries, which are run, Smith argues, less for the benefit of their citizenry than for the enrichment of a small, elderly elite at the top – and for the international community, who wish to believe their aid money is accomplishing something, rather than merely being expropriated.
The “postcolonial state has settled into the role of a collector of customs duties, import and export taxes, and external aid – anything that can be easily pocketed at the border, while the interior of the country is neglected as a tax base, both for political reasons and a lack of institutional capacity.” The international community has long turned a blind eye to this arrangement, giving rise to what Smith terms “phantom states,” polities that exist in paper and in the eyes of the United Nations but without a substantive enough presence to educate their citizenry or form stable governments and institutions. “A colourful piece of bunting, a few rhyming phrases set to music, a few embassies abroad and a national football team have often been enough to constitute a state.” These failed states have concocted an ingenious method of profiting from their failures, by subcontracting important state functions to for-profit companies, conglomerates, or even foreign nations. Customs enforcement is privately contracted, as is national defence (the French long served as defenders of the Central African Republic), and, most importantly, schooling:
In the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), 71 per cent of schools are private institutions; in Uganda, out of 5,600 secondary schools, nearly 4,000 are private; in Lagos State in Nigeria, three students out of four are enrolled in private schools; and even in the shanty towns around Nairobi, the Kenyan capital, four of ten students attend private schools, despite the endemic poverty of the slums.
Many of these “schools” are really religious institutions, most often madrassas, deficient in the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic. The point, as in everything else these phantom states do, is not to provide a quality service to its citizens or prepare them for a productive future, but to profit from them. “What is fascinating in this political alchemy is that it transmutes incapacity into profits, or base metals into gold: the less the state can act on its own, the more it has to offer external partners.”
These small-scale government failures are reflected in the anemic African economic growth, which has not in the least kept paced with population growth: “Since 1950, the continent’s share of world trade has oscillated between 2 and 3 per cent, and its contribution to worldwide GDP has remained between 1.5 and 2 per cent.” One major technological change, however, has had marked consequences for African culture: the development of satellite televisions and the Internet, which give the residents of poor Africa a daily glimpse into the affluence of the West, and are rapidly turning African culture away from its tribal and colonial roots towards American pop culture.
The recipe for a migration crisis seems set: a young and desperately poor population, trapped in economic backwaters with weak or non-existent civic institutions and little opportunity for advancement, and an ageing, enfeebled Europe, caught between a politics of open borders and a politics of nationalist populism. Smith adds two points worthy of our attention: first, economic aid – at least as it has been conducted to this point – seems to exacerbate migratory pressures, by allowing more people to cobble together the few thousand dollars necessary to make the journey northward. “Rather than the ‘poorest of the poor,’ it is a less indigent stratum of Africans – the continent’s emerging middle class – that migrates.” In other words, the very people most capable of effecting a positive transformation in their own countries are those most likely to flee, with disastrous consequences for the future of Africa.
Secondly, Smith notes, it is precisely (and paradoxically) those countries that have been least successful in assimilating migrants that are most attractive as destinations: “the harder it is for a diaspora to merge into its host country, the more effective that diaspora is in welcoming new immigrants who, in turn, will be more difficult to integrate as they find a ‘home away from home.’ He points to the Muslim communities of Europe, as well as the “Little Somalia” neighborhood of Minnesota, as examples.
In the book’s final chapter, “Europe as Destination and Destiny,” Smith explores some of the consequences of migration, on Europe and on Africa, and this chapter, in particular, provides a wealth of information for anyone eager to prognosticate on the future of European politics or global migration. Here, for example, is Smith detailing an unintended consequence of Western humanitarianism: the shocking “brain drain” from Africa.
A good third of all African-born physicians work in member countries of the OECD club of wealthiest countries. At the same time, the ratio of physicians to patients in sub-Saharan Africa is in the order of one for every 9,000 people, indeed, one for ever 90,000 persons in an extreme case like that of South Sudan – a ratio between thirty and 300 times less favourable than in the UK. Overall, in the past 30 years, it is estimated that between one-third and one-half of all African university degree holders have either left their country or did not return after studying abroad, preferring to work instead in a developed country.
These highly skilled immigrants to the West undoubtedly contribute greatly to their adoptive countries, but that benefit should not be tallied without mentioning its cost to the source nations as well. And then there is the small matter of gender. While it is Europe’s commitment to sheltering refugees that has provided this pathway to entry, photos and videos of migrants streaming across borders or landing overcrowded dinghies on Europe’s beaches contrast markedly with the footage of refugees from Syria and Ukraine. In the latter, it is the elderly as well as women and young children in desperate need of succour who predominate, but the African migrants are notably young and male. “In 2017, according to Eurostat, four out of five asylum seekers in Europe – 82 percent – were under the age of thirty-five and two-thirds of them – 68 percent – were men.” China, after decades of its ill-conceived one-child policy, has engineered a gender imbalance that will doom many of its young men to lonely, childless lives, but Europe, in its folly, has managed to recreate that issue in a much shorter span of time. In a 2016 article in Politico entitled “Europe’s Man Problem,” figures are provided for Sweden’s current predicament that should give anyone pause:
According to calculations based on the Swedish government’s figures, a total of 18,615 males aged 16 and 17 entered Sweden over the course of the past year, compared with 2,555 females of the same age. Sure enough, when those figures are added to the existing counts of 16- and 17-year-old boys and girls in Sweden—103,299 and 96,524, respectively, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s International Database—you end up with a total of 121,914 males in Sweden aged 16 or 17 and 99,079 females of the same age. The resulting ratio is astonishing: These calculations suggest that as of the end of 2015, there were 123 16- and 17-year-old boys in Sweden for every 100 girls of that age.
How will a large and growing subset of young men, without wives and jobs and an education, conduct themselves in these nations? How will Europe’s senescent population acculturate these newcomers? How will a continent committed to providing social services like healthcare and guaranteed old-age pensions survive a massive influx of new dependents? None of our grandstanding political leaders seem eager to provide an answer, nor does the vast network of NGOs who are so active in making the pathway from Africa to Europe as painless as possible but are conspicuously absent once those same migrants arrive with little more than the clothes on their backs.
The Scramble For Europe should be mandatory reading, not only for Western politicians – who could do with its heavy dose of facts – but for Western citizens more broadly, who have allowed themselves to be blinded by their compassionate desire to help, at the expense of an honest vision of the monumental problem before us. If nothing else, this book demolishes the petty binary that has all the good, noble and virtuous aligned on the side of limitless migration and all the base and intolerant “putting up walls.” In 2018, when this book was written, there was still room for naivety; in 2023, all of Europe stands at a crossroads, and the margin for error has evaporated.
Our idiot Prime Minister here in Canada finally shut his mouth about inviting endless people illegally across our border when they started to fill hotels in Montreal, the city in Quebec which is the only part of Canada he cares about. A decade ago, I was aware of Muslim families in Canada wherein several wives would collect welfare to support a bunch of kids and a bum husband who thereby did not have to work. I worked in Post Sec Education where these women were learning skills so they could better provide while the bums sat at home.