DEAL, England — For centuries they sailed to the south, conquistadors and colonists, wresting control of a continent’s riches and imposing alien ways of faith and governance.
Yet, in recent weeks, watching the inexorable exodus of migrants risking their lives to cross the Mediterranean toward Greece and Italy in leaky craft, it is tempting to wonder whether the tide has turned.
Now, it is the powers of Europe, which once divided Africa between them, that face an invasion that could reshape their societies.
The presence of outsiders seeking a niche in cosseted lands has long unsettled Europeans who boast of big-heartedness while protecting privileged lives built in part on oil, minerals and cheap labor from farther south.
But, more recently, xenophobia has gathered new strength, displayed in the rise of right-wing parties that oppose migration across the European Union’s open internal frontiers. It draws strength from the fear of The Other embodied in the migrants fleeing across the Mediterranean from Eritrea and Syria, Nigeria and Senegal — colonial-era creations overlaid with war, oppression, corruption or decline.
Graphic: What’s Behind the Surge in Refugees Crossing the Mediterranean Sea
Just last week, voters in Denmark dumped their center-left government, shifting toward the far-right Danish People’s Party, which, like the insurgent National Front in France or the U.K. Independence Party in Britain, had once been relegated to a cantankerous European fringe.
And this week, European leaders, debating a plan to take in 40,000 asylum seekers across the Continent, confronted a stark choice to determine the very nature of their land. “If selfishness and fear prevail,” the Italian prime minister, Matteo Renzi, wrote in The Guardian, “we risk losing the noble idea underpinning the European project.”
At a time of wider divisions over Greek debt and Britain’s discernible shift toward leaving the European Union, the question is this: What purpose will Europe serve if its successes are measured exclusively by the narrow self-interest individual states?
Here, on England’s south coast, history seems to offer one answer: It was ever thus.
On the ramparts of the 16th-century Deal Castle, built by Henry VIII to defend his realm against invaders, the long snouts of old cannons point out to sea, leading the eye across the English Channel, toward France.
Again, this week, that waterway was Britain’s bulwark against turmoil when a wildcat strike by French workers brought the port of Calais to a standstill. Tires were burned. Hundreds of England-bound trucks ground to a halt.
Migrants Target Trucks in France
Migrants attempting to enter Great Britain have been boarding trucks stuck in traffic at the port of Calais in northern France.
By Associated Press on June 24, 2015. Photo by Thibault Camus/Associated Press.Most alarming for many Britons, some of the thousands of migrants camping out around Calais scrambled for hiding places in the log-jammed vehicles to cross the channel — the last hurdle of an odyssey that, according to United Nations figures, brought a record 150,000 migrants to Europe last year.
Arguably the south-north flow is one more sign of the failure to build a new order after the Cold War to contain divisions of belief, ethnicity and geopolitics.
Just last week, indeed, the United Nations produced the startling assessment that the number of people pushed out of their homes by combat, repression and unrest had reached a record 59.5 million — nearly 14 million of them in the past year alone.
That enormous wall of human misery stands behind those fleeing toward Europe, hundreds of them dying in the process.
Much of Europe’s putative response has focused on curbing human traffickers and turning back migrants with no legitimate claim on asylum. That approach, however, ignores what David Miliband, the head of the International Rescue Committee, called a broader effort to settle conflicts that force people from their own lands.
“By the time ships are pulling bodies from the Mediterranean,” he said in a speech last week, “it is too late.”
In the 19th century, Europe’s industrialization fueled the imperial drive for riches. In the 21st, the imperative has turned back on itself, offering portends of what Mr. Miliband called a “decade of disorder” — if not much longer.
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