On a chilly fall evening one month into my first semester at Harvard, I sat alone in my dorm room, talking to my parents on Skype. My roommate was away and there was a party taking place at a nearby dorm. Music was blaring, strobe lights were flashing and freshmen were consuming beverages of questionable … Read more
For Europe, the five years since the beginning of the Arab Spring have meant a dramatic influx of Muslim and Arab migrants into the continent. The rhetoric surrounding this influx has become more stern and unforgiving in the past year. Angela Merkel’s administration in Germany, the Financial Times reported, is seeking to eliminate “pull factors,” … Read more
A potential “Grexit”. Terrorism. Security threats. The specter of uncertainty continues to loom over the European Union as the migrant crisis increases tensions between member nations. And yet, each pressing issue presents an opportunity—a critical window for change. Tragic events and adversity tend to reveal themselves as key players in relationships, possibly strengthening ties, possibly … Read more
This is not the first time in history that Europe has been forced to come to grips with an urgent and overwhelming refugee crisis. Nor, as it turns out, is it the first time that refugees have been slandered with xenophobic hate speech and broadly stroked suspicion. In 1933, T.S. Eliot proclaimed to an audience … Read more
The refugee crisis occurring in Europe has brought out the true feelings of many. This challenge has exposed the racists and drawn an unmistakable line in the sand among the people there. It has brought to light how much some countries value the help they could provide, or how much they value the idea of … Read more
Historians have written extensively about the profound political, economic, and cultural changes ushered in by the Second World War. But in the greater narrative of that era they have paid much less attention to the western world’s shift toward a liberal, globalized ideological status quo, central to which is an emphasis on human rights. The … Read more
Le Front National. United Russia. Jobbik Hungary. Golden Dawn. These are the names of just a few of the active and increasingly popular nationalist parties in Europe. Once considered unpopular and offensive remnants of the continent’s troubled past, these political groups have reemerged as the voice of a growing population in Europe. Their policies rely … Read more
Of late, newspapers have been saturated with heart-breaking images of the plight of African and Middle Eastern refugees stumbling ashore several Greek islands under the banner “The Refugee Crisis.” Yet while recent events have obviously represented a humanitarian disaster for the desperate migrants, the crisis to which many Europeans refer is in fact how they … Read more
The European Union is currently embroiled in a refugee crisis poised to test its member states’ commitments to internationalism and liberal democracy. According to Frontex, the agency in charge of guarding the EU border, to date in 2015 over 340,000 migrants have attempted to cross into Europe, triple the number who attempted migration in 2014. … Read more