Erdoğan and Taking Advantage of Europe’s “Pathological Altruism”

“For them, the feelings of guilt over Europe’s past seemed to require inviting in the world to redeem Europe of its sins. Erdoğan is playing on this fear by referring to the Greeks as Nazis, attempting to destabilize the collective psyche of the European leadership.”

Greece is again facing a surge of migrants attempting to get into Europe through Turkey’s western border. The numbers are nowhere near those Europe saw in the summer of 2015. Even so, the fact that this is happening demonstrates the situation has only been frozen since 2015. The migrant crisis, like the conflict in Syria, is nowhere near solved. It never ended, only abated, and it is once again playing a part in shaping the politics of the European continent.

We start in Syria. On Thursday, 27 February 2020, 33 Turkish troops were killed in Idlib by government forces. Turkey intervened in the Kurdish region of Afrin in January 2018 and in Syria’s Kurdish dominated north-east in October 2019. This latest clash comes as part of the final push by the Syrian regime to end the civil war. Thanks to the help of Russia and Iranian proxies, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad is on the verge of reclaiming what remains of his shattered country.

As a result of the civil war, Turkey has 3.7 million Syrians within its borders. Following the crisis of 2015, Turkey’s Islamist dictator and aspirant Sultan, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan agreed to curtail the numbers of migrants from making the journey to Greece following an agreement with the European Union (EU) in March of 2016. This deal boiled down to Erdoğan agreeing to block further mass movements of people into Europe through Turkey if the EU agreed to a liberalization of visas, reopening Turkey’s route to joining the EU, and to pay his regime €6bn to help deal with the migrants in Turkey.