D I P L O M AT I C A| QUESTIONS ASKED
when you see the discussions over the next months, when [British] people are wanting to make sure their businesses still have access to that market, to grapple with that and not falling back to World Trade Organization rules, I think more people in other countries who might have flirted with the idea will be more aware of the advantages the European Union gives us. I think it’s giving more perspective on what it means to be a member of the EU. [They] might not love the EU, but see what we have in it, and what we’d lose. DM: So you don’t see any other countries leaving the EU? SP: No. Unlike the situation before the Brexit vote, I don’t see any serious movements by any country about leaving the European Union. We have countries and parts of populations in countries who love the European Union and others who have a more pragmatic approach. I think both of them are good. I think the whole process and, even now, the negotiation process between the U.K. and the European Union is about making clear that membership rights only apply to members. You can’t have your cake and eat it, too. That is what it is about and that will lead to a negotiation process that I think will be demanding. Of course, there’s overregulation red tape, and sometimes it’s outright crazy the regulations from the European level, but that kind of criticism is sometimes too predominant to me. We talk only about
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red tape and bureaucracy. We have that in all of our own countries. Let’s sit down and talk and see and maybe we can reduce some of it. But this criticism, which is correct, shouldn’t keep us from seeing how great this project is in political, economic, cultural and social terms. I think it wasn’t a coincidence that the European Union, back in 2012, received the Nobel Peace Prize. I was personally offended by people in the media and politics who ridiculed this prize for the EU. There is no other institution in the world that deserves the Nobel Peace Prize more than the European Union. Those who said the EU got the prize for bureaucracy and red tape didn’t understand. Yes, there is too much bureaucracy and there are lots of ridiculous things coming out of it, but we all have laws that you could call ridiculous. That doesn’t take away from the importance of the [EU], which is a world historic one. DM: How is Austria dealing with the increased numbers of migrants coming your way? SP: We have to understand the motives of each and every person who wants to leave their own country and live in another country. Nobody takes that decision lightly and I say this, sitting in a country, Canada, that was built on immigration. On the other hand, we have to be careful with the different categories. We have migration and refugees. I think we have to be very clear with those categories. A person who is a refugee is identified to
DM: And then you have a trade agree-
ment with a country way across the Atlantic Ocean, namely Canada. SP: We have a trade agreement, which is working, but according to our informaSPRING 2020 | APR-MAY-JUN
BWAG
The migration crisis in Europe is about a lack of function in border control and the fact that those in the EU don't agree on joint principles of what migration and refugee status are. Shown here are Iraqi and Syrian migrants at the Vienna railway station in 2015.
the standards of international law. And if they are, they have the right to asylum and asylum status because they are persecuted for reasons of race, religion, sexual orientation or political views. On the other hand, apart from refugees, you have migrants. Being a migrant is perfectly legitimate. Migration has largely contributed to the wealth of countries, but I think we all understand that we need a different rules framework for refugees and for migrants. A refugee has to be accepted and it is legitimate for a country to tell a migrant that ‘yes, we need you now’ or ‘maybe we don’t need you now, but in two or three years’ time, if you acquire certain skills, we may.’ The core problem in Europe with the migration crisis is two-fold. First, it’s about the lack of function in border control, but at least of the same importance is the fact that we, in Europe, still don’t agree on joint principles of what is migration and what is refugee status. We have a kind of perverted situation that many people see the asylum system as the only key to enter the EU. At the same time, they’re 95 per cent migrants. We grandiosely failed in developing the system and not even developing an approach toward having such a system. That’s what we need. As long as we don’t have this set of joint ideas, [there’s no point in] talking about distribution quotas. I was part of the process when we started to negotiate the system of quotas and the distribution of refugees in Europe that has failed. It had to fail because how would I distribute an amount of people when the countries to which they should be distributed don’t even agree on what those people are? The immigration and asylum issue is closely linked with foreign political questions because the amount of people that push toward Europe has to do with the developments in our neighbourhood. Europe is a neighbour to the most unstable region in the world, which is the Middle East, and the one continent on Earth that provides us with lots of opportunity and also lots of conflicts and problems. That is Africa. Europe will always have more issues with neighbours than North America, or China. There are oceans dividing [the latter from the Middle East and Africa.] The Mediterranean Sea is not an ocean.
