When Western countries facilitated the ouster of Muammar Gaddafi (1942-2011), they did not expect that the former Libyan leader would be proven right when he predicted a refugee crisis in Europe.

In recent years, the European Union has been confronted with one challenge after another. Before fully recovering from the debt crisis, it is inundated with a flood of refugees. The refugee crisis is testing Europe’s conscience: how will Europe cope with the refugees fleeing civil war in Syria and Libya? These refugees risked their lives to go to EU countries or died distressingly on the way, creating an enormous humanitarian disaster.
 

It is “color revolutions” that resulted in Europe’s refugee crisis. Since the beginning of the 21st century, the West has instigated and supported “color revolutions” executed primarily through street politics, resulting in uprisings in countries throughout West Asia, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, including Georgia, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan and Egypt.

Through supposedly non-violent means, the West has achieved the goal of changing regimes and politics of these countries. Thus a second wave of “Western democratization” has come on the heels of the drastic changes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s.

The US intervened without considering consequences. Turkey suffered from terrorist attacks due to its participation in the Syrian civil war. The Islamic State group is a malignant tumor resulting from the West’s Middle East policy. Since the outbreak of the Syrian civil war, US-led Western countries have strived to overthrow the Assad regime, while the Islamic State, enemy of the Assad regime has now become the enemy of the West as well. The “color revolution” has brought about the chaos in West Asia and North Africa.

The European Union has exerted soft power in neighboring areas for a long time. It overthrew the Gaddafi regime after the “Arab spring.” Then it committed to bringing down the Assad regime along with the US, causing a large number of refugees from Libya and Syria to swarm into Europe.
 

In addition to the lure of freedom and social benefits, the key reason refugees across the Mediterranean are risking their lives to flock into Europe is the huge gap of wealth between the European Union and neighboring countries as well as their desire to avoid war in their own countries. Actually, the European Union has great difficulty in sharing happiness and woe with its neighbors. The refugee crisis indicates that the European Union must establish a sense of common destiny with neighboring countries. 

 

Wang Yiwei is director of the Center for European Studies at Renmin University of China.