Pat Kane: Can the dream of the wandering stork people survive the refugee crisis?

But we should also attend to the metaphors and symbolisms embedded in these reports. With so much emotion flying around, they have an important and shaping effect.

In terms of metaphor, dog-whistle Tories have already thoroughly alerted us. When David Cameron speaks of a “swarm of people coming across the Mediterranean”, we know he’s talking about migrants as insects or vermin. When his Defence Secretary Philip Hammonds talks of migrants “marauding around” the Calais area, we can see that his metaphor is that of an invading army.

These Tory usages were instantly picked up by opposition critics. Yet we should remember how everyday these metaphors are. Gordon Brown’s 2010 dismissal of Gillian Duffy as “that bigoted woman” was no doubt triggered by her statement about “Eastern Europeans coming in ... where are they flocking from?”

Both the right-wing tabloids and the BBC will regularly use “flood” or “stream” to describe the movements of African and Middle-Eastern migrants through Europe. Again, not rendered as humans – but as an imbalance of nature, an overwhelming force.

We can apply other metaphors and images to these giant movements of humanity – and they could trigger other emotions than fear, defensiveness and loathing. But we may have to dig deeply and widely to find them.

The poet and essayist Juan Goytisolo relates a story from the Berbers – those nomadic peoples who pre-existed the Muslim and Arabic presence in North Africa.

The Berbers believed that storks were men who had transformed themselves into birds (special hospices were even built to care for them). These stork-men flew to Europe to temporarily establish themselves, went the legend. After a while they returned to their home country, where they resumed their human shape.

Goytisolo invokes these “stork-people” – able to move, reside, return, move again – as a way to get beyond either “a multicultural utopia or a homogenous ethnicity”.

Isn’t it as much in our nature to move, as to stay? Our very species, homo sapiens – a straggling few thousands – wandered out of their African homeland to find more fertile prospects.

Indeed, in terms of our evolved time on this earth, our human bodies are much more defined by millions of years of nomadic hunter-gathering than by life in farms, citadels or nations. As Goytisolo says: “Humans are not trees – they have no roots: they have feet, they walk ... Space invites movement”.

Now, remember Brown’s retort to Mrs. Duffy? “Yes, there were one million immigrants to Europe from Britain, but there were also one million Britons who had moved to Europe.” There shimmers the old “European Dream” – of Euro-citizens being as flexible and mobile as capital and industry.

These are the stork-people, happily flying from one part of the continent to the other, enriching urban areas with their labour, talents and culture. (My daughter, a design post-grad in Delft, Holland, exemplifies this dream).

But this rosy image of a circulation of smart, engaged Europeans, flapping their wings across their well-fashioned and cleverly-regulated continent, has surely hit the buffers with the refugee and migrant crisis. (That is, if the summary and brutal treatment of Greece within the Eurozone hadn’t derailed it already.)

In the face of millions fleeing from war-torn areas like Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Eritrea, southern Sudan and elsewhere – and with the likelihood, as winter descends, of its impact on European countries being ever more acute – we will have to thoroughly refresh what we mean by citizenship and belonging. And what our rights and responsibilities to others might be, beyond our nation or continent.

I am utterly in sympathy with the sentiment that “because we broke it, we should deal with the outcomes”. That is, the ham-fisted interventions of the US and Europe in the Middle-East over the last few decades (and indeed, our imperial carve-ups in the century before that) means that we have a responsibility to cope with their unstable human consequences.

But a moral appeal to our fellows might only go so far. We perhaps have to look at the bigger trends, and make a stab at our acute self-interest as well. The peace-and-security expert Paul Rodgers points out very well the underlying processes.

It’s no surprise to hear from Rodgers that 85 per cent of global income is commanded by about 1.5 billion (a fifth) of the world population. The remaining five billion contain a billion that are malnourished (double what it was in 1975), 830 million that are living in slums, and three billion surviving on less than $2 per day.

But what Rodgers urges us to remember is that very large numbers of what he calls the “minority world” are much more literate and educated than in the 1970s. And with their mobile devices and internet access, they are easily able to compare themselves against every glittering detail of the developed world. What used to be a hopeful “revolution of rising expectations” has become, in Rodgers’ words, a desperate “revolution of frustrated expectations”.

It surely only takes a few minutes’ thought to realise that the response of the affluent world to this vast turbulence cannot possibly be to pull up the drawbridge. Or, in the case of Donald Trump or Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban, to build “beautiful” (Trump’s words) barbed-wire-and-concrete walls to keep migrants out. The dynamic is too large, too historically momentous for that.

In the next decade, we can add another factor to the push of migration: the ratchet of climate change (particularly water shortage) that will impact on even the subsistence livelihoods of many around the African rim of the Mediterranean, and other sub-tropical areas.

THE coming Paris intergovernmental conference on the environment has many urgencies to consider – but the increase in compelled migration due to global warming should be high on their list.

Pretty quickly, we in the affluent world have to come to a realisation. We must act in a concerted manner to redress the past exploitations of the Age of Empire: we must also address the current extreme inequalities that anyone in the world with a smartphone can measure and explain. If we don’t, whatever we regard as our “security” (social, national or whatever) will forever be at “risk”.

I know the hard-nosed economic arguments that favour greater migration to Europe. Due to declining birth-rate the population of Europe is projected to fall from 333 million to 242 million in the next 40 years – so tens of millions of new Europeans are needed to fulfil jobs.

The Scottish Government often pronounces a variant of this. As the son of a mother who was herself brought up in the “Paddysland” area of Coatbridge, I know all about the pace that the labour-market sets for the acceptance of economic migrants.

But in the face of this restive, globalised planet, it seems far too slow a solution. And in any case, there is reason to doubt its basic premise. For example, how far will the coming automations shrink the overall level of employment in Europe?

No easy answers here. But it strikes me, amidst the policy grind, that we could do worse than raid the storehouse of writers and poets for images that can snap us out of our panic-mode, just for a moment.

Apart from the storks, Juan Goytisolo also cites a line from (appropriately enough) the Arabian Nights, that great synthesis of Middle-Eastern and Asian storytelling. “The world is the house of those who do not have a house.” Beautiful and provocative – and for me, enough to drown a chorus of dog-whistles.

Pat Kane is a musician and writer (www.patkane.today)