It is commonplace to say that we live in an increasingly interconnected world. Personal experience bears this out. In the past few days, from Kuala Lumpur, I have ordered a birthday gift to be delivered the next day in rural Ireland; communicated with editors in Washington DC and Abu Dhabi; and arranged for a Malaysian politician to have a meeting with a think tank in London. Social media lets me know how people are reacting to current events where I am, where I live and pretty much anywhere I want.
Yet this ease of communication and online sharing is very shallow. The real barriers, both mental and physical, remain. In Morocco, thousands of desperate migrants wait months for the right moment to attempt to cross fences laced with razor wire to make it into the Spanish exclave of Melilla, or brave the Strait of Gibraltar in dinghies, as they did last week, to enter the Spanish mainland.
Others, like the 35 people (one of whom was dead) found crammed into a shipping container in East London last weekend, seek ever more perilous paths to freedom from poverty or persecution.
Wealthy countries claim to be concerned, but that sentiment, too, is shallow. Too often it does not extend into action sufficient to make a difference. Why, for instance, if we are truly “interdependent ... in today’s globalised world”, as José Manuel Barroso, the outgoing president of the European Commission, put it in a speech last year, won’t EC countries open their borders to those who need their help?
There is a free-market case for open borders, as the veteran British journalist Peter Wilby has pointed out: “Millions of people across the world – in Africa, eastern Europe, the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent – own nothing of marketable value except their labour. Why should they be prohibited from selling it freely?”
More important still is the humanitarian argument, as Wilby also noted: “No matter how much we give to [the charity] Oxfam, the most effective way of helping poor people in developing countries is to welcome them here. The life expectancy of a Ugandan baby who moves to London rises instantly by some 45 years. Remittances from migrant workers are worth far more to many developing countries than foreign aid or investment, with the bonus that the money reaches ordinary families rather than corrupt rulers.”
That is one way the UAE boosts the economies of its expatriate workforce, but for most western countries, talk of a “common humanity” is trumped by self interest.
Rich countries agree that the plight of, say, the over 800 million who will go to bed hungry tonight, is terribly upsetting, and yes, aid is given, but not of an order that might entail any doing without – which we would surely concur was the only morally justifiable response if we could imagine ourselves or any of our nearest and dearest facing suffering of that kind.
It is worth reminding ourselves of the philosopher John Rawls’s “veil of ignorance”, by which we are invited to consider constructing a social order on the basis “that no one knows his place in society, his class position or social status, nor does anyone know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence, strength, and the like”.
Would we really then opt for a situation so unequal that the annual income of the world’s richest 100 was sufficient in 2012 to end global poverty four times over, as Oxfam reported last year?
If we accept that the answer is obviously not, then the only way wealthy countries can tolerate the misery of much of the rest of the world is by effectively dehumanising the suffering.
The impoverished Africans drowning while trying to reach Europe or tribespeople on the Afghan-Pakistani border killed as “collateral damage” in drone strikes just aren’t recognisably similar enough to westerners to generate the kind of outrage that similar incidents would in advanced countries.
At one level, the greater fellow feeling we all have for members of our own circle, ethnicity or country is understandable. (The eminent Princeton historian Bernard Lewis once went a step further when he told me that “to hate and persecute people who are different is normal” – a position most would regard as far too Hobbesian.)
At another level, class and money do set us apart. There are probably few if any readers of this newspaper who have ever had to face living on less than Dh8 a day – so is real empathy with those people who do even possible?
The effort must be made, however, if we are to honour any ideas about our common humanity, or to pay proper heed to the words of the Prophet Mohammed when he said in his final sermon that “all mankind is from Adam and Eve” and bade listeners remember that no race had superiority over another.
The Muslim principle of zakat both recognises and embodies this, and, indeed, it appears that the UAE and other Muslim countries are setting an example others should follow.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported in 2012 that “Every year, somewhere between US$200 billion (Dh735bn) and $1 trillion are spent in ‘mandatory’ alms and voluntary charity across the Muslim world ... At the low end of the estimate, this is 15 times more than global humanitarian aid contributions in 2011”.
If only other countries would follow suit. Then maybe the 15 Cameroonians who died trying to enter Spanish territory in February would never have left home in the first place. But can the wealthy nations ever really consider such migrants their equals? If not, nothing will change.
Sholto Byrnes is a Doha-based commentator and consultant