{"id":2780,"date":"2015-12-09T08:38:54","date_gmt":"2015-12-09T08:38:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.solidaritynow.org\/?p=2780"},"modified":"2017-07-11T11:34:27","modified_gmt":"2017-07-11T11:34:27","slug":"europes-refugee-opportunity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/staging.solidaritynow.org\/en\/europes-refugee-opportunity\/","title":{"rendered":"[:el]\u0397 \u03c0\u03c1\u03bf\u03c3\u03c6\u03c5\u03b3\u03b9\u03ba\u03ae \u03b5\u03c5\u03ba\u03b1\u03b9\u03c1\u03af\u03b1 \u03c4\u03b7\u03c2 \u0395\u03c5\u03c1\u03ce\u03c0\u03b7\u03c2[:en]Europe&#8217;s Refugee Opportunity[:]"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p>\n<div>By <strong>Emma Bonino,<\/strong> a former Italian minister of foreign affairs,<br \/>\nminister of international trade, and EU commissioner,<br \/>\nand a founding board member of the European Council on Foreign Relations.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>\u0395urope\u2019s so-called refugee crisis should never have become an emergency. Accommodating one million asylum-seekers should not be a huge challenge for the European Union \u2013 an area with 500 million citizens that welcomes more than three million immigrants every year. Unfortunately, the lack of a coordinated response is transforming a manageable problem into an acute political crisis \u2013 one that, as German Chancellor Angela Merkel has rightly warned, could destroy the EU.<br \/>\nMost EU member states are selfishly focusing on their own interests. This pits them against one another and has precipitated panic, putting refugees in even greater peril. A smart, comprehensive plan would calm the fears. Instead, Europe has preferred to search for scapegoats \u2013 and Greece is the latest to be targeted for blame.Greece has been accused of not doing enough to process and house refugees. And yet, even if the country were not crippled by economic crisis, it would be unreasonable to expect a single small country to bear the burden alone \u2013 especially in a year when more than 800,000 refugees are expected to pass through its territory. This is a European and global problem, not solely a Greek problem.<br \/>\nThere is plenty of blame to go around. In Greece, George Soros\u2019s Open Society Foundations, acting in partnership with European Economic Area and Norway Grants, anticipated the problems that the lack of a serious European asylum policy would create. In 2013, the partnership established an organization, Solidarity Now, run by the cream of Greek civil society. Solidarity Now needs just \u20ac62 million ($67 million) to care for 15,000 of the 50,000 refugees who need to be housed in Greece next year. And yet, though the EU has promised to spend \u20ac500 million to help Greece manage the crisis, some member states have failed to pay their share.<\/div>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/www.project-syndicate.org\/commentary\/europe-refugees-plan-by-emma-bonino-2015-12\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">here<\/a>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Emma Bonino, a former Italian minister of foreign affairs, minister of international trade, and EU commissioner, and a founding board member of the European Council on Foreign Relations. \u0395urope\u2019s so-called refugee crisis should never have become an emergency. Accommodating one million asylum-seekers should not be a huge challenge for the European Union \u2013 an [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2781,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.solidaritynow.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2780"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.solidaritynow.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.solidaritynow.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.solidaritynow.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.solidaritynow.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2780"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/staging.solidaritynow.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2780\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3329,"href":"https:\/\/staging.solidaritynow.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2780\/revisions\/3329"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.solidaritynow.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2781"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.solidaritynow.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2780"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.solidaritynow.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2780"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.solidaritynow.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2780"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}