Britain’s prime minister knows such a plan won’t work. He’s cosying up with Giorgia Meloni for an entirely different reason, says professor in political theory Lea Ypi
Britain’s prime minister knows such a plan won’t work. He’s cosying up with Giorgia Meloni for an entirely different reasonne cold, late evening in the winter of 1999, I was waiting for a train at Termini station in Rome when I noticed an old lady struggling with her suitcases and offered to help. “Signorina,” her voice trembled ever so slightly. “Fortunately there are still youngsters like you. I was very worried. This station is full of Albanian muggers. It’s an invasion.
“Invaders” was just one of the labels. Although, taken literally, the only invasion in the history of the two nations went the other way round. It happened on 7 April 1939, when Mussolini’s troops disembarked in my home city of Durrës and annexed the Albanian kingdom to the kingdom of Italy, deploying it as a military base for the subsequent invasion of Greece, exploiting its copper, chrome and other natural resources, and adorning the Albanian flag with fascist symbols.
Yet all that Britain needs for an equivalent deal is a former colony with a government whose memory is sharp enough to remember the roads and buildings its master constructed in the past century but not the human beings it exploited in theA people sufficiently traumatised by its recent past to have removed from memory its distant one, and governed by a submissive political elite compliant with the liberal order, who will repeat the mantra that we must all share the consequences of migration...
Politically, the Albania model is presented as a novelty in the management of migratory flows because it involves cooperation between an EU candidate and an EU member state. Inspired by the desire to find a “structural” solution to the issue of irregular immigration, in reality it does exactly the opposite: it leaves to bilateral negotiations what ought to come about as a result of an EU-wide process.
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