This weekend's Paris attacks, occurring in the middle of one of history's
largest mass-migrations, has the feel of uncharted territory. But it's
actually an eerie echo of something that happened nearly two thousand years
ago in more-or-less the same place.
According to some historians, the fall of the Roman Empire wasn't
pre-ordained. By AD 300 it had its problems, including far-flung,
hard-to-defend borders and recurring currency crises, but was generally
stable and prosperous. Then a new power arose in the East. The Huns were
horse archers who could out-ride and out-shoot their neighbors, and they
terrorized the Vandals and Goths who lived in what is now Germany and the
Balkans, driving them west to Rome's borders.
Rome chose to let half a million "barbarians" enter, hoping to
use them as soldiers and laborers. Instead, it found itself with invading
armies and unstable, uncontrollable political coalitions. The complete story
is winding, convoluted and full of unfamiliar names, but it ends with the
division of the Empire into two parts and the destruction of the original,
Italian half. Here's a History Channel synopsis of the process:
The Barbarian attacks on Rome partially stemmed from a
mass migration caused by the Huns' invasion of Europe in the late fourth century.
When these Eurasian warriors rampaged through northern Europe, they drove
many Germanic tribes to the borders of the Roman Empire. The Romans
grudgingly allowed members of the Visigoth tribe to cross south of the Danube
and into the safety of Roman territory, but they treated them with extreme
cruelty. According to the historian Ammianus Marcellinus, Roman officials
even forced the starving Goths to trade their children into slavery in
exchange for dog meat. In brutalizing the Goths, the Romans created a
dangerous enemy within their own borders. When the oppression became too much
to bear, the Goths rose up in revolt and eventually routed a Roman army and
killed the Eastern Emperor Valens during the Battle of Adrianople in A.D.
378. The shocked Romans negotiated a flimsy peace with the barbarians, but
the truce unraveled in 410, when the Goth King Alaric moved west and sacked
Rome. With the Western Empire weakened, Germanic tribes like the Vandals and
the Saxons were able to surge across its borders and occupy Britain, Spain
and North Africa.
For more, see the Wikipedia entry on the sack of Rome
Obviously this isn't an exact fit -- especially the part about the
existing empire being in fairly good shape, since clearly today's eurozone
has some other potentially fatal flaws. But the part about the rise of a new
enemy in the West causing a mass-migration into "civilized" Europe,
which opens its borders in order to obtain cheap labor without offering what
the newcomers view as full rights of citizenship, is close enough to provide
some useful insight.
Meanwhile, the differences between now and then make the current situation
even scarier. Automatic weapons and home-made bombs give five or six angry
people the ability to wreak havoc on thousands. And the development of dirty bombs threatens to
make the next attack effectively permanent by irradiating whole city blocks.
But the most ominous difference is that even in the absence of a million
refugees at the border, the eurozone as now configured is doomed. Debt is
soaring, populations are aging, the periphery can't function in a
German-style monetary regime and the main political parties are too wedded to
the status quo to offer effective solutions. This, in short, is a mess
without an obvious fix.
