EU brought the refugee crisis upon itself

Heads of government from European and African countries, together with delegates from international and regional organizations, gathered in Malta on Wednesday and Thursday for a summit on migration. And the Middle East refugee crisis will be an important topic at the G20 summit in Antalya, Turkey, on Nov 15-16, too. This is a good time for the entire world to reflect on the reasons behind the crisis.

From the Ukraine crisis and the Greek debt crisis to the ongoing Middle East refugee crisis, serious exigencies have been haunting the European Union. But perhaps the greatest challenge the EU faces is the massive wave of asylum seekers from the Middle East, many of whom have risked their lives to flee their war-torn homelands in Syria, Libya and even Afghanistan.

The European Commission reportedly plans to propose a "structural EU-wide resettlement scheme" early next year for the refugees. Its aim is to accept at least 200,000 refugees directly from camps in countries such as Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon.

That EU leaders have resorted to transnational cooperation to take in and resettle more refugees from the Middle East is indeed praiseworthy. But it should not be forgotten that the humanitarian crisis would not have happened had the West not instigated the "color revolutions" in the Arab world and Eastern Europe.

By sowing the seeds of street politics, the United States-led West tried to spread its own form of democracy, characterized by drastic regime change and political transformation, in the Middle East and North Africa. It had tried similar methods to establish its hold in Eastern European countries in the early 1990s following the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

The "Arab Spring" has proved to be an endless winter of civil wars and terrorism, and Washington refuses to clean the mess it has created in the region.

Since the outbreak of the civil war in Syria more than four years ago, the West has been bent on overthrowing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. At one time, it even sought to get the "job" done by the Islamic State group. Yet this enemy's enemy has turned out to be an even bigger enemy of the West.

The West-engineered "color revolutions" in the Middle East and North Africa, which were part of Washington's "rebalancing to Asia" strategy, are the biggest reason for the mess that we see in the region today. And as a close ally of the US and a committed upholder of the "democratization" process, the EU can only blame itself for leaving some Arab countries in chaos by supporting the US' attempts to spread "democracy" in the region, which forced hundreds of thousands of desperate people to seek refuge in Europe.

Of course, what has essentially forced these people to flee their homes is the search for safety and security that they believe the EU states can provide. But this could be a mirage, because many citizens within the EU bloc still do not enjoy that "luxury". This makes the refugee crisis a wake-up call to the EU that it has to rise and fall with its neighbors as one community of shared destiny.

The EU's pride in its philanthropy and in guaranteeing freedom and equality to its citizens too is in crisis. The beleaguered bloc can no longer relive its glorious past as the center of the world, provide "cradle-to-grave" welfare to its people (as much as it is obliged to) and, more importantly, check the advance of the marauding IS group. To a point, the overly keen EU advocates of political correctness are also responsible for the massive refugee crisis Europe faces today.

The author is director of the Center for European Union Studies at Renmin University of China.