After a decade as an adult in Europe, here are some thoughts on why Europe Is a present sham: Historical amnesia, migration, and modern exploitation

I have been privileged enough to make my first move to Europe via a scholarship. Most people would wonder "why" I moved here. In fact, If I was given a penny every time someone asked...

Recently, I started reading The Odyssey of Ibn Battuta: Uncommon Tales of a Medieval Adventurer, and a passage got me reflecting. From the very beginning, the book touches on the idea that Europeans of the time (we're talking 13th / 14th century here) might have struggled to grasp the existence of such diverse and complex civilizations outside of Europe. And when I looked at the imaginary timeline of how historical events unfolded that involved Europeans colonising, robbing, and enslaving, some things started to fall into place.

My critique of Europe comes from a place of care: I was raised here as a child, and raised again as an adult. My identity is complex and I owe it to my travels, moving countries with the EU, being a polyglot, and much more. So no, I am not interested in questions like the usual "then why don't you go back to where you came from?" but more questions like "how can we do better?"

I migrated very young, on my own, with my own set of biases and misconceptions that, of course, I had to unlearn on the go. Yet the most surprising thing is what I learned over the years, and how my view of belonging in Europe changed drastically.

I grew up in a society that glorifies Europe. The West in general, but mostly Europe for its geographical proximity. The European Union is often upheld, by many, as a beacon of democracy, prosperity, and human rights. From the towering ideals of the Enlightenment to the post-World War II project of peace and integration known as the European Union (EU), the continent claims to stand as a model for others to emulate. Yet, beneath this polished exterior lies a contradictory reality: one of historical amnesia, colonial legacy, racialised exclusion, and economic exploitation. In the following passages, I argue that Europe’s current social and economic order rests on a distorted version of its past and an ongoing system of neocolonial practices, especially in relation to migration and labour. I attempt to trace Europe's trajectory from the medieval period, through colonial conquest, to the present crisis in the Mediterranean, to expose how Europe became a "present sham"—a space where the dream of prosperity lures many, only to trap them in cycles of precarity and invisibility.

 
 
Europe before Empire: A peripheral and underdeveloped continent

Popular historical narratives position Europe as the centre of civilisation, but this Eurocentric worldview collapses under scrutiny. Before the 15th century, Europe was by no means the apex of global development. As Ibn Battuta’s 14th-century travelogues demonstrate, the Islamic world—stretching from Andalusia to Indonesia—boasted vibrant trade networks, advanced knowledge in medicine, mathematics, astronomy, and a rich cultural and intellectual life (Dunn, 2005). African empires like Mali under Mansa Musa had developed complex economic systems and cities such as Timbuktu, known for their universities and libraries (Levtzion, 1973).

Meanwhile, Europe was recovering from the Black Death, plagued by violent feudalism, brutal religious inquisitions, and a lack of spices and goods from the East. As Dipesh Chakrabarty notes, the concept of superior European modernity erases the historical complexity of non-European societies (Chakrabarty, 2000). Europe's leap into global dominance began not through internal enlightenment but through external exploitation.

 
 
Colonialism: The theft of wealth and humanity

Europe's so-called Renaissance and Industrial Revolution were made possible by centuries of colonial violence. From the late 15th century, European empires expanded through “exploration,” which was in reality the violent subjugation of land and people. Slavery, extraction, and genocide underpinned this expansion. The transatlantic slave trade, led by Britain, Portugal, France, and the Netherlands, forcibly displaced over 12 million Africans (Eltis & Richardson, 2008). Colonisers extracted not only raw materials but also dismantled local governance structures, destroyed indigenous knowledge systems, and imposed foreign legal and economic systems.

Even as decolonisation movements gained ground in the 20th century, Europe continued to extract value through structural adjustment policies, debt traps, and trade inequalities (Rodney, 1972; Ferguson, 2006). The economic underdevelopment of many postcolonial nations cannot be understood outside of this history.

 
The Mediterranean as a death border

I grew up watching the news with my parents, where we (Moroccans) learned to compartmentalise seeing migrants that make it all the way to the North of Africa die trying to reach Spain or Greece. I always wondered, what are these people fleeing? Then I grew up, and slowly started to learn that the richest continent on the planet has been a playground for bullies who took, and took, and took, until they bled nations dry who are probably never going to fully recover.

Today, the legacy of colonialism plays out at Europe’s borders. The Mediterranean Sea has become one of the deadliest migration routes in the world. According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), more than 28,000 people have died attempting to cross the Mediterranean since 2014 (IOM, 2024). Far from being an accident, this death toll is the result of deliberate policy decisions. Fortress Europe has invested billions into border militarisation, outsourcing "border control" to authoritarian regimes like Libya and Tunisia, and criminalising humanitarian aid (Andersson, 2014; Achiume, 2019).

The migration "crisis" is framed as a "problem" coming from the Global South, but it is Europe’s geopolitical actions—arms sales, climate inaction, economic exploitation—that continue to destabilise the very regions migrants flee.

  
The myth of the European dream: From undocumented to undervalued

I have friends who left Morocco via routes that are not legitimatised by the EU. Some of them went on a tourist visa and stayed. Some of them faked marriage documents, and some went on tiny speedboats, risking their lives to reach the south of Spain. The common reason behind this migration is to either improve their quality of life, or taking back what Spain is still blatantly stealing from us (check out Melilia or Ceuta, Moroccan cities that Moroccans cannot enter without a Schengen visa).

For those who survive the journey and enter Europe, the promise of dignity remains elusive. Many undocumented migrants work under exploitative conditions—harvesting food in southern Italy, cleaning homes in Paris, or working construction in Berlin—for wages below the legal minimum, without contracts, insurance, or legal recourse (Palumbo & Sciurba, 2018). This "modern slavery" sustains parts of Europe's agricultural and service economies.

Even those who secure legal residency (like myself) are caught in a paradox: if they work legally and pay taxes, they face high deductions with few social benefits due to residency-based restrictions. If they work "cash in hand," they risk deportation and remain outside formal protections. Europe's legal and economic systems thus function as a double-bind for migrants: they are either invisible or hyper-visible, but never protected.

 
Neocolonial governance and racialising capitalism

Europe’s treatment of migrants cannot be separated from racialising capitalism—the process through which capitalism exploits racialised hierarchies to generate profit (Robinson, 1983). The racialisation of migrants justifies their economic exploitation and political exclusion. Simultaneously, the EU engages in neocolonial governance, dictating migration agreements, trade policies, and development funding in African and Asian nations in ways that benefit Europe first (El-Enany, 2020).

The “sham” is not that Europe has failed to live up to its ideals, but that these ideals were built on exclusion in the first place.

The very wealth that sustains European welfare states was accumulated through violence. Its current economic order depends on the continued marginalisation of the Global South—both abroad and within its borders.

 
 
Unmasking the Mirage

Europe’s self-image as a moral, civilised, and democratic continent must be confronted with the historical and material realities of how it came to power—and how it sustains that power today. The Mediterranean is not just a geographical border, but a symbolic one: between inclusion and exclusion, privilege and precarity, life and death. Migrants, whether documented or not, form the backbone of many European economies while being denied dignity and rights.

To call Europe a “sham” is not to deny its cultural achievements or democratic struggles. It is to expose the contradictions between its projected values and its actual practices. Until Europe reckons with its colonial past and restructures its borders and labour markets, it will remain, in the words of the Senegalese philosopher Felwine Sarr, “a province of the world pretending to be its center” (Sarr, 2016).

 
References

Achiume, E. T. (2019). Migration as Decolonization. Stanford Law Review, 71(6), 1509–1574.
Andersson, R. (2014). Illegality, Inc.: Clandestine Migration and the Business of Bordering Europe. University of California Press.
Chakrabarty, D. (2000). Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton University Press.
Dunn, R. E. (2005). The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century. University of California Press.
El-Enany, N. (2020). (B)ordering Britain: Law, Race and Empire. Manchester University Press.
Eltis, D., & Richardson, D. (2008). Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Yale University Press.
Ferguson, J. (2006). Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order. Duke University Press.
IOM. (2024). Missing Migrants Project: Mediterranean. https://missingmigrants.iom.int/
Levtzion, N. (1973). Ancient Ghana and Mali. Methuen & Co.
Palumbo, L., & Sciurba, A. (2018). The Vulnerability to Exploitation of Women Migrant Workers in Agriculture in the EU: The Need for a Human Rights and Gender-Based Approach. European Parliament.
Rodney, W. (1972). How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Bogle-L'Ouverture Publications.
Robinson, C. A. (1983). Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Zed Press.

Sarr, F. (2016). Afrotopia. Philippe Rey.