[A]t the heart of the Rome-Tripoli friendship pact is what some critics say amounts to a gigantic bribe that allows Berlusconi’s government to fulfill an election promise to combat illegal immigration. The agreement committed Italy to pay Libya some 5 billion dollars, ostensibly as compensation for transgressions committed during three decades of Italian colonial rule.

If continuing disorder in North Africa coincides with a world economic crisis, we might enter a spell in which, for the first time since the Middle Ages, history is driven by great movements of primitive peoples. If we are lucky, these movements will be leaderless and disorderly. Should an Attila or a Temujin take charge, things might get really ugly.

This would mainly be Europe’s problem, at least at first. Observing American liberals as they watch Camp of the Saints play out in the Mediterranean would be interesting. The ethical conundrums implicit in coping with tens of millions of desperate African and Muslim migrants would be difficult to discuss”€”perhaps impossible, given the framework of familiar multicultural pieties.

Southern European nations”€™ historical grievances might kick in. Piracy and kidnapping by the M/M nations plagued the south Mediterranean shoreline for centuries. Robert Davis’s book Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters tells the whole grisly story:

The effect on the European coastal populations was dramatic. Entire areas were depopulated. The author even sketches out an argument that the culture of baroque Italy was determined in part by a turning inward from the terrors of coastal life”€”from the “fear of the horizon” that afflicted all the regions subject to slave raiding. He tells us…that to this day there is an idiom in Sicilian dialect to express the general idea of being caught by surprise: pigliato dai turchi“€”“taken by the Turks.” The distress of those left behind, deprived of a husband or father, is painful to read about.

And then Europe’s problem might become ours. Cheap hand-held GPS devices make the Atlantic crossing feasible for anyone bold enough. In fact, the USA has already received its first African boat people. They are not likely to be the last.

The boat-people issue is a major topic in Australian politics. Geographically, we are not much further from Third World desperation than Australia is, and technology is constantly shrinking the meaning of “remote,” anyway. Australia’s today may be our tomorrow.

We have some thinking to do here. Will we do it? With so many PC landmines in this zone, the smart money says no.