There are three main migration challenges for Europe:

Flow. Migratory pressure is on the increase as the populations of poorer countries in the greater neighbourhood of the European Union become more mobile.

Stock. EU member states with a significant stock of immigrants are confronted with a major integration challenge as the aspirations of many second-generation migrants are frustrated by poor education and poor labour market performance. If integration policies fail, large ethnic underclasses may become a permanent feature in the EU

Talent. Global competition for high-skilled workers has intensified owing to skillbiased technological change and globalisation, and the EU struggles to attract and retain top talent.

Russia’s mauling of Georgia was a game-changing geopolitical development for Western democracies – above all, for Europe. For Russia, it is a conquest, and a diminished Georgia will need determined Western help to retain a fig leaf of viability. It is time to re-examine the assumption – left unexamined for too long – that time was working to bring about a happy ending to the cold war, with Russia moving along the lines that the West has been following since NATO enlargement a decade ago. Instead, Moscow has changed a national boundary by force of arms and will probably incorporate South Ossetia and Abkhazia into Russia. Some have described this action as a response to the West’s recognition of Kosovo. European Affairs published articles at the time warning that the Kremlin would someday claim Kosovo as a precedent. But the two situations are profoundly different. In Georgia, the Kremlin has thrown down the gauntlet about breaking what was still formally accepted as a joint approach to European security shared by Moscow and Western capitals.

Most public affairs people know how to cope with a crisis.  They have the knowledge, contacts and experience to predict change in a policy sector with a high degree of confidence.  They make their living by influencing the outcome of change.  It gets more interesting when the need is to understand the interaction of different sectors in crisis.  The Institute for Environmental Security explored this dangerous territory in early September with a seminar in Brussels entitled “The Perfect Storm: Trade, Finance & Climate in 2009”.  It started off as an examination of the climate-friendly changes in the World Trade Organisation, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund needed to underpin any agreement at the Copenhagen Conference of the Parties on Climate Change.  It rapidly became an analysis of the short term inter-connections of the collapse of the Doha Round, the drying up of global credit and the extra problems this presented for climate change negotiations.  In the last two weeks of September the various crises, political as well as financial, have merged to produce the potential for systemic change. Lobbyists have been playing their proper democratic role as carriers of messages between electors and elected.  At times however one has the sense that lobbyists have no greater sense of what is likely to flow from their actions than do politicians.  The vote on the rescue package in the House of Representatives on Monday 29th September may well be reversed, but for the moment it stands as a classic of political miscommunication.  The next few years will either make or break the existing political structures of the planet as we struggle to understand the interaction of foreign policy, financial stability, economic interaction, trade and climate change.  None of these crises are best handled by the black and white simplicity of political slogans.  I rather like the idea, aired recently in the UK, of a campaign to print tee shirts with the slogan ‘I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that’.  Campaigners thus dressed would be invited to stand next to those wearing tee shirts with simple slogans like ‘Ban the Bomb’ or ‘Make Poverty History’.