192 Franz nuscheler
party with a religious imprint like the AKP in Turkey’. Initially, there was
conf lict between various religious and secular groups, whereby the more
spontaneous avant-garde followers of the Arab Spring were no match for
the well-organised members of the Muslim Brotherhood. This develop-
ment became evident in the f irst parliamentary elections that took place
in Tunisia and Egypt. Behind the scenes, many pre-revolutionary power
and social structures, as well as the conf licting interests of the major world
powers, were still at work. The developments in the entire region, as well
as in the individual countries, were in f lux and hardly amenable to serious
scientif ic prognoses.
The construction of any sort of middle-term scenario (say, up to 2025)
requires some calculability and foreseeability. The premises employed
must not only be theoretically well-founded, but must also not exclude
various sequences and results of an if-then nature. The history of migra-
tion movements depends on certain variable political and socio-economic
parameters in both the home and the destination countries which do not
allow statistical projections based on present developments and existing
data.
Neither the social sciences in general, conf lict research in particular,
nor economics as a whole have the ability to prognosticate developments,
such as conf licts and crises or economic growth and per capita income, as
accurately as demographics can project population developments based
on calculable trends. Presumed objective projections of economic growth
and per capita income, which play a major role in Michael Bommes’, Simon
Fellmer’s and Friederike Zigmann’s estimates of migration potential in this
volume, can become meaningless in the presence of unforeseen events in
either the world economy or during crises at the local or regional level.
The Millennium Project (n.d.), organised by the World Federation of UN
Associations (WFUNA), summarised the methods, benef its and limits of
global exploratory scenarios. Their synopsis of the various models and
scenarios developed by think-tanks, institutes and individual research-
ers to describe global developments is proof of the general usefulness of
such procedures – but it also clearly demonstrates how vulnerable they
are to uncalculable events. Particularly in conf lict-laden areas – and the
MENA region surely is one –the socio-economic situation and migration
behaviour are dependent on the course of both domestic and cross-border
conf licts and, of course, on the vulnerability to economic crises of all sorts
of economies that live off natural resources and tourism. Tourism, the
great job-creator of the region, is especially sensitive to political unrest.
Every major act of terror reported in Europe’s press could, for example,