Deep divisions over how to cope with a flood of migrants from the Middle East, Africa and Asia pose a threat to the European Union’s values and global standing and may diminish its ability to act jointly to reform the euro zone and ease Greece’s debt.
With harrowing images of drowning children, refugees being herded on and off trains and beaten by police, and barbed-wire fences slicing across Europe, the migration crisis is the moral equivalent of the euro zone crisis. In both cases, the principle of solidarity is being sorely tested.
By making the EU look ineffective, disunited and heartless, pitting member states against each other and fuelling political populism and anti-Muslim sentiment, the latest crisis is undermining the ideals of European integration.
However, it often takes a bout of disarray and recrimination before the EU finds a joint response to a new challenge. Policy may be shifting in reaction to unbearable pictures of suffering, and to fears that the Schengen zone of open-border travel among 26 continental European countries may otherwise fall apart.
“The world is watching us,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel said last week as she tried to persuade European peers to share the burden of taking in people fleeing war and misery in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and beyond.
“If Europe fails on the refugee question, its tight bond with universal human rights will be destroyed, and it will no longer be the Europe we dreamed of,” she said.
Merkel’s bold attempt to exercise leadership, in contrast to her deep caution in the euro crisis, has won only cautious support from close allies like France, where domestic opposition to more immigration is strong, and been rejected outright by countries such as Hungary and Britain.
For many European politicians trying to keep in tune with voters, preventing unwanted immigration is a greater priority than welcoming hundreds of thousands of haggard, uprooted foreigners, especially if they are Muslims.
For the first time in a decade since 10 central European countries joined the EU, the crisis has opened up an east-west divide, with most new member states refusing to accept quotas of refugees, some explicitly citing religious grounds.
Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, from which refugees fled to western Europe to escape Communist crackdowns in 1956 and 1968, are among those most vehemently opposed to any mandatory distribution of asylum seekers now.
Analysts are saying Europe needs a common asylum policy capable of filtering applicants, sending home those who were not entitled to asylum and relocating genuine refugees according to member states’ capacity to receive them.
As EU leaders struggle to come up with a joint approach, their discord also bodes ill for attempts to find collective solutions to economic and environmental challenges such as reforming the euro zone or fighting climate change.
Governments could fall over the issue and upcoming elections could be swayed. Already, the rise of anti-immigration populist parties was putting the Nordic social model at risk.
