The way the European Union has surrendered to the demands of Turkey in the hope of stemming the tidal wave of migrants relentlessly hitting its shores illustrates the panic now beginning to grip European leaders. President Erdogan knew that he had the upper hand on his European interlocutors as thousands of migrants continue to cross European borders daily, switching routes as countries erect barriers to stop them or tighten controls.
Europe has lost the control of its borders and is now trapped in a reactive mode to what is potentially the gravest crisis since its inception. Already the destabilising impact of the crisis is being felt on the political scene of every single European country, with the far right and populist parties and groups gaining ground everywhere. The latest two examples are the spectacular victory of the far right Freedom Party in the Vienna elections and the record electoral score last Sunday of the Swiss People's Party campaigning on an anti-mass migrants campaign in Switzerland. After the ultra right or right wing parties' victories in Sweden, Finland, Denmark, the Netherlands and the right wing's significant advances in Poland and the Czech Republic, one can see in which direction the tide is going. The anxiety created by an anemic economic situation and fears about the future are feeding into the concerns and frustrations generated by the migrants crisis, playing into the hands of xenophobic groups.
However, issues are just beginning to crop up as the difficulties of integrating hundreds of thousands of migrants from a completely different culture and background - a majority of them barely literate or without any employability skills in a developed economy - are becoming apparent. For instance, the Dutch are now confronting the problem of dealing with child brides from Syria, 12- or 13-year-old girls married forcibly to much older men: Should they be reunited with their "husband" or would, doing that, mean condoning paedophilia and child abuse? In the same way, clashes in migrant camps between hard-line Muslims and non-Muslims have prompted the chief of the largest police union in Germany to ask for an "apartheid system" to be enforced in refugees' homes. One has also to wonder about the financial impact of absorbing more than a million of refugees this year at a time when all European countries are struggling to reduce the unsustainable burden of their welfare system.
Chancellor Merkel has tried to sell her open-door policy to migrants on the basis that this would provide a most welcome addition of the country's declining workforce, but this underestimates the efforts, cost and time this would take, considering the background of the majority of migrants. The sharp decline of her popularity and the increasing attacks against her policy show that an "enough is enough" feeling is beginning to prevail. One needs to add the very serious concerns about the loss of identity generated by the fact that the overwhelming majority of migrants are Muslims - some of them not among the most tolerant ones. So there is reason to fear that Europe might be sowing the seeds for serious problems in the years ahead. Especially so as many of the migrants who rushed into Germany might later on see their hopes for an easier life dashed and will then move to other European countries - being able to do so without any control or barrier because of the Schengen agreement.
The European Union is now paying the price for three major policy failures: First, it put its head in the sand for too long as the migrant wave was gathering strength and it did not provide the kind of major financial and material support that would have helped Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon to bear the brunt of the refugees flow; European countries did not either do anything serious to fight the human traffickers smuggling migrants to the European coasts, hiding their inaction behind phony legal excuses; they did not either send strong signals to the migrants that Europe would take a harsh policy against economic migrants; and by restarting the rescue operations at seas they became de facto accessories of the human traffickers who - in many cases - would give to the migrant they were abandoning at sea the emergency phone numbers of the Italian or Greek rescue units. When all these failures translated into migrants chaos, Chancellor Merkel compounded the problem by opening wide open Germany's borders without any control about was coming in, providing a powerful incentive for more migrants to rush in and creating a major problem for many other European countries.
The second policy failure was the stubborn illusion entertained by Europe and the US that they could set the ousting from power of Bashar Al Assad as a prerequisite for ending the Syrian war and their recourse to half-hearted actions to support the anti-Assad forces or to fight the expansion of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. To some extent this has contributed to prolong the war and the agony of the Syrian population. The US and European wishy-washy approach also created a vacuum that Vladimir Putin has not hesitated to use to reinsert Russia as a prominent player not only in the Syrian crisis but in West Asia's strategic and geopolitical equation, consigning the US and Europe to a reactive role.
The third policy failure has been the open reluctance and passive resistance with which the European Union has responded to the long-standing request from Turkey to move beyond the existing custom and get admitted into the EU. The negotiations between the two parties have been stalling for the last 15 years, with the misgivings of the EU to accept a Muslim country of 77 million people as a new member making it even more difficult to address the complex issues to be negotiated. In the meanwhile, the authoritarian and religious drift of the Turkish regime did not contribute to make things easier. However, there is a strong argument to be made that Turkey, with its strategic geographic location, its population and economic potential, is more important to the future of the EU than Ukraine. Now the migrant chaos has forced European countries to review their position. Chancellor Merkel, in a 180-degrees turnaround was in Ankara pledging German support for faster progress in the process for Turkey to join the EU and for accelerating visa-free travel for the Turks to the EU, as a price for Turkey to help stem the tide of migrants into Europe.
Unfortunately for Europe, this is now the time when these three policy failures are hitting back with a vengeance, coming to haunt policy makers for some time to come. There are no free lunches in foreign policy.
Claude Smadja is President of Smadja & Smadja, a strategic advisory firm
@ClaudeSmadja
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