Europe: The crisis that will not go

The European Summit is unlikely to come to grips with the migrant crisis nor should one expect significant progress on eurozone reforms

Thursday’s European Union (EU) summit is meant to discuss institutional and structural issues crucial to the future of Europe. But once again, the meeting will be overshadowed by the migrant crisis and the deep divisions it has been creating over the last six years.

It is true that in many ways Europe brought that calamity upon itself by refusing to make a number of tough choices that would have created a lot of controversies at the time but might have helped reduce the magnitude of the crisis now straining European cohesion to the limit. It was clear from the beginning that Europe was courting disaster by not enforcing an ironclad distinction between economic migrants and genuine political asylum-seekers; by becoming the de facto accomplice of human traffickers, who would abandon migrants in the middle of the Mediterranean giving them the phone number of Italian or Greek coastguards — or non-governmental organisations (NGOs) — who would then bring them onshore; by refusing — under hypocritical pretexts — to use military means to put out of business human traffickers easy to identify and locate.

And then German Chancellor Angela Merkel made things even worse with her unilateral decision in August 2015 to open her country’s doors to 1.2 million migrants, and subsequently trying to lessen the German burden through the imposition of mandatory quotas of migrants that other members would be required to take. She hit a brick wall with the opposition, among others, of the Poles, the Hungarians, the Czech, and the Austrians.

As the deadlock and the continuing inflow of migrants have made matters even worse, the crisis is not only exposing the EU’s inability to come up with a collective solution to an issue of existential social, political, ethical and economic importance but also highlighting the fact that Ms Merkel, once the most powerful leader in Europe, is now a political ghost whose authority is challenged in Europe as well as in her own government.

The Dublin agreement, according to which the asylum request has to be presented in the European country the person arrives in — mostly Italy or Greece — and which thus makes that country assume the greater share of the asylum burden is now dead in the water with Italy refusing to comply as it was left holding the bag by other member states. And there is a revolt in Germany against Ms Merkel’s 2015 initiative and the social, political and economic problems it has brought that led to the spectacular rise of the ultra-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), which got into the Bundestag for the first time last September as the country’s third-largest party.

Illustration by Binay Sinha

Under pressure in her own Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party and from the Christian Social Union (CSU) of Bavaria, without which she would not have a majority, and facing an ultimatum from Minister of Interior Horst Seehofer, who wants to enforce faster asylum procedures and increased deportations of those being refused asylum, Ms Merkel was trying to get out of this situation by engineering an EU-wide solution. This, unsurprisingly, failed last Sunday during the impromptu Migrant Summit among 16 EU members. The German chancellor is now desperately trying to pull out bilateral agreements that would help assuage her Bavarian coalition partners led by Mr Seehofer and Markus Söder, the Minister-President of Bavaria. This looks very dubious and Ms Merkel’s CSU partners will remain adamant as they are looking at next October’s regional elections and don’t want to risk losing ground against the AfD.

Ms Merkel cannot hope to get any succour from the new Italian government that is refusing to let ships from NGOs rescuing migrants at sea to enter Italian ports and is now at the centre of the migrant crisis. The Northern League-Five Star Movement coalition won the elections on a strong anti-migrant platform expressing the popular anger, frustration and anxiety triggered by the unrelenting waves of migrants — mostly Muslims — seen as a threat for the country’s culture and identity. The Italian government will thus not budge. Another factor contributes to the position of the Italian coalition in power: One reason for which people voted against the established political parties was that the preceding prime ministers and their governments were seen as too submissive to Brussels and to Germany and its northern allies’ edicts on some eurozone economic policies seen as hurting Italian interests.  So Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte and his interior minister Matteo Salvini are in no mood to accommodate.

The European Summit on June 28 will presumably come up with some measures such as reinforcing EU border patrol operations and creating   “centres” outside the EU — in Tunisia and Libya — for processing migrants who are rescued or intercepted at sea, and deciding on whether they will be accepted or not before they reach the continent. Whatever support French President Emmanuel Macron will provide to the beleaguered Ms Merkel — as he needs her political survival in Berlin despite their differences on eurozone reform — it is not expected to lead to more drastic policies being adopted.

So, don’t expect this European Summit to come to grips with the present crisis. Whatever will be decided might not be a sufficient deterrent for the economic migrants who today represent the large majority of those trying to reach Europe. The kind of tougher policies adopted by Hungary, Poland or Austria — and now Italy — will not be followed by the rest of the EU members who see them as contrary to “European values”.

In the same way, don’t expect any major progress beyond the minimal agreement that Ms Merkel and Mr Macron achieved on eurozone reforms during their meeting in Meseburg ten days ago. The implications of this situation are quite significant. Europe will continue to be bogged down by challenges that it does not have enough cohesion to manage: From US President Donald Trump’s frontal trade assault to the migration crisis and from the management of Brexit to the continuing strength of the populist movement, apart from dealing with the competition from Russia and China. As Ms Merkel’s authority fades away without a commensurate increase in Mr Macron’s heft to replace her as Europe’s leader, the German-French duo’s ability to steer the evolution of the EU and the eurozone will decline. This, even as Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Austria continue to look at certain political and institutional issues their own way and countries such as Italy pursue, first and foremost, a purely national agenda. 

You can bet your money that Mr Trump, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping are observing all this with a lot of interest… and glee. 

The writer is President of Smadja & Smadja, a Strategic Advisory Firm @ClaudeSmadja