Chaos afflicts migrant-filled Europe
This northern summer will be the tipping point, the moment the high-pitched anxiety about the disintegration of Europe starts to colour all political calculation.
The fast tempo of the street attacks in Germany and the cumulative terror assaults in France all point in one direction: imperfectly integrated migrant communities and damaged rootless refugees are beginning to turn on their host countries. As a result Francois Hollande’s countrymen no longer trust him as a commander-in-chief, while the Germans question the competence and judgment of Angela Merkel. The confidence in the integrative idea of Europe is evaporating.
That is about to take a turn for the worse. Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s post-coup coup in Turkey – the president’s mass round-up of critics – makes plain that the flawed grand bargain with the European Union on stemming the refugee exodus cannot hold for much longer. For the past few months it has cut the numbers of boat people and allowed the German chancellor to believe she is still clinging on to public support for a liberal refugee policy.
Even before Erdogan’s latest authoritarian lurch, however, the deal was beginning to look wobbly. The original idea was that Turkey should essentially become a holding pen for refugees in return for EU cash and the right for Turkish citizens to travel freely in Europe. Migrants rejected by Greece would be taken back by the Turks, people smugglers thwarted. For every illegal migrant taken back by Ankara, the EU agreed to take a properly documented refugee from the Turkish camps.
What is already happening, though, is that returned migrants are being dumped in detention centres; according to Amnesty International, some have even been sent back to Syria.
Migrants rejected by the EU are supposed to be returned to a ‘‘safe’’ country. Yet even before the tanks appeared on Turkish streets, the country did not look very safe to people on the move. EU states turned a blind eye.
Now Erdogan is making it all but impossible to work with him. He wants to introduce the death penalty; he has imposed a state of emergency.
It is not only the Germans who have been noticing that the refugees offered up by the Turks for resettlement in the EU include an unusually high number of young men with mental health problems. The sheer volume of Germany’s migrant intake – 1.2 million last year – means that many of the vulnerable are slipping through the net.
The machete and bomb attacks that have hit German streets are thus being seen partly as an indictment of Merkel’s open-door policy.
The calendar of European decline begins not with last month’s referendum in Britain or the unrest in Turkey. For the Germans at least it probably started on New Year’s Eve in Cologne when hundreds of women were sexually assaulted by migrant workers and asylum seekers. Information was initially withheld by the authorities because they did not want to admit that the state could no longer cope. The tensions could be concealed as long as they were restricted to the Muslim bullying of Christians in overcrowded gym halls that doubled as refugee dormitories. Now, the problems are tumbling into the streets, into public space.
Brexit, of course, has become a symbol of the fragmentation that could strike the whole continent. Eight out of 10 French people, according to a new survey, would accept limitation on their civil liberties to combat terrorism at home. That’s music to the ears of the far Right. Their guiding maxim has always been that the price of a diversified society is diminished individual freedom. Mainstream parties, by not checking the inflow of foreigners, or by looking away from crimes committed by them, were thus betraying core democratic values as well as abandoning their duty to keep citizens secure.
There are plenty of reasons to believe that the far Right would make an even bigger hash of things. But on European streets they are winning the argument.