Disputed policies on migrants are the top threat to E.U. unity
BRUSSELS—Forget Brexit or a looming trans-Atlantic trade war. The diplomatic spat this week among Italy, Malta and France over who should take responsibility for some 630 people rescued at sea shows that the biggest challenge Europe faces today is migration.
It’s not about the hundreds of thousands of people who arrived across the Mediterranean in recent years seeking better or safer lives. Turkey has welcomed more. Tiny Lebanon and struggling Jordan handle almost two million refugees between them.
The crisis threatening the very existence of the European Union is the enemy within: the inability of the 28 states that make up the world’s biggest trading bloc to manage those migrant arrivals collectively.
Asylum reform is stranded on the rocks of national interests. The questions of who should take responsibility for those arriving are fiercely disputed.
Long-suffering E.U. nations like Italy and Greece, where most sea migrants enter, feel abandoned by other E.U. nations.
In response, some European countries have deployed troops, erected border fences or temporarily reintroduced ID checks, undermining Europe’s wide-ranging passport-free travel area. Others have welcomed the migrants in.
“As long as we keep refusing the idea that we have a collective problem that can only be tackled with collective solutions— as long as we don’t see that— we will not find a solution,” European Commission VicePresident Frans Timmermans warned. “We will fail collectively.”
E.U. nations are now flirting with that collective failure, struggling to reform the bloc’s asylum rules known as the Dublin Regulation. It’s a pillar of Europe’s passport-free travel area. Failure to fix Dublin could sound the death knell for checkfree travel and easy cross-border business across Europe— the two crowning achievements of the bloc.
For two years, E.U. governments have battled without success to fix Dublin’s biggest contradiction: that migrants must seek protection in the first European country they arrive in.
With most migrants entering the Europe via Turkey or Libya, that chiefly means Mediterranean countries like Greece and Italy.
That rule was part of this week’s dispute over the Aquarius, a rescue ship carrying some 630 people including pregnant women and children who were saved off the Libyan coast.
Italy, which controls Mediterranean rescue operations, blocked the ship from landing, claiming that the small E.U. island of Malta was closer and should take responsibility.