With unity in peril, EU leaders to tackle refugee quotas at summit

BRUSSELS — European Union leaders will grapple Thursday with one of the most divisive issues ever to face the 28-nation bloc; how to collectively share responsibility for the tens of thousands of people arriving on Europe’s southern shores in search of a better life.

Ahead of an EU summit in Brussels, fresh tensions have surfaced over the perceived need for national refugee quotas. So far, solidarity with front-line nations Greece and Italy, where the refugees land, has been limited. A mandatory quota scheme was opposed mainly by eastern European nations — the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia.

For Europe, the political crisis over migrants is existential, despite the fact that migrant arrivals have dropped dramatically this year.

As hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees trekked northward from Greece in 2015, some EU nations erected fences, launched police crackdowns and closed borders, forcing migrants onto their neighbours. ID checks were reintroduced in parts of Europe’s passport-free travel area, hampering trade, business and tourism.

That fueled anti-immigrant parties and the far-right made significant political inroads.

“The migration crisis was a kind of character test for the EU,” Roderick Parkes, senior analyst at the EU’s Institute for Security Studies, wrote Wednesday.

It has tested the EU’s “capacity to lead in the field of refugee reception, to seize the economic opportunities of immigration and to share the burden borne by Turkey, Lebanon or Kenya by resettling refugees. And the EU failed the test, on all counts,” he wrote.

At the centre of Europe’s migrant malaise are refugee quotas. In response to the arrival of more than 1 million migrants in 2015, EU nations voted by a large majority to share 160,000 of those fleeing conflict or persecution to help ease the burden on overwhelmed Greece and Italy.