All eyes turn to the borders of Europe
Skeptics have good reason to take the panicky headlines in stride: Europe on the brink, Europe coming apart, Europe kaput.
Warnings that once packed a wallop ring just a bit hollow now, six cautionary years into a European financial crisis that screamed so much bloody murder, yet somehow left the continent intact.
Greece, after all, didn’t Grexit; Britain has yet to Brexit; the other weakest links in the EU chain rattled, yet remained — taunting a sea of forecasts to the contrary. The 28-state European Union may be a drama queen, politically speaking, but it’s durable, all the same.
Yet just like Aesop’s fabled boy who cried wolf, the new wail coursing through Europe — a fast-rising fury against refugees and migrants — is metastasizing into something altogether different.
Something that warrants real worry. Something that is already changing the shape of the union. Something the EU appears singularly hapless to fix.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, aglow with praise barely a month ago as Time’s Person of the Year for her generosity toward refugees, now finds herself the world’s loneliest leader as her EU peers surrender to the hardening public mood, trading unity for razor wire in a beggar-thy-neighbour race to exclude. Human Rights Watch, among many other advocacy groups, sounded the alarm with every bell at its disposal this week, placing Europe’s runaway fear foremost among the world’s problems in its annual world report.
“Blatant Islamophobia and shameless demonizing of refugees have become the currency of an increasingly assertive politics of intolerance,” the group’s executive director, Kenneth Roth, wrote in an essay accompanying the report.
Already unravelling, perhaps irrevocably, is Europe’s cherished Schengen Area, that sprawling passport-free economic hub shared by 26 countries and more than four-fifths of Europe’s 500 million citizens. Hungary, Austria, Sweden and Denmark are among the states that have set up temporary border controls.
Schengen wasn’t just great for business; it was, by almost any measure, the freest place on Earth. And its temporary implosion — many EU leaders now are calling for a formal, two-year suspension of Schengen, with the full restoration of border and passport controls starting in May — as a best-case scenario. How, or even whether, it might eventually be reconfigured is anyone’s guess.
Adding to the urgency is the turning of the seasons. Warmer weather is certain to bring a new surge northward, perhaps as many as one million refugees in 2016, barring any diplomatic breakthroughs in Syria. The timing puts the EU on a rapid countdown, with little prospect of cobbling much beyond the controlled restoration of borders from an anxiety-ridden union so rife with disunity.
On paper, EU resettlement experts agree, half a billion people should have been able to absorb the estimated 1.8 million newcomers in 2015 without the sky falling in. Sharp resistance, especially from Eastern Europe, was a given, along with the caterwauling of high-profile Euroskeptics who were certain to liken a 0.2-per-cent increase in population to a continent-gobbling Islamic invasion.
But poor bureaucratic preparation, uneven burden sharing and the shock of November’s Islamist attacks on Paris — though they were not carried out by refugees but by citizens of France and Belgium — have injected massive oxygen into the fires on Europe’s political far right — and left EU leaders in Brussels looking enfeebled, at best.
Europe has always had its nativist analogs to Donald Trump, after all. Geert Wilders of the Netherlands and Marine Le Pen of France, to name but two. But now they are nearer to the centre of political gravity than ever before, and working together with like-minded movements throughout the EU to inflame anti-immigrant sentiment.
One vivid example took place Friday in Milan, where Le Pen played a starring role at a convention of European nationalists, warning 1,000 attendees that the arrival of refugees will “impoverish European nations and kill their civility forever.” Sharing the stage with her were leaders from the New Right of Poland and Romania, Belgium’s Flemish Interest, Italy’s Lega Nord, the Austrian Freedom Party and Wilders himself, under the banner of the Dutch Freedom Party.
The European backlash is playing out with wholesale abuse in some desperate corners. In Bulgaria, for example, Human Rights Watch last week published accounts of dozens of refugees who were beaten, bitten by police dogs, robbed of their cash and belongings and then forced back across the border to Turkey by Bulgarian law enforcement officials. In at least one instance, an asylum seeker was stripped of his shoes before Bulgarian police swung their batons.
Beyond the buckling borders lies the riddle of Greece, which on top of all its other grief now finds itself living a geographic nightmare, as the first porous stop in a continuing human tide. Some 850,000 refugees entered Greece without invitation in 2015. That’s one migrant for every 13 Greek citizens.
For perspective, imagine for a moment putting Canada in Greece’s shoes. If one in 13 people in Canada were seeking asylum, we would find ourselves with 2,760,000 refugees — a number 110 times greater than the ambitious refugee plan now being implemented by the Trudeau government.
In the midst of this burden, Greece now finds itself in the EU’s crosshairs, threatened with suspension from the shrinking Schengen Area over its failure to properly process migrants.
Other EU partners are arguing that the union must go further and snip Greece out of the migrant equation and concentrate instead on building a migrant-barring Maginot Line along Greece’s border with Macedonia, a non-EU state.
Retaining freedom within, the thinking goes, means a crude fortress on the margins.