If the EU falls apart, it will be Merkel’s fault
After Angela Merkel rang Vladimir Putin to reprimand him for destabilising eastern Ukraine four years ago, she concluded that the Kremlin chief was living in ‘‘another world’’.
In fact, it is the German chancellor’s world that seems both to be shrinking and of a bygone age. When she opened Germany’s frontiers to an uncontrolled flow of migrants in 2015 she ushered in the creeping disintegration of the European Union. Belatedly she has grasped that her naive act of generosity has stirred up national and tribal animosities in a union that was supposed to tame them.
Take the city of Essen in the Ruhr. A foodbank there now insists that everyone in the queue must present a German passport because, say the organisers, asylum-seekers have been muscling their way past the locals to stock up with fruit and veg despite getting cooked food in their hostels.
The charity has been sprayed with graffiti calling the organisers Nazis. Merkel has chipped in, declaring that it’s the level of need that should count, not the colour of the passport.
Yet many ordinary Germans agree with the foodbank. It might have been reasonable to accept large numbers of desperate people from the Syrian war, they sometimes concede, but Merkel should not have abandoned her basic responsibility as head of government: to sort out who was actually coming in, to provide for them, integrate those who could be integrated and send home those who could not.
That’s coming to a head now, as it is in other EU states. Not just in the queue for food handouts, but in crowded schoolrooms, the scramble for social housing, the proportion of local budgets that go in child benefits to the newcomers.
About 15 to 20 per cent of the refugees – and about 70 per cent of their young – are illiterate. Mental health services are also under strain.
At the last election five months ago about a million votes switched from Merkel’s Christian Democrats to an insurgent farright grouping, the Alternative for Germany, which won more than 90 seats in parliament. And the Social Democrats were punished for failing to defend lower-paid workers who are in direct competition with the foreigners.
Merkel now borrows the rhetoric of the far right: ‘‘Integration requires well-defined underlying values and clear and noticeable consequences for those who refuse [it]’’, she said this week.
It is too late though; the votes have gone and her grand coalition, which is supposed to be confirmed this weekend, looks very wobbly indeed.
So too does the centre ground across Europe. In the north the ultra-nationalist Sweden Democrats have some 15 per cent support, enough to block the formation of a centrist government in September’s election. As in Germany, the unease about migrant numbers is most acute at local level and the national government is trying to head off hostility with tougher law and order measures.
To the south, Greece and Italy have held off right-wing populism by making tentative deals with Turkey and Libya. But as Italy is likely to find out in elections on Sunday, the political momentum is with those parties that make an explicit link between migrants and crime, and that revel in national pride. And in the east, the so-called ‘‘illiberal democracies’’ of central Europe are taking issue with the attempts of Brussels to impose on them a liberal, multicultural ethic.
There are plenty of flashpoints in this relationship between centre and periphery, from the politicisation of judicial systems to media laws, but the fury spilt over during the migration crisis when the EU tried to force quotas of refugees on every member.
That hit a nerve in Polish villages in particular that have emptied since the country joined the EU, with hundreds of thousands of young people heading westwards to work.
Child allowances have been raised to tempt them to return home but many will not rush back. So parish priests typically warn that the vacuum will be filled by refugees and foreign migrants if Poland’s doors are opened only slightly.
Declining birthrates and the fear of being overwhelmed by foreign newcomers, in the way that some German towns have been, propels the nationalist agenda across Europe. The birthrate is flat across the EU, with live births and deaths in rough balance; population growth has only come about through migration.
The crisis gripping Europe, then, is not just about national identity and protecting borders but about a culture of displacement.
It’s about who will do the work and pay the pensions in the coming decades. And it’s about patterns of violent crime.
The European Union was focused for so many decades on integration, and the weird mantra that institutional crises merely yield fresh opportunities, that it completely lost sight of the possibility that it could disintegrate.
The only serious book to hint at such a break-up was by the Portuguese genius Jose Saramago, whose novel The Stone Raft described how a Franco-Spanish river disappeared into the ground, setting the Iberian peninsula free from the continent to float away in the Atlantic.
That probably won’t happen. Brexit will; Britain is destined to be Saramago’s raft.
And unless EU leaders look more carefully at what is bothering their citizens outside the urban bubbles, the empire could shatter quicker than they realise. Unfiltered mass immigration has exposed the cracks.