Solution needed

IN TWO weeks Europe has moved from compassion and empathy with Syrian and other refugees striving to reach our shores to a reassertion of the fortress mentality that aims to stop, sort and return them – save for a proportion deemed to have a real claim on our hospitality. The reasons are both reprehensible and understandable.

Europeans pity the people on the move and fear them – or, rather, fear the consequences of their arrival in such numbers. The balance between those two emotions varies wildly from week to week and from country to country. After little Alan Kurdi was found dead on a Turkish beach, Germany took the extraordinary step of casting aside regulations and opening its doors to the refugees who were, literally in some cases, tramping toward its borders.

It was morally courageous but not entirely wise. What was meant to be a generous humanitarian response in an immediate emergency inevitably became a signal interpreted by large numbers of people in the Middle East and Africa that Europe, and particularly Germany, was now ready and willing to receive them.

If Germany’s burden-sharing thesis is defective, so is the argument put forward by leaders like David Cameron, who say the only real solution is to end the Syrian war. The difficult conclusion must be that neither burden-sharing nor diplomacy will end this crisis, that refugees will continue to come in very substantial numbers, and Europe will continue to blunder along, torn between concern about their suffering and fears about a future different from the one we had until now imagined. We are in desperate need of a solution.