Europe’s elite are so blinded by their own sanctimonious piety that they cannot see that the migration crisis is pushing millions to the extreme Right
This has not been a great week for Angela Merkel. A keen football fan who celebrated in the dressing room after Germany won the last World Cup, she watched in horror on Wednesday as the reigning champions crashed out at the group stage for the first time since 1938.
it might seem trivial. But the humiliation of Mrs Merkel’s boys is an irresistibly compelling symbol of what has happened to her domestic reputation and Utopian dreams.
The day after Germany’s exit, with cruelly ironic timing, Mrs Merkel was also on the move, arriving in Brussels for the EU summit.
For the Chancellor, it was a long day. she was up with her fellow EU leaders until 4.30 on Friday morning, arguing about immigration before agreeing a tissue-thin compromise deal.
When the text was finally published, with airy pledges to strengthen the EU’s border controls, stop migrants travelling within the schengen area, and ease the pressure on italy and Greece, the EU leaders themselves hailed it as a tremendous breakthrough.
it led yesterday morning’s BBC bulletins, with Radio 4’ s headlines describing it, quite wrongly, as a ‘deal to reduce the flow of migrants into southern Europe’ and an ‘ agreement on how to tackle migration’.
in fact, it was nothing of the kind. As one of the BBC’s own reporters, Adam Fleming, pointed out, the so-called deal was ‘ full of caveats, commas and sub- clauses’. Even the Corporation’s Europe editor, Katya Adler, said bluntly that it was ‘riddled with holes’.
For all the talk of a deal, the truth is that the EU is nowhere near a lasting agreement on the migration crisis. And the obvious reason is that the immigration issue rouses passions that politicians such as Mrs Merkel are simply incapable of understanding.
The fact that Germany’s leader found herself in this position is very revealing. There was once a time, back in the days when her countrymen were good at football, when Mrs Merkel would have arrived in Brussels as a conqueror, the architect of Europe, the mistress of all she surveyed.
NoTANY more. At home, she is under relentless pressure. her interior minister, Bavarian conservative leader horst seehofer, had explicitly warned that unless she brokers a new deal to ‘stop [ illegal] migrants bleeding into Germany’, he will ‘unilaterally slam Germany’s borders shut’.
Abroad, the atmosphere is increasingly bitter. This week Austria staged ‘ anti- migrant’ military exercises on its border, while the leaders of hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic explicitly restated their opposition to any EU scheme forcing them to accept more immigrants.
Even spain, which has been more welcoming than most, turned away a charity boat carrying 230 African migrants this week, with the prime minister insisting his country was no longer prepared to be ‘Europe’s sea rescue service’.
Meanwhile, italy’s hard-line interior minister, Matteo salvini, who recently refused admission to two more rescue boats carrying thousands of migrants, was also in the news.
he is adamant that other EU nations must take more migrants to relieve the pressure on italy.
But when Mr salvini heard French President Emmanuel Macron had dismissed his concerns, he exploded.
‘if Macron believes there is no migration problem in italy, then he can open his house to the 9,000 migrants France committed to take from italy under the EU deal,’ he snapped. ‘French arrogance is no longer fashionable in italy.’
so much for European unity, eh? No wonder even the EU Commission President JeanClaude Juncker, hardly one of life’s Eurosceptics, declared this week that ‘the fragility of the EU is increasing’ and ‘the cracks are growing in size’.
The common factor in all this is, of course, migration. it has ripped away the crumbling façade of Continental unity, exposed the bitter divisions between Northern, Mediterranean and Eastern Europe, and made a mockery of Mrs Merkel’s ambitions to lead a happy, harmonious EU.
Gaze across the Continent and you see the same pattern. From Greece to Germany, from sicily to scandinavia, people are unhappy about mass migration, are punishing the politicians they blame for it and are increasingly drifting into the arms of the extremist Right. And as a result, Mrs Merkel and her allies, who have staked their careers on building an ever-closer union and banishing the nation-state to history, are facing a horrible collision with reality.
it is hard to exaggerate the threat that all this poses to the European project.
Even the BBC — which regularly downplays public concerns about immigration — has recognised the scale of the crisis, with Europe editor Katya Adler posting an apocalyptic essay on its website this week under the headline ‘ Europe’s migration crisis: Could it finish the EU?’
Yet one group of people have been mysteriously silent about all this.
They are, of course, Britain’s unreconciled ultra-Remainers, who have spent the past two years lauding the EU as a progressive paradise and caricaturing Britain as a land
of closed-minded Philistines. Again and again they insist that talk of reducing immigration is tantamount to fascism, and insist that any deal must preserve freedom of movement, whatever the cost.
Evenwithin Theresa May’s Cabinet, some ministers seem not to have noticed that the mood within the eU is shifting back towards the restoration of national borders.
earlier this week, the Business Secretary, Greg Clark, told our leaders of commerce that he wanted the softest possible Brexit in order to ensure free movement — even though that is patently not what the country voted for in 2016. The irony, though, is that freedom of movement may be doomed anyway — not because of Brexit, but because of what is happening in the heart of the eU itself. You don’t have to look far to find examples of the new mood.
In Austria, the 31-year-old Rightwing Chancellor Sebastian Kurz sent hundreds of troops to the border to prepare for a possible migration surge this summer.
In Hungary, the authoritarian leader viktor Orban recently announced plans for a special 25 per cent tax on organisations that support migration.
In Germany, where September’s election gave the far-Right AfD 13 per cent of the vote, there remains a strong possibility that Mrs Merkel’s coalition partner, Herr Seehofer, will pull the plug on her government within weeks, unless she reverses her open-door policy.
So how did we get here? Well, the answer is no mystery. Germany’s experiment in throwing open its borders to more than a million people has been well chronicled, but it is merely one example of the way in which the eU’s commitment to free movement is buckling under the strain of mass migration.
The most revealing case, I think, is Italy. There the key figure is the ferociously anti-immigrant Signor Salvini, who has been outspoken in his demands for the eU to ‘defend its borders’ against African migrants. ‘If anyone in the eU thinks Italy should keep being a landing point and refugee camp, they have misunderstood,’ he thundered recently. ‘The air in europe is changing.’
It is tempting to dismiss Salvini as a throwback to Benito Mussolini, a bombastic demagogue whose political style involved relentless attacks on immigrants, gypsies and foreigners. (Chillingly, Italy has just announced it is going to take a census of its gypsies, while Salvini said he regrets not being able to deport them.)
But he did not come out of nowhere. His party, the Lega, won almost six million votes in March, and his rhetoric clearly resonates with many ordinary Italians.
In the past 15 years, Italy’s foreign- born population has ballooned from 1.3 million to more than five million. And even though last year saw numbers fall, almost 120,000 people made the perilous sea journey, a figure unthinkable only a decade ago.
Given the ferocity of the public backlash, you might have expected the Italian government to close its borders. But like 25 other european countries, Italy is part of the Schengen area, in which border controls were sacrificed in the name of freedom of movement.
Of course, free movement is a noble principle. Who can fail to be moved by the idea of a happy, harmonious europe, in which our children travel at will, learning languages and making friends? All too often, however, the reality looks more like the Jungle, the notoriously squalid migrant camp at Calais, where tens of thousands of desperate people waited and hoped to find a way to cross the Channel. Yet even now Mrs Merkel insists that free movement simply cannot be questioned.
In november 2016, for example, she ruled out allowing Britain to have access to the single market unless we accepted freedom of movement. You could not have one without the other, she said, ‘because everyone else will then want these exceptions’.
So if ‘everyone else’ — meaning the vast majority of ordinary european voters — now wants to ditch free movement, why on earth are Mrs Merkel and her allies so wedded to it?
The truth, of course, is that they see it as a quasi-religious principle, an unshakeable pillar of their world-view.
The former Belgian prime minister Guy verhofstadt once even threatened to read one of the founding texts of the eU, the 1957 Treaty of Rome, to Mrs May’s ministers. Specifically, he wanted to read out Article 3, which pledges to abolish all ‘obstacles to freedom of movement for persons, services and capital’.
YOUmight see it as the product of its time, to be amended or superseded when history moves on. But to Mr verhofstadt it is the equivalent of Moses’ stone tablets.
That strikes me as suicidally self- defeating. Times change. If you want to survive, you change with them. And if the leaders of the eU think they are a special case, they are even more deluded than I thought.
The Treaty of Rome was written in a world that has vanished, in which nobody imagined that literally millions of people would brave the waters of the Mediterranean to build new lives in Munich, Malmo and Manchester.
The eU’s chief architect, French mandarin Jean Monnet, was scarred by his native land’s humiliation in World War II. Obsessed with the need to consign the nation-state to history, Monnet believed ‘there is no future for the people of europe other than in union’.
He was wrong. People’s national identities are too deeply rooted to be thrown away overnight.
From the 18 million Britons who voted for Brexit to the millions of Italians, Hungarians and Greeks who bridle at being lectured from Brussels, most europeans are profoundly sceptical about the idea of a post-national future.
The fact is that Monnet’s project was not designed for an era in which millions of people are clamouring at the borders of europe. And when Mrs Merkel claims that the alternative would be the walls and fences of the Cold War, she is showing her age.
The Berlin Wall, which blighted her childhood, fell almost 30 years ago. It is not coming back. Indeed, instead of looking backwards, Mrs Merkel should be looking ahead, not to some rose-tinted federalist Utopia, but to a more realistic future that is bound to involve considerable international unrest and redoubled public anxiety.
It is perfectly possible, for example, that in five years’ time there could be another major crisis on europe’s borders: a fresh revolution in egypt, say, or a civil war in Turkey, or even some sort of meltdown in Russia.
How would the eU cope with yet another influx of millions of
refugees? Wouldn’t this be a gift-wrapped present for the far Right? Wouldn’t it play into the hands of demagogues like Italy’s Salvini? And mightn’t it tear an irreparable hole in the EU’s pretence of happyclappy unity?
All of this might sound obvious. But it clearly isn’t obvious to die-hard Remainers here in Britain — including some of Mrs May’s own ministers — for whom even the slightest talk of restoring national borders is apparently beyond the pale.
Though I voted Remain, I am heartily sick of the stridency and snobbery of those Euroenthusiasts who refuse to yield with good grace to the wishes of the majority.
Similarly, I cannot understand why the supposedly intelligent people among Remainers here and those who form Europe’s elite are so blinded by sanctimonious piety that they cannot see how the migration crisis is pushing millions of people towards the extreme Right.
A good example is the arch-Remainer Tory MP Anna Soubry, who dismisses popular concerns about immigration as ‘frankly racist’.
She believes we should stay in the single market and customs union, which means retaining freedom of movement. Britons should, in her words, ‘suck it up’.
I can’t believe I’m alone in finding this extraordinarily patronising. Have we not moved on from the days when politicians expected the general public to ‘suck it up’?
Still, all this is immensely revealing. For voters across Europe have been compelled to suck it up, most famously in 2015, when national governments were obliged to accept thousands of migrants under the EU’s quota system, whether they liked it or not.
In this respect, immigration is both an issue in itself and a symbol of something deeper. To voters in places like Hungary, occupied by the Red Army in 1956 and which endured decades beneath the Soviet jackboot, it has come to symbolise loss of national sovereignty and imposition of foreign rule.
The irony is if the EU leaders really wanted to preserve the principle of freedom of movement, they would be advised to reform it now.
Instead, like Britain’s archRemainers, they press on, cocooned by their own hubris, oblivious to the fact that their obstinacy is propelling voters into the arms of extremists.
Where will it end? I fear with more fences, walls, camps and cages. With more populist posturing and racist rabblerousing, a continent splintered into factions and a dream of unity smashed to pieces.
In other words, the destruction of the very values the EU is supposed to represent.
In politics, as in other walks of life, you pay a high price for hubris, complacency and a refusal to change.
And if Mrs Merkel doubts it, she should ask her nation’s humiliated footballers.