Migrants strain European unity. Spat involves 630 rescued at sea.
BRUSSELS» Forget Brexit or a looming trans-atlantic trade war. The diplomatic spat this week among Italy, Malta and France over who should take responsibility for some 630 people rescued at sea shows that the biggest challenge Europe faces today is migration.
It’s not about the hundreds of thousands of people who arrived across the Mediterranean in recent years — many in perilous sea crossings like those aboard the rescue ship Aquarius — seeking better or safer lives. Turkey has welcomed more. Tiny Lebanon and struggling Jordan handle almost two million refugees between them.
The crisis threatening the very existence of the European Union is the enemy within: the inability of the 28 states that make up the world’s biggest trading bloc to manage those migrant arrivals collectively.
Asylum reform is stranded on the rocks of national interests. The questions of who should take responsibility for those arriving — and whether there should be a quota system for European countries to share refugees — are fiercely disputed.
Long-suffering EU nations like Italy and Greece, where most sea migrants enter, feel abandoned by other EU nations.
In response, some European countries have deployed troops, erected border fences or temporarily reintroduced ID checks, undermining Europe’s wideranging passport-free travel area. Others have welcomed the migrants in.
Those acting alone have mostly angered their neighbors by passing the problem on. Mutual trust between nations in the bloc has evaporated.
Anti-migrant parties have exploited the chaos, winning votes as they foment fear of foreigners.
“As long as we keep refusing the idea that we have a collective problem that can only be tackled with collective solutions — as long as we don’t see that — we will not find a solution,” European Commission Vice-president Frans Timmermans warned. “We will fail collectively.”
EU nations are now flirting with that collective failure, struggling to reform the bloc’s asylum rules known as the Dublin Regulation. It’s a pillar of Europe’s passport-free travel area. Failure to fix Dublin could sound the death knell for checkfree travel and easy cross-border business across Europe — the two crowning achievements of the bloc.
For two years, EU governments have battled without success to fix Dublin’s biggest contradiction: that migrants must seek protection in the first European country they arrive in. With most migrants entering the Europe via Turkey or Libya, that chiefly means Mediterranean countries like Greece and Italy.
That rule was part of this week’s dispute over the Aquarius, a rescue ship carrying some 630 people including pregnant women and children who were saved off the Libyan coast.
Italy, which controls Mediterranean rescue operations, blocked the ship from landing, claiming that the small EU island of Malta was closer and should take responsibility.
French President Emmanuel Macron waded in, accusing Italy of cynical, irresponsible behavior. The new populist government in Rome found this hard to swallow, given that French border police have been routinely blocking thousands of migrants who try to leave Italy, upholding the EU’S flawed asylum rules.
Spain’s new center-left government came to the rescue, offering the boat safe harbor in Valencia, which it will reach Sunday. Spain also rescued 933 other migrants from 68 different smuggling boats on Friday and Saturday, and recovered four bodies.
“This is not something that Malta, Italy, Greece or Spain should be left alone to deal with. Countries not in the Mediterranean cannot try to use geography to exonerate themselves from responsibility,” Roberta Metsola, a leading EU lawmaker on migration, told The Associated Press.