‘Handle
with care!’
Europe
faces another summit of reckoning.
By MATTHEW
KARNITSCHNIG 2/18/16, 5:30 AM CET
BERLIN — Can
Europe be saved?
No less weighty a
question will hang over the dinner table at the European Council’s
ramshackle Brussels headquarters as the leaders of the EU’s 28
member countries gather for their first summit of the year.
The agenda is
focused on the thorniest of challenges, from coaxing the U.K. to
remain in the EU to keeping the huddled masses of the Middle East and
Africa out.
At some point
between the aperitif and dessert, leaders will look for ways to
rescue the Schengen treaty, Europe’s system of open borders that is
now under threat from the refugee crisis.
Europe’s leaders
have been warning for months that failure to reach agreement on any
of these fronts, whether it be Brexit, the refugee crisis or
Schengen, could sound the European Union’s death knell.
“The risk of break
up is real,” summit host Donald Tusk, president of the European
Council, said this week. “This process is indeed very fragile.
Handle with care! What is broken cannot be mended.”
Tusk has assumed the
role of town crier in recent days, crisscrossing the Continent,
channeling Shakespeare as he cajoled government leaders toward
consensus. “To be, or not to be together, that is the question,”
he declared this month.
Of course, Europe is
no stranger to slings and arrows.
It’s
still unclear whether Cameron can sell a deal to the British public.
During the euro
crisis, the do-or-die summit became the norm. Faced with the prospect
of collapse, Europe inevitably stepped back from the precipice. The
summit agreements, often little more than quick fixes, were still
enough to keep the peace.
Yet this time
around, the danger of collapse is real, officials both inside and
outside the EU cocoon warn. The issues at hand won’t be resolved
with stop-gap measures or by Germany simply opening its wallet, as it
did to preserve the euro.
Europe’s standard
operating procedure for dealing with difficult problems — to delay
action — won’t work this time around either. The clock has run
down. The refugees won’t wait. Nor will the Brits.
That said, Europe’s
reckoning was inevitable. The summit’s agenda points are simply
proxies for the existential question Europeans have dodged for years:
What does European solidarity really mean? Or, in simpler terms: more
Europe, less Europe, or no Europe?
“This will be an
indicator summit,” said Jan Techau, the head of Carnegie Europe.
“The question is how much political capital members are still
willing to invest in Europe.”
In true European
fashion, the answer so far appears to be “that depends.”
Moot threat
British Prime
Minister David Cameron is likely to leave the summit Friday with much
of what he asked for, from a commitment to cut Brussels red tape to
permission to limit welfare benefits for EU migrants.
EU and national
leaders will do their part to help Cameron at home by screaming
bloody murder to make it appear as though he has gotten the better of
them.
In fact, the deal on
the table costs them little, if anything. Losing the EU’s
second-largest economy, financial center and most vibrant city,
however, would be a heavy blow. An uneasy consensus has emerged in
Europe’s capitals in recent months that Brexit would likely be the
beginning of the end for the EU.
It’s still unclear
whether Cameron can sell a deal to the British public. If he can’t,
it won’t be because Europe stood in his way, however.
Unless Europe makes
headway in dealing with the refugee crisis at the summit, the Brexit
threat may be moot. Here, countries have shown little willingness to
invest political capital in the name of solidarity.
Emma Thompson at the
Berlinale film festival, February 15
Angela Merkel had
originally hoped for a breakthrough at the summit on allocating
refugees across the EU’s 28 members. Such a quota system remains a
distant dream, however, with most countries only willing to take a
token number of refugees, if any at all. Last fall, EU countries
agreed to allocate some 160,000 refugees. In the wake of the Paris
terror attacks, most demurred.
The
death of Schengen would be a disaster for Europe, both in economic
and political terms.
Given that
resistance, Merkel said on Tuesday that Germany would look
“ridiculous” if it continued to insist on quotas.
Instead, she plans
to enlist members of the so-called coalition of the willing, a group
of 10 countries including those most directly affected by the crisis,
to help pressure Turkey into stemming the flow of refugees.
Merkel’s fear is
that the re-implementation of border controls in Austria and other
countries along the Balkan route to Germany could trigger both the
collapse of the Schengen agreement and a humanitarian crisis in
Greece, where the refugees would likely be stranded.
The unthinkable
The death of
Schengen would be a disaster for Europe, both in economic and
political terms.
Merkel understands
that Schengen is the embodiment of Europe for many in the region, and
she will use that argument at the summit. The trouble is that the
repercussions of its collapse are abstract, whereas the refugees are
real.
What’s more,
Merkel’s “coalition of the willing” now faces formidable
resistance: the Visegrád Group. If nothing else, the refugee crisis
has given the Central European members of the EU something to agree
on.
Long irrelevant, the
Visegrád quartet has emerged in the refugee crisis as a potent
political force. It’s far from clear whether they will compromise.
Schengen is their economic lifeblood. But unlike Merkel, they see the
key to saving it on the Greek-Macedonian border. Closing that
crossing, the main refugee entry point from Greece towards the rest
of the EU, would halt the flow.
Merkel’s
plan is to push for a deeper EU solution at the next summit in March.
The German leader
warns that saddling Greece with the refugees would only worsen the
crisis, and she has vowed to fight the idea. Greece, still battered
by an economic crisis, has struggled to even register the refugees.
More than one million traveled to Europe in 2015. If a similar number
come this year, and Macedonia seals its border under EU pressure,
Greece could soon turn into the continent’s Lebanon.
“It goes without
saying that I will put the greatest effort into making sure that the
European-Turkish path proves to be the path that is worth
continuing,” Merkel told German MPs before heading to the summit.
Despite resistance
from Central Europe, Merkel will likely get her wish. Leaders may
also endorse Germany’s tougher line on economic refugees, allowing
Merkel to claim a small victory at home.
Her plan is to push
for a deeper EU solution at the next summit in March. The question is
whether that will be too late.
Germans have become
impatient and want to see progress in reducing the number of
refugees. In March, Merkel faces a trio of important regional
elections. The right-wing AfD party is expected to do well in all
three.
The chancellor has
staked her political future on resolving the refugee crisis and her
fellow leaders know they can’t send her back to Berlin empty
handed, even if they disagree with her.
Any gesture of
support would be less about charity, however, than a refusal to think
the unthinkable.
“No one can
imagine a Europe without Merkel,” Techau said.
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