Refugee crisis: east and west split as leaders resent Germany for waiving rules

Refugee crisis: east and west split as leaders resent Germany for waiving rules

Central European nations pin blame on the EU – but their unilateral actions are a hindrance to a solution

Ian Traynor in Brussels

Saturday 5 September 2015 20./ http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/05/migration-crisis-europe-leaders-blame-brussels-hungary-germany

Europe’s meltdown in the face of its biggest post-1945 immigration emergency is generating the worst east-west split since the Iraq war, when Donald Rumsfeld divided it into “new Europe and old Europe” – his supporters and opponents.

On Thursday Germany and France ordered the European commission to come up with a new “permanent” and binding regime for spreading the refugee load around all of the 28 countries in the union. David Cameron and home secretary Theresa May want nothing to do with the scheme and have absented themselves from the policymaking, carping from the sidelines.

On Friday the prime ministers of Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic told Paris and Berlin to get stuffed, arguing that west European-style multiculturalism is nothing but trouble and that they have no intention of repeating the same mistakes.

The commission has already done what Berlin is demanding. On Wednesday its president, Jean-Claude Juncker, will unveil proposals obliging at least 22 countries with a combined population of almost 400 million to absorb 160,000 people from Italy, Greece and Hungary, which are struggling with influxes from the Middle East and Africa.

The all-powerful busybodies of Brussels are relatively impotent when it comes to immigration

The seven countries of central Europe and the Baltic are being asked to take fewer than 30,000. It should not be a problem for big international cities such as Warsaw, Prague and Budapest. But the east Europeans are retreating into parochialism, digging into their national bunkers while nursing resentment at what they perceive to be German bullying.

Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, is the cheerleader of the “Europe is useless” chorus, but Robert Fico, the Slovakian premier, and President Milos Zeman in Prague are not far behind. Ewa Kopacz, the prime minister of Poland, sounds more moderate, but she looks likely to lose an election next month to the nationalist right. Her hands are tied.

When Europe’s leaders last met to grapple with the crisis, in June, they argued until 3.30am and dispersed without agreement, bringing Matteo Renzi, the Italian prime minister, to lament: “If this is Europe, you can keep it.”

Entirely predictably, things have worsened considerably since then. Governments are floundering, pirouetting on policy in response to front-page pictures of tragedy on a Turkish beach, engaging in a blame game which, coming on top of five years of division over Greece and the euro, is exposing major divisions.

If the euro proved to be a fair-weather currency whose structures and rules buckled and nearly collapsed in a storm, the same is now evident on immigration. The system is flimsy, not fit for purpose in an emergency.

There is no “European” immigration policy or regime. There is a mish-mash of national policies, a patchwork of systems and criteria which are contradictory, incoherent, fragmented. Italy is very far way from Finland, not only geographically, but when it comes to immigration and asylum. France and Germany have quite different historical approaches to integrating newcomers. Sweden and Denmark are neighbours with a close shared history, but their immigration policies are chalk and cheese.

National governments guard these prerogatives jealously. “Europe” in the form of the EU authorities in Brussels has minimal say over policymaking. Almost all power here lies with heads of national governments and interior ministries.

Yet, in this crisis, Brussels-bashing has become routine, the cheap and easy option for shameless national leaders acting unilaterally, blocking every suggestion that comes out of Brussels and then blaming it for the ensuing chaos.

Orbán proved the point in Brussels last week. “Europe” had failed, its leaders had irresponsibly created this mess, their response was “madness”. He has put up a razor-wire fence on the border with Serbia and announced he was fasttracking legislation to establish a zero-immigration regime within 10 days, with the army deployed on the border.

Brussels cannot stop him because these powers are national. If need be, he said, he would put up another fence on the border with Croatia, a barrier between two EU countries. On Friday Brussels shrugged and said it did not like this, but couldn’t do anything about it.

The all-powerful busybodies of Brussels are relatively impotent when it comes to immigration. For months the Italians, French, Austrians and Germans have been quietly re-establishing controls on the internal national borders of the open Schengen travel zone, which are supposed to be proscribed. Brussels cannot stop them. A commission spokeswoman said Italian police controls on the border with Austria were not border controls.

The commission is charged with policing the regime governing Schengen, but Germany unilaterally waived the rules regulating how immigrants entering the EU are handled. It did not tell Brussels, nor neighbouring governments.

Berlin is winning plaudits everywhere for its exemplary generosity and its open-door policy towards Syrians fleeing war, but Syrians can only get to Germany through other EU countries who were not told about the policy flip-flop. That contributed to the wretched scenes in Hungary and Austria.

Uniquely in Europe, Angela Merkel has seized the moral high ground on Syrian refugees. But this is the same leader who, a few years ago, declared that “multikulti has absolutely failed”. She is known to be acutely risk-averse, with a close eye on the polls which have shown her ratings slip over recent weeks.

For more than a year the Germans have been complaining bitterly that people entering Italy and Greece were deliberately not being registered by the national authorities, but simply encouraged to board trains and buses for Germany. Then they shifted and declared unilaterally that Syrians could come anyway.

The commission can propose a panoply of measures aimed at creating more joined-up policies. It did so in May and will extend the effort this week. But they are instantly shot down by national police ministries. As its vice-president, Frans Timmermans, said on Friday, “asylum policies in Europe are not aligned”.

The European parliament, as ever, has plenty to say about immigration, but absolutely nothing to do because it has no remit over policymaking, which remains overwhelmingly national. The countries of Europe prefer it that way, while blaming Brussels for the ever-worsening state of the union.