Remember during the Greek crisis when I said that one of the reasons why Brussels Eurocrats had a low opinion of national democracy was how the whole refugee debacle was unfolding…even back then? The “Brussels solution” to the refugee crisis, which hadn’t even taken on the dimensions and scale that it has now, was essentially that refugees arriving on the shores of Greece and Italy, at least 160K of them (now a laughable pittance), would be divided up among EU member countries by economic weight. This would mean that Germany and France and so on would still be taking the lion’s share of them, while Estonia very few of them, but everyone would be participating in the process without effectively putting the entire burden on peripheral countries.
Here, I will elaborate on the practical and ethical logic of this plan: Peripheral EU countries were, I might add, intended to be burdened with the bulk of refugee processing, by the Dublin treaty, which demands that refugees be returned to the first country in which they arrived, even if they manage to make it to countries with less capricious refugee processing. It was part of the generally awful “safe third country” trend that degenerated immediately into a purely political tool with often little relationship to the reality of migration and refuge. Dublin was signed in a time when refugee influxes were comparatively small. For peripheral countries, accepting the burden of shoreline refugee processing was a no-brainer compared to the benefits they thought they would get by being cooperative with EU-interior countries’ desire to be in control not only of immigration, but of arrival itself, a luxury that is physically, morally, and legally impossible for shoreline countries. However, when refugee arrivals are not so small, Dublin is unenforcible. It is the public acknowledgement of this that is blamed for the influx into Germany right now — what people are calling Merkel’s “invitation.” The alternative was not to acknowledge this and to attempt to deport migrants en masse back along the Balkan route, to countries not willing or able to process the full load. The Merkel administration’s act of acknowledgement (aka the “invitation” in many quarters) was both politically and morally the right thing, even if it has the character of one of Merkel’s time-buying tactics. It was the right time to buy time.
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Why is it impossible for peripheral countries to control their own borders, particularly those on the sea? It comes down to a matter of rescue. Dragging refugee boats back to the shorelines from whence they came requires the legal cooperation of the countries on those shores, some of which are producers of refugees themselves. One may indulge in a false European fantasy of omnipotence, but Europe does not have the ability to impose refoulement on many of the “origin” shoreline countries. So the question becomes: Do EU-peripheral countries have an obligation to rescue those who come, at least, by sea? The legal and moral answer is: Yes. Once they are rescued, the requirement to do something with them — meaning, of course, process their refugee claim — falls upon the rescuer.
But if the burden is too large for peripheral countries, of course they have an incentive to send refugees on towards the center. Not merely an incentive, but in some sense an obligation. Hence, as I said, the Dublin suspension. But why is the burden so large? It is large, particularly in this instance, because of the size of the migration from Turkey. Why is the size of the migration from Turkey large? It is large because the size of the migration from Syria and other war-torn countries is large. Turkey hosts many more refugees from this crisis than all of Europe. (I will leave aside for this post the extent to which Turkey contributed to creating these refugees.) So do many countries neighbouring Syria, particularly Jordan and Lebanon. They all, one way or another, must accommodate a refugee crisis far larger than what Europe has handled. They do so very imperfectly, with the expectation of foreign aid and the desire to prevent the situation from becoming permanent. (Lebanon cannot simply make a million people its permanent residents and future citizens, but the EU, as a whole, certainly can.) But the situation is such that it is entirely possible that many of the refugees will never even have the opportunity to safely go back to Syria.
Of course, many of the refugees are not actually Syrian. These are the dreaded “economic migrants.” The problem is, with no legal way created for Syrian refugees (or other refugees) to arrive in the EU without illegally crossing borders, but no ability to have a future, even for many of them in Turkey, Syrians must take clandestine approaches to moving westward. This effectively creates a massive flow of refugees, which creates an elaborate market and services which non-refugees can exploit. (The distinction between economic migrants and refugees is morally and functionally dubious, and we may have to rethink the entire basis of citizenship and sovereignty to de-couple it from territorial borders, but that is for another time.) In order to stop economic migration, one must either stop refugees entirely or one must provide another route for refugees in the hope that that will dry up some of the illegal transit market. To stop refugees entirely, one must either drown them or treat them so terribly on arrival that they act as living warnings against attempting to transit (this is the Australian “solution”) and view their present precarious situation as the same or superior to severe maltreatment. Needless to say, much of this could have been avoided by earlier action resettling Syrians — and others! — away from the Middle East.
If one is not willing to let refugees drown or to torment them, and one is not willing to let an EU country become a “warehouse of souls,” then one must permit refugees and potentially non-deportable economic migrants to proceed. This is essentially the route that Angela Merkel chose by suspending the Dublin Treaty. She and her government treated Greece very poorly in the financial crisis, but, in this, she effectively attempted to both rescue Greece and the dignity (i.e., appearance of unity) of the Union, and bought time to find a more permanent and less haphazard solution. While I dislike many of her policy choices, and I don’t believe the bandied-about (and probably sexist) claim that she suddenly became “soft-hearted,” or something. Give credit where credit is due: I do believe that she did the right thing for the European Union and for the refugees simultaneously.
The problem is that the only country that is willing to take refugees is Germany, and it will eventually be politically unsupportable for Germany to be the sole player in this game. While proportionately falling far short in terms of actual numbers, compared to some Middle Eastern countries, Germany has still taken on a million refugees (and/or economic migrants) and has, under stressful conditions, started to organize the terms of their integration. Even then, Germany has done what its alleged EU ‘partners’ have been unwilling to do. If there must be refugee transit within Europe, the only fair way to implement it is by the very redistribution proposal I mention above.
Unfortunately, a large number of EU states, particularly the so-called Visegrad states of Eastern European countries, are simply unwilling to share any burden at all, even a couple of dozen. That is due to naked racism (and yes, you can be racist against Muslims, even though Islam is not a ‘race’; you don’t need a ‘race’ for racism to occur, quite the contrary). The expansion eastward was ill-advised; these countries suffer in part from a post-communist nationalist ‘adolescence’ that is not really compatible with European convergence, and from that, an effective requirement to be a participant in dealing with refugees from on-going conflicts in the very much neighbouring Muslim world. Unfortunately, and further, even countries that were considered core European countries, such as France, are not willing to be part of a common solution to the refugee crisis.
Europe has so far flailed around attempting to come to a resolution of this impasse. While I gave credit to Merkel above for doing the right thing by suspending the Dublin treaty, unfortunately, her solution, possibly a matter of necessity, has been to attempt to bribe Turkey to accept deportations. The political situation in Turkey is not pleasant, to put it mildly. Ankara is in the strange situation of being both partly at fault for the refugee crisis, and yet for a power that is partly at fault, it is still not possible to force it to handle the entire burden. Consequently, one either deals with Turkey, or one doesn’t deal with Turkey, at which point, the choice between letting boats sink or rescuing them and taking on the refugees once again presents itself. Dealing with Turkey involves paying it money, giving it better access to the EU economy, and directly shouldering some of the refugee burden. For both good and bad reasons, the deal with Turkey is not universally popular in the EU, and there have been a number of false starts in which the deal has been claimed to have taken effect, when it has not.
This whole situation has now come to a head with Austria conspiring with other EU and non-EU states to cut off Greece, unless Greece gets “control” over its borders. Make no mistake; the “control” in question is a weasel-word. Greece has an indefinite sea border with Turkey, and no ability on its own to force Turkey to take back anyone who leaves from the Turkish coast. Greece was receiving tens of thousands of migrants before Germany suspended the Dublin deportation process. So what “control” could they possibly mean? That question is certainly rhetorical.
No, the only solution that has a modicum of humanity involves European countries sharing the burden, which is what was proposed for months in Brussels and is the principal position of Germany, Greece, and Italy. But if this doesn’t happen, it amounts to additional evidence in favour of Brussels’ contempt for national democracy. Make no mistake: I think that this contempt, given the conditions under which the EU has been constructed, is a mistake. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a grain of truth to it. Unless the European Union countries can come up with a joint solution to the problem, the whole thing will fall apart. And if the joint solution is boat pushback in the Aegean, then the whole thing isn’t worth keeping together.