Leading from the front

IT IS fair to say that Europe has not been living its finest hour. Over the last few months, as crises have erupted across the face of the continent like acne on an adolescent’s brow, officials have struggled to cope with a flow of migrants unmatched in recent history. From Hungary to Greece, and from Denmark to Britain, governments have turned on each other, introducing border controls, erecting fences and suspending public transport. And with the numbers of refugees entering Greece now at 5,500 a day, there seems little immediate hope of respite.

As a classic collective-action problem, the migrant crisis looks tailor-made for the European Union. But the scene is set for even greater rows, because Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission (the EU’s civil service), has abandoned the time-honoured method of slow consensus-seeking and alighted on a new tactic: brute force. Under a plan unveiled by the commission on September 9th, 160,000 asylum-seekers arriving in Greece, Hungary and Italy, the three main EU points of entry, would be relocated with little choice to most other EU countries over two years. Each would have to accept a quota of asylum-seekers, determined by a formula that incorporates population, GDP, unemployment and previous asylum efforts: Germany, for example, would take 31,000; France 24,000. (Britain and Denmark are allowed to opt out of such matters, and under the plan other countries will be able to skip their obligations in “exceptional” circumstances by paying a fee.)

The scheme will do only so much to relieve the burden on front-line states: more than 400,000 illicit migrants are expected to enter Italy and Greece this year alone. But by EU standards the change is ferociously ambitious—few national governments appreciate Eurocrats telling them whom they must accommodate inside their borders. Mr Juncker’s plan is strongly opposed by several countries in central and eastern Europe, including the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia. None of them has much recent history of immigration, none is keen on more of it and none has been overburdened with asylum claims (although Hungary is traversed by thousands making their way to Germany from Greece and the Balkans). Viktor Orban, Hungary’s prime minister, says the migrants are Germany’s problem, not Europe’s, because it is to Germany that they are largely headed.

In June, by uniting with other sceptics such as Spain, the easterners saw off an attempt by the commission to impose (far smaller) quotas, triggering in the process a screaming match between the Italian prime minister and the Lithuanian president. But in recent months, as the winds of European opinion have shifted and Germany, a strong backer of Mr Juncker’s plan, has found its voice, the sceptics have begun to look isolated. Although governments must vote on the relocation proposal, the naysayers will struggle to muster the votes needed to block it, and EU officials say this time they are minded to ignore them. In other words, Brussels will order governments to accept asylum-seekers that they do not want. Most will be Muslims.

That would be a “political disaster”, says Radko Hokovský of European Values, a Czech think-tank. Populists will grow emboldened and citizens disillusioned. There will be emergency summits and bitter arguments; some fear splits as wide as those over the Iraq war. The row could spill over into other touchy subjects the EU must manage this autumn, notably the renewal of sanctions on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, which expire in January. In the meantime the refugees flowing up through Greece, the Balkans and Hungary will keep up the pressure. Moreover, EU officials are discovering that their relocation plan is a lot harder to implement than they had imagined (a voluntary element is due to begin next month in Italy). No one has a convincing answer to the easterners’ strongest retort: many migrants will simply leave countries they do not want to be in.

The integration tango

Such are the troubles of a policy forged in crisis. Veterans of the euro-zone’s upheavals may detect a pattern: ill-thought integration can lead to big problems. Euro-zone members did not foresee that, to save the single currency, they would one day have to submit budgets to Brussels and sign up for whopping bail-outs. Similarly, the ex-communist countries that joined the EU in 2004, salivating at the prospect of subsidies and open labour markets, could not have guessed that barely a decade later they would be obliged to accept thousands of asylum-seekers. The free-travel Schengen area, which is tested whenever Europe faces a migrant surge, was initially an awkward bolt-on to European law; one Eurocrat called it “Europe’s illegitimate child”.

Such offspring, he added, are also “the fruit of love”. That would not describe the rancorous atmosphere today. Yet officials quietly note that Europe’s migration debate has advanced further in the last six months than it has for years. One says he has never seen such an appetite among governments for reform. Policymakers are fizzing with ideas, from the use of development aid to bring recalcitrant transit countries into line to the strengthening of a Europe-wide border guard. Once the principle of shared responsibility for migrants is established, says another official, the numbers of relocated migrants can be scaled up, and new programmes established, without too much wrangling. Even Britain, an evergreen sceptic of collective European action, has belatedly said it will resettle 20,000 Syrian refugees (from the Middle East, not Europe) over the next five years.

Still, one step at a time. Even if the new scheme works, national governments must soon face tough issues, including the integration of multitudes of newcomers and the co-ordination of asylum laws. Future rows will not make those discussions easier. But nor will they postpone the inevitable. The EU may yet improvise its way towards an immigration policy worthy of the name.