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.)