European Union leaders must this week confront the huge scale and pace of the refugee crisis affecting the continent. They meet on Wednesday aware that it simultaneously tests their solidarity, challenges their collective capacity to act and threatens to undermine the free movement of peoples underlying their economic and social integration. It is a time for generous vision, focused political leadership and courageous action. Since there is no sign the flow of refugees from Syria, Afghanistan and Africa will stop, means must be agreed to receive and accommodate them urgently and fairly.
The changing scope and scale of the crisis have been gravely underestimated as it was transformed over the summer from a perilous human flow across the Mediterranean to a complementary route through Turkey and Greece through the Balkans towards northern Europe. With underestimation comes ill-preparedness, panic and raw prejudice against this elemental surge of desperate people fleeing war and seeking a better life. All of this has been vividly apparent in official responses at European, national and local levels. But that is only half the story, since a growing awareness of the social realities involved has simultaneously opened up sympathy, generosity and hospitality among ordinary Europeans and leaders alike.
These conflicting impulses and the policies flowing from them are being argued out at all these levels this week. It is, inevitably, a messy process; but it is made much more difficult by conflicts over sovereignties and quotas between northern states like Germany and Sweden willing and able to accept high numbers of refugees, other states like France and Ireland ready to cooperate with a quota system and an increasingly resentful - and resented - group of central and eastern states unwilling to see mandatory EU rules applied. Outliers like Hungary and the United Kingdom effectively refuse to accept common rules or values on migration and refugees, storing up future hostility from their partners in negotiations to come.
Among the principles which should guide policy makers is a much greater recognition that this is a European crisis requiring a collective and coordinated response based on common values and fair sharing of costs and resources. That requires courageous leadership, capable of mobilising popular goodwill, but tailoring new procedures to existing capacities. A clear pathway needs to be created at European level to process, accept and settle refugees, if necessary by creating new rules and shared sovereignty. The burden should not be unfairly loaded on the Balkan transit states or on Greece, Italy or Malta but should be shared among the 28 EU member-states. The stark alternative exposed by last week’s border closures and razor fences is an end to the free movement everyone values.
A much greater effort should be made to channel aid to the frontline states of Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon where four million Syrians now find refuge, compared to the hundreds of thousands in Europe. Alongside that the crisis throws a huge responsibility on the EU’s foreign policy apparatus to define and search for ways of bringing the Syrian conflict to an end.