The fissures in the European Union are growing. The strain put on it by the burgeoning and unresolved refugee and immigration crisis is pitting east against west and south against north. The threats of Brexit and Grexit have not gone away.
The EU faces a crisis of leadership and morale the likes of which it has not witnessed in its 23-year history. The odds on an acrimonious break-up have shortened.
A generation after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Europe is building walls again. Bulgaria has planted fifty miles of razor wire along its frontier with Turkey. Britain has fenced off parts of the port of Calais in France. Hungary is fortifying its 100-mile border with Serbia in a race to seal itself against refugees and immigrants heading for Europe through the Balkans.
It is a race that Europe is doomed to lose as long as it remains unwilling, or unable, to confront the true scale of the crisis. There are more refugees in Europe, and seeking to get into Europe, since World War II.
Angela Merkel’s worthy plans to welcome Syrian refugees to Germany in early September may have been hailed as an enlightened moral act of leadership, but can now be seen as the result of muddled thinking.
Her pronouncements have lured thousands more into the hands of people-traffickers and offered false hope. It has generated a problem which European countries are incapable of managing.
These upheavals present the EU with an unprecedented challenge to its identity, its administrative muscle and its ability to combine compassion with hard-headed problem-solving.
The crisis has hit the continent’s weakest economies hardest. It is fuelling anti-immigrant extremism (including in Malta) and defying the EU’s efforts to devise a coherent response, let alone an effective one.
Hungary’s fence speaks volumes. But the reimposition of border controls by Germany and Austria, closely followed by Slovakia and the Netherlands, to staunch the flow of refugees and immigrants, has been a dramatic development, striking at the heart of the EU’s most notable achievement. The erosion, and possible end, of the Schengen free-travel area would negate perhaps the most visible advance in Europe’s much-vaunted “ever closer union”.
As with the EU’s other grand project, the euro – a well-intentioned but deeply flawed and ill-judged political gamble which could not withstand the financial and banking crisis of 2008 – the external shock of the refugee crisis has destabilised Schengen and embittered relations between EU states. The influx of migrants has undermined another of the EU’s rules – the Dublin Regulations - which, although their passing would not be mourned by Malta, still represents part of the EU’s asylum structure.
The refugee crisis has strengthened anti-immigrant, anti-EU, anti-austerity populist parties. Its mismanagement has further boosted these parties’ popularity. Marine le Pen in France is riding high against an unpopular socialist President and a split right-wing opposition. The Finns Party in Finland entered government two months ago. The DanishPeople’s Party is threatening to bring the Danish government down if it agrees to take in refugees. The leftist Syriza party has just retained power in Greece. Podemos is gaining ground in Spain. Geert Wilders Party for Freedom in the Netherlands and the UKIP in the UK are now part of the political furniture in those countries.
The strains on European unity have never been greater. The possibility of a Greek exit from the eurozone within the next 12 months is high
For many in Europe, especially the jobless young, the EU has come to represent only managed decline. The refugee crisis has made the fissures throughout Europe both more apparent and more divisive.
It is against this background that the possible effects of a combined Greek exit and British exit must be viewed.
The current crisis has done nothing to help pro-Europeans in Britain arguing the merits of staying in the EU. On the contrary, the possibility of a Brexit has been increased.
The UK’s quest for a new deal with Brussels has suffered a triple setback which could mean not being able to secure any EU treaty change before the (self-imposed, but politically binding) in/out referendum planned for 2017.
The European Commission said last week that discussions of a new treaty – seen as necessary to enshrine new rules to prop up the Eurozone – will not begin until the summer of 2017, with the formal treaty not drawn up until later. Eurosceptics in Britain would regard any promise of a “post-dated promise of treaty change” after the referendum as unacceptable.
The refugee chaos in Europe has further heightened British concerns about immigration. Prime Minister David Cameron’s wish to discuss his goal of limiting migrant benefits at the next European Summit on 15 and 16 October (with a view to settling the matter by December) has come up against opposition from the Poles who have vetoed it because there is a Polish election on 25 October and it could cost the Warsaw government votes.
But large majorities of British voters – like many others throughout the EU – want control of their nation’s borders. Britons would rather spend Britain’s Euro 16 billion EU contribution on the NHS than on allowing more European migrants to enter their country.
British Eurosceptics have also been cheered by a report from the European Council on Foreign Relations which showed that EU leaders are opposed to two thirds of what the government wants to change about the terms of British membership. Cameron’s key hope of limiting migrants’ access to welfare benefits attracts most opposition.
As to the chance of a Grexit, this seems to have advanced, rather than receded, since the recent Greek elections returned Alexis Tsipras to power. Tspiras repeatedly stated during the election campaign that Syriza did not believe in the Euro 86 billion bailout programme it now has the task of implementing. He vowed to find ways to replace the measures that will hit pensioners and the poorest, putting him back on a collision course with Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Athens has already fallen behind schedule after the reforms programme ground to a halt during the three-week election campaign.
That does not bode well for the next few weeks, when Greece has to deliver on 120 reforms to its creditors, which they were expecting to be in place by the end of October as a condition for releasing the loans upon which the country’s economic survival depends. State revenues from the start of the year are already well below target.
All this could lead to Greece being forced out of the Eurozone despite the reprieve which the third bailout had secured only two months ago.
The strains on European unity have never been greater. The possibility of a Greek exit from the Eurozone within the next twelve months is high. It is thought that the EU could survive a Grexit.
However, the shock-waves of Britain – the second largest economy in Europe, a major financial contributor to the EU, a member of the Security Council, a nuclear power and a major player in world affairs – leaving the Union in 2017-18 would be immeasurably more serious.
Given the immigration chaos and anti-EU sentiments among huge swathes of voters of both left and right across Europe – most notably in France, whose next presidential elections are in 2017 – its break-up might also be more difficult to prevent.