Two years ago, the European Union launched a plan, the Agenda on Migration, which was – like most EU plans dealing with the vexed issue of immigration – high on ambition and headline-grabbing rhetoric, but low on actual delivery.
Its centrepiece was the mandatory relocation of asylum seekers who reach Europe, based on a quota mechanism so that the burden of processing refugees is shared more equally between EU nations.
The binding quotas were intended by Brussels to relocate, over a period of two years, 160,000 Syrian, Eritrean and Iraqi refugees from Greece and Italy across Europe. But the outcome was disappointing. The EU struggled to impose the quotas, with only about 17 per cent of refugees being relocated to date, including a number that have come to Malta.
Hungary and Slovakia refused point-blank to accept refugees under the programme. The Commission therefore took them to the European Union’s highest court, the European Court of Justice (ECJ), to oblige them to comply.
The ECJ has just ruled that member states must take in a share of refugees who reach Europe. The court dismissed the challenge from Slovakia and Hungary throwing out in its entirety their legal challenge.
Moreover, it decreed that the EU, as a result of a majority of governments voting for it, was legally right to override Hungary and Slovakia because “it was not required to act unanimously” when it adopted the contested decision.
Hungary condemned the ECJ’s ruling as “outrageous and irresponsible”, an act of “political rape”. It vowed to resist it. Hungary’s foreign minister used unprecedented language to attack the European Court of Justice for upholding the EU’s relocation policy.
Slovakia has since backed away from confrontation. Its Prime Minister has said he respects the court’s decision, but his government still does not like the scheme which is seen as a system imposed on countries by unelected EU bureaucrats in Brussels.
The response suggests that the issue of immigration, with which Brussels has unsuccessfully wrestled for three years, will further exacerbate a cultural and political division at the heart of the EU. Hungary and Poland (for different reasons connected with democratic standards and the rule of law) could lose EU funding worth about three per cent of their GDP if they do not comply with EU law.
Hungary has vowed to reject the quotas that it claims have damaged national sovereignty. After a series of terrorist attacks in Europe, it claimed that the ECJ was holding open the door to Muslim refugees who posed a security risk. Poland was quick to support Hungary. Its Prime Minister pledged to continue its refusal to accept any refugees under EU quotas.
Moreover, its Prime Minister has made the issue the focal point of his government’s politics ahead of parliamentary elections in April next year. Hungary’s position is that only its elected leaders should be able to decide who should be allowed into the country.
Hungary’s position is that only its elected leaders should be able to decide who should be allowed into the country
For Poland, the fifth largest country in the EU, its disgruntlement goes even further. After Angela Merkel said recently that she could “no longer remain silent” about Polish legal reforms criticised by the EU, Warsaw stepped up its claim for reparations for World War II, which it said amounted to $1 trillion. Poland has touched a raw historical nerve.
Raising this issue 72 years after the end of World War II appears to flout the very essence of what the EU stands for today.
These latest major disagreements between countries in eastern and western Europe have deepened a rift within the EU that could permanently fracture it. Poland, Hungary and their defiant resistance to migrant quotas pose the same level of existential threat to the EU as Russian aggression in the east.
But while Russia poses an external threat, the widening divide between Poland and Hungary and the rest of the EU is seen as a challenge on a par with Brexit. Both countries, which are fiercely nationalistic, are now openly defiant of the ECJ, which puts them at direct odds with the EU’s legal order.
The gauntlet was thrown down by Hungary’s combative Prime Minister during a speech in Poland last year when he used Britain’s decision to leave the EU to declare what he called “a cultural counter-revolution”. His project, which is shared by Poland’s right-wing nationalist government, is to push the EU away from Western European liberalism towards policies based on preserving “historic, religious and national identity”.
The question of migrant quotas for Muslim refugees has become the catalyst for his ‘counter-revolution’, with a high level of popular hostility in Poland and Hungary to the EU’s measures. The two countries – like Malta before 2002 – have no experience of immigration from outside Europe and see the imposition of refugee quotas as an assault on their way of life.
At its root, there is a huge cultural difference between life in provincial Eastern Europe and the sophisticated metropolitan cities of Berlin, London or Paris and other Western capitals.
Many Hungarians and Poles believe that they are regarded as second-class Europeans, fit only for low-paid jobs and who are sneered at for their bigoted attitudes. Both Hungary and Poland are also alarmed at plans to restrict movement of workers from Eastern Europe.
The growing gulf between west and east in Europe, typified by this stand-off over migration policy, requires bridges to be built between east and west to end the growing sense of grievance in Eastern Europe before it is too late.
But all Europeans – not simply those who are racist – regard immigration as one of their top concerns. The populist anti-government backlash against immigration is a reflection of citizens’ anger at Brussels’ ineffectiveness to deal with the issue. The strong election of the far-Right AfD in the German elections epitomises this.
The dual fundamental problems of swelling waves of migration from the Middle East and Africa, and relatively open borders within the EU, will continue to dog all European countries. Immigration is a complex phenomenon not readily susceptible to quick solutions.
But the lack of political will and imagination – and inspirational leaders – is palpable and lies at the heart of the problem.
It is notable that the President of the EU Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, in his so-called State of the Union speech, made no positive proposals for dealing with it. He has failed to tackle the glaring differences within the EU on how to handle the influx. Europe’s schisms are as wide as ever. There was little in his address to suggest he has found a way of bridging them.