The European Court of Justice has ruled that member states must take in a share of refugees who reach Europe. The Court dismissed a challenge from Slovakia and Hungary which are refusing to accept refugees under the European Union’s relocation programme seeking to share the load on individual countries more equitably.
The Court threw out the legal challenge by the two member states to binding quotas being used by Brussels to relocate 160,000 refugees from Greece and Italy across Europe. The EU has struggled to impose the quotas, with only 27,645, or 17 per cent of refugees so far relocated, including a number that have come to Malta. The judges ruled that the quotas were legally justified.
Hungary condemned the Court’s ruling as “outrageous and irresponsible”. It vowed to resist it. Its Foreign Minister used unprecedented language to attack the Court for upholding the EU’s relocation policy. Slovakia appears to have backed away from confrontation.
Hungary’s response suggests that the issue of migration, with which Brussels has unsuccessfully wrestled for three years, will exacerbate a cultural and political split at the heart of the EU. This latest major disagreement between countries in eastern and western Europe has deepened a rift within the EU that could risk permanently fracturing it.
The gauntlet was thrown down by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán 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 perfect battle cry for his 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 had no experience of immigration from outside Europe and see the imposition of refugee quotas as an assault on their way of life and on societies that feel under siege.
Poland, Hungary and their defiant resistance to migrant quotas could pose the same level of existential threat to the EU as Russian aggression in the East and Turkey’s totalitarian lurch into authoritarianism under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
But while Russia and Turkey are external threats, the widening political and cultural 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 European Court of Justice’s decision, which puts them at direct odds with the EU’s legal order.
At its root, there is a huge cultural difference between life in provincial Eastern Europe and the metropolitan cities of Berlin or Paris. Many Hungarians and Poles believe 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.