Europe is under no obligation to take refugees, and if it does, the Schengen Treaty will die. But the EU itself will soldier on without it, unless the euro currency collapses
Europe has forgotten that history is fundamentally tragic”, said Mr Manuel Valls, the French Prime Minister. “If Europe can't protect its own borders, it's the very idea of Europe that could be thrown into doubt. It could disappear — not Europe itself, not our values, but the European project, the concept we have of Europe, that the founding fathers had of Europe.”
The European Union — 28 countries and 500 million people — is not really going to disappear just because it cannot agree on how to deal with one or two milton refugees. But one of the great symbols of its unity, the Schengen Treaty, that allowed its citizens to move around without passports or border checks, is being suspended, perhaps forever.
The Treaty was a remarkable achievement. You could get into your car in Portugal and drive all the way to Finland via Spain, France, Germany, Poland, lithuania, latvia and Estonia without ever once having to show a passport or identity card. There would not even be anybody in uniform standing at the frontier to wave you past, just a sign by the side of the road saying “Welcome to (country X)”.
That was the situation until last month, when Germany, Denmark, Sweden and Austria re-imposed passport checks at their borders, ports and airports even for travellers arriving from other Schengen zone countries. France acted even earlier, declaring emergency controls on its borders after the terrorist massacre in Paris in November, 2015. So now fully half of the EU's citizens (counting the UK and Ireland) live behind real borders again.
The new border controls are alleged to be temporary measures, which the Schengen Treaty permits for a maximum of six months in the face of some unspecified emergency. But the refugee emergency is not going to fade away by next July, and the threat of terrorism will persist for the foreseeable future.
That's why the European Commission is now examining how the legal framework of Schengen can be fiddled to allow a further two years of controls on the EU's internal borders. Nobody doubts that they will find a way to do that — but a great many people doubt that the passport-free zone, once suspended for that long, will ever come back.
The three countries that took in 90 per cent of last year's refugees, Germany, Austria and Sweden, have all blamed Greece for letting so many refugees in and failing to document them properly. “Greece has one of the biggest Navies in Europe,” said the Austrian Interior Minister, Mr Johanna Mikl-leitner. “It's a myth that the Greek-Turkish border cannot be protected.”
The Greeks quite reasonably ask, what their big Navy is supposed to do. Sink the refugee boatsIJ As for the failure to register all the refugees properly, they point out that at peak flow last autumn more than 10,000 were arriving each day. They didn't have enough officials and equipment to cope with such numbers: 40 fingerprint machines running non-stop around the clock can only deal with about 4,000 people a day.
It's not just a question of screening out possible terrorists, although that must be done better if confidence in Schengen is to be restored. In practice, Greece (or EU officials operating in Greece) would also have to decide at the border who is really a genuine refugee they are obliged to admit, and who should be returned immediately to Turkey.
There is no obligation for Europe to take them all, and the Schengen Treaty will die if it does. But the European Union itself will soldier on without it, at least until and unless the euro currency collapses when the next recession hits.