End of Europe?
Berlin, Brussels' shock tactic on migrants
By Alastair
Macdonald and Noah Barkin
The Germans,
founders and funders of the postwar union, shut their borders to refugees in a
bid for political survival by the chancellor who let in a million migrants. And
then -- why not? -- they decide to revive the Deutschmark while they're at it.
That is not the
fantasy of diehard Eurosceptics but a real fear articulated at the highest
levels in Berlin and Brussels.
Chancellor Angela
Merkel, her ratings hit by crimes blamed on asylum seekers at New Year parties
in Cologne, and EU chief executive Jean-Claude Juncker both said as much last
week.
Juncker echoed
Merkel in warning that the central economic achievements of the common market
and the euro are at risk from incoherent, nationalistic reactions to migration
and other crises. He renewed warnings that Europe is on its "last chance",
even if he still hoped it was not "at the beginning of the end".
Merkel, facing
trouble among her conservative supporters as much as from opponents, called
Europe "vulnerable" and the fate of the euro "directly
linked" to resolving the migration crisis -- highlighting the risk of at
the very least serious economic turbulence if not a formal dismantling of EU
institutions.
Some see that as
mere scare tactics aimed at fellow Europeans by leaders with too much to lose
from an EU collapse -- Greeks and Italians have been seen to be dragging their
feet over controlling the bloc's Mediterranean frontier and eastern Europeans
who benefit from German subsidies and manufacturing supply chain jobs have led
hostility to demands that they help take in refugees.
Germans are also
getting little help from EU co-founder France, whose leaders fear a rising
anti-immigrant National Front, or the bloc's third power, Britain, consumed
with its own debate on whether to just quit the European club altogether.
So, empty threat
or no, with efforts to engage Turkey's help showing little sign yet of
preventing migrants reaching Greek beaches, German and EU officials are warning
that without a sharp drop in arrivals or a change of heart in other EU states
to relieve Berlin of the lonely task of housing refugees, Germany could shut
its doors, sparking wider crisis this spring.
GERMAN WARNINGS
With Merkel's
conservative allies in the southern frontier state of Bavaria demanding she
halt the mainly Muslim asylum seekers ahead of tricky regional elections in
March, her veteran finance minister delivered one of his trademark veiled
threats to EU counterparts of what that could mean for them.
"Many think
this is a German problem," Wolfgang Schaeuble said in meetings with fellow
EU finance ministers in Brussels. "But if Germany does what everyone
expects, then we'll see that it's not a German problem -- but a European
one."
Senior Merkel
allies are working hard to stifle the kind of parliamentary party rebellion
that threatened to derail bailouts which kept Greece in the euro zone last
year. But pressure is mounting for national measures, such as border fences,
which as a child of East Germany Merkel has said she cannot countenance.
"If you build
a fence, it's the end of Europe as we know it," one senior conservative
said. "We need to be patient."
A senior German
official noted that time is running out, however.
"The
chancellor has been asking her party for more time," he said. "But
... that narrative ... is losing the persuasiveness it may have had in October
or November. If you add in the debate about Cologne, she faces an increasingly
difficult situation."
He noted that
arrivals had not fallen sharply over the winter months as had been expected.
"You can only
imagine what happens when the weather improves," he said.
SCHENGEN FEARS
Merkel and Juncker
explicitly linked new national frontier controls across Europe's passport-free
Schengen zone to a collapse of the single market at the core of the bloc, and
of the euro. Both would ravage jobs and the economy.
"Without
Schengen ... the euro has no point," Juncker told a New Year news
conference on Friday. Historic national resentments were re-emerging, he added,
accusing his generation of EU leaders of squandering the legacy of the union's
founders, survivors of World War Two.
Merkel has not
suggested -- yet -- that Berlin could follow neighbors like Austria and Denmark
in further tightening border checks to deny entry to irregular migrants. But
she has made clear how Europe might suffer.
"No one can
pretend that you can have a common currency without being able to cross borders
relatively easily," she said at a business event last week.
In private, German
officials are more explicit. "We have until March, the summer maybe, for a
European solution," said a second German official. "Then Schengen
goes down the drain."
A senior EU
official was equally blunt: "There is a big risk that Germany closes. From
that, no Schengen ... There is a risk that the February summit could start a
countdown to the end."
The next summit of
EU leaders one month from now follows meetings last year that were marked by
agreement on a migration strategy as well as rows over failures to implement
it.
Of the 160,000
asylum seekers EU leaders agreed in September to distribute among member
states, fewer than 300 have been moved.
Berlin and
Brussels continue to press for more distribution across Europe. But few place much
hope in that -- one senior German official calls it "flogging a dead
horse".
TURKISH KEY
EU leaders' hope
is for help from Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan, a man many of them see as an
embryonic dictator.
Berlin is pressing
for more EU cash for Ankara, beyond an agreed 3 billion euros, which Italy is
blocking. Some Germans suggest simply using German funds to stem the flow from
Turkey.
EU officials say
it is too early to panic. Arrivals have fallen this month. U.N. data show them
running in January at half the 3,500 daily rate of December. Progress includes
a move to let some of the 2.1 million Syrian refugees in Turkey take jobs. The
EU will fund more schools for refugee children.
Yet EU Migration
Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos, who travels to Berlin on Monday, told the
European Parliament last week: "The situation is getting worse."
The refugee crisis
was jeopardizing "the very core of the European Union", he said,
offering no grounds to be optimistic other than that "optimism is our last
line of our defense".
(Additional
reporting by Gabriela Baczynska, Paul Taylor and Tom Koerkemeier in Brussels;
Writing by Alastair Macdonald; Editing by Sonya Hepinstall)
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