Children choke on tear gas as they try to enter Macedonia en route to the heart of Europe. Outside Calais a woman threatens to slit her wrists as police try to move her to alternative accommodation. The UN warns that Europe is on the brink of a “largely self-induced” humanitarian crisis. In fact the crisis is already a threat to the EU and is primarily a result of Syria’s civil war. Yet it is true that Europe’s failure to agree a response to the biggest movement of refugees on the continent since the Second World War has left frontline states to fashion responses of their own.
The result is chaos. In Calais misguided activists have turned a humane French effort to end the squalor of the “Jungle” into a running battle with police. On Greece’s border with Macedonia 7,000 men, women and children are trapped, with at least 1,000 more arriving each day.
They come by ferry and then bus, taxi or on foot from the Greek islands, where nearly 120,000 have arrived so far this year from Turkey, a 25-fold increase on the first two months of 2015. With warmer weather will come an even more dramatic surge unless something is done.
Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, wants the EU to agree on a mechanism to bring order to this chaos by a crucial EU-Turkey summit next Monday in Brussels. She is right to insist on urgency. Without a workable deal with Turkey, the conduit for the vast majority of Syrian refugees heading for Europe, every chokepoint for migrants from Greece to Austria will become an expanding refugee camp. Hardline anti-immigrant parties will thrive at the expense of centrists, and the free movement of people so cherished by European integrationists will recede into history.
Mrs Merkel wants Turkey to help to stop migration to the Greek islands in return for generous EU assistance. She wants other EU members to accept the relocation of 160,000 refugees a year by quota while securing the union’s external borders to prevent a much larger influx. Her problem is that every part of this package has been floated before, and found few takers.
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Of the 160,000 migrants first promised relocation from Greece and Italy last year, 314 have been found new homes. Turkey has been offered €3 billion in cash and job creation schemes to house migrants in camps close to its Syrian border. President Erdogan accepted, in principle. In practice he has closed the border to tens of thousands fleeing Aleppo. He has done little to stop traffickers in the Aegean, and he has taken the €3 billion offer as a starting bid. His counter bid is for a deal worth more than twice as much. Turkey, like Macedonia, is entitled to prioritise its interests over Europe’s. At the same time, pending peace in Syria, Mrs Merkel is right to see the best hope of a durable solution to this crisis in Turkey. Britain has long since channelled most of its aid to refugees in camps in the region rather than those already in Europe. But no deal struck next week will hold as long as Germany refuses to set an upper limit on the number of Syrian refugees it is willing to accept.
Since last summer Germany’s open-border policy has been the pull-factor putting the crisis as a whole beyond EU control. Berlin claims to be furious with Austria for unilaterally imposing a tight cap on refugee numbers entering from Hungary, yet since Vienna’s decision the number entering Germany from Austria has shrunk by a factor of ten and Mrs Merkel’s slumping popularity has started to recover.
The continent that welcomed eastern Europe with open arms a generation ago is slowly realising that it cannot extend the same welcome to the victims of turmoil in the Middle East. It can lead the effort to help them, but only if Mrs Merkel subordinates her instincts, formed in 1989, to the harsher realities of 2016.