An emergency effort led by Germany to force European Union member states to accept mandatory quotas of refugees collapsed in discord.
Berlin called for EU financial penalties against countries that refused to accommodate their share of migrants. A Czech official said such threats were empty but nonetheless “damaging”. Slovakia said they would bring the “end of the EU”.
In scenes with echoes of the Cold War, families with small children sat in fields beneath the former communist country’s new 3.5-metre (10 foot) high fence, which runs almost the length of the border, topped with razor wire.
The greatest migration to Western Europe since World War Two has also created an institutional crisis for the 28-member EU, with one of the bloc’s signature achievements, its Schengen system of border-free travel across much of the continent, unraveling this week under the strain.
– From the Reuters article: Hungary Shuts EU Border, Taking Migrant Crisis into its Own Hands
Although everyone watching has been convinced that Europe’s disastrous economy and related debt crisis would be the spark to unravel the European Union project, it appears history has its own plans.
While EU technocrats have demonstrated an uncanny ability to scheme, threaten, kick the can and lie their way around the debt crisis, the migrant crisis will prove to be a much graver threat to the project. Strikingly, all it took was a few weeks of unrelenting migrants crossing into EU borders to put an end what is essentially the only achievement of the European Union — the Schengen system of borderless travel.
Without that, what is the EU really? A collection of nation-states forced by bureaucrats to pretend they are part of an artificial fantasy superstate called Europe? An amalgamation of debt serfs and technocratic overlords? See what I’m getting at?
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