Let’s begin today with a subject that is clearly close to home for most Britons: border control (or the loss of it). Sweden has introduced mandatory identity checks for travellers across the Oresund Bridge. The bridge connects Copenhagen in Denmark with the Swedish cities of Malmo and Lund. The new ID checks began yesterday.
About 20,000 commuters a day cross the bridge, according to the BBC. But that’s not what Swedish authorities are worried about. They’re worried about the 150,000 asylum applications they received in 2015. And those are just from people who bothered to apply for asylum through official channels. The actual number of migrants – legal and illegal – is probably far larger.
The walls are going back up in Europe
It’s not just at the border of the EU (Fortress Europe) and the rest of the world. It’s within the EU as well. In fact, Sweden had to obtain a temporary exemption from the Schengen Agreement to impose the internal EU border control. Why is it a big deal? For several reasons.
First, the exemption granted by the European Commission shows how fickle the law can be. If you can change a law because it’s inconvenient, well then what kind of law is it? Yes, there are exceptions to any rule. But if the four freedoms – the free movement of goods, services, capital and people – are not really freedoms, what are they?
The 1985 Schengen Agreement was designed to allow for the passport-less travel within Europe. Yet not long after Sweden instituted tighter border controls with Denmark, Denmark did the same with Germany. The path to Sweden runs through Denmark via Germany.
It’s allowable, under Schengen, to require a photo ID at the border of the EU. In fact, as a legal alien, I have to show a photo ID every time I enter the EU or the UK. Nothing strange there, and not nearly as draconian as the finger printing and photographing you get entering the US as a non-resident.
But the migration crisis is complicating the borderless travel Europeans have gotten used to. Last year, nearly a million migrants and refugees came to Europe from Syria and the Middle East. The proxy war between Shia Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia is getting worse. Do you think there will be fewer migrants in 2016?
The UK is exempt from Schengen
But like Sweden, Britain promises generous welfare state benefits to anyone who gets in the country. You could argue that a culture should be kind to strangers. You’d probably be right. But there is always a cost, in both money and social cohesion. Someone has to pay.
As someone from a country of immigrants, I’m all for adding a lot of variety to the social mix. Migrants can be some of the hardest working and most productive members of a society. But Sweden has accepted more migrants and refugees, per capita, than any other country. Perhaps it is finding out that there are limits to how many newcomers you can welcome into a small country.
Leave aside the social, ethical, and philosophical aspects of the issue. It’s more than a “migration crisis”. It’s an “existential crisis” for the European Union itself, according to New York University Professor Nouriel Roubini. And in 2016, the survival of the EU is “ground zero” for geopolitics.
Roubini wrote yesterday that EU disintegration is a bigger geopolitical issue this year than the Sunni-Shia conflict in the Middle East. It’s bigger than territorial disputes in the South China Sea. And it’s bigger than the low-level conflict between Russia and Ukraine. Why? He writes:
“Those who argue that the migration crisis also poses an existential threat to Europe are right. But the issue is not the million newcomers entering Europe in 2015. It is the 20 million more who are displaced, desperate, and seeking to escape violence, civil war, state failure, desertification, and economic collapse in large parts of the Middle East and Africa. If Europe is unable to find a coordinated solution to this problem and enforce a common external border, the Schengen Agreement will collapse and internal borders between the EU member states will reappear.”
Schengen dominos
Roubini reckons the collapse of Schengen could trigger other dominos: Greece finally falling out with its creditors and leaving (or being kicked out of) the EU. ‘Grexit’ triggering a run on the euro. And even though Britain doesn’t use Europe’s common currency, Roubini believes ‘Grexit’ would make ‘Brexit’ more likely.
And then?
If Britain leaves the EU, the Nordic states (Sweden, Norway, and Finland) might follow. And it might not stop there. It will reopen the issue of whether Scotland should leave the UK, or Catalonia should leave Spain.
Is all this catastrophic? Or just the natural devolution of political power when a centralising project fails? The answer to that question may be interesting but irrelevant if Roubini is right. The migration crisis has made the survival of the EU one of the major topics for 2016.
Category: The End of Europe