When British Remainers claim to “believe in Europe” — most of them literally don’t know what they’re talking about. As one travels eastward from the pointy western end of the continent, Europe just keeps widening out. It contains entire nations and peoples that most of us haven’t even heard of. How about Kalmykia — Europe’s only Buddhist state? Or the ginger-headed Udmurts? Or the Alans of South Ossetia? 

Faraway countries of which we know little? Evidently. But Europe beyond the borders of the EU is still out there — and it is currently reminding us of its existence.  

Most urgently, there is the crisis on the border between Poland and Belarus. The Belarusian government has discovered that migration from the Middle East and elsewhere can be used as a weapon against the EU. Migrants are being flown to Belarus, bused to the Polish border and then pushed across the frontier. The Polish authorities are pushing back, trapping thousands of people in the no-man’s-land between the two states. As temperatures drop, we’re coming closer to a full-blown humanitarian crisis — and perhaps to armed conflict. A regime capable of using people as weapons is also capable of giving weapons to people. 

Meanwhile, a thousand kilometres to the south another crisis is brewing. The Dayton Agreement that brought peace to Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1995 is breaking down. This fragile state is divided into two main parts — Republika Srpska (predominantly populated by ethnic Serbs) and the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in which ethnic Bosniaks and Croats are the biggest groups. 

It was never the most robust of arrangements, but now the Bosnian Serb leader, Milorad Dodik, is making moves towards independence for Republika Srpska. Most ominously, he wants to divvy up the Bosnian armed forces. What could possibly go wrong?

Unlike in the Nineties, this is happening right on the EU’s border. Bosnia is roughly triangular in shape and is surrounded on two of its three sides by Croatia, which is now an EU member. If the Bosnian state collapses, then that could bring the EU into conflict with Serbia and Russia — both of which support the Bosnian Serbs. And if that wasn’t enough, Turkey could be dragged in too — as the patron of the predominantly Muslim Bosniaks. 

Turkey is itself a potential source of instability for Europe. President Erdogan has long been a thorn in the EU’s side, but at least he was willing to do a deal on curbing the flow of illegal migrants from the Middle East (in return for money). However, he’s reported to be in poor health — and his party’s grip on power is slipping. Polls show that the opposition is in with a chance of winning the next general election. Whether they’ll be allowed to win is anyone’s guess. But one way or another, disruption is coming — and that could mean an end to the immigration deal. 

Could the European Union cope with multiple crises on its borders? No, because it just doesn’t have the capacity. You only have to look at Ursula von der Leyen’s statement on the Belarus border crisis. She condemns the actions of the Belarusian authorities — describing them as a “hybrid attack”; but she only offers unspecified “support” to the Polish, Lithuanian and Latvian governments. Significantly, there’s no mention of the only EU agency capable of acting in this matter — which is Frontex — the European Border and Coast Guard Agency. Even though Frontex is headquartered in Warsaw, the Polish government has declined the agency’s help. Clearly, the Poles have little confidence in the EU’s approach to border control.

In Bosnia, it’s the US keeping a lid on the situation. The EU has been of scant use — it couldn’t even stop the circulation of a diplomatic note that proposed a three-way partition of Bosnia (between Serbia, Croatia and a rump state for the Bosniaks). The Americans have rejected this dangerous idea, but what happens if they lose patience with policing Europe and tell the Europeans to sort themselves out? 

As for Turkey, any agreement with the EU depends on the ongoing cooperation of the Turks — or, when that’s not enough, turning a blind-eye to the alleged strong-arm tactics of the Greek and Bulgarian authorities.

What all of these crises reveal is the essential powerlessness of the European Union. We’ve been told ad nauseam that the EU is the producer of peace in Europe. The truth, however, is that the EU is the product of it. 

A political entity that lacks an army, a police force or the legitimacy conferred by national sovereignty, cannot survive without an international order created by others. If this order is compromised — even to a limited extent — then things start falling apart. Just look at the refugee crisis of 2014 and 2015, which contributed to Brexit, the election of a populist government in Italy and the tightening grip of the Hungarian leader, Viktor Orbán.

What would a deeper, longer crisis do to the EU? A number of possibilities present themselves, none of them good. The least worst option is that America, through NATO, rides to the rescue; in which case the western pecking order is settled for years to come. Alternatively, Brussels does a deal with Moscow — and essentially pays Danegeld to the Russians from hereon out. 

Or maybe the EU could start manning-up — either by creating an actual European Army or expanding Frontex into a de facto military. However, that creates a problem of democratic accountability. Von der Leyen as Commander-in-Chief? I hardly think so. A more likely scenario is more of what we’re seeing already — which is the EU relying on its eastern member states to hold the line. That means allowing them (indeed, paying them) to do things their way — which won’t be pretty. As Aris Roussinos argues, expect to see more barbed wire, more walls, more tear gas and worse.

We should certainly expect Belarus — with Russia in the background — to keep up the pressure. If the line breaks, then illegal migrants will pour into Europe fuelling a renewed populist backlash. Don’t forget there’s a Presidential election in France next year and that candidates of the far Right are in second and third place. 

Of course, the line may hold. But what would be the price of that? I’m reminded of the fate of the Roman Empire. Long before the western half of the empire fell and Rome was sacked, the institutions that had defined the state were reduced to hollow shells. That’s because all the real power had leaked away to the legions on the troubled frontier. 

The decisions that actually mattered weren’t made in the Senate or anywhere else in Rome, but in the forts and watch towers along the Danube and the Rhine. In the Crisis of the Third Century, marked by multiple invasions and rebellions, the Roman establishment was usurped by a series of “barracks emperors” — leaders of men who owed their position to soldiery not aristocracy. 

Obviously, the EU is not the Roman Empire — but it is an empire of sorts. And like all empires it has to choose a frontier and defend it. 

The stability of the EU currently depends on the sort of politician who can agree a budget proposal in a committee meeting or strike a backroom deal over dinner in a Brussels restaurant. It’s a dull, bureaucratic and sometimes corrupt culture of government. If, however, the EU comes to depend on the sort of person who can repel a column of cold and hungry migrants, then we’ll look back on the present era with fondness.

The country’s Westernised middle classes, centred on Kabul, and ethnic and religious minorities like the Shia Hazara, who played a central role in the 2015 migrant crisis, are unlikely to try their chances under Taliban rule, as long as the door to Europe remains open. Already, Afghans make up 42% of the refugees and migrants living in squalid conditions on Greece’s eastern island camps, perhaps an even larger proportion than they did in 2015 when the large presence of Afghan Hazaras was dramatically underreported in the West, distracted by the Syria crisis, despite Afghans constituting a major portion of the migratory flow, including 2/3rds of Sweden’s 2015 arrivals.

But in any case, the Europe of 2021 is not the Europe of 2015, and Europe’s leaders have no appetite for a return of the political turmoil that followed Merkel’s experiment with open borders. Distracted by Brexit and imported American culture wars, Britain’s remaining pro-EU contingent have neglected to follow the developing consensus on the continent, where the hard line on migration for which Viktor Orbán was lambasted by liberal commentators back in 2015 has now entered the political mainstream. 

When asked whether Germany had a duty to open the country’s doors to Afghan migration, even Merkel herself recently responded that “we cannot solve all of these problems by taking everyone in”. Instead she encouraged, rather unrealistically, a dialogue with the Taliban so “that people can live as peacefully as possible in the country”. In neighbouring Austria, Chancellor Kurz’s centre-right/Green coalition has responded to the surge in arrivals on its eastern borders with the deployment of the army and angry protests that European migration policy has “failed”, with the country’s Interior Minister Karl Nehammer complaining that “we have one of the biggest Afghan communities in the whole of Europe,” and that “it cannot be the case that Austria and Germany are solving the Afghanistan problem for the EU.”

The Austrian government has decisively swung towards the Central European approach of hardened borders and expedited returns to countries of origin, with Kurz stressing that he would not halt deportations to Afghanistan, as Sweden and Finland already have, a reflection of a public mood darkened by recent high-profile crimes carried out by Afghan asylum seekers. Like centre-left Denmark, which is accelerating both its return of refugees to Syria and the search, apparently along with the UK, of third-party countries in Africa willing to host refugees and migrants on its behalf, the new mood in Austria is not the result of the populist Right coming to power, but instead of centrist parties adopting solutions that were in 2015 considered the sole preserve of the radical Right.

Suggested reading

Europe's guilty conscience

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

As in Spain, where the next government is likely to be a coalition between the centre-right PP and the radical right Vox, in Italy a coalition government between the centre-Right and the far-Right looms in the wings. Indeed, Salvini’s Lega is now so outflanked on its Right by the rising power of Georgia Meloni’s post-fascist Brothers of Italy party, the most popular political party in the country, that it can be considered centre-Right itself, so far has the country’s Overton Window shifted. In France, where Macron has angrily rejected an imported American racial culture war in favour of the country’s homegrown culture war over Islam and the possibility of civil war, the soi-disant liberal saviour from the perceived populist menace has moved so far to the Right that the roughly even chances of a Le Pen victory in the forthcoming presidential election seem almost irrelevant in defining the country’s political trajectory. 

Perhaps it is Greece that highlights best not just the shifting mood in Europe’s external border states, but the shifting mood in Brussels itself. When Erdogan opened Turkey’s land borders with Greece in spring last year, bussing migrants to the border fences in a confrontation that came uncomfortably close to war, Greece’s militarised response unexpectedly won applause rather than censure from the EU hierarchy, as well as the swift dispatch of both Frontex border guards and funds to build an impassable border wall, now being beefed up with EU surveillance zeppelins and drones. Rather than a rerun of the 2015 migrant crisis, when Europe functioned as a ready source of monetary tribute to an embattled Erdogan, last year’s Evros crisis functioned as a dry run for the coming Afghan wave.

After all, when Belarus’s autocrat Lukashenko began funnelling migrants to the Lithuanian border a few weeks ago, Frontex immediately responded with the deployment of border guards, and support for Lithuania’s planned new 550-km border wall — with Estonia even donating 100km of barbed wire to its struggling ally. Once again, the exact same fortification project Orbán was condemned for in 2015 was hurriedly paid for by the EU in 2020, and presented as a heartening symbol of EU solidarity by 2021. From the Baltic to the Aegean, walls are going up across the eastern marches of the European continent, which will soon define the bloc against the huddling masses straining to get in. Even in Turkey, where the secular opposition CHP party has accelerated its demands to return the country’s three million Syrian refugees within two years and made alarmed noises about the increasing flow of Afghan migrants across the Iranian border, the ruling AKP party is constructing concrete border walls to stem the flow from Afghanistan, just as it has constructed a concrete wall all along its borders with Syria, and deploys lethal force against Syrians trying to sneak through.

Suggested reading

The fate of the 'Anywhere' people

By Robert Tombs

Turkey has become, indeed, the archetype of Europe’s new border guard states, the model for what will no doubt become a ring of authoritarian states bordering the continent’s southern and eastern fringes, whose rulers will be lavishly bribed to keep migrants and refugees from landing on European shores, a relationship somewhere between clients and blackmailers. Like Erdogan, who quickly learned to deploy migrants as a weapon against Europe whenever he was under pressure, Lukashenko has learned the value of Europe’s desire to keep migrants away while not actively being seen to dirty its own hands with the rough business of border management. 

The Moroccan government was equally quick to learn this lesson, recently waving through thousands of migrants to Spain’s North African foothold of Ceuta after the Spanish government granted asylum to a Western Saharan leader, and receiving a handsome bribe to take them back again. Meanwhile, Europe’s only interest in Libya is which faction can most effectively police migrants, just as its only interest in Tunisia’s ongoing coup will be the maintenance of this summer’s border policing deal. Despite the difficulties raised by American financial sanctions, the EU even appears to be eyeing up Iran as one of the potential host nations for the coming Afghan exodus, a dynamic which, if it takes effect, will surely dramatically affect all other aspects of its difficult diplomatic dance with the country. 

So while handing responsibility for keeping migrants out of Europe to regional states may be domestically easier for EU leaders, particularly those from Northwestern and Nordic countries with Green-tinged parties ideologically committed to pro-migration policies, it also offers neighbouring nations handy weapons to deploy against the bloc for their own geopolitical purposes. The great difficulty for European politics is how to balance these opposing tendencies: it is difficult to think, given the steady rightward drift of European politics, that an Open Borders attitude will win out against the simpler solution of a hands-on European effort to prevent migrants entering the EU. 

The expansion of the EU’s Frontex border agency into a 10,000 strong armed rapid deployment force indicates the direction of travel. Indeed, we are already seeing early manifestations of this approach, both in the pushbacks of migrants in the Aegean by the Greek coastguard with Frontex support, and in the growing legal restrictions on the activity of Western European NGO boats blamed for accelerating the migrant flow. Both were placed with the quiet acquiescence of Brussels, despite the protests of Northern European Green parties.

Suggested reading

Why do dictators rise and fall?

By Aris Roussinos

All this is, of course, a dry run for the almost certainly militarised and exclusionary border policing efforts that will grapple with the vast population movements from Africa and South Asia that will attend the coming decades of climate change. Already, Bangladeshis are the largest single national group making the dangerous crossing from North Africa, and it is not difficult to see a desertifying Sahel or collapsing Lebanon adding new sudden crises for European leaders torn between their desire to maintain allegiance to postwar liberal ideals on asylum and the increasing desire of their voting publics to reject them. The avowedly open, cosmopolitan Europe of the 1990s and 2000s is already dead, and even the lame duck Merkel and her ailing CDU party have abandoned the Wir schaffen das attitude of 2015 in the face of the coming wave. 

The British debate over the Nationality and Borders Bill, insular and self-regarding as all British political debate somehow manages to be, therefore ignores this rapidly shifting European context. In some ways, this must be a relief to a Conservative government that has shown itself incapable of satisfying its core voter base’s demands to stem the flow of irregular migration across the Channel: without any action by the UK itself, the EU will find itself drawn towards a Fortress Europe approach that will, eventually, choke the flow arriving on Kent’s shingle beaches. 

Just as France’s Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin demands a Frontex deployment with aerial surveillance assets along the Channel coast, Priti Patel’s border woes will be solved by European leaders without meaningful British input other than funding analogous to the tribute the EU hands in desperation to Erdogan. The walls are going up across Europe: we will not see them coming down again in our lifetimes.

When their small boat left the continent last week, the weather was relatively calm. But half way across the channel the wind picked up and the crossing was terrifying, waves crashing over the side of the boat. I doubt their young daughter — seven perhaps — will ever forget it.

I’m not interested in arguing the toss about the rights and wrong of taking a young girl on so perilous a journey. Those of us who have safe and comfortable lives over here should listen more and talk less. The parents who turned up at my church were clearly fighting for their daughter’s future in the way they thought best, and that is a parent’s job. Stuff your politics if you disagree. Humanitarianism trumps politics.

Save The Children estimates that over 200,000 unaccompanied children have sought refuge in Europe over the last five years. Seven hundred of them perished at sea. These statistics are just so unspeakably appalling that I think we block out the full horror of them, unable or unwilling to comprehend. While I cuddle up to my children in bed at night, other people’s children are on their own in the dark, frightened, in a boat bobbing about on the Med. Some of them die that way. It’s hard to think about it for long. But we must.

Many of those who survive the trip go missing. Lost in Europe, a collective of journalists, estimate that between 2018 and 2020 over 18,000 unaccompanied refugee children have disappeared from state care in Europe. They came here, on their own, seeking a better life, escaping horrors back home. And thousands of them have now vanished from official records.

The picture painted by various NGO’s working in the field is horrendous. There are now more than 72,000 refugees and migrants stranded in Greece, Cyprus and the Balkans, including more than 22,500 children, according to Unicef. “They are unable to move forward, unwilling to go back to their home countries and struggling to fit into their host communities.” These children, they say, are increasingly showing signs of deep psychological trauma. Those who are not herded into camps, sleep in doorways or under bridges. Some are taken in by people they hardly know — to God knows what fate.

At the same time, reports continue to emerge of the callousness and brutality being used by EU member states to deter refugees from seeking a new life in Europe. The Border Violence Monitoring Network’s annual report makes for horrendous reading. Stories of the use of un-muzzled attack dogs being used on migrants. Of migrants being stripped, their clothes set on fire, then being pushed back across the border, naked. Of people being detained in freezer trucks. The report describes “forms of violence and abuse that we assert amounts to torture or inhuman treatment”.

Suggested reading

Europe's guilty conscience

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

And the risks for those travelling to Europe by boats are worsening. Frontext — the EU’s increasingly expensive border force — has recently taken out a E100m contract with an Israeli military company for the purchase of drones to monitor migrants in European waters. Some see this as a clever way of keeping tabs on migrants without having the responsibility to save them from danger. Ships monitoring migrants have to rescue those who are at risk of drowning. Drones, conveniently, have no such ability — thus no responsibility.

Since the 2016 referendum, so much of the migration debate has been forced through the narrow weir of Brexit. And this has distorted things in at least two ways. First, it encourages Remainers not to hear a bad word about the EU, and its increasingly bad behaviour. And on the other side, it encourages the idea that leaving the EU has answered the migration issue, when it patently hasn’t. Our collective moral responsibility to these people is more properly basic than our membership, or otherwise, of some European political bloc.

Over the last few years, I’ve been involved in a crazily ambitious theatre project called The Walk. It involves a 3.5m puppet of a refugee girl, Little Amal, walking 8,000km  from the Turkish/Syrian border, over to Greece, up through Europe, and eventually ending up in Manchester. It is planned that Little Amal will land in Europe in August, on the Greek island of Chios. Where, according to The Walk website “she hears a group of women singing to her. Music that meets her across the sea…as she takes her first steps in Europe, she is invited to take part in a momentous concert created by the local orchestra.”

The reality of Chios is very different. It is a place where, earlier this month, a young Somali man died alone in his tent and was then partially consumed by rats. Dr Apostolos Veizis, executive director in Greece of the international humanitarian organisation Intersos has described it as being “like a scene out of the middle ages” He went on: “Greek island camps are synonymous with overcrowding and inhuman conditions. People are exposed on a daily basis to rats, rubbish and violence. In clinics across the islands children are often admitted with signs of rat bites. You have to wonder if treating them like this is a deliberate policy choice of the European Union so that more don’t come.”

Perhaps it sounds a little grotesque, a puppet being feted with song whilst real people are being eaten by rats. But that is precisely its point. It exposes the vast distance between how we would like to treat people, and how we actually do. And we should all be shamed by it.