Intra-EU divergences over migration
September 9th, 2015Conservative columnists criticise the European Union for its poor performance in facing the migration crisis and believe that the polarization of opinions within the EU is likely to increase.
The EU has so far failed to resolve the migration crisis and is unlikely to perform better in future, Loretta Tóth writes in Magyar Hírlap. The conservative columnist recalls that despite the pledges made in the aftermath of the death of 900 migrants in April in the Mediterranean sea, the EU has done nothing to fight traffickers. The EU preaches inclusion and humanitarian values, but cannot handle mass migration, Tóth maintains. She goes on to predict that mandatory quotas will not help to settle the migration crisis, since refugees redistributed among member countries will hardly stay in the countries where they are allocated. In conclusion, in the absence of a meaningful solution Tóth expects tension and polarization to increase among EU member states.
In Heti Világgazdaság, Péter Techet contends that the economic crisis in Greece and the migration crisis have shown that the EU is completely ineffective or even useless. While the US takes in large cohorts of migrants every year, the EU is unable to provide humanitarian aid for migrants amounting to 0.1 per cent of its overall population. The conservative philosopher finds it sad that while the Right wants to halt migration in order to defend Christian Europe, the Left calls for the inclusion of migrants in the name of Christian humanitarian values. He suspects institutional reasons behind the EU’s inability to resolve the situation. Facing both the Greek crisis and the migration issue, the EU is divided and cannot decide whether the situation would require more integration or more national sovereignty. If the EU wants to become a confederation, Techet opines, border control and migration issues should be dealt with jointly, and no EU member state should be allowed to go bankrupt.