A Modest Step for the Refugees

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD / International New York Times | 24 September 2015

Rachel Levit

The European Union finally did the very least it could do on Tuesday and voted to distribute 120,000 asylum seekers among member nations. That will relieve some of the pressure on the frontline countries flooded by the unending flow of refugees from the Middle East and North Africa. But the long delay in taking even this modest step, and the bitter resistance of four Central European states, offer a graphic display of the grave threat posed by the crisis to the fundamental principles of the union.

Almost half a million people have arrived in Europe this year, most of them entering the European Union through Greece, Italy or Hungary. Yet despite the humanitarian and political challenge posed by the flood, the union has agreed only on the most basic responses. Tuesday’s vote of E.U. interior ministers — which requires compliance from the countries that voted no — came after weeks of futile efforts to reach a consensus on how to relocate at least some of the arrivals.

Details of the plan are still being worked out, and it is hard to see how E.U. countries will prevent asylum seekers from moving on to the haven of their choice, usually Germany. That is one of the arguments used by the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia in voting against the plan. But the logistics are not the issue. European Union members were asked to share the biggest burden the Continent has been saddled with since World War II, and some of the newest members shamefully tried to cop out.

The refugee crisis, and before it the Greek debt crisis, have made plain that two fundamental achievements of the E.U. — the single currency and borderless travel — lack the necessary foundation of unified rules and institutions to function effectively in times of crisis. Both were essentially political attempts to graft the attributes of a single state onto a collection of largely independent states with only limited central controls. And not all countries signed on to the euro, the border-free Schengen zone or other joint obligations — Britain, Ireland and Denmark, for example, are not bound by the current refugee quotas.

But with all its inherent weaknesses, the European Union from the outset stood for more than trade or movement of peoples. It was intended to replace centuries of Continental warfare with a community of shared democratic and humane values. That’s what East European countries proudly signed on for when they broke free of Soviet-imposed Communist dictatorships in the 1990s.

That unity is being sorely tested today. Instead of coming together to cope with the crisis, many countries have retreated into a beggar-thy-neighbor stance [In economics, a beggar-thy-neighbour policy is an economic policy through which one country attempts to remedy its economic problems by means that tend to worsen the economic problems of other countries]. Germany, Austria, Hungary and Slovenia have re-established temporary border controls. Nationalist, populist and anti-E.U. parties have grown in strength. Slovakia, whose quota is a mere 802 refugees, has raised the loudest protest, with Prime Minister Robert Fico vowing to defy the E.U. vote.

At this point, interior ministers were right to stop trying for consensus and to impose quotas through a vote. Greece, Italy and Hungary simply cannot absorb the thousands who keep arriving, and the union simply cannot afford to scuttle what it stands for.