One image dominates the media coverage of Europe’s migration crisis: a heart-rending shot of Aylan Kurdi, a three-year-old Syrian boy, dressed in red T-shirt and blue trousers, lifeless on the beach in Bodrum, Turkey. He is apparently one of 12 people who drowned trying to reach the nearby Greek island of Kos to start a new life in Europe. The same boy appears in a less distressing shot used in many newspapers, where he is cradled in the arms of a Turkish policeman.
On the inside pages there is a different image: thousands of would-be refugees – many of them from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan – stranded at a railway station in Budapest, the capital of Hungary. The emotional charge is anger: having trekked up through the Balkans to find themselves marooned in Hungary, they are demanding the right to go to Germany, where they may receive asylum.
The focus of the migration story has shifted through the summer months from the Mediterranean, where more than 2,600 have died trying to reach Italy and Greece, to the Greek islands, and now to central Europe. By the end of the year, Germany expects to receive 800,000 applications for asylum, four times the number in 2014.
At every stage comparisons have been drawn with Europe’s last such crisis, at the end of the Second World War in 1945, when the surrender of Germany left more than 11 million displaced people looking for a home. They were prisoners of war and slave labourers, as well as whole populations driven out of their homes or fleeing the advance of Soviet troops. Some had fought on the wrong side and feared to go home. Within eight years, no more than 200,000 mostly elderly people remained in camps. The problem was essentially solved.
How come then that modern Europe, a thriving continent not ravaged by war, cannot cope with a humanitarian crisis? Europe is flailing around, with tensions rising between north and south, east and west, and rich and poor. It mirrors the crisis of the euro, the European common currency, where a project designed to bring the continent together has ended up highlighting the fissures of geography and wealth. Both crises together testify to a dangerous fraying of the European project.
In 1945, things were different: victorious allied generals were the real power in the land, and soldiers had the authority to get things done. There was also an extraordinary political will to rebuild Europe so that the cancers of the 1930s – interstate conflict and fascism – never recurred.
Not that polite opinion was any more welcoming to the poor: at that time the wealthier parts of Europe considered Italians and Poles sleeping at railway stations as peasants or criminals.
The definition of who is a European is now much broader. Angela Merkel, the German chancellor who has taken the lead in the migrant crisis in the absence of any other figure willing to defend “European values”, has told her compatriots that Germany should be proud of being a country of immigration. This is a step change: it was only in 1999 that German law was changed to make it easier for the children of migrants – then euphemistically called “guest workers” – to acquire German citizenship.
Germany has said it will relax European Union rules to allow Syrians to claim asylum in Germany, rather than in the first EU country they arrive in, which would generally be Italy, Greece, Malta, Hungary or Spain.
Other countries, with the honourable exception of Sweden, are not so welcoming. Various reasons are given – high unemployment (Spain), generous state funding for Syrian refugees in Jordan and Turkey (Britain) or the fact that most migrants are not Christian (Slovakia). But ultimately all governments in Europe – and most particularly France – live in fear of right-wing, xenophobic and anti-EU parties that gain strength from the migration crisis.
This is not to say that a new Hitler is about to stalk the land, but insurgent parties could make stable government impossible or, in the case of Britain, swing the vote in the forthcoming referendum on membership of the EU.
In sum, the problem is that the European project is an explosive mixture of integration, democracy and national sovereignty. These three together form an unstable compound. In politics you cannot have all of them at the same time. Integration within the wider union requires a loss of sovereignty, which entails curbs on democratic choice, as the Greeks have discovered in their debt negotiations with their fellow eurozone countries.
Yet, the European Union is still a grouping of nation states, each with its own government. And governments break the rules when they see fit – as has happened with Greece and Italy failing to register the asylum claims of migrants but sending them further north.
These two countries can hardly be blamed when the vaunted European solidarity is signally lacking when it comes to helping them. In a word, the European Union has no Allied general to organise crisis management.
At the moment, the migrants are blocked in Budapest because the Hungarian government is insisting on following the rules: the migrants should be documented and live in refugee camps there while their claims are processed. But Hungary approves fewer than 10 per cent of claims. Germany approves more than 40 per cent. The migrants want to go to Germany.
Germany’s courageous stand is beginning to shame the rest of Europe. Even some of the harsh anti-foreign language of the British tabloids is becoming more restrained.
The crisis has reached such proportions that Brussels must come up with a plan, for fear that one of the great achievements – the free movement of people inside the so-called Schengen zone of EU countries – will start to unravel. Some arrangement to distribute of the migrants may take shape next week. From beyond the grave that poor Syrian boy may warm Europe’s cold heart by a few degrees.
Alan Philps is a commentator on global affairs
On Twitter @aphilps