In the city of Rosenheim in southern Germany, giant tents are being constructed to accommodate asylum seekers, while elsewhere migrants have been housed at sites including sport halls.
Advertisement
And until European leaders get to grips with this crisis the death toll will continue to rise.
“The shit is just about to hit the fan”, Timo Lochocki of the German Marshall Fund, a US-German think tank, told Mother Jones.
Refugees go through a cornfield in Roszke, Hungary, on Saturday, September 12, 2015, as they try to avoid waiting for buses that will take them to camps at a temporary point after an hourslong trek through Serbia. But if the sense of drift over this crisis is not arrested in the coming days, that could be the least of Europe’s problems.
“And then the question truly arises”, he says, “if you are really going to renationalize, why would you still need a common currency at all?”
Austria’s public deficit is set to reach 2.0 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) this year, according to forecasts released in the spring.
That doesn’t mean a right-wing takeover is imminent. Eastern European countries argue that Germany’s welcoming stance has only encouraged more to come.
“We were in a situation that registration was no longer possible given the large numbers of refugees”.
And neither Alternative for Germany nor the NPD, Germany’s neo-Nazi party, is particularly powerful. Merkel defended her government’s decision last week to re-introduce border controls, especially along the country’s border with Austria, saying this was necessary to enable the registration of asylum-seekers and to facilitate and orderly entry into this country.
Ever mindful of its wartime past, Germany may now be showing that the exercise of power in today’s shrinking world lies less in military might than in moral example. While her open-door policy transformed her image nearly overnight from the scourge of the Greeks into the conscience of Europe, it threatens to split the continent and presents a domestic high-wire balancing act even more dramatic than the euro crisis.
It would also leave migrants who are refused asylum but who can not be deported to their home countries under German law with neither the right to work nor the right to social benefits, putting them in an impossible situation.
The move on Sunday signalled the extent of the crisis confronting Europe, a region where a decades-long policy of open borders, once a source of pride and unity, is eroding as nations struggle to cope with a record flow of migrants.
The Hungarian police announced Tuesday that the country has closed its borders to the influx of migrants and refugees attempting to cross into the European Union. The website of Der Spiegel described the border closure as “the end of the summer fairy tale”. For one thing, Eastern Europe (I’m using the term to distinguish these countries from places like Germany and Austria although “Central Europe is generally preferred.) has relatively little experience with large-scale immigration and until recently was generally considered a source of migrants rather than a destination”.
‘It is not fair if those member states that are particularly humane and take on the task and cost of looking after the asylum-seekers are punished by Brussels for excessive spending, ‘ Vienna’s finance minister Hans-Joerg Schelling said.
Advertisement
“They haven’t basically planned for this”, Lochocki said of the German government.
