Migration crisis tears at EU's cohesion and tarnishes its image

(Agencies) Updated: 2015-09-06 13:50

EAST-WEST DIVIDE

For the first time in a decade since 10 central European countries joined the EU, the crisis has opened up an east-west divide, with most new member states refusing to accept quotas of refugees, some explicitly citing religious grounds.

That prompted Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann to say that, if the eastern states did not share the burden, the EU should reconsider its future financial aid for their development.

Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, from which refugees fled to western Europe to escape Communist crackdowns in 1956 and 1968, are among those most vehemently opposed to any mandatory distribution of asylum seekers now.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has said the migrants pose a threat to Europe's "Christian roots", while both Slovakia and the Czech Republic have said they would take in only a handful of preferably Christian refugees.

Orban has accused Merkel of exacerbating the crisis by announcing Germany's willingness to admit large numbers of Syrians, encouraging more migrants to risk their lives in a scramble for Europe that has overwhelmed Hungarian authorities.

"Since the beginning of the euro crisis, Europe became part of the moral problem, not part of the solution," said Antonio Vitorino, president of the Jacques Delors Institute, a pro-EU think-tank. "This migration crisis adds a little bit more to the loss of the exemplary role of European integration."

The socialist Portuguese former EU justice and home affairs commissioner, who helped frame the flawed asylum rules that have crumbled under the weight of this year's influx, said Europe's profile as "a land of human dignity and respect for international commitments" was at stake.

In areas of the world such as southeast Asia and Latin America that once looked to the EU as a model of regional integration, people were now saying: "You used to teach us how to solve our problems, and now you're unable to solve your own problems."

Vitorino acknowledged that the Dublin convention he helped draft, which stipulates that the country where a refugee first enters the EU is responsible for handling the asylum claim, was unfair to states on Europe's fringes, which received little financial or practical help.

"Practice shows that the system did not work," he said. "Now things have got out of control."

Europe needed a common asylum policy capable of filtering applicants, sending home those who were not entitled to asylum and relocating genuine refugees according to member states' capacity to receive them.