Mediterranean refugee crisis: EU reduced to impotent handwringing

A wonder of modern engineering, Europe’s longest road and rail bridge connects Scandinavia to mainland European transport networks by linking the Swedish city of Malmö with the Danish capital, Copenhagen, across the Øresund Strait.

The five-mile bridge has brought Sweden and Denmark closer together. But when it comes to dealing with newcomers, the two neighbours could not be further apart.

While the Danes practise the most restrictive immigration policies in the EU, the Swedes have the most open, liberal asylum and refugee regime in the union. It is difficult for foreign-born spouses of Danes to get residence rights in Denmark. But Sweden last year fielded more than 80,000 asylum applications, more than twice as many as Britain in a country six times smaller than the UK in population terms.

When it comes to immigration, Swedish and Danish policies are chalk and cheese. It highlights how, in the middle of a Mediterranean migration crisis that is seeing hundreds of thousands surrender their life savings to trafficking networks and risk their lives to reach Europe’s shores, there is no such thing as an EU or European immigration policy.

As the tragedies in the waters between Libya and Italy multiply weekly, newspapers, pundits, MPs, NGOs and charities are clamouring to know what “Europe” is doing. The desperation and the suffering, so evident on television and online, are fuelling fresh Brussels-bashing as unelected, self-satisfied eurocrats are said to be feckless, impotent and cynical in their lack of response.

In fact, the institutions of Brussels have minimal authority over immigration in Europe. It is Britain not Brussels that decides how many uprooted Syrians it will take in. It is Berlin and the German regional authorities that rule on whether asylum be granted or deportations ordered. This is why the interior ministers from 28 governments meeting on Monday in Luxembourg could agree or disagree on what to do about Lampedusa and why the European commission or parliament could only issue rather sad and empty words. In a demonstration of handwringing impotence, the commission in Brussels hit a new low on Sunday when it said it was “chagrined” at the fishing trawler capsizing on Saturday night, which may have left more than 900 dead.

“European” immigration policy is a mess, a patchwork of 28 hugely varying national systems constrained by national politics, shaped by culture and history. The big British and French ethnic minorities stem from the hangovers of empire. German multiculturalism derives from the foreign labour force, mainly Turkish, brought in to power the “economic miracle” of the 1960s. The newer EU countries of eastern Europe were, until a generation ago, closed societies behind the iron curtain with no experience of mass migration except the flight of their native populations from Russian occupation. They have continued to export their own people to western Europe since the first joined the EU in 2004.

Estonia had 155 asylum applications last year, according to EU figures. Germany had more than 200,000, almost a third of the asylum claims lodged in the EU (626,000 and nearly 200,000 up on the year before).

Between them, seven countries – or one-quarter of the EU – fielded more than three-quarters of asylum applications. Most fail. But although 425,000 claims were denied in 2013, less than 40% of those failures resulted in deportation.

There have been innumerable proposals over the past decade from Brussels for more common and coordinated policies, ranging from “blue card” schemes modelled on the US green card to making it easier for migrants to enter the EU legally.

But an EU-wide scheme is a no-go area for all national governments except those who might benefit from it, since it would entail a system of quotas and distributing refugees and asylum-seekers more equitably between EU countries.

Incumbent governments of the mainstream centre-left or -right are scared of this because immigration is one of the most toxic and incendiary topics in the national politics of so many countries.

The UK prime minister, David Cameron, is wary of Ukip on the issue and is fighting the rest of the EU over freedom of movement within Europe. The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, has an eye on the large recent anti-immigrant street protests against the “Islamification of the west” in her country.

When the former French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, sought to blunt the appeal of the anti-immigrant National Front of Marine Le Pen, he did so by sounding tough on immigration. The current socialist prime minister, Manuel Valls, tried the same trick when he was interior minister.

On Sunday, in Finland’s general election, the anti-immigrant populists called the (True) Finns party reached second place and a claim on coalition government. The Danish hard line over the past 15 years has been due to the influence on coalition politics of the nationalist, anti-immigrant Danish People’s party. Similar dynamics are at play in Austria, The Netherlands, Greece, Italy and Hungary.

In Brussels, too, the fear factor applies. When the Lampedusa tragedy left more than 300 dead off the Italian coast in October 2013, European immigration policy was put on to the agenda for an EU summit. Herman Van Rompuy, organising and chairing the summit, then had it removed until June last year. Why? Because national leaders were worried it would boost the fortunes of anti-immigrant parties in the European parliament elections in May last year.

Next Thursday in Milan, leaders of the European People’s party, the Christian democratic caucus that is the biggest in the European parliament, is to grapple with the issue.

Their – inconclusive – draft policy paper, obtained by the Guardian, talks of introducing quotas for distributing migrants across the 28 countries according to a country’s size and its wealth or depending on whether a certain “threshold” of refugee influx in a country has been exceeded.

“An intra-EU relocation scheme has to be elaborated,” the document says.

Next month, the European commission will unveil a European migration agenda blueprint tabling similar proposals.

Governments are likely to balk at such notions, as they always have. But the situation in the Mediterranean is spiralling out of control. A summer of “Europe’s shame” headlines looms. The politicians may be losing control as events dictate political outcomes.