The Fire Forging Europe

STOCKHOLM - In 2003, when the European Union drafted its first security strategy, the continent’s citizens lived in a seemingly safe world. Indeed, the document’s opening sentence confidently proclaimed that “Europe has never been so prosperous, so secure nor so free.” The EU’s foreign policy in its immediate neighborhood was focused on creating “a ring of friends,” from Morocco to Russia and the Black Sea.

Today, the outlook could not be more different. The continent’s leaders are struggling to respond to a world that, in the words of a recent policy document, “has become more dangerous, divided, and disorienting.” The EU finds itself surrounded by a ring of fire, not of friends, with hundreds of thousands of people crossing its borders to escape the inferno.
In the east, Russia’s intervention in Ukraine has driven some two million people from their homes – more than were displaced by the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina two decades ago. Meanwhile, the horrific violence in Syria and disorder in North Africa have resulted in a sharp rise in the number of refugees, sparking talk of yet another crisis in the EU.

To be sure, the challenge is hardly unique to Europe. What the media portrays as a tidal wave is, in reality, little more than a trickle. The vast majority of those who have fled the carnage in Syria live in camps in Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey. Indeed, at least ten Turkish cities are now home to more refugees than original inhabitants, and more Syrian refugees are living in Istanbul than in all the EU countries combined.

As a matter of statistics, the EU can clearly accommodate a million or more refugees. This would amount to just 0.2% of the EU’s total population – far less than the number of people that member countries will need to admit in the coming decades to replenish their aging workforces.
But that doesn’t mean it will be easy. Demographic data don’t capture the on-the-ground reality of asylum systems on the brink of collapse or economies struggling to provide housing and employment. The biggest challenge for many EU leaders will be managing the domestic political reaction, as xenophobic and nationalist forces seek to stoke and capitalize on anti-immigrant sentiment.

Indeed, at the EU level, the divisions and debates among national governments came to the fore as leaders struggled to reach an agreement on a quota system for the distribution of refugees among member states. In the end, the decision on the quota system was settled by majority vote, rather than the usual – and much preferred – rule of consensus (though the majority was large, with only four of 28 countries opposed).
Until this latest crisis, the discussion about the EU was dominated by talk of a divide between northern creditors and southern debtors. Today, the hot topic is the division between western countries that welcome the refugees and eastern countries that want nothing to do with them.

But, despite all the disagreements and tensions, the real story may be that there is near-unanimous agreement that the solution must be European; everybody agrees that the challenges posed by the new world disorder are best faced together. Indeed, some of the ideas proposed – a common asylum system and a common burden-sharing scheme – would constitute a clear transfer of sovereignty to the EU in an area once seen as a core national function.
Judging from opinion polls, the European public has come to see the EU’s handling of the euro crisis as a success. Confidence in the EU has increased from 48% to 58% during the last three years, after a period of steady decline; skepticism about the European project dropped from 46% to 36%.

The pattern is starting to look familiar: a new crisis, a new meeting in Brussels, an initially muddled response, debates and divisions, and then gradual, step-by-step progress toward a common response, driven by the realization that there is no other alternative.
In today’s disagreements lie the roots of a stronger union. The public no longer thinks of the European project as some utopian endeavor, an abstract attempt to forge an ever-closer union. Increasingly, the EU is coming to be seen as a practical – and absolutely essential – mechanism for a group of small countries to work together to meet their common challenges.

The people of the EU are indeed waking up to a world that is more dangerous, divided, and disorienting. But it is an awakening that is more likely to bring them together than to drive them apart.

Carl Bildt has served as  Sweden’s Prime Minister from 1991 to 1994, and Minister for Foreign Affairs from 2006-14.