CFR Daily News Brief: Migrants Take New Route to Europe

September 16, 2015

Daily News Brief

TOP OF THE AGENDA Migrants Take New Route to Europe Hundreds of migrants arrived (Guardian) in Croatia on Wednesday, paving a new route to Europe after Hungary effectively sealed its border with Serbia. Croatia, the EU's newest member, said that it would help the migrants reach their destinations. EU interior ministers are slated to hold an emergency meeting (Irish Times) again next week in another attempt to reach an agreement on a proposal to relocate 120,000 migrants in Europe. On Tuesday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and her Austrian counterpart Werner Faymann called for an EU summit (Deutsch Welle) to address the crisis and urged for a unified response among member states.

ANALYSIS "It should now be apparent to all that the complex architecture of EU agreements on migration and refugees, like that embodied in the recently vulnerable euro currency system, is not working in the way its architects had expected or at least hoped. These agreements will need thoughtful scrutiny and careful adjustments," writes Michael S. Teitelbaum in Foreign Affairs. "Every additional border control merely displaces the problem further down the line. Tensions between Hungary and Serbia will surely grow. Later this week there may be trouble along the Serbia-Macedonia border, and then on Macedonia’s border with Greece. And with 5,000 people still reaching the Greek islands from Turkey every day, the dangers of bottlenecks are clear. Meanwhile people-smugglers are already scouting out new routes into central Europe, perhaps via Croatia and Slovenia, or by sailing from Albania to southern Italy. Political tensions are growing as markedly as migratory ones," writes the Economist. "Europe's resistance to uncontrolled inflows of migrants stems not from a sense of superiority or strength, or racial snobbery, but from a fraught sense of weakness, an abiding fear of itself and its own history of fragmentation and strife. The EU's leaders know what a creaky and contrary architecture of nationalities they’re upholding. They know how constantly it cracks, threatening increasingly to do so irreparably," writes Melik Kaylan in Politico EU.