The ideas behind the European project look even more hollow in the wake of the devastating terrorist attack in Paris.
What is left of the European idea? Whatever indeterminate reassurances emerge from however many EU “summits” on security and shared intelligence, everybody must know that Paris was the end.
The disastrously uncoordinated response to the refugee crisis had already discredited the notion that this was a unified federation in which all member states had an equal voice. The grand verbiage of solidarity and cooperation simply dissolved when faced with a global humanitarian disaster – precisely the sort of event which the whole edifice was originally constructed to avert. And then, with Paris, it became horrifyingly obvious that the open borders policy – the most sacred of the EU founding principles – was unsustainable. As Abdelhamid Abaaoud and his army of butchers had clearly known all along, and the migrant-traffickers were able to promise their desperate customers, once you set foot on the holy ground of Europe you may as well be invisible.
The failures of intelligence – about which European security agencies are now so exercised – may have been egregious but they were also inevitable. How can you track suspected terrorists across a continent which has not only dismantled boundaries but deconstructed the apparatus which allows nation states to monitor transit across their territory? When individual member states can unilaterally throw out the most basic agreements – as Germany did with the Dublin rules on asylum-seekers – why should anyone expect consistent, reliable cooperation on intelligence-gathering across national borders? Let alone any coherent, mutually agreed stand on the policing of external borders. After all, if there was such profound disagreement on migrant numbers – as there was between Germany and Hungary, for example – how likely was it that there could have been a policy on controlling external borders that would be acceptable to all member states?
The shambles that was the migrant crisis was predictably exploited by terrorists, but the chaos itself might have been avoided if separate nations had been dealing with migration instead of being forced to accept the consequences of the EU’s failure to act.