Ed West Ed West

Would the migrant crisis have happened without the EU?

For those people already bored with the interminable European question, Radio 4 might get unbearable over the next few months. Yesterday morning the subject was being discussed, in the context of David Cameron’s ‘deal’, and someone from Brussels was explaining that ‘more Europe’ was needed to solve the migrant/refugee crisis.

She never got to explain further what was meant by this, but isn’t it actually the case that the migrant crisis is related to the EU? For example, would Greece face a wave of 62,000 illegal migrants a month were it just an independent country that had its own borders and a government with responsibility towards its citizens?

The inherent weakness of the European financial system is that it has monetary union but not fiscal union; this is the worst of both worlds. It allows individual states to be as reckless and incompetent as they like without bearing the cost alone, which is instead shared: i.e. Daddy in Berlin will settle the bill. This is what happened with Greece in particular, which should not have been allowed into the Eurozone but was, for political and historical reasons. The Eurozone probably needs full fiscal union, but to make such a large step would have been politically unpopular, and too much of a leap for an institution that used the Monnet method.

Likewise EU migrant policy is a disaster because it is only as strong as its weakest states; free movement within the union would work fine only so long as the external border was strong, and only so long as the Union had one common authority that chose who got to live here. It’s like a group of flats that knock down their internal partitions to create a house share, only for one member to hold the

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