The European Union embraced a new hardline agenda to defend its borders against illegal migration last night as Angela Merkel warned that the fate of the bloc depended on addressing the three-year crisis over migration.

Europe’s growing crop of populist leaders claimed victory for their “Fortress Europe” agenda which saw the European Council summit in Brussels putting deterrence and the protection of EU borders at the forefront of its migration policy.

“Europe has many challenges but migration could end up determining Europe's destiny,” Mrs Merkel told the German parliament before the summit, with her own political future hanging in the balance following a rebellion against her softer migration policies by her Bavarian coalition partners.

The draft summit conclusions showed the German leader’s long-standing calls for an inclusive approach to migration playing second fiddle to the need to secure Europe's borders and process illegal migrants off-shore so they could be returned to their countries of origin.

In a sign of the high stakes at the table Italy took the highly unusual step of blocking the entire summit conclusions in order to extract concessions on migration. The move forced Jean-Claude Juncker the EU Commission president to cancel a planned press conference.

Senior Brussels sources said that Italy was demanding that the EU agreed that every migrant arriving in Italy was “arriving in Europe” in a bid to force other EU states to share the burden of migration.