Following a bruising fight this week to agree a new quotas regime sharing 120,000 refugees across Europe, EU policymakers say that by Christmas member states will be embroiled in much bigger battles over how to distribute up to a million newcomers.



The signals emerging from two days of summitry in Brussels on Tuesday and Wednesday and days of non-stop negotiations behind the scenes suggest that the EU’s biggest refugee crisis is but in its infancy, and that Europe’s agony has barely begun.

The meetings of leaders and interior ministers produced breakthrough decisions in EU policy terms, but at the same time they hardly scratched the surface of an emergency whose scale is predicted to balloon by the end of the year.

A Brussels summit that ended early on Thursday began to heal the divisions and cool the tempers that have flared for months over what to do about immigration, fragmenting the union between east and west, north and south, big and small. The leaders did not decide very much but managed to communicate more civilly with one another, unlike in June when they engaged in an unseemly bout of recrimination until 3.30am.

The breakthrough came on Tuesday when EU interior ministers employed the blunt instrument of a majority vote to impose refugee quotas against the will of four central European countries and despite the strong reservations of many others and widespread doubts over whether compulsory sharing will work.

“We don’t believe it will ever be implemented,” said a senior diplomat in Brussels.

It was a damaging and divisive exercise in which Berlin, Brussels, and Paris prevailed. The European commission, the initiator of the quotas idea, thinks it has set a precedent for future action. But the experience was traumatic for some and the question is will it ever be repeated, especially when the numbers are likely to be much higher the next time.

Donald Tusk, the conservative Polish politician and European Council president who chaired the summit, did not convene the emergency session until he had visited the camps holding four million Syrians in Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey. He seems to have been shocked by what he found. Following the summit he said the “tide” of refugees coming to Europe would get much bigger. He seems certain that almost all of those in the camps are determined to head for the EU and that the refugees have convinced themselves they are welcome.

According to intelligence reaching Brussels and information from the aid and UN agencies in the field, something switched psychologically on a mass scale in the camps in the Middle East last spring. Since then a level of certainty has taken hold among the displaced that their only hope is to head for Europe.

This realisation in European capitals has generated three responses, apart from the quotas decision. The first and the easiest option is to throw money at the problem. The EU will pay billions – the talk this week was of €2.7bn (£2bn) – if from its point of view it is money well spent, meaning that it stems the flow.

The second, much more fraught strategy is to secure the EU’s or the travel-free Schengen zone’s external borders. Unless that is done properly, Schengen will perish, say senior policymakers. Frans Timmermans, the number two at the European commission, predicted on Thursday that Schengen’s failure would trigger a surge of rightwing xenophobic extremist politics across Europe.

Logistically and politically, however, securing the borders is a tall order. There was tentative endorsement at the summit of commission plans to draw up a blueprint for a new European borders and coastguard regime by the end of the year. But diplomats and officials concede that this will run up against stiff resistance on the grounds of national sovereignty.

The border guards debate essentially focuses on Greece and Italy, the southern frontline states where people are entering Europe from Turkey and across the Mediterranean. The aim is to make the frontier much less porous. But the borders concerned are essentially territorial waters. How do you turn back people at sea, many of whom have a legitimate claim on asylum status?

Given the influx into southern Italy and on to the Greek islands, national leaders privately admit they need to build refugee camps and detention facilities, but none want to say so publicly for fear of being accused of repression and inhumanity.

The third policy initiative that crystallised this week stems from the belated realisation that Turkey possesses quite a few of the answers to Europe’s problems, and that Tusk and the big national leaders therefore have to strike a pact with the mercurial and irascible Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s president.

Turkey is sheltering up to two million Syrians, 85% of them said not to be in camps but living mainly in the towns of southern Turkey. Ankara mocks Europe’s so-called refugee crisis as risible compared to what it is dealing with.

Turkey has been a candidate member of the EU since 2005, but the negotiations were frozen long ago, with the French and the Germans consistently hostile to Turkish accession. The way Erdoğan sees it, he owes them no favours. Ankara opened the bidding on a mutual aid pact at the summit on Wednesday when the prime minister, Ahmet Davutoğlu, wrote to the EU leaders proposing that European and US ground troops and air cover help the Turks establish a 3,200 sq km safe zone in northern Syria along the Turkish border.

For EU leaders, the Turkish gambit represented an exercise in chutzpah and a declaration of zero interest in striking a deal, although Erdoğan is expected in Brussels in a fortnight and Angela Merkel of Germany will try to sway him at the United Nations in New York next week.

Besides, the Europeans estimate that there are around 30,000 people-smugglers active in Turkey plying the lucrative routes to the Greek islands. Erdoğan would have trouble stopping them even if he wanted to.

Merkel is fond of stressing that the refugee crisis is by far the biggest challenge she has faced in her decade in power. As the chilly nights of autumn and winter set in across the Balkans, that is beginning to sound like an understatement.