EUROPE’S GREAT MIGRATION crisis seemed to blow up out of nowhere. Yet at least within the EU, increased movement of people should not have come as a surprise. The admission of 11 countries from central and eastern Europe, between 2004 and 2011, and the end of the seven-year transition period before allowing full free movement, was bound to encourage people from the new member states to look for opportunities abroad, given that wages and living standards in the west were so much higher. A simultaneous upsurge of unemployment in the south prompted a push north.

Higher immigration from outside the EU might also have been predicted in light of the Arab spring, the 2011 intervention led by Britain and France in Libya, the civil war in Syria and strife in Afghanistan and Iraq. Besides, in most EU countries the population is ageing and shrinking, but in Africa it is young and growing fast.

Yet the sudden inflow of migrants from non-member countries turned out to be politically much more explosive. At first it was Greece that felt the effects most heavily, a double whammy since it was also at the centre of the euro crisis. Spain had seen an earlier influx of migrants, notably to the Canary Islands, but had largely stopped it by doing deals with source countries in west Africa. Italy is now the main recipient of illicit migration, in part because bilateral deals are impossible in lawless Libya. Economics, war and the lucrative business model of people-smuggling have combined to destabilise the EU, adding east-west tensions to north-south ones.

The refugee convention and the Dublin regulation for asylum-seekers have played a big part in this. The convention’s relatively generous rules for accepting refugees were designed in 1951, when refugee numbers were lower and people-smuggling was not a big business. Under the Dublin agreement, applicants in Europe are required to apply for asylum in the first country they reach and have their cases adjudicated there, creating an obvious problem for EU countries with southern borders. Yet for a time it was easy to move through the Balkans into the frontier-free Schengen system. In 2015 that brought in large numbers of would-be refugees, with the net number of arrivals quickly reaching a million.

It was very much to the credit of Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, when in August 2015 she extended a welcome to Syrian refugees. Yet her generosity backfired when it became clear that other EU countries were, in effect, funnelling refugees to Germany (and Sweden, which had also opened its doors). For a while Mrs Merkel’s popularity at home slumped, as the right-wing nationalist Alternative for Germany party, and even the Bavarian sister party of her own Christian Democrats, attacked her for being naive. The criticism became louder after a mass attack on German women by north African migrants at Cologne station on New Year’s Eve 2015.

The number of asylum-seekers has since come down (see chart), mainly thanks to a bilateral deal struck in early 2016 under which Turkey promised to stop would-be migrants from crossing into Greece. In exchange Turkey received money, a promise of visa-free access for Turks and a fair wind for its EU membership application. At a time when the EU was also condemning the Turkish government for its democratic shortcomings, this deal was widely seen as hypocritical. Yet an even bigger concern was, and is, that Turkey’s mercurial president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, could tear up the agreement at any time. Efforts are also under way to stop the inflow of mainly economic migrants from Libya. Under international law, upheld by European courts, pushing back boats laden with would-be refugees is forbidden. But national naval vessels are now trying to intercept them closer to the Libyan coast and pull rather than push them back. Elizabeth Collett of the Migration Policy Institute Europe, a think-tank in Brussels, huffs that this is an extremely fine legal distinction. Outflows from other source countries are also being stemmed, and people-trafficking rings are coming under attack. There is talk of setting up asylum-processing centres in north Africa, as long as the EU can find what officials now call “safe places”, not necessarily “safe countries”. Much money is also being spent on strengthening the EU’s external borders.

None for us, thank you

Yet the flow of migrants and asylum-seekers into Europe is likely to continue, and their distribution within the EU is creating huge problems. Germany and Sweden feel they have been landed with an unfairly large share of the burden. German officials criticise their EU partners for refusing to reciprocate the solidarity they asked for during the euro crisis. They are particularly angry with central European countries in the Visegrad group of Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary, which have taken almost no refugees, in contravention of their obligations. Pascal Lamy, a veteran former commissioner, reckons that the east-west divisions created by the refugee crisis pose a greater threat to the union than the north-south ones arising from the euro crisis.

British Eurosceptics see the EU’s migration crisis as evidence that continental Europe shares Britain’s concerns about the free movement of people. But they have got it wrong: the worries in other EU countries are almost entirely about external migration, not the movement of people and workers within Europe. Even so, the migration crisis has clearly destabilised the Schengen system of frontier-free movement.

Schengen, which covers all EU countries bar Britain, Ireland, Croatia, Cyprus, Bulgaria and Romania, plus a clutch of non-members, has been “temporarily” suspended in some places. Austria has hardened its border controls. Hungary has built two fences. One effect has been to trap thousands of would-be refugees in grim conditions in Greece and the western Balkans. It is not clear when or even if Schengen will be fully restored.

Welcome, up to a point

No EU member other than Britain has said it wants to stop the free movement of people, but the principle has been eroded in several respects, starting with limits on welfare-benefit entitlements. Germany, the Netherlands and others have won several cases in the European Court of Justice, establishing that people from poorer east European countries are not entitled to claim immediate welfare benefits in richer EU members which often exceed median wages at home.

The EU’s “posted workers” directive prevents central and east Europeans from undercutting domestic wages and working conditions in richer countries. But it allows them to pay welfare contributions in their home countries, which has been controversial in France, in particular. Some countries are trying to make it harder for would-be workers to come in without a job offer. Countries outside the EU but in the European Economic Area (EEA) can also in theory limit free movement, even though in principle they are bound to offer it. Liechtenstein, which is part of the EEA, sets quotas on the number of outsiders it allows to live and work there. Switzerland, which voted to restrict immigration from the EU in a referendum three years ago, has had to climb down, but it is at least being allowed to advertise jobs to Swiss people first.

The idea of free movement of labour was conceived at a time when living standards within the EU were more homogeneous than they are today. At the time nobody could have predicted the amount of movement triggered by the lifting of controls on east European countries. The sending countries do not necessarily welcome the outflow, either: although anxious to protect the interests of their nationals abroad, they realise that a brain drain of highly qualified workers may not be in their best interests.

In the proposal for continental partnerships by the Bruegel think-tank mentioned in the introduction to this report, the free movement of labour is not seen as a necessary part of a single market. The report also points out that, whereas the single market has lifted almost all restrictions on the movement of goods and capital, it is far from complete for services. The provision of services and mobility of labour, some economists note, tend to go together. And free movement is more essential for the euro zone than for the wider EU since it can be a partial substitute for the loss of currency flexibility.

Brexit may mean that no country in the EU or the EEA will challenge the free movement of people in Europe in the near future. Besides, the numbers coming in from outside and moving around inside may drop for a while. But all politicians want to be able to respond to public opinion, so the principle may start to fray at the edges. It could even become yet another example of the variable geometry that Brussels purists hate so much. The same is true of the EU’s foreign and security policy.