Europe launched a push late on Thursday at the fourth EU summit this year on the refugee crisis to obtain Turkey’s co-operation in stemming the flow of hundreds of thousands of refugees and migrants, while also agreeing a package of repressive measures aimed at securing the union’s porous external border and curbing new arrivals.

EU leaders agreed to give “political support” for an action plan for Turkey said to offer Ankara up to €3bn (£2.2bn), visa-free travel to Europe for 75 million Turks, the resumption of frozen negotiations on Turkey’s EU membership bid, and other sweeteners in what appeared to be a desperate attempt to gain Turkish cooperation.

Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European commission, said that the aim of the proposed pact was to keep more than two million Syrian refugees in Turkey where they were and prevent them attempting to get to Europe.

Diplomats said the €3bn were not available, however, and that there was much resistance among national leaders to fast-tracking visa waivers for the Turks. Discussions in Ankara will continue in coming days.

The European Council president, Donald Tusk, said “an agreement with Turkey makes sense only if it effectively contains the flow of refugees.”

The chances of a meaningful pact with Ankara are slim in the short term and would probably entail Europe agreeing to take many of the Syrians from among more than two million hosted by Turkey.



Senior officials and diplomats said the main aim of the summit was to avoid a major row and the kind of recrimination between leaders that characterised previous meetings. The summit took place in an atmosphere of gloom and tension.



Turkey is currently the main source of the 700,000 people who have entered the EU this year. The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, is to travel to Istanbul on Sunday for talks with the president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, only two weeks before a crucial general election in Turkey, leaving her open to charges that she is boosting the victory chances of his governing Justice and Development party.

“The purpose is to improve the mood on this very toxic issue. I’m not sure we’ll be able to give a positive answer, but we can’t afford a clear message of failure,” said a senior diplomat.



A senior official taking part in the summit admitted that the leaders do not have answers to the refugee crisis, “only questions”.

The summit delivered robust language on new measures aimed at shoring up the EU’s external borders, detention of refugees and migrants while their asylum claims are being processed, attempts to replace national powers over frontiers by new European agencies, and a drive to cajole countries outside the EU into keeping migrants at home and hosting those from elsewhere in transit to Europe.

But every area of policy discussed was hotly contested and nothing was finalised. The likelihood is high that the actions following the summit will fail to match the rhetoric.

The European commission and Germany are pushing for a new asylum and immigration regime that would see successful asylum claimants shared across the union on a binding and permanent basis.

Merkel said there was currently no “fair” sharing of refugees in Europe, while her ally on the issue, the Austrian chancellor, Werner Faymann, said there would need to be a new binding commitment to share more than the 160,000 refugees across Europe already agreed upon.

The issue is very divisive, especially in eastern Europe. The commission is also proposing a new system of European borders and coastguards, beefing up the Warsaw-based Frontex agency to police the external frontiers.

“I can’t say there is big optimism,” said one of the diplomats. “There is a strong feeling that protection of external borders is the competence of the countries. Very many want to state their reservations.”

Many governments are keen to see European deployments at the main refugee entry points on the Greek islands and in southern Italy, but they do not want them on their own borders.

“It’s a constitutional question in all member states,” said a second diplomat. “This is an issue of primary national sovereignty.”

Leaders said they would send hundreds more border guards to Frontex which last week asked for 775 more staff. So far, 48 have been pledged from six countries.

“There’s no majority for replacing national border guards with European ones,” said the senior official.

There is also confusion and dispute over new methods of dealing with the influx, focused on the idea of “hotspots” where new arrivals in Greece and Italy are to be registered and fingerprinted.

The Germans and others want these new facilities – the first one is operating on the Italian island of Lampedusa, another is to open next week on the Greek island of Lesbos – to be camps where people are detained while being screened and having their claims vetted. The Italians say they don’t want to host “concentration camps”. The Greeks are also reluctant and resisting EU proposals for mounting joint sea patrols in the Aegean with the Turks.

Merkel said the narrow sea channel separating Greece and Turkey was in the hands of the smuggling rackets.

“We need a big capacity for first reception [of migrants],” said the German government source. “We need first reception capacities where people can stay. Registration alone doesn’t work.”

Amid the frictions in almost all areas of immigration policy, there are high-level fears that mainstream leaders are losing the plot and making things easier for the far right and the hard left to set the agenda.

“You have a lot of political machos in the member states waiting to get into power to implement their ideas,” said a senior EU source.

“The migrant crisis will continue to dominate the EU’s political agenda. This will exacerbate all of the EU’s existing challenges, as nationalism surges and the space for political and policy action by mainstream governments becomes further constrained,” said the risk consultancy Eurasia Group. “Politics in Europe become more toxic and divisive.”

A national ambassador to the EU said: “We’re running the risk of losing our populations in Europe. In many cases, we’re running against majority [public opinion].”