The refugee crisis was already leading to the slow disintegration of the European Union. Then, on June 23, it contributed to an even greater calamity — Brexit. Both of these crises have reinforced xenophobic, nationalist movements across the continent. They will try to win a series of key votes in the coming year — including national elections in France, the Netherlands, and Germany in 2017, a referendum in Hungary on EU refugee policy on Oct. 2, a rerun of the Austrian presidential election on the same day, and a constitutional referendum in Italy in October or November of this year. Rather than uniting to resist this threat, EU member states have become increasingly unwilling to cooperate with one another. They pursue self-serving, discordant migration policies, often to the detriment of their neighbors. In these circumstances, a comprehensive and coherent European asylum policy is not possible in the short term, despite the efforts of the EU’s governing body, the European Commission. The trust needed for cooperation is lacking. It will have to be rebuilt through a long and laborious process. This is unfortunate, because a comprehensive policy ought to remain the highest priority for European leaders; the union cannot survive without it. The refugee crisis is not a one-off event; it augurs a period of higher migration pressures for the foreseeable future, due to a variety of causes including demographic and economic imbalances between Europe and Africa, unending conflicts in the broader region, and climate change. Beggar-thy-neighbor migration policies, such as building border fences, will not only further fragment the union; they also seriously damage European economies and subvert global human rights standards. What would a comprehensive approach look like? It would establish a guaranteed target of at least 300,000 refugees each year who would be securely resettled directly to Europe from the Middle East — a total that hopefully would be matched by countries elsewhere in the world. That target should be large enough to persuade genuine asylum-seekers not to risk their lives by crossing the Mediterranean Sea, especially if reaching Europe by irregular means would disqualify them from being considered genuine asylum-seekers. This could serve as the basis for Europe to provide sufficient funds for major refugee-hosting countries outside Europe and establish processing centers in those countries; create a potent EU border and coast guard; set common standards for processing and integrating asylum-seekers (and for returning those who do not qualify); and renegotiate the Dublin III Regulation in order to more fairly share the asylum burden across the EU. The current piecemeal response to the crisis, culminating in the agreement between the EU and Turkey to stem refugee flows from the Eastern Mediterranean, suffers from four fundamental flaws. First, it is not truly European; the agreement with Turkey was negotiated and imposed on Europe by German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Second, the overall response is severely underfunded. Third, it has transformed Greece into a de facto holding pen with inadequate facilities. Finally, it is not voluntary: It is trying to impose quotas that many member states strenuously oppose and requires refugees to take up residence in countries where they are not welcome and where they do not want to go while returning to Turkey others who reached Europe by irregular means. The agreement with Turkey was problematic even before the July 15 coup attempt that has plunged Europe’s future into even greater uncertainty. On one level, the agreement seems to be a success, since the Balkan route is largely blocked and refugee flows to Greece have fallen to a trickle. But refugee flows have surged on the more dangerous Mediterranean routes. At the same time, the very premise of the deal — that asylum-seekers can legally be returned to Turkey — is fundamentally flawed. Greek courts and asylum committees have consistently ruled that Turkey is not a “safe third country” for most Syrian asylum-seekers, a perspective likely to be reinforced after the coup attempt. The recent reorganization of the asylum appeals committees in Greece to make them more government-friendly is liable to be challenged in the courts, as will the European Commission’s July 13 proposal to override the decisions of national courts. Meanwhile, the EU-Turkey deal, built on the premise that refugee rights can be traded for financial and political favors, is now being used as a template more broadly. Last month, the European Commission called for making development funds contingent on the implementation of migration controls by African partners. This violates the values and principles that ought to guide the European Union, constitutes a break with decades of practice in development funding, and degrades the treatment of both migrants and refugees. The grand bargain with countries in Africa and elsewhere cannot simply be: If you stop migrants from coming to Europe, you can do anything else you want. This approach damages everyone, morally, politically, and economically. A true grand bargain would focus on development in Africa — real development that over a generation would actually address the root causes of migration that so many politicians frequently invoke in their rhetoric and just as frequently disregard in practice.

Heads of state of the European Union meet in Brussels, Belgium on June 28, 2016. (DAN KITWOOD/Getty Images)

An effective alternative to the EU’s current approach would be built on seven pillars.

First, the EU and the rest of the world must take in a substantial number of refugees directly from front-line countries in a secure and orderly manner, which would be far more acceptable to the public than the current disorder. If the EU made a commitment to admit even just 300,000 refugees each year, and if that commitment were matched by countries elsewhere in the world, most genuine asylum-seekers would calculate that their odds of reaching their destination are good enough for them not to seek to reach Europe illegally, since that would disqualify them from being legally admitted. If, on top of this, conditions in front-line countries improved thanks to greater aid, there would be no refugee crisis. But the problem of economic migrants would remain.

This brings us to the second point: The EU must regain control of its borders. There is little that alienates and scares publics more than scenes of chaos. Fifteen months after the acute phase of the crisis began, confusion continues to reign in Greece and its Mediterranean waters. More than 50,000 refugees live in squalor in a series of poorly organized, impromptu camps throughout the country. Europeans see this on their screens and wonder why the mighty European Union is incapable of supplying even basic provisions to children and women fleeing war. Meanwhile, the most advanced navies of the world appear incapable of saving those crossing the Mediterranean; the number of drownings has increased dramatically this year. The cynical explanation for all this — that the EU is intentionally allowing these conditions to persist so that they serve as a deterrent — is equally troubling.

The immediate remedy is simple: provide Greece and Italy with sufficient funds to care for asylum-seekers, order navies to make search-and-rescue missions (and not “protection” of borders) their priority, and implement the promise to relocate 60,000 asylum-seekers from Greece and Italy to other EU member states.

Third, the EU needs to develop financial tools that can provide sufficient funds for the long-term challenges it faces and not limp from episode to episode. Over the years, the EU has had to finance an ever-growing number of undertakings with a shrinking pool of resources. In 2014, member states and the European Parliament agreed to reduce and cap the overall EU budget at a modest 1.23 percent of the sum of its members’ GDPs until 2020. That was a tragic mistake. The EU cannot survive with a budget of this size.

At least 30 billion euros a year will be needed for the EU to carry out a comprehensive asylum plan. These funds are needed both inside the union — to build effective border and asylum agencies and ensure dignified reception conditions, fair asylum procedures, and opportunities for integration — as well as outside its borders — to support refugee-hosting countries and spur job creation throughout Africa and the Middle East. Robust border and asylum agencies alone could cost on the order of 15 billion euros.

Although 30 billion euros might seem like an enormous amount, it pales in comparison to the political, human, and economic costs of a protracted crisis. There is a real threat, for instance, that Europe’s Schengen system of open internal borders will collapse. The Bertelsmann Foundation has estimated that abandoning Schengen would cost the EU between 47 billion and 140 billion euros in GDP lost each year.

The current approach is based on reallocating minimal amounts from the EU budget and then asking member states to contribute to various dedicated vehicles, such as the Facility for Refugees in Turkey and the EU Regional Trust Fund for Syria, which were used, respectively, to provide financial compensation for Turkey and additional EU funding to international organizations and neighboring countries as a response to the Syrian crisis. These, however, can only be a temporary solution, as they are neither sustainable nor large enough to finance efforts that must grow in size and scope. Although these trust funds can be powerful instruments in the short term to redeploy resources and allow member states to commit more funds to a particular endeavor, they also illustrate the fundamental deficiency of the current system — namely that it remains dependent on the good will of the member states at each step.

In order to raise the necessary funds in the short term, the EU will need to engage in what I call “surge funding.” This entails raising a substantial amount of debt backed by the EU’s relatively small budget, rather than scraping together insufficient funds year after year. Today, the EU stands out for having a remarkably low amount of debt given the size of its budget; it should therefore leverage this budget like all sovereign governments in the world do.

Spending a large amount at the outset in that way will allow the EU to respond more effectively to some of the most dangerous consequences of the refugee crisis and prevent some of its worst consequences. These include anti-immigrant sentiment in its member states that has fueled support for authoritarian political parties and despondency among those seeking refuge in Europe, who now find themselves marginalized in Middle East host countries or stuck in transit in Greece. Making large initial investments in border protection, search-and-rescue operations, asylum processing, and dignified refugee sheltering will help tip the economic, political, and social dynamics away from xenophobia and disaffection and toward constructive outcomes that benefit refugees and host countries alike. In the long run, this will reduce the total amount of money Europe will have to spend to contain and recover from the refugee crisis.

To finance it, new European taxes will have to be levied sooner or later. In the meantime, needs can be partially met by mobilizing the unused credit of already existing EU financial instruments: balance-of-payments assistance, Macro-Financial Assistance, and the European Financial Stabilization Mechanism (EFSM). These instruments together have more than 50 billion euros of unused credit available. The facilities would have to be repurposed and their mandate expanded, which would meet considerable resistance. But those are not good enough reasons to avoid tapping the unused financial capacity of the European Union.

At the height of the euro crisis, member states were able to summon the political will to rapidly create a new set of instruments that vastly augmented the financial power of the EU. The EFSM, which then became the European Stability Mechanism, raised the borrowing capacity of the EU to some 500 billion euros in just a year, proving that when there is a will, there is a way. But all these instruments face three limitations: They are mostly intergovernmental and rely on member-state guarantees rather than the EU budget, which remains too small to undertake such large borrowing; they require unanimous authorization by the member states; and they are essentially designed to lend money to other member states rather than engage true spending in the name of the EU.

The only way ahead is to form “coalitions of the willing” that do not require unanimous consent. These initiatives could inspire deeper reforms of the EU budget. I was therefore greatly encouraged last year when German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble suggested a pan-European gasoline tax. I was soon disillusioned, however, when he explicitly warned against utilizing the largely unused borrowing power of the European Union.

The very existence of the European Union is at stake. It is the height of irresponsibility and a dereliction of duty to allow the EU to disintegrate without utilizing all its financial resources. Throughout history, governments have issued bonds in response to national emergencies. When should the EU use its largely untapped borrowing capacity if not at a moment when it is in mortal danger? Doing so would have the additional advantage of providing a much needed economic stimulus. With interest rates at historic lows, now is a particularly favorable moment to take on such debt.