Austria and Slovenia have said they will erect fences to stem the flow of migrants. As countries seek national answers to a regional crisis, what happened to solidarity in Europe?

Thousands of refugees stream across the Croatian border just a few hundred metres from Jurja’s small shop each day, but in her sleepy hillside village the passing strangers are invisible.

“They are taken on trains from the south into Slovenia, we never see them,” she says, as she packs up milk and chocolates in a country where the continent’s refugee crisis has been more a question of travel logistics than resettlement.

The hundreds of thousands of travellers who arrived in Greece without documents since the start of this year almost all want to travel north to countries they believe offer a better chance of safety and a new life. So officials in countries along the way have focused on helping them travel as quickly and safely as possible, providing food, shelter, medical help and transport before handing them across borders towards their final destination.

But the cracks in that strategy are starting to show as Germany reconsiders its welcome for refugees, and the onset of cold weather has brought not the expected fall in the number of travellers but an increase in desperate journeys.

Governments have replaced talk of closer cooperation with threats of a more visible separation, warning that they are considering blocking off their borders in a region meant to be growing closer under the EU, not pulling apart.

The tiny republic of Slovenia was the latest to give notice that it was considering a border fence, after more than 110,000 refugees and migrants streamed across its borders in two weeks. That is equivalent to about 5% of the country’s entire population, and 20 times the size of its police force. Camps set up to handle a few hundred people were suddenly struggling to provide food and shelter for 10 times as many.

“This is one of the first camps we made, originally for 400 migrants, but we were handling 4,000 to 5,000 a day,” said Boris Brinovec, assistant commander at the police station in Brežice, which has handled much of the influx, even turning its forecourt into a temporary camp.

The numbers grew so fast that violence broke out last week, with a group setting fire to more than 20 tents, in a protest against how long they had been held in squalid conditions. The country begged for European help and has been promised 400 police officers from other countries, part of a wider European Union plan agreed in late October to try to stem the surge in dangerous journeys and process and resettle those who do reach European soil.

If that plan doesn’t work, however, the Slovenian government has given notice that it will resort to physical barriers to entry, following the example of neighbouring Hungary. A quarter century after Europe celebrated the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, its members are threatening to throw up a string of other barriers along the continent’s southern edges.

“If necessary, we are ready to put up the fence immediately,” said the Slovenian prime minister, Miro Cerar, as images of migrants struggling to enter the country in the south and travel onwards to Austria in the north flashed around news sites and television channels worldwide.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A column of migrants moves on a path between agricultural fields in Rigonce, Slovenia, on 25 October. Photograph: Darko Bandic/AP

Just a day later, Austria issued its own notice that it planned to throw up barriers along the border with Slovenia, although chancellor Werner Faymann insisted they would be to control the flow of refugees more effectively rather than stop anyone entering the country. “We want to be able to carry out controls on people, and for that one needs certain technical security measures,” he told reporters last Thursday, while adding that he was not planning to copy Hungary’s razor-wire barrier, which stretches hundreds of kilometres.

Those open doors could come under threat, however, if Germany retracts its welcome for refugees, which is under mounting political pressure. The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, who has been a staunch defender of her country’s ability and obligation to accept refugees, called crisis talks over the weekend amid widespread accusations that her grand coalition is so riven over the issue that its ability to act is being severely affected.

Germany is the main destination for many of those who risked the boat crossing to Greece this summer, and if the country called even a partial halt to the flow of new arrivals it could strand tens of thousands of refugees in ill-prepared countries.

A fence thrown up by Hungary to seal its border with Croatia triggered Slovenia’s current crisis. It also provided a stark warning of how dangerous it can be to abruptly disrupt a route being travelled by thousands of people each day.Refugees heading for Hungary turned to Slovenia instead, but after being brought on trains to within sight of Slovenian fields there were no arrangements to get them across the border. Hundreds marched through farmland and waded chest-deep across an icy river, desperate to continue their journey before the weather got even colder.

“Many people had no winter clothes. There were children without socks, their feet red with the cold,” said Niveska Stanic Buljan, a volunteer with the Christian charity Remar, who lives just inside the Croatian border. The group normally works with drug addicts, orphaned children and vulnerable sections of the local population, but shifted much of its effort towards aiding refugees when hundreds began stumbling out of trains into their town, looking for the border.

“We didn’t expect the donations we got from people here, I was really overwhelmed,” she said, in a house that doubled as a temporary dormitory for mothers with young children before Slovenian authorities arranged for trains to continue straight over the border.

Many who did cross on foot were corralled into open-air camps just inside the border, where some spent more than 24 hours. Slovenian police say that those traumatic journeys were caused by the Croatian authorities, in a hurry to unload refugees and migrants across their border as quickly as possible. “We filmed with police helicopters how the Croatians brought the train to the last stop, escorted them to the border and then pointed them towards Slovenia,” said Brinovec.

The two countries later negotiated a deal to bring refugees across in trains, which means that they can be registered and sent on more humanely and efficiently, he said. But like many in Slovenia, he is concerned about what will happen when the bitter Balkans winter sets in properly.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Refugees wait at the border to Austria in Sentilj, Slovenia. Photograph: Maja Hitij/dpa/Corbis

“In winter we have snow, temperatures can fall to minus 10 or minus 15 degrees Celsius, we are worried about people arriving in sub-zero temperatures in future,” Brinovec said.

Police in the north of the country resorted to cramming shivering children into their vehicles to ward off disaster last week, but the number of refugees flooding into the country and the rapidly dropping temperatures make that only the most makeshift of solutions.

Hopes that winter would slow down the flow of refugees and allow Europe to plan a response for next year have proved to be in vain.

“We didn’t know we would be on the road so long when we set out,” said 35-year-old Makhtab Mohammedi, at the bedside of her teenage daughter in a field hospital just inside Slovenia. Her family of five had been travelling for a month until her daughter’s illness stopped them inside Slovenia. When she recovers they are heading to Germany or “any country that will welcome us, where we can be safe and not returned”.

If anything, Europe’s toughening stance may have propelled thousands to take even greater risks. Some fear that plans for a network of fences and long-term camps could effectively cut the route to countries like Germany forever, and others simply cannot afford to spend a winter in Turkey.

“There is a war back home, what choice do we have?” said 43-year-old Wajd Abu Sayed, waiting to be bussed to a Slovenian refugee centre after crossing Croatia by train. A chef who worked for years in Venezuela, he only returned to his home outside Damascus months before fighting broke out. “I did want to live in Syria,” he said.

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More people risked the sea journey from Turkey on an average day in October than at the height of the summer, despite rough seas claiming an ever higher death toll, said Ron Redmond, regional spokesman for the UN high commissioner for refugees in Greece.

“There is definitely a sense of urgency among people coming here, they are looking at this pretty much as a now or never situation,” Redmond told the Observer in a phone interview from the Greek island of Lesbos, where many new arrivals land. “What we are seeing is people waiting for a day of slightly calmer weather before risking the journey, and the traffickers are happy to facilitate it,” he said. “They also offer discounts to people willing to set to sea in worse weather.”

Squabbling at the government level, however, has been matched by coordination on the ground in Slovenia, where Hungarian medics and volunteers have flooded in to offer services no longer needed in their own country.

“We have free hands and free heads, and a big storage full of donated supplies, so we brought it here,” said Robert Bekesi, a 75-year-old Holocaust survivor who volunteers with Migration Aid Hungary. “I know what it is like to be a refugee.”

Eastern Europe pulls up the drawbridge

Germany

Expected to take up to 1.5 million people by the new year. Angela Merkel has come under increased domestic pressure to reduce the numbers arriving, with anti-immigrant group Pegida gaining in popularity. Germany has tightened its refugee policy, saying that Afghans should not seek asylum.

Hungary



Once a major transit country for migrants, it has closed its borders with Serbia and Croatia. It has been criticised for its treatment of refugees, including the use of razor-wire fencing to keep out migrants. It has fiercely opposed Angela Merkel’s push for compulsory and permanent quotas.



Austria

Once a critic of fences, it has announced it will erect barriers at the Spielfeld border crossing with Slovenia. It has struggled to cope after Germany began slowing entries. Johanna Mikl-Leitner, the interior minister, said Austria was being overwhelmed “because Germany is taking too few” migrants.





Slovenia

Nearly 105,000 people have entered Slovenia in less than two weeks since Hungary sealed its border with Croatia. Miro Cerar, Slovenia’s prime minister, said the country was ready to build a fence immediately and he has criticised Croatia for continuing to let migrants cross the border by train.







Croatia



The closure of Hungary’s borders has led thousands of migrants a day to enter Croatia and Slovenia. In the four weeks to mid-October, about 200,000 migrants passed through Croatia. Most of them moved on to Hungary, which has since closed its borders, diverting refugees to Slovenia.

Serbia, others



Bulgaria, Romania and Serbia have warned that they are ready to close their borders if other countries do so, fearing that they will otherwise face millions of migrants being stranded throughout their territories. Bulgaria has already built a wire fence along its border with Turkey.

Greece



In 2015, 560,000 migrants and refugees have arrived by sea, out of 700,000 who reached Europe this way. Alexis Tsipras, the prime minister, said he felt shame over “the inability of Europe to deal with this human drama”. European leaders have called for reception camps to be boosted in Greece.

Turkey



It is now hosting 2.5 million refugees. EU leaders have attempted to secure Turkey’s co-operation in stemming the flow of refugees by offering to consider giving more aid, speeding up visa liberalisation talks and resuming negotiations on Turkey’s EU membership bid. No deal has been reached.