Carl Bildt believes the current refugee crisis has strengthened the European Union rather than weakened it. He maintains people "are indeed waking up to a world that is more dangerous, divided, and disorienting. But it is an awakening that is more likely to bring them together than to drive them apart."

Looking back to 2003, a EU security document revealed that "the continent’s citizens lived in a seemingly safe world". It instilled confidence that Europe had "never been so prosperous, so secure nor so free.” Indeed, it explains why the 2008 financial crisis left so many Europeans stranded, as they were not prepared for enduring grievances.

Today Bildt says the continent is being plagued by one crisis after the other, prompting EU leaders to jump out of the frying pan into the fire. While the conflict in Ukraine "has driven some two million people from the homes", they have not fled to Western Europe. Yet wars and turmoil have triggered an influx of refugees to cross the Mediterranean, escaping the "horrific violence in Syria" and poverty in North Africa.

Bildt claims the media has misinformed the public. The influx of refugees can hardly be seen as "a tidal wave", but "little more than a trickle." He says most of "those who have fled the carnage in Syria live in camps in Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey," posing a huge burden on these countries and overstretching their resources.

In this respect he estimates the EU can "accommodate a million or more refugees, which would amount to just 0.2% of the EU’s total population." Bildt, like Merkel, sees the refugee crisis as an opportunity for many member states "to replenish their aging workforces." Indeed, he realises that it's easier said than done. In his home country, Sweden, the rising number of refugees seeking asylum has fueled xenophobia and abeted the rise of nationalists, the Sweden Democrats. There is a housing shortage and an unemployment rate at 8.5 percent. Many Swedes say, this is likely to get worse as a result of the influx of refugees.

In the past European politicians spoke of the north/south divide, like the one in the Greek bailout crisis. The refugee crisis has revealed a new rift - the east/west divide. Countries in eastern Europe, which had joined the EU a decade ago, oppose to sharing Germany's and Sweden's burden and resist to refugee quotas imposed by Brussels, even though the decision "was settled by majority vote."

Bildt is optimistic that the EU can weather the storm again and emerge stronger, when "everybody agrees that the challenges posed by the new world disorder are best faced together." He says opinion polls have shown that "the European project" is no longer "some utopian endevor," but "an abstract attempt to forge an ever-closer union".