Consequences for Europe and Schengen

Germany in 2024: 700,000 vacancies and four million people on the citizen’s allowance who are able to work. Stagnant productivity, dilapidated infrastructure (the bridge that just collapsed in Dresden is a symbol of this), deindustrialization, educational institutions struggling with major problems, a billion-euro backlog of repairs at the railway and the armed forces. Added to this is a bloated bureaucracy. The giant of Europe? This is especially true today of Germany’s welfare state.

The giant Germany, the hegemonic power with the difficult past, is not in a particularly good position in the perception of its citizens. Many no longer trust the state. Its handling of migration is particularly socially explosive.

The murders in Mannheim and Solingen were committed by people who would no longer have been in the country if the administration had fulfilled its duty to implement the law. And so citizens are increasingly voting against the establishment, as we have seen in Thuringia and Saxony and will probably see in Brandenburg as well.

Closing borders is an admission of loss of control

The fact that the German government is now closing its borders, at least for six months, can essentially be attributed to these three factors: migration pressure, political pressure, and threats to internal security. Many citizens have had enough of bogus discussions about lengths of sword; they want to see results: that their children are not bullied at school by aggressive migrant schoolmates, that they learn proper German, that women can go out on the street in the evenings. The big things are revealed in the small things.

For a long time, the German government ignored the urgent need for action. Migration has not been strictly regulated for decades. Small reforms are attempted every now and then, but that is not enough. German municipalities have been calling for help for years, saying that their capacities are exhausted, they cannot take in anyone else, there is resistance among the population and massive social problems. As recently as March 2023, German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser declared that there are “no upper limits to humanity.” Now the tone has changed. The limit of what is affordable has been reached, she wrote to the EU: “No state in the world can take in an unlimited number of refugees.”

The now ordered closure of the borders is an admission of loss of control. Article 25 of the Schengen Borders Code regulates when the reintroduction of controls at the internal borders “may be necessary in exceptional cases”: namely in the event of a “threat to public order or internal security, in particular as a result of terrorist incidents or threats or of threats from organized crime.”

Faeser refers to this in her notification letter to the EU Commission last Monday, in which she informs them that she has ordered internal border controls, starting this Monday. However, the measure endangers a major European achievement: a Europe without internal borders. And it also puts neighboring countries under pressure.

The neighbors don’t want the migrants

Austria reacted immediately. Austrian Interior Minister Gerhard Karner (ÖVP) announced that they would not take back rejected migrants. Bavaria’s Christian Social Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann countered that it was not about taking them back, because the people were not being allowed to enter the country in the first place. They would remain in Austria.

The small exchange of blows illustrates the fears of other countries neighboring Germany, such as Poland. Numerous migrants from the Middle East are coming to Europe via the Belarusian-Polish border, promoted by Russia as part of its destabilization strategy for Europe. Since the summer of 2021, the so-called Belarus route has been a major gateway for illegal migration. Most of them travel on to Germany. If Germany now turns these people away because they have passed through the safe country of Poland, Poland would have to take care of thousands of them every month. Prime Minister Donald Tusk has already announced that he will not accept this.

The government in Warsaw would then be in conflict with Germany and would at the same time close its border to the east. The Union in Germany is also speculating on such a domino effect with regard to other neighboring countries. Nobody wants the migrants rejected by Germany.

First-reception countries such as Greece and Italy fear that they will be overwhelmed. The problems caused by the massive influx of refugees from poor, non-European countries with often very different cultural ideas are all too obvious. These problems can also be observed in the Netherlands, which, with its new right-wing government, is reacting positively to the German initiative. The calculation is that this would lead to the countries concerned closing their external borders. Then there would be no need to wait for the Geas agreement to finally come into force in 2026. And Schengen could be revived: free travel within Europe, isolation from the outside.

Germany has unnecessarily burdened itself

Although Germany has taken in by far the most asylum seekers in Europe, it is also the country that does not have a single border with an unsafe third country. In other words, Germany has unnecessarily burdened itself with a burden whose consequences it is now feeling in the form of increasing crime, Islamist terror, sexual violence and hatred of Israel.

In its report for 2023, the German Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution reports the number of 27,200 Islamists in Germany. “The federal government will have to ask itself: How was it possible that such a reservoir for attacks could arise in recent years?” criticizes political scientist Martin Wagener from the Federal University. Germany let it happen.

This patience would probably be even greater without the AfD’s protest. However, the far-right party’s successes are forcing the established parties to act more decisively. Otherwise, they face ruin, as their election results in the East show.

The European neighbors saw the overload coming in 2015, when German Chancellor Angela Merkel decided at the last minute to leave the border open – for fear of ugly images. Merkel thus made the exception the rule; anyone who wanted to apply for asylum was allowed in, regardless of whether they came from a safe third country. And that is how it has remained to this day.

From January to August 2024 alone, 160,140 initial applications for asylum were submitted in Germany, and in 2023 as a whole, the number was around 330,000. In the whole of 2023, only 5,000 people were transferred to other EU countries under the Dublin rules – only eleven to Italy.

The Schengen-Dublin system no longer works

The Dublin system does not work, the vast majority of asylum seekers remain in Germany – even if they are rejected. More people come into the country in two days than are deported each month. The approach proposed by Faeser at the failed asylum summit last Tuesday of detaining refugees who had already been registered in another European country near the border and returning them to the country of first reception could have prevented (and not only) the murders in Solingen.

So what does all this mean for the future of the Schengen-Dublin system? First of all, the border closure now ordered by Germany contradicts the principle of open internal borders. Since October 2023, there have been stationary controls at the borders with Poland, the Czech Republic and Switzerland. The newly ordered controls affect the borders with Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. As a result, the Schengen Agreement is being largely undermined, at least for the time being.

The German move is being hotly debated, and not just on social media. The accusation is that first Germany, with Angela Merkel, is triggering mass migration and forcing it on other Europeans, and then it is destroying Schengen. Regaining trust could be difficult.