EU summit in Salzburg kicks cans down road

The EU heads of state and government had a summit meeting Wednesday and Thursday in Salzburg. There wasn't much drama. And not much was accomplished.

A Politico EU report on the summit opens with, "That was awkward." (David Herszenhor and Jacopo Barigazzi, Rocky mountain summit 09/21/2018)

Austria's Wunderwuzzi Chancellor Sebastian "Babyface" Kurz (ÖVP) currently holds the six-month rotating Presidency of the EU Council and so had a lot to do with shaping the agenda. His signature issue is his bitter opposition to immigration and apparently he is apparently equally determined not to address the current issue in Europe in a practical and serious way. So the first day of the summit was devoted to the topic of how the EU can shut out foreigners. Kurz as Council President established that topicfor the summit.

The main solution to the challenge of refugees from the Middle East and Africa coming to Europe to ask for asylum is called Turkey. Angela Merkel came up with that extend-and-pretend solution in 2016: the EU pays Turkey, and makes various other concessions, and Turkey holds what is now around three million refugees and prevents them coming to the EU. It's not a stable solution nor is it one that gives particular attention to what the refugees can do in the future. And if (when) the Syrian government launches its expected military assault on Idlib province, it could send up to 800,000 new refugees into Turkey and quickly destabilize the current arrangement even more.

Herszenhor and Barigazzi also report that Austrian hospitality was not nearly so obsessively-complusively organized as one might expect from Austrian stereotyples:

The media center was far too small for the 1,000 journalists in attendance and, thanks to a glass roof and unseasonably warm September weather, it effectively turned the building into a sauna. Adding to the ambience, butter-fingered catering staff repeatedly dropped glasses and coffee mugs, smashing them on the tiled floor — making the event feel like a Greek wedding.

The breakdowns continued until the very end, when the audio feed failed during German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s closing news conference.

Given how Kurz and his coalition partner and Vice Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache (FPÖ) are combining anti-EU posturing with their anti-immigrant policies, it wouldn't surprise me at all to find out the glitches they report were at least partially intentional.

Thursday was devoted to Brexit.

If anything of substance was accomplished on either issue, it was not very evident.

They all did reiterate their consensus on strenthening Frontex, the EU border control and coast guard agency agency.

Miguel Otero-Iglesias gives this summary of what a real solution might look like - a solution the EU has been unable to deliver, despite the massive freakout about the large wave of refugees arrived in 2015-6 (Europe’s two-faced migration reality Politico EU 09/21/2018):

The most persuasive idea, advocated by the World Bank, is to develop legal channels of migration based on the demand of the job market and better education and retraining systems to cover the displaced local workforce. These programs could be financed by the introduction of progressive fees on working visas. Crucially, these visas would be for time-limited periods, and only those migrants who integrate well would then acquire the nationality of the host country.

But for such a scheme to work, borders would need to be better controlled, repatriation agreements further developed and better implemented, and inspections against hiring of irregular workers would have to be more intrusive and widespread.

It would also have to specifically address the fate of the millions of refugees now retained in limbo in Turkey, Italy, and Greece. And it calls for a reorientation of EU foreign policy to mitigate conflicts in the Middle East and Northern Africa. The NATO intervention in Libya in 2010 was a major contributor to the current situation. I wouldn't venture to say that Libya under Gaddafi had a model immigration policy. But they did provide some economic opportunities for African immigrants and blocked a significant portion of immigrants from going north toward Europe. (Otero-Iglesias's boiler-plate lines about displacement and retraining could use some work, because displacement of current workers is a minor issue at best, although public perceptions may be otherwise thanks to xenophobic propaganda.)

The EU was at least able to come up with a small story on Serbia maybe-sometimes-soon will make an agreement with Frontex to enhance their border controls, but certainly not to accept more of them as immigrants. (Frontex ja - Flüchtlinge nein Wiener Zeitung 21.09.2018)

Kurz has proven himself adept in his first year as Chancellor at making a show of doing something on his pet anti-immigration issue. Coming up with substantive solution hasn't yet shown itself to be a strong point for him. The EU summit continues that pattern.

It's even less surprising that nothing of substance got accomplished on Brexit. The current deadline for Brexit is March 2019. And all sides have an interest in waiting to the last possible moment to close the deal, with the qualification that economic uncertainty will be more pressing as the months roll on. Businesses and banks are making preparations for the split, so the terms of Britain's exit are important.

The main sticking point in the Brexit negotiations now is how to manage the borders between British Northern Ireland and Ireland. (Tom McTague, UK, EU still can’t solve Irish border conundrum Politico EU 09/21/2018)

The peace agreement that finally ended decades of bitter and violent conflict in Northern Island crucially involved free movement between Northern Ireland and Ireland. Once Britain is formally outside the EU, having the current level of free border movement would mean that Britain's border would not be a normal international border between and EU and non-EU countries. Britain in understandably reluctant to establish the regular border security and enforcement at a line inside Britain, at the border to Northern Ireland. In concept, that would be analogous to Texas having an open border with Mexico and the national border controls being enforced only at the Texas borders to other US states. That is not the way inernational borders normally work.

Wolfgang Münchau's Eurointelligence describes that current status of the negotiations in The long Brexit endgame has started 09/20/2018:

What complicates the Brexit process massively is the multitude of triangular games: there are three competing positions in the House of Commons, none of which commands a majority on its own: May’s Chequers’ Plan; a eurosceptic Canada-style Brexit; and Labour’s plan for a customs union. Everybody is playing the same game: as we reported yesterday Labour does not want the spectre of a second referendum to scare eurosceptics in the Tory party into supporting Chequers. The British government is playing the converse game. A treasury minister yesterday upheld the possibility of a second referendum for precisely this reason - to scare the eurosceptics into supporting Chequers.

In another post (EU ponders Irish backstop protocol to help May Eurointelligence 09/17/2018):

The EU‘s technical solution differs in some respects from that of Theresa May, but the technical details are not the critical point at this stage. More important is the legal procedure itself. The EU is offering a protocol to the Irish backstop clause in the withdrawal treaty, which sets out possible technical solutions in case no agreement on a future trading relationship is agreed. As long-standing observers of technically complex EU-level treaty discussions, we are not surprised to witness the grand entry of the protocol, an important legal device in EU diplomacy that often succeeds in overcoming seemingly insolvable problems. Important as it may be, in historical perspective the Irish backstop is not the most difficult obstacle EU diplomats ever had to surmount. [my emphasis]

Monika Graf makes a very appropriate cautionary observative in Krisen machen die EU stark. Derzeit gibt es keine. Salzburger Nachrichten 21.09.2018 (behind subscription). She picks up on the optimistic saying that crises make the EU stronger. That can't be said of the handling of the Greek crisis in 2015, which helped set the stage for the contentious inability of the EU to agree on a Union-wide solution for the refugee inflow of that year that continued into 2016, commonly referred to as the refugee crisis of 2015.

She points out a flip side of that optimistic saying, which is that the EU can only manage to come up with good common solutions on major issues when there is a crisis. And that's not a good thing:

Rational betrachtet müssten die EU-Staaten jenes Zeitfenster nutzen, das sich durch die gut laufende Konjunktur und die Erfolge bei der Eindämmung von Defiziten und Migration geöffnet hat. In allen Staaten der Eurozone wachst die Wirtschaft, sogar um die italienischen Banken ist es wieder ruhig geworden, und an der Südküste Europas sind bis August so wenig Menschen angekommen wie nicht einmal vor 2015.

[Rationally considered, the EU states must use this time window that has been opened by the postive economic cycle and the successes with the limiting of deficits and migration {immigration}. The economy is growing in all state of the eurozone, things have even calmed down with the Italian banks, and since August there were fewer people arriving that even before 2015.]

The Herbert Hooverish conventional wisdom on both sides of the Atlantic continues to be harmful for economic policy. But the point that she's making here is that even taking view of the deficit obsessives, the EU should be making progress on major problems like immigration and presumably on reforming the eurozone before another crisis hits.

And depending on how the military situation in Idlib develops, a new surge in immigration could begin in the fourth quarter of this year.