TE20151107 by MrDi

Author:MrDi
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: News, The Economist
Publisher: The Economist
Published: 2015-11-05T20:46:50.770426+00:00

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Charlemagne

The dispensable French

France has less and less influence in the EU, and fears to use what it still has

Nov 7th 2015 | From the print edition

BACK in September, as Germany struggled to cope with the politics and logistics of the greatest influx of refugees in modern history, France decided to put on a show of European solidarity. French bureaucrats, armed with Arabic translators and loudspeakers, chartered three coaches and set off for the German city of Munich. The idea was to fill the vehicles with refugees and drive them over the Rhine to France, thus easing Germany’s load. The French had planned to fetch some 1,000 asylum-seekers. But in the end, only a few hundred could be persuaded to climb on board. It seemed they were not interested in French solidarity; they wanted to live in Germany. The coaches left half-empty.

The pattern was a familiar one. As Europe has scrambled to respond to the ground-shifting events of the past few months—first the Greek currency drama, now the refugee crisis—France has found itself increasingly marginalised: at best a junior partner to Mrs Merkel, at worst a mute spectator. With Greece teetering on the brink of expulsion from the euro zone in July, Mr Hollande cajoled, consulted and mediated. But it was Mrs Merkel’s word, after the best part of a long night, that determined Greece’s fate.

The refugee exodus finds France on Europe’s sidelines again. When vast numbers of migrants started to land on Mediterranean shores earlier this summer, Mr Hollande refused to countenance the idea of national quotas to share out the asylum-seekers. It was not until Mrs Merkel turned Germany into a haven, earning accolades as the guardian of Europe’s humanitarian spirit, that the French began to shift. By September Mr Hollande went into reverse, backing a compulsory European quota scheme after all. As fences went up and barbed wire was rolled out, Mr Hollande—a protégé of Jacques Delors, architect of a borderless Europe—stood quietly by. It was Mrs Merkel alone who went off to Ankara last month to try to persuade the Turks to tighten controls at their frontier with Europe. And it was she who then led an emergency meeting in Brussels of countries along the “Balkan route” favoured by migrants; France was not even present.

Up to a point, the eclipse of France over refugees is the product of geography and history. When Libya imploded a few years ago, and migrants took to the western Mediterranean, France and Italy were on the front line. This time, the surge happened in the east, far from French borders: from Syria and Iraq via Turkey and the Aegean islands of Greece. If anything, migrants’ ties of family, faith or tongue to towns in Germany, Britain or Sweden, as well as better job prospects in those places, have turned France into a country of transit, not a terminus. Its greatest problem with refugees is in Calais, where

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