That makes the section of his article on immigration all the more suprising. A new book by Winkler was just published, Zerbricht der Westen?. The article doesn't indicate whether it's excerpted from the book, and the book may present a more nuanced view of the issue.
But what made it into the Spiegel article can be generously described as frivolous. It could also be read as a concern-troll advocacy of the anti-immigration position nominally pretending to express sympathetic concern.
Labels for current issues change, sometimes quickly. The large influx of refugees in 2015 was certainly a crisis, and everyone recognized it as such. The solution that the EU found for it was the deal that Angela Merkel negotiated with Turkey's authoritarian President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in early 2016. The deal was essentially that Turkey would hold refugees that reach Turkey in exchange for payments from the EU. The EU outsourced the problem to Turkey, in other words. Turkey now is holding something like three million refugees. My understanding is that a large majority of them live outside of refugee centers. The European press as well as politicians don't seem to feel a lot of impetus to report in great detail on their condition.
There has been a very visible increase in the number of immigrants from the Middle East, Afghanistan, and Northern Africa at least since 2011. That date corresponds with the US-French-British military intervention that ended with the outster of Muammar Gaddafi's government and his lynch-murder of Gaddafit himself. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (in)famously celebrated Gaddafi's murder (after first being anally raped with a bayonet) as a delightful thing (Clinton on Qaddafi: We came, we saw, he died CBS 10/20/2011):
This delightful moment for the Secretary of State meant that Libya would then descend into failed-state conditions. (Ted Galen Carpenter, Libya Is a Failed State (and It's America's Fault) The National Interest 11/24/2017; Giorgio Cafiero and Daniel Wagner, Four Years After Gaddafi, Libya Is a Failed State FPIP 04/06/2015)
Qaddafi's regime was a brutal one. But the removal of his government had various baleful effects, including facilitating arms trafficking and attracting Islamist fighters from other countries. And it meant that Libya was no longer employing the large numbers of immigrant workers from nearby countries that they had been under Qaddafi. And we would probably shudder to think of the ways in which Qaddifi's government blocked irregular immigrantion out of the country and restrained the human smugglers ("coyotes" in American English, Schleppers in German) who were willing to provide passage to Europe. But after Qaddafi's overthrow in 2011, those factors no longer functioned with the same effectiveness.
After 2015-16, thanks primarily to the Turkey deal, refugee flows declined radically in 2017 and 2018. If the large influx of 2015-16 put real strains on the emergency services of EU countries, it would be pure demogoguery to make the same claim for 2017 and 2018. Since there's no shortage of xenophobic demagoguery, advocates for immigration sanity now tend to refer to 2015-16 as a "crisis" but stress that what the EU is facing directly right now can't be described as a crisis. And I try to be mindful of that important distinction.
But looking at the future, I tend to think it would be more accurate to describe the ongoing refugee flows as a long-term crisis that has acute and less acute phases. If Turkey changes its mind about continuing with the 2016 agreement, a new acute phase would follow.
Winkler's argument
Winkler begins the immigration section of his Spiegel article this way:
Deutschland ist am krisenhaften Zustand der Europäischen Union nicht unschuldig. Der deutsche (oder, was die Sache nicht besser macht, deutsch-öterreichische) Alleingang in der Flüchtlings- oder besser Migrationskrise im September 2015 konnte nicht ohne Auswirkungen auf die europäischen Nachbarn bleiben.
[Germany is not innocent in the crisis-like condition of the European Union. The German (or German-Austrian, which didn't make things better) go-it-alone path in the refugee, or better put, migration crisis in September 2015 could not help but have effects on the European neighbors.}I'm not going to try to deconstruct every sentence of Winkler's argument. But these first two sentences unfortunately telegraph the rest of it pretty well. "Migration" versus "refugees" has become a political slogan. The anti-immigration politicians and publicists prefer to call the people desperate enough to take the high-risk, deadly smuggler routes to get to Europe "migrants", which makes them sound like seasonal workers following the harvests year after year. Refugee is both a discription and a legal category grounded in international law: people who flee their countries due to political persecution or massive violence, like that in civil wars. The latter kind of refugee is entitled to asylum in safe countries, which grants them legal residence, the legal right to work and other advantages. The xenophobes prefer to brand refugees as "economic migrants" who are just looking for a better job or to take advantage of European taxpayers living it up in the "hammock" of the host countries' social systems.
The "German-Austrian go-it-alone path" is a head-scratcher, at best a very clumsy description of the immigrantion crisis events of 2015-16.
He goes on to say that the big problem for the EU in 2015-16 was that Germany tried to tell all the other contries what to do in the crisis. And he says that the other EU countries should have made it very clear that they weren't going to take direction from Germany. He also criticizes the position of Germany, identified with Merkel's stand on the refugee crisis, of presenting itself as "the leading moral nation of Europe." And thus he blames Germany (and Merkel) for mismanaging the refugee crisis and therefore causing the increased political success of the extreme right since then.
How this differs from the simplistic sloganeering of the anti-immigrant right is unclear to me.
If we rewind to 2015, the crisis began with the influx of large numbers of refugees into Hungary through what became known as the "Balkan route." Germany pushed for a "European solution" in which each EU country would agree to take contingents of specified numbers of refugees. This was not only reasonable and practical proposal then. It's still a part of what would be a longterm solution to the chronic refugee crisis.
Hungary's Viktor Orbán, egged on by Vladimir Putin's government in Moscow in pursuit of its longer-term strategy to disrupt the EU, saw an opportunity to exploit anti-immigrant sentiment politically. So once Germany had announced its willingness to accept refugees as part of an EU solution, Orbán's government brought thousands of refugees to the Austrian border, telling them they were being welcomed in Germany. Austria then had an immediate decision: repel the refugees by force or let them through.
The upshot was that Germany agreed to accept large numbers of refugees to solve the immediate crisis and their EU partners for the most part refused to participate. The two most notable exceptions were Sweden and Austria. Evenually, Sweden accepted the largest number of refugees in that wave relative to the country's population. Austria was second, Germany third. But Germany accepted by far the largest number of refugees.
Sweden at some point stopped accepting further refugees. There is an unavoidable chain-reaction effect in such a situation. Once a country shuts its borders to further refugees, the next country in the chain has to decide whether they will accept more or also further limit immigration. The solution, an inherently unstable one,
From the reporting on the 2015-16 crisis, there seems to be real reason to believe that Merkel was motivated by humanitarian concerns in her initial decision to accept large numbers of refugees. But she was also motivated by very practical concerns in dealing with a real problem. Germany, Sweden, and Austria provided a three-country interim solution to a European problem. The picture of Merkel as some kind of self-righteous moralist is a propaganda concoction of the far right. (Well, mostly.) Her deal with Turkey isn't one that Mother Teresa would have likely approved.
Winkler's Spiegel article seems to assume that the right solution for EU countries to the very real and ongoing immigration problem is to imitate the appproach of demogogic politicians like Austria's Sebastian Kurz or Hungary's Viktor Orbán by symbolically pounding their chests, shouting "Close the borders!", and trying to dump the problem onto some other country.
Immigration is a huge and comlex problem for the EU that can be temporarily mitigated by close-the-border chain reactions. But the refugee issue doesn't exist in a vaccum. The EU countries have to decide whether they want an optimal solution to the problem or prefer to lurch from crisis to crisis with all the risks and limitations that go with the current approach, i.e., dump the problem onto Turkey. (And, to a significant but lesser extent, onto the EU outer-border Italy and Greece.)
I doubt that advocates of practical solutions can ever communicate their message in as simplistic slogans as those the fear-mongers use: We're being overrun by foreigners! Political Islam! They're all rapists and murderers! Lazy bums trying to sponge off our tax euros!
But the radical right's simplistic solutions depend on creating phony problems. ("Little girls with hijabs, aaa-iii-eeee!!")
The people trying to find practical longterm adjustments have reality on their side. That always counts for something.
[04/16/2018: Corrected for clarity of wording and typographical errors.]
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