Jorge Alemán takes a (somewhat) hopeful lesson from recents setbacks of the far-right party VOX in Spain to suggest that the noeliberal project more generally is in a moment of crisis. (¿Qué pasa con el odio de las ultraderechas?Pagina/12 22.10.2020):
Hasta ahora las derechas clásicas habían sido ganadas por la extensión del rechazo de la política propio del discurso de las ultraderechas, pero ahora la dominación neoliberal duda sobre si ese es definitiva su camino.
Los teóricos afines al neoliberalismo saben la religión del Mercado no puede sostenerse en el odio, debe encontrar formas más seductoras para sus consumidores. No obstante, por ahora no pueden, temen como siempre el ascenso de fuerzas democráticas y progresistas que ya comienzan a retornar.
[So far, the classical right [center-right conservative] has been winning by continuing their rejection of the politics proper to the discourse of the far-right, but now neoliberal domination has doubts about whether that is definitely the direction they want to take.
Theorists aligned with neoliberalism know the religion of the market cannot be sustained by hatred, that they must find more seductive forms of politics for their consumers. Nevertheless, for now they cannot, fearing as always the rise of democratic and progressive forces that are already beginning to return.]
He is basing his larger observation also on the apparent rejection of Trump in this year's eletion in the US and on Angela Merkel's refusal to make common cause with the far right in Germany. The implication is that because the far right altervatives have an alternative form of politics that supports the established economic order but not the liberal political order. So allying with the far-right remains a chronic temptation for the conservatives parties.
Alemán argues that not only will Trump lose, but also "un estilo político primario con bases megalómanas y paranoicas que solo se afirman en el odio" [a primary political style with megalomaniacal and paranoid bases that are only affirmed in hatred.}
Americans opposed to Trump are at the moment in a don't-count-your-chickens-before-they-are-hatched mode about the Presidentioal election. It's not over until the election and the post-election challenges are finished and Joe Biden is sworn in as President.
But at least in the US political context, Alemán is more confident that I that the defeat of Trump will also mean the end of Trumpism. Not after the Republicans Party backed Trump so enthusiastically for four years, the NeverTrumpers at the Lincoln Project notwithstanding. The prospect of the Republican Party remaking itself in the mode of, say, the Eisenhower Administration is virtually unthinkable at this point. Radical right ideology will continue to drive the Republican Party. And thare is little pospect that "the fever will break," as establishment Democrats endlessly hope.
The Trump administration announced plans Wednesday to withdraw almost 12,000 troops from Germany, a sweeping continentwide reorganization that has provoked bipartisan congressional opposition and widespread dismay in Europe.
Secretary of Defense Mark Esper told a Pentagon briefing that the move would benefit Washington's strategic interests abroad, strengthening NATO and deterring Russia, and equipping the military for "a new era of great power competition."
But President Donald Trump has previously offered a different explanation, suggesting the planned drawdown is punishment for his long-standing complaint that Germany does not spend enough on its military.
I know what rightwing, America First isolationism is, i.e., extreme nationalism and militarism, so I've never expected Bunker Boy to actually have dovish policies, except by total accident. This is another idiotic move, that Trump justifies on the basis that NATO is a protection racket and Germany is behind on their payments.
"The announcement of a massive reduction of the number of American troops in Germany is Trump's revenge on Angela Merkel. There are few heads of government who are as opposed to him as the Chancellor," writes Konstantin von Hammerstein (Trumps Rache an MerkelSpiegel Online 07/29/2020; my translation from the German).
Expecting European countries to move quickly to deal with obvious problems is usually a bad bet. But it might be possible in the (relatively) near term to come up with a more coherent definition of what NATO should be . It's always been basically an anti-Russia alliance, so making it a jumping-off point for bonehead US interventions in the Middle East or Africa is probably not the best idea.
But after the Bunker Boy experience, can any European government really believe the US would go to war with Russia if Putin decided to take a piece of Estonia? Estonia is a NATO member, though Trump probably couldn't identify it as a country, much less find it on an unlabeled map. In any case, Russia is an overstretched regional power that also has the blessing/curse of being a petrostate.
Refounding NATO is probably too much to expect in any immediate future.
But hoping for better algebra isn't too big a stretch. This 2% of GDP goal for military spending is a typical lazy diplomatic marketing move. As NBC reports, "Belgium and Italy, where some American headquarters and troops would be redeployed under the plan, spend even less on defense than Germany in relation to the size of their respective economies."
But its GDP is basically the size of Italy's, depending on the exchange rates on any given day. Germany and France together have more-or-less the same size military as Russia, and France even has nukes. What percent of GDP countries are spending is all-but-meaningless for the comparison. Europe's problem isn't the GDP % they spend, it's the fact that they don't have a coordinated European force except for NATO, which Bunker Boy is wrecking.
There is a discussion underway in the EU about a plan for the EU to borrow money and distribute it to member countries to counter the negative economic effects of the corona crisis.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Merkel proposed a €500 billion recovery fund for the European Union in which the EU would borrow funds to distribute (not loan) to member countries to deal with the current recession that we're so far calling the COVID crisis or the coronavirus crisis. (Daniel Boffey, Merkel and Macron propose €500bn EU rescue fundGuardian 05/18/2020) One of the notable features of the proposed fund is that it would be an project of the full European Union, not of the euro currency zone.
The press like to refer to the relationship between the two leaders as "Merkron," reflecting the continued centrality of German-French leadership in the EU. A role that has now increased in relative importance with Brexit.
The "Merkron" proposal drew support from 23 of the EU's 27 members. Four countries, styled as the "Frugal Four," objected to the proposals on the grounds that it would be a direct EU support to member nations without an obligation to repay: Austria, Denmark, the Netherlands and Sweden. Austria's baby-faced Chancellor Sebastian Kurz has been prominent in making the case for the Frugal Four, also known as the Greedy Four. They made a counter-proposal whose central concept was that the assistance be made in the form of loans that would have to be repaid. This, of course, would affect the national credit rating and bond rates of countries like Spain and Italy, especially in the latter case increasing the likelihood of a new euro crisis.
The proposal has been evolving in the negotiations with the Greedy Four, with Ursula von der Leyen as head of the EU Commission proposing a variant. Lionel Laurent reports (An $826 Billion Battle Is Brewing in EuropeBloomberg Opinion 05/28/2020:
The European Union’s pandemic recovery plan has all the hallmarks of a historic leap in the dark for the 27-member bloc.
It aims to unleash as much as 750 billion euros ($826 billion) of fiscal stimulus, fueled by joint borrowing on financial markets - a big deal for member states that have always jealously guarded the power to tax and spend. The fact that the plan unveiled by Commission boss Ursula von der Leyen is so clearly aligned with the proposal from France’s Emmanuel Macron and Germany’s Angela Merkel is especially positive: Paris’s desire for continental assertiveness and foreign-policy grandeur hasn’t always matched Berlin’s focus on balanced budgets. ...
At the center of the battle are the so-called “frugal four” - the Netherlands, Sweden, Austria and Denmark - taking up a combative role similar to that of the British when they were members. As wealthy net contributors to the bloc’s budget, they’ve already been pushing back against what they see as unfair increases to the share they’re expected to chip in after Brexit; February negotiations on the next seven-year budget went nowhere after 28 hours of talks.
The Covid-19 crisis has redoubled efforts by the frugal four to push back against perceived profligacy, as the EU considers a bigger budget outlay than before, at 1.1 trillion euros (still only about 1% of gross national income), adds on pandemic stimulus tools and proposes aid in the form of grants rather than loans to be paid back — a package worth 2.4 trillion euros. The budget hard-liners may lack the diplomatic heft of Germany, but they can’t be ignored, as the plan needs unanimous support across national parliaments. [my emphasis]
Basti (Austrian Chancellor Kurz) is working this to promote his own anti-European credentials among the hard-right voters he works hard to cultivate. Basti has often aligned himself with the Visegrad group (Hungary, Poland, Czechia, Slovakia) on other anti-European positions like flat opposition to an revision of the Failed Dublin System of immigration and asylum processing. But his friends in the Visegard Group, including the EU's current start authoritarian, Hungarian Prime Mnister Viktor Orbán, want some of the money foreseen in the Merkron aid concept.
And, of course, different players try to negotiate deals over all kinds of things, so that's a factor always present in EU politics. (Just like every other kind of politics!)
Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz said that he and the other leaders of the EU’s so-called frugal four group were encouraged by some aspects of the European Commission’s proposal for a coronavirus crisis recovery fund, but cautioned it represents just a “starting point” for negotiations.
“What we find positive - not just myself, but the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark - is that there is a time limit and that the fund will be a one-time emergency measure and not the first step toward a debt union,” Kurz, who has emerged as the unofficial spokesman of the frugal faction, said in a telephone interview with POLITICO on Wednesday.
“Considering that there are many in Europe who want such a debt union, it’s important to us that this be clarified in writing once and for all,” he said, referring to concerns among the frugal group that the fund could morph into a permanent fixture, opening the door to mutualization of members' debt under the banner of the EU. [my emphasis]
Such political melodramas need to be understood in the context of EU politics, which is too often superficially reported even by the European press.
The EU is a strange critter. Its formal justifications are that it has promoted peace and democracy in Europe. And that's true. It's done both. But the teeth of the EU legal structure is in the economic area, and that structure is very much in the mode of the neoliberal gospel that we see embedded in "trade" treaties that are actually corporate-deregulation treaties.´ So despite the reality of the peace and democracy rationales, which I think are generally taken very seriously, the EU has no common foreign policy (to speak of), no common EU military, and a unanimity rule on major policies that make it extremely difficult to enforce the democracy part.
But the trade laws based on the deregulation-privatization model are enforceable in the courts. And the corporate lobbies aren't at all inclined to give up the advantages the EU structure brings them. Business regulation is dominated by EU laws and rules, but the various forms of social insurance - "social state" polices as they are also called - are the responsibility of individual countries, which given the way the European Supreme Court (EuGH) interprets the laws, creates heavy pressure to lower social-insurance protections toward the lowest common denominator. But it's not just the courts. The EU Commission, which is the EU executive body, has for years pushed member states to privatize their national health insurance programs, though fortunately most EU governments weren't so politically suicidal that they actually did much of it.
There's a lot of justified talk about the "democratic deficit" in the EU. I'm guessing that not even half of the voters in EU countries could correctly describe how laws are made by the EU Commission, the European Council, the Council of the European Union (not the same as the European Council!), and the European Parliament. For corporate lobbyists, this is a *desirable* state of affairs. Neither Merkel nor Macron have any intention of rocking that boat. And here's where the unanimity principle comes into play. If Macron and Merkel think it somehow looks good politically to advocate a common EU borrowing-and-subsidy program that they may not actually want, as long as they know that even one country will veto it, they are free to posture without having to worry they'll actually have to carry through. That way they can be the Good Europeans whose enlightened proposal got blocked by some annoying small countries.
Generally, the richer countries would prefer to have the vetoing country be one of the former "Eastern Bloc" countries. But in this case, the lowly Eastern countries want the money, so it's the Greedy Four who are the sticks in the mud on this one. If Germany and France apply even a fraction of the pressure they applied to Greece, Italy, Ireland, Spain, and Portugal in the last euro crisis to enact austerity measures, the dissenters will come around. (Craig Crowther, 'Frugal Four' will come round to EU's €750bn COVID-19 recovery fund, says former Finland PM StubbEuronews 05/28/2020) If Merkel and Macron don't apply that kind of pressure, we'll know they aren't serious. Since we're talking here about using public funds largely to bail out failing corporations and banks, it's possible that Merkel and Macron are serious on this one. Even staunch neoliberal austerians are true believers in "socialism for the rich."
Yanis Varoufakis is skeptical of the proposal, which he doesn't think will help with the problem the "periphery" EU countries like Italy face with pressure on their bond rates in a crisis. On the surface, the Merkron proposal is a move to make the EU more of a "transfer union". But the more critical problem is to make the eurozone (18 countries) a transfer union. That would mean things like have a eurozone-wide unemployment support program, for instance. Otherwise, the eurozone still faces the problem of the kind of tremendous pressure for internal devalution, i.e., lowering wages and living standards, that countries like Greece and Italy faced during the last eurocrisis. DiEM25 on Merkel Macron Announcement 19 MAY 2020:
There is an important geopolitical consideration in play with the "Merkron" proposal, as Wolfgang Münchau explains in China is pitting EU countries against each otherFinancial Times 06/24/2020:
China has shown remarkable skill in playing EU countries off against one another — for example in the race to develop 5G mobile networks. But this is just the beginning. China is well on the way to emerge as the most influential external power for the EU.
China’s Belt and Road Initiative, a project of long-term infrastructure investment spanning the Eurasian continent, lies at the heart of China’s global industrial strategy. EU governments understand this well. The Franco-German proposal for the €500bn coronavirus recovery fund includes a specific demand for an industrial policy to protect Europe against investments by third countries in strategic sectors. Yet such a strategy would pose problems for Italy, the likely main beneficiary of future Chinese investment in Europe. [my emphasis]
And Münchau's Eurointelligence looks more closely at the smoke and mirrors involved (Why it is not €500bn 05/29/2020):
When we read through the official document for yesterday's briefing, we were perplexed that the numbers did not add up - at least not in an obvious way. Further study of the proposal has revealed to us the reason why. The European Commission's claim that €500bn of the €750bn package comes in the form of grants is misleading. A more correct assessment is €400bn, which includes the €310bn grant element in the recovery plan and various bits and bobs, including an increase in structural funds. But it also includes components which the EU classifies as grants but whose ultimate incarnation is a loan. This is the Commission's old Juncker-fund reflex. It starts off by taking some real money and then leveraging it into a large loan. Whether this works or not is beside the point. Economically, this is not a fiscal impulse because it relates to claims that must be ultimately repaid. [my emphasis]
Europintelligence also argues that this is a clumsy attempt to backdoor a transfer-union function that really pertains to the specific needs of the eurozone:
... will the package survive the onslaught of the frugal four? The EU will need the consent of each of them to move ahead. They each will extract a price. On a per-capita basis, the frugal four are among the five largest net contributors to the EU budget. Leif Pagrotzky, a former Swedish economics minister, made the argument in Dagens Nyheter that Sweden should not veto the recovery fund, but argue that it is a eurozone-only instrument and Sweden should not take part in it. We agree with that argument. There is a lot of muddled thinking in Brussels about the nature of the monetary union, which is one of the reasons why the eurozone is stuck in a perma-crisis. The recovery fund is an economic necessity that arises as a direct result of countries having locked themselves into a permanent monetary union. It is not another regional aid programme.
The Dutch and the Austrians will have different objectives. We don't think they will want to veto the package, but the net economic gain for the EU as a whole is likely to be reduced through rebates for these countries. For example, if non-eurozone countries were allowed to opt out from the recovery fund, the refinancing burden on the remaining countries would increase, which in turn would reduce the extent of the fiscal transfer that is built into the package. [my emphasis]
Norbert Röttgen is a member of the German Budestag for the CDU (Christian Democratic Union), Angela Merkel's party. He was Environment Minister in Merkel's Cabinent 2009-2013 and is currently the chair of the Bundestag Foreign Policy Committee.
He gave an interview to Der Spiegel that has been rightly interpreted as a wide-reaching criticism of Angela Merkel's crisis management. Whether or not he has a better course for the country and his party to follow, Röttgen has some perceptive observations that focus on the key problem of how Merkel approaches crises. ("Den Bach runter", Der Spiegel 41:2018 {06.10.2018}; Röttgen greift Merkel anSüddeutsche Zeitung 05.10.2018)
Röttgen says that Merkel's politics are unraveling. The immediate background of his comments are the state elections in Bavaria this coming Sunday. The Bavarian CSU (Christian Social Union) has allied with the CDU since the immediate postwar era, so much so that one could easily talk about the "CDU/CSU" as a single party on the national level. But it is a separate party. Their political strategy has always been to capture the conservative vote, even when it means taking nasty positions that weren't obviously consistent with either the "C" or the "S" in their party's name.
But now the CSU is facing a credible challenge on the right from the far-right, the TrumpPutinist party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), which won enough votes nationally in 2017 to enter the Bundestag. They are currently the third largest party, and the biggest opposition party to Merkel's GroKo (Grand Coalition) of the CDU/CSU and the SPD. And given the xenophobic fears that the CSU and some its leaders have happily stoked since 2015, it's very possible that the AfD will win a significant number of voters from the CSU. ( Matthew Karnitschnig, The man who lost BavariaPolitico EU 10/12/2018) On the left-center, the Greens in Bavaria seem to be benefitting from the political shifts more than the Social Democrats (SPD), the latter currently at serious risk of becoming a minor party.
Röttgen makes three important points that should be at the center of political conversations about the refugee/immigration issue in Europe.
The immigration crisis that became acute in 2015-16 was obviously already there but Merkel's government didn't prioritize it.
Die Migrationskrise hat uns vollig unvorbereitet getroffen. Dabei hat Deutschland wie fast alle europäischen Staaten einen Hilferuf des Weltenährungsprogramnms der Vereinten Nationen ignoriert. Öffensichtlich stimmt etwas nicht in unserer Organisation von Politik, wenn es darum geht, Krisen zu erkennen. Selbst wenn sie eigentlich nicht mehr zu übersehen sind, reagieren wir nicht. Daraus muss man doch mal Schlüsse ziehen.
{The migration crisis caught us fully unprepared. Including the fact that Germany, like almost all other European states, had ignored a call for assistance from the UN World Food Program. Clearly something is wrong in the way we organize policies when it comes to recognizing crises. Even when they are really can't be overlooked any more, we don't react. We have to draw conclusions from that.}
Röttgen there does use the word preferred by anti-immigrant agitators, "migrant" rather than "refugee" or "immigrant."
The euro crisis that reached its most acute phase in 2015 with the negotiations over Greek debt also showed the serious failure of the government's prior kick-the-can-down-the-road approach.
Wir verlieren [Wähler] derzeit dramatisch, weil zu der Finanz- und zur Eurokrise noch eine weitere Krise hinzugekommen ist, welche die Menschen viel stärker berührt, nämlich die Migrationskrise. Die ist nicht mehr abstrakt, sondern mit Gesichtern verbunden. Es löst in vielen emotional und psychisch etwas aus, wenn in sehr kurzer Zeit sehr viele fremde Menschen kommen. Das hat die vorher schon vorhandenen Krisensymptome verschärft.
{We are losing [voters] dramatically right now, because in addition to the financial and euro crisis an additional crisis also added that touched people even more strongly, namely the migration crisis. It is no longer abstract, but rather is tied to faces. In many people, it releases something emotional and psychologica, if a lot of foreign people come. That intensified the crisis symtoms that were already there.}
The part about mass immigration triggering fear and anxiety for people is true. But a lot of bad faith can also hide behind phrases like that, too. So it's always important to keep in mind on this issue that polls in Germany and Austria show consistently that fear of immigration is inversely related to the presence of immigrants where the respodents live. The more people have contact with actual immigrants, the less xenophobic they are on average.But he's right to connect reactions to the finance crisis and the Greek crisis of 2015 in particular to the European responses to the 2015-16 refugee wave. Because it's hard to see how the nationalist venom that Merkel's government encouraged against Greece in early 2015 didn't contribute in some major way to the nationalist responses and the resentment of being dictated to by Germany in the 2015-16 refugee crisis.
None of that excuses the irresponsbile conduct of most EU countries in refusing to accept refugees in that crisis, of course. Nor have any of them stepped up to provide leadership on realistic solutions to the continuing refugee dilemma. They prefer to float imaginary solutions (long-term development aid to African and Middle Eastern countries, asylum application centers in North Africa, chest-pounding to "close the borders!!!") out of some combination of reckless irresponsbility and hope they postpone new crises until they become some other politicians' problem.
Röttgen recognizes that processes for assimilation of new immigrants, called "integration"in Germany and Austria, are currently inadequate and need to be systematically improved.
Um es klar zu sagen: Der Fehler war nicht, diejenigen nach Deutschland zu lassen, die schon in Europa waren. Das habe ich immer als praktisch, humanitär und alternativlos angesehen, wenn Sie mir dieses Wort gestatten. Aber es sind jetzt rund eine Million Menschen aus zum Teil sehr entfernten Kulturen hier. Anzunehmen, dass wir das mit unserem traditionellen Integrationsinstrumentarium, das einmal für türkische astarbeiter entwickelt wurde, bewältigen konnten, ist unrealistisch. Wir brauchten ein ganz neues Integrationskonzept. Aber darüber debattieren wir nicht.
{To say it clearly: The mistake was not in allowing those who were already in Europe to come to Germany. I've always viewed that as practical, humanitarian, and without an alternative, if you will allow me this phrase. But right now there are about a million people here that in part are from very different cultures. To assume that with our traditional methods of integration, that were developed at an earlier time for Turkish guest workers, that we can handle that is unrealistic. We need a completely new integration concept. But we aren't even debating it.}
Realism alone can't overcome xenophobic fear-mongering. But it's a necessary part of it. And it's even more necessary to develop practical solutions and practical plans for the ongoing chronic immigration problem.
Heinrich August Winkler is one of Germany's best-known and highly respected historians. The author description Der Spiegel attaches to his article, "Der Westen erodiert" (4:2018 06/10/2018) calls him the most influential German historian.
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 diedCBS 10/20/2011):
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, because became the 2016 deal with Turkey.
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.]
