“Countdown To The End”: EU Officials Say Europe Is “Going Down The Drain”
- “Countdown To The End”: EU Officials Say Europe Is “Going Down The Drain”
by Tyler Durden, www.zerohedge.com
Back in September, when Berlin and Brussels were busy devising a quota plan to settle the millions of Mid-East asylum seekers flooding into the country, Slovakia said that if Germany called for financial penalties against countries unwilling to accommodate their “share” of migrants, it would be “the end of the EU.”
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That might have seemed hyperbolic at the time, but since then, the situation has spiraled out of control. Border fences have been erected, refugee camps are overflowing, and anti-migrant sentiment is running high after a series of reported sexual assaults on New Year’s Eve sparked a bloc-wide scandal.
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In a testament to just how tense things have become, Austria suspended Schengen on Saturday as new rules came into effect for those seeking to traverse the country on the way north. “Anyone who arrives at our border is subject to control,” Chancellor Werner Faymann said. “If the EU does not manage to secure the external borders, Schengen as a whole is put into question… Then each country must control its national borders,” he added, before warning that if the EU could not better control its external borders “the whole EU [will be] in question.”
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Indeed, the idea that the worsening migrant crisis could well bring an end to the EU has made its way out of Eurosceptic circles and into discussions between the bloc’s top diplomats and officials.
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“The Germans, founders of the postwar union, shut their borders to refugees in a bid for political survival by the chancellor who let in a million migrants,” Reuters wrote on Sunday, describing a hypothetical European endgame. “And then — why not? — they decide to revive the Deutschmark while they’re at it.”
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Both Angela Merkel and Jean-Claude Juncker were out last week with stark warnings about the prospects for the union’s survival in the face of widespread disagreement among member countries regarding how to handle the influx of asylum seekers. Europe is now “vulnerable” Merkel admitted, before saying the fate of the euro is “directly linked” to how the bloc handles the refugee crisis.“Nobody should act as though you can have a common currency without being able to cross borders reasonably easily,” the Chancellor, whose ratings have slipped amid the migrant debate, said at a business event in Mainz.
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Juncker’s assessment was more dire. Europe “is on its last chance” he warned, before saying he hopes this isn’t “the beginning of the end.”
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