The Rising Migrant Tide

Strache cannot claim the credit. An earnest dental technician, he had a hard time firing up crowds in Vienna’s Leopold-Mistiger-Platz when he spoke there a week before the election. He’s querulous. If Haider’s speeches were tirades, Strache’s are more like tizzies. Nor is the country generally drifting towards the FPÖ’s platform, to judge from Strache’s mumbled support for the principle of equal pay for women. The earthquake in Austrian politics is explained by one thing alone: Shortly before the Upper Austria elections, 61 percent of voters told pollsters they were preoccupied with “refugees and asylum.” No other issue came close. 

The flood of Middle Eastern refugees into Austria began in the summer. By September they were arriving at the southeastern border at the rate of 10,000 or 12,000 a day. These migrants are associated in the public mind with the war in Syria but, in fact, come from throughout the Muslim world—Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh. Most of them are on their way to Germany. The great majority are young men. By the end of this year, Austrian authorities estimate, 375,000 will have passed through the country, and a quarter of them will have stayed to apply for asylum. Austria will have added 1 percent to its population in just about three months, with virtually all the newcomers Muslims. When migrant families follow, as they inevitably do, the effect will be multiplied. Donald Tusk, the Polish president of the European Council, warns that the biggest tide of migrants “is yet to come.” 

Austria is unprepared. Yes, the country took in a lot of migrants in the wake of the Balkan wars in the early 1990s. But these were people from 200 miles away, whose grandparents had been subjects of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Only in the last couple of years has there been significant non-European immigration to Austria at all. Vienna’s native poor have noticed that those who can claim to be part of a foreign “humanitarian emergency” get privileged access to public housing. The country has budgeted about $600 million for refugees, but a government study leaked in September set the true estimate (including family unification) at $14 billion over four years. Remember that Austria is about a fortieth the size of the United States. A proportionate human wave passing through this country would consist of 15 million people and cost as much as the Obama stimulus package. 

Social Democratic prime minister Werner Faymann has sped the migrants on their way into Europe. Strache prefers the tack of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán—to defend his country’s border with fences and criminal penalties. He has been criticized for lacking a specific plan, but, like Donald Trump, he is running in a climate where plans have been used not to solve problems but to dupe voters. No one wants to hear another plan. What people want is a token that a candidate is on their side. The Christian Democratic ÖVP ran on the slogan “The Answer in Hard Times: Reason” and wound up in single digits, almost swept out of Viennese politics altogether. 

Dirty Dublin

It is almost all German chancellor Angela Merkel’s fault. In August she made a big mistake. Refugees who had once hoped to wait out the Syrian war in Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey had been losing patience and started trickling into Europe. By this summer, traffickers had built a profitable streamlined route that could efficiently accommodate millions of clients/migrants. In August, Merkel announced that Germany would probably accept 800,000 Syrians this year. Syrians—and most anyone who believed he could pass for Syrian—took that as an invitation. The government estimate has been steadily revised upwards, and the new figure stands at 1.5 million.

The result is a rupture between politicians and publics that has spread across Central Europe. Sixty-one percent of Germans polled in February opposed migration from non-EU countries. In Merkel’s own party, 126 members of the Bundestag signed an angry petition distancing themselves from her policy. Horst Seehofer, state governor from her party’s Bavarian wing, is threatening to declare a state of emergency, due to crowded refugee conditions in Munich. Her Social Democratic coalition partners, generally more liberal on immigration than Christian Democrats, have called for a ceiling on newcomers. President Joachim Gauck, a Christian of a decidedly unworldly bent, has warned that Germany is reaching its limits. Opposition parties have sought to take advantage. 

The September crisis at Volkswagen came at a terrible time for Merkel. Arguably Germany’s most prestigious company, VW was found to have installed sensors in its vehicles that would systematically underreport noxious emissions. It is largely because of confidence in Germany’s expertise and probity that Merkel has been entrusted with the final say over Europe’s monetary and economic policy. Merkel similarly leaned on Germany’s reputation when she unilaterally announced what Europe’s migrant policy would be. But once German business figures were discredited and their honesty called into question, Germany’s neighbors began to wonder if their own leaders were being taken to the cleaners.

Austria is among the more credulous and contented members of the EU. Its elite newspaper Die Presse has a regular section—not a column, a section—called “Deepening Europe.” A heart-rending incident over the summer in which 71 migrants were found dead in an abandoned freezer truck on the A4 motorway left Austrians even less inclined to rock the EU boat. No one wants to gripe at such a moment.

But for Germany’s Central European neighbors, there was something unnerving about the way Merkel had made her pitch to the world’s huddled masses. Under the EU’s so-called Dublin regulations, passed in stages starting in 1997, refugees must apply for asylum in the first EU country they enter. Germany is nearly landlocked, and Middle Easterners need visas to fly into it. So Merkel’s invitation worked the way a lot of humanitarian philanthropy works: She got the reputation for “generosity.” But it was Germany’s EU neighbors, whose names the avid fortune-seekers couldn’t even remember, who shared the cost of Merkel’s million-man march. 

Merkel accompanied her invitation with the insistence that the Dublin regulation was “broken,” and that Germany was not going to stand on bureaucratic ceremony. In this she resembled Barack Obama waiving Affordable Care Act provisions. She also said, “Wir schaffen das,” a rough German equivalent of “Yes, we can.” Nonetheless, the existence of the Dublin regulation pushed other EU countries into lawless habits. Larger-than-ever waves of asylum-seekers, claiming to be headed for Germany, began appearing at the southern border of Greece. Were the Greeks supposed to incur the responsibility for feeding these German invitees by registering them as asylum-seekers? Not likely! Greece was too broke—and it was broke because Germany had spent the winter pitilessly enforcing payment of a foolish debt plan that Germany had drawn up for it. 

So Greece, standing at the outside border of the European Union, essentially waved the migrants in, assuming that the wider you open the doors, the sooner your guests will leave. The assumption was correct. These “asylum-seekers,” having found safety in the EU, now exited the EU into Macedonia, passed through Serbia, and then reentered the EU in Croatia or Hungary. But that just extended the Dublin dilemma to the next country. Who was going to record the entry of these migrants? Hungary tried to do it, but the asylum-seekers were convinced, perhaps rightly, that they would be foolish to have their claim adjudicated there. Austria, perhaps the most orderly country in Europe, itself stopped registering those who entered its national space, pleading logistical impossibility. In the old days, Austria would have said migrants who couldn’t enter in an orderly way couldn’t enter at all. Most wanted to wait until arriving in Germany to apply for asylum. At reception centers in towns on the Hungarian border, Austria loaded these travelers onto buses to Vienna’s Westbahnhof. From there they were sent on trains to Salzburg on the German border, or some place with available beds in between. Neither the interior nor the defense ministry published clear records of how many migrants were sent onward. The combination of Merkel’s invitation and the Dublin rules had created a cataract of corruption that was flowing from south to north.

How could it not? Citizens of all the tiny countries that lie between the Middle East and Germany were witnessing a migration far too big for Germany to handle. They knew Germany would eventually realize this, too. Once Germany lost its nerve, the huge human chain of testosterone and poverty would be stuck where it was. And if your country was smaller than Germany—Austria, for instance, is a tenth Germany’s size—you could wind up in a situation where the majority of fighting-age men in your country were foreigners with a grievance.

Even before Merkel’s August invitation, Austria had been trying to relieve the stress on its main train stations by putting up migrants in smaller towns. It had a problem, though: The country’s constitution permits local authorities to veto local projects decided at the national level. Nothin’ doin’, said every burgermeister who was asked. So Austria’s ruling coalition of Social Democrats and Christian Democrats amended the constitution to let the central government override local control over housing policy. Under the law, should Vienna deem it necessary, all communities of more than 2,000 people must take asylum-seekers numbering up to 1.5 percent of their population. Progressive migration policy often gets paid for this way—not in the form of funds but through withdrawn constitutional liberties. Those who passed the constitutional amendment over the summer said that the likelihood it would need to be used was slim. Do you think anyone believed that? The Vienna lodgings meant to accommodate asylum-seekers were soon full, and the lodgings set up in Salzburg were overflowing.

Germans had similar problems of congestion. They decided to solve the problem by—odd though this may sound in a German context—using a system of special trains (Sonderzüge) to move large masses of people around the country to far-flung camps. There were reasons for this. Germans did not want the regular trains for which they were charging money filled up with people who last bathed in a roadside tarn in Macedonia. For another, they needed to remove pressure on the city of Munich, and if migrants were taken there directly, they would not want to leave. There were already stories of refugees revolting when told that they would instead be going to Passau. So Germany sent Sonderzüge to Salzburg, on the Austrian border, to take up the daily flow.

Towards the end of September, rumors began to spread through the camps that Germany was about to stop the Sonderzüge. This was not true, but the Germans were unquestionably slowing them down. On Sunday, September 6, 13,000 migrants had traveled to Germany on special trains. Three Sundays later, no trains arrived in the morning at Salz-burg. The onward flow of refugees began to stagnate, frustrating those who thought they were on the verge of starting a new life. The Austrians themselves were no less worried to see their refugee population rise. So as Greek-style corruption flowed north, refugees began to get backed up further and further south. 

Platform 1

This movement of millions of Middle Easterners into Central Europe is going to change the continent at its core. What is extraordinary is how little it disturbs the tranquility of the cities where it goes on. Buses from the town of Nickelsdorf, near the Hungarian border, arrive at the unfrequented rear entrance to the Westbahnhof, on Langauerstrasse, and disgorge their passengers. This is across the street from the No Rules Café and the apartment building known as the Blue House, where the first hundreds of migrants to arrive in Austria were put up. 

They wash up a bit and get cold-weather clothing and shoes, should they need them, from a nearby depot on the square. Then they enter the station through a side door and take a large elevator up to Platform 1, which is (as the number indicates) at one edge of the station. The train to take them on to Salzburg or Graz or Klagenfurt is already in the station, shielding the platform from view. You could be a commuter who, day after day, reads novels while waiting for the train home on Platform 2, and you would never notice that the state and various charitable services were engaged in an industrial-scale operation to move tens of thousands of people a week into the European Union. It is a bit reminiscent of the immortal opening passage of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago:

Down the platform the migrants come, 90 percent of them men in their early twenties, in dark clothing—dark jeans, dark down parkas, brown or black shoes. They look like people from the Muslim world, so long as you remember that a big part of the Muslim world is now in Europe. They don’t look like the people sipping Campari on the Ring across from the Vienna Philharmonic. But they do look like Europeans of a kind—the residents of Paris’s banlieues, maybe, and now a lot of Vienna’s outer districts, too. Observers of the United States since Tocqueville’s time have noted the way America has, by reputation, tended to draw the people most suited to it. Among Europeans, America drew the rootless and the hardworking. In a similar way, Europe is now drawing those with a vocation to be Europeans of a certain kind: European Muslims.

The feeling on the platform is joyous, purposeful, optimistic, and macho. These people do not look like the wretched of the earth, although they have had a long, hard, dangerous road. There are two Pakistanis who walked 47 days across Iran and Turkey and saw the third in their party arrested in Yunan (which is what most peoples east of Greece call Greece), where he languishes still. There is a Syrian smoker, traveling with his family, who, shouting “Winston!” passes a 10-euro note to a young German-speaking volunteer, who races down the platform to the nearest tobacco shop and is back by the time the smoker boards the train. There are no obvious Christians among this group, and the Christian migrants in German refugee camps have reportedly suffered so much intimidation from Muslim ones that the German police union has recommended that they be housed apart.

What stands out on Platform 1 is the Muslim character of the welcome these newcomers are receiving. To be sure, there is a nationwide, nonsectarian operation to meet and transport these people. It involves charities (among them translators and collectors of clothes from the Catholic charity Caritas and the Protestant Diakonie, both of which now operate almost as social service agencies) and officials (including a large police presence, most of it down at the end of Platform 1, which prevents people not involved in the transport from happening across it). Corporations have helped, too. Caritas has received two tons of bananas from the Merkur and Rewe supermarket chains. Bushels and bushels of apples stand in grocery carts. There are four pallets of half-liter bottles of Vöslauer water (still water, because even thirsty migrants find sparkling water a bit repellent). There are diapers.

All are welcome to help, but almost all of the volunteers at this point are, it is plain to see, Austrian Muslims. Many of them are recent immigrants themselves. The more modest and traditional a woman’s headscarf, the more likely it is she is a translator from Vienna than a walker from Damascus. These people are all likable, insistent, impressive. There is the Tunisian Austrian translator whom we’ll call Ahmed. He wants to talk to me about Shams (as he calls the lands near Syria) and the Koran, and about how everything going on in the Middle East now is prefigured in it. He notes that, even though most Austrians are only just taking notice of these newcomers, the local mosques have been working doggedly to help them since at least 2013. Ahmed’s father, who arrived as a laborer in the 1960s, has a little shop in a mosque in the 21st district.

There is the wonderful group of middle-aged Bangladeshi men from the Baitul Mukarram mosque in Vienna. They are hauling 250 plastic tubs of delicious bulani and rice. Tell them you marvel at their generosity, and they will invite you to their mosque—there’s more bulani where that came from! There is an affable, intellectual Kurdish lady making coffee. A few of the migrants, who didn’t hear until once the train was loaded that there was coffee, leap off the train to get it even at the risk that all their possessions and loved ones will exit the station without them. There is a Chinese lady who owns a restaurant who brought a barrel of fried rice. She was just five minutes too late for this train, but the rice will keep for the next one. There are “native” Austrians involved in the charitable work, but at this teeming moment the station looks like buntes (colorful) Deutschland, as the multiculturalists describe the new demography of Austria’s neighbor. It reminds one of the issue of the newsweekly Die Zeit that came out that very week, showing various Africans and Asians on the cover under the headline “We are the new ones.” The feeling that a civilizational torch is being passed accounts, one suspects, for much of the joy. On September 11, Saudi Arabia made an offer to build 200 mosques for Germany’s new Muslims. 

This comes with worries, to the extent anyone cares to write about it. There have been reports that two of the more aggressive (ethnically German) members of Germany’s “Salafi scene” have been proselytizing migrants. In a camp in the German city of Kassel, 300 Albanians attacked 70 Pakistanis who had remonstrated with an Albanian delinquent who had attacked an 80-year-old Pakistani man. A writer for Die Zeit showed pictures of various things German to migrants in order to record their responses: bicycles, Heidi Klum, Oktoberfest, and other cultural references. “Oh, Hitler!” said Abdullateef D., a 32-year-old who arrived in Germany from Syria five months ago. “Good man!”

There is not much willingness to acknowledge the civilizational complexity of the situation into which Germany has now dragged all of its Central European neighbors. Cant rules. How often Merkel’s representatives say: “Barbed wire is no solution.” And how wrong they are. Do you wonder why Bulgaria, which built a border fence this year, has no migrants? Or why 92 percent of asylum-seekers have settled in just 10 EU states? Former foreign minister Joschka Fischer has warned that Europe “must not sacrifice its basic values.” By this he means it must remain vigilant against ancient forms of intolerance. New forms of intolerance and complacency escape his gaze. The opening of the New York Times’s run-up to the Vienna elections was a doozy: 

And there you have the consensus reading of Europe’s migration crisis in all its moral complexity: It’s not just that those uneasy about migration are as bad as Hitler. Those happy about it are as sweet as strudel. 

None dare mention Islam. One young Syrian-Austrian religion professor told the daily Der Standard that five of her students had gone off to join ISIS. “But Islam is not the problem,” she insists. Germanness is not mentioned, either. The Germans are often referred to in German-language accounts as die einheimische Bevölkerung—the native population. Nor do Austrians give the impression of having great resources of self-knowledge. There was a pretty young woman standing in front of an escalator in the Westbahnhof collecting money for refugees a few weeks ago. She was wearing a T-shirt bearing the Gloria Steinem slogan “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.” What did she think she was doing? Attacking men? Or summoning the kind of men who won’t be spoken to that way? 

There is something in this that reminds one of the financial crisis of 2008. Like a too-big-to-fail bank, Merkel has made a bet that will allow her to pocket the credit if she succeeds and spread the baleful consequences to others if she fails. It appears now that she is going to fail. Her defenders exult that she is showing a different face of Germany than the one the world knows from the last century of its history. It is premature to say so. Merkel is showing the face of a Germany that is acting unilaterally, claiming superior moral authority, and answering those who object by saying they’ll thank her for this someday. As such, she is dragging the whole European continent towards unrest. No German role is older.

Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard and the author of Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West.