The European Union is currently embroiled in a refugee crisis poised to test its member states’ commitments to internationalism and liberal democracy. According to Frontex, the agency in charge of guarding the EU border, to date in 2015 over 340,000 migrants have attempted to cross into Europe, triple the number who attempted migration in 2014. Outwardly, European leadership has agreed to take up the mantle of providing asylum. Most recently, the European Council proposed to distribute 160,000 migrants across member nations. Germany, led by Chancellor Angela Merkel, agreed to take in as many as 800,000 refugees.
At the same time, however, a plurality of ultra-right, populist, and anti-immigration nationalist parties have taken increasing hold within the politics of a number of prominent EU member states. Beyond forcing leadership to confront disparate stances on immigration within the European Union, the current migrant crisis reveals how this wave of ultra-right nationalism is not only anachronistic, but threatens the European Union’s role as a harbinger of pluralism, inclusionary politics, and cooperation.
France’s National Front Party, headed by Marine Le Pen, and Hungary’s Fidesz, led by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, are among the most politically influential of ultra-nationalist parties. Each have asserted sharp, vocal opposition to EU leadership’s most recent pro-immigration proposals. More broadly, each party is defined by xenophobia (and Islamophobia in particular), a tendency towards authoritarianism, and a willingness to engage in mass, ethnically charged propaganda.
On September 9, Orbán—a skilled orator who employs hyperbole and pathos to command the attention of his audience—went so far as to deny the migrant crisis’s existence, bluntly adding that “Muslims are not wanted in Hungary.” He purported to be defending Europe’s eastern frontier against a Muslim invasion. Orbán’s shocking rhetoric, which contains echoes of twentieth-century fascism, panders to popular prejudices within Hungary, revealing a key rift between the policies presented by top EU leadership and the at-times divisive impulses of the European public. In a particularly disturbing instance, on September 7, a Hungarian woman was caught in a now widely circulated video kicking a migrant fleeing from police along Hungary’s Serbian border.
Within France’s National Front party appear more overt affronts not only to the European Council’s pro-immigration policies, but to its very standing as an international governing body. On August 30, when French Prime Minister Manuel Valls called the country’s lawmakers to action in Calais to “treat, shelter and provide medical care to migrants in a dignified way,” Le Pen demanded he not “sacrifice Calais to the European Union dogmas” and “open the doors of our country to new illegal immigrants.” The French have been forced, to a certain degree, to temper their pro-EU policy stances to appease its hardline supporters. Asserting national sovereignty within the European Union is a perfectly legitimate and acceptable means of checking the European Council’s central governing authority. The current trend of nationalism within Europe, however, as reflected in Le Pen’s statements, defines itself by an archaic understanding of what constitutes a nation-state: a closed-off political entity populated by a single ethnic group, and strictly regulated by a powerful central authority.
For the decade following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, onlookers heralded the birth of “a new internationalism,” which would wipe away nationalist divisions in favor of a broader, more inclusive global political system. European nationalists of 2015, however, brought to the forefront of international media in their virulent rejection of efforts to provide asylum to migrants, seem willing to dismantle this cooperative world order in favor of one governed by division and exclusion. The current migration crisis is but the first of what will likely be many major tests of Europe’s commitment to internationalism.