Across Europe, the
migrant crisis that has engulfed the Continent since the summer is provoking
new levels of public anxiety after the New Year’s Eve sexual assaults in
Cologne, Germany, where witnesses and the police described predatory gangs of
mostly foreign men, including some refugees, groping and robbing young women.
The Cologne police are also investigating allegations of rape.
While the police say
the assaults in Cologne were carried out by hundreds of men, even that is a
narrow sliver of the more than one million asylum seekers who entered Europe
last year. Still, the anxieties provoked by the Cologne attacks quickly spread
as reports emerged of similar New Year’s Eve assaults in other German cities,
as well as in Finland and Austria.
While the details in
some of those reports are sketchy, and none approach what happened in Cologne,
they have touched an exceptionally raw nerve as European societies face the
challenge of integrating and acculturating the asylum seekers, most of them
Muslims, and a majority of those single men.
Far-right political
parties, which have long invoked hoary stereotypes of dark-skinned foreigners
threatening European identity and security, have pounced on the reports, having
already capitalized on the inability of the European Union to secure its
external borders while efficiently managing the movement of migrants inside the
bloc.
“This has been the
elephant in the room that no one is prepared to acknowledge — that the great
fear is the fear of Islam,” said Alexander Betts, director of the Refugee
Studies Center at Oxford. He argued that most mainstream politicians had failed
to directly address these public fears or to provide enough clarity in the
migration debate, creating a vacuum that anti-immigrant leaders have rushed to
fill.
Mr. Betts warned that
unless political leaders could quickly articulate a nuanced argument for
migration — one that confronts fears about security and religious differences,
especially in the aftermath of the Nov. 13 terrorist attacks in Paris — public
support for granting asylum to refugees could collapse. “To have attacks in
Germany that are of a sexual nature perpetuated by men ostensibly of Muslim
origin is symbolically devastating for a public commitment to asylum,” he said.
The public mood has
been shifting for weeks and is already influencing policy. European news
outlets reported on Tuesday that since Jan. 1, Germany had tightened screening
of migrants trying to enter the country from Austria. Many other European
countries erected fences or border checkpoints last year to block or divert the
flow of migrants — moves that threatened to destroy Europe’s system of open
internal borders. In Denmark, the government is even moving to confiscate
valuables from arriving migrants to defray the cost of accommodating them.
Chancellor Angela
Merkel of Germany has been Europe’s most outspoken advocate of accepting
refugees, emphasizing the humanitarian and moral imperative of doing so while
seeking to rally ordinary Germans with her slogan, “We Can Do It!” But Germany
is bearing the brunt of the new arrivals, and critics have accused Ms. Merkel
of failing to clearly articulate a plan for an integration process that is
likely to last many years.
“It seems as though the
time has come for a broad debate over Germany’s future — and Merkel’s mantra of
‘We Can Do It’ is no longer enough to suppress it,” wrote Der Spiegel, the
German newsmagazine, which described the police’s failure to stop the assaults
in Cologne as “symbolic of the state’s powerlessness in the face of chaos and crime.”
At the same time, polls
show that far-right parties are gaining support in France, Germany and
elsewhere.
In Austria, Herbert
Kickl, general secretary of the right-wing Freedom Party, has called for an
immediate halt to new asylum applications, while other party members have
called for closing Austria’s borders in the aftermath of the Cologne attacks.
Many Austrians who are very wary of the Freedom Party’s agenda concede that the
influx of refugees has stirred an undercurrent of fear, even though the country
has seen little violence.
“There’s a split in
society — in our editorial office, at the lunch table, in circles of friends,”
said Florian Klenk, editor in chief of Falter, a left-leaning weekly based in
Vienna. “It is a polarization, but we have little violence.”
Even so, Peter Hacker,
Vienna’s appointed refugee coordinator, said the city had developed strategies
to coordinate waves of migrants last September. “We decided then that we’d have
a maximum visible presence of police in the places, like train stations, where
migrants were,” he said.
Mr. Hacker added: “Here
in Vienna, we have a clear political stance on refugees and migrants. Vienna
has understood for decades that migrants are to be helped.”
Many analysts note that
the Cologne assaults are especially damaging because anti-immigration critics
and right-wing extremists are using them to discredit all migrants as criminals
or hooligans, even though the overwhelming majority of migrants, many of them
refugees fleeing war in Syria, are peaceful and law-abiding.
But fine distinctions
have been blurred amid a climate of anxiety and insecurity in Europe that has
widened divisions in politics, the news media and society alike.
In Finland, the
Helsinki Police Department issued a statement on Jan. 7 claiming it had
prevented a group of young Iraqi refugees from molesting women on New Year’s
Eve — an announcement that startled many Finns. But other witnesses, as well as
an official at Finland’s National Bureau of Investigation, later discounted any
suggestion of similarities to the Cologne attacks.
Yet already, Finnish
militia groups, including one called the Soldiers of Odin, are patrolling towns
in the name of protecting women. Many of these groups have ties to far-right
organizations, and their presence has become a major political issue.
Opposition politicians
have criticized the reluctance of Finland’s right-wing government to condemn
the militia patrols. The country’s justice minister, Jari Lindstrom, a member
of the populist, anti-immigration Finns party, caused a furor when he said the
patrols did not worry him.
Europe already endured
a tumultuous 2015 that included the migrant crisis, the Greek debt crisis and
two waves of terrorist attacks in Paris. For the European Union, no crisis has
been more threatening than the influx of refugees, which has turned nation
against nation and exposed the institutional shortcomings of the union’s
structure to address questions like external and internal security. Many
analysts say the Cologne attacks have only intensified the pressure for drastic
reforms to the European Union system.
“The only way to deal with this problem is through the
European Union,” said Sergio Fabbrini, director of the school of government at
Luiss Guido Carli University in Rome. “Yet it is clear that the European Union
doesn’t have the institutional tools or political will to deal with it.”
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