The Age of Walls

CHAPTER 7 Europe

Today, no walls can separate humanitarian or human rights crises in one part of the world from national security crises in another. What begins with the failure to uphold the dignity of one life all too often ends with a calamity for entire nations.

—Kofi Annan

People gather at the Berlin Wall as it starts to come down, November 1989.

Early one gray morning in 1979 I boarded a military train in West Germany heading through East Germany to Charlottenburg station in the West German sector of Berlin. The city was formerly the capital of a united Germany but was now locked within East Germany. By that time the wall had been up for eighteen years, and it appeared to be a permanent fixture in our lives, which would keep us apart forever. There didn’t seem to be any prospect of living another way—the present was fixed in concrete, barbed wire, part of a conflict that threatened to split enough atoms to kill us all.

As a serving member of the RAF, I was armed with a military ID card and thus had no need of a passport for this journey. At the East German border we stopped at a station complete with barbed-wire fences and a watchtower. Terse, unsmiling Soviet border guards entered the train and checked our documents while the East German Transport Police, known as TraPos, used sniffer dogs to inspect the underside of the carriages. The capitalist locomotive and crew were replaced by good Communist versions, and after about two hours we chugged our way into the military corridor linking West Germany to West Berlin.

The carriage doors had been locked with chains from the outside, and the windows were sealed as we entered a shabby, drab, half-lit world in which reality seemed to be a permanent gray. We were forbidden to stand up when the train stopped at stations or to speak to any East German or Soviet officials or civilians. The length of the 145-mile corridor was enclosed by high wire fences interspersed with watchtowers complete with floodlights and guards with submachine guns. Behind the fences were cleared “killing zones,” allowing a clear line of fire in case anyone was brave—or foolish—enough to try to cross the border. After a clanking, stop-start, four-hour journey, we rolled into Berlin and toward the symbol of the greatest ideological divide of the twentieth century. This was a city wall like no other—built not to repel invaders, but to keep people in.

These days most Europeans take the idea of freedom of movement for granted. But it was not so long ago that travel across the Continent was severely restricted. During the Cold War, to cross borders in Western Europe you had to have a passport, but it was routine. Crossing the Iron Curtain into Eastern Europe required a passport, paperwork, and security checks and was done in the knowledge that your every movement would be monitored. The Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall were the stark physical reminders that a continent with a shared history, interlinked cultures, and ancient trading routes had been completely riven by ideology and Great Power politics.

In the aftermath of World War II, as the Communist and capitalist victors sized each other up across this new divide, the Soviet economic system quickly started to fail its citizens. Just by looking out a window or crossing a street, ordinary people in the East could see the spectacularly successful rebuilding of West Germany. West German TV reached most of East Germany, beaming images of a burgeoning consumer society into ordinary people’s homes. The East Germans even used to joke that the most easterly regions, out of range of the West German transmitters, were the “Valleys of the Clueless.” Every day that people were able to witness the progress was a blow to the idea that the Soviet system was superior. The ruling Socialist Unity Party of Germany had boasted in 1958 that its principal task was to overtake West Germany in the consumption of consumer goods within two years. This didn’t happen, but the Soviet Union did take the lead in the space race; a popular East German parody of a Communist slogan of the time went “Ohne Butter, ohne Sahne, auf dem Mond die rote Fahne” (There’s no butter, there’s no cream, but on the moon the red flag flutters).

Before the wall went up, so many East Berliners had opted to migrate to the Western sectors, either to work or live permanently, that the East German economy was in dire straits. About 2 million had voted with their feet in the previous decade, and the flow was increasing. Between January 1960 and the end of July 1961 another 330,000 people moved West. East Germany was losing its workforce and its credibility.

In the middle of the night of August 13, 1961, with Moscow’s approval, the East German army began to wall off half of one of the world’s great capital cities. The authorities on one side called it the Antifaschistischer Schutzwall (antifascist protection bulwark); those on the other called it “the wall of shame.” For the first few years it consisted of occasional stretches of wall, but mostly of blocked-off streets, walled-up windows, and stretches of barbed wire. But within a decade a concrete wall was reinforced by watchtowers, bunkers, electric fences, dogs, automatic shooting ranges, and hundreds of armed guards.

On the eastern side people were forbidden to approach it, but in the West you could walk up streets that ended where the wall was built and touch the illogical madness of the division of the German and European peoples. On this side, the black humor of the Cold War years could be spray-painted on the wall. I remember two examples of the graffiti, both in English: JUMP OVER THE WALL AND JOIN THE PARTY and WARNING! EAST GERMAN HIGH JUMP TRAINING AREA. No one could jump the wall, but tens of thousands tried other ways of crossing from East to West, and at least 140 people were killed in the attempt, although some researchers put the total much higher. Tunnels seemed the most obvious escape route, but other memorable and successful efforts were made.

Just four months after the wall went up, twenty-eight-year-old train driver Harry Deterling pointed the passenger train he was driving at the wall, opened the throttle, and smashed through the fortifications. By no coincidence six members of his family were among the passengers. Two years later Horst Klein, an acrobat, noticed that a disused steel cable stretched over the border. Sixty feet above the guards patrolling below, he inched, hand over hand, to West Berlin. Perhaps the most audacious and brilliant escape came in 1979. Hans Strelczyk and Gunter Wetzel used their mechanical knowledge to build a rudimentary hot-air balloon using propane cylinders. Their wives fashioned the balloon bag from canvas and bedsheets. Gathering their four children (and having tested the wind direction), they floated up to eight thousand feet and several miles westward to freedom.

Nevertheless, the wall, judged by its raison d’être, can be called a success. It is estimated that only around five thousand got across it; the mass exodus had been halted. The East German economy began to stabilize after its workforce was imprisoned, and by the mid-1960s the state had control over its trade and currency and was capable of functioning, along with the rest of the Russian empire’s vassal states.

However, the East Germans had not been given a choice, and most of them knew it. They were trapped behind a wall that both physically and mentally imprisoned several generations. Shortly after it went up, psychologists and psychiatrists began to use the term wall disease (Mauerkrankheit). The barrier, it was theorized, created a syndrome in which some people considered themselves locked up, which led to psychological and behavioral disorders such as schizophrenia, alcoholism, depression, and even suicide. The Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung took a wider view, arguing that the Iron Curtain meant Europe in general was “dissociated like a neurotic.” Some degree of mental illness would have been present anyway, but it’s also difficult to believe that the wall had no hand in this.

Europe during the Cold War (1947–89), divided by the Iron Curtain.

For those of us in the West, the East was “over there”—behind the Iron Curtain. Several generations of thinkers and intellectuals were convinced that the East German system was superior to that of the West in both economic and moral terms. When the blindingly obvious became apparent to them in 1989, it was, and remains, difficult for some to admit that a lifetime of belief was based on the rubble of a giant prison system. As for the rest of us, we didn’t go “inter-railing” on our summer holidays to visit Budapest, Dresden, and Warsaw, nor were there weekend visits to Prague or Tallinn. Most of us were in our thirties before we ever met anyone from “over there” because it was difficult to get there—and nigh on impossible for them to get “here.” Many people behind the Iron Curtain needed a permit to travel from one city to another within their own country, never mind cross an international border to the West. For twenty-eight years it was just the way it was. And then, suddenly, it wasn’t.

In 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev had become general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Slowly he began loosening the chains around people’s lives. The word perestroika began to be used, meaning “restructuring,” but also signifying “listening.” Within this came the idea of glasnost, or “openness.” In a thousand small ways society and politics opened up and people listened to one another. By late spring 1989 the idea had spread so far that Hungary, behind the Iron Curtain, had begun to dismantle part of its border fence with Austria. That summer thousands of East Germans decided to take their summer holidays in Hungary.

By August hundreds of East German families were camped outside the West German consulate in Budapest, and hundreds more had taken refuge on the grounds of Holy Family Church, all under the watchful eye of officers from East German state security—the Stasi. A rumor went around about a “Pan-European Picnic” to be held at the Austrian border, and people were suddenly on the move. By late afternoon on August 19 several hundred had gathered by a wooden gate; dozens moved toward it, then hundreds ran through the gap, some crying with joy, some laughing, and some simply continuing to run, unable to believe they were really across the border. Three weeks later Hungary fully opened the border crossings, and sixty thousand people flooded out. The German chancellor, Helmut Kohl, said later, “It was in Hungary that the first stone was removed from the Berlin Wall.”

In the autumn, mass antigovernment demonstrations took place in East Germany. In October, the country’s much-loathed leader, Erich Honecker, resigned and was replaced by the marginally less loathed Egon Krenz. Without guidance from its Russian masters, the politburo was making policy on the hoof. It decided to allow East Berliners to apply for travel visas to visit West Germany. This process could have been managed, and the Communist authorities might have been able to buy time and engineer ways of staying in control, but one of those small details that can change history got in the way. The man tasked with announcing the visa decision on November 9 was the minister of propaganda, Günter Schabowski. He had just returned from holiday, had not attended the meeting at which the policy was decided, and had no idea of any of the details of the process, which included briefings for border guard commanders the following day so they could follow orders. When he was asked, “When do the new regulations begin?,” he hesitated, then replied, “As far as I know, immediately, right now.” Thousands of East Berliners were already at the wall; within hours tens of thousands of people were gathered on both sides.

At first the East German border guards refused to allow anyone out, but then, amid the confusion, they stamped a few passports and then stood back to allow the crowds to surge through. The scenes, which a year before no one had predicted, were amazing. West and East Germans embraced one another, champagne corks popped, and the “wall peckers,” ordinary East and West Berliners, climbed to the top of the wall with chisels, hammers, and axes and set to work leveling the great barrier. The word of the night was wahnsinnig—“mind-blowing.”

It was a heady, emotional day for all Europeans. I was living in Paris at the time and about thirty-six hours later saw a battered old East Berlin Trabant car, with four young East Berliners inside, sputtering up the Champs-Élysées. With the border open, they had decided the first thing they wanted to do was see the City of Light and had driven almost nonstop to get there. All along the great avenue Parisians stopped to applaud their German neighbors and the new era.

The two Germanys united politically in 1990, after forty-five years apart. In 1989 Willy Brandt, the former chancellor of West Germany, was reported as saying, “Now what belongs together will grow together.” It was assumed that he was referring to Germany, though in fact he was talking about Europe in general.

So, a united Germany? A united Europe? Up to a point. The divide that chisels and hammers could not destroy remained—“the wall in the heads.” The wall hadn’t just prevented people from traveling, it had created deep gulfs—economic, political, and social—that would prove harder to overcome than the physical barrier. So, after the tears of joy and the declarations of brotherhood, the hard yards of reunification began. This was not a merger of equals. In 1990 the East had a population of 16.1 million, the West 63.7 million, and the West’s economy dwarfed that of the East. Armed with the mandate from unified elections, which had seen the former Communist Party in the East crushed, the capitalist, democratic Western system set about destroying the Communist machine.

All large countries have regional cultural differences, but in this large country the people had had no contact with one another and lived under different systems. For example, in the West belief in God and church attendance were declining slowly, whereas in the East it had become a relic of the past. The East Germans may have rejected Communism, but that didn’t mean they were prepared for the harsher, more selfish aspects of capitalism. On the other side, West Germans may have welcomed unification, but quickly began to grumble at the financial cost of absorbing a failed economy and a population that needed to be “reeducated” in the ways of the modern world.

It all boiled down to a German version of “us and them”—Ossis (Easties) and Wessis (Westies). Opinion polls in 2004 found that one in eight East Germans hankered after the old days before the wall came down, and in 1999 many East Germans still spoke about feeling humiliated by job losses, compulsory retraining programs, and their difficulties with the new system and consumer culture. Even in 2015, a study by the Berlin Institute for Population and Development concluded that at least half of all Germans still felt the difference in both economic and cultural terms. The eastern areas are often still referred to as “the new federal states,” which is a reminder that, to some people, the East was joining the West, as opposed to the two joining equally.

Despite investment of more than $2 trillion, the eastern regions remain poorer than the West, and in late 2017 unemployment there was 12 percent, double that of the West. This is not a story of failure: the East has become considerably richer and more efficient than it was—Dresden, Leipzig, and other cities are thriving, living standards have risen. But more than a quarter of a century after unification, the divisions remain. Out of Germany’s twenty most prosperous cities, Jena is the only one in the East that makes the list. This is not only because wages are lower there; it is also because, due to the Communist system, property ownership was low. At unification, any savings people had were converted at the rate of two East marks to one West mark.

In 2010, sociologists at Bielefeld University found that although those from the East composed about 20 percent of the population, less than 5 percent of people the researchers defined as the “elite” in politics, business, and the media were from the East, even though education levels are higher there, especially in math and science—thanks in part to the high level of investment in schools since reunification. That education gap has itself meant that the brightest from the eastern region head west to take the best-paying jobs. With females achieving higher educational standards than males, the ratio of young women to men has fallen in the East, with a concurrent drop in the birth rate there. Long-term relationships and marriage between people from the East and West were once unusual, but have now begun to appear. Nevertheless, the majority of these comprise men from the West and women from the East; that they are still far from the norm is shown by the nickname for an Ossi/Wessi couple—Wossis. All this has contributed to a shrinking population in eastern Germany, although the rate has slowed. Some reports suggest the decline may even have stopped, partly thanks to the success of cities such as Dresden and Leipzig (“Germany’s coolest city”), although this has come at the expense of an exodus of young people from rural areas.

Regional differences in culture, in both food and consumer goods, have played a role in the German postunification identity. Twenty-five years ago the East Germans flooded into shops that sold Levi’s jeans, video recorders, and quality chocolate. But the consumption of the “new” products again underlined the dominance of the western side of the new joint relationship. Few East German products made it into the supermarkets in the West, and the puttering, spluttering “Trabbie” became the subject of Pan-European humor. The Trabant jokes have gone (as have many of the factories producing the old eastern goods), and the cultural and regional differences become less political as the years pass, but even in 2010 national headlines were made when Chancellor Merkel, an Ossi, was asked about her favorite food and chose an East German meat-and-pickle soup of Russian origin known as solyanka. Over time local foods such as solyanka and the Spreewald cucumber will simply be an element of regional culinary identity, with no political tang. There is no going back as Ostalgie (a mix of “nostalgia” and “east”) fades.

The divides in modern Germany are nowhere near as stark as they were during the Cold War, and some are due to factors that predate the Communist/capitalist split. However, the outlines of the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain can still be seen—and can still be felt. You can see physical remnants along Bernauer Strasse, at the Niederkirchnerstrasse, by the Bundestag (the federal parliament), and at the Wall Museum at what was Checkpoint Charlie. At flea markets you can even buy a bit of concrete “chiseled out of the wall on that famous night in 1989,” although the chances of its being genuine are slim given that the volume sold would have made the wall one of the biggest structures ever erected. Either way, you can take home a little gray symbol of history, of human suffering, of the ultimate political division of the twentieth century that split Europe in a way that seems unimaginable to many people nowadays.

* * *

After the wall came down, things moved fast in Europe. When the East Europeans came in from the cold and the Germans reunited, the political consensus was that the future belonged to a unified, borderless Europe, with a single currency in which the nation-state would fade away. This EU federation would interact with other major blocs in a globalized world dominated by huge trading pacts. People, goods, services, and money would all move freely between the member states.

The EU’s founding fathers helped rebuild a shattered and divided Europe after World War II, based on restoring the nation-states to prosperity within a shared trading area; hence it was originally called the European Economic Community. Their descendants took the view that the European states could be built into one unified nation tied together by ideology. This noble aspiration is rooted in the desire to end two thousand years of European tribes warring against one another. In the 1990s Yugoslavia discovered too late that it had failed to extinguish the flames of Balkan nationalism under the blanket of Slavic socialism and watched as the entire house burned down. Those seeking a European superstate saw Yugoslavia as evidence of precisely why the EU project had to succeed. However, a variety of small details and a few large-scale, high-impact factors have exposed problems in the system.

When the community of nation-states began to morph into a union of member states in the 1980s, more and more powers were transferred to Brussels in a dilution of sovereignty that not everyone supported. Over the years countries have called for more independence and the ability to make decisions in the best interests of their own populations on budgets, laws, trading regulations, and so on. They don’t want to be dictated to by a centralized power in Brussels. Following EU directives has led to serious economic issues in some countries. The Single European Act of 1986 established a single market, and a single currency, the euro, was created in 1999. However, no single fiscal or financial policy was concurrent, nor did the euro system have the flexibility to absorb regional financial shocks. When times were good, people were less inclined to question the wisdom of creating this interdependent system. Now, however, the euro sometimes struggles to hold its own in the world markets and can fluctuate alarmingly; and there have been financial winners and losers. Greece, for example, suffers horrendous levels of youth unemployment, partially due to economic policies forced upon it by Berlin and Brussels.

The EU has also faced the challenge of uniting East and West Europe, after expanding in 2004 to allow in several of the eastern states. Freedom of movement is one of the ideals of the EU, giving Europeans the right to live, work, and travel throughout the member countries. It was intended both to enable growth across Europe and to encourage integration among the European populations. Many have embraced the ideal, traveling around the Continent in a way that wouldn’t have been possible just a few decades ago, especially to places previously hidden behind the Iron Curtain. This has helped reduce that sense of “the other” that was pervasive during the Cold War. But, just as Germany has experienced a lasting impact from the Berlin Wall, many differences remain between the West and the East. States such as Hungary, Poland, and Bulgaria had been subjected to the same travel restrictions and economic lapses as East Germany, and their economies were then severely disrupted by the collapse of the Soviet Union. Progress has been made, but many of the EU’s poorest countries area those that used to be in the Eastern Bloc.

The expansion of the European Union since it was originally formed.

When the eastern states were incorporated into the EU, GDP per capita in countries such as the UK and France was almost six times higher than in Poland. Despite this, many in the political class in West European countries severely underestimated how many people would move westward to find work and were unprepared when several million did just that. Migrant workers are required and often do jobs some of the indigenous populations reject. However, the hard logic of economics does not always persuade French, Dutch, or British plumbers, builders, or taxi drivers of the benefits to their country of migrant labor when they find themselves in competition with new arrivals for jobs, housing, and health care. When so many economic migrants began to travel from poor European countries to rich ones, people started to grumble at the influx of East European migrant workers and question the benefits of free movement. This was felt most strongly in Britain with the rise of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) and ultimately contributed to the Brexit vote.

Adding to this growing discontent was the financial crash of 2008 and subsequent government cuts in social spending and investment across the EU. While the banks were crumbling, the taxpayers in each nation-state were left to clean up the mess. With unemployment rising and migration increasing across a border-free region, the weaknesses of the system started to show. True believers will endorse the European project come what may, ardent nationalists will always fight against it, but agnostics will only support it if it works for them—and large parts of the European electorate started to feel that it was no longer delivering. Without economic prosperity to bind them together, and with waning support for a failing system, rising levels of nationalism could no longer be suppressed or ignored.

The EU has never succeeded in replacing the nation-state in the hearts of most Europeans. It could be argued that its founders moved too fast, and too arrogantly, in believing that the creation of Europe would result in a population whose identification was European first, nation-state second. In 1861, one of the pioneers of Italian unification, Massimo d’Azeglio, said, “We have made Italy; now we must make Italians.” Even that has proved a challenge and is still ongoing; this was the case even where the regions had a shared religion, history, and, to an extent, geography. To create the EU and the eurozone and then set about making Europeans is an infinitely more difficult project in which the very different interests, needs, and priorities of Finland and Hungary have to mesh with those of Greece and Portugal. The limited success in doing so is visible in the growing instability in the union. The Scandinavians have met to discuss the possibility of a Nordic Union should the EU collapse. The Visegrád Group (Slovakia/Czech Republic/Poland/Hungary) increasingly presents a united front to Brussels. The push of “One Europe” is challenged by Brexit, by separatist movements in Scotland, Belgium, Italy, and Spain, and by the growth of Euroskeptic parties in almost every country. Late 2017 brought this into sharp focus with the crisis in Catalonia, underlining the tensions that exist when several nations are within a state.

Many academics like to argue that nationalism is a “false construct” because it is based on “imagined communities,” but there is nothing false about people’s feelings concerning their national identity, and “imagined” does not mean nonexistent. The Palestinians, for example, through language, religion, and culture, have developed a strong sense of identity and thus believe that they are a nation and deserving of a state. Few academics challenge this narrative, yet intellectually they continue to argue that nationalism is outdated, even primitive. The latter claim may be true, but to ignore the reality of nationalism, which is found the world over, is folly. Some academics, intellectuals, and sections of the media, business, and political class see themselves as liberated from nationalism. In 2016 the European Commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker, described national borders as “the worst invention ever.” He may have a point, but stating it so baldly is hardly likely to win over nationalists to his idea of a European superstate.

The new elite, of which Mr. Juncker is a prime example, doesn’t seem to understand nationalism and are too quick to dismiss it. As the late historian Tony Judt wrote in 1996, while reluctantly arguing that an ever-closer bonding of the Europeans was impossible, “We should recognize the reality of nations and states, and note the risk that, when neglected, they become an electoral resource of virulent nationalists.”

That is what has happened. As nations have experienced rapid change due to migration, attitudes toward immigrants have hardened and support for virulent nationalist parties has grown. A majority of people in most West European countries still have a favorable view of newcomers, but most opinion polls taken since 2004 track declining support. That trend has only intensified with the sudden influx of non-European refugees and migrants across both East and West Europe, fueled by the turmoil in the Middle East and beyond. The pressure of this latest challenge, given that the EU was already struggling to unify its members, who were still reeling from the effects of the financial crisis, has exacerbated cracks that have started to appear in the EU edifice from the Baltic to the Mediterranean and is threatening the system.

The migrant crisis built up steadily from 2011, hitting a peak in 2015. With serious conflicts and civil wars across the Middle East and Africa, millions have been killed and displaced, and millions more have fled the violence, looking for a new life in the West. At first most European leaders were welcoming, but as more and more refugees kept coming, it became clear that the EU was unprepared to handle such numbers—over a million in 2015 alone—and that a growing number of people were becoming increasingly unwilling to do so. As attitudes began to change, certain borders within the EU started to tighten again as many countries sought to regain control over the number of immigrants crossing their boundaries.

Unconnected to the migrant crisis, a resurgent Russia has also played its part in the rise of the “barrier continent.” Following Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Ukraine began building defensive fortifications along its eastern border. In 2015 Estonia and Latvia started building fences on their frontiers with Russia, and in 2017 Lithuania, which had already reintroduced conscription in alarm at Russian actions, followed their example. However, the migration crisis, along with the Ukrainian/Russian conflict, is a major reason why Europe now has about the same length of physical barriers along national borders as it had during the Cold War. The situation began along the borders of the EU itself. A few places were already fenced and walled, for example, Spain’s Moroccan enclaves of Melilla and Ceuta. In the former, as with many barriers, the twenty-foot-high double fence has proved porous. In early 2018 at least two hundred African migrants stormed over the fence, some so desperate that they attacked police officers trying to stop them. Most were caught later and taken to a migrant detention center, but thousands have made it to Spain via this route in the past few years. One of the first new walls to go up in 2011 was a razor-wire fence along the Greek border with Turkey to prevent migrants and refugees from the wider Middle East and Africa from getting in. In 2015 Bulgaria followed suit.

However, the border barriers at these entry points haven’t stopped new waves of migrants from arriving and finding a way in. Migration paths tend to change—many people choose to make the dangerous sea crossing from Turkey to Greece, for example—and although a 2016 deal between the EU and Turkey saw the latter agree to take back large numbers of these migrants, many still find their way into the EU. In response, a number of controls and barriers have started appearing along borders between EU countries as well.

Hungary was one of the first; twenty-six years after the Cold War barriers came down, new ones started to go up. It began to build a fence, first along its border with Serbia, then the one with Croatia, ending up with over three hundred miles of razor-wire fencing to keep people out. During the summer of 2015, many thousands of immigrants were crossing into Hungary every day; now that number has been reduced to virtually none. The Hungarian government has been one of the most outspoken against immigration and EU plans for resettling people. Prime Minister Viktor Orbán announced a referendum in 2016 on whether Hungarians wanted the EU to be able to dictate immigrant quotas. A vast majority voted in line with the government, although voter turnout was low. Nevertheless, a majority of the population do seem to sympathize with this viewpoint: according to a survey by the Pew Research Center, 76 percent of Hungarians think that refugees will increase terrorist incidents, and 82 percent see them as a burden on the country, taking jobs and social benefits. The Hungarian government continues to push its agenda, playing on people’s fear of foreign threats and focusing on the dangers from immigration of terrorism and the spread of Islam, and tightening its immigration policies even further. Although Hungary has been widely criticized for its attitudes and policies toward migrants, sanctions have not been imposed by the EU, and the prime minister’s popularity in Hungary has not been dented. Mr. Orbán won the 2018 general election with another comfortable majority.

Several other nations have followed Hungary’s example and taken similar measures, and a number of “temporary” border controls have arisen, including within the “border-free” Schengen Area. Slovenia erected a fence along its border with Croatia; Macedonia along its Greek border; Austria along its busiest border crossings with Slovenia and Italy; and plans are in place to construct a wall in Calais to prevent migrants from crossing the English Channel. To the north, Norway has built a fence along its border with Russia, and Sweden began to restrict the flow of migrants entering the city of Malmö across the Øresund Bridge linking it with Denmark. Alongside the walls and fences, other countries started to tighten their borders with further measures. These are mostly designed to restrict the movement of non-European migrants and refugees who have entered the EU through less secure borders—and the wave of terror attacks in recent years has helped make the idea of checks more acceptable to many people. However, the existence of these barriers still has an impact and threatens one of the basic ideals behind the EU.

The barriers also have a serious effect on countries where immigrants are now stuck—especially in places where they continue to arrive. Greece, for example, has tens of thousands now stranded on its island centers with nowhere to go, straining its resources. With the migrant crisis affecting some countries more than others, and with some refusing to share the burden, relations between the EU states are further strained.

Nevertheless, huge numbers of Europeans do have a positive view of immigration and are happy to welcome newcomers to their countries. Many feel the West has a moral obligation to help those fleeing violence and persecution, while others support the argument, put forward by many politicians, economists, and business leaders, that European countries need immigrants. Due to aging populations and low birth rates, some countries—Germany, for example, where the median age is 46.8—face a population decline and so need immigrants to ensure a healthy economy in the future. But although governments repeatedly try to explain this, people tend to base their feelings on the current situation, not on some vague problem in the future, and the number who support immigration is shrinking. Hence opinion polls such as those of 2014 from the Pew Research Center finding that 86 percent of Greeks and 80 percent of Italians wanted fewer immigrants allowed into their countries. The poll was taken as the migrant crisis was growing, but more than a year before it reached the peaks of 2015. As for wanting more migrants? Only 1 percent of Greeks and 14 percent of Germans surveyed felt that way.

Many EU leaders seem to have been unprepared for the backlash against immigration. It stems from a number of reasons, as people started to see and feel the impact on their lives of so many newcomers. Across the Continent a clear divergence was, and is, based on education. Far more people without a college education want reduced immigration, which is likely because they are often competing with immigrants from within and without the EU for low-paying jobs. Many people in this category particularly dislike being told they are bigots for feeling unsettled at the scale and pace of the change they see around them; the equation between lack of education and bigotry is seen as doubly insulting.

An increase in the number of terrorist incidents across Europe has led people to link terrorism with high levels of immigration. People fear that terrorists are coming into the EU posing as refugees and asylum seekers and can then travel freely between European nations. Some of the assailants in the November 2015 attacks on Paris had entered through migrant channels, but most attacks have been carried out by EU citizens.

Some people also feel a threat to their public services, concerned that they can’t cope with the additional burden, and this also ties in with a sense of fairness. Imagine being in the waiting room of a doctor’s office in, say, Hungary or France and a significant number of the people around you were not born in that country. You may well want everyone to be treated, but you may also think that you have been paying for the health system for decades whereas the person next to you hasn’t. The longer you wait for your own treatment, the more likely it is that you’ll think it isn’t fair. These may be base instincts, but they are predictable. The EU system is set up to make it fair as many member states pay in, and the citizens of all member states can benefit no matter which state they are in. But if the person in the waiting room isn’t even from a fellow EU state, the sense of injustice is, for some, intensified.

Across the EU, leaders have been looking for ways to manage the levels of immigration and discontent within the population. In 2016, Denmark introduced a bill under which asylum seekers arriving in the country with cash and jewelry could keep only ten thousand kroners’ worth (about $1,600); anything above this had to be contributed toward the cost of “basic maintenance, health care and accommodation.” Sentimental items such as wedding rings were exempt after comparisons were made to the treatment of Jews by Nazi Germany. Some German states and the Swiss had already, quietly, introduced similar measures, although the practice is less widespread: the Swiss, for example, only recorded 112 cases where assets were taken, out of 45,000 refugees who arrived in 2015.

In Denmark, this measure, and others in the same bill, were undoubtedly intended to assuage rising anxiety about the increasing number of refugees, the cost of taking care of them, and quite possibly to dissuade refugees from heading that way. The government had one eye on the rise in support for extreme right-wing groups. What was overlooked was that Danish law already required Danes who became unemployed and had no insurance to sell valuables up to a certain level before they could receive state support. With Denmark having welcomed twenty-one thousand asylum seekers in 2015, politicians found it increasingly difficult to sell the idea of charity to a culture steeped in the Scandinavian principle of social egalitarianism. The Danes were taking in more asylum seekers than France, despite having a population twelve times smaller—and although some critics of the new regulations were Danish, what annoyed many people was the charge that the measures were racist, and that comparisons were being made to the Nazis.

Europe is now home to people from all over the world. It took in hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese in the late 1970s and 1980s, large numbers of Chinese and Indians have come, and most capital cities have Latin American communities. They are all part of the mix of the new Europe to which everyone is adapting, but for many possible reasons the most difficult adjustment appears to be between non-Muslims and Muslims. One thing that seems to crop up frequently is the perception that Muslims have come in vast numbers, outnumbering local populations.

Muslims actually make up a fairly small proportion of populations across the EU. The most exhaustive study prior to the latest migrant/refugee crisis was by the Pew Research Center in 2010. It found that in the EU the largest Muslim populations are in Germany (4.8 million) and France (4.7 million). This constitutes 5.8 percent and 7.5 percent of their respective populations. The UK share was 2.9 million (4.8 percent), Sweden 430,000 (4.6 percent), and Greece 610,000 (5.3 percent). The numbers are rising—a steady 1 percent increase per decade over the last thirty years, so while 6 percent of the EU population (13 million people) were Muslim in 2010, the figure was projected to rise (prior to the mass influx of 2015) to 8 percent by 2030. But the numbers are still much lower than many people believe to be the case.

The misperception may be due to a number of reasons. For example, some representatives of Muslim communities (often self-styled) are far more vocal about religious issues than any other community and are therefore more noticeable through media coverage. However, a bigger factor is probably the highly visible concentrations of Muslims in urban centers. Approximately 20 percent of Stockholm is Muslim, 13 percent of Amsterdam, 15 percent of Brussels, and 12 percent of Cologne. Many people can easily assume from what they see around them that the rest of their country is similar. For example, a UK government report in late 2016 found that in overwhelmingly Muslim parts of northern cities such as Bradford, Muslims themselves thought the UK was well over 50 percent Muslim.

The polling from 2010 also suggests a clear divide between most of Western Europe and Southern and Eastern Europe in attitudes toward Muslims. In the south and east negative attitudes prevailed; for example 72 percent of Hungarians had an adverse view of Muslims, as did 69 percent of Italians, 66 percent of Poles, and 65 percent of Greeks. When we move north and west, clear majorities give Muslims a favorable rating. In the UK “only” 28 percent of respondents had a negative attitude; in Germany this was 29 percent.

However, in some parts of Western Europe, anti-Muslim sentiments seem to be on the rise. Public anxiety about Islam is probably highest in France. In the 2010 poll, for example, only 29 percent of people had a negative attitude toward Muslims, but hostility has since steadily increased, which may be linked both to the wave of terror attacks France has suffered and to increased migration. An Ipsos survey in Le Monde titled “French Fractures 2017” found that 60 percent of respondents “believe the religion of Islam is incompatible with the values of the French Republic.” On immigration, 65 percent said too many foreigners were in France. On this point a political split in attitudes was clear—95 percent of National Front voters agreed as opposed to 46 percent of socialists. A few months earlier, the then president, François Hollande, was one of that 46 percent. In a book titled A President Shouldn’t Say That, he is quoted as having remarked, “I think there are too many arrivals, immigrants who shouldn’t be there.” He also acknowledged that France has a “problem with Islam. . . . Nobody doubts that.”

France certainly has a problem with integration. Whole swathes of French towns and cities are now overwhelmingly Muslim. The neighborhoods tend to be on the periphery of the urban areas and are almost always among the poorest parts of town. We have been here before. Substitute some of the words in this fascinating 1928 essay by Charles Lambert in Foreign Affairs magazine, and it could have been written in 2018:

The foreigners who migrate to France tend also to congregate together, and certain of our departments have become veritable centers of irredentism. Several villages in the Département du Nord are peopled entirely by Poles who have brought their wives, their children, their priests and their schoolmasters along with them. Immigrants from Poland make up 20 per cent of the population of Lens, 40 per cent of the population of Courrières, 68 per cent of the population of Ostricourt. Thirty thousand Italians have settled in the south-west. The conquest of our frontier provinces by a process of infiltration is proceeding systematically. In the Riviera district nearly a third of the whole population is foreign, while the proportion reaches almost a half in Nice.

These communities ended up being assimilated, and this may happen again with the growing Muslim populations. However, there are differences—ones that apply to the European experience of the latest waves of immigration as a whole. First, if we accept that racism still exists across the Continent, then the skin color of most European Muslims may hold them back, both socially and economically. Second, unlike the Polish and Italian communities of the 1920s, some voices within the Muslim communities are telling them that they have come to an abominable place that must be resisted. These preachers of hate, often expounding an extreme religious worldview, may not represent the majority, but in communities in which faith plays a central role they have a platform and influence greater than their white extreme right-wing counterparts. Immigrant communities often have difficulty in settling in unfamiliar surroundings and gaining the acceptance of the native population, and this struggle is compounded if some of the communities’ “leaders” are telling them to embrace separation.

* * *

Negative perceptions of “outsiders” have caused divisions not just between countries, but also within communities, political parties, the media, at street level, and in the courts in every EU country. Free movement was already a challenge when it merely concerned Europeans, but real discontent was limited, to an extent, to the fringes of society. The arrival of so many non-Europeans has helped ignite the simmering nationalism across the EU countries and is a major factor in the dramatic rise of the Far Right in the last few years. A decade ago the only European extreme right-wing party (other than those of their own country) that most people could name was probably the French National Front. Now several are familiar throughout Europe, among them Golden Dawn (Greece), Sweden Democrats, Party for Freedom (Netherlands), Freedom Party (Austria), and Jobbik (Hungary). Most of the ultranationalist parties are against further EU integration, but a central tenet for all of them is a fear of Islam, and this is clearly a driving force for many of their supporters. The nationalists argue that they are simply against Islamism in the form of radical political Islam, but the ultranationalists frequently cross this line to outright Islamophobia and a dislike of Muslims as people.

The rise of nationalist and far-right parties is anathema to the ideology of the EU, which sees itself as a union of liberal democracies. Now the nature of those democracies is under threat across the EU, not just in the eastern countries such as Hungary and Slovakia. In essence the divide is between those who are tolerant of intolerance and those who are not. Germany has played a central role in both the EU and the migrant crisis, so it is worth exploring the way in which events have unfolded there. It will be some time before the issues are resolved.

Angela Merkel opened Germany’s doors to migrants and refugees in 2015. She was criticized by other EU leaders, certainly, but also started to face increasing opposition within Germany itself. This is not to say that Germany has been unwelcoming. The state has been working flat out to accommodate the newcomers, and thousands of ordinary people have volunteered to help in the refugee centers, as well as offering a wide range of services including language teaching and employment mentoring. Nevertheless, as more and more migrants have arrived, problems have emerged as people have started to grasp the scale of the task ahead in creating an integrated society. In 2015 alone, almost a million non-EU citizens arrived in Germany; most were Syrian, followed by Afghans, Iraqis, Iranians, and Eritreans. The Germans had not experienced the movement of peoples on such a scale since the end of World War II.

One of the initial problems is that new arrivals tend to gravitate to areas where ethnically similar communities have already been established, which can lead to problems with integration and can rapidly change the demographic and cultural character of districts. As the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees observed, “Refugees want to go to places where they are among themselves: Pakistanis want to go to the Rhine-Main area, Afghans move to Hamburg, Syrians to Berlin. But in dense areas, housing space is scarce and rents are high. Ghettos evolve quickly.”

As the initial wave of public goodwill has subsided, fueled also by incidents such as the numerous sexual assaults in Cologne on New Year’s Eve 2015, which were largely attributed to the immigrant population (although there were only a handful of convictions), Germany has seen a steady rise in violence against immigrants. In 2015 more than a thousand attacks were made on refugee shelters. That was at the height of the migrant crisis, but in 2016, when the number of people arriving had dropped significantly to under three hundred thousand as a result of the deal with Turkey to reduce the flow across the Aegean, a similar number of incidents still occurred.

In Germany the outlines of the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain can still be traced in matters more serious than food and accents, and this is especially true when it comes to immigration. Attitudes toward immigrants are much more negative once you cross the river Elbe eastward. Put simply, more immigrants are in western Germany than in its east (other than Berlin) due to a quota system used to distribute refugees and asylum seekers across the country; as the eastern states are poorer and less populated, they have received fewer of the new arrivals. In both 2015 and 2016, three of the western states, Bavaria, North Rhine-Westphalia, and Baden-Württemberg, took almost 50 percent of the migrants/refugees. By contrast, in 2015 Saxony-Anhalt received 2.8 percent, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern 2 percent, and Brandenburg 3.1 percent. But despite this, many more physical attacks on migrants occur in the east. Germany’s domestic intelligence agency (BfV) produced a 2016 report stating that the western states averaged 10.5 extremist attacks per million people. In the eastern state of Saxony this rose to 49.6 attacks, in Brandenburg to 51.9, and in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern to 58.7. The three regions are also home to the largest groups of organized neo-Nazis.

In 2016 the German government’s annual report “Status of German Unity” noted not only the effects on those suffering discrimination, but also, according to Iris Gleicke from the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy, that the difficulties of securing “social peace in eastern Germany” were causing a “very serious threat to the economic development” there. She also noted, “The large majority of eastern Germans are not xenophobic or right-wing extremists.” Germans are careful with historical references, but the scale of the attacks led Gleicke to invoke the memory of the 1930s and Hitler’s brownshirts: “We East Germans have to take the matter into our own hands and decide whether we want to protect our cities and villages or leave them to the brown nightmare. Society should not look away when people are attacked or refugee shelters are set on fire.” Such comments resonate deeply in the German psyche, but a growing contingent of people do not want the country’s past mistakes to dictate how they must feel, or what they can and can’t say. Which brings us to the Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West (PEGIDA) and the Alternative for Germany (AfD).

As early as 2014, members of PEGIDA were marching in Dresden and other Eastern cities. This overt hostility put it beyond mainstream politics, but by early 2015 it was attracting huge crowds and had spread across the country. One demonstration in Leipzig drew thirty thousand people, twenty thousand turned out in Munich, nineteen thousand in Hanover, and ten thousand in Dresden. As so often happens when politics moves from the fringe into wider society, many of the rallying cries heard at the demonstrations had first been voiced in the stands of football stadiums. A notable example was the Dynamo Dresden Ultras, fans who beat President Trump to the term Lügenpresse (lying press) by at least a year. From the Dresden stands the chant spread to the streets. The crowds felt that the authorities, in league with the media, were not telling them the truth about immigration.

By the early summer support for the party had dropped, due to a combination of “demonstration fatigue” and a series of scandals involving PEGIDA leaders, including a picture of the founder of the movement, Lutz Bachmann, posing as Hitler. But the underlying sentiments had not gone away, and as the migration crisis peaked that summer of 2015, they came back to the surface, creating the political space for a more “palatable” version of PEGIDA—the AfD.

The AfD had formed back in 2013, but its focus then was campaigning against the euro currency. As the migrant crisis began to grow, it turned its attention toward immigration and forged contacts with PEGIDA. By summer 2016, with PEGIDA floundering, AfD was well positioned to take over as the biggest radical right-wing movement. It quickly grew in both membership and representation in the state parliaments. The alarm bells began really sounding when it finished second in the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern election, taking 21 percent of the vote and leaving Chancellor Merkel’s Christian Democractic Union of Germany (CDU) party in third place. By the time of the general election in late 2017, AfD was well organized and popular enough to enter the Bundestag in large numbers, winning almost a hundred seats. This was the first time the extreme Right had been represented there since the early 1960s. Although Angela Merkel’s party gained the biggest share of the vote, the AfD made significant gains, particularly in the east of the country, coming in third overall in the election. The political center of gravity in Europe was again starkly divided.

AfD policies include the rejection of the Schengen Area and the creation of permanent border controls at both the national and the EU level. It supports enhanced vetting of asylum seekers and says Germany has no place for Muslim practices and beliefs if these run counter to “the free democratic social foundation, our laws, and the Judeo-Christian and humanistic bases of our culture,” according to party paraphernalia. Softening its stance, it does accept that Muslims can be “valued members of society,” but argues that multiculturalism does not work. It is also against the euro, campaigns for the deutsche mark to be reinstated, and wants powers returned to the nation-state.

All of these ideas are echoed right across the Continent. The regional and political rifts we see in Germany are opening up everywhere. In the Dutch general election of March 2017 the far-right Party for Freedom became the second-largest party. In May the National Front’s Marine Le Pen went through to the second round of the French presidential election and won 33.9 percent of the vote, almost doubling the share of her father, Jean-Marie, in 2002. Austria’s Freedom Party has also enjoyed increased support, coming in third in the election in October 2017. Even Chancellor Merkel tacked sharply to the right in the 2017 election campaign as she sought to close off the growth of the extreme Right. In liberal democracies, those who cannot crush domestic antidemocratic movements need to find ways to manage them.

As early as 2014 the stresses of migration prompted the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, to say he wanted to create an “illiberal democracy.” Behind this phrase is the idea that liberal policies and values can be rejected by an electorate that votes as part of a nationalist party hostile to these things, but the country remains a democracy. The Polish government elected in 2015 held similar views. This ideology runs counter to the ideals of the EU and is one of the growing divisions threatening to splinter the union. As the Brookings Institution states in a report on migration, “The crisis has destabilized the politics of the entire European continent, roiling the political systems of individual countries and threatening the solidarity of the EU as a whole.”

This is a fundamental challenge to a divided Europe. It is not just about immigration; it is also about economies, trade, sovereignty, and liberalism in general. But, as we cope with the new realities of mass immigration and the moral necessity to take in refugees, we must not lose sight of core values. If we do, we may condemn all future Europeans, from whatever background, to live in a more repressive society than at present. It’s worth remembering that most of those coming to Europe are trying to get away from despotic regimes that have failed them. We need to deal with radical Islamism, manage mass migration, and care for refugees, but in a manner that does not undermine our liberal values and rule-of-law-based systems.

Those laws, values, and that system are what eventually healed the most recent great schism in Europe, the one that developed after 1945. Now divisions, new and old, are again appearing. The next few years will show us if we can make a safe European home or will go backward into a divided future.