Greece said Thursday it was recalling its ambassador to Austria as disagreements over the handling of Europe’s migrant crisis escalated.
The move came a week after Austria announced it would let no more than 3,200 new people per day into the country and take only 80 applications for asylum daily.
And it came a day after Austria held a meeting with Balkan states to address the migration crisis — a meeting to which Greece, the nation through which the vast majority of migrants are accessing Europe, was not invited.
EU has yet to agree on plan to deal with migration
“Unilateral initiatives to resolve the refugee crisis and the violations of international law by EU member states are practices that can undermine the foundations and the process of the European integration,” the Greek Foreign Ministry said Thursday.
The European Union has struggled, generally without success, to create a coordinated plan to respond to a historic wave of migration from the Middle East, northern Africa and central Asia — a wave that has broken primarily over the cash-strapped country of Greece.
North-South tensions feed stereotypes
The International Organization for Migration estimates that just over 1 million people entered the EU last year without the normal documents. And of that million-plus, more than 80% came through Greece.
The country shares a land border with Turkey. And it has an impossible-to-patrol 8,500 miles of Mediterranean coastline.
The dispute also follows years of North-South tensions that have strained the EU during the global financial crisis. Many Greeks have come to view northern Europeans as rigid and humorless Teutons who like to make others suffer just to teach them a lesson. And some in Germany and Austria, for example, have come to view the southern Europeans as spendthrifts, lazy and unable to accomplish necessary tasks like collecting their taxes and guarding their borders.
Greece argues that if the EU as a whole wants to control migration, then Europe as a whole needs to contribute to securing the EU’s outer borders.
