Two years ago, German Chancellor Angela Merkel uttered the most resonant, but also the most widely ridiculed, judgment on the refugee crisis just then arriving at the borders of Europe: “wir schaffen das” — “we can do it.” A year later, after staggering numbers of Syrians — and then Iraqis and Afghans and Eritreans and Moroccans — had poured into Germany, and as the country’s fine-tuned bureaucratic machine buckled and at times broke down under the strain, and as refugees were implicated in sexual assaults and terrorist attacks, Merkel felt called upon to concede that “this phrase was a little overstated.” Or perhaps not a little: When I was in Dresden last December, I heard dire predictions that a xenophobic, nationalist party — Alternative for Germany (AfD) — would rise from obscurity to become Germany’s main opposition party, just as was happening in France, Austria, and elsewhere.
I have just returned from another trip to Dresden. And I have concluded that Merkel was, in fact, right the first time around — Germany can do it. And by “it” I mean both that it can weather the blow to its politics and that it can absorb a million-odd refugees, most of them ill-educated and poor. The damage that this Category 4 hurricane has left behind is very real. On Sept. 24, when Germany holds its national elections, AfD is projected to win a quarter of the vote in Saxony, the state of which Dresden is capital. The split between a progressive west and a traditionalist and resentful east will deepen. But Merkel is likely to win the election by double digits. As for the problem of “integration,” conversations with the refugees I first met a year ago have shown me how utterly dependent many of them are, and will remain, on German largesse. But Germany has a lot of largesse, and a lot of patience.
Merkel’s “das,” consciously or not, encompassed something yet deeper than the absorption of people fleeing the hell of Syria’s war. What has been at stake since the summer of 2015 is Europe’s capacity to honor the values upon which it was built without provoking a political backlash that would put precisely those values in jeopardy. I happened to be at a conference in Salzburg on Labor Day weekend, 2015, when refugees suddenly began filling the trains across Austria and into Germany. Austria was about to hold an election for president, and Norbert Hofer of the far-right Freedom Party of Austria was gaining in the polls every day. As we debated what to say about the refugees, Yoram Dinstein, a distinguished Israeli scholar of international law, said, “If the price of taking the refugees is bringing fascists to power, I hope they turn the refugees back.”
That thought has haunted me for the last two years. The fear that Dinstein was right helps explain why I have devoted much of that time to reporting on the refugee crisis and why I am now writing a book about the history and prospects of liberalism. Only two countries, Germany and Sweden, took their moral obligations seriously enough to accept the political risk of throwing open their doors to refugees. Both lived to rue their impulsive generosity and to block new avenues of arrival. Even in countries that essentially turned their back on the refugees, above all the United States and the United Kingdom, fear of refugees, of Muslims, of immigrants, of terrorism tipped elections to the nationalists. The risks have been — and remain — very real.
Yet Europe is not today in the place people feared two years ago. This spring, France elected as president Emmanuel Macron, the most vocally pro-refugee of the major candidates, while Holland turned away from the Muslim-hating Geert Wilders. Those elections still had a very sharp existential edge. Not in Germany: Angela Merkel has presided over a consummately boring, pedestrian campaign. And that is the most ringing answer to Yoram Dinstein’s nightmare.
