Ashton takes down some names as illegal immigration into the EU DOUBLES

When it comes to solving the highly flammable and destabilising mayhem in Ukraine, you wouldn’t start on the square marked Catherine Ashton. But she chaired a headless chicken meeting of EU foreign ministers yesterday, because alarmingly, she is in charge of this sort of thing. Her own version of Cobra (Worm?) agreed to issue asset freezes and travel bans against individuals “deemed responsible for violence and excessive force”. Ashton said this was “a matter of urgency”, although “negotiations between the two sides are progressing”.

Faced with an urgent crisis, I’m not sure tickling the underarms of a few security officers (chosen at random by Brussels wonks) fills me with optimism. William Hague got behind Ashton, saying he supported the sanctions but had to hurry off for another meeting in Washington. However, it was clear that France, Germany and Poland also didn’t see Ashton as the 7th Cavalry: they faffed about in Kiev to negotiate a compromise deal between the government and opposition.

If ever you wanted evidence on an hourly basis as to what a disaster the EU will always be when it comes to foreign policy, Ukraine is it. As German commentator Günther Nonnenmacher told his audience yesterday, ‘Der Kampf um Kiew ist ein Konflikt in geopolitischem Maßstab’: The struggle in Kiev is a conflict on a geopolitical scale. Is the correct diagnosis.

But in the context of a troubled, war-torn and increasingly extremist world, the Union which exacerbated the problem has become a sort of cross between the sprawling Austro-Hungarian empire and the Tower of Babel. It gets off to a bad start by having incompetently crooked bureaucrats, but then makes things worse by failing to patrol its myriad borders.

On Wednesday, The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported that, according to new figures from Frontex, the EC agency responsible for monitoring EU external borders, illegal immigration into the EU has almost doubled within the last year. What began as a trickle of spongers claiming EU entry on asylum grounds has turned into a tidal wave of illegals that keep the Greek and Italian authorities hard at it 24/7….and helps to stoke the bigotry spewed out by Golden Dawn and the resurgent Italian Right.

The FAZ piece was particularly disturbing for us, as it noted that ‘two thirds of the problem is concentrated in Sweden, Britain and Germany’ and is now of course being augmented by a surge of political/humanitarian asylum seekers from Syria. In Syria of course, the US sided with the Muslim Brotherhood…thus turning a repressive regime into a sieve from which fifteen different types of fundamentalist nutter are now leaking….into those Nordeuropa countries that already have the biggest Islamist problems.

Let’s get back to the Euro crisis, should we? The situation there seems more cheerful.

Yesterday at The Slog: If you don’t want to lose your marbles, try losing face now and again.