For almost a year now, the European Union has been in shock over a constantly increasing flow of migrants and asylum-seekers arriving at Europe's shores. This should have surprised no one: there has been a bloody civil war in Syria for five years now, violence in Iraq dramatically worsened with the reappearance of Al-Qaeda in Iraq (turned ISIS) in late 2013, Libya had already started the downward spiral towards a second civil war in two years by that time... And I won't go into structural reasons.
Already in October 2013, after a tragic drowning near Lampedusa, Italy had to establish its own operation in the Mediterranean to rescue migrants coming mostly from Libya. Other European countries did not only reject any involvement in the operation, but some criticized it because of its alleged "pull factor effect". So, when the Italian government asked for burden-sharing one year later, Operation Mare Nostrum was replaced by Operation Triton, an under-resourced European operation that could only patrol up to 30 nautical miles from the coast due to its focus on border protection.
What this shows is that by mischaracterizing and underplaying the situation, European leaders were unable to deal with a developing disaster up to this point, when they openly admit that the end of the free movement of people, one of the four liberties that are the bedrock of the European project, may be "6-8 weeks away".
So, it needs to be asked, how it is possible that the European Union, a project that could handle the disintegration of the Soviet Union or the reunification of Germany, can be on its knees due to a number of asylum seekers and migrants that, foreign observers admit, is not that big in relation to the EU's population of 500 million?