Exit West

18 months on the ground with Europe’s migrant crisis.

The number of new arrivals did not itself pose an existential threat; even at its peak in 2015, when a million people landed on Greek and Italian shores, the desperate newcomers numbered less than half a percent of the E.U.’s population. But populist movements capitalized on the demographic panic, and anti-migrant rhetoric became their rallying cry. The crisis played into the Brexit vote in 2016 and coursed through elections in Holland, France and Germany this year. Even when Europe’s new nativists didn’t gain power in legislative elections, they succeeded in pushing centrist parties to the right. As a result, nationalistic causes are entering the mainstream, and threatening the very identity of an E.U. forged from the ashes of a war over competing nationalisms. “This crisis has, in its way, become Europe’s Sept. 11,” says Ivan Krastev, a Vienna-based political scientist and the author of After Europe, which explores the future of the union, “in that it has fundamentally altered how Europe’s citizens look at the world.”

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