Disunity on migrant crisis would be ‘end of Europe’, Hollande warns

France’s François Hollande and Germany’s Angela Merkel delivered passionate pleas for greater European unity in tackling the continent’s many challenges on Wednesday in a landmark joint address to the European Parliament in Strasbourg.

The speeches by the French president and the German chancellor came 26 years after the last joint address by the leaders of the bloc’s two largest countries, when France’s François Mitterrand and Germany’s Helmut Kohl both spoke to EU lawmakers.

Speaking in turns, Hollande and Merkel delivered a strong defence of the Franco-German partnership and its role in driving EU integration and tackling the many challenges the continent faces today.

They singled out Europe’s migrant crisis, the Ukrainian conflict and Greece’s debt woes as examples of the two countries’ ability to overcome disagreements for the benefit of the 28-member bloc.

More Europe, not less

Striking an ominous tone, Hollande warned against nationalist reactions on refugees, the euro and other crises, arguing that failure to find a united response would spell “the end of Europe”.

"We need not less Europe but more Europe. Europe must affirm itself; otherwise we will see the end of Europe, our demise," he said, to heckles from the parliament’s many eurosceptic members.

Hollande said it would be a "tragic error" to call into question Europe's open borders. Instead, he said, the member states need to come up with a coherent asylum policy.

Merkel, whose government has pledged to take in up to 800,000 refugees this year, urged EU members to reform the bloc's “obsolete” rules on asylum.

"In the refugee crisis, we must not succumb to the temptation of falling back into national action," said the German chancellor, who has struggled to persuade her EU partners to share the burden of hosting refugees.

Both leaders gave ample space to the migrant crisis, recognizing that Europe had reacted too slowly to the turmoil on its borders that has produced a huge wave of refugees.

"I acknowledge that Europe was slow in understanding that tragedy in the Middle East or Africa could not but have consequences for Europe itself," Hollande said, adding that the EU had not provided sufficient help to Turkey, Lebanon and other countries who have accepted millions of refugees from the civil war in Syria.

“We have to help Turkey if we want Turkey to help us,” said the French president, arguing that if Europe fails to help countries flooded by refugees “they will come to us”.

‘Total war’

Calling for urgent efforts to tackle the roots of the refugee crisis, Hollande said all interested parties, including the EU, Russia and Iran, needed to find a political solution to the conflict in Syria.

"What's happening in Syria concerns Europe because what is going on there will determine the balances of power in the region for a long time," he said.

"If we let the recent religious confrontations between Shiites and Sunnis get worse then don't think that we won't be affected. It will be a total war, a war that will also affect our territories and we must act."

Hollande also reiterated the Paris line that any solution for Syria had to be based on an alternative to Syria’s embattled President Bashar al-Assad.

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