London: "If we can't deal with a challenge like this, what is the European Union actually for?"
The voice of German economist Fabian Zuleeg, head of the European Policy Centre, is dry over the phone. But his frustration is clear and is shared by many.
"What we are talking about here [in Brussels] is some stopgap solutions – to try to alleviate the pressure in those parts which are feeling the pressure most. But in the long run we need to find a way of working together."
This was the week that Europe woke up to its nightmare and responded with both compassion and bickering.
That photograph of a drowned Syrian child on a Turkish beach may have proved the last straw, and moved politicians to grief and promises to do more to help refugees. Or it may prove another Lampedusa: a tragedy that shocked millions but changed little.
This last fortnight has seen an outbreak of bad news: an overwhelming litany of chaos and death in Europe's refugee crisis. There was the desperate mess at Budapest train station, the dead families in the truck in Austria, the drownings off Libya, the nighttime dashes through the new razor wire on Hungary's outer border.
Tents are sprawled across the port of the Greek island of Lesbos, as migrants arrive in flimsy dinghies from Turkey faster than ferries can then get them to the processing camps on the mainland. At the other end of the Mediterranean, a West African migrant was found curled up inside a car engine en route to Spain.
This was the week that Europe realised it was not coping.
"We are in the middle of a crisis," says Zuleeg. "If this was a problem which could be resolved in the next few weeks, few months it would be a different issue. But what we are talking about is a very significant flow [of migrants] and the scale of the flow is increasingly difficult to manage."
"There is no real willingness to accept more refugees in a number of countries and that means the burden of the challenge falls disproportionately on a small number of countries which are finding it increasingly difficult to deal with."
More than 660,000 people applied for asylum in Europe in 2014. Already this year the number is over half a million. Germany is by far dealing with the most – according to one estimate, Germany expects to register up to 800,000 asylum-seekers in 2015.
Refugees – the majority of them fleeing Syria – know this. In Budapest, outside the train station they were barred from, then later in a train being diverted to a camp instead of the border, they chanted "Germany, Germany".
But the generosity of the Germans has limits. And those limits are being tested. On Monday, Chancellor Angela Merkel made a thinly-veiled threat to other countries not pulling their weight.
"If it's not possible to achieve a fair allocation of refugees within Europe, then some people will want to put Schengen on the agenda," she said. "We want a fair allocation of refugees and then we won't have to discuss Schengen."
The Schengen convention is one of the cornerstones of modern Europe. It abolished border checks inside the EU, getting rid of visas, boosting commerce, tourism and the hopes of citizens in the former Soviet states.
But it is now being thrown onto the table in the desperate haggling over refugee quotas.
"The Schengen treaty is under threat, that's absolutely clear," Martin Schulz, the European parliament speaker, said on Thursday. "This is a crucial moment for the European Union. A deeper split of the union is a risk we cannot exclude."
Clearly the refugee crisis has shaken the union to its core.
But it has not shaken it into consensus.
"The problem is not a European problem," Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban said on Thursday. "The problem is a German problem."
His country's job was just to register refugees, not to house them, he said. "Nobody would like to stay in Hungary, neither in Slovakia, nor Poland, nor Estonia. All of them would like to go to Germany."
He, and other eastern European countries, don't want a quota of refugees imposed on them.
Orban accused European politicians of encouraging migrants to risk their lives in travelling to Europe by "holding out the promise of a better life".
"Europe's response is madness," he wrote for a German newspaper. "If Europe does not return to the path of common sense, it will find itself laid low in a battle for its fate."
Dr Robert Visser is the director of the European Asylum Support Office, set up in 2011 to analyse and improve the EU's processing of asylum seekers.
He does not see a sudden crisis. He sees an accelerating trend that began years ago.
Ukraine, the Middle East, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Horn of Africa – "the situation around Europe is that there are more conflicts than there used to be," he says. "This produces people who go on the move and seek their future in Europe."
But the numbers have become so great that the system has almost broken down.
"At certain spots it is so concentrated that the normal procedures, normal processes, normal capacity find it very difficult to handle," he says. "I wouldn't say broken down but it is under heavy pressure."
It's simply a capacity problem, he says. They have the procedures and the staff. But, when refugee flows change, there can suddenly be twice as many people at a particular place, with no time to recruit or train.
"You create a backlog because you have no choice. Suddenly you have twice as many applicants and you don't have twice as many staff."
After the initial registration, once an asylum claim is being assessed, then the problem of accommodation is most acute. Also, Dr Visser says, before this point many of the migrants disappear from where they arrived, because they want to be assessed for asylum in a country where they have better prospects – can speak the language, or stand a better chance of a job and a new life.
The rule so far is that a refugee must apply for asylum in the country where they first touch European soil. Germany has already suspended that rule for Syrians who cross its borders.
Jean Lambert, a member of the European Parliament sitting on the civil liberties committee and working in several refugee-related areas, says the rule may have to be abandoned.
"It was a linchpin of the asylum system but it's really coming under question," she says. "It's fine when times are quiet but at this point you can't expect it. The Italians are saying 'we're doing the best we can but we just can't do everything that the rule book says we should."
But it can't just be Germany that takes up the slack, she says.
"We've been trying to develop a common European asylum systems for 15, 16 years. It's been hard work and very frustrating to put it mildly.
"Some of these EU member states have got to stop feeling like victims in this and start acting like governments, to do this in a humane way that does actually live up to the values that they like to spout. It's a test. It's a test of a lot of beliefs, the talk about common values, solidarity.
"You've got a smallish number of member states with very strong right wing, in some cases absolute fascist parties. This is pushing member states to make a decision, are they going to follow the line of anti-immigrant-lite, or stand up and be counted on this?"
Both Lambert and Zuleeg warn that Germany cannot bear the lion's share for much longer.
"At the moment there is a relatively wide consensus across German society: these are war refugees which need help," Zuleeg says. They want to be seen as open, welcoming and helpful. "But how long with that consensus last? If we are talking about up to 800,000 [refugees], we are talking about 1 per cent of the German population in a year, and there is no reason to believe that this will stop after a year."
Dr Visser, from EASO, says he and others have been working on a "safe countries" system – if a migrant comes from a country such as those in the western Balkans they are extremely unlikely to be granted asylum, so it makes sense to put them on an accelerated track and move them on more quickly.
"It's not closing down [asylum], it's not Fortress Europe at all," Dr Visser says. But such people are around a third of all asylum seekers, "and if you can accelerate the process for one third of the total, it will make a difference".
Zuleeg says there are "deep-seated structural issues" in Europe which are making it hard to make an enforceable deal on parcelling out the responsibility for refugees among member states.
This is why he doesn't hold out much hope for an upcoming EU emergency summit on the issue.
"Even getting an agreement in principle is going to be very challenging," he says.
"But in the long run we need to find a way of working together at the European level and that is the big challenge, that we see this as a common problem which we have to tackle together.
"If we cannot manage that… not immediately but in the medium to longer term it does put a real challenge to the European integration process."
