Little about the fallout from the latest tragedy in the English Channel has been edifying, but Emmanuel Macron’s call for a meeting of European ministers is informative.

The President naturally has every incentive to try and present the issue as an EU problem, given that the alternative is that it’s a French problem. No harm in attempting to kick the blame up to a level where it is famously difficult to hold anybody democratically accountable.

But such motives don’t mean that he doesn’t have a point. The small boats crisis in the Channel is just one part of a much bigger problem to which the EU is still struggling to find an answer.

On its eastern borders, autocrats are not shy about trying to wield migrant flows to exert pressure on the bloc. All eyes might currently be on Alexander Lukashenko, but the Belarusian dictator is borrowing the playbook of Turkey’s Recep Erdogan. Mediterranean countries have for years rightly felt frustrated at having to bear the costs of trying to combat people smuggling operations whose victims/clients are set on a life in northern Europe, not least because of Germany’s unilateral decision to welcome them in (before, again, trying to Europeanise the fallout).

Now countries such as Poland are wary of the EU itself trying to exploit the crisis. Hence why it has set about trying to meet the crisis on its border with Belarus via a series of bilateral sub-alliances – including with the United Kingdom – rather than appealing to Frontex, the European border agency. Given Warsaw’s fraught relations with Brussels, it is apparently concerned that the latter would attach conditions to any support that would attempt to bring Poland to heel. 

This situation could get much worse over the next few years, most obviously when the wave of people fleeing Afghanistan starts to reach the frontiers of Europe over the next few years.

Changes of regime in neighbouring states could also make an already difficult situation even harder to control. In Turkey, Erdogan’s regime seems to be teetering, and there are long-standing French concerns that future trouble in Algeria could open yet another front for Mediterranean crossings. Europe seems caught between two places: Member states all have different priorities and concerns, and there doesn’t seem to be anything like the political will required to make a genuinely European solution work. 

Yet EU policies, especially the Schengen free-movement area, exacerbate the problem. Countries such as Greece, Italy and Poland face huge pressures because they are de facto policing the borders of Germany and France, where the vast majority of the migrants want to end up (even if the latter is a staging post on the way to Britain).

If the sort of genuine and effective pan-European governance required to make something like Schengen work isn’t going to come about, is it perhaps time for member states to think again about the arrangement?

Reintroducing border controls need not impose particularly heavy restrictions on citizens; the UK was never part of Schengen and travelling to the continent was scarcely difficult when we were part of the EU. But it could afford more opportunities to control the internal movement of non-citizens, and reduce the pull factors that induce people to try and storm the fences in Poland.

We should not underestimate that doing so would represent something of a Rubicon moment for the European project, most of whose leaders are understandably proud of having built a continent-wide free-movement zone.

But something which makes sense as a stepping stone towards a coherent pan-European polity doesn’t necessarily make sense as an isolated policy if the broader project has stalled, and despite Macron’s best efforts there seems to be little sign that other nations are prepared to surrender control of their external borders to Brussels.

If there isn’t going to be a United States of Europe, the President might be better off trying to reimagine a European project better suited to today’s conditions and more accommodating of the divergent national aspirations of other Member States – even if that means slaughtering a few sacred cows along the way.