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BRUSSELS — The European Union is torn between upholding its values and pursuing its interests in the multiple crises over refugees, challenges to the rule of law, relations with Russia and Turkey, and Britain’s membership that are shaking the bloc.

Political and economic interests are mostly prevailing over the European Union’s declared values and governance standards, but it is not clear that the outcomes are any more effective. To critics including human rights campaigners, Europe is too willing to betray its principles. To supporters, it is “growing up” and acting less naïvely.

“Politics is the art of the possible, but this is very different from the conception of Europe promoted for the last half century,” said Michael Leigh, a former senior European Commission official and now a senior adviser at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, a think tank on trans-Atlantic relations.

After more than a million migrants flooded into Europe last year, European Union governments are divided on whether the bloc should give priority to its commitment to give asylum to refugees, or whether the main aim should be to toughen border controls and pay other countries to keep potential asylum-seekers at bay.

Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany is under fire at home and across Europe for having taken the moral high ground by welcoming hundreds of thousands of refugees. The sullen reluctance of most of the Union — not just central European states but core partners like France — to take in quotas of refugees to which they agreed months ago is driven by fear of a domestic political backlash.

Brussels faced another of those values-versus-interests dilemmas last week when the European Commission had to decide whether to begin disciplinary action over Polish laws shackling the constitutional court and the state media. The Union was widely criticized as failing to act to uphold its values of democracy and the rule of law when the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orban, began a similar crackdown in 2010 on the judiciary, the media and civil society organizations.

The European Commission did take a first step on Poland, but it emphasized that it wanted to resolve the issue in dialogue with Warsaw and that there was no likelihood of moving to sanctions, such as suspending the country’s European Union voting rights or access to funds. Within the commission, officials are reluctant to appear to be lecturing a democratically elected government as it goes about implementing campaign promises.

After big demonstrations in Warsaw in defense of liberal values, many in Brussels are pinning their hopes on the self-correcting strength of Polish democracy. Others are looking for someone else to take the lead, such as the Council of Europe’s Venice Commission, a pan-European constitutional watchdog. Countries Under the Most Strain in the European Migration Crisis

European Union officials struggle to cope with the growing crisis.


Germany and Britain have mostly kept quiet about Poland on pragmatic grounds. Berlin wants to preserve as cooperative a relationship as possible with the more nationalist government of Jaroslaw Kaczynski’s Law and Justice party. London needs Polish good will as it renegotiates sensitive aspects of its own European Union membership. It is also eager to curb the access of migrants from within the Union — mostly Poles — to welfare benefits to deter further mass immigration to Britain.

Indeed, Europe’s willingness to seek a formula to permit Britain to deny European Union citizens who enter its labor market the same benefits as its own nationals highlights a willingness to compromise on core values for the sake of expediency.

While the European Parliament, which sees itself as Europe’s conscience on human rights, is likely to criticize Poland in a special debate this week, other European Union bodies are cautious.

Similar mixed feelings guided the Union’s schizophrenic response to Russia’s 2014 seizure and annexation of Crimea and moves to destabilize eastern Ukraine. While the bloc did agree under German leadership to impose sanctions that have pushed the Russian economy into recession and restricted its access to capital, there are charges of double standards when it comes to energy policy.

European Union regulatory pressure forced Russia to cancel the South Stream gas pipeline, which was to supply southern European countries, bypassing Ukraine. But Berlin is resisting pressure to halt a second project, Nord Stream, which will run from Russia and under the Baltic Sea to Germany, also bypassing Ukraine.

The European Commission delayed a critical report on Turkish compliance with Union standards until after parliamentary elections in November to avoid upsetting President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Union officials acknowledge that they have muted criticism of Ankara because they are desperate for Turkish help to stem the flow of refugees.

Across North Africa, the Union is playing down the human rights and good-governance elements of its policy toward Egypt, Morocco and Algeria because of Europe’s need for security cooperation against Islamist militants.

“We are not abandoning our values,” said a European Union official involved in managing those relationships, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. “But we are perhaps being more pragmatic.”

Paul Taylor is a Reuters correspondent.

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