Europe Can’t Test Its Way Out of Migration Crisis

In a striking admission this week, former British Prime Minister Sir Tony Blair warned his own Labour Party that it was playing with fire. The architect of New Labour now advocates placing affordable energy above net zero targets and resolving illegal immigration by whatever means necessary, calling such action preconditions for earning the British public’s attention on broader policy matters, according to Brussels Signal.

Yet as Ralph Schoellhammer argues in his analysis, this belated recognition mistakes a symptom for the underlying disease. The political class has admitted the problem exists while fundamentally misunderstanding its nature.

The Bureaucratic Delusion

Across the continent, governments have responded to decades of failed integration with an avalanche of paperwork. Newcomers must now sign value declarations, attend orientation courses, and pass examinations covering constitutional principles and national holidays. Denmark has implemented citizenship tests, Germany has introduced naturalization exams, and Austria mandates compulsory value-and-orientation courses.

The underlying premise is transparently false: that national belonging can be taught in seminar rooms and certified with administrative stamps. This approach treats citizenship as a technical credential rather than what it truly is—a bond of cultural identity and emotional loyalty.

The Enlightenment’s Forgotten Legacy

The error runs deeper than contemporary migration policy. For three centuries, the West has told itself a self-flattering narrative about its origins—that the Enlightenment replaced emotion with reason, superstition with science, and tribal identity with rational individualism. According to this account, modern liberal order represents no culture at all, merely its absence: a neutral framework that anyone will accept once the rules are properly explained.

This is a dangerous fantasy. The West did not abolish culture but rather constructed a new one and then forgot it had done so. As Henry Kissinger observed, every historical era has its organizing principle: religion in the medieval period, reason during the Enlightenment, nationalism in later centuries, and science in our contemporary age.

Reason itself became the sacred foundation of a civilization that retained every emotional characteristic of the faiths it claimed to have transcended. The fatal mistake is imagining that because Western values present themselves as rational, they require no emotional attachment to survive.

When Constitutions Lose Their Hold

History demonstrates otherwise. The Weimar Republic collapsed not because its constitution was poorly drafted, but because too few Germans loved it. As sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset noted, significant segments of the German army, civil service, and traditional elites rejected the republic not due to ineffectiveness, but because its symbolism and foundational values contradicted their own. A constitution that commands no love is merely a document, not a country.

The crucial distinction here is between culture and ethnicity—a difference modern Europe has quietly abandoned. Ethnicity is determined at birth: no one selects their birthplace, physical features, or mother tongue. Culture operates oppositely, sustained through choice and emotional commitment.

A man born Swedish can become American, developing deeper attachment to the Declaration of Independence than to any monarchy. Conversely, someone may hold a passport for life while feeling nothing whatsoever toward the nation it represents. The strength of European nationhood in its finest expressions rested on culture rather than bloodline.

From Citizens to Consumers

Englishness, as philosopher Brian Barry described it, functioned additively rather than absorptively—diluting its own content until Scots, Welsh, and English could share a unified state. This achievement stemmed not from ethnic homogeneity but from an idea of belonging that people genuinely felt.

When such feeling disappears, citizenship degrades into something resembling a membership card. It provides benefits, demands no obligations, and retains holders only as long as advantages outweigh costs. A British passport becomes emotionally indistinguishable from an Amazon Prime subscription, and subscriptions command no loyalty.

The citizen, as philosopher Steven B. Smith observed, is animated by a powerful sense of belonging to a people. The bourgeois individual, by contrast, can feel at home anywhere—or nowhere. It was no coincidence that the Islamic State recruited some thirty thousand foreign fighters from Western nations whose citizens had been taught that their own civilization was merely a set of administrative procedures rather than a culture worth defending.

Forms Cannot Replace Faith

Europe’s current approach—attempting to manufacture loyalty through examinations and orientation seminars—reveals how thoroughly its leadership has internalized the Enlightenment myth. They genuinely believe that rational explanation suffices to create national attachment, that citizenship is a technical qualification rather than an emotional bond.

This bureaucratic fantasy ignores the reality that all successful societies rest on shared culture sustained by genuine feeling. No quantity of paperwork can substitute for the organic cultural confidence that European nations have systematically dismantled over recent decades in pursuit of multicultural neutrality.

The continent will not certify its way out of this crisis. Until European leadership rediscovers that their societies represent distinct cultures requiring active cultivation and emotional commitment—not neutral administrative frameworks requiring only procedural compliance—the integration failures will continue regardless of how many examinations migrants are required to pass.

With information from Brussels Signal