BRUSSELS — Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany met here Sunday with leaders of East European countries along the main migrant trail to affluent parts of Europe in a new push to bring some order to a chaotic flow of tens of thousands of people seeking shelter from war or simply a better life.
The gathering, called at Merkel’s behest by the European Union’s top executive, Jean-Claude Juncker, was the fifth consecutive meeting of leaders focused on so-far-fruitless efforts to deal with Europe’s biggest refugee crisis since the end of World War II.
Voicing despair at Europe’s failure to forge a common policy, Miro Cerar, the prime minister of Slovenia, which has been swamped by 60,000 people from Syria and elsewhere over the past 10 days, said continued failure to act in concert would signal “the beginning of the end of the European Union and Europe as such.” Europe, he said, “will begin falling apart.”
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The European Commission, the union’s executive arm, has proposed a raft of plans and programs since early summer to deal with the migrant crisis, but a wide chasm has opened up between talk in Brussels and real action on the ground.
Arriving in Brussels on Sunday, Merkel said leaders needed to find a way to help people who were “erratically wandering around, often under excruciating circumstances” and better share the burden of providing for them among the nations involved along the “Balkan Route.”