Welcome to the Eurointelligence podcast. I'm Wolfgang Wunschau and with me, Azizand Muncheng and Jack Smith.

Today, we would like to talk about the politics of fear in Europe.

Countries are suspending the Schengen system of passport-free travel in order to protect themselves against immigrants.

The decision by Germany has triggered demands by the Netherlands, by Hungary,

and others to do the same. We have politics of fear in our relationship with certain industries

like the car industry. And Europe is now currently an attempt underway, driven by Germany,

but not only to suspend the emissions reduction rules that this car

industry is legally subjected to.

The strategy in Europe, we feel, and this also became clear in the report by Mario Draghi,

is very much driven by reflexes, by fear.

It is not driven by a clear and cold calculation about what is the best

outcome. Jack, you have been writing about, we all have been writing about these subjects in various

guises, the car industry, immigration, in our political coverage. Where do you see this

is headed? It's difficult entirely to tell where this is headed, but it doesn't look good because

one of the other things that's happening, at least on the politics of migration and asylum,

is that countries are increasingly just doing things unilaterally and pulling the kind of

break themselves without really coordinating or consulting with others.

I think there was a little bit of hope that we might be able to get somewhere a bit more unified

on the issue with the Migration Pact last year.

That was a big political breakthrough after years and years of trying to negotiate the

stuff at the EU level and getting nowhere with it, especially since the 2015 refugee crisis.

But now it kind of seems like that's going backward again.

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