Austrian Chancellor Warns Against Possible EU Collapse Amid Migrant Crisis

MOSCOW (Sputnik) — On Sunday, a refugee summit is expected to be held in Brussels to discuss the enormous migrant crisis and the ways to solve it.

“Now the speech is about either a common Europe or about a quiet collapse of the European Union. One path is burdensome, difficult and supposedly long and the other one would lead to the chaos,” Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann told the Austrian Kronen Zeitung newspaper on Saturday.

He added that securing of the EU external borders is important, but the construction of the walls on the borders of the EU states would not solve the problem.

In recent months, Europe has faced a major influx of migrants fleeing war-torn countries in the Middle East, North and Sub-Saharan Africa. According to the EU border agency Frontex's latest estimates, the number of migrants who have crossed the bloc’s external frontiers in the first nine months of 2015 has exceeded 710,000.

Several EU states do not want to be the transit routes for the migrants moving to the wealthier members of the bloc therefore they construct walls on the borders, even with their neighbours within the borderless Schengen Area.