Considering the major damage control needed--and this was already before the recent refugee wave--this is an observation made by most of Europe EXCEPT the bureaucrats who suck up tax money and get (some, not all) between €6000 and €12000 tax free pensions for life after "serving" for a couple of years.
The EU has done some sensible things: enabled Schengen, introduced a common currency, tried to reduce nationalist tensions. There will not be another war between Germany and France, which was the original, overriding, ultimate goal of DeGaulle and Adenauer: the seed that sprouted the EU.
However, member countries both large (e.g. France) and small (Greece) have flouted EU rules, and completely ignored EU rules about border-free travel and free movement of people, goods and capital. Countries with small budgets for EU border protection adopt a "flow-through" policy which basically means "we won't turn them away, but YOU have to take them." Federal governments big and small (e.g. Germany and Sweden) generously agree to take in refugees in numbers equal to or above 1% of their existing population. Then, they shove them on ill-equipped and under-manned cities and towns unable to handle the crush, and say "here, deal with it."
To pay for it all, tax collectors in the more developed countries are being harassed by their superiors to bring more revenues than ever before, turning them into forced terrorist bureaucrats. Some don't mind, some hate their jobs. The predicable reaction is popular anger toward the local governments, the federal governments, the refugees, and the EU. All these well-meaning (many of them, anyway) politicians have done little else than provide a lot of fertilizer to extremist right-wing movements that the EU was (it had been hoped) designed to stamp out once and for all. A little less short-sightedness might have have prevented this mess, but vision was never the strong point of the bureaucrat--only rules and regulations, and a fanatic zeal for enforcing them, especially ones that made little sense. And who are we to blame them? They do their thing for 5-10 years and retire to Mallorca or some place with a fat cushy tax-free pension. Why should they care what their successors confront?
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