French PM Manuel Valls says refugee crisis is destabilising Europe

The French prime minister, Manuel Valls, has said Europe cannot take in all the refugees fleeing wars in Iraq and Syria without putting the concept of Europe itself in grave danger.

Speaking to the BBC at the Economic Forum in Davos, Valls said Europe needed to take urgent action to control its external borders. “Otherwise,” he said, “our societies will be totally destabilised.”

Asked about border controls inside Europe, which many fear put the passport-free Schengen zone at risk, Valls said the concept of Europe was in jeopardy. “If Europe is not capable of protecting its own borders, it’s the very idea of Europe that will be questioned,” he said.

He said a message to refugees that said “Come, you will be welcome” provoked major shifts in population. “Today, when we speak in Europe, a few seconds later it is mainly on the smartphones in the refugee camps,” Valls said.

More than 40 people drowned in the early hours of Friday in two separate incidents in the Aegean Sea between Greece and Turkey. Greece is the main entry point for hundreds of thousands of people seeking safety or a better life in Europe.

Greece’s coastguard said 34 drowned when a wooden sailing boat carrying migrants sank off the coast of the small islet of Kalolimnos. Coastguard vessels, a helicopter and private boats were still searching the area. Several hours earlier six children and one woman drowned after a sinking off the island of Farmakonissi.

The large numbers of refugees in Europe has been a persistent theme of the Davos summit. On Thursday the Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, said Europe was close to breaking point and needed to come up with a common response or run the risk that one of the European Union’s founding principles would start to unravel.

“We need to get a grip on this issue in the next six to eight weeks,” Rutte said.

He said that in the first three weeks of this year 35,000 people had crossed the EU’s borders, and the figure would quadruple once the spring arrived. “We can’t cope with the numbers any longer. We need to get a grip on this.”

Rutte said that before the Schengen agreement was killed off, the EU had to try to make the Dublin regulation – under which refugees should seek asylum in the first country they reach – work. “No one wants to kill Schengen, but if it is only a fair-weather system then it cannot survive.”

Valls has in recent days been hammering home his message that Europe cannot welcome all refugees.

Unlike Germany, France has not moved to open its doors to large numbers of people. The French president, François Hollande, after initially stalling and opposing quotas, has said France will take 24,000 refugees in the period up to next year.

French public opinion has been split, with at least half opposed to more refugees coming to France.

Refugees themselves have often chosen to avoid France in favour of other northern countries. When last year French representatives travelled to Germany to convince a small number of refugees to claim asylum, they had trouble convincing people, and the official coaches departing for France were not full.

This reluctance is for several reasons: France has over 10% unemployment – double that of Germany – but it also previously had a record of being slow to process asylum claims.

Some refugees were also put off by stories of tough policing in places like Calais. The current political debate on national identity and Islam, often inspired by far-right themes, has created an atmosphere where accepting newcomers is seen as problematic.

Sweden’s prime minister, Stefan Löfven, also speaking at Davos, expressed doubts about whether the tight timetable set by Rutte could be met. “I’m not naive,” he said. “My argument to the countries that are not willing to accept refugees is that if we can’t handle this the European Union is at risk. If we cannot do it there is a risk to Schengen.”

On Wednesday Austria announced that it planned to limit the number of people allowed to apply for asylum to 1.5% of its population over the next four years. For this year, the government said in a statement, the number would be capped at 37,500.

On Friday Germany’s finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, said Europe was running out of time to find solutions to the crisis. He told Spiegel Online that while EU members were in agreement that refugee numbers had to be reduced, the union remained very divided as to how to affect a reduction. Austria’s announcement had caught him off guard, he said.

“I had to take a deep breath when I heard they’d reached that decision without really talking to us,” he said. “But we know that the abilities of the EU countries are not inexhaustible. There’s little point in criticising each other.”

Schauble denied that Germany was increasingly isolated over the issue, saying there was agreement over the sense of increasing urgency to deal with the problems in the regions where the refugees came from.

“The EU is united on the need to reduce the migratory pressure. If the Schengen system is destroyed, then Europe is dramatically endangered – both politically and economically. That’s why we Europeans need to invest billions in Turkey, Libya, Jordan and other countries in the region as quickly as possible – everyone as much as he’s able,” he said. Schauble has won virtually no support for his suggestion of an EU-wide petrol tax to help finance such aid.

Jim Yong Kim, the president of the World Bank, said the refugee problem had intensified and he had been asked by the UN chief, Ban Ki-moon, to rethink the humanitarian response to the crisis so that emergency assistance formed part of a long-term development plan.

Speaking to the Guardian in Davos, Kim said the bill for refugees was soaring and a new approach was needed. “People are attached to staying where they are but there has to be hope of finding work. We have to build up the productive capacity of countries with large numbers of refugees. We have to make it attractive to stay in these countries.”