European Union ministers at a meeting in Brussels have been unable to agree on a quota system to distribute an additional 120 thousand asylum seekers across the bloc.
The EU is seeing thousands of refugees stream across its external border every month but deep divisions between its member countries are becoming more apparent.
Our Europe correspondent Jack Parrock reports.
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Hungary is tightening controls on its border with Serbia - across which they've already built a 4 meter high barbed wire fence.
Causing refugees to rush to make the crossing into the European Union.
Meanwhile EU ministers meting in brussels were trying to find agreement on a plan to share the burden of asylum seekers - who arrive in Hungary, Greece and Italy - through a quota system of 120 thousand places in other EU countries.
BITE: Dimitris Avramoplous - EU Commissioner for Home Affairs annd Migration
"We formally, as the president said before, adopted the decision to relocate 40 thousand refugees from Italy and Greece but for our proposal on 120 thousand we did not have the agreement we wanted."
REPORTER VO:
The quota system is heavily opposed by eastern EU states as they say it will encourage more refugees to come.
While the European Union continues to try to resolve the deepening refugee crisis, many here say it is calling into question the core values of the bloc, of solidarity and compassion. But it's also raising questions about whether EU's border free zone can survive.
The meeting came while a number of EU countries like Germany, Austria, Slovakia and The Netherlands temporarily reimposed border checks to try to control the flows of refugees - free movement between most EU nations has been unrestricted since 1995.
BITE: Kris Pollet - Senior Legal & Policy Officer at ECRE (The European Council on Refugees and Exiles)
"There is a lot of political discourse about about solidarity and responsibility sharing and that this is a problem that is common to all of Europe and Europe should tackle this together, there is a lot of nice words but in reality we do see that as soon as the temperature is rising in terms of the numbers of refugees arriving, states do tend to their own national interests."
REPORTER VO:
Most of the refugees entering the EU are from conflict torn countries like Eritrea, Somalia and Syria - and while the EU struggles to find a collective response, many more are continuing to arrive.
Jack Parrock in Brussels.
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