Europe’s passport-free zone faces a grim future

FIVE junior politicians, chuckling away on a pleasure boat. There is only one known photo of the day, in 1985, when Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Germany and the Netherlands agreed to end border controls between their countries. It was a low-key start for what was to become one of the European Union’s signature achievements. The Schengen accord, named after the Luxembourgish village nestled along the river on which it was signed, is the world’s only large passport-free zone. It now covers 26 countries, including four non-EU members.

The village itself, just yards from borders with France and Germany, took a while to cotton on to the potential that history had given it, but now offers tourists a museum, sculptures made from Luxembourgish steel and two slabs of the Berlin Wall. The most emotional reactions come from visitors outside the zone, says Martina Kneip, the museum’s director. In the 2000s eastern Europeans made pilgrimages to the village whose name had become synonymous with the freedom they were denied for decades. Today, Turkish visitors not yet ready to surrender the fading dream of EU membership leave heartfelt notes in the visitors’ book.

Schengen embodies the dream of frictionless movement across the EU’s single market. It eases transport of goods, boosts tourism and enables the cross-border commute of most of the EU’s 1.7m “frontier” workers. Michel Gloden, Schengen’s mayor, recalls the tiresome passport and customs checks of his youth. West German guards would sometimes wave you through; the French gendarmes, with their machineguns, were more threatening. Today’s arrangements suit his village’s multinational identity, and have put it on the map. “When you tell people you’re from Luxembourg, they say, ‘Whatever’,” he chuckles. “But if you say you’re from Schengen, everybody knows it. Even in Australia!”

Yet Schengen is in trouble. The officials who set it in motion were only dimly aware that eliminating internal borders required strengthening external ones. But the logic of the system has unfolded remorselessly as pressure from illegal migration has built against Europe’s southern flanks. The first jolt came in 2011, as refugees fled the upheaval of the Arab spring. A few years later Schengen came close to buckling, as over 1m migrants exploited the borderless zone, testing the asylum systems of some countries to the limit. Greece, the Schengen landing-point for most refugees, was nearly expelled. Instead, countries began to impose their own checks.

This week new figures showed steep declines in both asylum applications and illegal border crossings. But numbers that leaders could once tolerate have become unacceptable. Six Schengen countries maintain some form of internal border checks. Some are tougher than others. The motorist between Belgium and France is less likely to be inconvenienced than the traveller crossing the Oresund bridge between Copenhagen and Malmo. But all have stretched the rules that allow temporary controls to breaking point, or beyond. When governments feel that they must choose between upholding national security and EU rules, they will always choose security, says Raphael Bossong of the SWP think-tank in Berlin. Few expect the six countries’ supposedly temporary controls to be lifted when they expire in November.

That rankles with eastern European governments, like Hungary and Slovenia, who fear a Schengen collapse could relegate them to a new second tier of the EU. But Schengen has become a casualty of the EU’s crisis of trust. Northern European states do not believe that Greece and Italy guard their borders properly, and recall how they would once wave through migrants in their thousands. Anti-migration political insurgencies at home make compromise harder, as Angela Merkel is learning in Germany.

Fixing this requires overcoming the EU’s deadlocked asylum debate. It is pressure from asylum-seekers making, in the jargon, “secondary movements” from one Schengen state to another, that leads politicians to throw up the walls. Horst Seehofer, Germany’s interior minister, has come close to exploding his country’s coalition over a proposal to turn back from Germany’s borders asylum-seekers registered elsewhere in the EU. His plan implies a closing of frontiers along migratory trails, including the Brenner Pass between Italy and Austria. Pressure could come from the other direction, too. There are half a million illegal immigrants in Italy. The new government, which has vowed to deport them, may instead find it easier to nudge them northward.

Building fences, not bridges

If today’s checks are worrying rather than devastating, a gloomier future looms. Elizabeth Collett of the Migration Policy Institute Europe, a think-tank in Brussels, outlines three possibilities. First, the slow spread of border controls across Schengen, quietly tolerated by Brussels. Second, the expansion of controls via technology such as number-plate recognition and spot checks, including racial profiling (for years French police have been roaming trains crossing from Ventimiglia, an Italian border town, and returning illegal migrants). The third outcome is a regression to a smaller number of separate passport-free zones: Benelux, the Nordics, Iberia and so on.

The only way out is for Europe’s leaders somehow to resolve their differences on managing illegal immigration. The call is now for complete control of the EU’s external border; a laudable but ill-defined goal. Some want deals with north African countries to reduce departures; others seek to establish camps for failed asylum-seekers in the Balkans. Leaders will discuss these ideas at what is sure to be a fractious EU summit next week.

The sharp decline in immigrant arrivals ought to offer space to thrash out a deal. But instead the EU is struggling to get over its migration hangover. Ms Collett compares it to the muggy period before a thunderstorm, when the squirrels have scarpered and the air is pregnant with foreboding of trouble ahead.