Life
After Schengen
Bill Emmott
Bill Emmott, a former
editor-in-chief of The Economist, is executive producer of a new
documentary, “The Great European Disaster Movie.”
OCT 1, 2015
LONDON –
Throughout Europe’s refugee crisis, which has been building for
well over two years, warnings about the threat to the European
Union’s precious Schengen Area of border-free travel have
proliferated. Indeed, the warning was heard again recently, as EU
ministers thrashed out a late-night agreement on border policing and
the relocation of refugees. But, at a time of diminished confidence
in the EU, would eliminating border-free travel be such a bad thing?
In short, no. Of
course, the idea of abolishing borders within Europe holds great
symbolic importance and appeal. But sometimes even sacred cows need
to be slaughtered. With the refugee crisis turning Schengen into a
threat to the credibility of the EU as a collective entity and of its
national governments’ ability to maintain order and the rule of
law, that time is now.
When it was first
created in 1985, the Schengen Area included just five countries
(Belgium, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and West Germany).
Membership has since ballooned to include 22 of the EU’s 28 member
countries – with four of those left out (Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus,
and Romania) due to join in the future – plus four non-EU members
(Norway, Iceland, Switzerland, and Liechtenstein). All have abolished
controls at their shared borders and have adopted a common visa
policy for citizens of non-member states.
It is certainly
handy to be able to treat a flight from Zurich to Oslo as a domestic
journey, with no passport controls to contend with upon departure and
arrival. And it is undoubtedly convenient to be able to drive from
Berlin to Barcelona without having to wait in line at each border one
crosses. Indeed, that convenience is probably why only two EU
countries (Ireland and the United Kingdom) have opted out of the
Schengen Agreement.
But the refugee
crisis has exposed the flipside of the Schengen Agreement – namely,
the difficulty of monitoring national and EU territory without border
controls. And though non-Schengen countries have, in some cases, been
able to avoid direct obligations to participate in a common policy –
the UK, for example, has remained outside the EU’s scheme for the
relocation of refugees – they have not been insulated from the
challenges of the migration crisis. They, like the Schengen
countries, cannot credibly say how many migrants are in their
country, who these people are, or when they arrived.
This loss of control
matters, for two main reasons. First, if statistics about migration
are open to doubt, even before taking into account illegal
immigration, nationalist anti-immigration political parties can more
easily exaggerate the figures to stoke public fears. Second, if
refugees who have been granted asylum can move easily to any Schengen
country they choose, burden-sharing agreements lose their credibility
and accepting refugees loses its practical appeal.
A country would not
want to cover the up-front costs of settling a particular number of
refugees, only to miss out on the eventual economic benefits that
those refugees could provide when they join the workforce. To avoid
this outcome, it would make sense to implement a transition period –
like the seven-year transition periods faced by citizens of new
member states – during which successful asylum-seekers are barred
from moving to other countries for work. But Schengen makes this very
difficult to enforce – a reality that plays further into the hands
of the nationalists, who are keen to portray the EU as a burdensome
obligation, rather than as a source of solutions or opportunities.
To be sure, the
Schengen Agreement and the EU’s principle of free movement of
people seem naturally to reinforce each other. But the issues they
raise are not the same. It is the free movement of people, not
border-free travel, that forms an essential component of the EU. And,
under the current circumstances, Schengen is placing that fundamental
right and benefit at risk.
Of course, resolving
the refugee crisis will take far more than just reintroducing glass
booths and uniformed immigration officials at borders. But suspending
or abolishing the Schengen Agreement would boost the credibility of
governments’ efforts to maintain order at home, and thus make
ordinary citizens far more amenable to aiding more refugees.
At the same time,
reversing a once-cherished policy would prove that the EU, far from
being trapped by some utopian ideology, can adapt to changing
circumstances in a thoughtful and pragmatic manner. Reculer pour
mieux sauter – backing up in order to jump better – is, after
all, a time-honored and very European principle
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