After
Paris, drawbridges up?
The
Schengen system of open borders was already under pressure. The
latest terrorist attacks may end it
Nov 21st 2015 | The
Economist / Charlemegne
FOR a Dutchman
driving his caravan to the Costa del Sol, the only thing to remind
him that he had crossed borders used to be the successive text
messages welcoming him to Belgium, France and Spain. That was before
this summer’s migrant crisis—and last weekend’s terrorist
attacks in Paris. Now the liberty to roam the 26 countries in the
border-free Schengen zone, which Jean-Claude Juncker, the president
of the European Commission, calls a “unique symbol of European
integration”, is under greater threat than at any point since its
inception.
Calls to curb
borderless travel were already growing louder in August after Ayoub
El Khazzani, a Moroccan national, carried an assault rifle across two
borders on a Thalys train before attacking fellow passengers. In
September Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, warned that without
agreement on how to handle refugees they would grow louder still. The
overwhelming scale of migrant arrivals led several countries,
including Hungary, Slovenia, and ultimately Germany and Austria,
temporarily to reintroduce border controls. Sweden, then getting
10,000 new arrivals each week, joined them on November 12th. The
Netherlands has doubled its spot checks in the border area since
September. And Denmark’s announcement that it will introduce
electronic number-plate scanners at border crossings strains the
limits of the Schengen framework.
The attacks in Paris
have changed the debate. Ever since it became clear that the
terrorists had strong links to Belgium, Peugeots coming over the
border from Brussels have seemed just as great a threat to France as
planes flying in from Damascus. As investigators retrace the
movements of the terrorists and their weapons, more intra-European
links will surely be uncovered, and more of Schengen’s weaknesses.
After last week’s
attacks, France swiftly reinstated border checks at major crossings.
The Schengen framework allows such temporary measures for national
security; the French had been planning the move anyway for a UN
climate conference in Paris later this month. Now they are pushing
for more. At a meeting of justice and home-affairs ministers in
Brussels on November 20th, France will ask that Europe start to
collect passenger name records from those travelling within the
region—which it has pressed for since the Charlie Hebdo attacks—and
for further exchange of data through the Schengen Information System,
a security database. France will also demand a true Europe-wide
agency to police Schengen’s external borders. François Hollande,
its president, said he wanted a Europe of open borders, not a
continent of “walls and barbed wire”.
But others disagree,
especially in the east. Hungary has already built a 100-mile fence
along its Serbian border. Austria is planning one on its border with
Slovenia. Slovakia’s prime minister, Robert Fico, says he too is
ready to build fences (the security of Slovak citizens “is a higher
priority than the rights of migrants”). After the Paris attacks
Poland’s minister of European affairs declared that the EU’s deal
to redistribute asylum-seekers was off. Slovakia’s election
campaign has become an anti-migrant shouting match. Hungary’s prime
minister, Viktor Orban, blamed migration for the killings in Paris.
(He also said it increased rape and threatened Europe’s culture.)
In western Europe,
right-wing populists are playing on the public’s fears. Nothing
helped their cause more than the (unconfirmed) report that one of the
Paris gunmen entered Europe through Greece, posing as a Syrian
refugee. Marine Le Pen, who has warned for months that jihadists are
posing as refugees, claimed vindication. Matteo Salvini of Italy’s
right-wing Northern League repeated his call for the suspension of
Schengen. In polls taken since the bombings, 70% of Dutch people say
the borders should close.
Fear and loathing
are not the sole response. On November 15th Germany’s interior
minister, Thomas de Maizière, urged the press and society not to
link the attacks to the refugee debate. The dominant line in talk
shows in Germany and much of western Europe is that the refugees are
victims of Islamic State’s terror, not perpetrators. Recep Tayyip
Erdogan, Turkey’s president, an unlikely but necessary ally of Mrs
Merkel’s, said at last week’s G20 summit that treating refugees
as terrorists would be “evading humanitarian responsibility”. One
important meeting was Mr Erdogan’s with Alexis Tsipras, Greece’s
prime minister, on November 18th; their shared border is among the
most porous on Schengen’s periphery. Until the zone’s external
borders are secured, freedom of movement inside it will be in danger.
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