"The Brits, who never believed that fiction for a second, cussedly refused to have anything to do with Schengen. They were right."
So what will be lost when
Schengen has ceased to be? The essence of being European? The concept
of a European identity?
Schengen:
going, going … gone
An
optimistic experiment comes to a sad end. What next?
By ROSEMARY RIGHTER
11/26/15, 5:30 AM CET
LONDON — No
government is as yet fully prepared to admit it, but the brief era of
borderless travel through most of the European Union is over.
Confronted by the
double dilemma of unmanageable flows of migrants and their
embarrassing, fatal failure to track the movements even of notorious
terrorists, EU governments are rushing to seal national frontiers in
“temporary” measures that are likely to become permanent. Their
citizens would not have it otherwise. They no longer trust “Europe”
to keep their streets safe.
* * *
It is a sad ending
to an optimistic experiment. Since 1995, under the Schengen Agreement
named after a small town in minute Luxembourg, travelers, trucks and
commuters have crisscrossed the airports and land frontiers of the 26
European states — 22 of them from the EU, plus four non-EU
countries — without passports or other border checks.
The Schengen regime,
which covers 400 million people in an arc from Malta to Finland, has
been not just a convenience but an economic success, easing trade by
cutting delivery times, while saving governments the considerable
costs of policing each national border. It may even have helped
people to feel more “European,” although it is hardly the “unique
symbol of European integration” that the European Commission’s
president, Jean-Claude Juncker, fatuously proclaims. But in security
terms, Schengen has proved a disaster — because the necessary
accompaniment to Schengen, the pledge of effective policing of the
Schengen area’s 9,000 kilometers of common external frontiers, has
never been more than a bad joke.
The Brits, who never
believed that fiction for a second, cussedly refused to have anything
to do with Schengen. They were right. Its border controls never
looked plausible. Europe’s most permeable frontiers wove in and out
of tiny Greek islands and the length of the long Italian coastline,
as impossible a terrain to police as you could devise. It did not
help that Frontex, the EU agency supposed to act as Schengen’s
border control unit, was based far away in Warsaw. Worse, it was
never given anywhere near the money or manpower even to monitor
performance, and had no powers: Policing frontiers, including the
common external frontiers, remained a national responsibility. It is
no secret that Italian and Greek border police wave non-EU arrivals
through. One Italian border control officer told me this summer that
“80 percent of them don’t want to stay in Italy, so why should we
force them to?” A simple permit makes Europe their oyster.
Ronald K. Noble,
secretary-general of Interpol until last year, notes that not one
Schengen country has “systematically screened passports or verified
the identities” of those arriving at ports, airports or land
frontiers. And, because Schengen passports guarantee free movement,
they are much sought after; Noble adds that eight Schengen nations
were among the top 10 countries reporting stolen or lost passports to
Interpol last year. The UK, which started screening in 2005 after the
London terrorist attacks, catches some 10,000 people a year carrying
stolen or fake passports. In Brussels, officials admit that jihadists
who are EU citizens have a 90 percent chance of being waved through
border controls on return — although this must be no more than a
guess, given the sporadic screening.
This combination of
free movement across Europe and barely monitored external frontiers
has been, simply put, a massively irresponsible gamble with public
safety. A gamble that has failed.
* * *
In the wake of the
Paris atrocities, France is demanding stringent and obligatory
checks, using criminal and security databases, not only on immigrants
but on Schengen nationals returning from third countries. The
European Commission, which had been resisting the proposal for
months, has been forced to agree to a version of advance passenger
identification for airlines which would enable enforcement agencies
to check travelers against their watchlists.
Most governments
concede that such tinkering may make their citizens feel a bit safer,
but also that — given that they will still have no control over
Schengen’s external frontiers — it leaves the fundamental flaw
unaddressed. Meantime France has reinstated border controls, as have
10 other Schengen states. With another three million refugees and
other migrants expected to head for Europe next year, the chances of
their reopening are vanishingly small. Shengen has not yet been
declared dead, but all across Europe, the obituaries have already
been written.
Everywhere but in
the European Commission, that is. Juncker has tied his colors to the
Schengen mast, denouncing “cynics” for linking terrorism and
immigration, and insisting that “We will only save Schengen by
applying Schengen.” Whatever that means, other than a variant on
the eternal Brussels theme that the cure for every European failure
is “more Europe.” It remains remarkable how, every time something
built by the EU starts to crack apart — the eurozone for example —
it is immediately declared to be the very cornerstone of European
unity that must be “saved” regardless of cost, public opinion and
common sense.
* * *
So what will be lost
when Schengen has ceased to be? The essence of being European? The
concept of a European identity?
Rubbish. On the
contrary, I think the citizens of the EU’s nation-states will feel
rather more relaxed about “Europe” once they believe they have
some measure of control again over their own frontiers. Like it or
not, and I emphatically do not like it, terrorism and immigration
have rooted themselves in more or less the same area of the popular
cortex, and confidence that things are “in control” can be
restored only at national level. Without such confidence, there is a
serious risk that Marine Le Pen and other ultranationalist and
xenophobic politicians will grab, and keep, electoral support.
Frontier checks will
be inconvenient and time-consuming — I declare an interest here, as
someone who drives between London and central Italy six or more times
a year — but seriously annoying only for those who daily commute
across a border for work. Yet in the information age, some system can
surely be developed to speed their passage.
Taxpayers will be in
for quite a stiff policing bill, but that can be mitigated by much
closer coordination between security services, which is urgently
required with or without Schengen. Rail freight might be given a
boost, given the queues that frontier checks will involve for
lorries, although they have proved entirely manageable at U.K. entry
points, where by far the worst recorded traffic jams have occurred
only recently, as a result of the violent attempts by immigrants to
storm the Eurotunnel terminal in Calais — a problem linked to
Schengen as well as to the refugee crisis. I doubt that inter-EU
trade will suffer much.
* * *
Above all, it is
nonsense to assert that the death of Schengen would toll the knell
for the free movement of people in Europe. Having to show your
passport is hardly much of a barrier. The great magnet for young
Italians, French and Poles is London. It has never been part of
Schengen. That has not stopped it being Europe’s most thrillingly
multilingual, multinational city. With apologies to the great Général
de Gaulle, J’ai une certaine idée de l’Europe — and it amounts
to rather more than the perpetuation of a drive-thru zone.
Rosemary Righter is
an associate editor at the Times of London and a commentator on
foreign affairs.
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