BRUSSELS – As new variants of the coronavirus spread rapidly, large countries are moving to reintroduce border controls, a practice that became the new norm of Europe during the pandemic and which caused the world’s largest area of free movement to decline.
Fearing the highly contagious new variants first identified in Britain and South Africa, both Germany and Belgium introduced new border restrictions last week that contribute to the steps already taken by other countries.
The European Union sees free movement as a fundamental pillar of the deepening of the continent’s integration, but after a decade in which first terrorism and then the migration crisis tested the commitment, countries easily place it under new pressure under border control.
The European Commission, the EU executive, has been trying to restrict free movement countries since March last year, after most imposed restrictions at the start of the crisis. The result was an ever-changing patchwork of boundary rules that sowed chaos, while the spread of the virus was not always limited.
“Last spring, we had 17 different member states that introduced border measures, and the lessons we learned at the time were that it did not stop the virus, but that it incredibly disrupted the internal market and caused enormous problems,” the Commission President, Ursula von der. Leyen, told the news media this week. “The virus has taught us that closing borders does not stop it.”
But many countries seem to find border control irresistible. Mrs von der Leyen’s remarks and a proposal by Commission spokespersons that new restrictions should be reversed caused a setback from Germany, reflecting the new normal among EU countries in the coronavirus context: our borders, our business.
“We are fighting the mutated virus on the border with the Czech Republic and Austria,” German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer told the tabloid Bild. The commission “should support us and not put spokespersons on our wheels with cheap advice,” he snapped.
The system of borderless movement of people and goods is known in the language of Europe as Schengen, for the city of Luxembourg, where a treaty establishing its principles was signed in 1985 by five countries in the heart of the present European Union.
Today, the Schengen zone contains 22 of the 27 EU member states, as well as four neighboring countries (Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland), where travelers in principle cross borders freely without complying with controls or other requirements.
Accession to the Schengen zone is seen as the pinnacle of European integration, along with joining the single currency of the euro, and a quest for countries going through the process of accession to the European Union.
Throughout its 35-year history, the Schengen system has changed and deepened, but like many other EU pursuits for unity, it has been vulnerable to setbacks in times of crisis.
“My biggest concern – and I have been dealing with Schengen for many years – is that Schengen is in serious danger,” said Tanja Fajon, a Slovenian member of the European Parliament who heads the Schengen inquiry’s group into the meeting.
Over the past decade, terrorist attacks in EU countries and the abuse of Schengen’s vested freedoms by militants who have jumped from country to country have revealed that law enforcement cooperation and the sharing of intelligence are not being stepped up. held with the opening of their countries in European countries. .
In 2015-2016, the arrival of more than one million refugees fleeing the war in Syria gave Schengen an even more decisive blow. Many member states, unwilling to share the burden, hardened their borders, isolated themselves and used countries on the edge of the bloc, such as Greece and Italy, as buffer zones.
The impact of the Syrian refugee crisis was a tectonic shift in European border policy. Boundlessness, once a romantic ideal of a united, prosperous and free Europe, was seized by right and right and rather cast as a threat.
Soon, even moderate politicians are beginning to see borders within Europe as desirable, after decades of work to dismantle them.
“Freedom of movement is a symbol of European integration, the most tangible result of integration, something that people really feel,” Ms Fajon said.
“It is not just the pandemic that is threatening it – we have been in a Schengen crisis since 2015, when we saw internal border controls being used to protect narrow national interests around refugees, without any real benefit,” she adds.
The seemingly unstoppable spread of the coronavirus delivers a third blow in the dream of open European borders.
“Schengen is not a very crisis-resistant system,” said Marie De Somer, an expert at the European Policy Center, a research institute in Brussels. “It works in nice weather, but once we’re under pressure, we see that it has flaws and gaps in its operation, and Covid is an excellent example.”
Schengen countries have the explicit right to reintroduce checks at their borders, but they have to remove some legal obstacles to do so, and they are not meant to keep it in the long run. .
Ms De Somer said that flexibility is ingrained in Schengen because of how important national borders are for sovereignty; it is a deliberate part of the design.
“But the biggest risk is that these measures go beyond the original goal, and that the system is eroding,” making it harder to return to the previous state of open borders once the crisis subsides, “she said.
One factor that could help keep the borders open is the large and immediate economic impact seen from even smaller closures – a reflection of how the block’s daily functioning has been built for decades around the absence of borders.
Since Sunday, the only ones allowed to enter Germany from the Czech Republic or the Tyrol region in Austria, where the cases of the coronavirus variant originating in Britain are increasing, that is, Germans, who are in Germany living, transporting cargo or working in essential jobs. jobs in Germany. Everyone must register and show a negative coronavirus test result before entering.
But thousands of people in Austria and the Czech Republic commute daily to work in Germany, and after the new checks went into effect, long queues began to form. At the end of the week, business groups wrote desperate letters asking Germany to ease or lift the restrictions, warning that the seemingly limited and purposeful move had already wreaked havoc in the supply chains.
“The measures have very serious consequences for the whole of Austria and therefore clearly contradict the ‘learned lessons’ of last spring,” said Alexander Schallenberg, Minister of Foreign Affairs.
Even in an imaginary near future when most Europeans have been vaccinated and the coronavirus is finally under control, the future of Schengen is likely to be disputed.
The European Commission has proposed changes that would make it significantly more difficult for individual members to set barriers. But several French-led countries have argued that the bloc’s outer borders must become impenetrable in order to survive internal freedom of movement – an idea often called “Fort Europa” and reinforced by the budget of Frontex, the border agency of the EU, to increase.
These ideas go hand in hand with proposals for scaling up surveillance at the internal border to replace conspicuous physical obstacles and controls.
The fight for the future of Schengen is underway, according to Fajon, the European legislator, while the European Commission is preparing to present a strategy document on the subject later this year.
“The question is, what kind of Schengen will it be?” Me. Fajon said. “Hidden cameras at the borders and shooting at license plates or other technological instruments that can be questioned?”
Yet De Somer believes that the system of free movement has an important long-term ally: the youth of the continent.
“Young people say that the Covid crisis was the first time they experienced living in a Europe with borders,” she said. “It made them appreciate the boundlessness.”
Christopher F. Schuetze reported from Berlin and Monika Pronczuk from Brussels.