Written by Abe Mamet
The Schengen zone is on a clear path to disintegration. On Jan. 19 of this year, Donald Tusk, President of the European Council, issued an address to the European Parliament. The European Union, he said, has “no more than two months” to figure out a plan to deal with the rapid influx of migrants and asylum seekers. Most alarmingly, Tusk claims, the “collapse of [the] Schengen [zone]” will be all but assured.
16 days before Tusk’s dark prediction, Sweden imposed document checks over the Øresund Bridge, a vitally important trade route connecting Denmark to Sweden, in a move that nearly doubled the average commuters travel time and will cost what the BBC estimates to be over $145,000 a day. That day, the Danish Minister for Immigration, Integration, and Housing, Inger Støjberg, wrote a letter to the European Commission, concerned about new border controls introduced by Sweden, Norway, and Germany. Feeling ever more trapped in a slowly closing region, she explained that “the Danish Government has decided to temporarily reintroduce border control” measures, that she says “may extend to all internal borders, including land-, sea- and air- borders.”
Perhaps most striking was a move by Austria’s chancellor, Werner Faymann, to suspend Schengen rules in his country and check ID’s at all border points. Without the EU succeeding to “secure the external borders,” Faymann told Österreich newspaper, “Schengen as a whole is put into question.”
The Schengen Area, as it is formally known, currently includes all but six EU member states, only two of which (Ireland and the United Kingdom) voluntarily have opted out. An original five-country pact in 1985 quickly led to a formal Schengen Convention in 1990, in which proposals were drafted and approved that would take affect in March of 1995. This series of events created the framework for what is today’s Schengen Area. Key rules under the Schengen agreement, according to the European law consultancy EUR-Lex, are the abolishment of internal border checks on people traveling between Schengen countries, common port-of-entry rules for those entering Europe, establishment of a similar visa process for all member states, and an ease of extradition policies and interstate judicial enforcement. In essence, the Schengen zone allows for total freedom of commerce and movement between member countries. While the tourist benefits of this are obvious, more important is the allowance via Schengen of large, efficient interstate commerce.
The Schengen zone’s economic importance can not be overstated, and its end would be unthinkably disastrous to a world economy already teetering on the brink of recession. Quoted in a Reuters article from Jan. 20, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker defines just how impactful a closing of Europe’s borders would be. Citing a report from the European Commission itself, Juncker claims that a closing of the borders would easily cost the EU $3 billion in prospective revenue. “If we close the borders, if the internal market begins to suffer… then one day we will be wondering whether or not we really need a common currency if there is no single market, no free movement of workers any more.”
This slow drainage of money and interest in a single market is already taking effect. It is infrastructure like this that makes Europe such a great, interdependent continent with so much to lose. A spokesmen for the local commuters’ association told The Telegraph that closures and delays such as the ones imposed by Sweden mean that more “people will try to find work in the country they live in,” undoing decades of progress that Sweden and Denmark have made in becoming economic boons for each other.
Despite its seemingly imminent disintegration, there is a possibility, and a very real one too, of saving it and its benefits. A number of actions can be taken by the EU to limit the demise of this important system.
In the spirit of Donald Trump, the most obvious course of action for Europe is to ramp up policing and barriers along the border surrounding the actual Schengen Area. While flights into the Schengen zone, are, of course, processed through passport control and customs, land and sea borders are quite often left exposed and unmonitored. Kathleen McNamara further explains: “European leaders, quite simply, didn’t finish the job… The EU did not exert control over its external borders as internal borders fell, but rather, allowed member states to continue” to police their own borders in “highly variegated approaches.” This weak external enforcement is what has allowed for the large influx of refugees and other migrants from the east, the primary factor in the current challenge to the Schengen area.
Less tangible, yet just as important, is to control the hate speech of Europe’s right-wing populists by not rewarding these politicians with votes. As the Economist notes, European “right-wing populists are playing on the public’s fears.” Yet these fears, they go on to note, are rarely founded on fact. The refugees are “victims of Islamic State’s terror, not perpetrators.” A knee-jerk reaction that would close the long open borders of internal Europe would reward the terrorist perpetrators by arresting Europe in a locked state of fear, halting the economy and progress towards any better future for Europe and the world.
If all else fails, the spirit and framework of the Schengen zone can be retained by redrawing the map and excluding some countries from Schengen inclusion. This would create more feasible border protection and would allow for a more manageable mini-Schengen zone, if only temporarily. The most feasible iteration of this plan would be to boot Spain, Italy, and Greece in an effort to control entry by sea, and to also exclude Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary so that more wealthy states can control the eastern border more manageably. This redrawing of Schengen, though, would create irreconcilable rifts in the former zone, and this plan should be kept as an extreme last resort.
As Tusk himself reminded us during the very same address in which he predicts the fall of this great system, “our strength comes from our unity.” Mr. Tusk, I agree. Let us not stand idly by and watch one of the greatest diplomatic feats of modern Europe fall to the hands of extremists and terrorists.