Last year, as I crossed a bridge across the Rhine, a checkpoint on the Eurobridge blocked the route between France and Germany.
Europe’s borders are closing due to “the ongoing crisis in Eastern Europe and the Middle East”, “increasing migration pressure and the risk of terrorist infiltration”. France pointed to “a threat to public policy and public order”. Germany named it a “global security situation”. Austria and the Netherlands pointed to “irregular migration,” while Italy pointed to the influx “along the Mediterranean and Balkan routes.”
Things weren’t supposed to be like this. European integration promises to abolish borders and “build a closer union” that allows free movement of people, goods and capital within a single market. This commitment is reflected in the Schengen Area, an open-border area formed at the end of the Cold War under a treaty between France, West Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands that now encompasses 29 European countries. But fears about migrants traveling freely across Europe made Schengen a fragile project from the start.
Schengen once symbolized liberal internationalism and was a milestone in European unity established after World War II. Today it is a symbol of Europe’s migration crisis – a crisis that has sparked a backlash against globalization and the rise of illiberalism.
Such paradoxes have plagued Schengen’s history. Yet one of the most profound paradoxical moments has been all but forgotten – the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 that all but sealed the opening of Europe’s borders. The extraordinary sudden breach of the continent’s most emblematic border has brought progress to the Schengen treaty to a standstill, exposing the risks of free movement that now force Europe to restore checkpoints.
1989 was the year the Schengen Treaty was supposed to be completed. But revolutionary events intervened. Riots swept Eastern Europe, mass protests rocked the German Democratic Republic, and when the Berlin Wall came down on November 9, some 3 million East Germans crossed into West Berlin.
The 1989 rupture hastened the end of the Cold War and opened the way for a new era of globalization. But the lifting of the Iron Curtain highlighted the complexities of abolishing borders – especially in Berlin. Berlin’s location on the external border of the Schengen Area makes it particularly significant that its borders are open to Eastern European traffic.
Thus, the peaceful revolution of 1989 and the human movement triggered by the fall of the Berlin Wall disrupted the development of the Schengen Treaty. “Le Monde” commented: “Borderless Europe encounters a setback in the Schengen area.” The obstacle lies in the fact that “paradoxically, the East has regained freedom of movement.”
The signing of the Schengen Treaty is scheduled to take place at the end of this year in a church in a castle in Schengen, the village in Luxembourg that gives the treaty its name. However, during face-to-face negotiations between France and West Germany on the evening of December 13, the negotiations broke down and the treaty was not signed.
The focus of the conflict was the prospect of German reunification. A reunified Germany would not only change the balance of power in Europe; It also extends Schengen’s borders to the east. This would increase the risk of irregular migration from Soviet bloc countries (Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania), which were classified as security risks in a secret list prepared by the treaty makers to determine who would be excluded from Schengen freedoms Outside of flow guarantee.
A proposal to declare East Germany less “foreign” than West Germany was at the heart of the impasse. This is a proposal from Bonn that would open the Schengen area to all Germans. But there’s a stumbling block: East Germany is one of the countries whose citizens are included in the secret Schengen list of security risks. The signing was canceled due to the failure of the Schengen countries to reach an agreement on Germany. Bonn terminated negotiations, seeking “time for reflection” to open the border between East and West Germany.
As population losses accelerate in Eastern Europe, the European Commission has warned of the “fragility of the Schengen Agreement.” The French treaty makers spoke of “German difficulties” caused by “unexpected events in the Eastern European countries”. A representative from Luxembourg wondered whether the guarantee of free movement could continue: “The way things are going, it would be better to be a commodity or capital than to cross borders as a ‘person’.
According to diplomatic documents marked “confidential and personal”, West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl complained to French President François Mitterrand that “the French are dragging their feet and must sign the agreement”. At the same time, Mitterrand revealed his concerns about German revanchism to British Prime Minister Mrs. Thatcher. A memo from Thatcher’s private secretary described the president’s views: “The sudden prospect of reunification gave the Germans a certain psychological shock. The effect was to make them once again the ‘bad’ Germans they had been before.
Still, European leaders saw West Germany’s aspirations as inevitable. “It would be foolish to say no to unity,” Thatcher’s aide summed up Mitterrand’s thinking. “In fact, there is no power in Europe that can prevent this from happening. None of us will declare war on Germany.
The Schengen Treaty was finally signed in June 1990, completing the agreement that originated in 1985. rule. The solution to the German problem came in a statement foreseeing unification (expected to be achieved by the end of the year). However, at the time Schengen’s outer borders remained closed to migrants from elsewhere in the Eastern Bloc, and even borderless Berlin did not offer a transit point into the zone of free movement privileges.
From this moment – when Schengen negotiators faced the upheavals of 1989 – there emerged a blueprint for free movement, but also a blueprint for restrictions on it. The treaty established a Europe without internal borders. It also provides for the fortification of the Schengen area’s external borders, the establishment of a multinational security apparatus and the exclusion of so-called “undesirable” immigrants from Eastern Europe as well as Asia, Africa and the Caribbean.
This is the dilemma symbolized by the fall of the Berlin Wall: the precariousness of free movement in a world where the risks of open borders appear ever more serious.
Today, the fragility of the Schengen area is reflected in the confusion over Europe’s border measures. Schengen’s borders continue to expand to include countries that were once behind the Iron Curtain this year – Romania and Bulgaria. Meanwhile, Europe’s internal borders are being strengthened as a remedy for the ills of globalization, heralding the demise of the Schengen Zone by a thousand cuts.
