quarta-feira, 25 de novembro de 2015

Schengen: going, going … gone



"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.

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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.

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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.

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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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