BRUSSELS – As new variants of the coronavirus spread rapidly, major countries are moving to reintroduce border controls, a practice that became Europe’s new normal during the pandemic and is destroying what was once the largest area of free movement in the world.
Fearing the highly contagious new variants first identified in Britain and South Africa, Germany and Belgium introduced new border restrictions last week, adding to measures already taken by other countries.
The European Union sees freedom of movement as a fundamental pillar for the further integration of the continent, but after a decade in which terrorism first and then the migration crisis tested that commitment, countries’ easy recourse to border control is to put it under new pressure.
The European Commission, the EU executive, has been trying to get countries to stop limiting freedom of movement since last March, after many restrictions imposed at the beginning of the crisis. The result has been an ever-changing patchwork of border rules that has sown chaos, although it doesn’t always limit the spread of the virus.
“Last spring, we had 17 different member states that introduced border measures and the lessons we learned at the time is that it didn’t stop the virus, but it incredibly disrupted the single market and caused huge problems,” said commission chairman Ursula von der Leyen, told the media this week. “The virus taught us that closing borders doesn’t stop.”
But many countries seem to think that taking back border control is irresistible. Ms. Von der Leyen’s remarks and a suggestion by commission spokespersons that the new restrictions should be reversed triggered a reaction from Germany, which echoed the new normality among EU countries in the context of the coronavirus: our borders, our Business.
“We are fighting the mutant virus on the border with the Czech Republic and Austria,” German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer told the tabloid Bild. The commission “must support us and not put spokespeople on our wheels with cheap advice,” he replied.
The system of borderless movement of people and goods is known in Europe as Schengen, a city in Luxembourg where a treaty establishing its principles was signed in 1985 by five countries at the heart of what is now the European Union.
Today, the Schengen zone includes 22 of the EU’s 27 member states, as well as four neighbors (Iceland, Lichtenstein, Norway and Switzerland), where travelers, in principle, cross borders freely, without being subjected to controls or other requirements.
Adherence to the Schengen area has been seen as the culmination of European integration, alongside accession to the common euro currency, and an aspiration for nations that are in the process of joining the European Union.
Throughout its 35-year history, the Schengen system has transformed and deepened, but, like many other EU aspirations towards unity, it is vulnerable to setbacks in times of crisis.
“My biggest concern – and I’ve 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 serves as the head of the assembly’s Schengen ballot.
Over the past decade, terrorist attacks in EU countries and the abuse of vaunted Schengen freedoms by militants from one country to another, revealed that police cooperation and information sharing have not kept pace with countries opening their borders. Europeans.
In 2015-2016, the arrival of more than one million refugees fleeing the war in Syria dealt an even more decisive blow to Schengen. Many member countries, unwilling to share the burden, have tightened their borders, isolating themselves and using countries on the periphery of the bloc, such as Greece and Italy, as a buffer zone.
The impact of the Syrian refugee crisis marked a tectonic shift in European border policy. The absence of borders, which was once a romantic ideal of a united, prosperous and free Europe, was taken over by the right and the extreme right and, instead, considered a threat.
Soon, even moderate politicians began 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,” said Fajon.
“Now it is not just the pandemic that threatens it – we have been in a Schengen crisis since 2015, when we began to see internal border controls used to protect narrow national interests around refugees, with no real benefit,” she added.
The seemingly unstoppable spread of the coronavirus is delivering a third blow to the dream of opening European borders.
“Schengen is not a very crisis-resistant system,” said Marie De Somer, an expert at the European Policy Center, a research institute based in Brussels. “It works in good weather, but the minute we are under pressure we see that there are flaws and gaps in how it works, and Covid is an excellent example.”
Countries belonging to Schengen have an explicit right to reintroduce controls at their borders, but they have to overcome certain legal obstacles to do so and are not intended to maintain them in the long term.
Mrs. De Somer said that flexibility was ingrained in Schengen because of the importance of national borders for sovereignty; it is a deliberate part of the design.
“But the greatest risk is that these measures will persist beyond the original purpose and there will be an erosion of the system,” making it more difficult to return to the previous state of open borders when the crisis subsides, she said.
One factor that can help keep borders open is the vast and instantaneous economic impact now felt even with smaller closings – a reflection of how the bloc’s daily functioning has been built around the absence of borders for decades.
Since Sunday, the only people allowed to enter Germany from the Czech Republic or the Austrian Tyrol region, where cases of the coronavirus variant originating in Britain are on the rise, are those who are German, live in Germany, transport cargo or work mostly in Germany. Everyone must register and present a negative coronavirus test result before entry.
But thousands of people in Austria and the Czech Republic travel daily to work in Germany, and after the new controls took effect, long lines began to form. By the end of the week, business groups were writing desperate letters asking Germany to ease or lift restrictions, and warning that the seemingly limited and targeted change had already wreaked havoc on supply chains.
“The measures have very serious implications for the whole of Austria and therefore clearly contradict last spring’s ‘lessons learned’,” said Alexander Schallenberg, Austria’s foreign minister.
However, even in the imaginary near future, when most Europeans have been vaccinated and the coronavirus finally brought under control, Schengen’s future is likely to be challenged.
The European Commission has suggested changes that would essentially make it more difficult for individual members to introduce obstacles. But several countries led by France have argued that the bloc’s external borders need to become impenetrable if freedom of movement is to survive – an idea often referred to as “Fortress Europe” and reinforced by the increased budget of Frontex, the agency EU borders.
These ideas come hand in hand with proposals for increased surveillance at internal borders to replace perceived physical obstacles and controls.
The fight for Schengen’s future has begun, said Fajon, the European legislator, as the European Commission is preparing to present a strategy paper on the subject later this year.
“The question is, what kind of Schengen is this?” Said Mrs. Fajon. “Cameras hidden at the borders and filming on license plates or other questionable technological tools?”
Still, Ms. De Somer believes that the free movement system has an important long-term ally: the youth of the continent.
“Young people are saying that the Covid crisis was the first time that they have experienced what it is like to live in a Europe with borders,” she said. “It made them appreciate the absence of borders.”
Christopher F. Schuetze contributed reporting from Berlin and Monika Pronczuk of Brussels.