In 1989, Europe celebrated the fall of the Berlin Wall. Today, less than 30 years after, new fences are built along the European borders. Has Schengen failed?
The Schengen Agreement was first signed in 1985, as The Netherlands, Luxembourg, Belgium, France, and West Germany agreed to progressively remove their border controls. Within a few years, in 1990, it was integrated into the Schengen Convention, which establishes a common visa policy among all the participating states, and was further enhanced by its inclusion into the body of Law of the European Union. This decision, taken in the context of the Treaty of Amsterdam in 1997, has important repercussions now: making the Schengen’s provision part of the European aquis implies that a suspension of the Agreement cannot take place based on the unilateral decision of one or more adhering States, but has to be approved by the EU itself.
Nowadays, 22 countries belonging to the European Union are part of the Schengen Area, and Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, and Romania are formally obliged to eventually join it (while the United Kingdom and Ireland have formally opted out). Additionally, Norway, Liechtenstein, Iceland, and Switzerland have signed bilateral agreements with the EU to participate in Schengen, which overall impacts more than 400,000,000 citizens over a territory of more than 4,000,000 square meters. With such a widespread applicability, it seemed that the principle of free movement of persons in Europe had finally fulfilled itself, at least until the outbreak of the migrant crisis in 2015.
The migrant crisis
Europe has always been the destination of high migration fluxes, thanks to its easy accessibility from the Mediterranean Sea and its porous borders with Turkey, but since the end of World War II, it has never witnessed a migratory phenomenon like the one that started in 2015.
According to the statistics released by Frontex (The European Agency for the Management of Operational Cooperation at the External Borders of the Member States of the European Union), a total of 283,532 immigrants arrived in the EU territory in 2014, versus the almost one million reported by the UNHCR (The United Nation Refugee Agency) at the end of 2015.
This escalation was due, mostly, to the rampaging Syrian Civil war as well as the deteriorating social and political conditions in Afghanistan and Iraq; though not completely unforeseen, the magnitude of the 2015 migratory fluxes was more intense than expected: by beginning of September 2015 the number of immigrants arrived only by sea surpassed the total number of arrivals in 2014.
Faced with an unprecedented migration crisis, the EU started since the beginning to show some of its vulnerabilities on the matter.
The first weakness demonstrated by Europe was the lack of a harmonized, structured and realistic approach for supporting the receiving countries, even before the crisis exploded. Operation Triton, created in 2014 to replace the Italian “search and rescue” Operation Mare Nostrum and to focus more on border control, initiated its work heavily underfunded. A few months after its establishment in April 2015, already in the middle of the crisis, the EU had to inject three times the initial finances just to ensure the minimal viability of the Operation. Even so, the total funding and equipment of Triton, which is supposed to maintain border integrity in the whole Mediterranean area, is the same as Mare Nostrum, which was smaller both in scope and in coverage.
One other problem faced until the end of summer 2015 was the complex implementation of the Dublin Regulation: adopted in 1990, it aims at monitoring asylum-seeking procedures by forbidding requests to multiple countries. Upon arrival in EU territory, an assessment to identify the Member State which will be in charge of the asylum claim has to be performed, based on a series of pre-defined conditions: among those, whether the person has been already registered in a European country. This means that, if an immigrant has been identified and fingerprinted in the country of arrival, this will be more likely in charge of the asylum.
This, however, does not take into account one peculiarity of the immigration toward Europe: the vast majority of immigrants do not wish to apply for asylum in their arriving countries. In 2015, according to the IOM (International Organization for Migration), almost 90% of the immigrants arrived by sea either to Greece or Italy; however, requests for asylum were addressed mainly to Germany (35%), Sweden (12%), and Austria (7%). As a result, thousands of unidentified immigrants tried to leave Greece and Italy before being formally identified to place their requests in their preferred destinations, putting pressure on the borders of the neighbor countries (especially along the Balkan routes).
As already foreseen by the UNHCR and the ECRE (European Committee for Refugee and Asylum), the Regulation proved to be too burdensome for arrival countries, tasked with the unrealistic expectation of identifying thousands of immigrants on a daily basis, and triggered an uncontrolled internal migration inside Europe, straining the Schengen Agreement. Eventually, Germany waived the Regulation, followed suit by Italy and Greece, until the EU decided to temporarily suspend it; however, this did not relieve the pressure over the Schengen Rules.
The reinstatement of borders in Europe
Despite the suspension of the Dublin Regulation, since summer 2015 border control management has been hectic. When Germany and Sweden announced their “open arms policy,” their intention to accept asylum seekers regardless of the EU-agreed quota, more and more immigrants began their journey toward the North of Europe, triggering the domino effect of the temporary suspension of the Schengen Agreement.
Austria initially allowed free transit to migrants directed to Germany, but shortly after decided to reinstate border controls, supervised by the Army, on the borders with Hungary, which for its part built a razor fence with Serbia, and eventually in October 2015 closed its border with Croatia, forcing thousands of migrants to deviate toward Slovenia. Slovenia started monitoring its border with Hungary, and tried to limit the access of immigrants from Croatia, resorting also to the use of riot police. Finally, in November 2015, the Slovenian Army began building a razor-wired fence along its border with Croatia.
Denmark, centrally located between Germany and Sweden, closed for one day its train route from Germany and in 2016 reinstated ID checks on their shared borders. Sweden, similarly, had already restricted its rules on the checks performed on its borders and reintroduced controls on the Swedish-Danish route.
Austria has unilaterally decided to create a 250 meters control post on the Brenner Pass that connects Austria with Italy. The decision has triggered heated polemics, and Austria has been vehemently criticized not only by Italy but also by the European Commission; spokeswoman Natasha Bertraud has declared “For the moment we have only seen announcements in the press, but if these plans should materialize then we would have to look at them very seriously,” adding that the EU Commission could potentially have to assess, and possibly sanction, the proportionality of Austria’s response.
Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann stood strongly with his project, which he defined “desirable, necessary and just.” The Defense Minister, Hans-Peter Doskozil, also added that, regardless of the criticisms received, he was also ready to deploy a small contingent of soldiers to patrol the borders.
In front of the Italian protests, Doskozil pointed out that the wall would not be necessary if Italy would perform its duties and identify immigrants, reigniting the polemic between North and Central European countries on one side and South Europe.
Faced with complaints from Athens, Johana Mikl-Leitner, the Austrian interior minister, said, promptly seconded by the Swedish home affairs minister, Anders Ygeman: “Greece has one of the biggest navies in Europe. It’s a myth that the Greek-Turkish border cannot be protected.”
Will the Schengen agreement work?
Regardless of what will happen on the Italian-Austrian border, the Schengen agreement has never been under such a stress test. So far, almost half of the countries that signed the Agreement have temporarily suspended the visa-free policy, including France and Belgium, which maintained it during the migration crisis but waived it in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in Paris and Bruxelles.
For the first time, a President of the European Union, the Polish Donal Tusk, has declared: “If the crisis situation does not improve, Schengen could collapse.” This statement dates back to January 2016, at the same time when, in Amsterdam, the Interior Ministers of the Members States were discussing the option of extending the suspension from Schengen obligations from the maximum six months currently foreseen to up to two years.
Four months after, Schengen is still standing, but the solution to the crisis is far from being achieved. The latest resort has been striking a controversial deal with Turkey, which will start receiving migrants turned back by Greece in exchange for substantial financial compensation (68 billion Euro), a fast track for its long-stalled application to join the EU, and, not without a pinch of irony, the possibility for Turkish citizens to circulate without passports in the passport-free Schengen Area.
It is unlikely that Schengen will simply disappear: it has provided substantial economic benefits to all the states participating, in terms of simplified circulation of goods and reduced waiting time in export activities, thanks to the shorter queues at the national borders. Additionally, 80% of the commercial exchanges are currently between European countries; recalling the Schengen Agreement would put an enormous financial pressure on companies, and in some sectors, like the import-export of food, eventually on the customers.
Instead, the Schengen principles could be profoundly revised, possibly granting more flexibility on their application, or suspension thereof, to the national governments.
However, there are more lessons to be learned from the crisis than only the fragility of the free circulation principle. If Schengen is now under the spotlight, it is a consequence of other institutional issues. If it is clear that none of the EU countries could face the crisis on its own, it is also now evident that the European Union still lacks a comprehensive set of harmonized responses to these emergencies. At the same time, the existing provisions, like the Dublin Regulation, are often too cumbersome in times of emergency, and the decision-making process of the EU institutions is still inherently laborious and therefore weak when faced with situations that require a rapid response.
Blaming only Schengen for the failures of the crisis management would not only be unfair, but also, a missed opportunity for the EU institutions to take corrective actions in their own rules and procedures when tackling unpredictable scenarios.
Photo: European Commission DG/Creative Commons