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Easing travel in Europe

The European Union (EU) is on course to extending the Schengen borderless area to nine more countries this week, which will mean, among others, a common visa for third-country nationals, common external frontiers, and the abolition of personal checks at internal borders. These measures are already in force across 13 member states, besides Norway and Iceland. The development represents a triumph for the deepening integration process of the bloc which, since the 2004 enlarge ment into central and eastern Europe, has been grappling with explosive and acrimonious political debates on questions of illegal immigration, combating organised crime, and the influx of cheap labour into western Europe. Whereas EU citizenship guarantees right of entry into all the 27 member states regardless of one’s circumstances, a common visa is valid across the Schengen land for nationals of third countries, both of immense value for business- and tourism-related travel. The removal of internal border controls in the Schengen area is compensated by a slew of measures in the realm of police and judicial cooperation among states that authorise the maintenance of a sophisticated database on criminals, missing persons, and hazardous goods. The latest expansion of the Schengen area leaves five EU countries, including the United Kingdom and Ireland, outside of its purview.

Although the principle of free movement of persons is one of the pillars of the EU structure, its evolution in practice in the early decades remained largely an inter-governmental rather than an EU initiative. Beginning with Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg through the 1960s, and France and Germany thereafter, it culminated in the 1985 Schengen Agreement. Internal divisions over the question of restricting the eligibility for free movement to EU nationals and the implications of collective action on the immigration and asylum policies of individual states contributed to the hesitation of the European Parliament and the European Commission in pressing ahead with a common agenda. The corpus of Schengen regulations was eventually integrated into EU law in the 1999 Treaty of Amsterdam. Admission to the eurozone and embracing the single currency will mark the next milestone for the erstwhile Eastern Europe. The prospective opening of internal borders to the relatively new EU members and the economic opportunities that would flow as a consequence are sure to raise expectations among the Balkan states for earlier accession to the union.

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