European (dis)Union as Germany walls itself off
From today (September 16), the nearly 40-year-old European Schengen project – untrammelled borderless travel for hundreds of millions across nearly 30 countries – will face a real and very visible stress test.
Identity checks will be required at all nine of Germany’s land frontiers.
Some, particularly non-European Union (EU) nationals within the bloc, will say, “So what’s new? We’re used to being checked at the internal borders within the EU’s Schengen area, anyway”.
What’s new is that there’s no indication when the checks at Germany’s nine land borders will finally end. What’s also new is, as Poland’s foreign minister said on Sunday night, that Germany is acting unilaterally to choke off a continent-wide programme, even though no one country has ownership of the Schengen agreement.
Germany Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government continues to insist this is a temporary measure and that it’s in response to “irregular” immigration. But many of Germany’s EU neighbours, not least Poland and Austria, aren’t buying it.
Nor are some other EU members, such as Greece. Greek PM Kyriakos Mitsotakis has said that his country won’t accept “having to shoulder a disproportionately large burden”.
There is something in that. While Athens may be slightly further away from Berlin than Warsaw or Vienna in geographical terms, it remains very proximate in the way the European project has always intended. These countries’ fates are linked, economically, politically and on the world stage. The actions and/or intentions of one EU member profoundly affect another. This is particularly true of Germany, which is huge in all sorts of ways, and occupies a central position – politically, economically and geographically – within the European bloc.
But increasingly, these days, it seems like Europe is united more in outrage and angst than anything else.
