The names Kos, Lampedusa, Hegyeshalom may go down in histories of Europe’s 2015 refugee crisis yet it is an obscure village in Luxembourg, far from the human drama, that is hogging headlines.
Schengen, on the vine-flanked Moselle where old enemies France and Germany meet, gave its name 30 years ago to the code which removed border controls between most European states. Now, feuding over who should shelter hundreds of thousands of people on the move seeking asylum has put “Schengen” under threat.
The European Commission, the executive of the European Union which enforces the Schengen rules on 26 states including four non-EU members, has ruled out any change. It describes Schengen as one of the greatest achievements of the postwar peace, a boon for citizens and non-European visitors, as well as for business.
“It’s not Schengen that’s the problem,” the commissioner in charge of it, Dimitris Avramopoulos, said as Budapest, Vienna and Berlin bicker about what to do with thousands of mainly Syrian refugees trying to reach Germany from the Balkans.
The problem, most EU leaders agree, lies less with the lack of internal borders than with the bloc’s external frontiers and with another town inscribed in its statutes - Dublin. (With a touch of irony, Ireland, like Britain, shuns the Schengen zone.)
A system first agreed at Dublin in 1990 means that people requesting asylum must be housed and have their claims processed in the state in which they first arrived in the EU. A surge in arrivals by sea has left Italy and Greece struggling. Chaos in Greece means many move on across the Balkans to reach Hungary.
Accepting the Dublin rules must be fixed to spread the load, the Commission proposed to send some asylum-seekers from Italy and Greece around the EU according to quotas based on countries’ population, wealth and so on. Bickering has held that up, while Greece and Italy have resorted to DIY methods to relieve the pressure, simply letting migrants head north over their borders.
That has seen France step up checks on traffic around its Italian border, Danes monitoring their German frontier more closely and, this week, Austrian police mounting operations on roads from Hungary. If such procedures are increased and endure, they could undermine Schengen’s principles of free transit.
As yet, there appears little appetite among governments to challenge the Commission and undertake the cost and disruption of redeploying frontier police to make routine document checks to intercept the few thousands of migrants, among the millions travelling every day, who are not entitled to move country.
But German Chancellor Angela Merkel, fearful for the open-border system, this week brandished that danger to Schengen as a means to focus minds on agreeing to fix Dublin: “If we don’t succeed in fairly distributing refugees,” she said, “Then of course the Schengen question will be on the agenda for many.”
Schengen has also come under attack from some who argue that it has made life easier for criminals, including the suspected Moroccan Islamist accused of attacking an international train from Amsterdam via Brussels to Paris last month. The Commission says the Schengen code gives states sufficient powers to carry out both security and identity checks where these can be justified.
For many political leaders, however, the fate of Schengen is so bound up with the European Union’s essential sense of self, as the response to centuries of war between nations, that calls for major change will meet heavy resistance.