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ON THE EU'S DOORSTEP: A Bulgarian border policeman checks identification documents at the border between Turkey and Bulgaria. According to current Schengen rules, anyone entering Schengen country is free to travel within member countries. Countries like France and Italy, fearing mass migration from North Africa especially, want to amend this. Bulgaria is a member of the EU, but so far has not been granted Schengen status. (Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP/Getty Image)
The recent border crisis in Europe—created by the unwanted arrival of tens of thousands of Arab Spring migrants—has brought to the fore the deep ideological cracks in the Union. Not only is it challenging one of the core rights enjoyed by EU citizens, unfettered movement within the EU, but it has also shown Europe is far from being the union it intends to be.
European politicians are split into two camps: the majority still upholds the EU and is appealing for solidarity among member states, and for unified measures to handle the illegal immigrant influx. On the other side, are the so-called “eurosceptics,” mostly U.K. members of the European Parliament (MEPs) who have long been against the EU and its role as “nondemocratic super-state.”
Italy and France have had to shelter most of the 25,000 migrants from North Africa since last January, and as a result, they want the European Commission to review the borderless status created by Schengen and possibly even reimpose internal border controls.
William Dartmouth, MEP from the U.K. Independence Party (UKIP) calls the Schengen Agreement “unworkable” in 21st century and the proposal to review it “inevitable.”
“All these Tunisians who arrived at Lampedusa [Italy] had absolute rights to go to Paris or Amsterdam, which makes no sense,” said Dartmouth.
Under Schengen, signed in 1985, once inside the zone, anyone can travel freely between countries without passing border checkpoints. The key features of the Schengen cooperation are common border management standards and a common visa policy. Only the U.K. and Ireland opted out of it.
Another euroskeptic, fellow British MEP Gerard Batten, says the border problem is symptomatic of larger issues.
“The recent issues regarding the Schengen area demonstrate what happens when reality collides with ideology,” wrote Batten in an e-mail from London.
Batten gives examples of three major EU projects which, in his words, are falling apart: the open borders policy, the single European currency, and the Common Fisheries Policy, which “has been so disastrous that fisherman are paid for pulling plastic bottles from the sea.”
“These are just three examples of how artificially created projects come to grief in the light of reality,” wrote Batten via e-mail.
In the current reality where boatloads of North Africans are arriving in Europe, Rome felt forced to grant them temporary visas to offload some of the problem. France reacted by reintroducing border checks on the grounds of national security. And last month, Denmark announced its intends to reimpose controls at its frontiers with Germany and Sweden.
The border issue is only adding fuel to the fire of dropping public opinion of the EU, prompted by the instability of the euro and the debt crisis in Greece.
According to the last euro-barometer survey, published in August 2010, support for EU membership has fallen to 49 percent, down 4 percentage points from the year before, which is close to the lowest levels recorded in the last decade.
The proportion of Europeans who consider their country’s membership in the EU a bad thing stands at 18 percent, up from 15 percent from autumn 2009. In the U.K., where euroscepticism is the highest, a YouGov poll, conducted in September 2010, showed that some 47 percent of adults surveyed would vote for Britain to exit the EU.
Still, some European politicians think people have overreacted to the North African immigrant issue. “The numbers involved just do not amount to the tsunami that Italy has referred to,” argues to Guy Verhofstadt, leader of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats (ALDE) in the European Parliament and former prime minister of Belgium.
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