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When I crossed a bridge spanning the Rhine last year, a checkpoint blocked the route between France and Germany, on the Pont de l’Europe.
Borders are closing in Europe, for reasons ranging from “ongoing crises in Eastern Europe and the Middle East” to “increasing migratory pressures and the risk of terrorist infiltration.” France cites “threats to public policy, public order.” Germany names “the global security situation.” Austria and the Netherlands point to “irregular migration,” and Italy to the influx “along the Mediterranean route and the Balkan route.”
It wasn’t meant to be this way. European integration promised the abolition of borders, “an ever closer union” allowing the free movement of people, goods and capital in a single market. That promise was embodied in the Schengen zone, an area of open borders formed in the twilight of the Cold War — by a treaty among France, West Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands — and now encompassing 29 European countries. But the fear of immigrants freely traversing Europe made Schengen a fragile project from the outset.
Schengen once symbolized liberal internationalism, a landmark of the European unity built after World War II. Today it’s a symbol of Europe’s migration crisis — a crisis driving the backlash against globalization and the ascendance of illiberalism.
Such paradoxes haunt Schengen’s history. Yet all but forgotten is a moment of deepest paradox — when the fall of the Berlin Wall, in 1989, almost doomed the opening of Europe’s borders. Perversely, the sudden destruction of the continent’s most symbolic border brought progress on the Schengen treaty to a standstill, exposing the risks of free movement that today impel the return of checkpoints in Europe.
The year 1989 was when the Schengen treaty was supposed to be completed. But revolutionary events intervened. Unrest swept Eastern Europe, mass protests convulsed the German Democratic Republic, and some three million East Germans crossed into West Berlin when the wall fell on Nov. 9.
The ruptures of 1989 hastened the end of the Cold War, opening the way for a new era of globalization. But the lifting of the Iron Curtain made evident the complexities of abolishing borders — and nowhere more so than in Berlin. Standing at Schengen’s external frontier, its border opened to a tide of people from Eastern Europe, Berlin took on extraordinary significance.
So it was that the peaceful revolutions of 1989, and the human movement enabled by the breach of the Berlin Wall, disrupted the Schengen treaty making. “Europe without borders stumbles in Schengen,” observed Le Monde, and the obstacle was, “paradoxically, freedom to come and go reclaimed in the East.”
The signing of the Schengen treaty had been set for the end of the year — in the chapel of a castle in Schengen, a village in Luxembourg that gave the treaty its name. But the negotiations broke down, in a tête-à-tête between France and West Germany on the night of Dec. 13, leaving the treaty unsigned.
The conflict centered on the prospect of German reunification. A reunited Germany would not only alter the balance of power in Europe; it would also extend Schengen’s frontier eastward. That would heighten the risk of irregular immigration from countries in the Soviet bloc — Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania — that were classified as security risks in secret lists prepared by the treaty makers to determine which people would be excluded from Schengen’s guarantee of free movement.
A proposal declaring that East Germany was not “a foreign country” in relation to West Germany lay at the heart of the impasse. It would open the Schengen territory to all Germans, a bid put forward by Bonn. But there was a stumbling block: East Germany was among the countries whose citizens counted as security risks in the secret Schengen lists. The signing was called off, with the Schengen states failing to reach agreement on the German question. It was Bonn that halted the negotiations, seeking a “time of reflection” on opening the East-West German border.
As the exodus from Eastern Europe accelerated, the European Commission warned of the “fragility of the Schengen agreement.” French treaty makers spoke of the “German difficulty” created “by the unexpected events in the Eastern European countries.” A delegate from Luxembourg wondered whether the guarantee of free movement would survive: “The way things are going, it will be better to be a commodity or capital” than to cross borders as “a person.”
According to diplomatic papers marked “secret and personal,” the West German chancellor, Helmut Kohl, complained to the French president, François Mitterrand, that “the French were dragging their feet and must sign the agreement.” Meanwhile, Mitterrand revealed his fears of a revanchist Germany to the British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. A memo from Thatcher’s private secretary described the president’s views: “The sudden prospect of reunification had delivered a sort of mental shock to the Germans. Its effect had been to turn them once again into the ‘bad’ Germans they used to be.”
Still, Europe’s leaders saw inevitability in West Germany’s aspirations. “It would be stupid to say no to reunification,” as the Thatcher aide summarized Mitterrand’s thinking. “In reality there was no force in Europe which could stop it happening. None of us were going to declare war on Germany.”
The signing of the Schengen treaty came at last in June 1990, completing an agreement originating in 1985. Most of the treaty’s provisions set forth security measures, including rules allowing Schengen countries to reinstate internal border checks temporarily as required by “public policy or national security.” A settlement of the German question appeared in a statement foreseeing reunification (which would occur by the end of the year). At that time, however, Schengen’s outer frontiers remained closed to migrants from elsewhere in the Eastern bloc, not even a borderless Berlin offering a way station into the privileged zone of free movement.
Out of this moment — as Schengen negotiators confronted the upheavals of 1989 — emerged a blueprint for free movement but also for its restriction. The treaty enshrined a Europe without internal borders. At the same time, it provided for the fortification of Schengen’s external frontiers, the construction of a multinational security apparatus and the exclusion of so-called “undesirable” migrants from Eastern Europe as well as Asia, Africa and the Caribbean.
This is the predicament symbolized by the fall of the Berlin Wall: the precarity of free movement in a world where the risks of open borders appear ever more acute.
Today, Schengen’s vulnerability is reflected in the chaos of Europe’s border measures. Schengen’s frontiers continue to expand, enveloping countries that once lay behind the Iron Curtain — Romania and Bulgaria just this year. Meanwhile, Europe’s internal borders are hardening as a remedy for ills ascribed to globalization, presaging the death of Schengen by a thousand cuts.