A Union punctured by internal and external border hot-spots

A look at the EU’s border issues.

Europe’s borders, and those of the European Union, are the product of awkward geography, as in the case of Lampedusa, or of historical accident, with Kaliningrad and Ceuta and Melilla prime examples. They may be hard, as is the dividing line on Cyprus, or soft, as the Greek-Turkish land border used to be last year, when thousands crossed it illegally in search of a safer, better life.

Schengen

National borders have become invisible for people travelling on the European continent, as long as they stay west and north of a line that runs from Russia and Belarus through Ukraine, Romania and Serbia to Croatia. No border guards check identity documents, no customs officers ask intrusive questions. Travellers on international flights go through the same checks as domestic travellers – provided they do not stray outside the EU’s Schengen area. This includes non-EU members Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland, but excludes Ireland and the UK and, for the time being, Bulgaria and Romania. Recent tinkering with the Schengen rules, which would in theory allow the temporary reintroduction of border checks, appears to be political posturing rather than a genuine threat to travellers’ convenience. The same may very well be true of the additional checks that Denmark has put in place. It does show, however, how fragile this core achievement of European integration has become.

Ireland and the UK

Boarding the Eurostar to London in Brussels or Paris is a throwback to 20 years ago in Europe, when travellers had to show identity papers at most national borders. Anyone seeking to cross the English channel by train, boat or plane still needs to show their identity card or passport, as neither the UK nor Ireland is part of the EU’s Schengen zone. Permanent residents of the EU who are citizens of a non-member state may also face a rude shock: as a rule, they will have to produce a visa, even for short visits to the UK and Ireland.

Ceuta and Melilla

Ceuta and Melilla are two European outposts on the African continent, Spanish enclaves with their back to Morocco; Ceuta faces the motherland across the Strait of Gibraltar, Melilla is further east along the Mediterranean coast, toward Morocco’s border with Algeria. Both have the same problem: they are the easiest way for Africans to reach European soil without having to cross the treacherous waters of the Mediterranean or the Atlantic. As a reaction to waves of immigrants in the 1990s, Spain built tall wire fences around the two enclaves; a decade ago, they were reinforced, and in 2005 Morocco and Spain deployed additional security forces to keep would-be migrants out.

Lampedusa

Lampedusa, with a permanent population of just 6,000, lies closer to Tunisia than to Italy, to which it belongs. That has been its misfortune. In February, thousands of Tunisians began arriving, after the demise of their dictatorial regime. They were followed by – far fewer – citizens of Libya (and citizens of other countries) escaping the civil war there. In all, around 45,000 passed through the tiny island in search of a better life. When many of them received temporary papers from the Italian authorities, which made it easier for them to travel to other countries in the EU’s Schengen zone, France led a move by member states to pull up the drawbridges. An overreaction, many policymakers grumbled – but one which matched the public mood in Europe, dejected after three years of recession, defensive of employment possibilities, and even more suspicious of newcomers than usual. Today, the flood of Tunisians has been reduced to a trickle, although occasionally a large vessel with hundreds of people arrives. (Next-door Malta is in a similar, although less dramatic, situation.)

Cyprus

In the early hours of 29 December 1963, Major-General Peter Young, the commander of British forces in Cyprus, used a green chinagraph pencil on a map of the island to draw a dividing line between the Greek and Turkish communities. With Turkey’s invasion of the northern third of Cyprus in 1974, that Green Line became a hard boundary, patrolled by UN peacekeepers and impenetrable for ordinary Cypriots. Walls, fences and other fortifications were erected, often cutting across villages and, in the capital Nicosia, across streets and backyards. Since a failed reunification plan in 2004, the year the island’s Greek-controlled segment joined the EU, the Green Line has become more porous, and Cypriots have been able to visit the other side for the first time in more than a generation. But this has yet to lead to definitive rapprochement between the two communities.

Kosovo

A diplomat from an EU member state once described Kosovo as “a black hole within a black hole” – a particularly troubled spot even by the standards of the western Balkans, by long tradition Europe’s most troubled region. A former Serbian province whose independence, declared in 2008, is not recognised by Serbia and five EU member states (Cyprus, Greece, Romania, Slovakia and Spain), Kosovo is landlocked and at the mercy of its neighbours for trade and transport. Kosovo is the only country in the western Balkans whose citizens still require visas to enter the Schengen area. As a result of weaknesses in the rule of law (despite the presence of the EU’s largest mission abroad) and its vast family networks extending across Europe, Kosovo is an important transit route for all kinds of illegal trade, from people to drugs, adding a further tarnish to its negative image. See Page 15

Greek-Turkish border

The land border between Greece and Turkey, which cuts across the historic region of Thrace, last year became the main entry point for illegal immigrants to the EU, with a 45% increase in detected crossings compared to 2009. For a period last autumn, every day around 350 further irregular migrants crossed a 12.5-kilometer section near the town of Orestiada, prompting the first-ever deployment of rapid intervention teams by Frontex, the EU’s border-control agency. In all, almost 50,000 illegal entries took place in 2010, according to the Greek authorities, compared to previous peaks of 30,000 in the Canary Islands (2006) and 31,300 on Lampedusa (2008). Since the Frontex deployment, detections – like, it is assumed, illegal migrants – have declined sharply.

Moldova

In April 2009, Romania’s President Traian Basescu made it easier for Moldovans to receive Romanian citizenship, citing concerns about post-election violence and a political swing in Moldova towards Russia. The simplified regime has remained in place under subsequent pro-Western administrations in Chisinau. Many Moldovans can claim one Romanian grandparent, and hundreds of thousands have so far used this opportunity to secure a Romanian passport – and, with it, the ability to travel and work within the EU. This bilateral policy is something over which the EU has only political influence. It does, though, add to the political challenge that Romania faces in securing membership of the Schengen zone.

Kaliningrad

Until 2004, bilateral agreements enabled the one million people of this Russian exclave to travel to Russia and to neighbouring Poland and Lithuania with substantial flexibility (in Lithuania, for example, Kaliningraders needed visas only for a visit of longer than 30 days). When Poland and Lithuania acceded to the EU, some flexibility was maintained by the issue of ‘facilitated transit documents’ for regular rail and road travellers to and from Russia. In addition, the EU’s local-traffic regime allows the exclave’s residents to travel 30 kilometres into Lithuania and Poland, provided they live within 30 kilometres of the border. However, this theoretically excludes the 430,000 residents of the city of Kaliningrad, since the city is 35km from Poland and 70km from Lithuania. Poland is using its presidency of the Council of Ministers to push for everyone in the exclave to have local-travel rights, a position that the European Commission says “may be justifiable”.

Croatia

Thanks to its unusual shape, Croatia, which is expected to join the EU on 1 July 2013, has a border of 7,817 kilometres, the 31st-longest in the world, even though Croatia is only 128th by surface area. It also has the world’s 22nd-longest coastline, with 5,835 kilometres, thanks to its more than 1,000 islands in the Adriatic. At the stroke of a pen, the EU, when Croatia joins, will acquire a 932-kilometre border with Bosnia and Herzegovina. That may well make it more difficult for EU policymakers to ignore that country’s internal troubles, which have allowed many illegal activities to thrive. Given that Bosnia’s prospects for joining the EU anytime soon are dim, expect that border to become even more tightly controlled than it is now.