Moves in the Wrong Direction

by Toby Vogel

European Voice

On 2 May, the European Parliament's civil liberties, justice and home affairs committee is scheduled to vote on a report by Carlos Coelho, a Portuguese centre-right  MEP, which recommends that Bulgaria and Romania join the European Union's Schengen area of borderless travel.

In June, the entire Parliament is scheduled to vote on the report, which builds on an evaluation of the two countries by the European Commission. It is hard to imagine a worse time for these votes. The mood among the member states about Schengen is so dark that on Monday (18 April), Cecilia Malmstr?m, the European commissioner for home affairs, was forced to offer reassurances about its fate.

"I don't believe at all that this is the end of Schengen," she said, after a weekend of escalating tensions between France and Italy about Tunisian migrants. Malmstr?m is right: the ugly spat, in which France temporarily blocked trains from Italy at the border, does not spell the end of Schengen. But it does suggest that core achievements of European integration are vulnerable to ill thought-out unilateral action by national governments.

A group led by France that also includes Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands – all of which have threatened to re-impose border checks – is attempting to paint a picture of a Schengen area that is under assault from Tunisians, Bulgarians and Romanians. That stretches credulity. France hosts almost 2.5 million citizens from outside the EU and admitted close to 90,000 'third-country nationals' in 2008, the last year for which figures are available. Even if all of the 25,000 Tunisians who arrived in Italy over the past several weeks were to make their way to France – where many of them have family – it would hardly amount to an unmanageable human tsunami.

If Schengen is under assault, it is from insecure governments that are being challenged by an anti-immigrant hard right.

In Italy, the hard right is in government, in the form of the Lega Nord and Roberto Maroni, the interior minister, who mused after a meeting with his EU counterparts last week about whether staying in the EU made any sense if no one else was willing to admit Tunisians.

In France, Marine Le Pen of the xenophobic National Front appears poised to humiliate President Nicolas Sarkozy in a presidential contest next spring. She has exploited the disorder and squalor on Lampedusa, the Italian outpost through which most Tunisians reach Europe.

In Germany, where anti-foreigner feelings are more constrained by good taste, an anxious public frets about the lack of 'integration' of foreigners – for which read 'Muslims' – and applauds tighter enforcement of the EU's external borders.

Italy's policy of granting temporary papers to illegal Tunisian migrants reinforces powerful caricatures of disorderly southerners, as if the deplorable situation of migrants in Greece – not to mention the country's public finances – were insufficient.

In the UK, David Cameron, the prime minister, said last week (14 April) that he would introduce tough limits on non-EU foreigners entering Britain and transitional rules constraining the citizens of new EU member states from seeking employment – as if four million Croatians were poised to swamp Britain.

Bulgaria and Romania have contributed to the hostility that has greeted their bid to join the Schengen area. Four years after admission to the EU, they have failed fully to meet the obligations that they undertook before joining.

They appear determined to uphold an axiom of EU enlargement, which suggests that the EU's leverage over a candidate country is greatest before admission is decided – and plummets immediately thereafter.

Bulgaria and Romania may be no worse than other EU member states. Greece, with its sham of an asylum system and its systematic flouting of eurozone rules of fiscal probity, comes to mind. Hungary, the current holder of the rotating presidency of the Council of Ministers, would also struggle to convince the EU that it was not backsliding on democracy, were it not a member already. But Bulgaria and Romania are still applicants – in this case, to join the Schengen area – and are therefore under greater pressure to stick to the rules.

The Schengen mess in Italy, Bulgaria and Romania suggests that core achievements of European integration are vulnerable to the policies of national governments. It is surely alarming that a trickle of migrants from a small neighbouring country has led member states to question one of the EU's greatest achievements, that of freedom of movement across the Schengen area.

On Sunday, Herman Van Rompuy, the president of the European Council, warned against "exaggerating" the risk of migration. He said that neither Italy nor France had yet done anything illegal, but that there was "a danger of their not respecting the spirit of the Schengen treaty on free movement". That is an understatement. Internal borders have disappeared for most travellers, and France and Germany are undermining that achievement.

The Schengen project began outside the structures of the EU, as an intergovernmental project. But now that it is part of the EU, individual governments cannot be allowed unilaterally to dismantle it.

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