The Schengen Agreement at 40: Will free movement in Europe endure amid rising migrant antipathy?

Straits Times

12-06-2025

BRUSSELS – Few people – even in Europe – know where the real Schengen is; it's a tiny community in southeastern Luxembourg, one of the continent's smallest states.
But everyone in Europe and almost everyone coming to the continent from elsewhere around the world has personally experienced what the village's name has been synonymous with: the free movement of people and goods between the member states of the area of the same name.
Or, simply put, a border-free Europe, where people travel without having to produce any document or explain the purpose of their journey. In many countries, even the physical location of national borders is no longer very obvious; markers for borders that once people fought and died for are now just historic curiosities.
On June 14, Europe will mark with pride the 40th anniversary since the signature of the Schengen Treaty.
All opinion surveys indicate that the border-free benefits of the agreement brought to the continent are still considered the most significant and popular achievement of European integration.
Still, the celebrations will be muted. For although Schengen remains highly popular – there was joy in Romania and Bulgaria when these two nations joined the Schengen area last year – European officials are debating whether the arrangement, as originally conceived and currently applied by its 29 member-states, can survive in an age of heightened international security threats and massive migratory pressures.
The story of the Schengen Agreement is a classic example of both the excellent and infuriating aspects of Europe.
One of the original principles of the European Union (EU) since its foundation in the late 1950s was the idea of the free movement of people and goods. But for many decades after the EU came into being, border controls were still enforced.
These were not very onerous, and increasingly, EU citizens could travel by just showing an identity card rather than a passport. Still, people had to queue at border points, and travellers from outside Europe who required visas had to apply for travel permits to each individual EU state they wished to visit.
Pressure to do away with the internal EU border controls has been building up since the 1970s, but no consensus could be achieved inside the Union.
On June 14, 1985, a small group comprising only five EU countries – Belgium, France, Germany, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands – gathered and signed a separate treaty abolishing their immigration controls.
That agreement was outside the EU structures but – as its signatories hoped – it eventually caught on as other nations joined the arrangement.
This gradual approach offered maximum flexibility.
As everyone knew from the start, Britain was never likely to join Schengen. But Ireland also did not join because it was impractical to do so without the British, and Cyprus did not join because the island is part-occupied by Turkey.
However, Iceland, Norway and Switzerland which are not in the EU did become Schengen members, as did the continent's smallest states of Andorra, Liechtenstein, Monaco, San Marino and the Vatican City.
Schengen is now the world's largest association of independent states operating a complete freedom of travel.
Still, Schengen was conceived for a continent that no longer exists. When the original five countries put their signatures to the deal, Europe was still divided by the Cold War and the eastern half of the continent was hermetically sealed with electrified barbed wire, machine guns and minefields.
And while immigration pressures on Europe were already evident, most were confined to Britain and France and their former colonies.
Yet only five years after the treaty was concluded, communist regimes collapsed in eastern Europe, enabling tens of millions of relatively poor east Europeans to travel.
Subsequently, all European countries were hit by waves of migrants from the Middle East and Africa.
And if this was not enough, terrorist attacks swept across the continent, with both criminals and weapons moving freely across borders.
The ghastly terrorist November 2015 attack on the Bataclan nightclub in Paris, in which 130 people perished, was perpetrated by terrorists who lived in Belgium, and bought their weapons and explosives from traffickers across the continent. Most were known to police forces; all arguably escaped detection because of Europe's open borders.
According to the Schengen Borders Code, it is within the competence of member states to reintroduce border controls for a limited period of time, but only as 'a last resort in an exceptional situation'.
In 2006, France was the first country to temporarily reintroduce border controls, supposedly in response to demonstrations by Basques, an ethnic group straddling the borders of France and Spain.
This pattern continued for years in France for major sporting events, political summits, or sensitive political rallies.
The major turning point came in 2015 – the year in which around two million migrants flocked to Europe. Schengen states introduced border controls in droves. And then came the coronavirus pandemic.
Countries got more innovative in the way they justify their 'exceptional' circumstances.
Norway, for instance, once cited 'threats to critical infrastructure' to reimpose border controls. And Slovenia, a south-eastern EU nation, simply cited the 'increased global terrorist threat' to do the same.
According to the available statistics, between 2006, when France pioneered the move, and 2015, there were 36 recorded cases when countries reimposed border controls.
But between 2015 and 2024 – a comparable period – the number of such 'exceptional' border controls jumped to 405. It's an exception which threatens to become a rule.
Yet most of these measures are ineffective because European countries no longer have the border forces or the required logistics to close their borders completely, so the moves were symbolic and of short duration.
That was certainly the case with Germany in September 2024, when the country reintroduced border controls at just certain points, announced well in advance.
This gave plenty of time for those trying to cross the frontiers illegally to find other routes.
Still, it is remarkable that despite all these tensions and the broad political backlash against migrants throughout Europe, the Schengen arrangement has survived essentially unchanged.
That's largely because it remains a powerful symbol of European integration. The reimposition of border controls would also snarl up transport and trade throughout Europe.
All this discussion is largely irrelevant for the community of Schengen, now decked up with flowers and flags for the grand anniversary on Saturday, June 14.
A 'Europe Museum' is operating in Schengen, telling the continent's history of border-free travel.
And Princess Marie-Astrid, the boat on which the original treaty was signed, will also be on call for this weekend's celebrations.
Even though the necessary land docking facilities planned to accommodate the boat were completed far too late.
Some things never change in Europe.
Jonathan Eyal is based in London and Brussels and writes on global political and security matters.
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