Reality Bites, Idealism Chewed and Spat Out

More Checks, Please

Can the Euro fantasy survive?  Over the past three years it has come under enormous strain financially as member states have had to bail out countries in the Med-zone.  In effect, the EU has blinked and decided to kick the can further down the road for someone else to deal with.  But the strains, the doubts, and the tempers were real enough. 

Now terrorism is the crisis d'jour.  An increasing number of European countries have decided to go ahead and implement their own border controls, effectively rejecting the Schengen system, where all within the Schengen zone were allowed to travel freely across borders through the 26 member states.

Member states have acted unilaterally (albeit temporarily) until Brussels can come up with an appropriate solution.  France and other states have pointed out the obvious: at the borders of the Schengen zone, checks are so ineffective that terrorists are able to get into Europe like water passing through a sieve.  Therefore, nation states are going to police their own borders.


A rough equivalent would be Texas in the United States setting up its own state border controls, identifying and vetting all who present themselves, in defiance of the authority of the US Federal Government.   

But EU infighting at the EU Parliament in Brussels is likely to stymie an progress on more rigorous screening at the external borders of the EU.  Therefore, expect that member states will go their own way.  This will be another nail in the coffin of the European Experiment. 

Officials, diplomats, and governments are warning that Schengen, seen as one of the main achievements of European integration, is at risk of unravelling among a welter of beggar-thy-neighbour policies unless much stricter controls are effected on the zone’s external borders.  The Dutch government has even launched exploratory talks on taking Schengen back to basics, including only five instead of 26 countries – the Benelux countries, plus Germany and Austria. [The Guardian]

The French, the Belgians and the Brits have all moved to apply their own national border checks, European Union be damned.