Culture and Society | Migrations
Trying (and Failing) to Re-Write Schengen’s Rulebook At a glance, France and Italy’s standoff over Tunisian migrants in April 2011 seems to be why EU and national officials are re-thinking the rules governing the Schengen area. But, with the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that Schengen governments seized on the events in and around Ventimiglia as a convenient pretext. In reality, frustrations over Schengen’s working arrangements were building for years. But governments cannot now agree either between themselves or with the EU’s institutions about the specific reforms needed to make the passport-free zone work better. This is unfortunate, given that the Schengen area is facing one of the most difficult periods in its short history. Schengen countries have re-introduced border controls on around 70 different occasions since border controls first came down in 1995. The current rules allow them to do this on grounds of national security or public order, such as the need for special security arrangements at major sporting tournaments or in-
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The Schengen area – the EU’s zone of passport-free travel, which benefits 650 million travellers annually – is in trouble. The most pressing concern is how to secure Greece’s porous frontier with Turkey, the largest source of illegal immigration into the EU by land. But political tensions between Schengen members have arisen on other fronts, too. In April 2011, France temporarily re-imposed border checks with Italy, after the political unrest unleashed by the Arab Spring led to a rise in uncontrolled migration from Tunisia to the small Italian island of Lampedusa and to Puglia. The number of arrivals was large but manageable, eventually peaking at around 48,000 migrants. Nevertheless, Roberto Maroni, Italy’s then Interior Minister, demanded a major intervention from other EU countries to help deal with the influx, claiming that a “human tsunami” was underway from North Africa. This exaggerated rhetoric was part of a strategy to pressure neighbouring France into taking in the French-speaking migrants from its former colony. Maroni issued newly-arrived Tunisians with residency papers, giving them the right to move freely around the Schengen area. The French authorities responded by re-instating checkpoints between the two countries and halting trains travelling from the northern Italian town of Ventimiglia, the last town before the border. In the end, this dispute proved to be minor. It was resolved swiftly at a bilateral summit the same month between the leaders of the two countries, Silvio Berlusconi and Nicolas Sarkozy. But the political impact reverberated throughout the EU because Maroni’s tactics alarmed other Schengen members including Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany.
During their talks in April, Berlusconi and Sarkozy agreed that the basic rules governing the Schengen area needed to be renegotiated. EU leaders duly backed this idea at their summit in Brussels in June 2011. Governments want to change the Schengen “border code” so that they can introduce temporary checkpoints more easily; improve the monitoring of the common border; and, in extreme cases, temporarily suspend those countries that cannot or will not maintain their borders properly. But negotiations over these changes have become bogged down in disputes over “legal bases” – in effect, the question of how much power the EU’s institutions will have over any re-erection of national frontiers.
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Hugo Brady Senior Research Fellow Centre for European Reform, London
Panorama
The Schengen Crisis in the Framework of the Arab Spring