Virus variants deliver new blow to Europe’s open borders

BRUSSELS — As new variants of the coronavirus spread rapidly, major countries are moving to reintroduce border controls, a practice that has become Europe’s new normal during the pandemic and is chipping away at what was once the world’s largest area of free movement.

Fearing the highly contagious new variants first identified in Britain and South Africa, both Germany and Belgium introduced new border restrictions last week, adding to steps already taken by other countries.

The European Union (EU) sees free movement as a fundamental pillar of the continent’s deepening integration, but after a decade in which first terrorism and then the migration crisis tested that commitment, countries’ easy resort to border controls is placing it under new pressure.

The European Commission, the EU executive, has tried to pull countries back from limiting free movement since last March, after most imposed restrictions at the onset of the crisis. The result has been an ever-shifting patchwork of border rules that has sown chaos, while not always limiting the virus’ spread.

“Last spring we had 17 different member states that had introduced border measures, and the lessons we learned at the time is that it did not stop the virus but it disrupted incredibly the single market and caused enormous problems,” the commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, told the news media last week. “The virus taught us that closing borders does not stop it.”

But many countries seem to find taking back control of borders irresistible. Ms. Von der Leyen’s remarks, and a suggestion by commission spokespeople that new restrictions should be reversed, triggered a pushback from Germany, which echoed the new normal among EU countries in the coronavirus context: our borders, our business.

“We are fighting the mutated virus on the border with the Czech Republic and Austria,” the German interior minister, Horst Seehofer, told the tabloid newspaper Bild. The commission “should support us and not put spokespeople in our wheels with cheap advice,” he snapped.

The system of borderless movement of people and goods is known in the parlance of Europe as Schengen, for the town in Luxembourg where a treaty establishing its principles was signed in 1985 by five countries at the heart of what is now the European Union.

Today the Schengen zone includes 22 of the 27 EU member states as well as four neighbors (Iceland, Lichtenstein, Norway and Switzerland), where travelers in principle traverse borders freely without being subjected to checks or other requirements.

“My biggest concern — and I’ve been dealing with Schengen for many years — is that Schengen is in serious danger,” said Tanja Fajon, a Slovenian member of the European Parliament who serves as the head of the assembly’s Schengen scrutiny group.

In the course of the previous decade, terrorist attacks in EU countries, and the abuse of Schengen’s vaunted freedoms by militants who hopped from country to country, revealed that law enforcement cooperation and intelligence sharing had not kept pace with European countries’ opening of their borders.

In 2015-2016, the arrival of more than 1 million refugees fleeing the war in Syria delivered Schengen an even more decisive blow. Many member countries, not wanting to share the burden, hardened their frontiers, isolating themselves and using countries at the bloc’s edge, such as Greece and Italy, as a buffer zone.

The impact of the Syrian refugee crisis marked a tectonic shift in European border politics. Borderlessness, once a romantic ideal of a united, prosperous and free Europe, was seized on by the right and far right, and cast instead as a threat.

Soon even moderate politicians started to see boundaries within Europe as desirable, after decades of working to dismantle them.

“The freedom of movement is a symbol of European integration, the most tangible result of integration, something people really feel,” Ms. Fajon said.

“Now it’s not just the pandemic that threatens it — we’ve been in a Schengen crisis since 2015, when we started seeing internal border controls used to protect narrow national interests around refugees, without any real benefit,” she added.

The seemingly unstoppable spread of the coronavirus is delivering a third blow to the dream of open European borders.

“Schengen is not a very crisis-resilient system,” said Marie De Somer, an expert at the European Policy Center, a Brussels-based research institute. “It works in fair weather, but the minute we’re under pressure we see it has flaws and gaps in how it functions, and COVID is a prime example.” —