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By Isaac Stanley-Becker
Dr. Stanley-Becker is a national security reporter at The Washington Post and author of the forthcoming book “Europe Without Borders: A History. “
When I crossed the bridge over the Rhine a year, a checkpoint blocked the road between France and Germany, at the Pont de l’Europe.
Borders are closing in Europe, for reasons ranging from ongoing crises in Eastern Europe and the Middle East to increasing migratory pressures and the risk of terrorist infiltration. France cites “threats to public policy, public order.” Germany names “the global security situation.” Austria and the Netherlands point to “irregular migration” and Italy to the influx “along the Mediterranean route and the Balkan route.”
I didn’t mean for it to be like that. European integration promised the abolition of borders, an ever-closer union that would allow the free movement of people, goods and capital within a single market. This promise is materialized in the Schengen Zone, a domain of open borders set up in the twilight of the Cold War – through a treaty between France, West Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands – and which now encompasses 29 European countries. But concerns about migrants crossing Europe hastily made Schengen a tenuous task from the start.
Schengen once symbolized liberal internationalism, a landmark of the European unity built after World War II. Today it’s a symbol of Europe’s migration crisis — a crisis driving the backlash against globalization and the ascendance of illiberalism.
Such paradoxes haunt Schengen’s history. Yet all but forgotten is a moment of deepest paradox — when the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 almost doomed the opening of Europe’s borders. Perversely, the sudden destruction of the continent’s most symbolic border brought progress on the Schengen treaty to a standstill, exposing the risks of free movement that today impel the return of checkpoints in Europe.
The Schengen Treaty was to be finalized in 1989. But revolutionary occasions intervened. Unrest spread across Eastern Europe, mass protests rocked the German Democratic Republic, and some 3 million East Germans crossed the border into West Berlin when the wall fell on November 9.
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