End of one Europe? Oh Mein Gott!

A solid mid-life crisis is set to hit Europe’s nearly 40-year-old signature project – the Schengen free movement zone – from mid-Sep. Germany, which has the most land borders of any country in the 29-country Schengen area, will reimpose frontier checks with nine of its neighbours.Those neighbours aren’t happy, as Poland and Austria, for starters, have already made clear. But it’s a dispiriting development no matter where you sit. For more than 425mn EU nationals, the new German restrictions mean Schengen’s promise of untrammelled borderless travel is now deferred, possibly to some undetermined point in the future. Ditto for non-EU nationals, not least Indians, visiting the European bloc as tourists, for business purposes, or living there as exchange students.On account of Germany’s central position within EU – politically, economically, geographically – it’s fair to say that the borders the European bloc was founded to tear down are inexorably going back up. Europeans arguably started to think like Europeans rather than nationalists in 1951, back when the rubble of World War II was barely cleared away. Some 70 years on, the way Schengen and Germany are going, new questions arise about an integrated Europe as a benevolent giant destined always to bestride the world stage.Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s centre-left coalition govt has explained it all away as a temporary measure and claims the new checks are a response to “irregular” immigration. In actual fact, this is realpolitik and the borders as well as the mindset they represent may last longer than Germany’s next scheduled national election, more than a year away.The European far right is delighted. Geert Wilders, who led his anti-immigrant far-right PVV party to triumph in the 2023 Dutch general election, felicitated the German leader’s repositioning with a snarky social media post: “@Bundeskanzler Scholz, welcome to the club!” The Netherlands’ migration minister, who belongs to PVV, said, “we are talking to Germany about working together (on this).” Hungary’s PM Viktor Orban, recently name-checked by Donald Trump at the US presidential election debate as an enviably “tough…smart…strongman”, also publicly “welcomed” Scholz to the “club”. And a leading member of the far-right Sweden Democrats, the party propping up Sweden’s coalition govt, declared that Germany’s “left-liberal” govt had signalled “the debate in Europe has shifted”.Has it really?To be clear, the new six-month border controls announced by Germany are hardly exceptional in Schengen-liberated Europe. The first curtailing of Europe’s agreed free movement was in 2011, when France briefly closed its border with Italy to head off Tunisian migrants fleeing unrest during the so-called Arab Spring. It was a shock, coming just six years after the Schengen Agreement on frictionless travel had started to be fully implemented across EU. Originally signed in 1985 by anonymous officials – not heads of state or govt – of five EU countries in the tiny eponymous Luxembourg village, almost no one had thought Schengen would one day become a synonym for freedom…from paperwork, from Kafkaesque interludes, from fear itself.Since that brief 2011 suspension by France, multiple Schengen member countries, including Austria, Denmark, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Slovenia and Finland, have imposed temporary border controls, variously citing real or perceived security threats. So has Germany. In 2015, it imposed controls on the border with Austria. In 2023, it targeted the borders with Czechia, Poland and Switzerland. Checks were in place at all its land borders while Germany hosted the Uefa Euro 2024 football championship over the summer.Even so, Germany’s new Schengen suspension feels slightly different. EU officials acknowledge the move is “obviously aimed at a domestic audience.” That’s a reference to efforts by Germany’s ruling centre-left parties to fight back against the rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. AfD had historic success in Thuringia and Saxony on Sep 1, the first for a far-right party in any German provincial election since the Nazis in the 1930s, and opinion polls indicate further gains next week in Brandenburg (Sep 22).While other countries too have occasionally suspended Schengen for politically expedient reasons, the response of Germany’s centre-left govt to right-wing populism bears special scrutiny. It’s nakedly, nay shamelessly, political. And it ignores the world’s anguished memory of historical tripwires and their consequences.Some German migration policy scholars fear an overly ruthless attempt to strangle far-right support, possibly by cutting off its essential oxygen supply – any and all immigrant access to Germany. This would, say the pointy-headed experts, only be achievable by abolishing the constitutional right to asylum, as well as a wholesale withdrawal from Schengen. If so, a domino effect would be manifest across Europe and it would have started in plain sight, with the cynical and legally unjustifiable dismantling of Schengen. More to the point, the far right would, yet again, have dictated Germany’s destiny.Perhaps.There are many reasons still to argue with the doomsters and gloomsters, to use Boris Johnson’s omnibus categorisation of soothsayers, experts and forecasters, as well as the occasional Cassandra. But this much is true: any weakening of the moral and cultural unity of the 20th century’s biggest, most utopian supranational project will be a tragedy on a par with the gradual dimming of that other radiant product from two centuries earlier, the idea of America.Lall is based in London and writes on international affairs