The debate over border management
As the European Union prepares for the possible admission of new members within three to five years, political debate is intensifying among its 15 existing members, as well as its candidate states, over the issue of border controls. What began in 1985 as an agreement between core members of the EU on abolishing mutual border checkpoints has developed into an integral part of EU law.
A revision to the EU treaties that came into force last year means that new members will have to abide by the agreement and adopt common policies on external border controls, asylum and immigration. These changes could complicate Europe's efforts to reinforce stability on the continent following the collapse of communist rule in Central and Eastern Europe.
One of the most controversial implications of the agreement, known as Schengen after the Luxembourg village where it was first signed, is that countries wanting to join the EU will first have to curb traditional links with their eastern neighbours. This task will not be easy for some of the front-runners in the quest for EU membership and it is already generating a feeling of exclusion among East European countries that are unlikely to be admitted in the near future.
The Hungarian government has warned that its accession to the EU and adoption of EU policies on visas, refugees and immigration must not adversely affect the country's ties with non-EU states in the region. Estonia, however, despite sharing border-straddling population groups with neighbouring Russia, has been happy to tighten its eastern border under Schengen rules.
The EU expansion prospect together with widespread Western European fears of illegal immigration and organised crime are turning border management into a politically controversial issue within the Union. Schengen has been used to justify reinforcing and tightening controls on immigration from outside the Union; to curb flows of asylum seekers; to increase visa restrictions and to widen the scope of data collection. Concerns in Western Europe about immigration from non-Union countries will put considerable pressure on candidate states to apply the Schengen system rigorously. EU politicians want to reassure their populations that EU accession will not undermine public safety and quality of life by allowing an unchecked influx of foreigners perceived as undesirable. Given that all EU member states will have to ratify the accession agreements, such reassurance has effectively become an essential prerequisite for the whole enlargement project.
Apart from Malta and Cyprus, the frontrunner candidates are all in Central and Eastern Europe: the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Poland and Slovenia. In this region, borders have long been subject to the vagaries of power politics. It is not uncommon for towns and villages to have changed hands between states more than once in the last century. Many people still feel trapped on the wrong side of a particular border and many in such situations suffer various forms of discrimination. The fall of the Iron Curtain prompted yet another major state-boundary re-adjustment. Out of 27 states in the post-communist area, 22 are new.
Eastward EU enlargement will in effect involve another border shift. The common political objective within Europe since 1989 that no new dividing lines should be created to replace the Iron Curtain is being undermined. There is a risk that those countries excluded from the EU expansion process will eventually reassess the advantages of continued adherence to Western-oriented reforms and political identity. Hardened borders in the newly admitted countries could counteract long-term strategic efforts to encourage sustained reform and stability across Central and Eastern Europe.
Migration from candidate states to the EU
There is a widespread belief among EU citizens that enlargement will lead to the migration of cheap Eastern European labour to affluent Western Europe. Hence there is growing public reluctance to proceed with enlargement. This is especially the case in Germany and Austria, which host the highest shares of Eastern European workers. About 70% of the total labour force from Central and Eastern Europe working in Western Europe has found employment in these two countries. Many German and Austrian workers fear they will lose their jobs to migrants from Eastern Europe accustomed to wages that are barely a tenth of those in Germany and Austria.
Similar concerns were expressed but proved unfounded when Portugal, Greece and Spain were admitted to the Union. Those who voice them now often fail to take into account enlargement's potential impact on economic growth in the newly admitted countries. Better economic conditions would reduce incentives to migrate.
Moreover, since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, migrants from Central and Eastern Europe have represented only 15% of migrants to the Union. At present, around 850,000 people from the Central and Eastern European candidate countries – which also include Bulgaria, Romania, Latvia, Lithuania and Slovakia – are residing in the EU member states. Of these, around 300,000 are permanently employed. This is only 0.2% of the total EU workforce and 6% of non-EU nationals working in the Union. In Austria, the EU state with the highest proportion of the Eastern European labour-force, workers from the candidate countries account for 1.2% of the workforce, while in Germany they number 0.4%. In both these countries, workers from the ten Central and Eastern European states account only for about 10% of all foreign workers from outside the EU.
According to some estimates, the actual number of workers from Central and Eastern Europe is twice as high as the official figure. But if so, they would still form only a relatively small proportion of non-EU workers. Most undocumented workers from Central and Eastern Europe are so-called 'worker-tourists' taking advantage of visa-free travel to the EU. These short-term migrants leave their families behind during their stays abroad and make no demands on medical insurance, unemployment benefits, social security or public education in the receiver-states. They also represent a relatively cheap solution for filling seasonal or structural shortages of labour within the European Union. Extending EU membership to the candidate states would help by legitimising what is now illegal employment by immigrant workers, as well as by helping to spread immigrant employment across a wider EU area.
Influx to the candidate states
Migratory pressures on the candidate states' borders represent a greater challenge to enlargement. More migrants from the Third World are already attempting to settle in the region, with increasing numbers trying to enter the EU via the applicant countries.
Until recently, visitors from Eastern Europe could benefit from visa-free agreements between the former communist countries. Poland alone registered more than ten million annual entries from the east. Most of this movement was income-oriented in the form of casual labour and petty trade. Bazaars in major cities in the region are crowded with immigrants from Belarus, Ukraine, Romania and Russia.
Visa-free travel throughout the continent for other than work purposes, as established in the 1990s, is now giving way to a two-tier system. According to this system, Central Europeans will enjoy borderless arrangements within the EU and its Schengen associates (e.g. Norway from 2001) while East Europeans will, in effect, be faced with a revocation of the right to travel westwards that they consider one of the key freedoms won when communism collapsed. At present, obtaining a Schengen visa for a non-EU person can take up to three months.
The Czech and Slovak Republics have already introduced visa requirements for citizens from Eastern European countries. Poland is due to do so next year. But for Hungary, the creation of a hard border would mean cutting 'family' ties with more than 3m Magyars living in Romania, Serbia, Ukraine and Slovakia. Poland has cultural and historical links with Ukraine and Lithuania.
Imposing a hard border between the Czech Republic and Slovakia, or between individual Baltic states, would be neither practical nor politically wise. The timing of accession will therefore be crucial, particularly if candidate states are not admitted to the Union at the same time. Bulgaria has recently indicated that its continued involvement with regional cooperation in the Stability Pact for South-east Europe would be in doubt unless its nationals are granted visa-free travel privileges to Schengen states. In Western Europe, countries such as Bulgaria with sizeable Roma (Gypsy) populations are seen as potential sources of westward migration pressure. Even though they are EU membership candidates, their early inclusion is unlikely. This does little to help reduce discrimination against Roma within these countries.
Curbing migration from Eastern Europe would also hurt the EU candidate countries' economies. The value of goods purchased by Ukrainian tourist traders alone accounted for nearly 50% of Poland's official exports to Ukraine. For hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians, Belarussians and Romanians, casual labour and petty trade help to alleviate the hardships imposed by their own countries' economic transitions. In the candidate states, decreased immigration from the east is likely to produce labour shortages in sectors such as construction, agriculture and services.
In many cases, installing modern border control and visa regulation systems would not be possible without outside financial and technical support. It also requires online links between external border-crossing points and the multinational Schengen Information System database. New frontline states of the Schengen zone would have to establish an effective legal apparatus to deal with asylum claims, illegal migrants and international crime.
The wider impact
Politicians in EU countries often justify their calls for tighter border controls by citing the need to combat crime. But combating organised cross-border crime at a border is largely ineffective. Most experts agree that improving police and security cooperation between countries is more efficient than investing in large numbers of border guards or in expensive surveillance technology.
However, the politics of present-day Europe often ignore such arguments. On the German side of the Polish-German border, for instance, the number of professional border guards has been dramatically increased in recent years and special 'civic guards' have been formed – even though statistics show that criminality in the border region is no higher than in the rest of Germany. At the same time, cooperation between Western and Eastern European police and security forces remains underdeveloped. Western forces are sometimes reluctant to share intelligence and take joint action with East European counterparts.
Critics of eastern enlargement often cite the migration issue. But there are powerful disincentives to migration from Eastern to Western Europe. These include exploitative working conditions, competition with migrants from the Third World and cultural differences – if not animosities – between Eastern European migrants and the local populations of Western Europe. New hard borders are unlikely to solve migration problems. They are more likely to produce strategic difficulties for Europe at large.
