EU’s free movement regime under attack as Europe’s leaders lose their taste for the ‘Arab Spring’

News reportssuggest that the European Commission might be about to capitulate to pressure from the governments of France and Italy for the reinstatement of border checks at EU internal frontiers.  Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso is reported to be preparing proposals to place before a meeting on immigration this Wednesday which will expand on the currently limited circumstances in which identity checks at an internal border will be permitted to take place.

The current system of open border between 25 European states, whose conjoined territories are known as the Schengen area, has been in place since 1995.  It allows people already present in a Schengen area country to cross all the internal frontiers of the area without having to submit to passport and other identity checks.  The chief beneficiaries are EU citizens, who are able to exercise their full free movement rights without the impediment of border controls.  But non-EU citizens present in the area also benefit, with the system allowing them to freely cross the internal frontiers for a maximum period of three months before returning to their normal country of residence.

The Schengen system have proven immensely popular with many EU citizens, with opinion polls suggesting that the right to travel freely across the region is regarded as one of the most obvious, tangible benefits of the European Union.

It now seems that this considerable achievement is being placed in jeopardy by a massive failure of nerve on the part of the current generation of right wing populist leaders in Europe.  Confronted with movements of refugees across the Mediterranean which currently accounts for around 30,000 people French president Sarkozy and Italian prime minister Berlusconi penned a joint letter to the European Commission on 26 April asking for help from the European Commission in dealing with refugee movements across the region.

The European Commission seems set to capitulate to demands from the French and Italian governments to extend the currently limited reasons which would allow suspension of Schengen rules from occasions when a threat to public order exists to one which implicitly allows the authorities to limit movements for immigration purposes.

According to a draft paper prepared by the Commission for Wednesday’s meeting, seen by the newspaper European Voice, the EU authorities are prepared to concede that  “as a last resort”  there should be a mechanism “for a co-ordinated and temporary reintroduction of controls” at sections of the internal borders of the Schengen area.  The paper also considers that permission might be granted to consider applications for refugee protection from people fleeing violence in North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean on the basis of temporary influx arrangements envisioned in the EU’s common asylum policy directives, which have not yet been invoked.

There is a great danger that these measures are being considered for reasons of political expediency rather than the existence of a real threat to EU security or public order.  The drift towards right wing populism across large swathes of Europe has reduced the capacity of democratic politics to assess the nature of the challenges posed by important global-level developments, right the way from the rise of the economic authority of Asia through to such issues as state security and international migration. 

In the 1989, at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and in subsequent years when the continent had to deal with the genuine crises provoked by the breakup of Yugoslavia, relatively liberal approaches to asylum rights and free movement allowed the EU to make rapid adjustment to pressures caused by movements which were on the scale of hundreds of thousands or people each year.  An approach to these issues which was more strongly marked by progressive approaches to the completion of the single European market and a sense of fundamental rights due to EU citizens allowed an array of civil society organisations to work in conjunction with governmental institutions and the courts to ensure that appropriate approaches to human rights and the rights of citizens were adopted.

All of this is being threatened today by national leaders in European governments which see democratic struggle in North Africa and the Middle East as an excuse to clamp down on refugee and free movement rights.  The arrival of people in numbers of tens of thousands is being presented as a fundamental threat to Europe which needs to be countered by rolling back on rights to cross internal borders and for a ramping up of the powers of Frontex– the EU’s border control agency – to act against the movements of people fleeing civil war violence.  

Whist centre-right political leaders descent into a state of panic as they confront the challenges of the Arab world’s democracy movement in the coming weeks, it is essential that others hold their nerve.   In order to aid the revolutionaries we need to ensure that the EU’s borders remain open to the arrival of refugees, and that ‘burden sharing’ between states is quick resolved by allowing those seeking refugee to locate themselves in regions where their immediate needs will be met by the social support networks.

Europe should provide genuine aid and support to those resisting tyranny in those areas immediately to its south and east, and this is more likely to come in the form of a generous and welcoming immigration policy as it is through the highly selective forms of military intervention, which send such mixed messages across the world about whose side the EU is really on.  By keeping doors open, rather than slamming them in the face of people fleeing violence, we can demonstrate that we are on the side of democracy.

Author: Don Flynn

Source: Migrants' Rights Network