Nicolas Sarkozy appears ready to send the EU's Schengen
area to the guillotine in order to win re-election to the French presidency.
Last week, Claude Guéant, France's minister for the interior, was despatched to
a meeting of his EU counterparts in Luxembourg with a stark warning: Schengen's
common border – which stretches from the Baltic to the Mediterranean to the
Aegean – must be secure by the end of 2012. Otherwise, France will leave the
26-country passport-free zone, or so says Sarkozy on the stump.
Guéant's move seems like crude electioneering to most
observers. Marine Le Pen, the anti-immigration, anti-EU leader of the National
Front, won 18 per cent of the vote in the first round of France's presidential
election. Sarkozy must poach a sizable chunk of these votes in order to beat
socialist rival, François Hollande, in the run-off on May 6th. Furthermore,
although Guéant complained to his ministerial colleagues that 400,000 people
enter the Schengen area illegally each year, this figure must be seen in
context: the passport-free zone benefits some 650 million legitimate travellers
annually.
Yet France's ultimatum is about more than simple
pandering to the far-right. French scepticism of the Schengen project goes
right back to its inception in 1995, when border controls were first abolished
between the original five members: the Benelux three, France and Germany. If
Germany gave up its beloved deutschmark in the cause of European integration,
France sacrificed sole control over its own borders and reluctantly accepted
the free movement of people between EU member-states. Whereas Germany was able
to ensure that the European Central Bank reflected its own economic orthodoxy,
France had no such means to export its traditions of robust border security to countries
guarding the new external frontier. Hence its authorities initially refused to
drop border controls after 1995, citing smuggling at the Belgian border and a
row with the Netherlands over its liberal drugs policy, to the general
consternation of fellow Schengen members.
The Schengen area does have common rules on borders and
visas that detail the standards its members must maintain in their border
checks and consular procedures. But such stipulations are purely technical in
nature and deliberately limited in scope. For example, Schengen countries have
only recently agreed to harmonise the background information required from
travellers applying for a visa in their consulates abroad. Their governments
are highly unlikely to be able to agree anything like a coherent immigration or
common security policy in the short-term.
Schengen members are reviewed once every five years for
their compliance with the basic technical requirements by teams of border
guards and police from their peers, led by the EU presidency. These inspections
produce 'recommendations' for improvements to be made but there is very little
to force the country in question to follow them up. Greece has completed two
such peer reviews and received reams of recommendations since joining Schengen
in 2000. But Frontex – the EU's border agency – still reported in early 2012
that the country will remain the largest source of illegal entry to the
passport-free zone until at least 2013, with illegal entries remaining as high
as 50,000 per year. See http://frontex.europa.eu/assets/Publications/Risk_Analysis/Annual_Risk_Analysis_2012.pdf
Such figures are based only on the number of migrants
caught trying to cross the border: the total number of detected and undetected
illegal entries is higher.
The net result of all this is that France views the
Schengen area very much the way Britain sees its membership of the EU. The
French feel trapped inside a club in which they claim higher standards than
others while having little faith that fellow members can be kept even to the
minimalist rules to which they have signed up. That is why Sarkozy hoodwinked
his Italian counterpart, Silvio Berlusconi, into pushing for a review of the
Schengen regime in April 2011, after Tunisian migrants began to reach France
over its open border with Italy following the unrest of the Arab spring.*
Currently, Schengen members can re-introduce border
checks for up to 30 days if either public security or 'order' is at stake,
without asking permission of other members or the European Commission. The
latter condition is defined quite strictly in EU law: countries usually only
invoke it to ensure the security of major events like international sporting
tournaments or political summits. (Switzerland, one of Schengen's four non-EU members,
invokes the clause annually to maintain security at the World Economic Forum in
Davos, for example.) But, if the Greeks are going to permit 50,000 illegal
entries to their – and, potentially, French – territory each year, France feels
entitled to argue that Schengen's border code should include a third condition
for the unilateral re-introduction of border controls: large-scale illegal
immigration.
The European Commission has the job of ensuring that
Europe's borders remain as open as possible to trade and the free movement of
people. Cecilia Malmström, the EU Commissioner for Home Affairs, fears that
France's proposed new exemption would result in a tit-for-tat retaliatory
imposition of border controls across the passport-free zone. Instead, she has
proposed that countries may re-instate border checks but only if the border
code is also amended to give the Commission the right to approve specific
incidences lasting longer than five days.
However, Guéant, backed up by Germany, Austria and
others, made clear last week that Schengen governments consider the latter idea
an unconscionable – and opportunistic – power grab. Never before has the
Commission had the power to stop a country guarding its own borders. This
doomed attempt to establish a confederal arrangement for managing Schengen
exposes the contradiction facing the passport-free zone: governments want more
control over their own but also over other countries' border decisions
simultaneously. (French authorities are dismissive of inspections by EU-led
teams evaluating their own implementation of Schengen rules but expect
countries like Greece to fall into line.) At the same time, Commission
officials must beware of over-reaching: a world of difference exists between
winning formal legal powers over a sensitive area of policy and having the
moral authority to intervene in national decisions on immigration and security.
France's problems with the Schengen area were there
before Sarkozy, and they will remain after he leaves office. So there must be a
re-think if the current tensions within the passport-free zone are to ease. One
preliminary idea is for Malmström to take a zero-tolerance approach to
non-compliance with the existing border and visa codes (as well as EU rules on
the security of passports) by bringing countries to the European Court of
Justice for minor infractions. That would help convince other members that the
passport-free zone is a club where those who do not play by the rules are
swiftly taken to task. “France is attached to Schengen, but to a Schengen that
works”, said Michel Barnier, then France's Europe minister, in 1995. Given that
other members – even Schengen's biggest supporter, Germany – seem to be losing patience with the current
system's imperfections, the Commission needs to put this sentiment at the core
of any further attempts at reform.
* For a fuller analysis of the politics of the Schengen area, please see the CER report: Saving Schengen: How to protect passport-freetravel in Europe
Hugo Brady is a senior research fellow at the Centre for
European Reform.
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