Spot of bother at the border

Date: 10/07/1997

SCHENGEN is a mess.

An agreement designed to usher in a harmonious border-free European Union has actually succeeded in highlighting the huge level of mutual mistrust which still exists between EU governments.

In addition, the seemingly endless problems surrounding the accord have brought to the fore one of the oldest and most puzzling conundrums in EU politics - why do member states insist on signing up to things they do not want to do?

The failure of the Schengen executive to agree on when to allow signatories Greece, Italy and Austria to become full members of the club at a meeting last month in Lisbon was blamed on technical problems.

The Dutch and French Parliaments still had to ratify parts of the convention, it was said. Italy could be integrated into Schengen's computer database by the end of October, but further work needed to be done before it would be possible to lift border controls between Rome and the seven full Schengen members (France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Spain and Portugal), the committee explained apologetically.

But everyone knows the real reason.

The Germans and the French do not like the idea of allowing foreigners to guard their national borders. Bonn and Paris do not believe that Rome, Athens and Vienna can be trusted to prevent hoards of illegal immigrants from Albania and eastern Europe flooding into their safe European homes. It is that simple.

“The problem with Schengen is that it is not European enough. It is too intergovernmental. The big countries do not want to give up their national sovereignty,” says Belgian Socialist MEP Anne Van Lancker, who has just prepared a report on Schengen for the European Parliament's civil liberties committee.

The Amsterdam Treaty was supposed to rectify this problem by integrating the non-EU Schengen agreement into the acquis communautaire - the body of EU law.

But the agreement which actually emerged in the Dutch capital last month has only served to make the problems which surround the whole issue of ending border controls between member states appear even more intractable.

The new treaty confirms that the UK and Ireland will remain outside the deal, but will in future be able to apply to 'opt-in' to whatever parts of the accord they want on an à la carte basis.

Denmark, on the other hand, is half in and half out. Copenhagen has a special treaty provision which allows it to participate politically but not be bound legally.

Then there are the non-EU Schengen states, Iceland and Norway, both of whom signed up to the convention when it stood outside Union law. At present, the two take part in discussions in the Schengen executive committee but do not vote.

Once the agreement passes into the acquis, the executive's role will be taken over by Union bodies such as the justice and home affairs' K4 committee and the Council of Ministers' Committee of permanent representatives (Coreper).

It is not clear whether non-EU member states could or should be able to participate in such discussions.

“The whole thing is evolving in a very strange way. We are letting in countries which are outside the EU and at the same time refusing full access to some member states,” said one expert.

In addition to this, diplomats are still arguing over how Schengen will be integrated into the new treaty. They are currently trying to decide which parts of the agreement should be incorporated into the Union's intergovernmental third pillar and which elements should pass to the communitarised first pillar.

But one thing is clear: whatever solution they finally come up with promises to be horrendously complicated.

What the whole Schengen debacle seems to indicate is that, for some reason, member states feel obliged to push ahead with the agreement against their will. The question is, who is pushing them?

Whatever anyone may say about the European Union, the bottom line is that the entire show is run according to rules drawn up by national governments and enshrined in the treaties.

The Intergovernmental Conference which produced the Treaty of Amsterdam was so described precisely because it was a conference held between governments. The European Commission and Parliament obviously made their views known at every opportunity, but it was the member states who actually drew up this latest - and every other - EU treaty.

Some observers argue that the current clutch of national administrations is still being dragged forward by a process set in motion by former Commission President Jacques Delors, ex-French President François Mitterand and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl.

This 'holy trinity' - seen as the motor of European integration in the mid-1980s and early 1990s - put their considerable combined weight behind the Schengen project when it was first mooted over a decade ago.

“Once you are engaged in a process, you cannot stop it,” said one expert.

Another explanation for the current confusion is that in the first flush of a newly rediscovered Europeanism, the original Schengen states simply did not think things through very well.

The Kohl-Mitterand axis assured the necessary agreement between the big two of the original seven Schengen states and the other five did not present any serious problems on the illegal immigration front. All five only have borders with other EU member states, with Spain's proximity to North Africa over the straits of Gibraltar not regarded as a big enough problem to exclude Madrid.

Even so, Parisian annoyance at the Netherlands' liberal drugs policy means that 'temporary' controls remain in place to this day at France's borders with the Benelux states.

But Greece and Italy, with their thousands of kilometres of difficult-to-patrol coastline (including, in Greece's case, hundreds of inaccessible islands), coupled with Austria's borders with central and eastern Europe, have presented a whole new set of problems.

“They did not think of the consequences [when they drew up the original plan]. I am convinced of that,” says Van Lancker.

However, if member states continue to blame the past for their present difficulties they risk making the idea of free movement throughout the whole of the EU look like even more of a pipedream than it already does.

Critics say national governments need to face up to the realities that Schengen presents them.

“Perfect border control does not exist. No border is impenetrable,” says one expert, who argues that member states should not try to convince themselves that it will be possible to build up an insurmountable wall around the Schengen zone. The only way the system will really work, he insists, is for external border controls to be supported by much greater cooperation between national police forces.

Evidence that this sort of cooperation is actually happening on the ground is still very hard to come by. Member states have agreed to set up Europol - a pan-European police agency which is essentially a vast database - but the convention which will allow the organisation to begin operating at full capacity has yet to be ratified by the vast majority of national parliaments.

Schengen - perhaps more than any other aspect of the whole European project - proves an acid test of national commitment to the principle of shared sovereignty. Without such mutual trust, the system simply will not work.

The current mess clearly shows that many key players on the EU stage have not reached the point where they feel ready to make such commitments.

The result is that a deal which was supposed to unite Europeans in a border-free union has actually become synonymous with the nationalism it was supposed to supersede.