Fragile symbol

After the great fear over the survival of the euro just a year ago, another major achievement of European integration is now under threat: the free movement of people. Faced with the arrival of nearly 30,000 migrants from north Africa, Rome and Paris found nothing better to do than ask to revise the Schengen Convention to restore internal border controls and to prevent hordes of unwanted immigrants from coming to threaten their prosperity.

Since Europeans can now move freely from one country to another, the borders have ceased to embody the most visible aspect of state sovereignty. But today, state sovereignty has the wind in its sails and member states are reclaiming several areas in which they feel, mainly for domestic political reasons, better able to deal with problems, starting with foreign policy and now moving on to domestic security. Except when they need to invoke, as Rome did, the solidarity of their partners when things get beyond their control.

If the request for a more equitable sharing of duties and burdens among the 25 member countries of the Schengen area is legitimate – currently, it is the states bordering the non-Schengen area that are responsible for border controls — the symbolism of the request is no less potent. Even more powerful than this clawing back of national ground, though, is another opening up: that of the German and Austria labour markets to workers from the former communist countries.

Since Europeans can now move freely from one country to another, the EU has stopped being merely a symbolic common market for them and has become a true community. This is a step forward that has contributed much more than treaties, regulations or other directives to the building of a people’s Europe. Calling that into question is to threaten one of the reasons for being of the Union itself.