Europe Wasn’t Built to Be Like This

Opinion|Europe Wasn’t Built to Be Like This

When I crossed a bridge spanning the Rhine last year, a checkpoint blocked the route between France and Germany, on the Pont de l’Europe.

Borders are closing in Europe, for reasons ranging from “ongoing crises in Eastern Europe and the Middle East” to “increasing migratory pressures and the risk of terrorist infiltration.” France cites “threats to public policy, public order.” Germany names “the global security situation.” Austria and the Netherlands point to “irregular migration,” and Italy to the influx “along the Mediterranean route and the Balkan route.”

It wasn’t meant to be this way. European integration promised the abolition of borders, “an ever closer union” allowing the free movement of people, goods and capital in a single market. That promise was embodied in the Schengen zone, an area of open borders formed in the twilight of the Cold War — by a treaty among France, West Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands — and now encompassing 29 European countries. But the fear of immigrants freely traversing Europe made Schengen a fragile project from the outset.

Schengen once symbolized liberal internationalism, a landmark of the European unity built after World War II. Today it’s a symbol of Europe’s migration crisis — a crisis driving the backlash against globalization and the ascendance of illiberalism.

Such paradoxes haunt Schengen’s history. Yet all but forgotten is a moment of deepest paradox — when the fall of the Berlin Wall, in 1989, almost doomed the opening of Europe’s borders. Perversely, the sudden destruction of the continent’s most symbolic border brought progress on the Schengen treaty to a standstill, exposing the risks of free movement that today impel the return of checkpoints in Europe.

The year 1989 was when the Schengen treaty was supposed to be completed. But revolutionary events intervened. Unrest swept Eastern Europe, mass protests convulsed the German Democratic Republic, and some three million East Germans crossed into West Berlin when the wall fell on Nov. 9.