Abolishing Borders : For Europe, Opening Up Is Hard to Do

“Our objective is . . . to do away with internal frontier controls in their entirety.” --A 1985 European Community commitment

Perched in his second-floor office on the Belgian-West German border, chief customs officer Peter Noben admits that his future is uncertain.

The highway control point that he commands here is among the busiest in Europe, but by 1993 it could vanish.

A far-reaching program to dismantle barriers between the 12 European Community nations calls for eliminating all of the 400 or so major police and customs checkpoints on borders linking EC countries.

As Easily as in U.S.

If the plan succeeds, boundary gates will come down, uniformed officials will disappear--along with the lines of waiting vehicles they create--and Europeans and visitors alike will cross community frontiers as easily as people now move between U.S. states.

While tourists may be delighted at the prospect of avoiding bureaucratic delays, and while visionaries acclaim the goal as a dramatic step toward a united Europe, those on the ground see it differently.

“I’m all for (a more unified) Europe,” Noben said. “But I’m not entirely convinced this is a good idea.”

As the December, 1992, deadline looms, others, too, have begun to doubt.

Some See It as Folly

Some see ending border checks as misguided folly for a continent beleaguered with mounting problems of terrorism, drug trafficking and illegal immigration.

How the community eventually resolves the issue constitutes a pivotal test of its commitment to the vision of greater unity.

Few proposals in the EC’s ambitious program to fashion “a single European space” symbolize this vision more powerfully. And few are plagued with greater difficulties.

To remove all internal controls, community countries must agree to common positions on such volatile issues as immigration, political asylum, visa rights and a range of delicate taxation issues.

Such complexities have already overwhelmed current timetables, and last December, a summit meeting of leaders from the 12 European Community nations--Britain, France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, The Netherlands, Spain, Ireland, Portugal, Greece, Denmark and Luxembourg-- established a high-level working group to break the log jam.

Among the problems:

-- How to reconcile West Germany’s liberal policy toward asylum-seekers, enshrined in the country’s constitution, with stiff restrictions imposed by other EC nations. Are the mainly East Bloc refugees now entering West Germany at a rate of 300,000 per year to be eligible to live anywhere in the community?

-- How to apply controls on those entering community territory to the 17 million citizens of Sweden, Norway, Finland and Iceland, who are not EC members but enjoy unrestricted access to Denmark as part of a Nordic-area agreement.

-- How to resolve the position of countries such as France, which require visas for all non-EC citizens, with the more relaxed policies of other member countries.

Officials at EC headquarters in Brussels believe progress on such points as visa rights, extradition and asylum is possible at a Madrid summit scheduled for late June.

Other problems are more difficult.

Some nations fear that a primary result of lifting internal border controls would be to provide criminals and illegal immigrants a vast, unrestricted playground.

The British Home Office recently provided statistics showing that 44% of the drugs seized in Britain last year came from or through another community country.

Britain is especially concerned. Unlike many of its EC partners that have national identity cards and require residents to register with police, Britain, as an island country, has traditionally relied far more heavily on its entry points to catch undesirables.

“Of course we must make it easier for our people to travel throughout the community,” British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher told a Belgian audience last fall. “But it is a matter of plain common sense that we cannot totally abolish frontier controls if we are also to protect our citizens.”

Other community countries, including Greece, Denmark and the Irish Republic, express similar reservations, although without Thatcher’s stridence

EC officials reject claims that border controls are a key crime fighter.

“The big catches are based on tip-offs, not because someone happened onto something at a border,” one community source asserted. “We oppose the simplistic view that abolishing internal frontiers is going to be a bonanza for terrorists and drug runners.”

Britain’s Guardian newspaper, in a recent editorial urging member states to hold to their 1985 commitment to open borders, commented: “Freedom of movement is like freedom of speech. You don’t ban it just because a minority abuses it.”

Goal of Single Marketplace

Senior EC officials believe that it is critical to abolish frontier checks if the community is to generate greater public support for the goal of building the world’s single largest marketplace.

In an integration process so far dominated by struggles over arcane detail, the proposal is seen as a rare, daring initiative, easily understood and genuinely popular among the community’s 320 million citizens.

To the motorist trapped in a traffic jam at a border checkpoint, lofty rhetoric of a united Europe rings hollow.

“It is vitally important to steer this through,” community spokesman Willy Helin stressed. “The internal market won’t be visible to ordinary citizens until they can go unimpeded from Athens to London with as much as they want to take with them.”

There are also compelling economic reasons to do away with border posts.

An EC-funded study, published last year, calculated that the cost of administering internal customs checks, coupled with the estimated productivity lost in delays at the frontiers, totals more than $8 billion annually.

Any genuinely unfettered freedom of movement on a mass scale would be unprecedented for Europe.

Certainly there have been periods in its history when unimpeded travel was possible.

In fact, European nation-states with fixed external borders as they now exist are not much older than the United States.

Wandering scholars traversed medieval Europe using Latin as a lingua franca and the church as a hostel. A luminary such as the 15th-Century Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus studied in Paris and traveled freely throughout Northern Europe before finally settling in Switzerland.

In the first half of this century, British economist John Maynard Keynes recalled with nostalgia a pre-World War I Europe where travel was easy, passports unnecessary, border formalities a rarity and gold coins a common currency.

But historically, such mobility in Europe was the preserve of a privileged, moneyed few.

Even if skilled craftsmen had the means to travel, they were trapped by parochial institutions like the inbred city guilds that effectively froze out a newcomer looking for work.

There were also some Draconian restrictions, such as those imposed by the city of Venice aimed at protecting its glass-blowing secrets during its golden age, between the 13th and 16th centuries. City authorities made it virtually impossible for a non-Venetian to obtain permission to live in the city--and treasonous for Venetians to reside outside.

“In the 1992 sense, the opportunity (for all) to travel from, say, Dublin to Lisbon with no checks and no questions asked is revolutionary,” said Peter Pulzer, Oxford professor of government and public administration.

To achieve this goal, the search for compromise has already begun.

Martin Bangemann, a former West German economics minister and the EC commissioner overseeing the program to abolish internal frontiers, talks of using spot checks as a possible transitional measure.

“The (EC) Commission is not averse to spot checks if they are not another form of border control,” he said.

West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and Spanish Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez recently floated the idea of a multilingual, internal EC law enforcement agency similar to the American FBI to combat cross-border crime.

At present, however, the idea of a frontier-free community remains largely a noble vision--as one group of schoolchildren from the French city of Orleans learned on a recent tour of neighboring countries to learn more about Europe’s unifying process.

At the Belgian border, their lofty mission hit present-day reality.

Six of the group, all of Moroccan parentage, were hauled off the bus and sent home, while a seventh child argued his way back on board only after convincing a Belgian official that it was possible to be both black and French.

And here on the border at Aachen, customs inspector Noben still chuckles about how enraged truck drivers recently ran into a delay that had little to do with bureaucracy.

Held up through much of a day at the frontier because of West Germany’s Sunday ban on heavy truck traffic, a long line of goods vehicles was finally permitted to cross, only to discover that the driver of the lead truck had locked his cab and disappeared, blocking the way for all behind.

“He was nearly lynched when he got back,” Noben said.

Times researcher Christine Courtney contributed to this story.