‘Want to see my passport?’ ‘Nein’

Once upon a time, when rail travelers crossed the Polish-German frontier, their passports and belongings were scrutinized by stern Polish and German border police. Even in the 1990s, it felt like a movie from the 1930s.

These days, the Polish police are gone for good, and the Germans are taking a long coffee break.

During a recent westbound trip, two German border policemen got on the train at the frontier. They headed straight for the first-class coach and sat down. One read a newspaper; the other plunged into a romantic novel. They didn’t look up until two hours later when the train rolled into Berlin.

Asked if they were going to check anyone’s passport, the one reading the newspaper replied with a curt “nein.”

This is the new “borderless Europe,” where it is possible to hop on a train or bus and travel from Portugal to Poland without showing your passport to anyone. Most of the frontier border posts in Western Europe have been gone for nearly a decade. Europe’s eastern half is rapidly catching up. Only the gentle beeping of your cellphone and the arrival of a text message telling you that you’ve entered a new service area lets you know that a national border has been crossed.

In the wake of the 20th century’s two world wars, which saw the rival powers of Europe invade, bomb, occupy and otherwise devastate each other’s territory, the grand experiment of doing away with internal borders is, quite simply, astounding.

One of the European Union’s guiding principles is “the free movement of people” across the borders of its 27 member states. Principle became reality in 1995 with the implementation of the Schengen agreement to eliminate border controls between seven countries in Western Europe. The list of countries joining the Schengen zone has increased steadily since. Britain and Ireland are the notable holdouts.

In December, nine members were added: Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Malta. The zone now stretches from the Atlantic to the EU’s border with Russia, a territory of 1.65 million square miles and 400 million people.

Traditionally, European borders have been symbols of state sovereignty and order. Mountains and rivers formed logical borders, but where nature was insufficient, statesmen and tyrants drew lines on maps, often with little regard for logic or nature.

Language and ethnicity became another basis for defining borders, but sometimes communities were so intermingled that no border made sense. This remains true in Eastern Europe, where some elderly people boast that they have lived in half a dozen countries while never leaving the village of their birth.

The Iron age

The end of World War II led to the harshest division of Europe as the Iron Curtain split the continent in half. Germany was divided into East and West; a wall bisected Berlin, the capital.

Behind the Iron Curtain, the facade of socialist harmony concealed some of the continent’s least hospitable borders. The German-Polish border along the Oder River was always one of the nastiest. (Today’s anomaly of German border police boarding the train from Poland has more to do with job security for the officers than border security for the German nation.)

The Hungarian-Czechoslovakian border also had a chilly Cold War history. The Danube River forms part of the boundary between Hungary and what is today Slovakia, but the main crossing point, the Maria Valeria bridge linking Esztergom in Hungary with Sturovo in Slovakia, was destroyed in 1944 by the retreating German army.

After the war, communist authorities on both sides of the Danube decided to leave it that way. It was not repaired and reopened until 2002, when Slovakia and Hungary were seeking admission to the EU.

Before the bridge’s reopening, the only Danube crossing between the two countries was the bridge linking the sister cities of Komarno and Komarom.

A large Hungarian community lives on the Slovak side of the river; in the Slovak city of Komarno, Hungarians are the majority. When the pro-Moscow populist Vladimir Meciar came to power in Slovakia in the early 1990s, he strengthened his power base by stirring up resentment against the Hungarians.

Ladislav Boros, 59, a Slovak resident of Komarno, blames politicians on both sides for the tensions. His family originally comes from a Slovak enclave in eastern Hungary, but after World War II, the family was forced to resettle in Slovakia.

Boros, a gregarious man who speaks both languages, sent his children to Slovak-language schools in Komarno, but is happy to cross the bridge five days a week to work in a factory on the Hungarian side.

“During the communist era,” Boros recalled, “very few people were crossing the bridge. After 1989, it became easier, but you still needed a visa in your passport. When Slovakia and Hungary joined the EU in 2004, you just needed your ID card to cross the bridge. Now, with Schengen, you don’t need a thing.”

Still, Boros has mixed feelings. “Nobody ever said they were getting rid of borders, only the border crossings,” he said. “Hungary will always be Hungary and Slovakia will always be Slovakia.”

Nationalism may still be in Europe’s DNA, but Robin Shepherd, an analyst at Chatham House, a London think tank, says a borderless Europe has provided a layer of protection to minorities in countries where historically there have been tensions -- Hungarians in Slovakia and Romania, for example, or Basques in Spain.

“Being in the European Union and being a citizen of Europe gives you a whole panoply of rights and laws and memberships that you didn’t have before,” he said.

“If some tinhorn nationalist like Meciar comes along and wants to break out of the civilized norms of the EU -- or NATO, which is led by the U.S. -- he’s going to come up against some seriously powerful forces. This is ultimately what the EU has accomplished in this part of the world.”

Ethnic rivalries

It is no coincidence that Eastern and Central Europe, with crazy-quilt borders and simmering ethnic rivalries, have triggered Europe’s 20th century wars.

“The only way to lock down this troublesome part of Europe is to give these countries entry into the EU,” Shepherd said. “Lock them into the EU, and you’ve locked down the possibility of the kind of violence we saw in Yugoslavia in the 1990s.”

Such ethnic rivalries are one reason most European leaders are eager to entice Serbia into the EU.

But the Serb leadership, still stung by the 1999 NATO airstrikes and more recently by the loss of Kosovo, has been wallowing in a kind of self-imposed quarantine. Surveys show that most Serbs see their future in the EU, but a significant minority backs the government’s argument that Moscow is Serbia’s only true friend.

Pozar Geler, 47, a firefighter from the Serbian border town of Subotica, has no doubt about which side he’s on.

“We need the EU,” he said while sitting in a long line of cars with Serbian license plates at the crossing into Hungary. He grew increasingly irritated as cars with Romanian and Bulgarian license plates whizzed through the lane marked “EU Members Only.”

In Geler’s lane, guards searched each vehicle, enforcing the Schengen agreement. Many cars were turned back.

“We used to cross like nothing -- to go shopping or to go to a restaurant. Locals like us didn’t even need a passport, just an ID card,” he said.

For Geler, easy access to Hungary was key to his own identity as an ethnic Hungarian living in Serbia.

“People feel angry and they feel isolated,” he said. “Everybody can cross the border except us. It’s like we are not real Europeans.”