Open doors and open perils Robert Wargas See note please
The Schengen Agreement led to Europe’s borderless Schengen Area. comprising 26 European countries that have abolished passport and any other type of border control at their common borders, also referred to as internal borders. It mostly functions as a single country for international travel purposes. rsk
Watching all the videos and news coverage of Americans blitzing the stores on the day after Thanksgiving, the day we know as Black Friday, I found myself thinking about our priorities. The news cycle reminds me daily that they aren’t quite in order. I learned last Friday from Reuters that Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the malevolent author of the latest terrorist attacks in Paris, “boasted of the ease with which he had re-entered Europe from Syria via Greece two months earlier, exploiting the confusion of the migrant crisis and the continent’s passport-free Schengen system….”
Now, I know there are some who really think the Schengen Agreement is an indispensable part of the newer, better, enlightened Europe. But I’m going to be straight with you about this: it strikes me as odd that anyone could place so much emphasis on passport-free travel as a measure of our civilisation’s moral worth. After all, those most likely to be titillated by the Schengen ideal are generally the same people who think the government should decide what kind of lightbulbs we use in our homes. How odd that these obsessed micro-managers become total anarchists at the border, one of the few places the state should have a say.
I actually remember my first experience of the radical Schengen arrangement. I crossed the Austrian-Hungarian border by train and ended up in Budapest’s Keleti station — a large, old-fashioned railway hub in a part of the city that can’t have changed much from the days of Communism. (Keleti station was, you might recall, recently one of the epicenters of the migrant crisis.) I stepped off the train amazed that I had actually crossed into a different country without anyone caring. No bureaucrat had any idea where I was. No one had asked me any questions. It felt good, but it also felt contrived and unnatural. I remember thinking to myself, “this can’t last.”
There is still much to be thankful for. The Anglosphere remains the freest set of nations in human history. Can that last?
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