When East Germans first glimpsed the freedoms their western cousins enjoyed after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the idea of a borderless Europe held powerful appeal. By the time the Schengen zone came into force in the mid-1990s, free movement had become a cornerstone of European integration. Today, as EU member states reintroduce border checks, that vision is under a new kind of stress.
Joachim Bitterlich, a German diplomat whose life and career have been shaped by Schengen, now fears for its future. By failing to put in place proper control mechanisms and cooperate with each other, governments have allowed Schengen to develop into a security threat, he says.
The Schengen agreement was signed 40 years ago last month. Whether it’s going through a mid-life crisis or heading for an early grave is still to be determined, with decisive political action needed to save borderless travel, Bitterlich told The Parliament in an interview. “I've tried to warn people. But where are the real steps of cooperation? Where are they?” he says.
European public opinion has turned sharply against irregular migration since 2015 when Germany effectively declared itself open to people from the Middle East without consulting its neighbours. Then-chancellor Angela Merkel dismissed concerns about economic and cultural ingration with an insouciant Wir schaffen das — “We’ll manage it.”
Since then the political situation has only got worse. The French public feels that immigration is “no longer under control,” Prime Minister François Bayrou said in January. Italy, Greece and Malta have all raised concerns with the EU about a surge in migration from Libya. Spain is feeling the strain of migrants arriving in the Canary Islands.
“I am not against migration. I have always been pro-migration because migration is a fact of life,” Bitterlich says. Nevertheless, “in democracy, if you lose control, you lose authority — and that’s how you invite the far right in.”
Political leaders must understand the severity of the situation and work together on solutions at the EU level, he says — or else risk the Schengen system collapsing altogether.
Earlier this month, Poland reinstated controls at 52 border crossings with Germany and 13 with Lithuania. Hungary and Bulgaria have also implemented border controls, supposedly temporary, with their Schengen neighbours. But it’s unfair to put the blame solely on these governments, says Bitterlich.
“We have not created something operational. If somebody says no to an asylum seeker, [they go] to the next one,” said Bitterlich. “I do believe Europe needs immigration. But Europe has to find a system that is functioning and is accepted.”
The birth of borderless travel
Bitterlich grew up near Germany’s border with France in the 1950s, and spent much of his youth crossing borders in and around Europe. “You had to stop at the border station, show your ID papers. You had to open the car. They were looking in the car if you did not have forbidden things. I've been influenced during this time by these border controls,” he said.
France, West Germany and the Benelux countries signed the Schengen Agreement in 1985, marking a new stage in European cooperation. Bitterlich remembers the decision as one bound up in the promise of modern Europe. “The European communities took steps to realise the dream of the European movement: open borders,” he says.
Four years later the Berlin Wall came down as East Germans could no longer tolerate the gap in wealth and freedom with their Western cousins — including the freedoms offered by the borderless travel zone that would soon come into effect.
“The East Germans had two dreams: to see Paris — so they organised bus tours — and to take a plane from Berlin to Mallorca. These were dreams of freedom, freedom of movement,” recalls Bitterlich.
Italy signed up to the Schengen zone in 1990, with Bitterlich sat next to West German chancellor Helmut Kohl at the negotiating table (Germany would formally unify later that year, with Kohl as chancellor). Others soon followed. “We did it. The Italians were in, the Austrians joined, and Portugal, Spain came in,” he said.
Beyond tourism, the Schengen zone increased labour mobility and the movement of goods, boosting the European economy by facilitating seasonal farm work and cross-border trade.
But then gaps started to appear. Negotiations to improve cooperation between national police forces “happened in slow motion,” Bitterlich said.
“We have never been able to develop a real police authority with executive competencies and at the same time at least a coordinated migration policy,” he said. “This should be the standard in Europe. And I regret that only a few of the interior ministers understood this challenge.”
In 1990, the first 12 countries signed the Dublin Convention, requiring asylum seekers to file their application in whichever EU country they first arrived in. The system, intended to avoid migrants gaming the system by pursuing parallel claims in multiple countries, has in practice led to long backlogs in the most common countries of arrival, and large numbers of migrants staying there for a long period in legal limbo.
The Dublin agreement “never worked, really,” said Bitterlich. “And it’s not working today.”
European ideas run into national interests
Bitterlich was involved in a series of meetings in 2018 between EU interior ministers around migration and asylum policy, in the leadup to the Migration and Asylum Pact, which was put forward two years later in 2020.
The meetings eventually led to a consolidation of the Schengen Information System (SIS), updates to existing rules to include new categories of alerts, the types of data that could be used by border agencies, and the way it could be accessed.
At the time, alongside representatives from the European Commission, Bitterlich proposed a system of EU-run offices in transit countries to process asylum and immigration requests before migrants reached Europe. The idea was to avoid the problem of migrants without a valid asylum claim settling in Europe during the long process of having their claims rejected.
Bitterlich’s proposal was inspired by a British system he observed during a stint in the Middle East, where UK officials processed refugee claims directly from camps in Jordan. “I saw a small office, a building with a Union Jack on it... receiving demands for immigration to Britain,” he explained. “I proposed the same system at EU level in 2018. Till now, nothing.”
Efforts to create a unified European border policy have long been hampered by member states’ failure to cooperate. Even in 2015, Merkel could have set a different tone by coordinating with the South-East European countries between Turkey and Germany, Bitterlich says: “Invite the Austrians, Hungarians, Romanians, Bulgarians — maybe even the Serbs — for a weekend meeting and say: we must regain control of migration.”
As the cracks widen, Bitterlich believes European countries will have to cooperate to a previously unthinkable degree to save Schengen. “We have 27 member states. All of them have border guards. Why not pool them together, to have a real European border guard with real competences? Not only to support the Italians or the Greeks, but to take over, if necessary. This was never accepted. Never.”
“We are still speaking about the sovereignty of the member states,” Bitterlich says. “We have a patchwork system, not a European system.”
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