In June, EU officials flocked to the small Luxembourgish town of Schengen to celebrate — or perhaps commemorate — the open-border agreement named after it.
Behind the speeches and photo opportunities, the idea of a borderless Europe is fraying. More and more countries are reinstating checks at the frontiers Schengen was meant to erase — a political reflex to migration fears, security threats, and wars both near and far.
“What are they actually celebrating? The anniversary? The birthday party? A funeral?” Stefan Salomon, professor of European law at the University of Amsterdam, told The Parliament. “Or is it more of a Halloween — the macabre return of the half-dead?”
Irregular arrivals into Europe have fallen since 2023, and especially since 2015, when nearly a million people arrived from the Middle East. But politically, the damage is done: Electorates have turned against irregular migration and the asylum system, far-right parties are on the rise, and mainstream politicians are scrambling to demonstrate control over national borders.
Border checks are “basically used as a symbolic means of signalling something to the population. Namely that we are in control, or we are supposedly in control and we know what we’re doing,” said Salomon. “We have the right measures and we take the right measures in order to reduce irregular migration.”
The Schengen Agreement, signed in 1985 and in effect since 1995, aimed to create a borderless area where citizens could live, work and travel freely. Today, 25 EU member states and four non-EU countries — Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, and Switzerland — are part of the Schengen zone. Romania and Bulgaria became full members in early 2025.
“The European communities took this engagement, [saying] let's realise the dream of the European movement, let's abolish internal borders,” said Joachim Bitterlich, a former German diplomat who helped integrate Italy into the agreement in the 1990s.
Border checks: from exceptional to commonplace
The agreement contains provisions for countries to put up temporary border restrictions in certain circumstances. “Foreseeable events” such as large sports competitions allow border checks for up to six months. Urgent security threats allow restrictions for two months, and the European Council can also approve border controls in exceptional situations to protect the zone as a whole.
But in recent years, such provisions are being rolled over indefinitely, suggesting that theoretically temporary measures are becoming a tool for long-term management of migratory flows.
“There's quite a few countries extending that six-month exception period,” said Bram Frouws, Director of the Mixed Migration Centre think tank in an interview with The Parliament. “I think it signals that we don't value Schengen as much as we used to, which I think is a risk for something that is really a great thing, something we can be proud of as Europe.”
Today, ten Schengen countries have ‘temporary’ border controls in place, citing issues such as migratory pressures, hybrid threats, the war in Ukraine, the fall of the Assad regime in Syria, terrorism, and pressure on public services, among others, as driving factors behind the decisions.
Shifting patterns of migration make it difficult for policymakers to come up with permanent solutions. Figures from Frontex, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, show an overall 38% decline in irregular border crossings in 2024, compared with 2023. There were sharp falls in arrivals via the Central Mediterranean and Western Balkan routes.
But arrivals via the Eastern Borders route — the EU’s 6,000km land border with Belarus, Moldova, Ukraine and Russia — saw a surge of 192%. Arrivals from the Western African and Eastern Mediterranean route rose by 18% and 14% respectively.
Outside countries exploiting EU divisions
Tensions arise because not all EU countries experience migration in the same way. Countries on the edge of the bloc, such as Italy and Greece, receive large numbers of migrants, many of whom make asylum claims that should in theory be processed by the first EU country they arrive in under the Dublin Agreement.
But migrants often make their way to countries deeper inside the EU that may have more generous welfare systems or existing communities from the migrant’s country of origin. Others attempt to reach the UK — an “El Dorado” due to the English language and its lack of ID cards facilitating informal labour — but end up settling somewhere along the way.
Central European countries such as Austria, Germany, Poland and Czech Republic account for the greatest use of temporary border controls, of which only Poland has a border with a non-EU country. Besides being destinations in themselves, these countries all serve as transit routes between frequent countries of entry and the riches of Western Europe.
“What's underlying the problem, I think, is the fact that member states have lost trust in each other, and in each other's respect for the common rules that we have in the Schengen area,” Jonas Bornemann, Professor of European law at the University of Groningen told The Parliament.
Foreign powers are more than willing to exploit those divisions to extract concessions or sow chaos in Europe. Libya, Morocco, Turkey and others have all been able to use the threat of uncontrolled migration to exert diplomatic leverage on Europe.
“Europe also made itself very vulnerable to these kinds of tactics, in the sense that there is immediately this panic if migrant arrivals go up,” said Frouws. “Europe is quite willing to immediately do something, offer something to try and stop that. So it made itself very vulnerable to this kind of blackmail. In that sense, it's a symptom, I think, of Europe's failure.”
Some foreign powers are hostile rather than opportunistic. The Polish authorities suspect Belarus, a client state of Russia, of deliberately pushing large numbers of migrants to make illegal crossings at the land border they share.
On Monday, the Polish Border Guard Service said on X that more than 550 illegal crossing attempts from Belarus were documented between 9-11 August in the Podlaskie region. It says the crossing attempts have become increasingly violent in recent months.
Asylum policy on life support
Going hand in hand with issues surrounding Schengen is the issue of asylum law. The EU's Pact on Migration and Asylum, which was approved by the European Council in May 2024, is designed to establish a more coordinated asylum system for the EU and is set to take effect within two years.
But it’s under increasing strain. In March this year, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said his country would not implement the pact, citing the one million refugees it has taken in from Ukraine. The Netherlands and Hungary also requested to opt out of it in October 2024.
Both Denmark and Ireland have a special legal status within the EU that allows them to opt out of certain areas of EU policy including migration. In Denmark, whose centre-left government has exceptionally taken a firm line on migration, asylum applications are on the decline: In 2024 only 860 asylum applications were granted.
Moreover, almost half of EU countries failed to submit their National Implementation Plans, detailing how they would implement the pact, by the December 2024 deadline.
“The patient that is in a critical state is the common European asylum system, not Schengen,” Catherine Woollard, Secretary General of the European Council on Refugees and Exiles, told The Parliament. “The fact that member states are allowed to ignore asylum law when we have a situation of rampant non-compliance, that then has an impact on Schengen.”
She pointed to a snowball effect of countries not abiding by the pact, implementing their own border controls, and thus causing their neighbours to do the same.
“We then see the issue becoming more and more politically sensitive and [German Chancellor Friedrich] Merz unwisely, in his competition with the AfD, introducing measures that are in themselves unlawful,” said Woollard. “And then Poland retaliates again.”
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