Borders and Free Movement

Of everything the Union has done, the change most people notice is the one that happens at borders: driving from France to Spain without stopping, or catching a flight from Berlin to Lisbon without showing a passport. Behind it lie two separate things that are often confused. One is the Schengen area, which removes routine border checks. The other is the right of EU citizens to live, work and study in other member states, which is part of the Union's founding treaties. This chapter explains both, shows where they overlap and where they do not, and follows the debate about border checks since 2015. Dates and figures are given from general knowledge and flagged where they should be checked.

Two Ideas, Not One

It is possible to have one without the other. Ireland is an EU member whose citizens enjoy free movement, but it is outside Schengen. Switzerland is outside the EU but inside Schengen. The two overlap heavily, and so are easy to treat as one.

Free Movement of Workers

The 1957 Treaty of Rome (Chapter 2) included the free movement of workers as one of the four freedoms of the common market, alongside goods, services and capital. At first it meant the right of a worker from one member state to take a job in another without discrimination on grounds of nationality (check the scope). It developed in stages.

• Workers, then everyone. From the 1990s the right was extended beyond workers to students and others with sufficient means, and Maastricht (Chapter 4) created EU citizenship, with a general right to move and reside (check).
• The conditions. A right to stay for the first three months with little more than an identity document. For longer stays, an EU citizen needs to be working, studying, or self-sufficient, with health insurance (check the details of the 2004 directive).
• Recognised qualifications. Rules for recognising professional qualifications let doctors, architects and others work abroad, a part of the single market programme.
• Social security. Contributions and pension entitlements can be counted across countries, so a person who worked in several countries is not penalised for moving (check).

The Schengen Story

Schengen is named after a village in Luxembourg, on the river Moselle, where the agreement was signed on a boat in June 1985 (check the detail of the boat) by Belgium, France, West Germany, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. They did this outside the EU's formal structure, because not every member wished to go as far. A fuller convention followed in 1990, and the first controls were removed at the end of March 1995 for a small group of countries (check). In 1997 the Amsterdam Treaty brought the Schengen rules into the EU's legal framework (check).

• What it does. Removes routine passport and customs checks at internal land, sea and air borders between participating states. A visitor with a Schengen visa can generally travel freely around the area.
• What goes with it. Stronger checks at the area's outer borders; shared police databases such as the Schengen Information System; common rules for short-stay visas; and a border agency, Frontex (check).
• What it does not do. It does not abolish the power of states to check identity inside the country, and it allows temporary checks to be reintroduced (see below).

Who Is In and Who Is Out

Erasmus: The Best-Loved Programme

If one EU programme has a good public reputation, it is Erasmus, launched in 1987 to let students spend part of their degree at a university in another country (check). The name honours Erasmus of Rotterdam, the Renaissance scholar who travelled widely, and is also treated as an acronym (check). It later grew into a wider programme covering school pupils, teachers, trainees and young people, and over ten million people are said to have taken part (check the figure). Its effect has been largely cultural: friendships, marriages and careers across borders. Chapter 9 returns to it as part of everyday life.

Borders Come Back

The Schengen rules allow member states to reintroduce border checks temporarily for serious threats to public order or security. This provision has been used far more often since 2015.

• 2015 onwards. After the large number of asylum seekers arriving in Europe in 2015, several states, including Germany, Austria and Sweden, introduced checks on some internal borders, some of which were repeatedly extended (check the countries). Chapter 7 treats the migration crisis itself.
• 2020. During the Covid pandemic, many borders were closed or restricted at short notice, which showed how quickly the open area could be interrupted (check).
• Since then. Some countries have kept or reintroduced checks for reasons including security and irregular migration (check the current position).

Supporters of Schengen say that the temporary exceptions show the system working as designed. Critics of the exceptions say that long-running checks erode a core achievement of the Union. Both claims describe the same facts.

Exercises

Next chapter: Enlargement: Eastern Europe and Beyond, which follows the Union's biggest expansion and its unfinished list of candidates.