Open borders defy rising nationalism in Europe. We must protect them | Alexander Hurst
With so many economic and political challenges looming, the EU nevertheless began 2025 with a little bit of its old magic and a reminder that it?s here to do far more than simply react. At the stroke of midnight on 1 January, a dog crossed the border between Romania and Hungary, and like all the people to follow it, nope, it didn?t have to show ID. As of 2025, Romania and Bulgaria are full members of the Schengen area ? that counterintuitive dismantling of borders that refuses to be snuffed out in an age of rising nationalism.
The quote ?we have made Europe, now we must make Europeans? is often apocryphally attributed to Jean Monnet, one of the founding fathers of the European Union. Even if he never actually said it, the ?making? of Europeans is tangible in two ways. Both have to do with movement. Erasmus ? the scheme that lent its name to a whole generation of students for whom it opened Europe?s doors ? and the Schengen agreement, which eliminated physical borders between most countries in the EU.
The first time I experienced the Schengen effect (cycling across the bridge over the Rhine from Strasbourg in France to Kehl in Germany), it felt noteworthy. I learned, with amusement, that it was common for people who lived in Strasbourg to do their grocery shopping across the border in Kehl ? for some reason, the German supermarkets were cheaper. You could even run your cross-border errands on the tram.
Quickly, the absence of any kind of border became simply anodyne to me, and not just between Strasbourg and Kehl. The train from Paris to Brussels? Nothing. The train onwards to Amsterdam? Still nothing. It felt no more significant than driving from Ohio to New York as a kid to visit my grandparents and somewhere in the middle zipping past a sign that said ?Pennsylvania welcomes you!? The nationalism embodied in the words of war poets such as Rupert Brooke was a thing that seemed to live in the past. Did it matter where French soil ended and German soil began? To a still-fresh outsider, Europe was simply Europe.
The first time I experienced intra-Schengen identity control (on a TGV from Brussels to Paris), it was surprising precisely because it broke the experience of a seamless European space. Not just logistically, but cognitively. When you step, cycle, drive or roll across a border without anything happening, the power it once exerted disappears. Maybe you don?t even realise until you get a text notification from your mobile provider that you are now ?somewhere else?. Paris-Brussels means nothing more significant than Paris-Lyon; Paris-Cologne the same as if it were Paris-Marseille (though without the added benefit of sun).
A few years ago, Luxembourgers voiced their surprise ? and annoyance ? at how regular a sight it had become to see on-duty French police cars filling up their tanks at Luxembourg petrol stations. Perhaps choosing the most conveniently located petrol station wasn?t technically a ?cross-border mission? (and so allowed under Schengen rules), but to anyone who believes in a united, more federal Europe, it speaks to the progression of Europe as a seamless cognitive space, ie a win.
The absence of physical borders ? of having to pull out a national ID card or a passport and show it to someone in a uniform ? cements in the mind, consciously or unconsciously, that this is all just one contiguous continent, something more than an often raucous collection of nation states. And the minute you do have to pull out your wallet, political lines exist once more in the world. This one Portuguese, this one Spanish, that one Italian, another one Dutch.
Recognition of that is why the Schengen agreement allows the reintroduction of border controls only in a situation of threat to public policy or internal security, and then requires that they are a measure of last resort, minimal in practice, and temporary in nature. In practice, both France and Spain have been relatively frequent appliers of temporary border controls ? originally with migration as a justification, and more recently, security. When France reintroduced border checks with Belgium on 13 November 2015, after the terrorist attacks in Paris, it was done with the rationale of protection. The reflex was understandable, given that so many of the attackers had come from or had deep connections to the Brussels district of Molenbeek, where one of the terrorists, Salah Abdeslam, was later arrested. Slowly, over the past decade, other countries have followed this same logic to the point where, now, Germany, Austria, Slovenia, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Italy and France have all reintroduced checks on their borders.
These moves may have been made with the argument of protecting citizens, but together, they all create a danger. It?s a tougher, more diffuse danger to grapple with than the concrete idea of stopping crime or terrorism, but in the long run, it?s also socially destructive to break repeatedly into Europe?s seamless cognitive construction. Schengen borders can be temporarily reimposed in the event of a threat to public policy ? but what if the reintroduction of the border is itself a threat to European public policy?
A column in the Guardian last year about the Olympics offered a thought experiment that has stuck with me. In order to determine how special something was, the writer wondered, we should imagine that it didn?t exist, and then ask ourselves: ?How hard would it be to create it today??
By that metric, Schengen surely is special ? something with clear and evident benefits, but which domestic political forces might prevent from coming into being if it didn?t already exist. States should keep that in mind as they continue to nibble away at the way it has put so many borders out of sight and out of mind.
