It’s true, of
course, that the retention of border controls by the UK has prevented many
people from reaching the UK. It’s also
true that the open border policy of much of Europe means that once people are
in the Schengen area, there is no physical means of preventing them travelling
as they like within that area. Such a response
within the UK does, though, reinforce the perception elsewhere in Europe that
the UK is a member of the EU but not really part of it. The UK’s anti-EU brigade may claim that they
want to return to a ‘common market’, but in truth, they struggle with the
concept of a ‘common’ anything.
It also betrays
an attitude towards borders which is based on a perception that some borders
are right and natural and need to be protected, whereas others do not, and an
attitude towards movement by people which regards it as a privilege rather than
as a right. Both of those attitudes are
being reinforced on a daily basis. It’s
something that should worry us more than it seems to.
Most of those
who demand the continuation of full and rigorous border controls at all points
of entry would be outraged at the thought of border controls between England
and Scotland or Wales (although, to be fair, some of them strike me as the sort
of people who’d really rather like to introduce controls on movement between
counties if they thought they could get away with it). But why?
What is it about the boundaries between states which makes them more sacrosanct
than other boundaries? All boundaries
are, ultimately, human constructs.
There’s nothing eternal or inevitable about any of them; and most, if
not all, have moved regularly over the centuries. The idea that they are rigid, natural, and
eternal is of fairly recent origin.
Politicians
would be doing us a better service if they expended their efforts on working
out how to prepare for, and deal with the consequences of, free movement than
on using the current problems to restrict that freedom still further.
Posts
1 comment:
This is something which also struck me, listening to a succession of our elected representatives demanding that the member states of the EU "seal their borders". Incredibly this includes a number of Tory MEPs who you would think would do quite a bit of travelling in Europe. But probably they just hang around a few favoured watering holes because if they did travel, they would know that borders cannot be sealed short of erecting the sort of border which used to cut across the middle of Germany.
Tens of thousands of French and German citizens commute from the suburbs into Basel every day; there are villages in Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany where international borders zig-zag invisibly along residential streets, and outsiders would be hard put to say which country they were standing in. There are bits of Germany completely surrounded by Austrian territory. Tens of thousands of miles of international borders snake through farmland and woods. How do you seal that?
Having endured 50 years of sealed borders, nobody is in a hurry to return to those halycon days.
Post a Comment