Shifting borders

"In Europe, principles are not what they once were," writes România libera on the eve of the meeting of European ministers. On September 22, the ministers decided to postpone the accession of Romania and Bulgaria to the Schengen area, having failed to reach a compromise with the Netherlands and Finland, which are demanding more guarantees in the fight against corruption and crime. In Bucharest and Sofia the governments feel betrayed, as they feel they had worked hard to do just what was asked of them - in vain.

Beyond the national perspective, however, everything today indicates that Europe has become a kind of labyrinth in which no one recognises his own borders. The external frontiers, the Schengen area, pressed hard on their Greek or Italian flanks, are reinforced on one side with barbed wire (between Greece and Turkey) or with increased sea patrols (in the Mediterranean) - all without any guidelines having been drawn up at European level.

Internal borders, which theoretically are now largely symbolic administrative lines, are in turn subject to manoeuvring that undermines the very principle of free movement throughout the area. Denmark has restored its border controls, ostensibly to fight cross-border crime, and France has done the same to prevent Tunisians from crossing over from Italy. Finally, other borders, these ones political, forced up by domestic issues, are popping up where they were not necessarily expected: in the Netherlands, in Finland and in Denmark, pushed for by Geert Wilders and his party, by the "True Finns", and by the Danish People's Party.

“I blame Europe and Italy for being asleep, for not being aware of the nationalist and centrifugal forces that are tugging it apart. We have not remembered the lesson from the Balkans: it's enough simply to identify an enemy of the people for a people short of reference points to take it on as truth,” writes the Italian Paolo Rumiz in his book On the Frontiers of Europe (ed. Hoebeke, 2011). He might have added that it risks abandoning part of its soul to wander between these more or less shifting borders, and lose itself.