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Concern over control at Europe’s borders
Hungary hopes to bring Bulgaria and Romania into the Schengen area.
Bringing Bulgaria and Romania into the EU’s Schengen area of borderless travel is among Hungary’s priorities for its presidency. The EU’s interior ministers are to decide in February whether the EU’s youngest member states (they joined in 2007) qualify as members of the Schengen area. But Péter Györkös, Hungary’s ambassador to the EU, told European Voice: “It’s not up to us.”
The more sceptical Schengen states, such as France and the Netherlands, are careful to present their reservations about Bulgaria and Romania as a concern about the technical inadequacy of border controls. “Romania’s and Bulgaria’s gates are not firmly closed,” Laurent Wauquiez, France’s secretary of state for Europe, told the French parliament earlier this month.
To assess the validity of France’s accusation, technical experts from member states and the European Commission are currently in the region. They are to report back at a meeting of interior ministers in February.
Diplomats suggest that their report may be phrased in such a nuanced fashion that the ministers’ decision will be more political than technical.
Different levels
One political decision has already been taken: Bulgaria and Romania will not be treated separately, but as a package, even though Bulgaria’s problems in controlling movement across its borders appear less acute than Romania’s.
Romania is handing out passports to citizens of neighbouring Moldova, with which it also has an ongoing border conflict. Since some 21% of Moldova’s population – more than 770,000 people – are expatriates (one of the highest proportions in Europe), the generosity in Bucharest is not seen as a trivial matter by governments farther west. The expulsion by France of Roma from Romania has highlighted the emotive potential of east-west migration if populist politicians seize on it.
But Hungary has a complex relationship with Romania, which absorbed large tracts of Hungarian territory after the First World War. Paradoxically, this could make Hungary more sympathetic to Romania’s extention of nationality rights towards Moldovans, who have close linguistic, cultural and historic links with Romania.
A similar rationale lies behind one of the first laws adopted by Hungary’s centre-right-dominated parliament following an election in April. This was a new citizenship code that makes it easier for at least two million ethnic Hungarians in Romania, Slovakia and elsewhere to acquire Hungarian nationality. Hungary’s government is unlikely to criticise Romania for pursuing an analogous policy.
One other element makes some western European countries nervous about Bulgaria and Romania joining the Schengen area. The two countries would provide the first land bridge to Greece, which is already in Schengen but which is in the throes of a migration crisis, with tens of thousands of migrants streaming across its border with Turkey.
This is not a propitious moment for abolishing border controls in the eastern Balkans.
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