Last week, Friedrich Merz came to London with security on his mind. For the German Chancellor, who signed a new friendship treaty with Keir Starmer as part of a broader European reset with the UK, that most immediately means bolstering defence against Russia. But, in a telling sign of the times, the story doesn’t end there. Both leaders also agreed on a joint plan to crack down on people-smuggling operations, making any attempt to send migrants from Germany to Britain a criminal offence.
Combating human trafficking is all the rage in Europe these days, and for good reason — but while Germany, along with the rest of the EU, might be eager to cooperate with external neighbours such as Britain on the issue, internally, the challenge of irregular migration has produced bitter division, a resurgence of hard borders, and localised frontier policies that together threaten the unity of the Schengen Area itself.
Earlier this month, Poland became the latest Schengen state to reintroduce border controls along its frontiers, both in the west with Germany and in the northeast with Lithuania. The reason? Partly to combat people smuggling, but also the involuntary return of individuals across internal EU borders — by member states themselves. Unimaginable in the End of History days when Schengen was first devised, Poland is far from alone in subverting the zone. The Germans themselves, after all, are increasingly conducting their own border checks, with Poland and Czechia, along the way rejecting thousands of migrants trying to enter the country. In one especially surreal incident, vividly underscoring the contrast between how Berlin treats countries like the UK and its eastern neighbours, German police effectively abandoned an Afghan man in Polish territory, under cover of darkness, making their escape before Polish authorities could arrive.
The revival of European borders is nothing new. Several countries have restarted controls since the 2015 migration crisis, and then during the pandemic. What is new, however, is a growing sense that Schengen was always built on a false premise: that the countries of the zone share a common approach to territorial sovereignty, and can therefore function like a uniform state. This has never been true of course, but only in the last few years has it become so clear. And with its cross-border antics into Poland, Germany has demonstrated that even the EU’s prime mover no longer approaches Schengen in the spirit it was intended, and that what happens just beyond its own borders is no longer its concern. It all speaks, with shocking vividness, to how migration continues to haunt Europe, even if ultimate blame lies less with migrants themselves than with the continent’s bickering, bloviating leaders.
Border security in a structure like Schengen only works if everyone is on the same page — and over the past decades, Europeans have made it abundantly clear that they are not. For years, this core paradox at the heart of how the system works has been written into the so-called Dublin Regulation, the system governing asylum applications in the EU. Under this regime, asylum claims may only be adjudicated by the country in which an asylum seeker is first fingerprinted by authorities, usually the first EU or Schengen country they step foot in.
But because asylum seekers by definition arrive on the external borders of Schengen, this naturally puts enormous pressure on so-called “frontline” migration states, which by default are burdened with handling all the asylum cases for the entire bloc. For years, this piled pressure on Mediterranean countries such as Italy and Greece. But, starting in 2021, Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia found themselves in similar straits, with the start of the migration crisis engineered by Lukashenko’s Belarus.
On the surface, Belarus’s antics were an attempt to weaponise migration, putting pressure on the external borders of the EU. But as time went on, it became increasingly clear that Minsk’s strategy strained the internal structure of Schengen too. Just as during the 2015 migrant crisis, when Syrian refugees made use of Schengen’s open borders to reach Germany and its generous immigration system, few migrants and refugees crossing into the EU from Belarus wished to stay in Poland — once again making their way to the social democracies of northwest Europe. For them, the fiction of Schengen as a single unified political entity is obvious, even from within its theoretically borderless expanse. The fact remains that certain countries are more attractive as destinations not just for economic reasons, but for policy reasons too.
Here, the Dublin system made it necessary for states to either refuse entry to migrants wishing to cross internal Schengen boundaries, or deport them back to their first country of entry — precisely setting the stage for the crisis underway today. Though Germany’s forcible transfer of that Afghan migrant made news in Poland, eliciting sharp words from officials in Warsaw, many similar returns were undertaken under the auspices of Dublin and thus were entirely legal.
Ultimately, though, Germany came to the same conclusion as Poland did when it came to dealing with asylum applicants on its own soil: if migrants are stopped from even entering its territory, then the whole asylum farrago can neatly be avoided. Poland took this approach to its logical conclusion when it suspended the right to asylum altogether in late 2024, swiftly copied by other EU states. And after Warsaw’s move was approved as legal by the bloc’s officials in April of this year, Germany’s new government decided to formally enshrine its practice of turning migrants back at the Polish border — something that, in an ironic twist, likely led to the very rise in migrant returns that convinced Poland to enact its own border checks.
If, however, Dublin isn’t working, the EU’s solution looks doomed too, albeit for basically the opposite reason. Passed in April 2024, the EU Migration Pact tries to bring order to the continent’s migratory Wild West. It implements a whole host of provisions, from streamlined asylum processing to expedited deportation procedures, but its most controversial element is the burden-sharing mechanism: requiring all EU member states to host migrants entering the bloc, or else to make financial contributions towards them elsewhere.
This kind of solidarity is all well and good in theory. Yet in the way it mandates a unified set of migration rules and procedures across the EU, while also asking states to take on responsibilities not directly on behalf of their own citizens, the Pact butts up against the precious autonomy that so many EU states have sought to carve out in this, the current age of independence-minded nationalism. While Dublin erred in making migration an exclusively local issue, subject to the whims of national governments, the Migration Pact errs in dramatically misreading the room.
“The Migration Pact errs in dramatically misreading the room”
Yet having rejected the Migration Pact, countries such as Poland and Hungary now believe they can engage in a spot of cakeism — preserving their sovereignty, and avoiding hosting migrants from other parts of the EU, while also continuing to bask in the warming sun of Schengen. In a sense, this approach is the essence of the new European Right’s vision of a Europe of sovereign states, where the EU exists as a weaker, purely economic union, while ties between individual members are constantly negotiated and renegotiated according to national interests.
But while the temporary border controls erected by countries across the EU may today seem like a compelling solution for filtering out illegal migration — while letting trade, tourists, and intra-EU labour flow with minimal hassle — such protocols would finally squeeze the ease of movement that has allowed Schengen to revolutionise European life since the end of the Cold War. Over time, it would kill the common visa policy too, and amid the constantly shifting geopolitical relationships of such a Europe, instability would inevitably soar, making border policy ever more fraught and complex.
Poland and Germany’s ongoing spat has already strained their relationship, while Austria, Germany, and Italy have pursued unilateral migration policies that have hurt their relations not just with Brussels — but also with each other. Despite not being a member of the EU, Turkey’s years-long confrontation with Greece over migration, which has at times spilled over into dangerous geopolitical posturing, presents an extreme case study in what may await Europe if states continue to dig in.
Where does all this leave Europeans? As bleak as it may seem, the answer is that there is no good way of bolstering the sovereign liberty of EU states on migration matters without also undermining the foundations of the Schengen Area itself. Conversely, crafting a continent-wide migration policy that actually works is impossible so long as Schengen members behave like fully independent states. Seeing as there is likely to be little appetite for a federal Europe anytime soon, the current border regimes are a shadow of the Europe that lies ahead — a divided, multi-polar continent, where realpolitik rules and where everyone is out for themselves.
While this may not seem like such a bad outcome for European conservatives tired of Brussels overreach, the truth is that countries like Poland and Greece would still need to deal with the same migration problems they face today. Now, though, they’d be going it alone, without recourse to any of the international laws or bodies that have given them support in their current struggles, however limited that may have been in practice.
Socio-cultural concerns about foreigners would also be moot here. With only one minor post-pandemic uptick, in 2021, the continent’s birth rates have continued to fall every year since 2016. With little hope that things will change course anytime soon, legal workers will regardless have to fill gaps in the labour force of this newly splintered Europe, changing the face of the continent with or without illegal migrants. Just this month, Giorgia Meloni’s government in Italy announced it would issue 500,000 visas for workers from outside the EU; for years, Poland has led the EU in issuing residence permits for non-EU immigrants.
Policies like these show that, on some level at least, European politicians understand that the current status quo of border checks and chest-thumping, absent any new ideas, is fundamentally untenable for the continent’s long-term future. And yet, trapped by a continent-wide attitude that favours retreat into a familiar yet narrow view of national interest, they have abdicated any sort of thinking about what European identity, and its place in the world, will look like in this new historical age. However naive the Europe of the Nineties may have been, it was nevertheless ambitious, imaginative, and boundary-pushing in its way. Today, that ambition, to imagine something better, has been replaced by a politics of fear, not just of migrants, but of what might come after the end of post-historical Europe.
While Euroscepticism is at an all-time high, very few actors on the continent actually want to leave the EU — they just want to rebuild it in their own image. The central question that Europeans need to ask themselves, then, is how committed they actually are to the European project, assuming they cannot cooperate enough to solve a problem like migration. Are European national identities really so fragile that they can’t survive collective action? Are they really willing to sacrifice something as groundbreaking as Schengen for short-term gains?
The unfortunate answer European leaders seem to have given is “yes”. Though some Schengen states may sooner or later be forced to band together, clarifying their open-border relationships in the face of threats like Russia, the truth is that there is little evidence that EU states will mature enough to solve their fundamental border problems.
For the moment, of course, Schengen isn’t dead — nor should it necessarily be dismantled merely because national leaders seem unwilling to coordinate. The benefits it offers Europeans continues to dramatically outweigh the costs. But keep stumbling and it might all count for nothing, as Schengen falls and Europe’s walls only continue to rise.
