(CN) — Spurred by anger over illegal immigration and rising support for the far right, Germany’s Social Democrat-led government on Monday reinstated border checks with neighboring countries, prompting worries over the future of Europe’s core principle that people and goods can move freely across borders.
Security checks went into effect along Germany’s land borders with France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Denmark. Since last year, similar checks already were in place on its borders with Poland, the Czech Republic and Switzerland. Border controls with Austria have been in place since 2015, the year Germany was rocked by massive flows of asylum seekers stemming from the civil war in Syria.
Monday’s move was a blow to the European Union’s central principle that people and goods must be allowed to move freely across the bloc, without passport checks. The border-free regime was encapsulated in the 1985 Schengen Agreement and came into effect in 1995, transforming Europe.
Across Europe, though, this principle has been eroded as governments tighten their borders in response to large migrant flows, terrorist attacks and the coronavirus pandemic. The European Court of Justice, the EU’s high court, has ruled against long-term border checks, but the European Commission, the executive branch, has ignored the court and let governments carry on enforcing border controls.
The government of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, a Social Democrat, cited a series of suspected Islamist attacks as the reason for the border checks. Last month, three people were killed in a knife rampage in the western city of Solingen, in which the Syrian suspect was slated for deportation but evaded law enforcement.
Nancy Faeser, the interior minister, said Germany must “protect against the acute dangers posed by Islamist terrorism and serious crime.”
But political considerations are behind the border checks, experts said.
“This is a decision driven by German politics, and German politics alone,” said Jeremy Ghez, an economics and international affairs professor at HEC Paris, in an email.
‘Unprecedented’ border checks
Anti-immigration sentiment is flourishing in Germany and opposition parties — the center-right Christian Democrats, the far-right Alternative for Germany and a new left-wing party led by Sahra Wagenknecht — have all called for tighter controls.
Badly bruised by election losses and extremely low popularity, Scholz and his coalition partners, the Greens and pro-business Free Democrats, have taken a harsher line on immigration too.
Ghez said Germany’s border checks are “in complete contradiction with the spirit of the Schengen Treaty.”
“The form this has taken is unprecedented, and this makes it worrisome for the very future of the EU project,” he said.
Heiner Flassbeck, a German economist, said the border checks send a dreadful signal to the rest of Europe, do little to solve the problems of migration and crime and make no economic sense.
“It’s ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous,” he said in a telephone interview. “It doesn’t solve any problem. It’s a show policy to give the German people the idea that we are doing something on migration.”
As a regular commuter by car between Germany and France, Flassbeck said he was distressed to see armed German police at the border over the weekend.
“You cross the border as a French person and you see a German policeman standing with a machine gun on the border,” he said. He added with sarcasm: “That’s wonderful! That’s Europe!”
He worried the border checks will undermine the EU project of integrating economies and societies.
“It’s a symbol of German ignorance concerning Europe,” he said. “It will show everyone who passes the border how ignorant the Germans are and how little they understand about Europe and the European idea and everything we’ve been talking about for 50 years.”
At previously unmanned border crossings, German police now are stationed with orders to stop vehicles they deem suspicious. Vehicles must slow at the crossings to allow police time to inspect them. There were no reports of major traffic interruptions on Monday and police have said they will seek not to disrupt the flow of traffic.
“They look at the people,” Flassbeck said. “If you have a black face or a brown face, you’re stopped. It’s absolutely clear that an old man, a white man, like me, in a Mercedes will not get stopped.”
Germany’s interior ministry said police will not resort to racial profiling at the border crossings.
“A racially motivated implementation of police measures would be completely unacceptable and also illegal,” a ministry spokesman said, as reported by Deutsche Welle, a German public broadcaster. “We want people to be able to trust the security authorities.”
German authorities said they will target delivery vans because they are used often by human smugglers, and will stop vehicles based on criteria such as “locations, time periods, age structures or even conspicuous behavior.”
Andreas Rosskopf, the head of Germany’s Federal Police Union, told the broadcaster RBB24 Inforadio that anyone crossing the border into Germany should expect to be checked.
Winfried Kluth, a law professor at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg in Germany who specializes in migration issues, said Germany is likely violating EU laws with its long-running checks along the border with Austria.
“It is quite illegal because normally you can make those border controls for six months and then you can say we need it more, up to two years,” he said. “Some of the border controls have existed for more than two years.”
Although the European Court of Justice has ruled against countries enforcing border checks for lengthy periods of time, the European Commission has not stopped governments from doing that. The commission approves requests to impose border checks, which are often related to emergencies and special occasions, such as international sporting events like the Summer Olympics in Paris this summer.
In reality, Kluth said the Scholz government has taken a cautious approach by not imposing even stricter border controls. He said the government didn’t want to cause economic disruptions with lengthy border checks.
He said the government wanted to send the message to the public that it was doing something, “but at the same time respecting the interests of the economy.”
The Christian Democrats, Germany’s main opposition party, have called for even tougher border controls.
Kluth said Scholz also may have opted for a softer approach due to strains on police forces and to avoid a scenario where Germany was unable to detain all the people it took in crossing its borders without proper documentation.
“If we find many irregular migrants and we cannot detain them, which would be the case if there are too many irregular migrants, that would also be a disaster,” he said.
He added that tougher border controls may become permissible under a tough new set of EU-wide rules designed to curb migration that come into effect in 2026.
“Some of the things that are done now — and which are perhaps illegal — will be legal under the new regulation,” he said.
Courthouse News reporter Cain Burdeau is based in the European Union.