Europe Unbound provides an analysis of the enlargement of the European Unionand examines from both a theoretical and a political perspective issues such as:

• Where does Europe end?• Should Europe’s borders be open or closed?• How does the evolution of territorial politics impact on the course of

European integration?

The book focuses on the evolving scope and nature of borders in Europe. Itdiscusses how dilemmas of inclusion and exclusion could be handled in the newEurope; how new borders will change the geopolitical map; and who should bein charge of border policing and administration. It also looks at patterns ofmigration between current and future EU members; examines ethnic minorityproblems in the applicant states; and analyses the threat of transnational crimeacross the new borders of the Union. Special attention is devoted to the easternenlargement of the European Union.

This book draws upon such diverse fields as History, Sociology, PoliticalScience and International Relations and contains contributions from an interna-tional range of respected academics.

Jan Zielonka is Professor of Political Science at the European UniversityInstitute in Florence, Italy. His recent books include Explaining Euro-Paralysis andDemocratic Consolidation in Eastern Europe, Volumes One and Two.

Europe Unbound

1 Russian Messianism:Third Rome, revolution, communism and afterPeter J.S. Duncan

2 European Integration and the Postmodern ConditionGovernance, democracy, identityPeter van Ham

3 Nationalism in Italian PoliticsThe stories of the Northern League, 1980–2000Damian Tambini

4 Uncertain EuropeBuilding a new European security orderEdited by Graham Timmins and Martin Smith

5 Widening the European Union:The politics of institutional change and reformBernard Steunenberg

6 Institutional Challenges in the European UnionEdited by Madeleine Hosli, Adrian van Deemen and Mika Widgrén

7 Europe UnboundEnlarging and reshaping the boundaries of the European UnionEdited by Jan Zielonka

Routledge Advances in European Politics

Edited by Jan Zielonka

London and New York

Europe UnboundEnlarging and reshaping theboundaries of the European Union

First published 2002 by Routledge11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canadaby Routledge29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

© 2002 Selection and editorial matter, Jan Zielonka; the individualchapters, the contributors

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted orreproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafterinvented, including photocopying and recording, or in anyinformation storage or retrieval system, without permission inwriting from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication DataA catalog record for this book has been requested

ISBN 0–415–28253–5

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003.

ISBN 0-203-21709-8 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-27308-7 (Adobe eReader Format) (Print Edition)

List of tables viiList of contributors viiiPreface ixList of abbreviations xi

1 Introduction: Boundary making by the European Union 1JA N Z I E L O N K A

2 Does Europe need a frontier?: from territorial to redistributive community 17C H A R L E S S . M A I E R

3 Fixed borders or moving borderlands?: a new type ofborder for a new type of entity 38P I E R R E H A S S N E R

4 Facing the ‘desert of Tartars’: the Eastern border ofEurope 51A L I NA M U N G I U - P I P P I D I

5 Where does Europe end?: dilemmas of inclusion and exclusion 78W I L L I A M WA L L AC E

6 The geopolitical implications of enlargement 95C H R I S TO P H E R H I L L

7 Ethnic minorities and long-term implications of EUenlargement 117A N D R É L I E B I C H

Contents

8 Politics versus law in the EU’s approach to ethnic minorities 137B RU N O D E W I T T E

9 Transnational migration in the enlarged European Union 161E WA M O R AW S K A

10 Illegal migration and cross-border crime: challenges at the eastern frontier of the European Union 191E B E R H A R D B O RT

11 Border regimes, police cooperation and security in an enlarged European Union 213D I D I E R B I G O

12 The future border regime of the European Union: enlargement and implications of the Amsterdam Treaty 240M A L C O L M A N D E R S O N

Index 257

vi Contents

1.1 Types of territorial boundaries 54.1 Territorial nationalism in selected European countries 534.2 EU applicant countries: selected indicators 574.3 Regulation of work permits in EU countries 584.4 East European would-be workers in the EU 594.5 Numbers of Roma in selected EU countries 604.6 Rule of law in Eastern Europe: selected indicators 63

Tables

Malcolm Anderson is Senior Fellow at the Centre of European Policy Studies,Brussels.

Didier Bigo is maître de conférences des universités à l’Institut d’ÉtudesPolitiques de Paris.

Eberhard Bort is Academic Co-ordinator at the Institute of Governance,University of Edinburgh.

Bruno de Witte is Professor of Law at the European University Institute,Florence.

Pierre Hassner is Senior Research Associate at the Centre d’Études et deRecherches Internationales in Paris.

Christopher Hill is Montague Burton Professor of International Relations atthe London School of Economics and Political Science.

André Liebich is Professor of International History and Politics, GraduateInstitute of International Studies, Geneva.

Charles S. Maier is Krupp Foundation Professor of European Studies andmember of the History Department at Harvard University.

Ewa Morawska is Professor of Sociology and History at the University ofPennsylvania.

Alina Mungiu-Pippidi is Professor of Political Science at the RomanianNational School of Government, Bucharest.

William Wallace is Professor of International Relations at the London Schoolof Economics and Political Science.

Jan Zielonka is Professor of Political Science at the European UniversityInstitute, Florence.

Contributors

This book represents a follow-up to my book Explaining Euro-Paralysis (1998).There I argued that fixing the EU’s borders, but keeping them relatively open,would help the Union to address the questions of identity and democracy thatwere found to be at the root of Euro-paralysis. However, I soon realized that thisproposal is problematic on both practical and conceptual grounds. In fact, theUnion decided to do the opposite: it began to harden its external borders, butremained ambiguous about their future reach. Once at a conference in Prague Ishared my thoughts and doubts with Anna Michalski from the Forward StudiesUnit of the European Commission and we decided to elaborate a researchproposal entitled The Long-Term Implications of EU Enlargement: The Nature of the

New Border. The objective of the project was to learn more about the evolvingnature of European borders and about the various implications of moving theseborders further east. Yves Mény and Jérôme Vignon, at the time directors of theRobert Schuman Centre and the Forward Studies Unit, endorsed the proposal.Both institutions provided financial and organizational support for the creationof a special Reflection Group that was to meet six times over two years andproduce a series of policy reports focusing on the borders of the enlargedEuropean Union. For each meeting we commissioned two academic papers, andthis book is largely comprised of the revised drafts of these papers. Interim andfinal policy reports from the project have already been published and are avail-able via the Internet: <http://www.iue.it/RSC/PublicationsRSC-PP.htm>.

I owe a special debt of gratitude to members of the Reflection Group whodebated early drafts of chapters from this book: Giuliano Amato (chairman),Judy Batt (rapporteur), Maarten Brands, Lord Dahrendorf, Jean-MarieGuéhenno, Elemér Hankiss, Christopher Hill, José María Maravall, KrzysztofMichalski, Jacques Rupnik, Aleksander Smolar, Rüdiger Stephan and RenateWeber. Never before have I had the pleasure of working with such a thoughtful,inspiring and collegial group of academics, and their contribution was crucial incompleting this book. Several officials from the European Commission andprofessors from the European University Institute have also contributed to indi-vidual discussions and my thanks are extended to them as well. Although none ofthe sponsoring institutions is responsible for the individual arguments presentedin this book, this project could hardly be realized without their generous help.

Preface

Special thanks go to Ania Krok-Paszkowska, who helped me to edit themanuscript, and to Angelika Lanfranchi, who provided secretarial help. HeidiBagtazo and Grace McInnes from Routledge assured the smooth and speedyproduction of the book. Above all I am indebted to the authors of the individualchapters for all the effort, talent, persistence and devotion invested in successivedrafts of their contributions.

Jan Zielonka

January 2002

xii Preface

AFSP Association Française de Science Politique

BGS Bundesgrenzschutz

BKA Bundeskriminalamt

CAP Common Agricultural PolicyCEECs Central and East European countriesCFSP Common Foreign and Security PolicyCIS Commonwealth of Independent StatesCSCE Conference on Security and Cooperation in EuropeCSU Christian Socialist UnionDST Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire

ECE East Central EuropeECJ European Court of JusticeEEC European Economic CommunityEEE East Eastern EuropeEMU European Monetary UnionEU European UnionE–W East–WestFH Freedom HouseGATT General Agreement on Tariffs and TradeIGC Inter-Governmental ConferenceILEA International Law Enforcement AcademyILO International Labour OrganizationIOM International Organization for MigrationJHA Justice and Home AffairsNAFTA North American Free Trade AgreementNATO North Atlantic Treaty OrganizationNGOs non-governmental organizationsOECD Organization for Economic Cooperation and DevelopmentOSCE Organization for Security and Cooperation in EuropePHARE Pologne, Hongrie: Assistance à la Reconstruction Économique

RG Renseignements Généraux

SCTIP Service de Cooperation Technique Internationale de Police

SIS Schengen Information System

Abbreviations

TOC transnational organized crimeUN United NationsUNHCR United Nations High Commission for RefugeesWEU Western European Union

xiv Abbreviations

Europe’s borders are again in flux, causing problems and anxiety. The Cold Warborder between the East and West was imposed arbitrarily in defiance of historyand culture, but it was firm and stable. There was little trade and mobility acrossthis border, and those who did venture to cross it were subjected to strict andoften humiliating scrutiny by border guards with dogs and machine guns.However, in 1989 a euphoric crowd dismantled the Berlin Wall – the epitome ofthe East–West border. The Soviet empire subsequently collapsed, partly becausethe idea of making Europe ‘whole and free’ motivated resistance to it. Yet thelegacy of the Cold War divide persists and Europe has found it difficult toresolve the complex issues of borders, frontiers and mobility.1

The European Union is the key actor trying to cope with these new borderissues, and one of its prime strategies in this endeavour is to enlarge to the East.2

However, implementation of this strategy is confronted with mounting practicalproblems and conceptual dilemmas. Various gaps in terms of democracy,economics and culture still persist despite all efforts to make both parts ofEurope more compatible. Accepting new and to a degree incompatible statesinto the Union cannot but affect the already existing system of European inte-gration. Enlarging the Union to include only some, more compatiblepost-communist countries replaces old dividing lines by new ones, with poten-tially destabilizing implications for the entire continent. Moreover, the keyaspects of European integration – the single market and the Schengen system –make it more rather than less difficult for outsiders to enter the integratedEuropean space. While internal borders among EU member states are graduallybeing abolished, external EU borders are being tightened up. The SchengenManual for the External Frontier, containing common rules that provide forstrict controls, has added to a series of other judicial and security measures envis-aged by the Schengen Convention. Those who aspire to join the Union areasked to comply with the Schengen acquis and harden their borders.

Although the Schengen regime is largely about the free movement of people,judicial assistance and police cooperation, in some sections of public opinion inEastern Europe it has come to be regarded as an imposed regime with discrimi-natory implications. For many in the post-communist part of Europe, Schengenhas become a symbol of exclusion of the poor and allegedly less civilized

1 IntroductionBoundary making by the EuropeanUnion

Jan Zielonka

European nations by wealthy and arrogantly superior ones.3 The problem is notonly about a rising gap between symbolic politics and realpolitik, the formerreflecting psycho-cultural anxieties, the latter relating to legal and administrativenecessities. Since the fall of communism, the Schengen system has evolved in adirection not originally envisaged by the signatory states: the fears of massmigration from an impoverished and crisis ridden ‘East’ have prompted WestEuropean governments to reassure their voters that the abolition of internal EUfrontier controls would be complemented by the preservation of tough externalborder controls. Thus the implementation of Schengen has been accompaniedby a new emphasis on tightening up of immigration controls, curbing flows ofasylum seekers, increasing visa restrictions, widening the scope of secret datacollection on personae non grata and mixing crime and migration. The terroristattacks on New York and Washington DC on 11 September 2001 reinforcedfurther the arguments for tightening up borders, including those in Europe.

This book attempts to analyse this complex set of problems from both a polit-ical and a theoretical perspective. It is about the evolving nature, characteristicsand scope of EU borders. The scope of borders largely depends on the degree ofdiversity the Union is able to import and digest in the course of enlargement. Italso depends on the reaction of external actors to an EU with an ever-greatergeographical reach. The nature of borders largely depends on the degree towhich these borders are open or closed and the extent to which they are part ofthe EU governance system rather than limited to national systems. The type andscope of borders may well be determined by different factors, but they areclosely interlinked. For instance, the Union may well afford to have a ‘fuzzy’ typeof border with Slovakia (assuming this country is not included in the first wave ofenlargement), but not with Russia or Iraq (after eventual inclusion of Turkey).Also the internal and external characteristics of borders are closely interlinked.These linkages are even more crucial if we approach the borders from a theoret-ical perspective of governance and state building.

This book devotes special attention to the problems resulting from the instal-lation of a relatively harder EU border as envisaged by the Schengen regime andthe single market. A hard border sharpens the distinction between members andnon-members of the EU, producing an exclusion complex. It makes a greatdifference in both objective and subjective terms whether a country is on theright side of the border. Hence, the pressure for EU membership is growing andis becoming unmanageable. A hard border seems also at odds with the pressureson the EU from global economic competition. Globalization and interdepen-dence may render prohibitive the costs of controlling the flow of goods, capital,services and people across borders. Moreover, the main argument used to justifythe hard external border does not seem plausible. There is little evidence thatattempts to control terrorism, international crime and migration at the EU’srigid border are effective. In fact, a hard border creates extra demand for orga-nized cross-border crime.

It can also be argued that the ‘fortress’ impulse undermines the coherence,moral authority and international credibility of the EU. The future scope of EU

2 Jan Zielonka

borders is important, but so is the nature of the future EU border regime.Defining the borders of the EU should not imply closing them. Of course,borders by their very nature divide and exclude. However, the actual (and desir-able) degree of exclusion and access should be carefully scrutinized. Likewise,there is no reason to treat EU borders in state-centric linear terms. The linearconcept of a border emerged only some 150 years ago, and it is linked to anabsolute and now largely outdated notion of sovereignty. More flexible types ofborder arrangements worked well in various historical contexts, starting with theRoman concept of limes or the French concept of marche, both treating theborder more as a geographical zone than a clear line. In fact, for centuries EastCentral European countries had loose border areas and ‘marches’ rather thansealed types of borders.

However, can one apply medieval concepts to modern or possibly ‘post-modern’ institutions such as the European Union?4 What would a soft, flexibleand functionally overlapping border regime imply in practice? And can onerestore loose ‘limes’ or ‘marches’ in a Europe characterized by a much differenttypes and levels of cross-border mobility? This book assumes that it is virtuallyimpossible to address these kinds of questions in a purely technical or adminis-trative manner. This is because borders ‘are not simply lines on maps where onejurisdiction ends and another begins. … Borders are political institutions: norule-bound economic, social or political life can function without them.’5 In fact,Max Weber and generations of his disciples have argued that the whole historyof human organizations could largely be read as a series of continuing efforts tobring territorial borders to correspond to and coincide with systemic functionalboundaries, and to be in line with the consolidated socio-political hierarchies ofcorresponding populations.6 This book will look at the EU’s borders from thisbroad theoretical perspective.

This introductory chapter cannot do justice to all the diverse, complex and attimes conflicting arguments elaborated in this book by individual authors. But Iwill try to show and explain the sequence, rationale and implications of thesearguments, and point to their broader theoretical context. I will first demonstratethe crucial role of borders in shaping the very nature of political systems. Theextension of this argument is that the scope and type of borders of the Unionwill determine the profile of the EU itself. Second, I will try to assess the futurescope of EU borders resulting from enlargement. The further the Unionexpands, the more diversity it will import. This will have serious implications forthe Union’s cultural identity, economic path of development and model ofgovernment. The geopolitical implications of extending the EU further east andsouth will also be very serious. For all these reasons, the Union cannot expandendlessly, even though there is no rational or ‘natural’ way to draw boundaries ofthe European Union. I will therefore argue that the Union is likely to remainambiguous about its future reach. Expansion is set to be open-ended, incre-mental and based on largely arbitrary and often vague criteria. This will shapethe nature of Euro-polity and influence its neighbours’ reaction to it. Third, thisintroduction examines various possible border types. What will determine the

Introduction 3

degree of openness and closure of EU borders? Are these borders to be adminis-tered by the Union or by individual member states? I will show in particular thatmaintaining a hard border regime is increasingly difficult in practice, but alsopolitically damaging, especially vis-à-vis law-abiding and economically pros-perous East European countries. But I will also argue that the degree ofpermeability of borders cannot be totally divorced from the issue of Europeangeo-strategy. The final section will try to assess the evolving nature of EUborders in the process of eastward expansion. The evidence points to theongoing change in the scope of these borders, increased disharmony betweendifferent types of borders and the emergence of fuzzy border zones to replacethe carefully guarded existing border lines. As a consequence, the Union mayincreasingly come to resemble a neo-medieval empire rather than a Westphaliansuper-state.7 The architects of enlargement should take account of these broaderimplications of boundary re-modelling.

Systems and their borders

The concepts of frontiers, borders and territory are historically determined.They have meant different things at different times and they have been employedfor different historical purposes. The 1648 Peace of Westphalia symbolized theadvent of territorial politics.8 It was at that time that the ideal of a sovereignstate controlling a given territory became prevalent. This was later to be pairedwith the ideal of the sovereign people carried on the banners of the French andAmerican revolutions. But as Charles Maier argues in his chapter, modern terri-toriality and the modern nation-state are not just a consequence of ideologicaldevelopments or legal treaties. They also depend upon the material and adminis-trative possibilities for controlling large regions on the ground. Such possibilitiesemerged in the second part of the nineteenth century with the development ofmodern forms of transportation (especially railroads), and the successful central-ization of government. Only then, Maier argues, did a new awareness of‘bounded space, a preoccupation with fixing border lines, with the demarcationof insiders and outsiders, public and private’, become truly the reality. Borderswere seen no longer as zones, but as sharp lines separating largely homogenousand centrally governed nation-states. In other words, a strict overlap wasprovided between administrative borders, military frontiers, cultural traits andmarket transaction of individual states. Table 1.1 illustrates these different typesof territorial boundaries of modern states indicating processes that led to theircreation and consolidation.

However, one should ask two basic questions. Is this ideal of a sovereign terri-torial state still valid in the twenty-first century? And can we apply this ideal of aterritorial state to the European Union? Several chapters in this book providenegative answers to these questions, but usually with some important qualifica-tions.

Charles Maier in his chapter shows how globalization is undermining thecapacity of nation-states to maintain discrete political, cultural and economic

4 Jan Zielonka

space within their administrative boundaries. In his view, the decisive changestook place between the late 1960s and the end of the 1970s. National economicsovereignty in particular has been eroded by massive international labour andcapital flows that constrain governments’ abilities to defend their countries’economic interests. The economic basis of public life has also been reorientedwith the demise of Fordism. Moreover, the basic class configuration that createdthe old territorial order has disappeared: ‘the new elite at the centre reaps therewards of being adept at transnational control of information and symbols,’Maier argues.

Pierre Hassner in his chapter also points to the evolving trend towards ‘inter-penetration between the interior and the exterior of states and organizations’producing virtual ‘de-borderization’. Christopher Hill confirms that theorists ofpolitics and international relations increasingly call into question polarities suchas those between the domestic and external environments, between the state andworld society, and between agents and structures. Several other chapters clearlyshow that it is no longer possible to control trans-border flows, suppress multiplecultural identities or defend particular lines of demarcation. Ewa Morawska,Eberhard Bort, Didier Bigo and Malcolm Anderson illustrate, in particular, thateven carefully guarded and technically well-equipped borders can hardly stopterrorists, criminals and other unwanted migrants in an age of cascading inter-dependence and globalization. The tragic events of 11 September 2001 have ledto further tightening of border controls, but they are unlikely to halt the ongoingprocess of globalization and interdependence.

The notion of a sovereign, territorial state has thus been eroded and it is farfrom certain that the European Union itself will ever become such a state. So far,the European Union has been anything but a classical territorial state. It has noproper government, no fixed territory, no army or traditional diplomatic service

Introduction 5

Table 1.1 Types of territorial boundaries

The boundary is defined in terms of:

market transactions cultural traits force military/

coercion claims

politico-administrative

claims

The limitssurrounding theterritories aredefined as:

fringes (confinium) margins (finis) frontiers (limes) borders (terminus)

These limits arecreated andconsolidated bythe processes of:

market building nation building state building functional regimebuilding

Focal point foroperationalizationof the territory:

economic rights,property rights,exchange options,factors’ mobility,common currency

membership spacecharacterized bythe traits of theinhabitants(language, relig-ion, ethnicity)

central repressiveand extractiveagencies

political-socialrights, regulatorysystems (education,welfare, labourmarket)

Source: Stefano Bartolini, ‘Exit Options, Boundary Building, Political Restructuring’, Florence, European UniverstityInstitute Working Paper, SPS, no.1, 1998, p. 25.

– it even lacks a normal legal status.9 The Union increasingly acts in concentriccircles or variable geometry due to various opt-outs negotiated by individualmember states in the areas of foreign, monetary or social policy. At the sametime its laws and regulations are increasingly being applied by East Europeanstates that are not as yet EU members. The Union also lacks a strong andcoherent sense of cultural identity, let alone of a European patria. Nor is there aEuropean political demos. In short, a particular form of territoriality – ‘disjointed,fixed, and mutually exclusive’, to use John Gerard Ruggie’s words – is no longerthe basis of political life. In fact, Ruggie argues that the Union is a champion in‘unbundling territoriality’.10

Other scholars disagree with this assessment. In their view the Union is in aprocess of acquiring all the characteristics of a territorial state and we simplylack a sufficient time-perspective to make a proper judgement concerning itsprogress. Besides, the demise of territoriality is not assured either. There arestrong arguments for trying to prevent such a demise, and in fact various politicalforces are trying to raise rather than lower borders and to reinstate sovereignauthority within them. Pierre Hassner in his chapter talks about ‘nostalgia forroots and for walls’ as a reaction to ‘new nomadism’ that tries to overcomeborders and transcend territoriality. Malcolm Anderson talks about deeplyrooted ‘dispositions in favour of inviolability and intangibility of borders’ and awidely held view that frontiers are ‘inseparable from the entities that theyenclose’. He points out that for many Europeans the maintenance of territorialsovereignty is a necessary condition of true democracy. Borders are also seen as aprecondition of security. William Wallace argues that boundaries enable socialsystems to relate to their environment in a regular and predictable way and it istherefore hard to imagine any system without clearly defined boundaries. In hisview, ‘[t]he distinctions between internal and external security, between sharedtaxation and redistribution and “external” programmes of economic assistance,between citizens and aliens, between domestic law and international law, are allintrinsic to the modern state.’

This division between ‘territorialists’ and ‘globalists’, to use Charles Maier’sexpression, is currently at the centre of political discourse and it is also present inthis book. The former, as Pierre Hassner reminds us, echo Rousseau’s argumentsabout the virtues of internal cohesion of a political unit secured by sharp, linearborders designating the limits of property, cultural homogeneity and militarybalances. The latter, on the other hand, echo Kant’s concern about universalmorals and about the fortunes of a broad community of people: thecosmopolitan polity, as he put it. They argue that most problems confrontingstates are transnational and sharp borders make it difficult to address them.

The division between ‘territorialists’ and ‘globalists’ cuts across existingideologies and party lines in the sense that opponents and supporters of territo-rial politics can equally be found on the left and right of the European politicalspectrum. In other words, parochial nationalists are not the only ones whodefend the principle of territoriality. Not all liberal intergovernmentalists wouldbe happy to remove clear, if not hard, borders, either at the nation-state level or

6 Jan Zielonka

at the level of the European Union. In fact, the concept of hard external EUborders as envisaged by Schengen directly challenges Ruggie’s above-mentionedassertion about the EU as a champion in ‘unbundling territoriality’. The oppo-site might in fact be the case, and this book tries to examine this issue. Is theUnion trying to rescue the principle of territoriality or to ‘unbundle’ it? Is ittrying to harden and fix its borders or is it trying to make them more open andfuzzy? And what is likely to happen regardless of all plans and intentions?Enlargement of the Union is basically about borders and territoriality and assuch represents an ideal case study.

Our findings may prove crucial in determining the very nature of theemerging Euro-polity. In other words, the scope and type of the future EU’sborders are likely to be most crucial in shaping the nature of the EU as a polit-ical system. ‘Tell me what your borders are and I will tell you who you are’ mightbe the motto of this volume. The established scope and nature of EU borderswill tell us whether the enlarged Union is likely to became a Westphalian super-state or something entirely novel.

The scope of the EU’s borders

Those who believe that the Union needs clearly defined borders should be ableto say where to place these borders on a map. However, since the end of theCold War this has proved to be a most difficult, if not impossible, task, and thisbook explains why this is so. On the one hand, there is no ‘natural’ border ofEurope based on history, geography or culture that the Union could simplyadopt as originally stipulated by the Treaty of Rome. (Its article 237 said, ‘anyEuropean state may apply to become a member of the Community.’) On theother hand, fixing borders through a process of political bargaining is complex,costly and conflict-ridden. As the experience of the enlargement process shows,this is the case even if bargaining is based on clearly stated criteria and proce-dures.

Several chapters in this book argue that defining borders in cultural, historicalor geographical terms is virtually impossible. As William Wallace puts it in hischapter,

Europe as a cultural and geographic region cannot be clearly defined: thediversity of images of Europe is too wide to provide a sense of identitycommon to citizens of Lisbon and Madrid, Helsinki and Stockholm, Pragueand Warsaw, Thessaloniki and Palermo.11

Christopher Hill points to the fact that when the European Communities usedcultural and geographic arguments to refute Morocco’s application for member-ship, they were accused of colonialism and racism. One does not need to beculturally agnostic to understand that it is difficult to prevent a country fromjoining the Union because it is predominantly Muslim rather than Christian orbecause it had the historic misfortune to be swallowed up by the Ottoman rather

Introduction 7

than the Habsburg Empire. Of course, as Alina Mungiu-Pippidi argues in herchapter, cultural stereotypes, or, as she puts it, after Václav Havel, ‘walls in ourheads’, cannot but have some influence on European decision-makers. ‘[E]venimagined borders can, at times, if we are dealing with widespread perceptions,turn into real borders,’ she argues. Nevertheless, the official policy of the Unionis to select the new member states (and by the same token to draw the newexternal borders of the Union) along more tangible criteria than history, geog-raphy and culture.

These criteria were initially spelt out at the 1993 European Council inCopenhagen, and later specified in a special blueprint for enlargement: Agenda

2000. The applicant countries must have stable institutions guaranteeing democ-racy, the rule of law, human rights and the protection of minorities. They musthave a functioning market economy as well as the capacity to cope with competi-tive pressures and market forces within the Union. And they must have theability to take on the obligations of membership, including the adherence to theaims of political, economic and monetary union. The Union insists, in partic-ular, that the applicant countries must adopt the entire set of laws and rulesexisting in the Union, the so-called acquis communautaire, prior to accession.

The Union not only spelt out the criteria for accession, it also agreed on theprocedure of ‘screening’ the applicant countries’ progress of meeting thesecriteria and of selecting new member states accordingly. The purpose was toassure objectivity and predictability of the selection process. In reality, however,this selection process proved to be anything but predictable and objective,leaving the future EU’s borders in limbo. Several chapters in this book explainwhy laying down Europe’s borders has proved so complex and difficult. First ofall, there is a problem with the admission criteria and their interpretation. Manyof the admission criteria are prone to abuse and manipulation because they areconfusing, contradictory or inconsequential. For instance, some criteria are veryvague (like that concerning democracy) while others are extremely detailed (likethose concerning competition regulation). Several criteria are in conflict (e.g.adopting the requested environmental standards will undermine rather thanenhance the candidates’ capacity to cope with competitive pressures). And thereare also some criteria for membership that even the current members are notexpected to meet. As Bruno de Witte shows in his chapter, insistence on minorityprotection in the candidate states is ‘inconsistent’ or even ‘hypocritical’.

There is a problem not only with the admission criteria themselves, but alsowith their implementation. It took current EU members many decades to arriveat common laws and similar administrative practices, but it is clear that theaccession of candidates to the Union cannot be put off for so long. The selectionprocess of the candidates is therefore increasingly politicized and uncertain,making it virtually impossible to predict who in the end will join the Union,when and why.

Second, the admission criteria hardly mention security considerations, but asthe chapters of Hassner, Wallace, Hill and Bigo clearly show, these securityconsiderations are crucial in deciding the future scope of EU’s borders. In fact,

8 Jan Zielonka

in the aftermath of the war in Kosovo the Union began to engage more in theBalkans than in Central Europe, although the former are much less advanced inmeeting the Copenhagen criteria than the latter. As Pierre Hassner points out inhis chapter, Bulgaria and Romania, for instance, were allowed to open accessionnegotiations in December 1999 as a reward for their role in the Kosovo crisisand not for their progress in legal and economic reforms. But the Union cannotonly worry about its acquis communautaire; it also must provide a secure interna-tional environment. Failure to stabilize its post-communist courtyard is bound tocreate pressure on the EU’s borders and on the Union itself.

Third, keeping the prospect of enlargement open provides the Union witheffective international leverage. Many countries on the continent are willing tomodify their behaviour in line with EU wishes in the hope of obtaining EUmembership. Fixing borders would deprive the Union of part of its attractionand would de-motivate if not frustrate countries that are left out. Moreover, bynot establishing clear territorial boundaries, the EU may avoid antagonizingpotential enemies and instead be able to coax them to join. If Ukraine, Turkeyor even Russia have the prospect of joining the Union at some point, there is lessreason for them to fear successive waves of enlargement of the previously‘suspect’ Western club.

Fourth, setting limits on the number of countries to be admitted to the Uniondoes not necessarily solve the future scope of EU borders. This is becauseborders of the candidate states from Eastern and South-Eastern Europe areoften being questioned. Alina Mungiu-Pippidi quotes data in her chapterrevealing that a majority of East Europeans (compared with less than a third ofWest Europeans) considers their borders ‘wrong’. André Liebich’s chapterprovides historical and cultural explanation for this widespread contention of theexisting borders in the region.

Fifth, and probably most crucially in our context, the Union has little choicebut to follow a policy of enlargement in stages with many functional transitionperiods at each stage. All the current candidate countries cannot join at the sametime since their progress in meeting the admission criteria is very unequal. Thisis not only a matter of rewarding regional champions and providing extra moti-vation for the laggards; it is also a matter of the Union’s internal functioning.Importing too much divergence from Eastern Europe at the same time will affectthe Union’s internal identity and efficiency. Moreover, formal admission to theUnion will most likely be accompanied by transition periods in various func-tional fields, complicating the border issue even further. For instance, underpressure from the German government the European Commission suggestedthat free movement of labour would not be extended to new member states fromthe day of their accession. Similar transition periods will probably be applied inthe field of the Schengen acquis. New members could sign up to Schengen fromday one, but in practice implementation of free movement would depend on thesubsequent assent of all Schengen members to opening borders, and this couldtake a considerable time. This means that we will have different scopes ofborders in different functional fields for some considerable period. This will be

Introduction 9

coupled with ongoing uncertainty about who will join the Union and when. Thecurrent list of applicants is likely to grow, the progress of meeting the admissioncriteria is likely to be diversified and erratic, and various external pressures willalso emerge, making it difficult for the Union to fix the scope of its borders onceand for all. This is why Christopher Hill observes in his chapter: ‘Enlargementhas neither a single decision-point nor a clear end-point. It is a virtually contin-uous and long-drawn-out process.’

Open-ended incrementalism may have its advantages, but it implies that theborders of the Union will remain ambiguous and fluid for many years to come.In other words, the important prerequisite of a Westphalian territorial type ofstate can hardly be met in view of the forthcoming open-ended enlargement instages. The Union’s borders will be neither fixed nor linear. The question is, willthey become closed or open?

The nature of the EU’s borders

One can argue that it is difficult to seal borders that are neither fixed nor linear,but the official policy of the Union suggests that hard external borders will bethe norm nevertheless. This is the essence of the Schengen acquis, and candidatestates are asked to adopt this acquis as a key precondition of EU membership.Tighter border controls and introduction of a Schengen visa are the clearestmanifestations of the hard border regime. Several chapters in this book examinewhether hardening the EU’s external borders is a desirable and achievableobjective. The answers provided are negative, with only a few important qualifi-cations. The authors argue, in particular, that a hard border regime does notnecessarily help mitigate concerns about cross-border crime and migration. Atthe same time, hard borders hamper profitable trade, alienate the EU’s currentand future neighbours and jeopardize the existing Western system of civic rightsand freedoms.

First of all, there is little statistical evidence to substantiate widespread fears ofmass migration from Eastern Europe. As Ewa Morawska’s chapter shows, migra-tion from this region is likely to remain relatively low, with positive rather thannegative overall economic implications for the current member states.12 Mostmigrants from the candidate states are so-called ‘worker-tourists’ taking advan-tage of visa-free travel to the EU. They leave their families behind during theirstay abroad and make no demands on medical insurance, unemployment bene-fits, social security or public education in the receiver-states. Admitting the tencurrent applicant countries from Eastern and Central Europe would move theincentive for labour migration further east. But also in this case the pattern ofmigration is similar to the previous one: so far it has usually consisted of ‘worker-tourists’ crossing the eastern borders of the candidate states. Moreover, theirnumbers are comparatively low. For instance, in Germany there are more resi-dents from tiny Hungary than from the entire former USSR.13

Arguments for a hard border regime to stem ever-rising cross-border crimeare linked to symbolic rather than ‘real’ politics. As Eberhard Bort shows in his

10 Jan Zielonka

chapter, on the German side of the Polish–German border the number ofprofessional border guards has been increased dramatically in recent years andspecial ‘civic guards’ have been formed, even though the statistics show thatcriminality in the border region is no higher than in the rest of the country.Since the Polish–German border is soon likely to become an internal EU border,much of this investment may prove redundant anyway.

Of course, this is not to suggest that a benign attitude should be adoptedtowards crime, but the policy of hardening the EU’s borders is not necessarilyhelping to combat it.14 In fact, most specialists argue that hardening the bordersfor goods and people creates a lucrative market for transnational criminalsinvolved in illegal trafficking and smuggling. Specialists also argue thatcombating organized cross-border crime at a border is largely ineffective. (Thesame can be said about combating international terrorism.) Effective policing isdone not at border checkpoints, but in a broader border zone or even within theentire territory of crime-exporting and crime-importing countries.15 Improvingpolice and security cooperation between countries rather than investing in largenumbers of border guards or in expensive surveillance equipment is seen as themost efficient way of combating cross-border crime. But as Didier Bigo shows inhis chapter, EU member states seem more interested in promoting their ownnational style of policing in Eastern Europe and in selling them their own bordersurveillance technology than in sharing intelligence, let alone responsibility, inthe process of combating cross-border crime.

The demand for and the utility of hard borders are therefore overstated. Atthe same time, hard borders may be a source of some considerable problems.First of all, the policy of hard external borders would make it difficult for theUnion to handle the problem of national minorities in post-Cold War Europe.As André Liebich’s chapter shows, millions of people in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe live on the ‘wrong’ side of a border. Restricting their freecross-border movement would have serious cultural and political implications.Hungarian minorities in Ukraine and Serbia (and possibly also in Romania) arelikely to suffer most in this context.

One can also envisage negative economic implications of hardening theborders between the new EU member states and their neighbours further southand east. For instance, the reintroduction of the visa requirement betweenPoland and Ukraine has drastically reduced cross-border trade and investment,causing severe economic problems, especially in the border regions.16 As EwaMorawska points out in her chapter, prior to the introduction of tighter bordercontrols, the value of goods purchased by Ukrainian tourist traders alone repre-sented nearly 50 per cent of the value of Poland’s official exports to that country.

Hardening the borders may also have damaging security implications. AsPierre Hassner, Alina Mungiu-Pippidi and Christopher Hill clearly show in theirchapters, the policy of respecting existing borders, but keeping them relativelyopen for those living on the ‘wrong’ side of them. is seen as the only workableway of avoiding renewed inter-ethnic tension in the Balkans, which are only nowemerging from a decade of bloody war. This also supports the progress made

Introduction 11

over the last decade by the countries of Central and Eastern Europe in over-coming historic animosities and implementing minority rights.17 Moreover, hardborders produce suspicion and a feeling of exclusion that may also cause securityproblems. For instance, as Christopher Hill rightly remarks:

If the contrast becomes too marked between a large, inclusive and increas-ingly prosperous EU and a stagnant Russia, then the scenario of revivednationalism leading to disputes with the Baltic states and possibly otherwestern neighbours will not seem so remote. In these circumstances it willnot take much for the EU and Russia to start looking like security threats toeach other, and the old realist game will have recommenced.

Hardening the external borders of the EU will also hamper cross-borderregional cooperation in Europe, which is seen as one of the most effective meansof convergence and readjustment of the two parts of Europe. In the past severalyears the European Union has tried to stimulate various types of cross-bordercooperation between both current and future EU members through programmessuch as INTERREG.18 The purpose, which is seen as a prerequisite for anyfurther European integration, is to enhance ‘constructive multilateralism’ and‘interconnectedness’ with immediate neighbours. As Thomas Christiansen andKnud Erik Jørgensen have observed, in some cases this regional cooperation hasresulted in a dense network of associations, conferences and joint ventures that‘turned state borders from dividing lines between states into spaces of gover-nance in their own right’.19 Hardening the EU’s external borders would make itdifficult to continue this type of regional cooperation.

Last but not least, a hardening of the external borders is in conflict with theset of political values the European Union is trying to identify with. As DidierBigo puts it in his chapter:

The right of European citizens and legal residents to move and reside freelywithin the territory of the EU is one of the most important assets of EUdemocracy. At the normative level, this right cannot be undermined by thecreation of second-class citizens in Eastern Europe without seriouslydamaging the principles of the EU and creating significant resentment.

In its foreign policy, the Union is also committed to overcoming rather than (re-)reating divisions in Europe. Its policy of enlargement, in particular, is said to beabout inclusion rather than exclusion. Hardening of the EU’s external borders isclearly in conflict with these principles.

Of course, several chapters in this book warn against adopting a zero-sumreasoning. Softening and opening of the EU’s external borders does not meanabandoning them altogether, and vice versa. For instance, the Union may trysoftening its visa policy, while at the same time insisting on strict bordercontrols.20 Moreover, as Christopher Hill puts in his chapter: ‘The question of ahard or soft outside border is closely related to that of where the enlargement of

12 Jan Zielonka

the EU will finally stop.’ Accepting Poland or the Czech Republic createsdifferent problems than accepting Turkey, Croatia or Serbia. That said, it is hardnot to draw the conclusion that the Schengen hard border regime is neithersustainable nor sensible in view of eastward enlargement.

The future shape of the EU’s borders

Since the end of the Cold War, time has seemed to be moving faster on the oldcontinent and some of the most rapid and at times fundamental changes haveconcerned borders. It is therefore very risky to make any predictions. In the lastchapter Malcolm Anderson envisages three scenarios for future developments ofcooperation in Justice and Home Affairs (JHA), although he openly acknowl-edges the speculative nature of his attempt. In his view, considerable uncertaintysurrounds such fundamental issues as the implications of the new JHA provisionsin the Treaty of Amsterdam and the Tampere programme. He also points to theuncertain effects of entry (or delayed entry) on national and cultural identities,and the ways in which ‘identity’ politics will be used by the various politicalforces in play. The evolution of global political and economic balances and theireffects on the European Union and its border regime are also unknown. Andthere is always the possibility of unexpected political crises further south or eastof the Union. Anderson adds that Europeans do not share any common percep-tions of their borders. ‘Governments of the EU do not have an elaboratedoctrine about frontiers because their frontiers are regarded, above all, as lega-cies of history,’ he argues.

Despite all the uncertainty, however, this book makes it clear that the futureborders of Europe are unlikely to be either hard or fixed. They will be, to usePierre Hassner’s words, ‘less territorial, less physical, more complex and lessvisible’. This will have several important implications for the future shape of theUnion. Instead of a ‘Schengen Europe’ we will probably have a ‘Maze Europe’in which different legal, economic, security and cultural spaces evolve indepen-dently, cross-border multiple cooperation flourishes, and the inside/outsidedivide is blurred.21 Instead of a Westphalian super-state we will probably have aneo-medieval empire characterized by overlapping authorities, dividedsovereignty, diversified institutional arrangements and multiple culturalidentities.22 As Charles Maier puts it in his chapter, Europe would need to ‘rein-vent itself beyond territoriality and outside of fixed frontiers’. This means that anew ‘unbounded’ principle of solidarity and community would have to be foundand endorsed. As Jean-Marie Guéhenno has argued: ‘Having lost the comfort ofour geographical boundaries, we must in effect rediscover what creates the bondsbetween the humans that constitute a community.’23 This also means that thenotion of democracy would need to be readjusted because the current demo-cratic rules are tailored for a clearly defined territory and a territorially defineddemos. This means that the notion of security must also be redefined and‘unbounded’. After all, terrorism and organized crime are more and more seenas the prime and most dangerous threat because they are not territorially bound.

Introduction 13

This book forces us to think in a new way about borders, not as dividing linesbetween different people and regimes, but as zones where different people,norms and rules co-exist if not mingle. It also forces us to think in a new wayabout eastward enlargement, not as a means of redrawing the map of Europe,but as a means of getting away from division in Europe for the benefit of theentire continent. And finally, this book forces us to think in a new way about thefuture shape of the entire Euro-polity, not as a traditional territorial actor, but asa new unbounded entity with fuzzy borders, and various kinds of multi-levelregulatory arrangements.24 Such a new entity might represent a new opportu-nity for the old continent rather then merely a challenge or even a threat. But weneed to understand the evolving nature of this polity and start thinking aboutproper ways of handling it. Comprehending the new nature of Europe’s borderswill be most crucial, and this book throws new conceptual and empirical light onthe dilemmas posed by borders.

Notes

This introduction greatly benefited from thoughtful comments by MalcolmAnderson, Judy Batt, Christopher Hill and Ania Krok-Paszkowska. The usualdisclaimer applies.

1 The use of the terms ‘frontier’, ‘border’ and ‘boundary’ varies. According toMalcolm Anderson, for instance, ‘frontier’ has the widest meaning (line or region);‘border’ can be a narrow zone or a line of demarcation; ‘boundary’ is a line of delim-itation only. See Malcolm Anderson, Frontiers, Territory and State Formation in the ModernWorld (Cambridge: Polity, 1996), p. 9. Michael Smith distinguishes between fourdifferent concepts of boundaries in the context of the European Union: geopolitical,institutional/legal, transactional and cultural. See Michael Smith, ‘The EuropeanUnion and a Changing Europe: Establishing the Boundaries of Order’, Journal ofCommon Market Studies, 34 (1996), p. 13.

2 In its essence enlargement is about moving the borders of the European Union.However, not all analysts believe that the border issue should preoccupy the Union inthe process of enlargement. As Michael Emerson stated: ‘It is neither necessary nordesirable for Europe to agonize over the future frontiers of the European Union,which unfortunately is the only kind of map people inside and outside the EU seeminterested in at present.’ See Michael Emerson, Redrawing the Map of Europe (London:Macmillan 1998), p. xxi. Needless to say, this book works on the opposite assumption.

3 See Alina Mungiu-Pippidi’s chapter in this volume or Jakub Boratynski and GrzegorzGromadzki, The Half-Open Door: The Eastern Border of the Enlarged European Union(Warsaw: Batory Foundation’s Policy Papers, 2001), pp. 7–9.

4 For a responsible way of using the terms ‘modern’ and ‘post-modern’ in the contextof the EU see John Gerard Ruggie, ‘Territoriality and Beyond: ProblematizingModernity in International Relations’, International Organization, 47:1 (Winter 1993),pp. 139–74. See also James Caporaso, ‘The European Union and Forms of State:Westphalian, Regulatory or Post-Modern?’ Journal of Common Market Studies, 34 (1996),pp. 44–8.

5 Anderson, Frontiers, p. 1.6 See S. Rokkan, D. Urwin, F.H. Aerebrot, P. Malaba and T. Sande, Centre–Periphery

Structures in Europe (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 1987), pp. 17–18.7 For more on the neo-medieval metaphor see Ole Waever, ‘Imperial Metaphors:

Emerging European Analogies to Pre-Nation-State Imperial Systems’, in Ola

14 Jan Zielonka

Tunander, Pavel Baev and Victoria Ingrid Einagel, eds, Geopolitics in Post-Wall Europe(London: Sage, 1997), p. 61.

8 See e.g. Friedrich Kratochwil, ‘Of Systems, Boundaries, and Territoriality: AnInquiry into the Formation of the State System’, World Politics, 39 (1986), pp. 25–52.

9 For a comprehensive discussion concerning the legal framework of the EuropeanUnion see Joseph Weiler, The Constitution of Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1998). Weiler’s book does not cover the most recent efforts to create aEuropean defence identity. But although the 1999 Helsinki European Councildecided to create a European military corps (up to fifteen brigades or 50,000–60,000persons) able to perform the so-called Petersberg (peace-keeping) tasks, it explicitlyrefrained from creating a European army. See Presidency Conclusions. HelsinkiEuropean Council.Press Release: Brussels (11–12–1999) – Nr: 00300/99.

10 Ruggie, ‘Territoriality and Beyond’, pp. 168–70. For a similar argument about theend of territoriality but from a broader historical perspective see especially Charles S.Maier, ‘Consigning the Twentieth Century to History: Alternative Narratives for theModern Era’, The American Historical Review, 105 (2000), pp. 807–31.

11 And as Pierre Hassner points out in his chapter, defining Europe in terms of democ-racy and viable economic markets is not easy either because these are universal ratherthan continental qualities.

12 Morawska’s chapter does not cover Romania, but Mungiu-Pippidi’s chapter quotesstatistics showing a relatively high percentage of Romanians interested in finding ajob in one of the EU’s countries. However, most other analysts believe that admittingnew states from Central and Eastern Europe to the EU is not likely to provoke largemigratory flows from the new member states to the current ones. See, e.g., SándorRichter, EU Eastern Enlargement: Challenge and Opportunity, Research Report no. 249(Vienna: Wiener Institut für Internationale Wirtschaftsvergleiche, 1998) or ‘The FreeMovement of Persons for the Pursuit of Economic Activity in the Context ofEnlargement’, European Commission’s Information Note, Brussels (April 2000), pp.14–15. For a comprehensive data analysis of labour migration patterns and theirgenesis in one East European case see Jan Fidrmuc and Jarko Fidrmuc, ‘The SlovakRepublic’, in Helena Tang, ed., Winners and Losers of EU Integration (Washington, DC:World Bank, 2000), pp. 200–2, and especially Appendix 3 on pp. 213–14.

13 Trends in International Migration. Annual Report (Paris: Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, 1999), p. 61. The cited data is for 1997. Likewise thedata show that in Hungary there are many more foreign residents from Romaniathan from the former USSR.

14 A special report of the House of Lords on frontier controls in the context of enlarge-ment concluded ‘the extent to which enlargement to the east will exacerbate[cross-border crime and illegal migration] remains unclear and essentially specula-tive’. See Enlargement and EU External Frontier Control (London: House of Lords SelectCommittee on the European Union, 2000), p. 24. See also Mark Galeotti, Cross-BorderCrime and the Former Soviet Union (Durham: International Boundaries Research Unit,1995), pp. 1–6. For a general overview see 1988-EU Organised Crime Situation Report(The Hague, 1999), File nos 2530–50 (open version).

15 See, e.g., Malcolm Anderson and Monica den Boer, Policing across National Boundaries(London: Pinter, 1994) or Neil Walker, ‘The New Frontiers of European Policing’, inMalcolm Anderson and Eberhard Bort, eds, The Frontiers of Europe (London: Pinter,1998), pp. 165–85.

16 This has particularly devastating effects on regions such as Transcarpathia. See, e.g.,Katarzyna Wolczuk, ‘Ukraina a kwestia rozszerzenia Unii Europejskiej: potencjalnekonsekwencje na szczeblu regionalnym’, in Tomasz Paszewski, ed., Polska granicąwschodnią Unii Europejskiej (Warsaw: Center for International Relations, 2000), pp.46–55. See also Oxford Analytica Daily Brief (10 and 11 July 2000) and The Economist (2October 1999).

Introduction 15

17 The Baltic countries and the countries with a Magyar minority, for instance, maybelong to the latter category. As far as the Balkan region is concerned, although mostof the countries of the former Yugoslavia are not as yet official candidates to the EUthe situation is likely to change very soon given the democratic breakthroughs inCroatia and Serbia. Croatia has in fact already embarked on a very active strategy ofgaining membership in the European Union, and has even created a special Ministryfor European Integration. In fact, some Western experts agree that the EU’s enlarge-ment to South-Eastern Europe may represent the optimal solution to cope with theexport of migrants from the region. See, e.g., Michael Emerson and Daniel Gros, eds,The CEPS Plan for the Balkans (Brussels: Centre for European Policy Studies, 1999). Seealso German Presidency, ‘A Stability Pact for South-Eastern Europe’, paragraph IV.1(12 April 1999); <http:///www.bundesregierung.de/english/01/0103/3810/index.html>. At the same time, one should keep in mind that instalment of a hard borderin the region would inevitably reinforce calls for creating a greater Albania, Croatiaor Serbia.

18 Guidelines for the Community Initiative INTERREG 2000–2006 (Brussels:European Commission, 1999). See also H. Eskelinen, I.Liikanen and J. Oksa, eds,Curtains of Iron and Gold. Reconstructing Borders and Scales of Interaction (Aldershot: Ashgate,1999), pp. 89–115.

19 Thomas Christiansen and Knud Erik Jørgensen, ‘Transnational Governance “Above”and “Below” the State: The Changing Nature of Borders in the New Europe’,Regional& Federal Studies, 10 (2000), p. 66. See also Lykke Friis and Anna Murphy, ‘TheEuropean Union and Central and Eastern Europe: Governance and Boundaries’,Journal of Common Market Studies, 37 (1999), p. 228.

20 The Hungarian parliament recently passed a ‘Status Law’ offering ethnic Hungarianscertain rights when on Hungarian territory. (See Act on Hungarians Living inNeighboring Countries, Budapest 2001, Hungarian Parliament’s Act no. LXII.) Thisdoes not include any mention of a special visa regime, and the law will lapse uponHungary’s accession to the EU as it will then be incompatible with Hungary’scommitment to the Schengen acquis. However, strong pressures can be expected fromHungary for some such special regime to preserve free access for ethnic Hungariansto the Hungarian ‘motherland’. For instance, a system of giving a ‘national visa’ forethnic Hungarians has been envisaged, enabling them to enter Hungary freely butnot the rest of the EU (their status would be comparable to that of holders of over-seas UK passports.) See Enlargement and EU External Frontier Controls (London: House ofLords Select Committee on the European Union, 2000), p. 16.

21 The term ‘Maze Europe’ has been used in Christiansen and Jørgensen,’Transnational Governance’, p. 74.

22 For more on this dichotomy see Jan Zielonka, ‘How New Enlarged Borders WillReshape the European Union’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 39 (2001), pp. 509–11.

23 Jean-Marie Guéhenno, The End of the Nation-State (Minneapolis and London:University of Minnesota Press, 1995), p. 139. See also Robert A. Dahl’s argumentabout the optimal European democratic unit or David Held’s argument about a‘cosmopolitan model of democracy’. See Robert A. Dahl, ‘A Democratic Dilemma:System Effectiveness versus Citizens Participation’, Political Science Quarterly, 109(1994), pp. 23–34 and David Held, ed., Prospects for Democracy: North, South, East, West(Cambridge: Polity, 1993), pp. 37–44.

24 See, e.g., James G. March and Johan P. Olsen, ‘Organizing Political Life: WhatAdministrative Reorganization Tells Us about Government’, American Political ScienceReview, 77 (1983), pp. 196–281; Beate Kohler-Koch, ‘Catching Up with Change: TheTransformation of Governance in the European Union’, Journal of European PublicPolicy, 3 (1996), pp. 359–80; and Gary Marks, Liesbet Hooghe and Kermit Blank,‘European Integration from the 1980s: State-Centric v. Multi-Level Governance’,Journal of Common Market Studies, 34 (1996), pp. 341–77.

16 Jan Zielonka

This boundary fixation, this obsession with territoriality carried the seeds ofdownfall.

Derek Williams, The Reach of Rome, p. xx

Where does Europe end? An ancient question to which the conventional answeris the Urals and the Bosporus. Where might the European Union end? Acontemporary issue for which the conventional answer won’t work. First becausemany countries within those borders are far from ready for membership; buteven if they were, the EU admits nation states as units and the ancient limits ofEurope bisect two major nations.

Still, it may be helpful to ask what it has meant for a geographical region to‘end’,if only because having an end – a frontier – helps determine the nature ofwhat is within. The European Union is a variety of territory, an area of theearth’s surface enclosed by a frontier. But must it remain so? The premise of thischapter is that both the concept of frontier and what it encloses – i.e. territory –are historically determined notions, and that both are in a period of transforma-tion. If we wish to think about where the European Union should end, it willhelp to understand these changing concepts.

Frontier and territory

The idea of the frontier as an end or limit is conventionally more of anAmerican concept than the current European one. Until recently, when NorthAmericans have written about their frontier, they have envisaged a place wheresettlement ended and ‘wilderness’ began, or more precisely where white settle-ment ended and wilderness, perhaps populated by indigenous settlement, began.The North American frontier had a sparse population, but none the less it wasconceptualized as a definable line beyond which individual whites might pene-trate as explorers but collective settlements ceased. This frontier dividedcivilization from nature or from peoples thought to be at a ‘lower’ or lessadvanced degree of social development. By 1890 the Bureau of the Interiorannounced that the frontier as such had ceased to exist; white settlers had filledup the continental space of the United States.

2 Does Europe need afrontier?From territorial to redistributivecommunity

Charles S. Maier

The American frontier ends settlement. Normally frontier in Europe dividespeoples: when ordinary Europeans write about a frontier they envisage a linewhere settlements of one people are replaced by a settlement of another people.Thus the American frontier is symbolized by the forest or the prairie; theEuropean frontier by the border post. The Romans left us an idea of the frontierthat shared both elements – the end of their world, but one that had to be forti-fied against outsiders at a clear border. It would have been as strategicallyrational to allow for transitional zones of penetration (so-called ‘marches’ or‘marks’, apparently so named from the concept of markings), but the emperorsdispersed their troops to minimize their political threat at home, and, thusplanted in military colonies, they established defence at the border line, notfurther within. The result was a trade-off. The reach of Rome extended to thelimes, but tribal trespassing meant institutional decay. Nonetheless, in comparisonwith other frontiers, for the three centuries they were maintained, Rome’sborders may have imposed less cost on outsiders.

The imperial boundaries seem benign in comparison with the contact zonesof recent centuries. Human and ecological disasters most commonly occurat cultural and economic divides, of which the decimation of the AmericanIndian, the enslavement of the African, the destruction of Aztec and Inca,the near extinction of the North American bison and the Siberian furanimals are prominent examples. Rome was far from blameless, butinstances of interfacial brutality were relatively fewer and their scale smaller.A world without barriers is a noble goal, but pending man’s fitness toachieve it, firm frontiers, disciplined and clear, have undeniable advantages.1

Those advantages did not continue: the frontiers crumbled and defence wasneeded at every point within the former imperial territory: a disorder testified toby church towers and dispersed castles. The concept of the frontier persisted: theTreaty of Verdun in 843 required two hundred agents to set out the rocks andshow the rivers that divided Charlemagne’s legacy among his three heirs.‘Frontier’ (the adjective from ‘front’ made into a noun) became the term for sucha division: from the analogy with troops confronting other troops. By the latethirteenth century, the ‘frontier’ of the French kingdom, which separates it, sayfrom the Empire, is differentiated from the ‘limits’ dividing feudal jurisdictionswithin the kingdom. At the frontier one state abuts against another, one peopleconfronts another; and if one people’s frontier moves outward, the neighbouringfrontier contracts. The concept is implicitly zero-sum.2

Of course, this distinction is too simple. Geographers do use the term ‘fron-tier’ to indicate a transitional region, which is a bit more like the Americanconcept of frontier except that the geographers do not postulate a transitionfrom settlement into wilderness, but a ‘zone’ of contacts, of local back-and-forthtraffic – commercial, official, personal – between two or more contiguouspeoples. And they use the term ‘border’ or the French limite or the Italian confine

to indicate the formalized demarcation line, concepts that derive from the

18 Charles S. Maier

Romans’ limes, which was construed as the end of an encompassing jurisdictionand an advanced civilization. Nevertheless, whatever terminology one mightchoose, the concept under discussion here is the contemporary lay Europeannotion of a division between peoples, not an end to settlement.

It remains a highly relevant question whether these peoples are perceived tobe of the same cultural and economic level or not. In theory we have frontiersbetween peoples of equal development: Americans and Canadians, French andBelgians, etc. But the problematic frontiers (problematic even after consensus hasbeen reached on where precisely they are to be located) are those where theauthority on one side of the line feel that the population on the other side lacksome evolutionary attainment. Have they abandoned inconvenient and intrusivereligious practices? Have they moved beyond habits of feud and violence? Havetheir youth suitably compartmentalized their sexual foraging to enclosed sitesestablished for this purpose? Do they wash often enough? Have their home soci-eties advanced beyond poverty or beyond a more primitive distribution ofeconomic activities?

The economic gradient does not arouse the same prejudices and passions asthe cultural differences. In fact, many of us in the more advanced societiesbenefit from the economic gradient. Our large firms can find large reservoirs oflabour across the frontier to assemble manufactured goods. And if we maintainsome control over our frontiers, we as individuals can admit other peoples to fillimportant jobs in our own metropoles: South Asians as physicians in NewEngland; Central Americans and Mexicans as lawn tenders or fruit pickers inCalifornia; Portuguese and Azorians as cleaning women in Paris andCambridge, Massachusetts. Still, the economic gradient does present the majorpolicy problem relating to frontiers because economic disparity encourages theless advanced across the border to try to cross it in numbers greater than thehost societies tend to wish. They can cross it as individuals, hence the problemsof the Rio Grande or of Schengen; or they can, in effect, try to cross it collec-tively – hence the issues relating to NAFTA and to enlargement of theEuropean Union.

The idea of frontier accompanies the idea of territory. Frontiers enclose areason the earth’s surface, and, once enclosed, such areas take on the aspect of terri-tory. No boundaries, no territory. Being enclosed involves specific properties,historical and geographical. Territoriality is different from mere spatiality, andeven from a community’s historic sense of place.3 The qualities that go with‘spatiality’, the relations of distance to settlement and location of towns oreconomic sites, etc., are important, but territoriality adds the dimension of polit-ical jurisdiction. And not only jurisdiction, but overriding jurisdiction, perhapsexclusive, perhaps sovereign, in any case having some decisive elements. Not allterritories have to have land frontiers; they can have natural frontiers entirely orin part – pre-eminently the sea, but also mountain ranges, or even significantrivers. Peoples can have territories with indefinite frontiers – the tribal units ofthe Arabian peninsula or the peoples of Central Asia – and they can, as nomads,

Does Europe need a frontier? 19

have no fixed territory, but regions they successively occupy in one cyclicalpattern or another.

Historians have long been interested in frontiers, but have done less work onthe idea of theme of territoriality as such. Instead they have focused on thenature of the units claiming territorial extension, that is, on states and nations.Consider, for example, Max Weber’s famous definition: ‘The State is that humancommunity which in a specified area [Gebiet] – and area forms belongs to thecriterion – successfully claims a monopoly of legitimate capacity for physical violence.’4

Theorists have examined the criteria of ‘monopoly’ of violence, or its ‘legiti-macy’, but have taken the concept of territory for granted until recently,although there is a large literature on the relation of the territory to the state.But political scientists have now begun to interrogate the issue of sovereignty,claiming it is a cultural construction of the post-Westphalian period and not atimeless attribute of states. The prevailing chronology associates modernconcepts of sovereignty, the emergence of the territorial state and a renewedstress on interstate frontiers with the Peace Treaties of Westphalia in 1648 andthe Peace of the Pyrenees in 1659. The concept emerged with different mean-ings: theorists of domestic order, such as Hobbes and Bodin, referred to the needfor a supreme authority within the state, while the international settlementsstressed the autonomy of recognized states with respect to other states.5

Westphalia ended the Habsburg bid for Central European reconquest and‘universal monarchy’. After Westphalia, sovereignty and plurality of statesemerged as related ideas. The Habsburgs remained nominal overlords of theRoman Empire of the German Nation, but the three hundred-odd Germanstates had the right to exchange ambassadors and go to war.

The frontier thus acquires an urgency – all the more when for almost fiftyyears Louis XIV will be embroiling much of Europe in his frontier mania, trig-gering war after war by pressing up against the northeast or arranging thedynastic switch from Habsburg to Bourbon in Spain. Frontiers, in fact, occupythe map makers from the sixteenth century on. Encouraged by the great explo-rations to map the oceans and the New World, they turn to draw the boundariesof the old. We take the maps for granted and forget their metaphoric quality ofreducing space and extent to readily apprehended planar models. To map is tocontrol space, to dominate it conceptually. The map is cousin to the landscapeand kin to the Renaissance mastery of perspective: a reduction of space to asmall surface. The landscape accomplishes its task at close to the ground level,the map from on high. Ortelius publishes his atlases – one of the modern worldand, revealingly, one of the travels of Aeneas, the founder of the Roman world –in mid-sixteenth-century Antwerp. The first national map of France appears in1525; an atlas follows in 1594; the late seventeenth century sees a systematicmapping of the frontiers, an effort culminated by the Cassini family of Italiancartographers of France in the mid-eighteenth century. The Sieur de Beauplanwill map Ukraine, the British in the nineteenth century will conduct geographicsurveys of Ireland and India.6 Looking ahead to what he construes as thedestructive ‘high modernism’ of nineteenth- and twentieth-century social engi-

20 Charles S. Maier

neering, James C. Scott writes, ‘All the state simplications that we have examinedhave the character of maps.’7

Besides requiring mapping, the frontier had to be made defensible. Vaubandevoted his efforts to the most significant fortifications in the East and Northeast,Savoy and the Pyrenees: an achievement that has led one scholar to apply thephrase ‘invention of the Frontiers.’ Other powers had similar programs: as theypushed the Turks back out of Hungary and acquired Slavic territory, theHabsburgs settled Croatians on the so-called military frontier, who were prob-ably more useful for excluding plague-bearers than soldiers.

Historians have recorded the creation of these boundaries, but territorialityhas its own history as well and while it is usually taken to be the logical counter-part of the development of the frontier, in fact it emerges at a different pace ofhistorical development. To be sure, the territory of the seventeenth- and eigh-teenth-century state must be administered as a fiscal resource, banditry must besuppressed, military cantons and supply centres established, nobles given admin-istrative responsibility over local governance, roads built and canals cut. Colbertrationalizes the great farms of the French fisc and also removes many of theinternal tolls and taxes. Mercantilism makes wealth a national resource. Thegreat project of the Italian and Central European states in the mid-eighteenthcentury will be the cadastral survey.10 Habsburgs and Bourbons must map theirrealm, tax contributor by tax contributor. Maria Theresa’s cameralist adminis-trators will leave their imprint in Milan and Trieste, Hungary and Bohemia aswell as Austria. Even where a ‘feudal’ nobility has arrogated almost all officesand perquisites as ‘fiefs’, as in the Kingdom of Naples and Iberia, ambitiousadministrators such as Genovesi, Carracciolo and Pombal will work to maketheir territories rich (or less poor) and obedient. But the forces of privilege, thegreat inertial grip of a landed church and nobility, the sparseness of administra-tive personnel, all combine to limit the achievement. The resources forpenetrating the territory and its local elites are still insufficient.11

Railroads, centralization, class realignment: creatingmodern territoriality, 1850–80

Historians and political scientists conventionally attribute the rise of modernnations to the epoch of the French Revolution and American and French ideasof the constituent people. But modern territoriality, and the modern nation-state, are not just a consequence of ideological development. (Indeed theinadequacy of ideas to assure the national state outcome becomes evident in therevolutions of 1848 in Italy and Central Europe.) They depend equally, I wouldsubmit, upon the material possibilities for controlling large regions of the earth.And while control requires establishing new frontiers, mid-nineteenth-centurytechnology – coal, steel, electricity and steam – seems to permit a greatercapacity for permeating and energizing the territory within frontiers. The tele-graph, steamboats and the railroad mean that far more points within the state’s

Does Europe need a frontier? 21

territory can be supervised by administrators, opened for economic exploitation,mobilized for national purposes.

The activists who would organize state and society often draft their blueprintsaccording to analogues from the physical world. Medieval writers described asocial order functionally divided like the individual. Eighteenth-centuryreformers awaited a Newtonian politics subject to law and regularity.Nineteenth-century nation-builders celebrated the physical energy coursingthrough nature. It is logical that metaphors of energy and ‘fields’ achieve a newdominance, both for science and for human geography. ‘As sure as a fact yieldsonly to fact,’ August Ludwig von Rochau argues, ‘so it is sure that neither a prin-ciple nor an idea nor an agreement will unite the dispersed German energies,but only a superior energy which swallows up the others.’ A. E. Schäffle willpropose that national economic energies must flow freely throughout a terri-tory.12 Searching for counterparts in scientific awareness to politicaldevelopment, historians have long cited the impact of Darwinism (On the Origin of

Species appeared in 1859) on the pervasive sense of conflict between social groupsand nations. Physics, however, was as rich a metaphorical source as biology.James Clerk Maxwell’s 1873 formulation of electrical and magnetic field theorymeant that every point in a ‘field’ could be assigned a potential energy, andenvisaged the whole space as filled with invisible ‘lines of force’. Territorialconsciousness now meant that no point inside the frontiers could be left devoid ofthe state’s control just as no point within a field was devoid of physical force.Administrative energy in the form of primary schools, prefectures and railroadswould pervade and ‘fill’ the nation’s space. Filling that space, making certain nopoint evades the potential of governmental energy, is the mission of the sixtiesgeneration.

The telegraph and railroad emerged as the strategic instrument for masteringterritory. The former allowed centre and periphery to exchange informationinstantaneously; the railroad moved soldiers, settlers and goods in quantities thatonly waterways had earlier allowed and at a far more rapid rate. In Hungary theliberal nationalist Széchényi pleaded for railroad development; in Italy Cavourwrote that the railroad would especially assist the backward countries:

For such nations railways will be more than a means of self-enrichment;they will be a powerful weapon with the help of which they will succeed intriumphing over the retarding forces that keep them in a baneful state indus-trial and political infancy.

Or as Cattaneo wrote in 1861, the railroad was the instrument ‘to rapidlycorrect the evils of history and geography’.13 The railroad emerged as the tech-nical underpinning of the modern state. Mastery of its techniques allowed themovement of troops on which national power politics rested, as demonstrated bythe Northern victories in the American Civil War or the Prussian humiliation ofFrance in 1870. To thrust a railroad into southern Italy was a strategic necessityfor subduing the guerrilla resistance, the Brigantaggio, that was felt to discredit the

22 Charles S. Maier

new state. Fifteen years after Cavour’s advocacy of railroad development, by theend of the 1860s, Americans had traversed the North American continent with arail link; control of the new railroads in the American South helped unite thepost-Civil War ruling elites in the American South. The Canadian Pacific wasdriven to the Pacific during the 1880s, in effect extending the Dominion west-ward along its dorsal spine. Similarly, as the Left secured control of the FrenchRepublic in the 1880s, it carried through two major projects: Ferry’s seculariza-tion of primary education and Freycinet’s national railway web, radiatingoutward from Paris to modernize the interior of the country so that the nationaldomain might truly be integrated. Everywhere, the material results were impres-sive. Railroad lines tended to quadruple in the advanced states across the middlethree decades of the nineteenth century. The United States went from 6.3 kilo-metres of track per 1,000 square kilometres in 1860 to 34 in 1890 to 84 in 1920;Britain’s tracks had already jumped from 7.6 in 1840 to 46 in 1860 to 88.6 in1890 and to 134 in 1920; France from 17 to 62 to 70 in 1860, 1890 and 1920respectively.14 Finally, by the end of the century, Count Witte had engagedRussian energies on the huge Trans-Siberian project. At one and the same timethe railroad was the foundation of economic development, peopling hithertoremote areas, providing the transport infrastructure for commerce, creating anew demand for iron and steel manufacturers and machinists, beckoning with arepresentation of moral and political progress, supplying a tangible image ofenergy radiating through the national space, interlacing the national territorywith specimens of the lines that were demarcating private and public, nationaland transnational spheres.

The same era brings about the territorial reorganization not only of CentralEurope, but also of much of the populated world. Fragmented states achieveunification; existing countries are recast to emerge more centralized, cohesiveand militarized. To cite some of the specimens: Italy and Germany are unifiedfrom 1859 to 1870; the Habsburg realms are reorganized into two more cohesivehalves (1861–7), the Kingdom of Hungary and the Cisleithanian lands repre-sented in the Austrian Reichsrat. The Dominion of Canada is reorganized(1867). The Confederate States of America are defeated and the United Statesforged as a more homogeneous state from ocean to ocean (1861–5). Mexicanliberals defeat the French imperial forces, push through a reform programmeand create the basis for a more efficient secular state (1853–63). The MeijiRestoration (1867–8) displaces the old aristocratic families behind the TokugawaShogunate and embarks on a programme of technological and administrativemodernization. The remnants of East India Company control are effectivelytaken over by the British Government of India after the Mutiny of 1857. TheQing dynasty endeavours to reconsolidate its rule in the wake of the massiveTaiping rebellion. King Mongut of Thailand reforms his state in a successfuleffort to resist French or British absorption.

Accompanying this reimagined territorial space was a widespread politicalreorganization. In a now forgotten study from the mid-1930s, the Americanhistorian Robert Binckley suggested that the worldwide turmoil of the 1850s and

Does Europe need a frontier? 23

1860s amounted to a crisis of the federative principle. He brought together theunsuccessful efforts at confederal nation-building in Scandinavia, the Romanianprincipalities, the kingdom of Greece, Switzerland, Italy and the Germanies. Inalmost every society that underwent fundamental political reorganization, themore centralizing model prevailed over the more confederal.15 Binckley did nottry to explain why this universal process took place after mid-century. Would nottechnological advances have allowed alternative political models? Perhaps so, butthe rationalization of territorial space undermined the major alternative thenpractised. This was political rule officially based on nominal but weak centralregimes with authority largely delegated to local ‘feudal’ magnates.

National centralization also hastened another world-scale development – thecontinued weakening of imperial models of control. Empire had entailed theo-retical claims of suzerainty coupled with de facto rule through powerful magnateswho exercised most power and claimed most resources at the local level. Multipleethnicity was permitted, sometimes (though not always) including religious toler-ation. Ottoman erosion took place in the early nineteenth century (facilitatingGreek and renewed Egyptian state formation) and then again in the 1870s (withimpacts on Romania, Serbia and Bulgaria). The weakening of Habsburg impe-rial concepts had even more familiar results. The relatively centralized nationalstructures that emerged out of Habsburg disarray between the mid-1850s and1870 were a logical reaction to the earlier Viennese effort at a confederalHabsburg ascendancy. Austrian rulers had resisted the consolidation of nation-states at the expense of their overarching but nominal suzerainty. They hadoffered instead a succession of schemes for overlapping jurisdictions extendingfrom the local county level to that of the German Bund. As Vienna’s dominationflagged after 1848 and national states emerged, in each case more confederalplans lost out to more centralized concepts. Cavour’s policy was unreceptive toGiobertian Papal federalism or even to a looser affiliation of the formerlyBourbon territories of Naples and Sicily. Within Germany, advocates of a‘trialist’ position that would have reformed the German Bund by means of threeblocs – the Prussian-dominated north, the German-Austrian and the formerRheinbund group (Baden, Württemberg, Bavaria, etc.) – were also rebuffedduring the course of 1862–4, even though Vienna itself finally supported such areform as a fall-back position. Once Vienna was finally defeated by thePrussians, the Magyar leadership lost no time in pressing their own claims forgreater autonomy. The conflict between centralized and confederal politicalorganization in fact occurred universally and not just where ancient imperialstructures were disintegrating. The last major significant effort at confederaldevolution in Europe took place in Spain with Pi y Margal’s advocacy of adecentralized (‘Federalist’) regime and the subsequent ‘cantonalist’ uprising of1873, which provoked an oligarchical monarchical restoration.

Outside Europe the Americas were racked by fundamental issues over thedegree of national organization during the 1860s. The most spectacular was thesecessionist effort by the Confederate States of America. The social structurethat emerged in the defeated South after the end of an abortive dozen years of

24 Charles S. Maier

‘reconstruction’ was a compromise not unlike the 1867 Ausgleich in CentralEurope: Magyar leaders and former Confederate elites traded their claims oftheoretical sovereignty for internal domination in a vast agricultural regionwhere lesser races performed a good deal of peasant labour. The United StatesCivil War was not the only significant struggle in the Western hemisphere. TheMexican civil war, following upon conflicts with the Church, a regressive landredistribution and Santa Anna’s unsuccessful foreign policies, led to statebankruptcy and to European intervention. French imperial ambitions in Mexicowere defeated by 1867, and Benito Juárez began the task of reconsolidation thatwas completed by the oligarchical administration of Porfirio Díaz and los cien-

tificos. Far to the south, the divergence in Argentine development betweenBuenos Aires and the pampas, with their respective political styles – representedby the cosmopolitan English-oriented elite of the port versus the strong man ofthe grazing plains – culminated in an attempted secession by the port and itsfailure in 1867. And half a world away to the north in the same year, the BritishNorth America Act brought the Dominion of Canada into being – hardly acentralized structure, but at least the basis for a unified state with a nationalparliamentary representation.

In sum: most societies outside Britain and France saw major conflicts betweendefenders of local or regional liberties, on the one side, and partisans of a moreuniform national authority, on the other. No revolutionary effort seeking local-ized power or outright territorial partition succeeded in the mid-nineteenthcentury. Whether as initiators of political rationalization, or as defenders of along-term trend suddenly challenged by the ‘federalists’ (i.e. decentralizers), thechampions of cohesive authority prevailed. In those cases where ethnically cohe-sive elites seemed to prevail within a larger, imperial framework, as in Hungaryor the American South, they themselves confirmed political control over theirregions, in effect creating quasi-independent nations. In those cases where theformer authorities successfully reasserted their control, they rationalized andreorganized their rule, as in British India after the Mutiny of 1857. In thosecases where new elites captured control of the central governments (Japan andgradually the Ottoman Empire), they reorganized the national territory toconsolidate their regime. Authority over national territory was centralized,enhanced, reformed.

Ironically even the revolutionaries who rejected the social and political orderreflected its tendencies toward centralization. The First International was rackedfrom 1864 to 1874 between ‘anarchists’, such as Bakunin, Fanelli or JamesGuillaume, and Marxists, who, despite their international commitment, stilllooked to the national states as the foyer of revolution and transformation. Theanarchists failed to prevail within the First International, in part because theywere tarred with the disastrous outcome of the Paris Commune as theInternational itself disintegrated among schism and recriminations. None theless, their suppression within the socialist camp hardly seemed inevitable duringthe late 1860s. The struggle within the International mirrored the great civil war

Does Europe need a frontier? 25

and conflicts between adherents of national centralized and local control thatcharacterized the worldwide politics of the age.

In this great process of centralization, power was taken in hand by a newconstellation of classes. The old aristocracies, based on land as a materialresource and lineage as a source of prestige, were not thrown onto the rubbishheap of history. But they had to share power with the new administrative elites,industrial and commercial leaders, the leaders of science and education: if onecan use the term, with self-made aristocrats of merit. It is this fusion of elites(Orleanist and Bonapartist, Meiji, Whig and Tory, National Liberal) that pushthrough programmes of national modernization.

How did bourgeois liberals win a place alongside the ‘feudal’ elements andtransform the nature of the state? Why in the 1850s and 1860s and hardlyearlier (France, Britain and the United States being notable exceptions)?Possession of the land itself was a major reason. Landed power was the crucialeconomic resource of the old regime, and one of the major developments thatestablished the bourgeoisie as a class challenger was its accession as a landedclass. This was the upshot of that great despoliation of Church lands that theCatholic monarchs of Spain and France had initiated with their dissolution ofJesuit properties in the 1760s. The mass takeover continued with the sales ofChurch properties in the French Revolution, and thereafter with the seculariza-tions in Napoleonic Naples, British-administered Sicily, Spain under theLiberals, Rhenish Germany under the French, Spain under the Liberals,Cavour’s Piedmont, and in Mexico. This cumulative process of desamortización

did not accrue to the benefit of the peasant, but to the well-to-do lawyers of theFrench and Italian and Iberian towns who prevailed at the auction block. Ineffect, the new coalition of the 1860s comprised the beneficiaries of disentail.Throwing land into the crucible of the market was the precondition for thebourgeois–aristocratic coalition.

But the coalition was forged from necessity as well as opportunity. Just asWorld War I would require class compromises with organized labour, so theclashes of the mid-nineteenth century necessitated enlarging the social bases ofthe state. This was not primarily to mobilize men for outright warfare. (By themid-nineteenth century, conscription existed on the continent and it managed tostipulate universal obligation even while it allowed for class-differentiatedservice.) The more continuous rivalry was economic and focused on the differentpaths to development. The economic ebullience of the 1850s and 1860s spot-lighted the importance of new industry.16 Hence a historical feed-backmechanism evolved: the support of bourgeois and liberal parties for nationalspokesmen (e.g. the National-Verein of the Prussian New Era in 1859, or thePiedmontese Liberals) intensified international competition. Heightened rivalrybetween states made it all the more necessary to enlist the economic strength ofthe middle classes. Each episode of territorial consolidation and rationalizationconstituted a phase of non-aristocratic recruitment into the governing elites. Theopening of regimes was needed even where territorial controversies were nolonger at stake, as in France and Britain.

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It would be misleading to construe the new participants too rigidly in terms ofa bourgeoisie, even that redemptive Marxian notion of ‘national bourgeoisie’. Todescribe as middle class the impatient Samurai of the outer Daimyo, thePrussian bureaucrats or the Whig cousinage would be misleading. But thesereformist groups were prepared to wager on technology and industry for the sakeof national power and family enrichment. They insisted upon drawing on alter-native principles to recruit a political elite – industrial leadership, professionalexpertise, literary and scientific capacity. The nation-state required this conscrip-tion of talent; the new elites needed the nation-state as their arena of ascent, as alattice for meritocracy. At stake was hardly a doctrine of natural rights or demo-cratic liberalism, but a demand for the representation of proven merit.Middle-class spokesmen who insisted on a broader, more universalist recruitmentwere in fact decisively defeated by the new national coalitions. Garibaldians insouthern Italy, the Prussian Progressives unreconciled to Bismarck’s browbeatingof parliament despite his nationalist success, remained outside the new coali-tions.

Precisely because this major restructuring of the governing classes proceededthrough cooptation rather than revolution, it is often underestimated. The greatupheavals that mobilized urban and peasant masses in 1789 and 1848 weremore visible and historically captivating. But their achievements were often lessdurable. Whether in Britain, where Disraeli wagered on household suffrage in1867, or at the national level in Germany, similar strategies were attempted.Literally throughout the world, a similar process of simultaneous reform andstabilization was underway. It mobilized the same elements and excluded similarmass democratic alternatives. Either electoral participation was restricted byproperty and/or educational qualifications (witness the Prussian three-classsuffrage or the four Austrian curiae of 1873), or, when opened up, it was manipu-lated by rural elites with the connivance of their new urban colleagues. Whetherone travelled to Andalusia or to Alabama, to Mecklenburg or Moldavia, thesame machinery of clientelism, suffrage manipulation and peonage held sway.17

Racial appeals, gerrymandering, caciquismo and the turno politico (the Spanisharrangement by which liberals and conservatives took turns in accumulatingparliamentary majorities) and open voting kept the will of the peoplepredictable. Beneficiaries of the system were new coalitions of industrial elites,landlords and professional men, divided increasingly by 1900 over the issue ofwhether to try a further cooptation of the reformist working class while smallindependent farmers oscillated precariously between support and rebellion.

Territoriality triumphant, 1880–1968

Let me summarize the argument so far. My claim is that political space was deci-sively reorganized in the generation after 1850 or 1860. National territories wereseen as spatial domains that could be mastered physically by the railroad andtransportation. Governance became more centralized and less confederal.Bourgeois and professional elements joined landed magnates in forming a new

Does Europe need a frontier? 27

ruling elite. A new awareness of bounded space, a preoccupation with fixingborder lines, with the demarcation of insiders and outsiders, public and private,transformed social consciousness.

This combination of elements, I would maintain, did not decisively changeduring the first half of the twentieth century. Rather they culminated in the twoworld wars and the Cold War. The concept of territory as a bounded space, tobe fought over, became more compelling. Imperialism meant that the Europeanpowers took their notion of conflicting territoriality and extended it to Africaand Asia. The world economic crisis finally also led (outside of Britain at least) togreater efforts at political control of failing national markets, to national bailoutsof industry, and to major reforms of national banking systems. The Westernworld got through the Great Depression by strengthening the principles of terri-torial governance, not reversing them. Doctrines of geopolitics, extensiveterritorial aims in World War I (whether German plans for continental expan-sion or Allied plans for colonial partition), even more ambitious notions ofLebensraum in World War II, and the ‘Iron Curtain’ and the Berlin Wall thatmarked the decades of Cold War tightened the grip of territoriality.

The general technological corollaries also remained intact. Industrial prowessseemed focused on high-energy mass-production industry. Mass-production fromthe assembly lines introduced in the auto industry on the eve of World War Ithrough the continuous-flow steel mills of the 1950s remained what we call‘Fordist’; that is, it yoked the largest number of labourers practicable to a contin-uous production process controlled from above and designed to turn out largemasses of standardized output. Shipping lines increased their traffic; the airlinebecame a critical innovation in overcoming space after World War I and evenmore after World War II.

The class coalition of the territorial epoch had to be enlarged, but this wasaccomplished by cooptation again, not by revolution. The new ruling alliance ofbourgeoisie and old elites was challenged by the trade unions and social demo-cratic parties of the industrial working classes. That challenge led to the sharpestpolitical conflicts and the growth of confrontational ideologies in the newcentury, including fascism and communism. But it was resolved in large part by afurther enlargement of the governing coalitions in the West – one that admittedreformist leaders of the working-class movement to the governing elite.

Until 1960 or 1970, therefore, I think it justified to assert that Western society,indeed world society, lived in familiar territory. And that familiar territory wasprecisely territory itself. The ruptures that were so politically spectacular – 1914,1917, 1919, 1933, 1939, 1945, 1947–8 – represented caesuras within an under-lying system of national states that did not challenge the premises of territorialityand modern industrial development. Defending rigid borders, moreover, becamea preoccupation of social and political life more generally. Throughout the nine-teenth century and until the last decades of the twentieth, Western societyfirmed up the frontiers of private and public life, including the lines betweenclasses and the highly rigid gendered division of family and work. The norm ofthe male bread-winner family tended to be reinforced, not relaxed, by the

28 Charles S. Maier

construction of the post-World War II welfare state.18 Until the late 1960s, socialchange and social conflict was described as taking place within familiar well-demarcated dualist categories: city and country, developed and undeveloped,middle-class and working-class, male and female, native and foreign. Socialscience constructed our world in terms of clear and distinct boundaries; leadersconducted politics in terms of clear and distinct territories. Collective life defineditself by its multiple frontiers, social and spatial.

Globalists, territorialists and the contemporarytransformation

Somehow we have come to live in different times. Even if they culminatedlonger-term strains, the decisive changes took place rather abruptly between thelate 1960s and the end of the 1970s. The United States, which had come toanchor the territorial system of the Cold War, came to the limits of the power itcould or would deploy. It became mired down in a Third-World war in which itssuperior military technology gave it no real advantage. Within the Atlantic worldit ceased to guarantee at least the international monetary structures that hadcome to play so important a role. The easy neo-colonial control of energyresources that it upheld for the West disappeared with the oil crises of the 1970s.The inter-class corporatist collaboration that underlay Western political align-ments proved increasingly unwieldy and hard to coordinate, as the stagflation ofthe seventies also demonstrated. New social groups, such as students or self-aware women’s movements, could not easily be integrated into the traditionalsocial bargaining. The industrial system of Fordist production that underlay thegreat economic achievements of World War II and the Cold War seemedincreasingly obsolete: Western Europe and the United States had to shut downthe coal and steel industries that had been the underpinning of the industrialsystem. Underlying the transition was the diffusion of Fordist production to Asiaand Latin America as well as the spread of a new economy of electronics andservices in North America and Europe. And while the innovation in other areasbecame a source of new vitality and wealth, such a shift undermined the socialstructures and political party alignments that underlay public life since early inthe century. Similar tensions afflicted the communist world, and the SovietUnion had to resort to armed interventions, most shockingly in 1956 and 1968,to perpetuate its geopolitical control.

Thus followed a generalized transformation of the First World with respect toterritory and boundaries: Populations and elites have lost the reassurance of aterritorial space that allowed control of public life. This chapter cannot exploreall the transformations we know of as globalization: whether the international-ization of corporations and the siting of manufacture far from the headquartersof the firm; or the growth of non-hierarchical communication on the internet;or the advent of what Foucault would have called a new decentred epistème werefer to post-modernism; or the partial disintegration of societal frontiers thatearlier demarcated public and private space or gender roles and insignias.19

Does Europe need a frontier? 29

Second, the economic base of public life – and the economic imagination ofthe contemporary era – has been reoriented. The transformative technologies nolonger entail heavy metal or pumping iron, mass output and physical motion ofgoods. Fordism seems passé as firms organize team production and produce awider range of customized products. The transforming sectors of the economyseem increasingly built upon the transmission of data. The metaphors or mental-

ités fostered by this technology no longer focus on ‘lines’ or borders, but onnetworks. To be sure, contemporary public discussion of this change far outrunsthe actual rate of transformation: heavy industry based on bending metal andphysical transformation persists as do hierarchical factories – just as atelierproduction remained crucial throughout the era of industrial capitalism.Nevertheless, the culturally transformative impact of economic innovationremains as critical as its actual quantitative input and output, and this hasreached avalanche tempo.

Third, the basic social class configurations that created the old territorialorder have also changed. The consolidation of national territorial space drewupon a post-1848 alliance of old magnates – oligarchic, agrarian, committed todecentralized local power – and new bourgeois elites drawn from science,learning, industry and commerce. This coalition soon faced a mass workingclass, concentrated in the factory or the mine, seen as a contender in a forth-coming apocalyptic struggle. But our class images have changed. Today weenvisage elite and mass arranged in concentric circles, no longer in taperingpyramids. We use the language of centre and periphery: the new elite at thecentre reaps the rewards of being adept at transnational control of informationand symbols. The new proletariat performs menial services: cleaning hospitalcorridors or city streets, taking care of our homes and children. The former hier-archic geography of centre and periphery has altered such that what we used todescribe as Third World metastasizes into the First: enclaves of glitz and misery,the boutiques and the barrios, exist cheek by jowl in New York as well as LatinAmerica. We confront stratification on a world scale. Where Leninists anddependency theorists earlier described uneven development in terms of imperi-alism and geographically demarcated zones, the unevenness persists or advancesbut less between national territories than within them. The trend is moreadvanced in North America than in continental Europe, but progresses there aswell. Relatedly, the movement of population has resumed the levels that it did inthe decade before World War I, both from poor countries to richer and fromcountry to metropolis. Cities grow again, but now the cities of Latin America,Africa and Asia: in the last thirty years, Mexico and São Paulo and Lima, Cairoand Lagos, Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta. When metropolitan conglomerationsgrow crowded in the first world, it is the greater conurbation – what can bedescribed, in terms of urban radius, the 20-kilometre city – that registers theincrease, and not the old ten-kilometre city, whose population has hardlychanged at all, unless to decline slightly. San Francisco, Paris inside thePériphérique achieved their maximums before mid-century; while Los AngelesCounty, Houston, the Couronne de la Seine are the new sites of growth.

30 Charles S. Maier

Obviously this development has not happened without widespread publicdisorientation. The transformation underway has provoked what may be themajor new impulse behind political division – one that cuts across old partiesand encourages new ones. The traditional alignments and confrontations of Leftand Right were pulverized between 1979 and 1989. Voters deserted socialdemocrats to endorse Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and Chancellor Kohl.Where they remained loyal, the socialist parties themselves turned towardmarket solutions, as in France under Mitterrand or Spain under Felipe González.The end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union shattered themajor orientation of European Marxists. The failure of communism was part ofthe general loss of faith in political control of the economy that afflicted the Leftin general during the late 1970s and 1980s. In Italy the Left’s collapse became aneven more total decomposition by virtue of the socialists’ involvement in a perva-sive system of urban pay-off, which intensified the general shattering of theloyalties on which the post-war Republic had been constructed from 1944 untilthe end of the 1980s.

The result of the political reorientation means, as I have proposed elsewhere,that the significant division in the Western electorate today cuts across traditionalgroupings and has generated what might be called two ‘virtual’ parties.20 On oneside are those elements prepared to accept, or even profit by, the transnationalflows of wealth and information, convinced that only going with this global flow,so to speak, will allow the rewards of markets to enrich us all. I have termed thisparty the ‘globalists’. They include centrist Democrats and moderateRepublicans in the United States, Tony Blair Labourites or pro-European Toriesin Britain, the battered Brahmins of the Congress in India, etc. They advocateever more encompassing free-trade arrangements and identify with suprana-tional institutions, including the European Union, envisaging a transnationalcivil society of NGOs that will assure international order. To a degree these arethe elements with which most contemporary intellectuals identify. On the otherhand, often their enthusiasm for market solutions threatens to become just asimple pro-market neo-liberalism, which believes that ultimately political controlof the globalization process is hopelessly anachronistic.

On the other side, increasingly, agitate the ‘territorialists’, who propose toreunite identity space and decision space. They argue that, whether inside thenation-state as we once knew it, or the new region as we must create it, peoplesmust reconstruct meaningful frontiers. Western intellectuals are ill advised not topay attention to their themes and their campaigns. When European farmerswere buffeted by modernization and the depression, their votes helped bringfascism to power. The victims of globalization have at least the capacity fordisruptive politics and endemic violence. They represent what I think is bestcalled territorial populism, and Jörg Haider is probably the most skilful of thegroup. To condemn them as neo-fascist misses the source of their appeal. Nonethe less, if the globalists threaten to become mere neo-liberals on a world scale,the territorialists threaten to degenerate into chauvinistic politics. Outside

Does Europe need a frontier? 31

Europe, their counterparts, in what we misleadingly term ‘fundamentalism’,advocate a new or restored public role for religion for the same ends.

None the less, there is at least some hope, I believe, for a reconstruction ofpolitics that listens to the laments of the territorialists without succumbing totheir xenophobia and aligns with the globalists without merely surrendering tomere market orientation. Such an endeavour would involve reinforcing suprana-tional institutions with political capacities and political representation – notmerely a web of NGOs, for no matter how attractive that vision, it will remainelitist and feeble. It involves seeking a renewed concept of location, no longerterritorial, but linked to the real consolations of place, such as familiarity, land-scape and community.21 Such a commitment to place would ideally go beyond,say, just loyalty to national or local athletic teams, which has become the majorsurrogate for competitive loyalties and political activism as well as a lottery-likemechanism for offsetting inequality with dreams of riches (our gladiatorial poli-tics). Commitment to place might suggest viable concepts of local developmentthat could temper the harshest buffeting of the market without indulging in asentimental or destructive effort to reconstruct old frontiers and withoutrenouncing the post-modern internationalist sensibility that has been so liber-ating. Let those who wish to migrate to do so; help those who wish to stay onfamiliar ground. We might describe this as a task of inventing a sense of territo-riality, now on a supranational scale, without frontiers. Is such a paradoxpossible? Another approach, perhaps more feasible, would be to renew bonds ofloyalty and collective action without fixation on spatial location. Does theEuropean Union offer one possibility, perhaps among several that might overlapin world politics?

Where Europe ends: beyond the European frontier

So we return to the issue of the frontier and the question of where Europe ends.If the nature of territoriality has changed in the last two decades, so too has theconcept of a frontier. And if the notion of a frontier has changed for the nation-state, the implicit notion of the European frontier must also change. DoesEurope in fact need a frontier? Admitting all the reasons for de-emphasizingfrontiers, Jan Zielonka has argued that, nevertheless, a clear boundary will allowinstitutional progress.22 I plead the alternative case. If Europe wants a frontier toconstrain the free movement of persons (Schengen), does it need the same sort offrontier to manage the European Union as an association of nation-states? (Infact Europe wants to exclude or control not people, but roles – terrorists, jobseekers, drug dealers, welfare applicants, but not students and tourists; however,it has learned to differentiate only visas but not passports, which represent amore fundamental identity.) Speaking of the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall,the most recent historian of Rome’s frontier writes of

the sadness of abandoned frontiers. No one wanted them in the first place.Though boundaries are as inevitable as our sense of property, only landlords

32 Charles S. Maier

like them. Though they are a natural response to danger, we forget themwhen danger has passed. Nothing is less relevant to a people than theboundary of a former people across its land. Frontiers are history’sorphans.23

To think about the future of the frontier we need to ask about the nature ofterritory. They determine each other. What constitutes territory as seen frominside the frontiers? If we understand that, we can perhaps design the appro-priate enclosure, or at least understand where the territory ends. Less and lessare we comfortable construing territory as a regime of ethnic settlement. This isironic in that, after World War II, Eastern Europe achieved relative homogeneityfor the first time: a Poland as pure-blooded as any Endek or neo-Sarmatianmight desire, no Germans in the Baltic or Silesia or the Sudetenland, few Jewsanywhere and those few left to be further depleted by remaining antisemitismand the appeal of their own homeland. Ironic, too, since active ethnic cleansingand realignment turned out to become the de facto principle for national organi-zation in the ex-Yugoslavia throughout the 1990s. In the era of ethnicpurification, we dare not claim that territoriality should express an ethnic prin-ciple. We ask the Germans to dismantle the remnants of jus sanguinis even if theSerbs wallow in it.

Yet without ethnicity, what is left to animate a sense of territory?Verfassungspatriotismus – that term coined by Jürgen Habermas during theHistorikerstreit (the controversy among German intellectuals in the late 1980s overthe uniqueness of the Nazi crimes) to describe the community of rationalconversationalists – is the most attractive option: a civic culture. But if all ourcommunities converge toward democracy and liberalism, why shouldVerfassungspatriotismus provide a loyalty only within national frontiers? Must it notspill out to embrace all of civilized society? Ubi bonum ibi patria: the republic oflaw if not of letters, the Rechtssuperstaat. ‘Seid umschlungen O Millionen.’ A homelandof values must implicitly soar outside the nation-state.

Perhaps collective memory, our common blood-soaked histories (butabstracted from contemporary ethnicity), will serve to constitute territory ifconstitutionalism is unacceptable. We have become intoxicated by monumentsand melancholy, and maybe they provide the basis for territorial loyalty. Butwhat is remembered? Usually some sacrifice or tragedy, a common loss, a sharedvictimhood. Indeed, we generally link collective memory to a particular land-scape or site: un lieu de mémoire. Almost every people has its own Field ofBlackbirds, its Battle of the Boyne or Trail of Tears. Even those nations that arenot ‘martyred’ – as the Poles, Irish, Jews and Serbians imagine themselves tohave been – have sites of sacrifice: Gettysburg, Verdun or the Somme. But if weassociate collective memory with particular places, can we reduce place tomemory? And do we wish, in any case, to associate territory only with memory,with the past, and thus renounce a future orientation?

In fact, so I believe, the intimate association of collective memory withplace testifies to the fact that place or territory no longer serves as a site for

Does Europe need a frontier? 33

forward-looking aspirations. The sentimentalist or ironic evocation of history bybrilliant post-colonial authors living in the metropole, in Merchant–Ivory films,post-modern American architecture, etc., have become a substitute for an earliervigorous confidence in territoriality – whether as locus for economic energies orpolitical loyalties. Paradoxically, as Europeans and North Americans have lostconfidence in territoriality, they have invested emotional energy into a sense oflandscape and place – but now as an elegiac recourse, a refuge for historicizedmelancholy.

Perhaps, therefore, the moment has come to replace the territorial premise, toassociate our collective enterprises not with place or frontier, but with some otherprinciple of community or association. What unites a people that is organizedpolitically? Is it not these days a commitment to redistribution of resources, anacceptance of a community of risk? A political community, whether local,regional, national or European, is constituted by its self-imposed acceptance ofmaterial redistribution. The rich aid the poor, not out of Christian compassion,not individually as a gesture of charity, but collectively and by law. That impliesa legislature as an institution as well as redistribution as an outcome. Citizenshipis a community of redistribution: from parents to children, from youth to theelderly, from city to countryside, advanced regions to poorer regions. The EUhas accepted this bond in two respects above all: its subsidization of farmers, theCAP and its structural funds.

Does this not imply, then, that the conventional frontier should disappear?Must Europe have a frontier in the traditional sense? Is it not possible that whatemerges will be overlapping communities of redistribution, not all of which aregeographically coterminous (but all of which should receive legislative scrutiny)?Let the geographical limits of the Erasmus programme extend further, forexample, than those of the right to hold a job. The Europe of students can bemore extensive than the Europe of banks or of common employment, just as theEU is more extensive than EMU or WEU. Call this, if you will, a frontier ofvariable geometry: I prefer to think of it as the transcending of the frontier andthe dissolving of territoriality. In a way this means reverting from the notion ofthe frontier as limes to the frontier as ‘mark’ or zone, where peoples mingle.

Such a transformed concept of frontier, furthermore, would allow theEuropean Union to overcome the major theoretical difficulty with the idea of aredistributive community, namely that there must be some prior basis for inclu-sion in such a community. How can Europeans decide which individuals, familiesor other groups are to be included in a community of redistribution? Do not theclaims of candidates for redistribution – farmers, residents of less developedregions, etc. – depend upon their prior inclusion in some pre-existing concept ofcommunity? And if to qualify for redistribution one must already be deemed amember of a common community, what is the basis for membership? How dowe construct communities of redistribution without implicit frontiers that sepa-rate the ‘ins’ from the ‘outs’? Which farmers? Which underdeveloped regions? Isthere any other answer than that of acknowledging a territorial base? Certainly

34 Charles S. Maier

the EU cannot propose to admit farmers wherever they may reside, or to scatterdevelopmental funds far and wide for the sake of a European union.

The most plausible response is that potentially any group roughly contiguousto the given boundary of the Union should be considered a collective candidatefor inclusion. In this respect the idea of zone rather than a line would serveBrussels well. Let every community in the area outside the boundaries of the EUat any given date be potentially a candidate for inclusion. Such homely ideas asvicinity or area or even neighbourhood should suffice as the geographicalcommon denominator. In so far as the Union has a frontier, let its frontier beconstrued as a ‘rolling’ border. There may be practical reasons why the EU is notextended at a particular time to Ukrainians or Turks or Russians; they may notbe ready to accept the obligations of citizenship, that is, to open up theireconomies to international and even domestic market forces, or to police asegment of the common frontier. But they should not be excluded because ofany reified concept of a fixed European frontier.

We know that there are conundrums of belonging that are counter-productive. Is Russia part of Europe? Is Turkey part of Europe? Well, of course,parts of Russia are parts of Europe – and not only territorial parts, but institu-tional and spiritual parts. And parts of Turkey have been accepted as parts ofEurope and the Atlantic Alliance. Does the notion put forward here amount toanything more than so-called ‘associated memberships’ for Russia or Ukraine orTurkey, etc.? I would argue that it will over time. For instead of conceiving of theEU as a nucleus or core with some affiliated members, or a core and periphery, itwill be more constructive to envision a non-geographically referenced set ofredistributional commitments. Provision for the aged or the ill, for children orthe jobless, will be harmonized increasingly and made subject to European treat-ment. Over time any national unit can enter more and more of thesecommunity agreements.

From the beginning, however, such partial members should enter a Europeanparliament, which should become, as it has not so far, the major attribute ofparticipation. No redistribution without representation – whether as donor or asrecipient. This need not mean that Turkey or someday Ukraine would have toenjoy the same number of representatives as France, even if their populationsare comparable. Rather let the size of a parliamentary delegation, or thenumber of civil servants, reflect the commitments that new members accept: ifthey participate in only a few sectors of redistribution, their numerically justifiedrepresentation could be adjusted accordingly.

The European Union has the advantage of constructing itself at a time whenour familiar notions of territory are in epochal transformation. The age of tradi-tional territoriality, as configured almost a century and a half, ago is past. TheEuropean Community was designed during the last years of that territorialregime, but it has been renewed even as a new territorial regime has swiftlyreplaced the earlier one. Europe may still claim to be a community, but needEurope be a territory? Is it not time for this most inventive of continents to rein-vent itself beyond territory and outside of fixed frontiers?

Does Europe need a frontier? 35

Notes

1 Derek Williams, The Reach of Rome: A History of the Roman Imperial Frontier, 1st–5thCenturies (London: Constable, 1966), p. xix.

2 On these issues of frontier and territory, Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of Franceand Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,1989), pp. 1–7; B. Guenée, ‘Des limites féodales aux frontières politiques’, in PierreNora, ed., Les lieux de mémoire (part 2): (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), pp. 11–33; LucienFèbvre, ‘Frontière: The Word and the Concept’, in Peter Burke, ed.., A New Kind ofHistory: From the Writings of [Lucien] Fèbvre, K. Folca, trans. (London: Routledge andKegan Paul, 1973), pp. 208–18. Fèbvre outlines the history of the words: from fins toconfins, then limites and frontières. The latter can apply to a whole territory like a‘march’ or ‘mark’; it is often a zone not a line. The American equivalent of nationaland internal dividing lines is not frontier, but ‘border’ or ‘boundary’. The UnitedStates has a border with Mexico or Canada, and Massachusetts has a border withConnecticut or Rhode Island. When I tell family guests that we must cross theMassachusetts frontier to reach our weekend house in Rhode Island, they think sucha locution either playful or affected. But even if it is assumed that no Europeans use‘frontier’ for internal borders, if I refer to crossing the Canadian frontier, it soundsequally odd.

3 But for the emphasis on the social relations of place rather than enclosure see Guy diMéo, Géographie sociale et territoires (Paris: Nathan, 1998). This American author noteswith admiration that his basic texts on geography are produced in France, whichmaintains a tradition of historical (since Vidal de la Blache) and social geography thathis own colleagues are only slowly reconstructing in the post-modernist problema-tizing of spatial organization. See also the manual by Joel Charré, Statistique et territoire(Paris: Reclus, 1995).

4 ‘Politik als Beruf ’, in Gesammelte politische Schriften (Tübingen: J. C. Mohr, 1971), p. 506.See also Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, 5. rev. Auflage, Kap. VIII, 1(Tübingen: J. C. Mohr, 1972), p. 514.

5 Stephen D. Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 1999), pp. 9–25, suggests that effective ‘domestic sovereignty’ need not corre-late with ‘international sovereignty’ (recognition as a state among states) or even whathe further differentiates as ‘Westphalian sovereignty’, the exclusion of any outsidepower from decisive domestic influence. But it was hardly accidental that theserelated notions all moved onto the European political agenda in the same era and aspart of a long effort to establish political authority from claims to intervention orpower made in the name of religion. See also John Gerard Ruggie, ‘Territoriality andBeyond: Problematizing Modernity in International Relations’, InternationalOrganization, 41:1 (Winter 1993): pp. 139–74.

6 For a Marxian treatment see Paul Alliès, L’invention du territoire (Grenoble: PresseUniversitaire de Grenoble, 1972); and for French cartography in the context of abso-lutist statecraft, Jean Gottman, The Significance of Territory (Richmond, VA.: UniversityPress of Virginia, 1973), pp. 58–9. For Ortelius see Jessica E. H. Maier, ‘TheParergon of Abraham Ortelius’, MA thesis, Columbia University (March 1999).

7 James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human ConditionHave Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 87.

8 Michel Foucher, L’invention des frontières (Paris: Collection Les Sept Epées, 1986).9 Gunther E. Rothenberg, The Military Border in Croatia, 1740–1881: A Study of an

Imperial Institution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966) and Peter Sahlins,Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley and Los Angeles:University of California Press, 1989), pp. 1–7.

10 Roger J. P. Kain and Elizabeth Baigent, The Cadastral Map in the Service of the State: AHistory of Property Mapping (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

36 Charles S. Maier

11 Some suggestive recent works include Bertrand Badie, La fin des territoires: Essai sur ledésordre international et sur l’utilité sociale du respect (Paris: Fayard, 1995); Bernard Lepetit,Chemins de terre et voies d’eau: Réseaux de transports, organisation de l’espace (Paris: Éditions del’EHESS, 1984); Gérard Labrot, Quand l’histoire murmure: Villages et campagnes du royaumede Naples, XVIe–XVIIIe siècle (Rome: École Française de Rome, 1995), esp. the contrastwith Tuscan development, pp. 566–82; Dino Carpanetto and Giuseppe Ricuperati,L’Italia del settecento (Rome–Bari: Laterza, 1986).

12 Rochau and Schäffle cited in Theodore S. Hamerow, The Social Foundations of GermanUnification, 1858-1871: Struggles and Accomplishments (Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 1972), pp. 48, 51.

13 Cavour’s memo on railroads cited by Mack Walker, Plombières (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1968), p. 47; Cattaneo cited by Raffaele Romanelli, L’Italia liberale(1861–1900) (Bologna: Mulino, 1979), p. 69.

14 Peter J. Hugill, World Trade since 1431: Geography, Technology, and Capitalism (Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), p. 174.

15 Robert C. Binkley, Realism and Nationalism, 1852–1871 (New York: Harper & Bros.,1935).

16 Guild restrictions had been abolished in France in 1791, in Austria in 1859, in theGerman states in the early 1860s, in the North German Confderation in 1869, inSweden in 1864, Denmark by 1857. See Thedore Hamerow, The Birth of a NewEurope: State and Society in the Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of NorthCarolina Press, 1983), p. 275.

17 For a survey see Eugene N. Anderson and Pauline R. Anderson, Political Institutions andSocial Change in Continental Europe in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles:University of California Press, 1967), pp. 307–44.

18 See Susan Pedersen, Family, Dependence, and the Origins of the Welfare State: Britain andFrance, 1914–1945 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

19 For the implications of these issues as they apply to geographical and economicfactors, see David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,1989). See also the work of Saskia Sassen, The Global City – New York, London, Tokyo(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).

20 Charles S. Maier, ‘Territorialisten und Globalisten. Die beiden neuen “Parteien” inder heutigen Demokratie’, Transit, Heft 14 (Winter 1997), pp. 5–14.

21 For the notion of place (vis-à-vis space), see Edward S. Casey, The Fate of Place: APhilosophical History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997).Also di Méo, Géographie sociale et territoires, pp. 48–62.

22 Jan Zielonka, Explaining Euro-Paralysis: Why Europe is Unable to Act in International Politics(London: Macmillan, 1998), esp. pp. 230–5.

23 Williams, The Reach of Rome, p. 294.

Does Europe need a frontier? 37

This chapter was written in France. In some ways, there is no better vantagepoint from which to speak about borders. France has no border disputes to speakof with its neighbours; it is satisfied with its national borders and they are notchallenged by any other state. Yet few other states are as preoccupied with theproblem of borders in Europe and in general. The reasons for this paradox canserve as a good introduction to the nature of our problem.

More than any country, France is committed to the notion of clear and stableborders. It is the country that created the ideology of ‘natural borders’ (theRhine, the sea, the Alps and the Pyrénées). Today, it is the most resolutedefender of the fixed nature of borders, whether in Africa or in Europe, in theformer Soviet Union or in former Yugoslavia, in order not to open a Pandora’sbox of reordering Europe or the world along ethnic lines. While accepting theenlargement of NATO and of the European Union, France’s heart lies withdeepening rather than with broadening and it insists on imposing clear limitsupon both enlargements.

It is in France, therefore, following the decision of the Helsinki summit, on 10and 11 December 1999, to enter into negotiations with twelve states, includingRomania, Bulgaria and even Turkey, that the most serious and vocal fears havebeen aired that over-extension may jeopardize the original project of theFounding Fathers: very explicitly from Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and JacquesDelors, more discreetly from the Foreign Minister, Hubert Védrine. They allbelieve that a Europe of more than twenty-five countries cannot become a realpower, capable of an autonomous monetary, foreign or military policy, and that,if anything of the European dream is to be saved, it will be through a differentia-tion between a tight hard core, which would pursue the goal of Europe as a greatpower or a ‘federation of nation-states’, and a broader and larger periphery.

Its deepest traditions, whether embodied in historical formulations or incurrent language, insist upon a division between inside and outside, be it at theindividual or at the national level. There are many examples, such as one’s pré

carré (i.e. one’s own, inviolable piece of land), ‘charbonnier est maître chez soi’ (‘thecoalman is the master in his own house’, the equivalent of ‘an Englishman’shome is his castle’), ‘le roi de France est empereur dans son royaume’ (‘the king of Franceis Emperor in his own kingdom’), etc.

3 Fixed borders or movingborderlands?A new type of border for a new typeof entity

Pierre Hassner

But at the same time, it was in France that the slogan ‘Les frontières, on s’en fout!’(‘To hell with borders!’) dominated the events of 1968. And it is in France thatthe organization Médecins sans frontières was created, and it is France that gavebirth to a series of sister organizations, such as Pharmaciens sans frontières orReporters sans frontières. This gave rise to what has become known as the ideologyof sans frontièrisme (borderlessness), as well as to the notion of droit d’ingérence, justi-fying the violation of borders in the name of humanitarian intervention. Indeed,the current debate between ‘national republicans’ or ‘sovereignists’ and interna-tionalists or humanitarian interventionists has been labelled as the clash between‘republicans in one country’ and ‘democrats without borders’.

And this shows, of course, where the real debate lies. With the possible excep-tion of Britain, France is the country where the notions of the state and ofsovereignty have retained the greatest prestige and the most committeddefenders, even though these notions have been eroded, like everywhere else, byglobalization and other general trends. But at the same time, France is also thecountry that, with the possible exception of the United States, has insisted themost strongly, since 1789, on carrying a universalistic message: that of the rightsof man and citizen. The country of Raison d’État and of human rights and ofself-determination is faced with a contradiction common to all states, but moreacute in its case, which is reflected in its divisions on the importance and natureof borders.

Other national traditions make it easier to manage these contradictionsbecause they are more at ease either with change, or with ambiguity, or withboth. The United States, which was built first on continental, then on commer-cial, expansion, is wedded to a dynamic conception of the ‘frontier’, to thenotion of ‘manifest destiny’, and finally to that of the ‘open door’, even though itcombines these concepts with an acute sense of its own sovereignty. This sense ofsovereignty, however, emphasizes the universal freedom of action of the stateand the safety of its solders and citizens more than its territorial limits.

This is even more the case with empires, which, almost by definition, have noproper borders in the sense of fixed and clear boundaries. The Russian empireexpanded through the recurring necessity of defending its ever-extendingborders against external threats or peripheral disorder. From the Roman limes tothe Austro-Hungarian confines or Grenze or Krajinas, all empires have known theseperipheral zones where settler-soldiers served as ever-embattled ‘buffers’ for theimperial centre. With the collapse of empires and their division into nation-states, the inhabitants of these borderlands or buffer zones more often than notbecome nostalgic or independence-seeking minorities in a hostile environment.1

As a result, the new states are confronted with a tension between strictly definedstate borders, more or less imposed or tolerated internal borders whose character(administrative or potentially international) is a matter of dispute, and the imagi-nary religious or ethnic borders that would encompass their whole nation asdefined by history and myth.

This, of course, is the story of the Balkans, where different conceptions ofborders, based on different relations to time and space, co-exist uneasily. In the

Fixed borders or moving borderlands? 39

Balkans, great migrations, whether forced or voluntary, are part of the sametradition as an obstinate attachment to territory. However, the full coincidence ofstate and nation, language or religion, is the exception rather than the rule.Indeed, this is the case in most of the world.

Closer to our point of departure, the case of Germany offers a perfect coun-terpoint to that of France, and one most relevant to our concern with theborders of the European Union. This case can be interpreted, as some (often theFrench) do, in an imperialist mode. They emphasize the Drang nach Osten, thesearch for Grossraum, pan-Germanism and the German school of geopolitics atthe beginning of the twentieth century as evidence of the destabilizing effect ofan absence of clearly defined borders.2 Or it can, on the contrary, be inter-preted, as some (often Germans) do, in a federalist mode. They point out thatGermany’s tradition (except for seventy unhappy years) is not that of a central-ized nation-state but that of a continuum between different types of entities, ofauthorities and of overlapping borders between principalities and empire. Theyargue that it is precisely this lack of a sharp, dualistic division between above andbelow and between the interior and the exterior that makes it more adaptable tothe new condition of world affairs and more applicable as a model for Europeanintegration.3 It is precisely the preservation of its pre-modern roots whichenables it to enter the post-modern age more easily than France, which is alwaysidentified with the strict model of the modern state.4

Beyond this almost classic parallel between two Western states, one can goback to the basic opposition between nomadic and sedentary peoples, with theirdifferent conceptions of territory and hence of borders. Borders obviously play adefining and decisive role for agricultural peoples and a much more complexand relative one for nomadic ones. In a world dominated by communications,commerce and technological change, some have talked of a new nomadism andmany of a devaluation of territory as well as of sovereignty and the state. This inturn has led to a new nostalgia for roots and for walls.

Thus it is at three levels that the ambiguous and complex nature of bordersappears relevant to our subject. The first concerns the concept itself, as it unfoldsin history with, in particular, the dualities of line and zone, and of expansion andrigidity. The second level concerns the distinctive character of our time, with thegrowth of communications and of informal, trans-border networks as well as ofincreasing fragmentation and new types of borders. Last but not least, the thirdlevel concerns the specific nature of the European Union, which can neitherdispense with borders altogether nor settle on one fixed type. Although it seemsfated to live with ambiguous and moving borders, this may actually help it toinvent a new type of relationship between centre and periphery.

Boundaries and borderlands: the dialectics of aconcept

By way of introducing the permanent problems and paradoxes of the notion ofborders, let us start with a statement by President Clinton in Sarajevo: ‘Our goal

40 Pierre Hassner

is the full integration of this region into a Europe where borders unite ratherthan divide. Our answer to calls for a greater Serbia and a greater Albania mustbe a greater Europe.’5

At least two general questions are raised by this statement. First, how canborders unite rather than divide? Isn’t dividing the essence of their function, andisn’t their disappearance the only way to stop them from doing so? On the otherhand, if by borders one means borderlands, rather than fixed boundaries orlines, it becomes possible to see them as links between two countries throughtheir economic exchanges or human contacts. The Czech regions borderingGermany are becoming an example of this.6 But the problem raised by thesetypes of links is whether they create new divisions within the countriesconcerned, an issue hotly debated in the case of the Euro-regions.

This leads to the second question raised by President Clinton’s statement.Does a greater Europe imply a permanent division both among Serbs andamong Albanians? By rendering some borders meaningless, does this not createnew ones, that is, between those who are inside this greater Europe and thosewho are outside it? This is, of course, hotly debated in connection with theSchengen agreements. It seems clear that, as Spinoza put it, ‘omnis determinatio

negatio est’, any union that does not encompass the world implies a differentiationfrom its environment and hence is characterized, like any system or organization,by its borders. But it may be that in the context of a general devaluation ofborders, some borders may simply become more quickly and more totally irrele-vant than others. All borders would tend to disappear but those inside integratedunions would disappear more than others. Again, to give meaning to the state-ment implies a certain transformation in the concept and reality of borders assuch. And this, in turn, has important theoretical implications.

There are three possible approaches to the problems of borders. The first is apositive and conservative approach, which sees borders as the central instrumentof political order. The second, a negative and revolutionary approach, considersborders to be an unnatural obstacle to peace and the unity of humankind. Thethird, dialectical and evolutionary, approach maintains that, like tonguesaccording to Aesop, they are both the best and the worst of things: the abolitionof some borders inevitably creates new ones, but the latter do not necessarilyhave the same character as the former. The general trend, according to the thirdapproach, is towards borders becoming less territorial, less physical, morecomplex and less visible.

The first theory rests on the age-old alliance, emphasized by Rousseau in hisDiscourse on the Origin of Inequality, between property, authority and war, which wasespecially striking in agricultural societies. Borders are lines, walls, barriers orhedges that designate the limits of a given property or domain. They indicate thelimits of the competence or of the sovereignty of a given state. Hence theyencourage homogeneity, or at least a feeling of common belonging, within theirlimits, and separation, or at least a feeling of detachment, from the world beyond.Finally, more often than not, they follow lines of past confrontation, they indicatea military balance or stalemate, they are changed by conquest or expansion.

Fixed borders or moving borderlands? 41

This is made particularly obvious by the etymological connection between ‘front’and ‘frontier’.7

This traditional approach has been given a particularly forceful and coherent,but also extreme and dangerous, form by the German legal and political theo-retician Carl Schmitt. His great book Der Nomos der Erde8 is based on a punbetween Ordnung and Ortung. Order means above all a territorial order: the divi-sion of the planet into legitimate units controlling different pieces of land. Thelimitation of war is based on a ‘Hegung des Krieges’, again conveying the suggestionof physical delimitation. Of course this delimitation, while being the source andthe basis of international public law, is not equalitarian, as it is the result of rela-tions of power. Hence intermediary notions like Great Power, Grossraum orspheres of influence give rise to other types of borders than the physical inter-state ones. Still, they rest upon a continental conception based on the division ofterritory. Colonial expansion and wars make for other, looser types of bound-aries, called ‘amity lines’, between conquering powers. But the sea and, even less,the air are not amenable to the kind of order favoured by Schmitt. Hence hisantipathy for the maritime, commercial and universalistic conceptions of theAnglo-Saxons.

A second source of his hostility to the notion of an order based on humanityas such is his view that the political world is a ‘multiverse’ rather than a‘universe’, and that the opposition of friend and foe is its defining feature.9

Sometimes the two adversaries seem mutually to recognize their legitimacy;sometimes the enmity seems total, leading to a total state and a total war.10 Buteven in the more positive and peaceful version, borders are linked to the resultsand prospects of war.

Sometimes these divisions and these wars seem to be based on ethnic, reli-gious or cultural differences, as in the notion of the ‘clash of civilizations’.Sometimes they appear as the result of power relations and of political inven-tion. Even physical divisions, such as the Urals as the limit of Europe, as opposedto the much more imposing Himalayas, which are held to delineate only asubcontinent, have been shown to be the result of a particular political reading,usually of European origin.

It is this artificial character of borders, and its basis in the desire for politicaldomination and the results of war, that inspires the second theory, that of aborderless world. In this view borders are essentially prison walls that hamperboth the free development of economic exchange and cooperation as well asunderstanding among peoples and their banding together for the common tasksof humankind. Peoples are kept inside borders, oppressed by rulers whose legiti-macy rests on the threat from outside. If borders were suppressed, we could bebrothers and sisters instead of being artificially divided into ‘quasi-species’. Themoral argument based on our common humanity is reinforced by a practical onebased on effectiveness: borders multiply costs; they divide the forces necessary totackle global problems, from epidemics to the environment, from hunger toweapons of mass destruction.

42 Pierre Hassner

There is a convergence between:

• the philosophical inspiration reaching from Kant, for whom the goal ofhistory is the creation of a ‘cosmopolitan situation’,11 to Hans Jonas, forwhom the primary responsibility, transcending all national and political divi-sions, is to ensure the survival of the planet;12

• an ideology that emphasizes global solidarity like that of Médecins sans fron-

tières or that of the prevalence of generational over territorial ties (‘We arethe world’, ‘Woodstock nation’, etc); and

• the analyses of political scientists, like Bertrand Badie,13 who refer to ‘theend of territoriality’ because of the revolution in communications, theprevalence of transnational flows, or, in a word, globalization.

Does this, then, invalidate the conclusion of Malcolm Anderson’s book onfrontiers: ‘A world without frontiers in which solidarity with the whole humanrace dominates all intermediate solidarities remains an utopian dream’?14 Beforejumping to that conclusion, one must ask two basic questions. First, assumingfrontiers are dangerous and counterproductive, does this necessarily mean thatthey are on the way out? Second, are they in a process of withering away or arethey in a process of transformation and differentiation? Could it be that sometypes of borders are disappearing but that they are being replaced by others, thatwe are witnessing ‘the unbundling of territoriality’, to use John Ruggie’s expres-sion,15 rather than its end, or even that non-territorial borders are rising whileterritorial ones are declining?

The answers implicit within these questions are at the root of the thirdapproach, which I have called evolutionary and dialectical, and which seems tome to be more helpful in understanding the specific character of our time ingeneral and of the European Union in particular.

The key lies in the notion of differentiation. While the modern Westphalianorder tended to promote a sharply delineated separation between nation-states,with borders understood as lines rather than zones, and an ideal model empha-sizing homogeneity within state-centred territorial units and rivalry betweenthem, the progress of communication and of interdependence tends to favourthe opposite model, that of heterogeneity within society-centred units and ofoverlapping among them. Borders tend to be less clear-cut and less fixed,borrowing more from the experience of nomadic peoples and of empires.

Above all they tend to be different in scope and in tightness according to issueareas like economics, security, etc., so that the basic distinction between insideand outside, between natives and aliens, tends to become much more complexand uncertain. This does not mean that it disappears. The common error of thefirst and the second approaches is to posit the alternative as being betweenexclusion (or downright hostility) and fusion or elimination of differences. Incontrast to the proponents of a world without borders, adherents of the firstapproach see the distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’ as the essence of human

Fixed borders or moving borderlands? 43

society and politics. But, contrary to Carl Schmitt, this is not identical with thedistinction between friend and foe. Of course, any inclusion implies an exclu-sion, and vice versa. But there is a world of difference between starting with theone or with the other. If the main purpose of states is defined by internationalrivalry, then they are based above all on exclusion and their respective citizensare defined by their non-exclusion. In a world where universalistic values andmaterial interdependence converge in the direction of globalization, and wherethe primary purpose of states is seen as guaranteeing the individual well-being oftheir citizens, the prevalent politics are the politics of inclusion. But of coursedifferences immediately emerge concerning degrees of inclusion, whether interms of power or prestige or in terms of community and solidarity. The rele-vant spatial metaphor is, then, the distinction between centre and periphery:exclusion becomes the extreme form of marginalization. But this means theborderline between inclusion and exclusion becomes a relative one: there is noabsolute or immutable difference in nature between internal and externalboundaries, between internal and external periphery.

More generally still, the trend is towards interpenetration between the interiorand the exterior of states and organizations, which produces what the Germansociologist Ulrich Beck calls Entgrenzung or ‘de-borderization’.16 This, in turn,changes the perception and the status of foreignness and foreigners as such. Asanother German sociologist, Sighard Neckel, puts it, the increase in mobility hasmeant that ‘what was the characteristic of the foreigner (the migrant who comestoday and stays to-morrow) becomes in the age of individualization a generalform of life.’17 This, again, means not that there are no longer any foreigners,but rather that foreigners are among us or even are within ourselves. In turn, thiscreates a longing for a return to real exclusion, to real separation, to real walls,between a unified individual or a collective self and the outside world, whetherthrough withdrawal or through ethnic, religious, ideological or social cleansing.

Here again, the dialectics of borders may produce paradoxical results. Thedesire to exclude immigrants may lead a country to isolation from the othermembers of the community. Jörg Haider’s Freedom Party in Austria, by trying toerect a wall to prevent the invasion of poor masses from the East, may havecreated a psychological and moral wall between itself and its neighbours to theWest.

This, again, raises the question of co-existence and contiguity: when territo-rial separation through partition or expulsion is impossible, can the aspiration toseparate communities be satisfied within a common territory? The trend,concerning citizenship, has been towards attachment to a common territory asopposed to a common blood. Can there be different communities, obeyingdifferent laws and customs, yet living together within the same borders? Can aleaf be borrowed from the book of the Austro-Hungarian Empire or ofLebanon in the direction of personal federalism or autonomy rather than terri-torial federalism, as has been argued by Stéphane Pierre-Caps? 18 Does this notmean an inequality of rights, sooner or later leading either to clashes or to terri-torial separation? Forced co-existence of communities who fight for status and

44 Pierre Hassner

influence or for work and wealth may well be the fate of the big metropolisescreated by modern population movements.

This is only one example of the permanent fluidity of borders, constantlyerased and re-created on another level in our complex, moving world. As theFrench geographer Denis Retaillé put it:

The simultaneity between globalization and the fragmentation of identitiescreates a new field for political action: between the World and the Place, allintermediary levels are but constructions and strategic steps according to thenew territorial imperative that engages the responsibility of actors in bothdirections. … Before, the coalescence of societies used to be handled in asimple way by contiguity. … Now what one has to invent is the coalescenceof different levels of society. Something that resembles horizontal feder-alism, i.e. the process of assembling incomplete or unfinished societies inplaces that are imperfect, a little elusive, and with variable dimensions.19

Does this not read like a description of the task facing the European Union?

Elusive borders for an unidentified object: theEuropean paradox20

Jacques Delors has called the European Union ‘an unidentified political object’,and John Ruggie sees it as ‘the first multiperspectival unit to emerge since theadvent of the modern era’.21 No wonder that the problem of its borders cumu-lates all the paradoxes and ambiguities we have seen – and adds some additionalones.

The specific difficulties have to do with its open-ended enlargement. This hasbeen made almost inevitable by the duality of its criteria, as laid down in theTreaty of Rome. On the one hand, the European Union is geographicallyembedded, since it is on the continent of Europe. On the other hand, the criteriafor membership – democracy and an economy able to be integrated – areuniversalistic and point beyond a limitation to contiguous territory. In 1954,polemicizing against what he called ‘Little Europe’ at the time of resistance tothe idea of a European Defence Community, the French economist FrançoisPerroux launched the slogan: ‘Europe without shores’ (‘L’Europe sans rivages’). Butwhat is the real ‘Europe without shores’ if not the whole planet? ObviouslyEuropean unity must have some geographical or territorial limit. Conversely,whatever the temptations of West Europeans at the time of the Cold War,nobody can consider the limits of Europe as defined by the Iron Curtain to befinal. Nor does ‘Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals’ – a geographic notionthat no longer corresponds to the political, economic and military realities of thetwenty-first century – fit the bill. It does seem that the Europe of European inte-gration is bound to remain ambiguous in its geographical dimension. It cannotbe conceived without borders, but these borders are bound to remain fluid andcontradictory.

Fixed borders or moving borderlands? 45

The first of these two features distinguishes the borders of the EuropeanUnion and, to some extent, of NATO from those of the European states, whoserule, according to Michel Foucher is to combine geographical fixity withincreasing permeability.22 But the second, the fact that the monetary, thecommercial, the financial, the military, the cultural borders of Europe do notcoincide, only makes it the most visible and powerful example of a trend that isaffecting the nation-states themselves. If, as Ruggie suggests, ‘the distinctivefeature of the modern system of rule is that it has differentiated its subject collec-tivity into territorially defined, fixed and mutually exclusive enclaves oflegitimate dominion’23, then we must acknowledge that the fluid, mobile char-acter of relations between the internal and the external, the intergovernmentaland the supranational, the political and the functional that characterizes theEuropean Union represents a break with the modern conception of politicalterritoriality. But in the same breath we must also acknowledge that this breakrepresents a significant move towards the new sociopolitical, national, interna-tional and transnational reality into which we are sliding – a reality that could becharacterized by the interpenetration of units and issue areas, by the multiplicityof competences, and by their mobility or fluidity.

The very multitude of paradoxical or intermediate formulations needed todescribe the relations between the European Union, its member states, thecandidates for membership and the associates indicates the predominance ofnuances and shades as opposed to clear and distinct delimitations. At the level ofthe European Union, the relation between the centre and the periphery remainsambiguous and fluid. It is no easy matter to distinguish between the internal andthe external periphery: the distinction between centre and periphery tends to bereproduced within the centre and the periphery themselves through a spectrumthat goes from the centre of the centre to the periphery of the periphery. Whatwe are witnessing is neither a stable and accepted hierarchy nor a trend towardsthe pure and simple erasing of distinctions. But this is precisely what our thirdtheory was predicting.

Not only are classical oppositions between interior and exterior, public andprivate, political and social, brought into question, but new and ambiguousforms of subnational and transnational community are beginning to appear,while classical ones like the nation, state and territory are far from ready todisappear.

We are seeing more and more abstract identities such as Delors’s ‘unidentifiedobject’, the European Union, but also such as Bosnia-Herzegovina (a sovereignstate composed of two ‘entities’ that can have their own special links withdiffering neighbouring states) or Kosovo (a mixture of UN protectorate and of de

facto independent state that is still supposed to be part of Serbia). We see popula-tions whose statuses are ambiguous or incomplete (refugees, gypsies, permanentresidents, European citizens); and places whose status is equally obscure (concen-tration camps, ‘safety zones’, ‘grey zones’, enclaves, zones placed underinternational administration), not to mention a myriad of networks in everysense of the word.

46 Pierre Hassner

What emerges is a field of forces in which attraction and repulsion pull indifferent directions. There is a tendency for the centre to pull back from theturbulent and violent peripheries. In the case of the closure to immigration, thistendency works towards the creation of a separation between the Union and itsexternal environment, as symbolized by the Schengen agreements. There is atthe same time a retrenchment in the individual member states themselves. Evenmore importantly, both inside and outside the European Union, new spaces andnew differentiations are being created in order to isolate or reject migrants; theygo from‘security zones’ at airports to ‘first host’ or ‘first safe’ countries.

The retrenchment of the ‘haves’ from the ‘have nots’ can be reversed,however. This has happened in the case of relations between the European orAtlantic centre and the South-East European periphery. Enlargement has alwaysbeen an option for Central Europe. The Central European states are more plau-sible candidates than their neighbours to the east or south. They are closer to thecentre economically, politically and culturally and are thus easier to integrate.But disorder, war and famine – the very reasons for which the prosperous andliberal West would prefer to keep a region like the Balkans at arm’s length – alsoforce the West to get involved in spite of itself. Paradoxically, after the Daytonaccords and the war in Kosovo, the European Union and NATO are much moreengaged in the Balkans (where they hold certainly Bosnia and Kosovo, and tosome extent Albania, Macedonia and perhaps tomorrow Serbia, under a combi-nation of a military protectorate and a mandate for economic reconstructionand political reform) than in Central Europe, which, although more familiar andreassuring, does not find itself in a crisis situation. As for countries like Romaniaand Bulgaria, their place on the list of priorities for the EU may decline evenfurther, as they risk falling between two stools. Or, as would seem to be indicatedby decisions made in Helsinki in December 1999 to include them in negotiationsfor accession, they may benefit from their role during the Kosovo crisis, whichseems, at least for the time being, to loom larger than their progress (or lackthereof) in economic reform.

Another paradoxical illustration of the discrepancy between degrees of prox-imity or distance according to issue areas is the case of the Baltic states. Theirdimensions and Nordic affinities would allow a rapid economic integration intothe European Union, but, because of their geopolitical and historical relationswith Russia, they have, for a long time, been denied any hope of joining NATOand any serious prospect of being protected by it.

For international institutions, the question of universal or open-endedmembership raises considerable problems concerning their ability to fulfil theirspecific functions. Indeed, by their very nature, NATO, the European Union orthe Council of Europe, unlike the UN or the OSCE, cannot become universalor open to any and all applicants. Some limitations exist concerning the char-acter of the candidate states, in terms of human rights, market economies ortheir commitment to the observance of certain rules. If ignored, they wouldmake a mockery of these institutions, which exist precisely in order to differen-tiate between those who do conform to these rules and those who do not. This is

Fixed borders or moving borderlands? 47

what seems to have happened as a result of the failure of the Council of Europeto exclude or even to issue a warning to Russia in spite of its crimes inChechnya. But, by the same token, history or geography cannot easily beinvoked to keep out those who do adhere to these rules even if increasedmembership means decreased effectiveness. ‘Multiple speeds’ or ‘variable geom-etry’ is inevitable. It is likely, for instance, that a hard core around a commoncurrency or a common defence policy will emerge within the European Unionand that the enlargement of NATO will lead to a multiplication of limitationsbased on the French or Scandinavian model: members without foreign troops orwithout nuclear weapons on their territory, etc. This obviously reduces the polit-ical potential of European unity and the protective effect of NATO. The myth ofequality and of solidarity, common to nation-states and to collective securityorganizations, may become less and less credible. Instead, both NATO and theEuropean Union may begin to look more like traditional empires, with thedistinction between centre and periphery (or centres and peripheries) becomingalmost as important as the distinction between members and non-members.

Their survival and their ability to fulfil their functions will then depend, aboveall, on the reliability (in terms of both coherence and flexibility) of their respec-tive centres. The more differentiated the organizations are and the less they areconstrained by external threats or rigid boundaries, the more they need a legiti-mate, wise and active leadership to keep them together. NATO certainly doesnot lack assertive leadership but the problem lies in its unpredictability and itsreluctance to run risks and incur costs. In the European Union, the problem iswhether its leading powers and its central institutions can be both united andopen enough to steer the organization and its periphery on an ocean battered bythe contrary winds of globalization and nationalism.

Jacques Delors seems to fear a negative answer to this question, so much sothat he advocates ‘a treaty within the treaty’ among the central powers once theyare ready to enter a ‘federation of nation-states’. But their willingness to do so isdoubtful and the consequences upon the periphery may be highly unwelcome.Heather Grabbe and Kirsty Hughes have captured these uncertainties well:

Enlargement may thus both demand and contribute to the development ofa multi-tiered EU; as yet it is unclear how this would be structured or func-tion, and whether it would be sufficiently cohesive. There are three broadoutcomes that can be envisaged if enlargement goes ahead. First, anenlarged EU could essentially reach a point of stasis, with adequate func-tioning of well-established areas, but lacking any further policy developmentand failing in particular to develop in problematic or newer policy areas(notably the common foreign and security policy, and justice and homeaffairs). Secondly, the EU could move towards defining a narrower coreacquis, while allowing flexibility in other areas: this outcome might be effec-tive as long as the core acquis was sufficiently cohesive. Thirdly the EU mightenlarge on the basis of the current acquis with a core group of countriesmoving ahead in a number of areas; without effective institutional change,

48 Pierre Hassner

however, there would then be problems in operating the acquis and pressuresmight also build for the core group to splinter off from the rest.

In the absence of a genuine strategic overview of how to structure thefuture EU, one of these outcomes might emerge not through direct choicebut by default, at the end of a sequence of step-by-step decisions on institu-tional reform and accession conditions; the resulting Union might be not somuch multi-tier as a patchwork EU.24

This patchwork character may well extend to our subject proper, namelyborders. With the accession of Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, andeventually of Slovakia, Romania and Bulgaria, not to speak of Turkey, theproblem of what has been called the Schengen acquis would raise drastic, if notdramatic, problems. The principle of the abolition of borders and controlsinside the Schengen space and their reinforcement outside would, if appliedrigorously, bring havoc to the relations of Hungary with its national minorities inRomania or Serbia, or of Romania with Moldova, or to the economic relationsbetween Poland or the Czech Republic and Ukraine or Belarus. It would havedisastrous consequences for the latter countries. If, on the other hand, a series ofexceptions were made, the principle of ‘bringing one’s friends along’ would notonly transform the whole process of accession but would also intensify the blur-ring of the distinction between inside and outside even further, just as theaccession of Turkey would accelerate the creation of an internal peripherysubject to restrictions of movement not unlike those of the external one.

In the end, very much will depend on the general environment. If it developsinto a benign environment, with no immediate military threat, with immigrantsbeing welcomed for economic reasons rather than feared for social and psycho-logical ones, if borders continue to lose their tightness and even their meaning,the European Union will appear as the wave of the future and as a model forother regions. But if a severe general or domestic economic crisis or externalmilitary threat sharpens its multiple contractions into ‘either–-or’ or ‘us againstthem’ alternatives, then hardening and closing may become the order of theday: The trend is certainly in that direction; the fear of immigrants for reasons ofeconomic competition or of national cohesion manifest from Austria to Australiais multiplied by the fear of terrorism in the post-11 September world. While theexternal borders of Schengen law may become even more rigid, the abolition ofinternal borders may become less and less total. And in that case the cleavagemay well be following national or core versus periphery lines even more thanbetween the European Union and the rest of the world.

Notes

1 Michel Foucher, Fronts et frontières, 2nd edn (Paris: Fayard, 1991), p. 512.2 J. Ancel, Manuel géographique de politique européenne, vol. 1 (Paris: L’Europe centrale,

1936).3 Reinhart Kosellek, ‘Diesseits des Nationalstaats. Federale Strukturen der deutschen

Geschichte’, Transit, 7 (Spring 1994), pp. 63–76.

Fixed borders or moving borderlands? 49

4 See Robert Cooper, The Postmodern State and World Order (London: Demos, 1997).5 Newsweek (17 August 1999).6 Anne Bazin, ‘Les régions frontalières tchèques: différenciation interne et enjeux

européens’, Revue d’Études Comparatives Est–Ouest, 29:4 (1998), pp. 229–55.7 Foucher makes much of this connection, although he thinks one can get rid of ‘fronts’

while safeguarding ‘frontiers’. See his conclusion ‘Critique des fronts, éloge des fron-tières’, Fronts et frontières, pp. 531–45.

8 Carl Schmitt, Der Nomos der Erde: im Völkerrecht des Jus Publicum Europaeum (Berlin:Duncker und Humblot, 1950).

9 Carl Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1965).10 Carl Schmitt, ‘Totaler Feind, Totaler Krieg, Totaler Staat’ (1937), in Carl Schmitt,

Positionen und Begriffen im Kampf mit Weimar–Genf–Versailles 1923–1939 (Berlin: Dunckerund Humblot, 1988).

11 Immanuel Kant, ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Intent’, inPerpetual Peace and Other Essays (Indianapolis/Cambridge, MA: Hackett, 1983), pp.29–41.

12 Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).

13 Bertrand Badie, La fin des territoires (Paris: Fayard, 1995).14 Malcolm Anderson, Frontiers: Territory and State Formation in the Modern World

(Cambridge, Polity, 1996), p. 191.15 John Gerard Ruggie, ‘Territoriality and Beyond: Problematizing Modernity in

International Relations’, International Organization, 47:I (Winter 1993), pp. 139–79.16 Ulrich Beck, Die Erfindung des Politischen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1993), p. 87. (English

edn: The Reinvention of Politics [Cambridge: Polity, 1996]. )17 Quoted in ibid., p. 123.18 Stéphane Pierré-Caps, La multination (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1996).19 D. Retaillé, ‘L’invention du territoire’, in Bertrand Badie and Marie Claude Smouts,

eds, L’international sans territoire, special issue of Culture et Conflits (1991), p. 138.20 This section draws freely on my chapter ‘Obstinate and Obsolete: Non-territorial

Transnational Forces versus the European Territorial State’, in Ole Tunander, PavelBaev and Victoria Ingrid Einagel, eds, Geopolitics in Post-Wall Europe: Security, Territoryand Identity (London: Sage, 1997), p. 45.

21 Ruggie, ‘Territoriality and Beyond’.22 See note 7.23 Ruggie, ‘Territoriality and Beyond’.24 Heather Grabbe and Kirsty Hughes, Enlarging the EU Eastward (London: The Royal

Institute of International Affairs/Pinter, 1998), p. 106. See also Heather Grabbe, TheSharp Edges of Europe: Security Implications of Enlarging EU Border Policies Eastwards,Occasional Paper 13, the Institute for Security Studies, WEU (March 2000); andMonica den Boer, Look Who Is Talking: The Double Logic in the Imposition of Instruments ofControl on Candidate Countries, paper for the Robert Schuman Centre’s ReflectionGroup on ‘Diversity and Unity in the Enlarged European Union: What Influencesthe Process of Transition and Adaptation in Central and East Europe?’ (21–2 June,Brussels).

50 Pierre Hassner

What are borders? Of the many possible definitions, the one nearest thischapter’s approach is that of borders as formal delimitations between collectivesubjective entities – identities in the fortunate cases – politically organized instates or equivalents. As such, their importance is twofold: political, as they standas protectors of one given set of laws and regulations, and not another’s; andsymbolic, as they also guard certain customs and norms, therefore cultural iden-tity.1Both roles make borders indispensable, as collectives cannot do withoutidentity, albeit conventional, cultural anomie is unhealthy. Yet in both endeav-ours borders are vulnerable and increasingly harder to sustain in times ofunprecedented movement of ideas, people and capitals.

The 1999 EU Helsinki summit made the historic decision to set an Easternborder to Europe. It included the Baltic States, Turkey, two Balkan countries –Romania and Bulgaria – and left out the Ukraine, Serbia, Moldova and others,with more or less similar legitimate claims and assumed identities. As the deci-sion was taken in the aftermath of the Kosovo war, the border could not havelooked different. Nevertheless, this historic decision seems to follow the blueprintof the most important European policies in the last decade of the twentiethcentury, the crafting of today’s policies on yesterday’s shabby forecasts, be theythe prolongation of the Cold War or the survival of the Milošević dynasty intothe twenty-first century. Given the benefit of hindsight, one cannot fail to noticesome considerable inertia behind the signing of the European Maastricht Treatyor the EMU, but neither can one deny the exceptional significance of such deci-sions, regardless of their initial motivation. For some East European states,Helsinki was the best news in a century otherwise quite poor in historic opportu-nities. But much is still to be done to turn this conventional border drawn on amap in Brussels into a border of Europe, even assuming the target set is the rightone. Challenges to the Eastern border of Europe are tremendous, and enlarge-ment policies may well stop short of securing what Europe was seeking in thefirst place: peace, security and prosperity on the Eastern border.

This chapter will review these challenges taking a political analysis approachrather than a technical policy-bound one. The latter would discuss the Justiceand Home Affairs acquis, cross-border police cooperation, and so forth,breaking down each item into the two main challenges: the geographical terres-

4 Facing the ‘desert of Tartars’The Eastern border of Europe

Alina Mungiu-Pippidi

trial border to the East and the ‘wealth’ border, the difference in incomebetween Western and Eastern Europe. I will take a broader approach,however: challenges are rooted as much in policies’ design as in their imple-mentation, so from the Brussels policy planning cabinets to the Easternoutskirts of the vast European empire, border posts and consulates directlyfacing the ‘desert of Tartars’,2 one can try to cast a fresh look. Change is saidto come only incrementally to huge organizations, but understanding can beoccasionally unleashed. Still, understanding is culturally bound: of thescenarios for Europe released by the Forward Studies Unit in 1999 none actu-ally foresaw Helsinki at close range, and only one displayed some trust inclassic liberal democracy to endure in the twenty-first century on the basis ofsuccessful markets, all the others being more or less disguises of post-1968 post-materialist ideologies. If the rate of forecast writers is one free-marketer to fourpost-materialists, or of one Euro-optimist to four Euro-pessimists, than thefuture seems grim indeed.

Ideas are therefore as important as facts: this is the underlying assumptionguiding this policy analysis. Consequentially, this chapter is structured aroundthe discussion of five essential ideas relevant to enlargement policies and theEastern border topic, and the challenge of the use of common wisdom towardsthose. This should not be read, however, as though this author is somehow beable to resort to some alternative source of wisdom, or as though such an alter-native source might even exist; instead, it should be viewed as a programmaticattempt at some ‘mise en abime’ exercise, the open exhibit of our common assump-tions with a hope that unconventional discussion will foster our more advancedunderstanding. As such, I shall discuss policy options in the light of thesewidespread assumptions and their challenge to reach, in the end, a few recom-mendations.

Is East European borders’ ‘goodness-of-fit’comparable to the West European one?

State borders may seem, at first sight, to be granted similar significancethroughout the continent of Europe as the main symbols of national sovereignty.One estimate is that 8,000 miles of new state borders have been created inCentral and Eastern Europe since 1989 alone. The brutal, be it peaceful(Czechoslovakia) or non-peaceful (Yugoslavia) redrawing of frontiers withinEastern Europe frightened the Western world after 1989: but it was a mererevenge on a century of frustration over the inability to find the ‘right’ borders,the expression of what a political scientist labeled as ‘unfinished national revolu-tions’.3 All borders may be conventional (i.e. formal), but some are moreconventional than others, and East European borders after the wars of liberationthat started in the second half of the nineteenth century and ended with theVersailles Treaty in 1919 resemble, to some extent, more post-colonial Africanborders than those of Western Europe. The character of Eastern Europe as‘colony’, unable to pursue a normal development path due to chronic foreign

52 Alina Mungiu-Pippidi

domination and intervention by the entities designed under the name of ‘theGreat Powers’, is rarely acknowledged nowadays. For a region such as the Balkanseven its negative consequences are disputed.4 None the less, the essential variablethat prevented normal state formation in Eastern Europe and led to the impos-sible patchwork we face today is the confiscation of natural nationaldevelopments by centuries of foreign domination and/or intervention. Nowhereand at no time were nation-states built without violence: the idealization of theWest European state- and nation-building only leads to flawed categories ofnationalism. Centuries of combined ethnic and religious cleansing, conversionand negotiation led to West European nations within the Euro-Atlantic region,what Gellner once labelled the ‘first and second time-zones of Europe’.5 In thethird time-zone, roughly the enlargement countries of today, this evolution wasprevented by the zone being a playground not for God, as the title of a contempo-rary history of Poland proclaims,6 but for the Ottoman, Habsburg and Russianempires. The most influential set of classifications of nationalism are as Westerncivic, Eastern ethnic,7 which, in fact, may be reduced to ‘Western good, Easternbad’ and fully based on the lack of acknowledgement of two essentialphenomena: the national under-development of Eastern Europe due to foreignoccupation, and civic liberal models, not German romanticism, as the initial

dominant paradigm of nineteenth-century East European state-building.8 Amuch more refined, therefore more accurate, perspective does exist in nationalistliterature,9 but, as it is often the case with more complex, less black-and-whiteapproaches, their use by the media and policy-makers is severely limited. WestEuropean borders, one must acknowledge, were rendered a lot more ‘natural’through centuries of evolution. Their superimposition on the natural frontiers of‘social communication’10 set by use of common or close languages reached a highdegree of ‘goodness-of-fit’. Where it did not, as in the case of borders betweenFrance and Germany, a revolutionary process of European unification wasneeded to solve the matter. But nowadays, indeed, less than a third of WestEuropeans consider their borders ‘wrong’, and the figure decreased even moreafter the unification of the two German states. In Eastern Europe, however, thesituation could not be more different: on the average, a majority of EasternEuropeans are not settled with their borders, and three polls11 found high rates ofagreement with the statement ‘There are parts of other countries which belong tous’ (see table 4.1).12 Unsurprisingly labelled by Miller, White and Heywood as‘external nationalism’, this variable may measure simply the awareness ofperceived ‘lack-of-fit’ of national borders to national cultures. Living with cultural

Facing the ‘desert of Tartars’ 53

Table 4.1 Territorial nationalism in selected European countries

UK FRG GDR Cz Hun Pol Bul Rus Ukr Lith Rom

There are partsof othercountries whichbelong to us

20 43 25 39 68 60 52 22 24 46 71

Source: Times Mirror Survey, 1991; Freedom House–SAR, 2000

minorities within your national borders is both acceptable and manageable. Toaccept, however, that one’s own ethnic group forms a minority or even a majorityin a neighbouring state (Kosovo, Moldova) while the ethnic group of anotherneighbour forms a minority in your state means acknowledging that borders arewholly, not somewhat, conventional, which renders them meaningless altogether.Eastern Europeans’ perception that something is wrong with their borders istherefore partially grounded in reality; this does not imply, however, that a betterset of borders could have been produced when centuries of unnatural evolutionhad to be brought overnight to an equitable and workable solution. This also doesnot imply that the perception, in itself, of borders as wrong does not generateterritorial nationalism. It does. Hungary, for instance, leads, at the top of thecountries polled for external nationalism, despite Hungarians from abroad beinghigh on the list of the most disliked groups in Hungary.13 In a March 2000Freedom House–SAR survey Romanians prove a close match to Hungarians’dissatisfaction with borders, and also share the distaste for co-nationals living insurrounding countries, especially Moldovans.14 This shows that territorial nation-alism is fed by memories of historical ‘greatness’, more than contemporaryfeelings of solidarity grounded in common identity.

If that is the problem, what is the solution? Most East European bordersresemble the France–Germany model rather than the ordinary West Europeanborder, so the plain solution that these borders must be rendered superfluous viaa process of unification (although it was not specifically stated as such atCopenhagen or Helsinki) is wise. But three serious problems arise here:

(i) The most difficult borders lie not within the enlargement area; after all,Hungary, which has the greatest amount of minorities in surrounding countries,would not dream of waging war against Slovakia or Romania to recuperatesome of its pre-1918 territories. The most difficult borders are with and withinthe former Yugoslavia, and there exists only a poor foreseeable forecast for thestabilization of South-Eastern Europe without some degree of inclusion offormer Yugoslav countries. There is no final solution, nor indeed a temporaryconvenient one, for former Yugoslav countries without their inclusion in the EU,even though this solution may seem remote and indeed far-fetched today. Whencrafting a border policy one has to keep in mind that Yugoslavia must be broughtinto Europe sooner or later if Europe wants peace on its South-Eastern front,and this can be achieved sooner than some people believe.15 The pessimism ofsome authors regarding former Yugoslavia is exaggerated.16 Wasn’t it equallydifficult at a given time to conceive the German–Polish or the German–Frenchreconciliation, not to speak of the Spanish–Spanish one? It is difficult indeed tobe optimistic about Yugoslavia within the limited framework of imagination, asthe embattled, not viable and not even ethnically homogenous statelets outsidethe EU.17 The same applies to Albania: smuggling Albanians into Italy willcontinue, despite Italy being a full Schengen member, if Albania is not givenmore hope that it can belong to Europe some day.

(ii) Some of the borders with problems are between accession countries andtheir neighbours, who would be excluded once all applicant countries adopt the

54 Alina Mungiu-Pippidi

Schengen acquis. Hungary’s border with former Yugoslavia, where a strongHungarian minority lives in Vojvodina; Poland’s border with Ukraine, with aPolish minority; and Romania’s border with Moldova fall in this category. To besure, these are not conflict-leading borders per se; nobody would wage war tochange them. But making those borders impermeable would sever minorities’connections with countries where the bulk of their culture lies, prompting illegalentrances and feeding resentment. Formal barriers stop ordinary citizens,students and truck drivers; they fail to stop criminals.

(iii) The same risk is faced in the third circumstance, the very plausible eventthat even within the current pool of EU applicants some will join sooner andothers later – considerably later (Romania and Bulgaria apply for certain, butthings may get messy even for Poland). Foreseeing such a development, theHungarian government of Viktor Orbán, for instance, crafted a bill (the so-called ‘Status Bill’) granting Hungarians living in neighbouring countries(Slovakia, Romania, Ukraine, former Yugoslavia) limited citizenship rights, thatis, entitlement to limited work-permits and benefits, although not the right tocast a vote in Hungarian elections. As many of these countries are still on theblack-list of visas, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán may have reasoned correctly onbehalf of the four million Hungarians living in neighbouring countries, of whichquite a few try to work in Budapest, at least seasonally.18 Such policy remains toprove itself as having the potential to solve more problems than it creates. MostHungarians from outside Hungary were eligible for work permits even before theHungarian Parliament passed the ‘Status Bill’; if they did not apply for such apermit it is because there is a black labour market for seasonal workers. It isaffordable to hire Magyars from surrounding countries because they settle forlower wages and no taxes have to be paid to the state by the employer, and thelaw will not change this economic rationale. The main driving idea behind thelaw was nevertheless the need to do something to help ethnic Hungariansresiding in neighbouring countries not to fall behind the border once it willbecome the border of an enlarged Europe.

Once a border is set, albeit conventionally, it starts working as a border; inother words, it starts generating differences across it, and homogeneity within.19

This is even more the case when a border is designed as the manifestation of avast programme of crafting a new identity and the common reality underlying it,as with a unified Europe. This implies an increase in the differences currentlyexisting between accession countries joining Schengen earlier and those that willjoin later, as well as between the latter and their neighbours further to the East.Gaps will only be widened by the imposition of impermeable borders.20

Culture, and not development, is what divides Eastfrom West?

The difference between the development of Western and Eastern Europe isabove any controversy. Even where we are dealing with the same history and thesame culture, as is the case with East Germany versus West Germany, decades of

Facing the ‘desert of Tartars’ 55

further investment are needed to rectify the destruction communism wreaked onthe economy and society. However, this development border was much less anobject of public concern in the West than was the assumed ‘cultural’ one. Morethan one version of where this ‘cultural’ border actually stands has been aroundin the past three decades. Václav Havel had the honesty to acknowledge thatbetween Western and Central Europe there still lies ‘a wall in our heads’, but hewas alluding to the legacy of communism, not to some structural cultural differ-ence. Many Central Europeans implicitly accept the ‘cultural border’ argumentwhen striving to push this imagined cultural border further to the South and theEast.21 Samuel Huntington endorsed this with his William Wallace-based argu-ment: ‘The Velvet Curtain of Culture has replaced the Iron Curtain of ideologyas the most significant dividing line in Europe.’22

This well-phrased assertion came under serious attack. However, one mustacknowledge that, if we are dealing with widespread perceptions, even imaginedborders can, at times, turn into real borders, so ‘the wall in our heads’ can well beof our own making. Until the last day of the last millennium, for instance,Eastern Balkan countries, despite being invited to join the EU, were black-listedby the EC and most member states as well, so in order to travel to the rest ofEurope their inhabitants needed to get a visa at the consulate of some memberstate, a process often expensive, time-consuming and humiliating. Countriesfalling within the cultural borders, despite being rated similarly in terms of theiroverall performance by the EU, such as Slovakia, or not even featuring amonginvited countries, such as Croatia, enjoyed a lot more freedom of movementwithin Europe than did Bulgaria and Romania. However, when checking publicopinion data no cultural differences seem to matter. Amazingly, on average,Eastern Europeans report having a ‘European identity’ more than do WestEuropeans (66 per cent as against 54 per cent), but this probably reflects onlytheir strong desire to end the forced separation of Europe they have livedthrough fifty years of communism.23 Comparisons of Eastern and WesternEurope,24 or within Eastern Europe,25 as well as cultural classifications based onthe World Values Survey26 show that Eastern Europe falls within one culturalarea, with the recent influence of communism overriding dramatically anyremote influence of past regimes or cultural factors such as religion.27 In terms ofdevelopment, however, things are quite different. And the imagined wall becomesa very real wall when one considers the figures of foreign investment per capita(see table 4.2), which by itself explains considerably why some transitions weresuccessful and others not. Historical legacies of development, however, canhardly be seen as ‘cultural’ legacies, and they should not be considered as such.

Can the most severely constrained of these societies; the countries beyondHuntington’s fault line to the East, carry the burden of EU accession with littledirect foreign investment and insignificant structural aid? The problem is morepressing for Romania and Bulgaria, which seem to fall behind the rest of thegroup, but only due to persistence or aggravation of stronger initial constraints,low foreign direct investment and less interest in these countries in general.Without a proper differentiation of policies28 in order to make the Helsinki invi-

56 Alina Mungiu-Pippidi

tation more than just a symbolic thank you to Balkan countries for support overKosovo,29 chances are the Eastern border will be set between Central Europeand the Balkan countries, which would induce major political disadvantages andwill prove the Balkan stability pact an empty catchphrase. This would clearlypoint to the fact that the border is economic rather than political. Both Bulgariaand Romania visibly showed they are committed Euro-Atlantic supportersthroughout the Kosovo campaign and the 2000 elections in Romania, despiteinitial worries, produced a government with a foreign policy similar to theprevious one. Both countries have come to fulfil the Copenhagen politicalcriteria. But they also have a long legacy of stronger constraints: Ottoman rule,underdeveloped institutions, more closed and repressive communist regimes,large ethnic minorities, vicinity with Yugoslavia and therefore reliance on theDanube trade, paralysed by embargo and war for most of the past decade.30

Even if no cultural problems can be found despite so many self-fulfillingprophecies, development problems abound. Few dare to phrase it plainly in suchpolitically incorrect terminology, but the major problem of the Europe of todayand tomorrow is how to protect its havens of prosperity from an invasion of‘Tartars’, its high living standards from the need to redistribute wealth to poorregions of post-communist Europe, and its social acquis from a more liberalAmerican-type approach.31 And it may well be that the latter requires theformer. The ambiguous career of the Euro so far and the slowdown of theAmerican economy create further need for Europe to protect its moderategrowth and pursue cautiously its economic integration. This leaves little room fora daring policy to increase competitiveness, to radically reform EU spending andto use the enlargement as an opportunity to boost the European economy. And,as long as the EU has a conservative policy towards its budget and enlargementstays, in terms of expenditure, a third-rank policy, economic challenges to theEastern border remain considerable.

The issue of freedom of movement remains the first such challenge.According to various sources, even Slovenia, which has the highest per capitaincome of all applicant countries, might need twelve to twenty years to level itsliving standards with neighbouring Austria. As long as differences betweenWestern and Eastern Europe remain so dramatically high, the worry will persistthat the enlargement will be followed by a wave of immigration. So far, theGerman and the Austrian governments have been the most active among

Facing the ‘desert of Tartars’ 57

Table 4.2 EU applicant countries: selected indicators

Cz Est Hun Pol Sloven Bul Lat Lith Rom Slovak

GDP/capita adjusted bypurchase power parity(PPP – 1999)

62 38 53 42 73 24 29 31 28 49

Foreign direct investment(FDI)/capita – thousandsUS dollars

1.68 1.64 2.05 1.04 1.35 0.464 1.75 0.649 0.268 0.389

Trust in Parliament* 15 – 25 25 20 12 – – 13 21

* Freedom House for Romania, Bulgaria and Slovakia; New Democracies Barometer V for the rest of the countries.

member states in this area as they considered themselves to come under the mostserious threat. Germany has recently managed to obtain from the Commission astall of five to seven years on the freedom of movement of workers once the firstapplicants are in (see table 4.3). For Poland and Hungary, this was a considerableblow as governments there have constantly quoted the free movement of labouras the main incentive of the European accession. With the structural aid and theCAP reformed to prevent newcomers from getting a share, and the free move-ment of labour blocked, the EU becomes quite unattractive to the most advancedapplicants, who are also required to adopt and implement the full Schengen acquis

even before becoming members of the Union.32 Certainly the accession processalso has other important advantages, foremost among which is that it gives clear

58 Alina Mungiu-Pippidi

Table 4.3 Regulation of work permits in EU countries

Total number of

permits

Access for self-employed? Are long-term residence permits issued?

Austria 126,889 (1999) Only residence permit Yes, for 1 year

Belgium 83,500 (1999) With prior agreementof Ministry

Yes, after 5 years

Denmark 73,092 (1999) Very rarely, only forimportant aspect of theactivity

Yes, if a work permit is granted

Finland – Only residence permit,and business plan

Yes, usually for 1 year

France – Many professionsprohibited to foreigners

Yes, between 1 and 10 years

Germany 1,083,268(2000)

Yes, lengthyprocedures

Yes, granted up to 5 years

Greece 69,600 (1997) Yes, required financialresources

Yes, between 1 and 10 years,renewable each year

Ireland 2,600 (1997) Yes, but ‘businesspermission’ required

Yes, for 1 year

Italy 30,000 (1999) Yes Yes, after 5 years

Luxembourg 6,800 (1997) Yes, bunk guaranteemust be paid

Yes, for 1 year

Netherlands 20,816 (1999) Yes, residence permitneeded

Yes, for 1 year. After 3 years no morework permit needed. After 5 yearspermanent residence permit isgranted under certain conditions

Portugal – Yes Yes, if has resided legally for at least10 years.

Spain 85,526 Yes Yes, after 6 years a permanentresidence permit may be applied for

Sweden 220,000 Yes Yes, after 2 years a permanentresidence permit may be applied for

UK 72,599 Very tough conditions After 4 years work permit holderscan apply for permanent settlement

direction to a process of institutional and economic transformation, promptingeven reluctant governments (such as – at times – those of Romania or Slovakia) toundertake necessary reforms. But such incentives are quite meaningless for coun-tries such as Estonia or Poland, which are already moving ahead at full speed.Unsurprisingly, public support for EU accession in these countries is declining asperceptions of sacrifices induced by years of liberal reforms prevail over short-time hopes of boosting living standards via accession to the Union.

The concern with the potential immigration of the cheap labour force fromthe East may be exaggerated, but it still remains a serious one, in bad need of acommon policy. Some separation is needed, however, between fears of risingcriminality in the enlarged Europe – addressed in detail by the Schengen acquis

and the policy documents of Justice and Home Affairs, and needing only intelli-gent and effective implementation – and the problem of immigration – whichbadly needs a totally different set of policies.33

How justified is the fear of massive immigration? Most authors agree it ismuch exaggerated.34 Extrapolations from the past enlargement process orcurrent figures have obvious limitations. Polls confirm, however, that Poland’s orRomania’s immigration potential remains quite high (see table 4.4). Other esti-mates point to a figure of 35 per cent of would-be employees out of a total of335,000 residents who it is assumed will immigrate following the removal ofbarriers after the first enlargement wave.35

The figure is by no means alarming, although Germany’s fear of Polish immi-gration has already succeeded in halting the free movement of labour for five toseven years. The problem increases, however, with the next wave of countries,those with a higher migration potential, from Lithuania to Romania. The cruxof the matter is the difficulty in solving the Roma problem within a foreseeabletime-frame and to avoid feeding the already existing perception of Romaniansand Bulgarians that the EU member states operate with double standards: on theone hand, asking these countries to solve their Roma problem; on the otherhand, delaying their entrance from fear of floods of Roma invading Western

Facing the ‘desert of Tartars’ 59

Table 4.4 East European would-be workers in the EU

Czech Republic Hungary Poland Bulgaria RomaniaWould you bepersonally interestedin finding a job inone of the EUcountries once yourcountry enters theEU? (%)

Sept.2001

May2001

Sept.2000

May2001

Sept.2000

May2001

May2001

May2001

1. Yes, I aminterested and I willcertainly try

4 4 6 7 10 13 9.6 17.3

2. Yes, I aminterested and I willprobably try

7 8 7 7 8 10 10.6 13.5

Source: CEORG poll, 2001

Europe.36 Without question, the walls of a fortress are needed to keep beggarsout, but how thick can you make them, and would it not be cheaper to tackle theroot cause of the problem? The model Europe should look at more closely is theGreek one: following the abandonment by the Simitis government in 1996 of thepractice of forcefully expelling Albanian illegal migrants, an estimated 500,000Albanians now work in Greece, representing a boost for both economies.

It has already become obvious that the second issue related to the neweconomic border concerns the Roma. Large migrant communities of Romahave managed to cross the borders regardless of all the barriers in the past tenyears and there is little to keep them in their home countries, where they areallegedly politically discriminated against, and certainly economically disadvan-taged. Enforcing borders against the Roma was not a solution in the last decadeand it will not work in the next one either: the Romanian Roma, for instance,have reached the point where they control the black market for some products inthe underground Paris market.37 Roma claim that they are the targets of raciallymotivated discrimination and violence in candidate countries; candidate stategovernment officials make the counter-claim that they are merely economicmigrants.38 Both have found support for their claims within the EU: discrimina-tion and violence against the Roma is highlighted in the EU’s Regular Reports,but claims by Roma for asylum in EU member states are generally denied.39

While implementing anti-discrimination policies, we should not for one momentimagine that they have the potential to solve the issue. Affirmative programmesfor Roma, now in fashion, are not without use, but they do not address the hardissues. Nor is it likely that Roma coming from former Yugoslavia will be grantedpolitical asylum in Western countries as a result of aggressive demands byhuman rights groups.

The largest group, the Romanian Roma, which is estimated at up to 1.5million strong (see table 4.5), cannot even be called a community due to its loose,fragmented, pre-modern organization and important internal differences.40 TheRomanian Roma are the heirs of slaves liberated between 1848 and 1854 fromlarge domains, who have neither benefited from the kind of social assistance theAmerican black community have, nor ever lived in a prosperous country. Thelegitimacy enjoyed in their own ethnic group by leaders who get to discuss withgovernments and international organizations is low to nil.

Can one realistically assume that Romania is able to tackle the heritage of itsRoma by itself ? Despite producing a national strategy for Roma at Brussels’request, it is clear that such a document can be a proof of good will only. Acountry that has not achieved an economic breakthrough since the fall of theWall cannot solve a problem that has proved long and strenuous even in the most

60 Alina Mungiu-Pippidi

Table 4.5 Numbers of Roma in selected EU countries

Hungary Bulgaria Czech Rep. Slovakia Romania

140,000–600,000

313,000–800,000

32,000–200,000

80,000–520,000

600,000–1.5 million

advanced economies. Even if to a smaller degree, the problem exists in othercountries in the region as well. In this spirit, the Czech government has asked forthe ‘Europeanization’ of the Roma problem. Some programmes mostly basedon community building and empowerment of groups – in other words, more ona social capital type of approach – may work, but these require not only considerablymore funds, but also a different approach to assistance programmes and theunderstanding of Roma issues.41 And it would take decades properly to solve thehistorical inequalities, even if the positive signal of starting such a mass-scaleprogramme would certainly deter many Roma from emigrating. In other words,incentives have to be created to keep Roma in their countries, but countries aspoor as Romania and Bulgaria cannot currently offer such incentives to any oftheir citizens. What countries can and should do is pay more attention and bemore effective in enforcing equal treatment before the law – but that will havelittle practical consequence in preventing immigration. A global Europeanstrategy to the Roma issue is badly needed.

Do good ends somehow generate their own effectivemeans?

The failure or success of an institutional transformation on the scale of theEuropean integration of a post-communist country seems increasingly to restupon clear delimitation between the ends of a transformation – let us call thesefinal institutions, e.g. Eastern economies competitive with Western ones – and themeans used to attain these, such as the acquis. The mixing of the two in policydiscourse and debate has occurred more often than not in the past decade, and inthe most difficult country cases (which had previously been subject to deepercommunization processes) such approaches inflicted major damage to themanagement of the transformation. Examples accounting for dramatic failurescan vary from competition policies to law enforcement.42 It is not a simple issueof empowerment, although empowerment is important, but an imperative needto assert the necessity of intermediate institutions,43 to identify them correctly (asthe final institutions are obvious: the White Book and the Agenda 2000 statethem clearly) and then implement them by empowering the right agents. Fromeconomic development to social inclusion and ability to integrate into Europe,much will depend on the strengthening of institutions and governance in EastCentral Europe. Gradual integration with the European Union will requiresignificantly more mature institutional structures, able to satisfy the economic andpolitical framework conditions of the EU and to implement the acquis communau-

taire. Unlike other strategies that come in one package with at least someintermediate institutions (like development strategies), European accession is anend often deprived of means, and quite a burdensome end for countries whereinstitutions are weak, norms are shabby and resources are scarce. One cannotstress enough the need for institutional development necessary for East CentralEuropean countries to become reliable partners in the EU integration process.44

Good governance comes basically from a set of institutions that structure political

Facing the ‘desert of Tartars’ 61

and economic life, yet arriving at these often requires intermediate institutionsable to motivate people and organizations to change from whatever institutionsthey previously had (communist ones, in our case) to the newly required ones.Such transformations can and should be measured.

Weak institutions cut across government agencies and tasks – it is highlyunlikely that one sector will have strong institutions and another one will haveweak ones. Many countries in transition have weak institutions and the highdegree of institutional transformation required by successive ideologies andcontradictory targets throughout transition will have weakened them evenfurther. The core services that the government is supposed to provide, such aslegal and judicial protection for citizens, are the most affected by institutionalweaknesses, although most of the public debate focuses on market institutions.Overall, the weakness of institutions operating in the area we are interested in –Justice and Home Affairs – could use accountability as a useful proxy. ECEcountries need to build accountable governments and public agencies. Thedramatic public discontent with politicians and political organizations comesfrom a generalized feeling that governments are not accountable. More oftenthan not this perception is rooted in reality since institutions of horizontalaccountability are extremely weak or non-existent. In developed democracies,vertical accountability is ensured by constituencies, and by competition forresources between various levels of government. Legislative bodies and the judi-ciary provide formal horizontal accountability, but NGOs, interest groups andstrong, impartial media also bring an essential contribution to informal hori-zontal accountability.

Surveys of the applicant countries show important differences but also point to a clear under-

development of institutions of accountability and law enforcement in general (see table 4.6).

Both subjective and objective estimates of corruption and accountability showmost countries of the ECE falling into the bottom half of the scale. Romania andBulgaria, accession countries, score below Croatia on rule-of-law items. Poland isnot doing much better than Eastern Balkan countries, however. Former Yugoslavcountries were included in order to facilitate comparisons between the three-speeds of Eastern Europe. Three clusters indeed emerge, with Slovenia andHungary at the top, highly similar in Home and Justice items, Macedonia andKosovo at the bottom, and Romania, Bulgaria and Croatia somewhere in themiddle of the scale, with Poland and the Czech Republic ahead of them. Thisshows that the three countries to become the next ‘buffer’ area of the EU in theEast – Poland, Romania and Bulgaria – are not the best prepared for such a task.

The ‘Area of freedom, security and justice’ has shown an extraordinary build-up of structures and activities as a reaction to perceived transnational threats tointernal security; the outcome was the proposed common structures andmeasures at the European level, of which there have been quite a few over thepast ten years. Monar45 quotes:

(A) A proliferation of centralized European control mechanisms such asupgrading the Schengen external border controls, creating the Schengen

62 Alina Mungiu-Pippidi

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Information System (SIS), establishing Europol, setting up the CustomsInformation System, and reaching an agreement on the EurodacConvention;

(B) The adoption of a large number of binding and non-binding restrictivedocuments on the concept of asylum and immigration, which include theDublin Convention, various resolutions to restrict immigration, the re-admission agreements concluded by the Schengen members with thirdcountries, etc.; and

(C) Some first measures aimed directly at improving law enforcement, suchas the imposition of standardized minimum sentences for fraud against theEC budget, the criminal law measures taken against cross-border corrup-tion, the facilitation of extradition, and the first steps in permittingcross-border law enforcement operations.

At the 1999 Tampere Council substantial steps were taken towards: thecreation of a common asylum system (especially on procedures and minimumguarantees); the use of external EU instruments to reduce the pressure exertedby immigration on the Union; improved cross-border litigation procedures; andan enhanced mutual recognition of judgements and more legislative actionagainst money laundering. Two new institutions were created: Eurojust, to facili-tate the coordination of national prosecuting authorities and support criminalinvestigations in organized crime cases; and a European Police College for thetraining of senior law enforcement officials.

These highly complex and sophisticated instruments are to be adopted almostat the same time, and many of them either prior to accession or on day one ofthe accession by applicant countries. Given the current stage of institutionaldevelopment of the East European applicants, in many instances such adoptioncan only be formal. More time and assistance is needed in order to adjust bothnational legislation and practice to such a demanding task, and in some casesthose won’t even suffice. For border policies to be effective, however, more thanformal adoption is needed. As Home Ministers from Poland and Romania haverepeatedly pointed out, it is difficult to enforce borders without cooperation fromneighbouring countries. There is considerable corruption among customs andborders officers even in applicant countries where they receive their wages regu-larly (although they are required to resist corruption on wages averaging between$100 and $400), but on the Eastern neighbours side, in Ukraine and Moldova,there are often law enforcement officers who are not paid at all. In Moldovathere is a price tag for every felony, including the life sentence.46 Infrastructureupgrading and professional training on a massive scale are needed, but the mostserious issue of all is the socioeconomic gap. How much above the nationalaverage can one pay law enforcement officers and judges to make sure they resisttemptation? The downside of globalization is that bribes reach the level ofdeveloped countries even in underdeveloped ones, while even the highest wages

64 Alina Mungiu-Pippidi

in Eastern Europe’s public sector cannot match those of the West. Even by 2005,Slovakia, for example, is not likely to have reached more than 15–25 per cent ofthe Austrian wage level (at current exchange rates). In the Czech Republic andHungary wage differentials are not much different.

Eastern countries have made considerable efforts to comply with require-ments to bring their judiciary and law enforcement agencies in line and someprogress is indeed visible. But there is a direct correlation between the general level of insti-

tutional development and the implementation of Justice and Home Affairs. The future bufferzone countries have an uneven potential, but even the most advanced ones arehardly able to carry the burden of the EU Eastern border by themselves. Theapproach so far has been that of requiring them to adopt the acquis – thereforestressing the institutional end – and of offering some support in training andinfrastructure building via PHARE programmes, reputed for their lack of flexi-bility and their inability to contribute to institution-building efforts.

When describing the difficulties of reforming the law enforcement agencies inRussia via Western assistance programmes, Stephen Holmes makes a number ofconsiderations with much larger applicability:

The first steps of legal reform, such as deregulation, may be relatively easy.But subsequent steps, such as creating an honest civil service, are muchharder. Improving the quality of public institutions requires a broader anddeeper social consensus and capacity for cooperation than, say, currencystabilization or price liberalization. Law is a public good, and politicallydisorganized societies, by definition, have a hard time creating public goods.The magnitude of the challenge facing legal reformers can be expressedsimply by recognizing that legal reform is a branch of state building.47

Evidence from East European states acknowledges this reality. The poor stateof the judiciary is considered by analysts to be the most alarming problem withinthe Bulgarian and Romanian political systems. The budget for the judiciary inBulgaria, for instance, is about one fiftieth of the average budget set aside bycomparable EU countries, and the situation of other East European countries isnot much better. Even more worrisome is the fact that the judiciary cannot beconsidered independent. For instance, a common feature is the involvement ofthe executive (primarily the Ministry of Justice) in nominating the judiciary,removing the attorneys in corruption cases and determining budgets.48

Paradoxically, the channelling of Western financial assistance for liberalreforms through East European governments has only amplified problems inmany sectors: the main EU assiatance programme, PHARE, often sponsorsdirectly the domestic administrative corruption and lack of effectiveness, mainlyunder pressure from Brussels to spend the funds, rather than reach clear measur-able targets. ‘Success’ in assistance programmes to some East Europeangovernments means, more often than not, that grantees managed to spend theallocated funds. A thorough diagnosis of what specific problem should have beentargeted, by what means, by empowerment of what actors and with what finality

Facing the ‘desert of Tartars’ 65

is often missing. Therefore, it is no surprise that vast sums of money out ofWestern taxpayers’ pockets are spent in the East with minimal effect. Promotinglarge-scale institutional and societal change requires an understanding of thelocal situation based on thorough research, flexible and creative procedures ofaid granting, and regulated measurements of its effects (much more than consul-tants’ assessments).

The advent of a new legal culture in Eastern Europe cannot be promptedunless a more comprehensive strategy is forged aimed at building institutionalsocial capital. This will require bringing in line various organizations capable ofacting as horizontal accountability agents, either formal or informal, andempowering them to act as partners, ombudsmen and audit agents for govern-mental agencies within the framework of large coalitions granting transparencyand accountability on the part of governments and the public sector in general.Corruption and accountability issues have been given little space on the agendaof European accession negotiations so far, the reason being that they areinformal phenomena, while negotiations are extremely formal in their nature.Informal realities therefore, regardless of their importance, become the main casualties of the

negotiation process. Since the reform of the East European public administrationsystems is Brussels-driven, the EU needs to further strengthen its positionregarding accountability and best administrative practices, and use its leverage tosupport domestic ‘mani pulita’ (‘clean hands’) coalitions, not governments alone. Ifthe EU wants the negotiations to succeed in countries where informal institutions are at least as

strong as formal ones, there is little choice but to develop a strategy that will address informal

problems, backed by part of the resources earmarked for formal ones.49 It is only investmentin the former that can prompt some returns from investment in the latter. Thesame applies to countries that are not applicants – such as Russia – but arenevertheless massive recipients of European assistance programmes for thereform of law enforcement agencies.

Do good fences make good neighbours?

Unlike previous enlargements, this is the first one to include the Justice andHome Affairs acquis, which now covers asylum, control over external borders,migration, organized crime, terrorism, drugs, as well as police, customs and judi-cial cooperation. Most importantly, the acquis also includes the Schengenagreement on the removal of border checks between member states. Article 8 ofthe Amsterdam Treaty Protocol, which includes the Schengen acquis, states thatfuture EU members will be required fully to comply with the Justice and HomeAffairs acquis. In spite of the diversity of national practices visible in the flexi-bility of arrangements within the Justice and Home Affairs regime (toaccommodate Western countries that opt out: members such as UK and non-members such as Norway), this regime is well on its way to becoming generalizedin Europe, at least in its control and enforcement rationale and its tendency tocreate Central European controlling instruments, such as Europol and the SIS.50

Most of the applicant countries have already started to adjust, changing their

66 Alina Mungiu-Pippidi

border control mechanisms and their visa regimes, and concluding re-admissionagreements with their neighbouring countries. Romania and Bulgaria wererequired to do this as a condition for their removal from the visa black-list,despite the prospective membership being quite distant for the moment. In otherwords, there is no room for negotiation here, with East European countriesbecoming passive consumers of asylum and border policies set by the EU.Applicant countries have more or less complied so far, the bottom line beingmore rather than less under all circumstances. Challenges vary greatly fromcountry to country, however. The security of Poland’s eastern borders, forinstance, has been a major concern for the EU. Not only has EU money (morethan $50 million in 2000 alone) and technical assistance been provided to shoreup Poland’s ability to control its borders, but in addition, the EU hopes to stationGerman patrols along the Union’s new Eastern front. Poland in its turn isworried over the fate of ethnic Poles living in Ukraine. Indeed the variousmeasures adopted between 1997 and 1999 led to a dramatic decrease in bordertraffic (50 per cent).51 Although Poland initially resisted the outright militariza-tion of its borders with Ukraine and Belarus, Polish customs officers have begunto police the border in keeping with EU expectations. German-trained Polishborder brigades have successfully tightened surveillance, but in doing so theyhave also curtailed the vibrant ‘bazaar economy’ that was flourishing in theborder regions.52 There is clearly some political cost to these restrictions,combined with the strain of a long admission process. Poland was once the EastEuropean country most in favour of membership. But in 2000 only 59 per centwould vote in favour of it, down from the 80 per cent approval rate in 1996.53

The Czech Republic is an easy case by comparison. Visa policy was adjustedto come fully in line with that of the EU by the date of the Czech Republic’saccession. The Czechs’ main problem is their Roma population, whichprompted repeated warning from the European Commission, but the Slovaks’access to the Czech Republic’s labour market might also be reduced followingfull EU membership for the Czechs. The Czechs have also already introducedvisas for Eastern neighbours who are black-listed by the EU. This meant puttingan end to the only good legacy of communism: freedom to travel from one EastEuropean state to another. They had followed in the steps of Slovenia, which hastaken the most restrictive approach to freedom of movement and therefore is theclosest in spirit to the Schengen requirements. Slovenia introduced visas forRomanians and Bulgarians in 2000, following earlier similar requirements forcitizens from the CIS, former Yugoslavia (except Croatia) and Albania. At thesame time it started the very expensive process of building a Schengen borderbetween itself and Croatia, to the discontent of the Croats.

The most serious problem with the Schengen-induced visa policy, however,concerns Hungary and its neighbours. Of all the first wave countries, Hungaryhas struggled the most to keep its borders open to neighbouring states, duemainly to the existence of important Hungarian communities living outsidenational borders, notably in Transylvania (Romania), Ruthenia (Ukraine),Vojvodina (Yugoslavia) and Slovakia. In June 2001, as noted above, the

Facing the ‘desert of Tartars’ 67

Hungarian government adopted the ‘Status Bill’, the aim of which was allegedlyto stop ethnic Hungarians’ emigration to Hungary and to ensure better condi-tions for them in their homelands. The Bill grants a ‘Hungarian card’ to everyethnic Hungarian living in a neighbouring country (Austria is excepted) whoapplies. The card is a token of second-rank citizenship: holders are able to travelvisa-free and work in Hungary for three months every year with all benefitsincluded. Needless to say, the Bill was quite unpopular with Hungary’s neigh-bours, mainly Romania, where a 1.6 million Hungarian community still resides.Romania filed complaints with the EC, tried to propose a motion of protest inthe Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, and in the end managedto ensure that the card is granted to every applicant for a job who holdsRomanian citizenship, and application could be made only on Hungarian, notRomanian, territory.54

Slovakia had moved ahead even of Hungary. Since 1997, during the Meciargovernment, it adopted the ‘Slovak card’, meant to expand some of the citizen-ship rights to ethnic Slovaks living in neighbouring countries, notably Ukraine.Following this, Slovakia introduced visas for CIS countries and is currentlycomplying with the request of having the full Schengen acquis adopted on thefirst day of its accession. The border with Ukraine is Slovakia’s only ‘hard’border, the rest being borders with the EU or applicant countries.

Bulgaria has moved ahead to tighten its borders. In 1999 a law was adoptedthat introduced a far more secure type of passport. Conscripts were replaced bypolice officers at the borders, and visas for some of the countries black-listed bythe EU were introduced. Following these timely measures, Bulgaria had the satis-faction of being removed from the visa black-list at the end of 2000. Neighbourssuch as Macedonia are extremely worried by the prospect of being cut off fromBulgaria by a restrictive visa policy.

After the removal of Bulgaria from the visa black-list in 2000, Romania hasthe worst position among applicant countries, until being removed itself from 1January 2002. Romania signed over thirty re-admission agreements (allowing therepatriation of illegal migrants from Western Europe to their country of origin),introduced passport for Moldovans and granted Moldova the funds for them,and generally strived to meet requirements within the framework of its severelylimited institutional capacity. The consulates of EU member states granting visasin Romania have long been a picture of ineffectiveness, arbitrariness and corrup-tion. Frequent purges of corrupt clerks by EU member states (those who cared todo it) proved unable to solve the matter. The freedom of movement ofRomanian citizens is still extremely disputable as now Romanian authorities arepreventing people from crossing the border if they cannot prove that they haveenough money to travel. Faced with the lifting of visa requirements, somemember states without warning introduced new conditions to determinewhether Romanians could enter their space. In January 2002, nearly eightyRomanians were not allowed into Greece for failing to show hotel vouchers,despite producing proof that they had enough money to pay for a hotel.

Problems of the Baltic states’ borders seem more remote for now compared

68 Alina Mungiu-Pippidi

to Central and South-Eastern Europe, but they will arise once their membershipbecomes a fact. The Russian-speaking minorities in the Baltic states willundoubtedly require some special travel status for relatives from Russia. Indeed,Russia itself is certain to feel its isolation more acutely once separated from theBaltic countries, whose seaside cities were once the pride of the Soviet Unionand a common destination for domestic tourists. Some flexible arrangementallowing Russian citizens to get at least national visas at the border and be ableto travel freely in the Baltic states, while being prevented from entering the rest ofthe Schengen space without a visa, looks like an absolute necessity.

This review shows that the implementation of the Schengen acquis by the new applicant

states and the enforcement of the Schengen border appears to satisfy only the security-related

concerns of West European states. Schengen is hardly a ‘security and stability factor’for Eastern Europe; rather it induces new tensions between neighbouring coun-tries that had barely managed to surpass prior tensions. The situation ofSouth-Eastern Europe is even more delicate since, although the EU-endorsedStability Pact vowed to bring more stability and security to the region, favouringCroats over Serbs even after the normalization of the situation in Serbia,isolating high-migration potential Bosnia and Macedonia, and erecting a newwall between Slovenia and the rest of the Balkan countries can hardly be consid-ered as stabilizing policies. Transitory or lasting forms of accommodation withneighbours are highly necessary. These would cover the Ukrainian–Polish andRomanian–Moldovan problems and the Balkan borders in general. Whilerushing to join the EU, applicant countries should not forget that vicinities arelasting realities, and by no means is the vicinity with Western Europe the onlyone that matters. Yugoslavia, Ukraine and Russia may not be doing well for themoment, but their citizens bear no guilt for their politically or socioeconomicallyinferior status, and if entrance to the club of the rich is still at a distance, at leastthese citizens should not lose their essential freedom to circulate within theformer common East European space. This would only feed unnecessary frustra-tion and resentment, which are far from being in short supply in the region.

5. Can consensus amongst the elite substitute forgeneral lack of support?

Critics of enlargement in Eastern Europe see it is as unnecessarily complicated,lengthy and half-heartily endorsed. Compared to the previous enlargement or itsshare in the EU budget expenditures, the current enlargement looks second-rankand low in importance. Supporters in Western Europe, who know the difficultyof pushing for the enlargement idea, which is popular in the West only as long asit does not cost the taxpayer a penny, claim that this slow speed is the onlypossible one: at a faster pace either East Europeans could not bear the burden ofadjustment, or the West European public would get scared off and put a hold tothe whole process. Despite a low investment financially, the process is no less amajor historic one and in time it will prove that a lot was accomplished even withlimited resources. By and large, one gets the feeling that Easterners somehow

Facing the ‘desert of Tartars’ 69

steal the enlargement by the back door of the EU with the help of theCommission and the political and intellectual elites of a few member states.According to a recent Eurobarometer poll, a mere 27 per cent of Westernersthink that enlargement is of primary importance for the EU, with Germans thewariest of EU citizens. That makes the Brussels bureaucracy the only consistentsupporter of enlargement and adds to the democratic deficit between EU head-quarters and member governments. Speaking no doubt for his constituents backhome, the EU Commissioner for Enlargement, Guenther Verheugen, repeatedlyemphasized that enlargement should be an informed political choice for EU citi-zens. But that will not happen until the enlargement project ceases to be alow-priority issue on the agenda of Western political leaders, who never had aconsistent and sustained programme of ‘selling’ it to the public at home.

Despite temporary setbacks, the view that by and large Eastern Europe after1989 was a tremendous success55 seems to prevail over the pessimistic opinionthat the region has changed at a slower pace than expected. Never before hasdemocracy taken root anywhere at such an amazing speed: even countries thatdid not meet standards of economic success, such as Romania, managed to solvecenturies-long inter-ethnic problems more impressively than anyone dared topredict in 1989. Successful markets paved the way for societal transformationalmost everywhere, the different paces of change being better explained by thedifference in initial constraints than by any other factor.56

Despite all this, the popularity of EU enlargement in Eastern Europe is stillquite paradoxical. The masses seem to endorse the EU accession process in polls,but evidence shows they are largely ignorant about it and give it more of asymbolic endorsement than anything else. Elites are, however, fully committed,and this commitment has gone beyond the communist/anti-communist dividewithin the political class, present at the beginning of transition. A major gain forthe region is the fact that the pro-EU political discourse is the only legitimateone, with all alternate discourses being so far delegitimized.

But will the pro-EU stance survive the difficulties of negotiations and integra-tion? Will it survive Schengen and the double standards it incurs? Pro-Westernelites in Eastern Europe are something the West has always taken for granted,and for good reason too, because there has always seemed to be a fair supply ofthem. Western political elites have quickly supported the enlargement idea incompensation, among other things, for deserting their Eastern counterparts in1938, 1945 and 1956 – to mention only the more exceptional moments. On aless grand scale, the fall of democratic pro-EU governments in Romania (2000)and Bulgaria (2001) can also be partially blamed on the insufficient Westernsupport they received. The popular support of these governments vanished afterthey endorsed the EU and NATO in the Kosovo war against an Orthodoxneighbouring country and long-term ally. Promoting the austere fiscal policiesneeded to make these countries’ economies competitive with the EU did nothelp to boost their popularity either. These two governments can be consideredcasualties of the policy to engage in full pro-European policies with minor invest-ment from the EU as back-up.

70 Alina Mungiu-Pippidi

Lack of support from the West for pro-European leaders and lack of massawareness campaigns in the EU promoting the enlargement’s historic impor-tance will sooner or later undermine the whole process. When this happens,Europe may find itself prey to a return to populism already anticipated by someelection results in the last elections of the twentieth century, from Jörg Haider toVadim Tudor. Symbolic issues such as borders will feature prominently in suchelectoral wars.

Conclusion

All problems have solutions, more if looked at in detail, fewer if addressed glob-ally. The East European border is no exception to the rule. On a broad historicalscale it may look to be a hopeless game, in particular for Europe’s Balkan,former Ottoman-dominated territories, but also for Christian Orthodox andMuslim Eastern Europe in general. Voltaire said that Europe must distance itselffrom the Balkan Peninsula, then under Turkish occupation: its former Byzantineaffiliation mattered less to him than the need to keep Europe away fromlegendary Thrace.57 Of course, the fact that it is the Orthodox countries that arelagging behind Europe, within or without the future enlarged EU border, maymean nothing in itself. The case of Greece shows that geographical deter-minism, not religion, is the origin of Europe’s post-modern borders. Passiveendorsement by Western leaders of cumulated negative geographical deter-minisms, however, by paying less attention to and investing less in South-EasternEurope can only reinforce the vicious circle and draw the European bordernorth of the Balkan Peninsula. Voltaire’s warning would then be fulfilled.

Looking at issues in more detail, though, there are a few obvious policyoptions to be endorsed if such negative developments are to be prevented. Theyare based on a series of assumptions, some of which are not really optimistic.The first assumption is that Europe will resist the need for radical reform of itsspending as much as possible, with some member states acting to lessen theimpact experienced by European budgeting priorities as a result of the newcountry memberships. Exceptions and transitional thresholds of all kinds58 maybe expected to prevent the new members from enjoying the same basic rightsand privileges as the old ones and to protect the old rules of the game.59 Thesecond assumption is that the enlargement process may well be delayed or evenhalted after the first group of countries join, more if Poland is part of this firstgroup, less if it is not, due to difficulties presented in point one and to the seriouseconomic gap between some of the applicant countries and the EU, despiteprogress registered with the formal adoption of the acquis. Since the EU’s policytowards Eastern Europe over the past decade was largely an incremental, self-interest filtered response to strong pressures from Central European countries,60

we can assume that once these pressures fade the process will be stalled, althoughmajor points on the agenda of the new entrants (such as Poland’s need to keep aflexible Eastern border) are likely to make it to the top of the European agenda.However, we can fairly assume that controlling change in Europe after and via

Facing the ‘desert of Tartars’ 71

enlargement may fail in the end and the reality will force important adjustmentsto be made as soon as joint pressure is applied by the disappointed first-wavejoiners, on the one hand, and the delayed (for different reasons) second-waveapplicants, on the other. This may not go as far as the expected opportunity to‘remodel Europe’s economic and social shape’,61 but it will prompt some adjust-ments none the less.62

A third assumption concerns Russia and Ukraine, who will continue todevelop at a slower pace, remaining extremely poor and disorderly societies.Illegal border-related activities as well as immigration pressures on the EUborder will therefore only grow as it moves further East. Assumption numberfour is that it would take at least a decade to bring former Yugoslavia back intosome form of self-sustaining regional political unit, even if a clear politicalproject, which is now missing, were found and put in place.

Given these assumptions, three broad recommendations seem appropriate:(1) A case-by-case differential approach. The one-size-fits-all enlargement policy

worked well with countries that were small enough, committed enough andreceived a high level of foreign direct investment. Its weaknesses are all the morevisible in the other cases, at risk of generating casualties once real hard problemsare on the table, such as Polish agriculture. Furthermore, the acquis can be aburden rather than an aid in places where there is serious institutional underde-velopment and informal institutions prevail over formal ones. This is merely tosay that different cases (or countries) require different approaches; more prob-lems require more support if there is the political will to bring the task to asuccessful end for each and every applicant country; the acquis must be under-stood as an end, not an instrument, and therefore policies should be devised thathelp to integrate it within domestic institutions rather than expect it to shapenew ones. This requires giving up some of the rigid strategies pursued with suchlittle success so far and their instruments (the famous PHARE programme in itscurrent form) and associating with other actors and donors (such as the WorldBank and domestic NGOs) in a more problem-centred approach. This is espe-cially valid for the building of an accountable, transparent and effective judiciaryand law enforcement segment in South-Eastern Europe. No revision of treatiesor other inaccessible strategies are needed, only a better and more daring under-standing of assistance strategies and the need to bring in the customers besidesthe government as main allies and pressure groups for such reforms.

(2) Assignment of a special border role to South-East European countries should be

combined with joining forces with NATO in preventing risks and the potential danger of insta-

bility in the region. It was obvious all along that Eastern Balkan countries were notready to join the EU and that the process will be lengthy. All the more logical,since border enforcement becomes their mission even before joining, is that theyshould become NATO members. This can be realistically done before theirbecoming EU members in 2002. The tremendous difference NATO member-ship would make for border infrastructure (e.g. in modernizing airports,highways or bridges, as it did in Turkey or more recently in the Czech Republic)and the training of specialized staff need not be argued. NATO membership

72 Alina Mungiu-Pippidi

should be extended in 2002 to at least all countries on the South-Eastern flank ofenlarged Europe.63 It is only realistic to assume that some borders will remainmore difficult than others, and that for a while borders may remain betweenregions at peace (Bulgaria) and regions at war (Macedonia). While struggling todevelop civilian institutions, we must also admit that some challenges will notwait until these countries are ready.

(3)Extended regional cooperation and development assistance to the East and South. Morecooperation between the EU and Russia, on the one hand, and EU and Ukraine,on the other, is needed, including flexible solutions that will allow non-applicantsto keep some freedom to travel in Eastern Europe. The same solutions should beapplied in former Yugoslav countries, exceeding the model of the recentEU–Macedonia agreement. Enhanced cooperation and investment in regionalprogrammes rather than isolation from former Yugoslav countries can bring theregion back together, a solution that has become less unimaginable after the fallof the Milošević regime in Belgrade and the relative appeasement of thetensions in Macedonia.

In order to succeed in enlarging to the full panel of current applicants and toinclude in the future other former Yugoslav states, Europe needs to move beyondthe mechanical strategy of adoption of the acquis. The acquis is not a develop-ment strategy, and wherever it is tried as such it will not bring about institutionaldevelopment, in the field of Justice and Home Affairs or any other, but onlyformal multiplying of unenforceable rules and regulations. Some intermediatestrategies should be devised to help more backward countries catch up, and theseshould be innovative, patterned, for instance, on the model of US policies ofencouraging – and guaranteeing – private investment in neighbouring Mexico.Where public money is short, a strategy must be devised to make private moneycome in to support indirectly the development of institutions necessary to busi-ness. The business sector has a main interest in developing law and orderinstitutions, and it should be made an ally. The treatment in the developmentphase for some of the applicants or potential applicants should be different tothe treatment states receive after becoming members. This implies having anactive policy to encourage Western private investors and to build partnershipswith them and domestic allies against corruption, mafia and illegal border activi-ties. This means giving up the current formal and strictly governmentalassistance in the field in order to create far-reaching coalitions with innovativeways of funding programmes. Looking again at the Balkans, Greece is there asan example of funds wasted on formal, government-run structural aidprogrammes that did not succeed in changing informal institutions. Instead ofsuch programmes, the Balkan stability pact should propose innovativeapproaches based on broad coalitions of governments, businesses and NGOs.

In olden times, enlightened conquerors were accompanied in their campaignsby merchants and artists: Europe’s advance to the East requires such a collectionof military, police, business and institution-building groups and none of thosealone can succeed in taming both the Tartars and the West’s dread of them.

Facing the ‘desert of Tartars’ 73

Notes

1 See also Zielonka (chapter 1) and Anderson (chapter 12), this volume, for a moresubstantive definition of borders.

2 The expression is the title of a famous novel by Dino Buzzati. The hero guards aborder facing a desert and spends his lifetime waiting for the threat to the borders –‘the Tartars’ – to materialize.

3 Philip Roeder, ‘Unfinished National Revolutions?’, Slavic Review, 58:4 (1999).4 Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).5 Ernest Gellner, Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and Its Enemies (London: Penguin,

1994).6 Norman Davies, Poland: God’s Playground (New York: University of Columbia Press,

1984).7 Hans Kohn, Nationalism: Its Meaning and History (Malabar: Robert E. Krieger, 1965);

Gellner, Conditions of Liberty.8 Peter Sugar, Ethnic Diversity and Conflict in Eastern Europe (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-

Clio, 1980).9 Ibid.; Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism, Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 1991); Roeder, ‘Unfinished National Revolutions?’.10 Karl W. Deutsch, Nationalism and Social Communication: An Inquiry into the Foundations of

Nationality (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/New York: Wiley, 1953).11 Reported in Klaus von Beyme, Transition to Democracy in Eastern Europe (New York: St

Martin’s Press, 1996).12 William Miller, Stephen White and Paul Heywood, Values and Political Change in Post-

Communist Europe (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998); Alina Mungiu-Pippidi, GovernmentAccountability in East Central Europe; Governance, Accountability and Institutional Social Capitalin the Third Europe. A Survey of Romania, Bulgaria and Slovakia (Romanian AcademicSociety and Freedom House with the World Bank Institute, 2000).

13 Miller et al.,Values and Political Change; Beyme, Transition to Democracy.14 Alina Mungiu-Pippidi, Making Democratic Institutions Work for the People, United Nations

Development Programme Regional Report (Bratislava: UNDP, 2000).15 Had Europe not been pursuing policies crafted in the Cold War era, but had made a

timely offer of enlargement to Eastern Europe in the aftermath of German reunifica-tion, European history might have been spared its most recent war (see also HeinzKramer, ‘The European Community’s Response to the New Eastern Europe’, Journalof Common Market Studies, 31:2 [1993], p. 234).

16 See, for instance, Gale Stokes, Three Eras of Political Change in Eastern Europe (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1997).

17 Let us imagine for a moment that the EU were to decide to bring in all formerYugoslavian states at the same time, therefore setting the most important incentive topeace possible. Even if this were to upset the more developed states, such as Croatia,for instance, and were basically to alter the current rule – the one-joins-when-one-is-ready approach – good policies are built on good incentives embedded within.Borders, not economic development, are the prevailing common problem of formerYugoslav states, and border-solving business requires regional, not country-by-country, approaches.

18 The Status Bill had been long pending before being passed on 19 June by theHungarian Parliament. Its initial version included a few discriminations, which weresubsequently dropped at the EC’s suggestion.

19 This worked in post-1918 Eastern Europe to a large extent, in unitary states morethan in federal ones. As the region was so heterogeneous, however, it did not workfully on all counts.

20 See Marius Vahl, ‘Borderland Europe: Dividing along the Polish–Ukrainian fron-tier?’, CEPS Commentary (The Centre for European Policy Studies, 2000).

74 Alina Mungiu-Pippidi

21 Timothy Garton Ash reviewed this argument a number of times (see also Todorova,Imagining the Balkans).

22 Samuel P. Huntington, ‘The Clash of Civilizations’, Foreign Affairs, 72:3 (Summer1993), p. 31.

23 ISSP survey on national identity, 1995.24 Miller et al., Values and Political Change.25 Richard Rose, William Mishler and Christian Haerpfer, Democracy and Its Alternatives:

Understanding Post-Communist Societies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998);Mungiu-Pippidi, Making Democratic Institutions Work for the People.

26 Ronald Inglehart, Modernization and Post-Modernization: Cultural, Economic and PoliticalChange in 43 Societies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).

27 Huntington’s famous cultural divide between Catholic Habsburg Central Europe andOrthodox Ottoman Balkans does not exist. Multivariate models explaining demo-cratic orientation fail to turn out religion as a predictor (see Rose et al., Democracy andIts Alternatives); when comparing within a closer development range, that is, Romaniaand Bulgaria against fellow second-wave applicant but Catholic and CentralEuropean Slovakia, neither religion, nor even nationality makes a difference(Mungiu-Pippidi, Making Democratic Institutions Work for the People).

28 Daniel Vaughan-Whitehead (Economic and Social Gaps: New Hidden Borders in the EnlargedEurope, RSC No. 2000/20, 2000) also emphasizes the widening gap between appli-cant countries and considers differentiation essential (see also Mungiu-Pippidi, MakingDemocratic Institutions Work for the People).

29 A quite ineffectual thanks to this effect. The unpopular policy of support for NATObombing cost the Romanian liberal government a dramatic drop in popularityfollowed by loss of office. The Bulgarian government, despite holding elections over ayear later, also paid dearly in popular sympathy.

30 The Gothenburg European Council acknowledged this and, for the first time in aresolution on enlargement, included the idea that applicants facing more problemsneed more help.

31 See France’s Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin, speech on EU, International Herald Tribune(29 May 2001).

32 When one is poor, one also lives in the wrong neighbourhood, it seems. Strictgeographical–economic determinism seems to guide the EC’s policy on Schengen,imposing on newcomers harder rules than on Western non-Schengen member statesand non-members.

33 See also J. Batt and G. Amato, Final Report of the Reflection Group on the Long-TermImplications of EU Enlargement: The Nature of the New Border (Florence: EuropeanUniversity Institute, 2000).

34 See Ewa Morawska, chapter 9, this volume; Renate Langewiesche and MartinaLubyova, ‘Migration, Mobility and the Free Movement of Persons: An Issue forCurrent and Future EU Members’ ETUI, Transfer 3/March 2000 (pre-print version).

35 According to a Brussels-commissioned report by the German think-tank DIW.36 Daniela Heimerl and Ivanka Petkova, ‘Border Regimes in Southeastern Europe’, in

Beyond EU-Enlargement, Vol. 2, The Agenda of Stabilisation for Southeastern Europe(Gutersloh: Bertelsmann Foundation Publishers, 2001).

37 Such as selling the homeless newspapers.38 Commenting on the case of Romany families from Zámoly seeking asylum in France,

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán told Hungarian Radio on 9 August 2000that ‘Roma in Hungary should try to learn and work more.’ József Krasznai,spokesman of the Zámoly group, said Orbán would be entitled to make suchcomments ‘only when all Romany children are able to go to standard schools andRoma are not discriminated against on the labour market’, RFE/RL Newsline, Vol. 4,No. 153 (10 August 2000).

Facing the ‘desert of Tartars’ 75

39 One of the more dramatic examples of member state attitudes towards Romanyasylum seekers came when Belgium ignored a stay on deportation issued by theEuropean Court of Human Rights and forcibly deported a large group of Romanyasylum seekers to Slovakia in October 1999. See RFE/RL Newsline, 5:2, Part II (4January 2001). See also Claude Cahn and Peter Vermeersch, ‘The Group Expulsionof Slovak Roma by the Belgian Government: A Case Study of the Treatment ofRomany Refugees in Western Countries’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs(Spring/Summer 2000).

40 The Roma population is subdivided into almost forty groups, according to customsand traditional structures, occupations, language, religion and degree of nomadism.Roma groups include the bear owners (Ursari), the tinsmiths and coppersmiths(Caldarari), the musicians (Lautari), the whitewashers (Spoitori), the blacksmiths(Fierari), the horse dealers (Grasdari), the woodworkers (Rudari), the flower sellers(Boldeni), the jewellers (Argintari) and the goldwashers (Aurari). Another distinctionto be made is between those settled and sedentary (Vatrasi) and the tent dwellers(Corturari).

41 A successful example of such a programme is the World Bank’s Social DevelopmentFund in Romania. Targeted at the poorest communities, the programme matchesWorld Bank funds with community resources (most often labour). Field operatorsidentify communities most in need, advertise the programme and help local organiza-tions. It is hard to imagine that such an effective programme could be run by the EUone day as the application procedures are minimal, the operator assists applicants indoing them and the applicants do not even need to be legal entities, proof of a sharedbank account being sufficient.

42 See Stephen Holmes’ ‘Demand for Law’ on the failure of assistance programmes toreform Russia’s judiciary in East European Constitutional Review, 8:4 (Fall 1999).

43 The meaning granted to institutions here is of sets of rules and practices; institutionsare the means of governance, not its ends, therefore instrumental and intermediate intheir essence.

44 A broader argument on this is to be found in The Road to Stability and Prosperity in SouthEastern Europe: A Regional Strategy Paper, Chapter 6, ‘The Need for Strong Institutionsand Good Governance’ (World Bank Europe and Central Asia, March 2000).

45 Jörg Monar, ‘An Emerging Regime of European Governance for Freedom, Securityand Justice’, Briefing Note 2/99 for ESRC Programme ‘One Europe or Several?’(Centre for European Politics and Institutions, Department of Politics, University ofLeicester, 1999).

46 The latest form of struggle against corruption in the law enforcement agencies hasbeen the setting up, in Romania, of anonymous websites disclosing corruptpolicemen, again with price tags attached to various felonies.

47 Stephen Holmes, ‘Introduction’, East European Constitutional Review, 9:4 (2000).48 Albena Azmanova, ‘Bulgaria’, East European Constitutional Review, 9:4 (2000).49 Corruption, an informal issue, cannot be addressed by formal training, for instance.50 Jörg Monar, ‘Justice and Home Affairs in a Wider Europe: The Dynamics of

Inclusion and Exclusion’, Working Paper for ESRC Programme ‘One Europe orSeveral?’ (Centre for European Politics and Institutions, Department of Politics,University of Leicester, 2000).

51 See Vahl, ‘Borderland Europe’.52 Newsweek International (18 September 2000), p. 18.53 CBOS Survey (July 2000).54 Early Warning Report No. 2, 2001, UNDP Romania.55 Milada Anna Vachudova, ‘EU Enlargement: An Overview’, East European

Constitutional Review, 9:4 (2000).56 Valerie Bunce, ‘The Political Economy of Postsocialism’, Slavic Review, 58:4 (1999).57 Essai sur les moeurs, CXCVII.

76 Alina Mungiu-Pippidi

58 One example is the April 2001 Commission decision to phase the granting of fullmobility rights for five to seven years in the case of new entrants, as requested byGermany.

59 See, for instance, Spain’s reluctance to accept a change in the distribution of struc-tural aid, ‘What’s Ours is Ours’, The Economist (26 May 2001).

60 Karen Smith, The Making of EU Foreign Policy (London: Macmillan, 1999).61 RSC No 29/2000.62 Vaughan-Whitehead, Economic and Social Gaps.63 Zbigniew Brzezinski proposed a good arrangement, basically patterned after

Helsinki; to invite every EU applicant to join NATO in 2002, countries joining atdifferent paces. This would also allow NATO to decide where more urgent involve-ment is needed, such as the more vulnerable borders.

Facing the ‘desert of Tartars’ 77

The Cold War gave Western Europe a secure and stable eastern frontier,guarded by the Russians. Western Europe became ‘Europe’, and ‘Europe’ wasfirmly part of ‘the West’: two overlapping concepts, easily elided. Across the IronCurtain lay Eastern Europe: unfree Europe, Eurasian Europe, excluded bySoviet domination from ‘Western’ institutions. These Western institutions – theEuropean Community and NATO, the Council of Europe and the WEU – inturn formed part of the broader ‘Atlantic Community’, the ‘free world’. Ideologyand institutional membership went together; concepts of community served asthe rhetorical underpinning for both the North Atlantic Treaty and theEuropean Communities.

This has, however, created a central problem for post-Cold War Europe. Thecultural claim to be ‘European’, to share European values, history, identity, haspolitical, security and economic consequences. The evocative phrase that dissi-dents in East Central Europe used in the 1980s – to ‘rejoin the West’ – impliedboth to recover their links with Western culture and ‘civilization’ and to negotiatefull membership of Western institutions, with all the privileges that membershipoffered. Must cultural Europe become identical with institutional Europe? CanWestern institutions avoid provoking an anti-Western backlash in countries thatdo not gain the full membership that they seek? Is there an alternative todrawing new lines of inclusion and exclusion as institutionalized Europeextends reluctantly eastward? Is it possible to design forms of variable geometrythat avoid the erection of a new divide between Europe and non-Europe, privi-lege and dependence, security and insecurity, free movement and entrycontrols?

The ideal of a Europe without borders developed within a Western Europewith a strongly defended eastern frontier; the development of the Schengensystem (of the abolition of internal border controls within the EU) since 1985has been accompanied by a wide range of compensatory measures, includingefforts to tighten external border controls. Modern states, after all, depend on aclear division between citizens and aliens, between insiders and outsiders; themore functions the confederal EU takes over from its component states, themore it needs in turn to have clearly defined external lines. The central paradoxthat this chapter addresses is that the European Union is unworkable without

5 Where does Europe end?Dilemmas of inclusion and exclusion

William Wallace

clear boundaries, but that Europe as an entity lacks any consensus on its easternand south-eastern frontiers. The division of Europe allowed for confusion ofunderlying assumptions about ‘Europe’ and ‘the West’. This chapter will arguethat Europe as a cultural and geographic region cannot be clearly defined: thediversity of images of Europe is too wide to provide a sense of identitycommon to citizens of Lisbon and Madrid, Helsinki and Stockholm, Pragueand Warsaw, Thessaloniki and Palermo. It notes that the most pressing problemin defining European borders is that of defining the limits of political institu-tions in Europe, particularly the EU. It discusses the unavoidable necessity ofdrawing lines that delimit insiders from outsiders; this necessity is shown to bein conflict with the fuzzy logic of overlapping economic, political and identityspaces at the European periphery. The conclusion explores ways to moderatethe impact of the new borders that will have to be drawn as Western institu-tions are enlarged.

Europe’s fuzzy borders

What Europe you see depends on where you live. ‘Europe’ is a moveable set ofmyths and images, both positive and negative, embedded in national historiesand vernacular literatures. There is no idea of Europe common to all Europeanstates, and therefore also no agreement on where Europe ends. West and EastEuropeans, Northern and Southern Europeans all have their own definition ofwhat Europe means and where it ends – and all are equally convinced that theyare offering a generally valid definition.

Cold War Western Europe exhibited its own confusion about its core spaceand potential outer limits. Greece and Turkey were accepted into the ‘Atlantic’Alliance, in spite of their geographical position in the eastern Mediterranean;Turkey was also recruited by the Americans into the Central TreatyOrganization, which stretched eastwards across Iraq and Iran to Pakistan.Article 237 of the Treaty of Rome states simply that ‘any European state mayapply to become a member of the Community.’1 The loose definition of what‘Europe’ implied was evident in the EEC’s first Association Agreements, withGreece and Turkey, which envisaged membership at the end of a long transitionprocess of over twenty years. The political debate within Israel in the early 1960sabout whether to pursue a parallel agreement, with the same long-term objec-tive, led to little more than Israel’s continuing membership of such peripheralEuropean bodies as Eurovision, whose annual song contest was won by an Israelisinger in 1998; but the expectation that Israel might negotiate at least asfavourable an association agreement as Greece illustrates how little thought hadbeen given to the future shape and limits of European integration.

The Council of Europe’s membership in the 1980s offered an extraordinaryimage, of a continent which stretched from Finland to Cyprus without includingPoland or Hungary, justified in terms of the political values that the Councilrepresented and defended: though it included the non-democratic Vatican state,and did not extend to democratic Israel. The Organization for European

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Economic Cooperation, created under American leadership to manage MarshallPlan aid and promote cooperation among the market economies of non-socialistEurope, was reshaped in 1961 into the OECD, with NATO’s two NorthAmerican states and in addition the Pacific‘Western’ states of Australia, NewZealand and Japan extending its previously-European membership. Spain wasexcluded from European institutions until after the death of General Franco in1975, though the Franco regime – staunchly anti-communist – succeeded inbuilding close bilateral security links with the USA. Authoritarian Portugal,however, was granted full membership of NATO and, under British sponsorship,of the European Free Trade Area.

European détente extended this lack of clarity. The Cold War imagery of twohalves of Europe, each led by a semi-European power, was institutionalized inthe Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe: ‘Europe fromVancouver to Vladivostok’, with the Soviet Union bringing the former Russianempire to the conference table, and the USA including Alaska and Hawaii. Itwas therefore ‘natural’ for the successor states to the USSR to take up their seatswithin the expanding post-cold war OSCE. Their territories, after all, containedmany of the strategic missiles over which East–West negotiators had bargained,and many of the military bases with which security analysts remainedconcerned. Georgia and Armenia, at least, could claim a small stake in Europe’sculture and heritage, through their links to the Byzantine Empire; Azerbaijan,Turkmenistan and the other Central Asian states could claim only their links toTurkey and to Islamic civilization as alternative reference points to Russianconquest.

Each of these institutions embedded different aspects of the loose and over-lapping concepts of ‘Europe’ and ‘the West’, as these had come to be defined byWest European elites and their transatlantic allies during the Cold War: resis-tance to communist expansion; commitment to open societies, civil liberties andparliamentary democracy; acceptance of market economics and (relatively) freetrade. These institutionalized values were spelt out in (US) Presidential speeches,in the preambles to the Treaties of Paris and Rome, in the communiqués ofheads of government meetings, but were not – except in the Council of Europe– tightly defined or applied. There was overall agreement on some kind ofEuropean (or Western) tradition of science, civil, political and social rights,autonomy of cities, parliamentary democracy, civil society and political culture,2

but national interpretations of the meaning of these terms differed widely. Adefinition of democracy that required that government should clearly representthe majority of the electorate would, for example, have excluded the UnitedKingdom almost throughout the modern era; no British government in the pastthirty years has represented more than 44 per cent of the electorate, some lessthan 40 per cent. The Italian economy in the 1960s and 1970s was an extraordi-nary mixture of state control and private influence in which market rules playedonly a secondary role and competition was far from open. Secret services inseveral Western countries operated largely beyond democratic scrutiny, on occa-sion even beyond governmental control. The death penalty was in use in a

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number of West European states. Under Cold War conditions Western govern-ments overlooked variations in national practices that fell short of the idealsproclaimed but operated to preserve domestic peace and international stability.

Ideas and expectations have evolved over the past fifty years, hardening intothe precise conditions that the European Union now spells out to applicants formembership. Agenda 2000 thus provides for some purposes the most precise defi-nition of European values outside the European Convention of Human Rights,extending more widely than that Convention into the details of market rules andpublic administration. States like Turkey that were accepted members of the‘Western’ community throughout the Cold War feel aggrieved, with, from theirperspective, considerable justification, that the goal-posts have now been moved:that their partners and allies now demand of them adherence to standards ofbehaviour that they themselves scarcely met a generation ago, as a condition ofaccess to the economic and political privileges that Western institutions provide.Westernizers in Russia and Ukraine have a similar sense of unfairness: of unreal-istic demands placed upon them, without recognizing the difficult circumstancesunder which they are living and the special social, political and economic condi-tions they face.

The concept of a ‘return to Europe’ has thus proved deeply ambiguous.Historical claims, associated with national myths, overlap with assertions ofpolitical, social and economic transformation as criteria for qualification.‘Europe’ is identified with the EU; denial of accession to the EU is thus seen as adenial of the claim to share a European identity. Refusal to recognize suchclaims is seen as exclusion: as an insult to national identity as well as a blow tohopes of prosperity. It is the perception of exclusion that is most damaging.Norway and Iceland have chosen to stay out of the European Union;Switzerland has chosen to remain outside most European institutions. But theirgovernments and political elites are confident that they would be welcomed asapplicants should they change their minds, and anticipate that they would beable to negotiate mutually satisfactory terms of entry. Theirs is a voluntaryexclusion, which carries no sense of inferiority or forced dependence; theireconomies are prosperous, their societies are stable, their boundaries are secure.The states to Western Europe’s east and south, in contrast, start from an aware-ness of their unavoidable dependence. They are demandeurs for access, asking forassistance – and for recognition, for the status that membership of Europeaninstitutions is seen to confer.

It is thus much easier in the post-Cold War world to leave a certain fuzzinessaround Europe’s western and northern borders than about those that haveopened to the east and south-east. Public opinion in Norway and Iceland, polit-ical and intellectual elites, feel no less European because they are outside theEU; there are those within Norway (and more within Switzerland) who feelalmost superior to those who have compromised their sovereignty and nationalidentity by accepting the full obligations of formal European integration. Theserich Western countries have, relatively successfully, managed to pick from the à

la carte menu of European integration: with economic association, and for

Where does Europe end? 81

Norway and Iceland also full freedom of movement within the EU, withoutshouldering the other burdens of EU membership or feeling it necessary torepresent their interests directly round the Council of Ministers’ table. It ismuch harder to persuade poorer and less secure countries on Europe’s otherperipheries that ‘Europe’ does not need to become coterminous with Europeaninstitutions. Most West European governments would be happy for the privi-leges and obligations of EU and NATO membership to diminish step by stepacross Europe’s eastern periphery, through patterns of association and variablegeometry. They may, however, face an insurmountable challenge in persuadingsuch countries that half-membership or association offers either sufficienteconomic and security advantages or sufficient status to form an acceptablealternative.

Mikhail Gorbachev’s concept of a ‘common European home’, for example,was intended not only to strengthen the CSCE but also to encourage Westernstates to open their markets – and their technological exports – to trade with theUSSR: to include the Soviet Union inside the European economic system, fromwhich Soviet planners hoped to gain desperately needed technological assistance,and hard currency to pay for the imports they needed. The hope of gainingthese benefits persuaded Soviet leaders to accept that their regimes should bejudged in terms of human rights and civil liberties by Western, or WestEuropean, standards: an early example of the trade-off between political stan-dards and potential economic benefits that has characterized Western Europe’sapproach to former socialist states since 1989. The leverage Western govern-ments exercised over socialist regimes through CSCE review conferencesdepended upon the expectation of those socialist regimes that access to Westernmarkets, financial and technological transfers was open to them if they demon-strated some degree of willingness to comply: no expectation of access, nopolitical leverage. Expectations among post-socialist governments have beenhigher: not only of access and transfers but also of recognition and acceptance,as full members within a Western/European community that is also anAtlantic/European Community. ‘But how can the West refuse us?’ a Romaniangovernment spokesman protested to a visiting BBC team in early 1991. ‘Youcannot create a common European home, and then expect the Romanians tolive in the doghouse.’3

Yet Europe is an imaginary space, shaped and reshaped by politicians andintellectuals to serve their changing purposes. There is – as will be exploredfurther below – no ‘natural’ basis for solidarity. The limits of internationalcommunities are defined by inherited assumptions and subjective choice; poli-tics depends upon imagination and invention.4 ‘Europe’ as a set of values, oras a region of shared history, has no clear outer limits, and many competingclaims to constitute its historical core. The problem political leaders face isthat they are forced to operate both at the rhetorical level and at the opera-tional. And an operational, institutionalized Europe cannot be reconstructedwithout drawing boundaries, without bringing some states in and leavingothers out.

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The necessity to have clear borders in the modernpolity

No boundary, no state – and by extension, no boundaries, no effective Europeaninstitutions. Boundaries enable social systems to relate to their environment in aregular and predictable way. Luhmann has remarked on the role of boundaries:

[They] reduce the points of contact with the environment, thus allowing thecomplex internal conditioning of relations with the environment. … Onlywhen boundaries do exist can relations between system and environmentincrease their complexity, their differentiation and their controlled muta-bility.5

The distinctions between internal and external security, between shared taxationand redistribution and ‘external’ programmes of economic assistance, betweencitizens and aliens, between domestic law and international law, are all intrinsicto the modern state. As West European institutions, above all the EuropeanUnion, have developed state-like qualities through increasingly extensive frame-works of law, regulation, taxation and expenditure, so they too cannot avoid thedrawing of boundaries to define the limits of jurisdiction, obligation and privi-lege. Not only for the EU but also for NATO the inside/outside distinction is offundamental importance. It is not only a matter of shared obligations, difficult tofudge as half-obligations or semi-guarantees to associate members; the terms ofNATO’s Article Five are clearly stated, and bind each full member to share inthe common defence. For members of both NATO and the EU, full participa-tion in decision-making is also a key factor: the right to sit at the table, to ensurethat each national perspective is expressed, each national interest protected andpromoted. The presence of Danish representatives, and since 1995 also Swedishand Finnish, throughout the extensive network of EU ministerial and officialmeetings has made it easier for Norwegian and Icelandic politicians to stayoutside, relatively unconcerned that their particular interests will be forgotten inspecific negotiations; on most issues and under most circumstances, they can beconfident that others will speak on their behalf. Few states in Eastern or South-Eastern Europe can share that confidence, or accept that they may safely wait inthe corridor while others shape European policies on their behalf. Their govern-ments want to make their voice heard, at the right time, in the right meetings.They do not need to study the politics of federal states or international organiza-tions to understand that when hard bargains are struck, it is those who strikethem who protect their own interests best, not those outside on whose behalfthey may from time to time claim to be acting.

Fiscal boundaries are as old as the modern state. States rely on frontiers forthe definition of residents for tax purposes and in many cases also for the actualraising of the tax. The European Union relies for its revenue partly on its ownresources, giving it a certain independence from national contributions andmaking it into a political unit that can act in its own right within the remit of itstasks. Although small in scale – limited to 1.27 per cent of Community GDP and

Where does Europe end? 83

with little macro-economic significance – the budget is vital to some smaller andpoorer countries of the Union (above all Ireland, Greece and Portugal, but to asignificant extent also Spain) that depend on extensive transfers from the struc-tural funds. Part of the Community’s own resources – that is, the customs dutiesbased on the Common External Tariff and the agricultural levies on trade withnon-member countries – are raised at the frontiers. The percentage of eachmember state’s VAT revenue that is transferred to the EU is collected by customsofficers operating inside the EU territory.6

Taxability requires clear boundaries. The erosion of national tax basesthrough the transfer of capital to ‘tax havens’ inside and outside the EU isalready becoming one of the most sensitive issues on the EU’s agenda. The‘prevention of harmful tax competition’ is seen to require clear rules, imposedacross the EU – and as far as possible extended through negotiation and regula-tion beyond its boundaries. ‘Offshore’ financial centres with ambiguousrelationships to the EU – Monaco, Liechtenstein, Gibraltar, the Channel Islands,the Isle of Man – have been tolerated so long as their operations are not seen asrepresenting too great a threat to fiscal revenues within member states; but itappears increasingly likely that member state concerns about possible fiscalirregularities will force changes in their regimes in the coming years. Swissbanking regulations and the perceived role these play in tax evasion within theEU represent some of the most sensitive issues in Switzerland’s relations with theCommunity, which surrounds its territory.

The distinction between insiders and outsiders arises vividly when it comes toquestions of redistribution. The EU’s cohesion and structural funds have developedthrough a succession of internal bargains, justified in the Preamble to the RomeTreaty as ‘to strengthen the unity of their economies and to ensure their harmo-nious development by reducing the differences existing between the variousregions and the backwardness of the less favoured regions’. The concept of‘Community solidarity’ is evoked as a rationale for this transfer. This raises someunderlying questions about the economic benefits that follow from membership,and the link between perceptions of shared community and willingness tocontribute to redistribution. Economists have long argued over whethereconomic integration spreads its benefits evenly across the territories included, orleads to core regions profiting more than the periphery. If the latter is accepted,peripheral states and regions will require substantial and permanent transfers incompensation; if the former, then transitional transfers of the type agreed atMaastricht in the ‘Cohesion Fund’ to assist poorer member states to qualify formembership of the single currency should be sufficient. Financial transfers haveformed part of Community bargaining since the Rome Treaties were negotiated,providing side-payments to reluctant (or awkward) member governments to buyagreement to common policies that they claim will operate to their disadvantage.The problem, as Paul Taylor and others have noted, is that the sense of sharedcommunity on which such ‘solidarity’ rests gets thinner with each expansion ofthe Union.7 ‘Europe’, one sceptical participant in a discussion on the future of

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the Community budget remarked in the aftermath of Maastricht, when theprospect of paying for eastern enlargement was edging onto the agenda, ‘willstretch only so far as the German taxpayer is willing to accept.’ ‘In that case,’ aGerman colleague replied, ‘it stops just west of Leipzig.’8

The growth of West European cooperation in justice and home affairs hasalso given greater prominence to the external borders of the Union. The key tothe establishment of an area of ‘Freedom, Security and Justice’ is strengthenedcooperation in internal security, and a clearer demarcation between the internallysecure area and the uncontrolled area outside. The whole logic of internal secu-rity is to identify a clear population within a territory whose welfare is to beprotected by keeping undesired aliens out, and by maintaining systematiccontrols on those who cross the external border. The rapidly developing struc-ture of Schengen, of Europol, of cooperation among national intelligenceservices, customs and immigration services, testifies to the strength of this divi-sion between free movement inside and greater protection against outsiders.Some have identified an emerging discourse that identifies as ‘dangerous’ every-thing coming from the East, through the development of a security continuumcriminalizing immigration and securitizing crime.9 There is an underlyingambivalence in the EU’s approach to eastern enlargement in the field of internalsecurity and border controls. In 1999 both Bulgaria and Romania were subjectto the EU’s common visa regime, though in principle accepted as futuremembers of the EU. German officials have made it repeatedly clear to theirPolish counterparts that progress in opening the German–Polish border dependspartly upon the effectiveness of Polish controls on their country’s eastern border:thus choking off the flourishing cross-border trade that had developed betweeneastern Poland and western Ukraine in the mid-1990s, opening Poland to thewest at the expense of shutting its borders to the east.10

Cross-border exchanges have nevertheless been expanding across the EU’sexternal borders. Even with tightened controls, there is plenty of evidence thattotal control of borders is impossible.11 Nevertheless, the queues of trucks andcars at the Community’s eastern external borders provide vivid evidence thatborders do still matter, that globalization of economic activities is still limited byterritorial jurisdictions, and that contemporary democratic polities need bordersfor their own internal economic and political systems to flourish. Europe mayhave no clear boundaries, but it is difficult to conceive of the European Unionwithout them.

The frontiers of Europe in the past

Jan Zielonka has suggested that the twin weaknesses in identity and democracyare at the root of ‘Euro-paralysis’.12 The re-emergence of ‘Central Europe’ inWest European consciousness, during the course of the 1980s, called up echoesin collective memory and history sufficiently familiar for West European publicsto accept. The end of the Cold War, however, has left the comfortable citizens of

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Western Europe without a map that they recognize, and without the compass toreorient themselves that clear political leadership can alone provide.

Classical Europe was Mediterranean Europe: Greece and ‘Magna Graecia’ –Italy. The first idea of ‘Europe’, of a shared ‘awareness of itself as an intellectualentity in contradistinction to Asia’13 developed in ancient Greece. Even beforethe arrival of Christianity and Islam, Iver Neumann argues, ‘the proto-EuropeanGreeks defined themselves culturally in direct opposition to the Asian Other.’14

Beyond the Danubian and Rhenish limes lay the barbarian north. Traditions ofeastern Orthodoxy have preserved this sense of civilization as centred in theeastern Mediterranean, and Western Europe as populated by ‘Franks’. TheArchbishop of Athens, in a sermon in April 1999, is reported to have comparedNATO’s bombing of Serbia with the Frankish sacking of Constantinople duringthe Fourth Crusade. The overrunning of the Western Empire by a succession ofnorthern invaders, and the re-establishment of a new Western Empire with itscentre in the Rhineland and Burgundy, took ‘Europe’ further north and westthan any classical scholar would have imagined.

The common threads through history that refer to what have been termedthe ‘three basic elements of Europe’, Athens, Rome and Jerusalem –monotheism, the birth of scientific inquiry, the rule of law, freedom andhumanism – all lie in modern Europe’s south and east.15 Yet the core of Europe,since the rise of the Holy Roman Empire and the decline of Byzantium, has lainmore and more clearly in the west. Rome represented the southernmost territoryof the Holy Roman Empire, rarely under the effective control of the Emperor –though the conversion of the Germanic tribes to Western Christianity hadprovided a key element in the rise of organized kingdoms in the west. Frankishexpansion eastwards across what is now Brandenburg into present-day Polandgave the Empire a stronger northern foundation.16 The Western Emperor cameto title himself first as ‘King of the Germans’, with a capital that moved acrosspresent-day Germany from the Rhineland through Swabia into Franconia andBohemia, before becoming fixed under the Habsburgs in the ‘eastern kingdom’(Osterreich) of the West – Austria. Western Christendom pushed east, bothagainst pagan Prussians and Lithuanians and against Orthodox rulers in Russia.More disastrously in European history and in the creation of myths that lingeron to the present day, Western Christendom’s Mediterranean expansion,embarked on as a crusade to recapture the holy places that Byzantium had lostto the infidels, deteriorated into incursions against the Byzantine Empire, whichbriefly planted Western kingdoms around the eastern Mediterranean and hasleft behind ‘Frankish’ castles in Greece and the Greek islands.

The Orthodox countries of eastern Christendom took the heaviest brunt ofthe invasions that swept out of Asia between the fall of Rome and the highMiddle Ages. Islamic successes in the western Mediterranean pushed the core ofreviving Western Europe further north; but Islam had already conquered theAsian lands of the Byzantine Empire. The Mongol hordes that broke throughthe Carpathians in 1240, sacked Cracow and left the Polish kingdom devastated,reduced Muscovy to a dependency for several generations. Then the Turks

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established themselves on either side of the Black Sea, wearing down Byzantiumuntil the final collapse of 1453. The elision that Samuel Huntington makes in‘The Clash of Civilizations’17 between the Islamic and Orthodox worlds hadalready been made by Western Catholics by the end of the fifteenth century, asTurkish armies with troops recruited from their Orthodox subjects advancedthrough Hungary towards Vienna, and Turkish galleys with Orthodox oarsmenattacked the power of Venice in the eastern Mediterranean. The Orthodoxworld was thus shut off from the great intellectual revolutions that shaped themodern West – the Renaissance, the Reformation and the eighteenth-centuryEnlightenment. Enlightenment ideas spread eastwards with French culture,flying into the Russian Tsars’ ‘window on the West’ in St Petersburg.Revolutionary ideas of the rights of man and the popular nation flowed back-wards and forwards across the Atlantic as French troops supported the AmericanWar of Independence; and were carried across Central Europe and into theMediterranean by Napoleon’s armies. Huntington expressed the conventionalview of Western historians, as set out in a semi-official history sponsored by theEC;18 academic and political proponents of the centrality of Central Europehave vigorously contested this Western consensus view since the division ofEurope ended.19

Nineteenth-century Europe was the West. The most ‘modern’ states andeconomies, and the most ‘advanced’ cultures in the world, were to be found inGreat Britain, France and Germany. The empires of Eastern Europe were itsperiphery: accepted as European in the culture of their capitals, but (accurately)seen from the West as less advanced and less stable. The Industrial Revolutionspread eastwards, from England across Belgium into the Rhineland, Bohemiaand northern Italy; the limited industrialization of Russia before 1914 dependedheavily on British and German entrepreneurs, and French, British and Germancapital. Russia was accepted as one of the European ‘powers’, building its drivefor imperial expansion on the dual foundations of its claim to have become theprotector of the Orthodox world against Ottoman oppression and on its land-ward colonization of Central and Northern Asia. But liberal opinion in Parisand London never regarded Russia as fully part of the civilized world; whileimperial Berlin and Vienna saw Russia as Eurasian, a half-barbarian state heldtogether by a determined and Europeanized elite. Modernizing elites in Istanbuland Tokyo identified Europeanization with modernization, learning to dressand to dance according to European fashion in the same way that they acquiredEuropean skills in engineering and military training. Japan was accepted as a‘Western’ power, alongside Russia, in the interventions in China in the late nine-teenth century. Those in contemporary Turkey who argue that the OttomanEmpire had succeeded in establishing its European credentials, if only as ‘thesick man of Europe’, are saying little more than that all national reformerslooked to Western Europe to provide the models for political, economic andsocial reform, in the same way that in the world post-1945 all nationalreformers looked to the USA or the USSR as the models that they shouldfollow.

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Are the frontiers of modern Europe the same as the frontiers of the West?The definition of Europe in terms of shared values implies that they should be:that it is the spread of Western values – those inherited from the Renaissance,the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the English and French Revolutions –that delimit Europe. Optimistic interpretation of such a definition implies thatEurope’s boundaries may thus spread as ‘Westernizers’ in countries on Europe’seastern and southern peripheries succeed in incorporating those values into law,politics and society. Pessimistic interpretation, in contrast, would followHuntington’s view: that there is a deep divide between the political and socialcultures of Western Christendom and those of the Orthodox/Ottoman world,unbridgeable within the foreseeable future. It is important to note that Westernpowers have assumed their superiority over eastern empires (and Ottomandependencies) for the past two hundred years; and that Eastern elites havereturned that disdain with a studied ambivalence about their relationship to thecorrupt but luxurious West. Russian history has witnessed cycles of conflictbetween Westernizers, Old Believers, and self-proclaimed patriots attempting tobalance between the two, from the time of Peter the Great to that of Gorbachev,Yeltsin and Putin.

Detailed discussion of whether Europe has ever had clear or accepted easternfrontiers is thus in many ways superfluous. Mental maps have counted for morethan physical geography; the Carpathians, the Urals, the Dnieper or the Donhave served to illustrate imaginary boundaries as much as to delineate territory.The Urals have acquired a degree of authenticity as a frontier from generationsof Western schoolbooks, together with the Bosphorus; but neither has served as aformal frontier, whether between states or ‘civilizations’.20 Boundaries in theBalkans were repeatedly redrawn by war and by conference diplomacy betweenthe 1870s and 1919; the border between Greece and Turkey was settled onlyafter Greece’s disastrous failure to conquer western Anatolia in 1922. What isnow Algeria was formally part of France until the early 1960s; migration andsettlement have flowed north and south across the Mediterranean since classicaltimes, and continue to do so.

What we know of earlier ‘European’ projects is that most have started fromWestern Europe and have spread only some way eastwards. The Duc de Sully’sproposals for a European federation in the early sixteenth century included thePapacy, Hungary, Bohemia, the Empire, Poland and Venice, France, Spain,Britain, Denmark, Sweden, Savoy, Switzerland, the Netherlands and ‘Italy’, butexcluded ‘Asiatic’ Muscovy. ‘The frontiers allowed for religious blocs – Lutheran,Catholic and Calvinist – to remain separate, and these frontiers were to be guar-anteed by a general assembly of representatives from all the newly shapedunits.’21 Immanuel Kant’s plans for perpetual peace were thought out in theeastern Baltic, but he looked west from Königsberg in the hope of findingEuropean republics in the lands reshaped by the Enlightenment and the Frenchrevolutionary wars.

Konrad Adenauer, with the Western perspective of a Rhinelander and aGerman scholar, declared that with the Soviet occupation of Eastern Germany,

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‘Asia had reached the Elbe’. Count Metternich held that ‘Asia begins at theLandstraße’ (the road out of Vienna towards the East),22 as German lands gaveway to Slav and Hungarian. Definition of Europe through contrasting it withnon-Europe, the uncivilized ‘other’ that threatens the civilized West, has deeproots in European history and literature, as Iver Neumann has argued. ‘In thefourteenth and early fifteenth century, … the presence of an Other which couldbe characterized as the embodiment of evil served to unify and strengthen thedisparate Christendom.’23 When divisions within Western Christendom widenedinto the Reformation, John Calvin spoke of a shattering not of Christendom,but of Europe itself (Europae Concussio)24 – which indicates how closely associatedthe ideas of (Western) Christendom and of Europe had become.

The role that Russia assumed with the fall of Constantinople as the protectorof Orthodoxy defined Russianness, in turn, in opposition to the corruptedWest.25 Russian nationalism thus contained strong anti-Western (or anti-European) elements for political leaders to use when it served their purposes.With the Russian Revolution, the religious element in anti-Western rhetoric wasreplaced by the ideological one, rejecting the corruption of Western capitalismfor the claimed purity of Soviet communism.

Ethnic undertones also remain buried in European literature and history,even though discredited in politically correct circles by the memories of theSecond World War. Neumann argues that Europe defined itself to a large extentin opposition to an Eastern ‘other’, defined partly in religious, partly in cultural,and partly in ethnic terms.26 The position of the ‘other’ for early modernEurope was occupied mainly by Turkey and Russia. In the nineteenth centuryparticularly, the Ottoman Empire was characterized as barbaric in comparisonto civilized Europe, which was based on humanity, individual rights and adher-ence to international law and the rule of law domestically. Russia, for (West)Europeans, was also essentially an Asian country with a Europeanized elite. WithRussian expansion beyond the Urals, a debate began as to the demarcationbetween Asian and European Russia; this also led to the emergence of the term‘Eurasia’ for Russia west of the Urals. Indeed,

[t]he problem that Russia presented for the West was a double one. On theone hand, there was a long association of Russia with the Mongols who hadruled the entire country in the thirteenth century. On the other hand, therewas the fact that Russia itself, after emancipating itself from the ‘TartarYoke’, turned eastwards and colonised north-eastern Asia. Russia thus cameto be a frontier separating Europe from Asia.27

From the West European perspective the countries between Germany andRussia – contemporary Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, populated bySlavs intermingled with Germans and Jews – represented a frontier region, thelands in-between the West and the Asiatic East. The concept of Mitteleuropa

carried undertones of prejudice against both Slavs and Jews, the peoples of aregion dependent on Western Europe and oriented towards Western Europe,

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though politically dependent on the three empires that had divided the regionamong themselves. The occupation of East Central Europe after 1945 thus fittedinto pre-existing Western images – as did the dissident voices of the early 1980s,looking westward to help these dependent peoples escape from Eastern authori-tarian domination.

In secular Western Europe, more than fifty years after the end of the SecondWorld War, with a substantial Muslim minority living in most West Europeancities, these echoes of the past should be fading. But enough remains for politi-cians (like Wolfgang Schäuble) still to refer to Europe as Western Christendom,to the exclusion of the Turks, for ‘Balkanization’ and ‘Salade Macedoine’ to carryimplicit messages, for West European political leaders to feel ambivalent abouteastern enlargement on more than economic grounds. In Eastern Europe, too,enough remains to sustain ambivalence about Western domination – and togenerate popular support in several Orthodox countries for Orthodox Serbsunder ‘Western’ attack.

Can we define any settled border – and should we?

In principle, most Western institutions are now committed to a long process ofrolling enlargement, holding open the prospect of future full membership ofNATO and the EU to a lengthening list of hopeful countries once they can meetthe criteria set out – and offering help in preparing to meet those criteria. In thespring and summer of 1999 Western leaders committed themselves far moreexplicitly than ever before to extensive enlargement, justified on political andstrategic grounds, in response to the crisis in Kosovo. Half-promises toMacedonia and Albania that they will in time find a place within Western insti-tutions indicate that Bosnia, Croatia and Yugoslavia will, under more favourabledomestic circumstances, also find a place; and that the West is thus committed tosome fifteen to twenty years of transition to full membership, with the stick ofconditionality and the carrots of market access and financial assistance to guideapplicant states along the right path. This is as long term a commitment as thatwhich the infant EEC made to Greece and Turkey in their association agree-ments nearly forty years ago. It may well prove to have been as lightlyconsidered, as little thought through, as the earlier commitments to Greece andTurkey, building up difficulties for the future when expectations within the appli-cants come up against second thoughts among the member states.

Commitments to Cyprus and Malta raise other delicate questions of micro-states and of state capacity to shoulder the responsibilities of membership. Theyalso raise questions about the outer limits of European institutions to the southand south-east. Nicosia is 200 miles from Beirut, deriving some of its prosperityfrom its role as an entrepôt in Middle East trade. Valetta is half-way betweenItaly and Tunisia: a bridge to a more closely associated Mahgreb, perhaps, or anoutpost of institutionalized Europe on Europe’s well-policed Mediterraneanborder?

The temptation for policy-makers is to raise long-term expectations that their

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successors may have to meet. The legacy of the Turkish Association Agreementhad been an aggrieved Turkish elite, complicating an already delicate relation-ship with major West European governments. The agreement at the HelsinkiEuropean Council in December 1999 to accept Turkey as in principle a candi-date for EU membership was another delicately crafted compromise, aboutwhich many member governments retain strong reservations. West Europeangovernments find it tempting to resolve immediate difficulties by offering half-promises of future obligation, with the date of delivery safely beyond their termof office: of ‘partnerships’ and ‘membership action programmes’ that serve topostpone decisions on full membership, of association or ‘candidate status’raising the prospect of full membership in fifteen to twenty years. The commit-ments to South-East European states that the German Presidency, theWashington NATO Communiqué, the British Prime Minister and others madein the summer of 1999, repeated in the South-Eastern Europe Stability Pact,have extended the potential boundaries of NATO and the EU far further thanmost of their citizens would yet accept – or are aware of. A change of govern-ment in Ukraine, a repetition under favourable conditions of Georgia’s declaredintention to join NATO, and democratic politicians risk offering more than theymay be able to deliver, thus building up future resentment at exclusion fromstates with a great deal of economic interest, security concerns and status atstake.

‘The greatest danger’ of enlargement, President Mitterrand once said, is thatas the last grateful applicant takes its seat at the Council table the institution ithas been seeking to join at last collapses under the complexities of managing somany members with so diverse a set of interests. An associated danger is that theEU and NATO reluctantly enlarge, without carrying through the internalreforms necessary to cope with the implications. There are enough signs of drift,with suggestions that perhaps two Inter-governmental Conferences will beneeded before the EU is ready for the next enlargement, and that the negotia-tions now under way will take sufficient time to carry through to completion toallow member governments to postpone hard decisions for several years yet.

What conclusions should we therefore draw as to the outlines of a strategy forextending and managing institutionalized Europe’s eastern and southern fron-tiers? First, we must accept that there are severe limits to a variable geometrysolution, comparable to that which has developed within North-Western Europe,to the enlargement of Europe to the east (and perhaps in time the south).Applicant states seek full membership, of as many institutions and areas ofWestern integration as they can; denial can only cause offence.

Second, ambiguity in relations with significant third states is counter-productive: it builds in misunderstandings, with the potential for rising feelings ofgrievance later. If EU governments conclude that it is unlikely that they will beable to accept Turkey (for instance) into the EU by 2020, they would do better tosay so, and justify their position – and to seek to construct an acceptable alterna-tive. Similarly, conditions for full membership are best spelt out explicitly: thelack of clarity over whether Greek Cyprus may aspire to join the EU before a

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negotiated settlement with Turkish Cyprus has been reached risks drifting intopolitical – or, worse, military – crisis as different parties act upon different expec-tations.

Third, it is imperative that there is an approach that attempts to create mutu-ally acceptable patterns of association that can provide an alternative to fullmembership. Ukraine and Russia (and, perhaps in time, Belarus) are importantpartners for institutionalized Europe, but unlikely full members of the EU, atleast. A ‘privileged partnership’ is needed, which will give their leaders somevoice within EU councils without the complications that would follow fromaccepting such large and distant states into full membership.

Fourth, the duality of NATO and the EU as the leading Western institutions,with distinctive functions, may perhaps offer one variable geometry solution. IfNATO, which already includes non-EU Turkey, were to enlarge to offer fullmembership to Russia and Ukraine (and perhaps in time even to Georgia), theWest would avoid drawing a single solid line between insiders and outsiders.NATO would thus to some extent displace the OSCE as a pan-European secu-rity organization.

Fifth, what is offered to the states on Europe’s eastern periphery will also needto be offered to the states on its southern periphery: not ‘European’ on manydefinitions, but economically dependent on European markets and investment,with established patterns of migration and settlement for their citizens withininstitutionalized Europe. Close association for Mediterranean partner countries,through an enhanced Barcelona process, will not only be the price that theSpanish government and its Western Mediterranean partners may wish toextract for accepting eastern enlargement; it is also in the EU’s long-term interests.

Sixth, as far as possible, Europe’s outer borders should be permeable andopen, with cross-border exchanges encouraged rather than blocked. But this willnot always be possible: pressures for illegal immigration are such, organizedcrime is sufficiently skilful, to require systematic controls – and for domesticpublics within EU member states loudly to demand that they be maintained.Indeed it is likely that border controls along the EU’s eastern and southernborders will be stepped up in the coming years, as much to provide visible reas-surance to anxious EU citizens as to increase the effectiveness of policing itself.

Seventh, the relationship between core Europe and peripheral Europe isinherently unequal. Peripheral states will unavoidably protest that they areaffected by the extra-territorial reach of EU jurisdiction, and will complain thattheir ministers and prime ministers have to wait for the EU to reach decisions,rather than taking part in those that affect them directly. An untidy network ofassociation councils and agreements is likely to grow still untidier as coreEuropean states struggle to provide symbolic status and the illusion of seriousconsultation to states whose interests they normally consider only when theyhave struck bargains among those inside.

Lastly, it is unhelpful and unconstructive for politicians both inside andoutside Western institutions to pursue further the dangerous rhetoric of

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European inclusion and exclusion, couched in terms of history, religion, ethnicorigin or culture. Historical claims exploited to support contemporary demandsfor privileged treatment for inclusion or exclusion are the stuff of conflict, as wehave witnessed in the former Yugoslavia. There have been many different‘Europes’, with many different core regions. The core region for West Europeanintegration was defined by the historical circumstances of the Cold War. Theeconomic and political balance of the wider post-cold war Europe that is nowemerging is likely to tilt eastwards. The language of ‘core Europe’, of an avant-garde or noyau dur, represents an attempt to sustain the privileged position thatthe Benelux states and France had established within the old order, at theexpense of those states that were locked out of Western Europe for fifty years.

The European priority now is to construct a stable and workable institutionalorder for a broad region without definable boundaries, within which it willnevertheless be necessary to draw demarcation lines. The EU and NATO areclearly emerging as the defining institutions for this emerging order; and thereare good reasons, as argued above, for drawing the lines of membership forNATO wider than those that will be manageable for the EU. The most difficulttask will be to construct a mutually satisfactory framework for relations with thedependent states on Europe’s periphery, to associate them with Europe’s pros-perous and secure Western states: to find a formula that allows them access,through borders which are at once permeable and secure. The test of statesman-ship within rich Western Europe will be to persuade reluctant voters to sharesome of their wealth, their markets and their security with their less fortunateneighbours to the east and south, when those voters would much rather cultivatetheir own gardens behind a high boundary fence.

Notes

This chapter owes a great deal to the advice and assistance of Franziska Hagedorn.For the definition of the terms ‘frontier’, ‘border’ and ‘boundary’, see the introduc-tory chapter by Jan Zielonka.

1 Article 6 of the 1949 North Atlantic Treaty lists Turkey and ‘the islands under thejurisdiction of any of the Parties in … the Mediterranean sea’ separately from‘Europe and North America’, thus excluding Malta and Cyprus along with Turkeyfrom its definition of ‘Europe’.

2 See Soledad García, ed., European Identity and the Search for Legitimacy (London: Pinter,1993).

3 I was the BBC interviewer.4 Malcolm Anderson, ed., Frontier Regions in Western Europe (London: Cass, 1983) and

John Benyon, Andrew Willis, Rachel Woodward and Adrian Beck, Police Co-operation inEurope: An Investigation (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1993).

5 Niklas Luhmann, ‘Territorial Borders as System Boundaries’, in RaimondoStrassoldo and Giovanni Delli Zotti, eds, Cooperation and Conflict in Border Areas (Milan:Franco Angeli Editore, 1982).

6 See Malcolm Anderson and Eberhard Bort, eds, Schengen and EU Enlargement. Securityand Co-operation at the Eastern Frontier of the European Union, Proceedings from anInternational Conference at Vienna and Bratislava, 17–20 April 1997 (Edinburgh:The University of Edinburgh, International Social Sciences Institute, 1997), p. 30.

Where does Europe end? 93

7 Paul Taylor, The European Union (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).8 Notes from a meeting in Brussels sponsored by the Trans-European Policy Studies

Association (May 1992).9 Didier Bigo, L’Europe des polices et de la sécurité intérieure (Paris: Éditions Complexe, 1992).

10 17th Report, House of Lords EU Committee, 1999–2000, ‘Enlargement and EUExternal Frontier Controls’, HL 110, October 2000.

11 Albrecht Funk, ‘Policing Europe: Border Controls and European Integration’, inStefan Immerfall, ed., Territoriality in the Globalizing Society: One Place or None? (Berlin:Springer, 1998).

12 Jan Zielonka, Explaining Euro-Paralysis (London: Macmillan, 1998).13 Hélène Ahrweiler, ‘Roots and Trends in European Culture’, in Soledad García, ed.,

European Identity and the Search for Legitimacy, p. 34.14 Iver Neumann, ‘The Other in European Self-Definition: An Addendum to the

Literature on International Society’, Review of International Studies, 17 (1991), pp.327–48 (p. 335).

15 Ahrweiler, ‘Roots and Trends’.16 Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). Robert

Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change 930–1350(London: Allen Lane, 1993).

17 Samuel Huntington, ‘The Clash of Civilizations’, Foreign Affairs (April–May 1993).18 Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, Europe: A History of Its Peoples (London: Viking, 1990).19 Norman Davies, Europe: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).20 Gerard Delanty, Inventing Europe (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), p. 58.21 John Hale, ‘The Renaissance Idea of Europe’, in Soledad García, ed., European Identity

and the Search for Legitimacy, p. 62.22 A.J.P. Taylor, The Habsburg Empire 1815 – 1918 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1942), p.

9, cited in Delanty, Inventing Europe, p. 49.23 Neumann, ‘The Other in European Self-Definition’, p. 334.24 See Hale, ‘The Renaissance Idea of Europe’, p. 47.25 Delanty, Inventing Europe, p. 62.26 Neumann, ‘The Other in European Self-Definition’, pp. 329–30.27 Delanty, Inventing Europe, pp. 59f.

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Borders and foreign policy

Foreign policy depends on the existence of borders.1 The word ‘foreign’ origi-nally referred to that which is ‘outside’, and where there is an outside there mustnot only be an inside but also a line of demarcation between the two. Thiselementary point is worth making for two reasons: first, theorists of politics andinternational relations increasingly call into question polarities such as thosebetween the domestic and external environments (because of globalization, forinstance), between the state and world society (for normative reasons) andbetween agents and structures (for epistemological reasons);2 second, theEuropean Union itself is a perpetual challenge to the historical fixity of borders– it is steadily breaking down those between its member states, and its rollingprogramme of enlargement, from six to fifteen and possibly twenty-plusmembers, and from 1969 to well into the second decade of the twenty-firstcentury, makes unclear the nature of its current border, let alone that of a puta-tive permanent border in the future.

The discussion here does not go into these theoretical, even meta-theoretical,issues in any depth. The main focus is on the extent to which the currentenlargement of the Union, a massive historical enterprise by any standards,requiring political stamina over many decades, will raise problems of foreignpolicy for the EU and its member states. For borders imply foreign policy just asmuch as foreign policy implies borders. Where decisions are taken to excludestates from membership (even if not permanently), their relations with the Unionremain by definition at the level of foreign policy. Their very desire to enter ispremised on the view that being inside involves a qualitatively different kind ofrelationship than is implied even by close friendship from the outside. Moreover,changing membership transforms relationships between those admitted and theirneighbours left outside, previously shaped at least in part by the common statusof exclusion. It is thus evident that enlargement should be seen not simply fromthe perspective of resources and institutional complications, but also from that ofinternational relations and foreign policy.

Enlargement, indeed, is foreign policy. The decisions at Copenhagen, Corfu,Essen and Cannes between 1993 and 1995 can be seen as a commitment to a

6 The geopoliticalimplications ofenlargement

Christopher Hill

major new foreign policy on the part of the EU, that of changing the map ofEurope to the East and to the South. Such a commitment is seen by third statesas having a structural impact on the international system, as in fact the Fifteenintended it to have. They want to stabilize East, Central and South-EasternEurope through taking in states from those regions where it is practicable to doso. With the precedents of Portugal, Spain and Greece fresh in the mind, theaim is to extend the zone of economic prosperity and the ‘democratic peace’ as aprophylactic against war, nationalism and autocracy. That the strategy has beenconducted on the basis of disjointed incrementalism rather than a fully workedout grand plan does not make it any less significant. The very flexibility of theprocess, or incoherence according to viewpoint, means that expectations outsidethe EU are unstable and its international politics the more turbulent.

The foreign policy aspect of enlargement is extended by virtue of the factthat this is one area where the EU does possess capabilities. Whereas manyactions under the heading of the Common Foreign and Security Policy are viti-ated by the inability of the Union to back them with resources or unifiedpolitical will, the enlargement process was undertaken on the basis of consider-able consensus and an evident ability to deliver gains for those states that wereultimately to be admitted. Enlargement cuts across all three pillars of the systemset up by the Treaty of Maastricht and by its nature imposes a degree of unityon an EU decision-making process bound to generate incoherence. It mobilizesboth economic and political resources and cannot be ignored even by thosestates not themselves seeking membership. It has an impact on the internationalsystem, and it makes a difference.

There are two central foreign policy questions thrown up by the move towardsa new external border that the EU is currently, if incidentally, engaged in.3 Theseare, firstly, where are we going, and, secondly, what are the consequences of ouractions? In the first case we need to have some sense of where we might end up,in terms of the ultimate shape and extent of the EU, even if those currentlyleading us there find the issue too difficult to discuss openly.4 If ‘Europe’ is reallyto stretch from the Atlantic to the Urals, from Malta to Tampere, from ScapaFlow to Batum, then it will be a very different entity from that which for most ofits existence has been little more than a caucus within ‘the West’, led by theUnited States. Such a body might become a superpower, or it might be unable tocope with its sheer size and complexity, but it will certainly figure prominently inthe mental maps of decision-makers across the world. Whatever enlargementtakes place, even if it stops well short of the potential colossus I have described,would still make a significant difference to the international politics of EasternEurope, the Balkans and the Mediterranean. The geopolitics of any new bordersshould not, therefore, be relegated to the margins of discussions on agriculturalprices, migration or the size of the European Parliament.

In the second case, the issues are just as important. Enlargement has neither a single decision-point nor a clear end-point. It is a virtually continuous and long-drawn-out process. This means that each stage will take some time – as we cansee from the fact that even the first wave of new entrants from Central Europe

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will not join until at least ten years after the decision to admit them in principle –and that it will be seen as a discrete event in its own terms, with distinct conse-quences. In other words, the negotiations with candidate countries will bedifficult and raise foreign policy issues in their own right, while the consequenceof discriminating among the many would-be members by giving out queue-jumping tickets is bound to have international fall-out and complicate otheraspects of the Union’s external relations. One advantage of this gradualism isthat the map of Europe will change only slowly, perhaps even imperceptibly; thecorollary, however, is that each stage can itself seem like a major upheaval in thediplomatic landscape.

Thus enlargement, borders and foreign policy are inextricably bound up witheach other. Indeed, the border question is probably the most important of all theforeign policy implications of enlargement.5 Some, like Charles Maier in thisvolume (chapter 2), like to see the EU as so unusual, perhaps post-modern, in itscharacter that it represents more a virtual than a territorial community, reachingout to peoples and processes well beyond its nominal borders.6 By contrast thepresent chapter argues that it is of vital importance where the external frontierof the EU falls, whether temporarily or permanently, for both the domestic andexternal environments of the Union. Outsiders are far from indifferent to itsgeopolitical character, in terms of size, range, resources, population proximityand potential. This is as true of the United States and Russia as it is of smallstates in the EU’s orbit such as Morocco or Iceland. Equally, each aggrandize-ment of the Union is inherently both territorial and communitarian. That is, itbrings the external border into new zones of international relations (e.g. deeperinto Balkan politics if Slovenia is admitted) and new problems of cross-bordercommunities (e.g. the problem of ‘Hungarian’ Romanians). Turkey is the mostobvious case in point: if admitted, it would greatly enlarge the area, scope andpopulation of the EU and would alter the way others currently perceive it – as abroadly rich, Western, Judaeo-Christian entity. This may be a good thing; what isclear is that the international effects of Turkish entry would not be neutral.

What follows elaborates this argument by looking in more detail at the natureof geopolitics in the context of contemporary Europe, and by examining thequestion of whether territorial limits necessarily mean sharply defined borders.It goes on to examine the issue of ‘otherness’ and how changes in size produce,or perhaps even require, some excluded outsiders: to be ‘us’ we may need tohave a clear idea of who is ‘not us’. The key issue of security is given particularattention, as are the geopolitical zones of greatest sensitivity so far as the EU isconcerned, that is, Eastern Europe, North Africa and Turkey. Finally, the ques-tion is raised of what the world role of an enlarged Europe might look like,although the constraints of space require that it be left open.

Geopolitics, grand strategy and geo-economics

The external boundary of the EU is of vital importance both to the Union itselfand to the wider international system. Furthermore, enlargement is the major

The geopolitical implications of enlargement 97

influence on the character of that boundary. If these two propositions areaccepted, then the EU has to be analysed in a geopolitical context. This is partic-ularly the case because it has something approaching a common foreign andsecurity policy and generates many significant outputs to that end. It now alsoaspires to a common defence policy. Moreover, its very existence signifies ageopolitical presence in the world, with its resources and element of supra-nationality making for a sharp distinction between members and non-members,between inside and outside. Even if the Union falls far short of being able tomobilize its resources and political will on a state-like basis, it still represents adistinct power-centre, a force for change, and, de facto, an entire region.

Students of the European Union have for too long neglected geopolitics,either because they could not see its relevance to a ‘civilian power’ or becausethey were uneasy with that kind of discourse for normative reasons. To someextent the neglect was mirrored among international relations specialists. Thelong tradition of realist writing about strategy and the balance of powerproduced a deep scepticism about civilian diplomacy, the inability to supplantNATO and the lack of the capacity to engage in ‘rational actor’ behaviour.Others, reacting against realism, were attracted by the EU and the model itembodied, but were not, by definition, interested in its geopolitical aspect. Thisdichotomization, however, can no longer be sustained, given the EU’s own evolu-tion and aspirations, and the changing nature of security relationships in theaftermath of the Cold War. Of course, fundamental change is still more a matterof promise than realization, but the admixture of multi-level foreign policieswith an enlarging Union means that geopolitics can no longer be bracketed outof our analysis of the EU and its international functions.

The meaning of geopolitics is not, however, an uncomplicated matter.Although at bottom it refers neutrally to the impact of the spatial organization ofthe world on international politics, it is contaminated by its association withnotions first of Lebensraum and ‘heartland’ and then of containment and domi-noes. From c. 1890 to c. 1985, with only a brief pause between 1919 and 1933,international relations were conceptually dominated by the language of militarystrategy, with its apparent qualities of objectivity and determinism. The aggran-dizements of Nazism, fascism and Japanese imperialism were all based on theidea that security, indeed civilization, required territorial expansion. The ColdWar, which followed, saw both sides place buffer zones and global reach at thecentre of their concerns. As before 1939, international politics was dominated bythe ‘great game’ of power politics, with at stake ‘key’ states like Poland or Korea,and nodal strategic points like Suez. Complex interdependence and multipo-larity came slowly to overlay this game, but even after the end of the Cold War,they have not wholly replaced it.

Yet if the post-war world has been largely understood geopolitically, the term‘geopolitics’ itself fell into disrepute because of its association with Nazi dreamsof world power, and it is paradoxically only since Mikhail Gorbachev soundedthe tocsin for the Cold War that it has crept back into fashion as ‘the newgeopolitics’. By this is meant: regional balances of power; the politics of control

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over natural resources; the differential impact of size, position and topographyon foreign policy; and, to a lesser extent, the international politics of the environ-ment. There is under this cooler rubric no reason why the classical question ofthe emergence of new powers, their zones of influence and the ‘shatterbelts’between the various geopolitical regions should not also be considered, now thatthe normative language of the old tradition has been stripped away. Moreover,unless we grant determining force to transnational economic regions like theAsia-Pacific Rim, or the ‘golden banana’ from Barcelona to Livorno, geo-economics can be subsumed within the new geopolitics. States may need to bandtogether to dispose of economic power, but that is precisely what they aretending to do, and the configurations of strength thus produced create new fault-lines of competition in international affairs.

In this respect the EU is, of course, the leading example, possessing aformidable concentration of wealth and, through enlargement, even greaterpotential. Even without the development of a single military policy thiseconomic power cannot avoid being political in its use and implications. Thefrequent use of terms such as ‘fortress Europe’ in relation to trade, ‘hard shell’ inrelation to migration or ‘EurAfrique’ in connection with development denotesthat, even as it stands, the EU is perceived as a major geopolitical/geo-economicentity. Given that the Union is also increasingly prioritizing its own near abroad,with the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership and a Common Strategy on Russia, itis evident that it is beginning to behave like a traditional great power.7 Furtherevidence for this conclusion is provided by the reactions to Europe’s relativeimpotence in the Balkans. Britain and France in particular, but even the smallerand neutral member states, have concluded that the EU needs to acquire morecapabilities so as to enable it to intervene in crises in its own region independentof the United States. To this end the Anglo-French declaration at St Malo inNovember 1998 started a process that led to all fifteen signing up to a prospec-tive militarization of the EU and the winding up of the Western EuropeanUnion.8 If this happens, the consequences will not be unmitigatedly positive.The emergence or growth of military power always alarms outsiders and veryoften leads to an increase in their own armament programmes and to a rise intension in external relationships. In that event the EU will not be able to avoidthe geopolitical implications of integration and enlargement.

The geopolitics of enlargement by stages

If a large-scale enlargement of the EU is indeed to happen, it may not now beby the big bang method. Rather, it will be spread out over twenty years or so,and seems likely to take place through the accession of three or more groups ofnew members.9 If closely managed, with those at the end of the queue compen-sated and constantly reassured as to their eventual reward, this could work wellenough. In geopolitical terms it would also have the advantage that the externalborder would change only slowly and predictably. It is already more than adecade since the newly free Visegrad (Central European) countries first voiced

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their expectations of membership. They are still not in the EU and are veryunlikely to enter before 2004. This hardly sets a breakneck pace risking suddendestabilization of the international environment. By the same token, however,long-term foreign policy projects, especially those on the grand scale, make itvirtually impossible to ensure a close control over events and the greater likeli-hood is that those who miss the first bus will become ever more irate andinsecure. The very fact of differentiation and delay will increase the possibility ofthe excluded looking for other protectors and/or suffering internal reactions.The great length and staccato nature of the process will also create an environ-ment of perpetual uncertainty, to an extent counter-balanced by the disciplineexerted on the candidate states through the fear of exclusion. The inevitability ofchanges inside the EU and differences amongst its principal member states arefurther factors making for an unpredictable and to some extent arbitrary process.Thus, given the complexity of the multiple issues involved, and the bargainingprocess over them, the problem of the external border is bound to be settledincidentally and not by strategic decision.

It is worth considering how solid a construction Europe will be in terms of its‘hard’ external boundary at the various stages that it might go through – the firstfew of them by definition merely transitional. These stages are illustrated in themaps in figure 6.1, on the premise of a likely first round of expansion fromfifteen to twenty (Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Slovenia); asecond from twenty to twenty-five (Bulgaria, Romania, Latvia, Lithuania,Slovakia); and a third of Cyprus and Turkey.10 These are to be taken as exem-plars more than firm predictions.

An EU of the twenty states suggested by Agenda 2000 would bring new fron-tiers with Belarus and Ukraine, as well as lengthening that with Russia andpushing the Union’s reach further towards the Balkans and South-EasternEurope.11 Slovakia would then be almost encircled by EU states, and politicalpressures would build up for its inclusion – a kind of domino theory in reverse (atheory, of course, so far refuted by Switzerland). The same would apply toBulgaria and Romania, to the two remaining Baltic states, and possibly by thento the states of ex-Yugoslavia, now much more difficult to ignore after theKosovo war. At the very least the EU’s sense of responsibility for these by nowneighbouring states would be sharply heightened. Relations with Russia wouldbecome more sensitive and significant in direct proportion to this eastwardsexpansion.

If a combination of pressure, planning and self-fulfilling prophecies then didproduce an EU of twenty-five, the geopolitical pivot of the Union wouldcertainly shift eastwards. Albania and the remaining successor states of ex-Yugoslavia would be wholly surrounded by the EU, and the issue would arise ofwhether in their turn Moldova, Belarus and the Ukraine were not possible candi-dates for entry. If by this time the EU had indeed acquired a significant defencecapability, with or without a supplanting of NATO, then we can be sure thatRussia would be becoming concerned in the extreme, while Turkey, unless sureof its place in the next round, would be on the verge of alienation. Moscow and

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Ankara have in common the fact that they are the major losers of EU enlarge-ment – in the sense that they are both, despite being highly significant states,unlikely ever to gain entry. In the long run their options will reduce to eitheraccepting a place in the EU’s orbit, or seeking other protective groupings.

This analysis assumes that Cyprus will not be in the next round of enlarge-ment, for political reasons arising out of the division of the island. If, however,Greek Cyprus is allowed in despite the lack of a settlement with the North,Turkey will become hostile unless bought off with its own accession. Either way,Turkey is certain to continue protesting at being overtaken by parvenu states andwill have few incentives to lessen the tensions arising from its relations withGreece, its role in Cyprus and its abuses of human rights. Turkey’s frustrationswith the EU also have the potential severely to exacerbate its existing internalpolitical problems, and quite possibly to precipitate a crisis inside what is animportant NATO member and a large neighbour of the Union. If the unlikelycomes about and Turkey does itself join the EU, then geopolitics will hit homewith a vengeance (see pp. 109–111 below). At present the fifteen EU memberstates have between them borders with twelve non-members. Enlarged to

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The EU of 20The EU of 15

The EU of 25 The EU of 27

Figure 6.1 Continental drift: the possible enlargement of the European Union

twenty-seven, that figure rather surprisingly rises only to fifteen, but the composi-tion of the neighbouring group would have changed radically.

A sharp or fuzzy border?

The geopolitical implications of expansion will differ according to whether theexternal border of the Union is going to be sharp, in both practical and politicalsenses, or fuzzy – by which is meant a condition of ambiguity resulting fromsome insiders having opted out from some common activities and some outsidersbeing ever more closely associated with what the EU does.12 At present, withonly ten of the fifteen being full members of the WEU, a history of ‘footnotes’by individual member states in foreign policy cooperation, and a number ofthird countries engaged in political dialogues, it is arguable that the Unionpresents a less than distinct image as an international actor. In the future, withlong transition periods and/or special arrangements on agriculture and labourmobility having to be found for some new members, the picture could be evenmore complex. On the other hand the very challenge of enlargement couldprecipitate internal crisis and a leap forward into unity. The apparent consensuson the need to make the ‘European Security and Defence Policy’ more than anaspiration could be the first manifestation of such a trend.

The converse of this, however, is that if the EU system continues not to beclearly demarcated, with insiders not accepting identical obligations and someoutsiders enjoying privileged access, it will be the more difficult to pull togetherthe threads of foreign policy as a sharply defined actor in international politics.It is not clear in which direction the causation will run, or what place enlarge-ment will play in it: will the need to cope with expansion and the externalchallenges entangled with it push towards greater uniformity and a sharperinside/outside split, or will the combination of internal complexity and externalpressures for involvement make both the physical and the political borders of theEU less clear? The United States, for example, may favour EU enlargement butit also has no wish to see an autonomous Europe emerge in contradistinction toitself. It wishes to continue a close association between the CFSP and US foreignpolicy, with NATO as the major producer of security. For their part theEuropeans are only too aware that for the foreseeable future they still needAmerican troops and guarantees.

From the Russian perspective, things might look rather different. AlthoughMoscow has so far been relatively relaxed about EU enlargement, there is noguarantee that this will remain the case. The subtleties of differentiated integra-tion and institutional overlap might seem less important than the image of anEU expanding eastward relentlessly, apart from the certainty that it will halt atthe Belarus border, excluding Belarus and Russia itself. The consequence, of amassive trading and political bloc with the potential to place a second super-power on Russia’s doorstep, is unlikely to be viewed with equanimity, particularlyif the United States continues to favour enlargement. Conversely, despite the

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putative advantages of not stirring up Russian fear and hostility, the statesbetween the Oder and the Don rivers are not likely to settle for anything lessthan full membership, and will keep pressing if they are stalled with ‘special rela-tionships’. Whatever the risks, they will seemed outweighed by the potentialgains in terms of the transfer of resources, and perceived protection.

The question of a hard or soft outside border is closely related to that ofwhere the enlargement of the EU will finally stop, as it must. Until there is asense that the geographical and cultural limits of ‘Europe’ have been reached,there will always be an uncertainty as to whether those still outside are perma-nent or only temporary exclusions. The sense of an unrolling EU border couldprovoke just as much instability as it is able to reduce through ‘the power ofattraction’. Furthermore, the problems of absorbing some new members arelikely to go beyond temporary attacks of indigestion. While anomalies likeNorway or Switzerland could easily be absorbed if they should choose to reversecurrent policies, Croatia, Bosnia, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria or Turkey would be acompletely different matter. And yet all these states have some clear claims incultural terms to be regarded as European (as indeed does Russia), even if theydo not currently qualify under the Copenhagen conditions.13 There will come atime when, for both internal and geopolitical reasons, the EU will have toabandon its current policy of creative ambiguity in favour of a blunt statementthat ‘enlargement stops here (or there)’, explaining precisely why some statescannot be included, whatever their political and economic progress. This will benecessary if only to resolve uncertainties and lower escalating expectations. Ifand when it does this – and many will argue on grounds of realpolitik forperpetual ambiguity – it will not be able to avoid geopolitical reasoning.Countries will be excluded either because they are too far away, or because theywould make the EU too big, or because they would involve it in problems andquarrels that even the irenic optimists in Brussels cannot take on. There mayalso, ultimately, be some realization that continuing the eastwards movement ofthe Union could end in a more direct confrontation between Europe and theMiddle East than has existed since the height of Ottoman power in 1683, and asharper division between Europe and Russia than has arguably ever existedbefore. A fourteenth-century encyclopaedia said that:

Europe begins at the river Tanay (Don) and stretches along the NorthernOcean to the end of Spain. The eastern and southern part rises from the so-called Pontus (Black Sea) and is all joined to the Great Sea (theMediterranean) and ends at the islands of Cadiz .14

In these terms the historical mould of Europe is a loose, geo-cultural one. Thereis a danger that too strong a push to enlarge on the part of the EU, which has,none the less, inherent limits and a geopolitical non plus ultra, will not make theconcept of Europe synonymous with the Union, but rather break Europedamagingly in two. There will then be an ‘other’, alienated Europe.15

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The ‘other’ as a geopolitical problem

There can be little doubt that historically a good deal of international conflicthas revolved around the problems of scapegoating outsiders, polarizing relationswith ‘enemies’ and defining the ‘us’ and the ‘other’. The European Union hasbeen constitutionally ill-disposed towards polarization of this kind, let alone thearmed-camp syndrome that tends to be associated with it, but it cannot avoidcertain similar attributes through the very process of enlargement. The ghosts ofthe division between the Roman and Orthodox churches, as well as that betweenChristianity and Islam, have inevitably been awoken by the flux that hasfollowed the Cold War and the choices that have confronted the EU in the east.Fears have arisen that the EU will fix its external border as a way of differenti-ating its culture and protecting itself from what are perceived as inimical ways oflife. Self-fulfilling prophecies could arise here to increase the sense of threat onboth sides of the EU frontier, and the consequences of the ‘war againstterrorism’ after 11 September may compound the problem.

Rather more concrete are the fears that expansion can evoke in thoseexcluded, to the south as well as the east, on economic and security grounds. Inthe case of the south, the issue is only indirectly connected to enlargement. Thatthe EU is not planning to enlarge onto the southern littoral of theMediterranean means at least that there is no ambiguity over membership andstatus. Morocco’s expression of interest in accession was briskly rebuffed in 1987without internal disagreement. By the same token, the feelings of exclusion maybe felt more keenly, together with resentment at the images of the new threatsfrom Islam and Maghrebian emigration that are all too easily conjured up in the‘new’ security environment. King Hassan of Morocco openly opined in 1994that ‘[Europeans] look for allies more to the East, because there people are white… because it’s one big family. And they look across the Mediterranean and say“Ah yes, it’s true, there are those poor little people that we colonized.” ’16

The EU naturally attempts to soften the impact of having clarified itssouthern border, and to console the countries excluded with cooperation agree-ments and the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership. Given the traditional influenceof France, Spain and Italy in the region, the combination of firm exclusion withapparently open-ended enlargement towards the east and south-east runsdangerously close to being seen as neo-colonialism and certainly makes amockery of the term ‘partnership’. Even if a commitment was made atBarcelona in 1995 to transfer to the Mediterranean non-members approximately70 per cent of the sums being given to the Central and East European countriesuntil the end of the century, actions speak louder than words, and the implemen-tation of transfers has turned out to be slow and tortuous.17 The countries of theMaghreb are well aware that the priorities of the rich northern states lie inEastern Europe, while the EU’s very concept of a clear southern border ispremised on the notion of dangers that need to be kept at bay. Money has beenpromised on the intelligent if unsympathetic basis that young Arabs need to begiven incentives to stay at home rather than seek admission, legal or otherwise,to the EU. Given this barely concealed double-think, it is hardly surprising that

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there is in-built resistance to European attempts to exert influence on the cheap,as with Algeria’s rejection of first Italian, then EU attempts to mediate in its civilwar.18 Europeans will now have to tread even more carefully in the Middle East.

As for Russia, the sense of ‘us’ and ‘them’ is similarly never far from thesurface. It is true that so far Moscow has been remarkably laid-back about EUenlargement. NATO enlargement drew the Russians’ fire, and by comparisonthe EU’s role seemed almost benevolent. There is indeed something of a Russianinterest in seeing the markets of East and Central Europe develop, so long asboth its own development can keep pace, allowing Russia to take advantage, andthe accession of the CEECs does not lead to a damaging diversion of trade andinvestment. But these are big assumptions, both dubious, and it would be amistake to assume that Russian attitudes cannot change. If the contrast becomestoo marked between a large, inclusive and increasingly prosperous EU and astagnant Russia, then the scenario of revived nationalism leading to disputeswith the Baltic states and possibly other Western neighbours will not seem soremote. In these circumstances it will not take much for the EU and Russia tostart looking like security threats to each other, and the old realist game will haverecommenced. Technical border problems will also arise when the EU frontiermoves to that between Poland/Hungary and Belarus/Ukraine. The chances ofthis border being well policed seem very low. It is currently highly permeablebecause poor pay, training and equipment of the customs officials on both sidesinvite corruption. The highly organized mafias from Russia and other parts ofEastern Europe are not slow to take advantage, and the consequent flows ofcrime and migration will be immensely hard to stem. Criminals tend to be insou-ciant about state boundaries wherever they are set.

Security: wider definitions, bigger problems?

This prospect leads us from the question of the general perception of opposinginterests, even hostility, to that of concrete security problems. The EU cannothelp but create various ‘others’, by virtue of its existence and continued enlarge-ment. But the nature and degree of this process are hardly inevitable. One ofthe factors on which it is most contingent is the degree to which the EU creates agenuine security and defence identity for itself. The Union is already seen fromthe outside as a secure zone – after all, that is an important reason why manywish so fervently to join it. If, however, it begins to acquire the capacity to useforce, and in particular to project force externally, as wider borders bring moreagonizing dilemmas over humanitarian or political intervention, it wouldcertainly sharpen the antagonisms with those still excluded, like Russia.

The EU’s emergence as a superpower, with correspondingly alarmed reac-tions along balance-of-power lines from the other powers, remains something ofa doomsday scenario. Nonetheless, there remains an important security dimen-sion to enlargement. As the security agenda has widened, encouraged but notbegun by the end of the Cold War, so the range of problems that enlargementcan bring the EU grows in proportion. Nor is this simply a matter of perception

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or language. We have already referred to the likelihood of a new, long andporous eastern frontier, with associated problems of crime and illegal immigra-tion. The hard-won Schengen system will come under renewed pressure of botha technical and political nature once it has to be extended. It is revealing, forexample, that citizens from both Bulgaria and Romania still need visas to enterthe Union. The next round of accession will also bring into the Union the envi-ronmental problems still produced by old smokestack industries in EasternEurope, and create new responsibilities for protecting the peoples of Poland,Hungary and the Czech Republic from any future Chernobyls on their borders.The accession of Bulgaria and Romania would place the intractable problem ofthe ‘dying’ Black Sea on the EU’s plate. Moreover, on the front of energy andthe security of its supply, the eastern enlargement is likely to worsen the ratio ofcustomers to producers within the EU. The Visegrads may have coal and lignitebut they lack oil and gas. This does not matter in a period of stability and freetrade, but things might look very different in the event of foreign policy criseswith Russia or in the Middle East. Even a rise in the price of energy foreconomic or ecological reasons might cause significant problems for an enlargedand more variegated EU.

If Turkey and/or the ex-Yugoslav republics were also to join the Union, theseproblems would be magnified further – although those citizens of the EUalready playing host to substantial numbers of Albanian and Kurdish refugeesmight be forgiven for thinking that the external border of the EU makes littledifference either way in some of these matters. Indeed, one of the strongestarguments for rapid and extensive enlargement is that the Union will have fewerproblems when some of these countries are subject to the socializing effects ofEuropean integration than if they are left outside to fester. On the other hand,‘domesticating’ a large number of potentially intractable problems is hardlylikely to make for a settled external frontier and geopolitical stability. It merelyincreases the number of potential flashpoints, depending on where the line isdrawn – at Macedonia, Turkey, Israel, the Transcaucasus. It might be added thatwhereas enlargement could have neutral effects so far as the technical vulnera-bility to terrorism is concerned – the advantages of cooperation off-setting thegreater number of sources and/or potential targets – an enlarged Europe wouldcertainly present a high-profile and much more accessible target for anti-Westerngroups than does the virtually island-continent of North America. The events of11 September 2001 proved that no state is invulnerable, but Europe is particu-larly difficult to defend against determined terrorists.

Notwithstanding these very real aspects of the new security agenda, the mostimportant way in which enlargement raises security issues is in relation to theEU’s emerging defence dimension and to its impact upon NATO. And thesequestions in their turn are powerfully dependent on the reactions of the UnitedStates. Thus far the US has promoted EU enlargement with some enthusiasm.Indeed, arguably Washington has subtly and successfully incorporated theUnion’s policy into its own range of foreign policy instruments, a factor thatshould give pause to all but those who regard European and American interests

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as inherently co-terminous. If the United States sees EU enlargement as essen-tial, perhaps it is because it reinforces Atlanticism more than European influencestricto sensu? The US may be more willing than the reluctant Europeans to seeNATO expand beyond the three members admitted in 1999, but it acknowl-edges the problems and therefore wishes to see the Baltic and the Balkansstabilized through the use of the often satirized ‘civilian’ instruments of the EU,including that ‘power of attraction’ that is enlargement.19

So far, so good, and the Washington Summit of April 1999 even carefullyendorsed in advance the EU’s move towards taking over the functions of theWestern European Union, announced at the Cologne European Council thefollowing June. Phrases like ‘the dual enlargement strategy’ and ‘combined jointtask forces’ have not yet been exposed as misnomers, despite the sceptics. TheUnited States has, however, shown some concern about the apparent Britishvolte-face in backing the development of a real EU defence presence, throughthe ‘headline goal’ of a 60,000 strong Rapid Reaction Force in place by 2003. Ifthis does mean that the European Union is on the verge of serious movestowards taking more responsibility for its own ‘defence’, in the broadest sense,then the continued rationale of NATO in Europe must come into question, andwith it the role of the United States. In fact, if the future of NATO is the mostcrucial geopolitical question facing Europe, possibly the world, over the next fewdecades, then the enlargement of the EU will have a significant bearing on itand thus indirectly upon its own geopolitics. Things could go either way:enlargement could strengthen EU confidence and military resources, while alsoprecipitating a great leap forward in integration – in this case NATO would be atrisk, and the EU would become the major player in Eurasia; or enlargementcould so burden the EU financially and in terms of decision-making that theCFSP becomes even more circumscribed, with the Union turning into a vast,flabby territorial entity unable to rouse itself and even more dependent thanbefore on externally provided security.

There are two more particular aspects of the twin current developmentstowards a larger and militarized EU that might prove problematical. The first isthat the bigger the EU, the weaker the distinction between it and the OSCE.Admittedly the latter contains Canada and the United States as well as Russia,which means that the major outside powers with an interest in European securitycan participate in a major forum for discussion on the continent’s internationalrelations. But an EU that were to add ten states or so to its current size, most ofthem with no recent tradition of stable and independent foreign policy-making,might find itself in ever greater difficulties when confronting the need for jointactions, and resembling ever more closely the loose framework organization (ortalking shop) that is the OSCE.

The second current dilemma in the context of security and enlargement isthe fate of the ‘WEU family’ now that WEU is being absorbed into the EU. Bythis is meant the eighteen states that are not full members of the WEU but thatare currently closely attached to it. Of these the four ‘neutrals’ already inside theEU need not detain us, except to note that if in practice they turn out not to

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have renounced fully their distinctive foreign policy traditions they will dilute theCFSP even more obviously than at present, and blur the distinction betweeninsiders and outsiders. Likewise two of the three Associate Members of WEU,that is, Iceland and Norway, will continue their current cooperation with the EUand NATO almost whatever happens, unless enlargement transforms the formerinto something unrecognizable. The problems really arise with the thirdAssociate Member, Turkey, and with all the Associate Partners. These states havebecome used to being closely involved in WEU discussions, and indeed by exten-sion with CFSP. If the EU is really to start down the road to militarization, albeitin close association with NATO, then this will be manageable for the states onthe verge of entering the Union, and accepting its acquis politique, namely theCzech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Estonia and Slovenia – the first three are,after all, now in NATO; but it is much more problematical to allow Turkey in onCFSP discussions given Greek concerns. This has already caused a minor crisisin NATO and threatens to merge with a much bigger one over Cyprus. It willalso be difficult to give the other Baltic and Balkan states privileged access giventhe historical preference for restricting the CFSP to members of the EU.Anything short of rapid and wholesale enlargement will therefore leave a signifi-cant group of states rather more cast loose from European security cooperationthan they have been in the recent past.

Special sensitivities

The analysis above has already referred frequently to the three main potentialsources of hostile reaction to EU enlargement on geopolitical grounds, namelyRussia, the Maghreb and Turkey. But it is worth attempting to be more specificabout the extent to which problems are likely to arise on all three fronts, in boththe short and the long terms.

Russia

For Russia the enlargement of NATO and of the EU puts an end for the foresee-able future to the role in East and Central Europe that it has enjoyed for the last250 years. In consequence the Poles may feel safe at last from further partitions.In its relatively enfeebled condition, modern Russia has few means ofobstructing EU enlargement, but that does not mean that the process will notcause problems for both sides. There can be little doubt that Moscow’s alreadyimportant relations with Belarus and the Ukraine will become ever more criticalas Russia seeks to attenuate a perceived isolation, leading either to heightenedtension (the Polish–Ukrainian relationship has already developed at Moscow’sexpense) or to an embattled sense of bloc unity. As for the Baltic states, it wouldnot be surprising were Russia to grow more uneasy about their possible EUentry, and conflicts could easily widen over the questions of the Russian minori-ties, and of Kaliningrad. The EU will need to show a high degree of sensitivity

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and skill in its relations with Russia over enlargement if it is not to add a majornew difficulty to its external relations.

This also particularly relates to the Balkans, where Russian policy has all tooevidently diverged from that of the Western Europeans in recent years. It wassomething of a triumph for the new multilateralism that Russia was kept onboard to the extent that it was during the end-game over Bosnia, but all theincipient tensions emerged over Kosovo in 1998–9.20 Although not now physi-cally contiguous with the states of South-Eastern Europe, Russia can still wieldconsiderable influence in the region, as some of its decision-makers were keen todemonstrate at Pristina airport at the end of the Kosovo war.21 Through thetaking of new responsibilities in this, the bear-pit of contemporary Europe, thenew Stability Pact for South-Eastern Europe, and hints of rapid accession forhelpful states, the EU has created a moving border zone for itself in Balkans, andone that is both atomized and unstable.

It is impossible to say whether the states of the Balkans will or should be ableto enter the EU inside the next two decades, and, if so, in what order. What iscertain is that the interplay between the seven of them, pivoting around thequestion of enlargement, will be of critical importance to both Russia and theEU, and it will present major obstacles to their mutual relations. In this processbilateral problems, like those between Hungary and Romania, Macedonia andKosovo, Albania and Yugoslavia, will no doubt continue to figure prominently.The EU will not be a bystander; indeed its policies and instruments already havean important impact on outcomes. But given that there is going to be no whole-sale movement of the EU’s border to the west coast of the Black Sea, but rather,at best, a faltering and contested series of particular changes, the geopoliticalconsequences will be particularly unclear. The EU is going to need the OSCE,the Stability Pact, the Partnership for Peace, and more, if it is to move its borderthrough the Balkans in a controlled and peaceful manner.

Turkey

Despite the importance of the Balkans, Turkey is potentially the most seriousgeopolitical issue raised by enlargement. It is the country that holds the mostcritical strategic position of all the candidates for accession, poised as it isbetween Europe and the world’s most turbulent region, the Middle East. As along-time (and valued) member of NATO on Russia’s southern flank, its ‘loss’ tothe West would cause the most serious policy repercussions even today. And yetTurkey has aspired longer than any other candidate (since 1964) to enter theEC/EU, and its chances are still remote. The states of Western Europe wantgood relations with Ankara, and they want to encourage the forces of democracyand modernization in the country. Yet they fear the prospect of Turkey’s acces-sion for a whole range of reasons, which include foreign policy despite the factthat factors such as size, human rights and income levels are usually given farmore prominence.

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With Turkey the EU is really damned if it does and damned if it doesn’t. If abenevolent view were to be taken of the economic and demographic problemsTurkey presents, and the prospect of its membership were to become real, thenthe EU would run straight into a set of foreign policy issues of even greatermagnitude. Does it wish to be directly implicated – as opposed to involving itselfby choice, as is the present case – in the politics of the southern Caucasus, theLevant and Mesopotamia? Turkish entry would give the EU long, unmanageablefrontiers with three of the world’s most problematic states in Iran, Iraq and Syria(to say nothing of Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan), to add to those furthernorth. If, on the other hand, it is made clear to Turkey that accession will not bepossible in the foreseeable future, then bitter disappointment and alienation willprobably follow. Indeed, Ankara has drawn its own conclusions in recent yearsand has already made various moves in directions other than the EU – in thefirst place towards Transcaucasia, and subsequently into a closer relationshipwith Israel. The Turks themselves take the question of EU membership veryseriously and are perfectly capable of seeing through the various EU prevarica-tions. If the most likely outcome in the medium term is that Turkey will remainoutside an EU that continues to enlarge in Eastern Europe, while being subjectto an intermittent charm offensive (as with the the revival at the HelsinkiCouncil in December 1999 of the idea of Turkey’s ‘eligibility’ for membership),its reactions cannot be taken for granted.

The problem would be more manageable if one could assume a stable, strate-gically calculating government in Ankara. Unfortunately the issue of EUmembership is intimately tied to that of the very identity of Turkey – secularmodernity versus fundamentalist self-assertion – and by extension to internalpolitical struggles of some ferocity. The EU is willy nilly a player in these strug-gles. It is by no means inconceivable that the exclusion of Turkey from the EU,and anger over the preferences being shown to other ‘Eastern’ states, couldinflict severe damage on the standing of the pro-Western domestic parties, andby extension on Turkey–EU relations.

Petrol has been thrown on the fire in this respect by the way that the EU hasplayed the Cyprus card, thereby apparently acceding to Greek wishes to putpressure on Turkey. In so far as the move has been clearly thought through bythe European Council (which is to be doubted), the decision to open negotia-tions with Cyprus six months after the end of the IGC was a calculated risk inorder to break the deadlock over the partition of the island. And to some extentthere have been gratifying moves towards better Greek–Turkish relations. But itis a very high-risk gamble indeed. Turkey holds all the cards over northernCyprus itself, and has little incentive to change the status quo, apart from – asthe EU reasons – its desire not to see Greek Cyprus join the EU on its own.The leverage of the EU is in fact much more limited than it appears. If Ankaracalls the bluff, and threatens a serious intra-mural crisis in the Western alliance,the EU will find it difficult to admit Greek Cyprus without a prior settlement,despite the economic grounds for so doing. It will then have stirred up allparties to the dispute for little gain; indeed, another war over Cyprus or in the

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Aegean cannot be ruled out, and the prospect of enlargement could conceiv-ably be the trigger.

The question of island states is of little geopolitical importance in itself(although micro-members pose major problems for the European institutions);Crete, Sicily and Sardinia are simply not international problems. Malta in or outof the EU is a distinction without a difference. Difficulties only arise when thereare disputed jurisdictions, whether in the Aegean, or over the rightful home ofNorthern Ireland. In this context, Cyprus represents a major historical stalemate,and the general process of enlargement has added a dangerously unpredictableelement to the inflammable cocktail. Keith Kyle saw early that ‘by decision ofthe EU the alarm clock is ticking over the Cyprus Problem’, and the hands arenow approaching midnight.22

The Maghreb

Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia represent the same danger to the EU as Turkeydoes, namely the consequences of neglect, but not to the same degree or withthe same strategic importance. That this is so at least at the level of perceptionsis indicated by the relative indifference shown by both policy-makers and publicsto the current slaughter in Algeria, where deaths since 1991 amount to almosthalf the total killed in all the Balkan conflicts over the same period.23 A war likethat in Algeria – the second in forty years – is important for its spillover ofterrorism into France, and for the extra impetus it gives to migration into theSouthern European states and thereby the whole European Union. The same istrue of structural problems like poverty, population growth and political insta-bility. The EU states see that they have to do what they can to encourage thepeoples of North Africa to be contented in their own countries if they are todiscourage the pressure of illegal immigration and the export of indigenousconflicts with them.

Otherwise, this important part of Braudel’s ‘Mediterranean world’, a singlegeopolitical space going back to the Greeks and the Phoenicians, is seen ascontainable. Spain, Italy and France are particularly anxious to promote‘Mediterranean security’ through ideas such as the Conference on Security andCooperation in the Mediterranean (abortive) and the Barcelona Process (stillalive). This is conflict prevention rather than conflict management, and it isarguably having a modest success. The fears of the early 1990s about an‘Islamic’ threat sweeping up from the South have quietly subsided, and thereseems no imminent prospect of a rash of small Irans springing up along theNorth African coast. Islam’s presence through the headscarves of French school-girls is a more concrete political issue than the potential hostility offundamentalist regimes in the Maghreb – whether because of the electoral inter-vention of the Algerian generals or despite it. Even the riddle wrapped in amystery that is Qaddafi’s Libya has begun to come in from the cold.

This is not to say that the current regimes in the region are inviolable, or thatthe EU’s evident preoccupation with Eastern Europe might not have some

The geopolitical implications of enlargement 111

damaging effects on potentially friendly governments struggling to explain totheir ever more youthful populations why the CAP and the Single Market onlydamage their livelihoods incidentally, and not by design. The problems that theEU faces in North Africa may seem at present largely historical and moral, butfundamentally they arise from one of the more world’s more clear-cut geopolit-ical fault-lines – between a homogeneous rich northern littoral and the poor butaspirant southern littoral, part of the world’s poorest continent and representingvery different cultural and political traditions. Now, more than ever, in the post-Twin Towers world, this must be a source of concern. What is more, given thatenlargement is not available in this zone as a policy option, as a way ofmanaging difference, the contrast must be faced directly. This means attempts atcreating inclusive but ultimately limited processes like Barcelona, but also,inevitably, seeing North Africa as a question of foreign policy. Whatever the justiceof the matter, the pressures from that region cannot but be regarded as of adifferent order from those deriving from states whose right to become part of theEU community has already been conceded.

The shape of future Europe?

In all the expert discussions of the details of enlargement, it is easy to forget thebig picture: what kind of Europe will we end up with? What will it look like tooutsiders, to geopoliticians in Beijing and Washington, to historians in the future,indeed to ourselves? Will it seem overbearing and expansionist, or unwieldy andoverstretched? An octopus or a giraffe? Is it moving towards territorial cohesionand defensibility, or are these very notions unnecessary in a post-modern age,where the kind of border problems represented by Danzig, Suez and EastPakistan are now only distant memories?

Even in this age of the new geopolitics, however, realism is far from dead, andthe EU has to take it into account. Some observers, like John Mearsheimer,believe that Bosnia is unsustainable and should have been partitioned.24 Eventhose who stop short of such bluntness accept that the Dayton settlement isinherently fragile, just as it will prove extremely difficult to reconstitute theCyprus of the 1960 agreement. The EU itself has so far managed to avoid thedilemmas posed by realism, in terms both of its own foreign policy and of theperceptions of others. Given that it is a multi-level foreign policy system thatcurrently eschews military action, it wishes neither to constitute a ‘power’ in theworld nor to be seen as such.

The EU’s role in the world is, however, in constant evolution, and we maynow be verging on a situation where the member states will make a commitmentto a common defence capability and to more independence from NATO.25 Ifthis is the case, then enlargement will have an even greater geopolitical reso-nance than has been suggested thus far. The nature of that impact will dependon two things in particular. The first is the pace of enlargement. It is by no meansclear how quickly it might accelerate after the next round of accessions, whichmight be completed by 2005. On geopolitical grounds there are strong argu-

112 Christopher Hill

ments for going slowly so as to give outsiders time to adjust to the new size andshape of the EU, both those sore at being excluded and those who can neverhope to be members. On the other hand, the dragging of feet on promises oncemade creates bitterness and uncertainty, and what seems rapid to existingmembers can seem funereal to those waiting in the ante-room.

The second key variable in the interplay between enlargement and geopoliticsis size. How big will the EU eventually be? Will it ever be possible to say that itsboundary is final? What are the desirable stages of enlargement, and how farshould each be regarded as more a stepping-stone to an eventual imagined entitythan a way of expressing Europe’s international presence in its own right? Wehave already considered, with the help of the maps in figure 6.1, the possibilitiesof the EU expanding further but becoming becalmed at a number of differentpoints – twenty, twenty-five, twenty-seven, or almost anything in-between,depending on individual states’ situations. Moreover, size is likely to be related toeffectiveness, in terms of both the degrees of supranationality engendered to copewith enlargement, and the international resources generated through economiesof scale. The variables of pace, size and effectiveness combined make for manypossible scenarios for the future of the EU in the world system. Of these, fourmay be picked out as the most interesting:

• A large and loose EU, relatively quickly achieved. The pace of this transformationwould complicate the international system considerably, but without givingthe EU much extra ability to resolve problems or to pursue its interests.Indeed, because the Thatcherite model of intergovernmentalism wouldessentially have prevailed, the external capabilities of the Union might wellturn out to have been diminished (not, ironically, an end for which anyBritish government would wish).

• A large, tighter EU, achieved within decades is perhaps the least likely outcome.This would, in effect, create a new superpower without civil war, andpresumably without international war in the short term. Whether the veryexistence of another superpower to rival the United States (and possiblyothers by then) would add to the long-term stability of the internationalsystem, as realists like Kenneth Waltz, and believers in the EU’s inherentlypeaceful intent, might both argue, must be open to argument. It wouldconstitute the largest impact it is possible to imagine the EU having on thewider international system.

• An EU of only limited enlargement and progressive supranationalism would also be animportant actor in international politics. It would pose serious questions forat least the United States and Russia, not least because the EU wouldinevitably have to assume full responsibility for its own defence. The issuesof identity and purpose would also be central to the debates that wouldpresumably proceed pari passu on the nature of both the EU polity and itsworld role.

• An EU of both limited enlargement and stalled integration would either stay as itcurrently is, that is, with a CFSP interdependent with NATO and other

The geopolitical implications of enlargement 113

organizations, and no autonomous military capacity (which many wouldregard as the most responsible outcome from the international point ofview), and/or it would become preoccupied with internal conflicts over thereasons for the lack of change.

The EU wishes, in foreign policy as in trade policy, to be both a strong negoti-ating presence and a community open to the world and to internationalcooperation. This combination, perhaps also a contradiction, has led it both toundertake responsibilities for its liberated European cousins and to hesitate overthe implementation of enlargement. From the viewpoint of strategic action itmay seem too late now to do more than slow down the process and to dampdown unreasonably raised expectations, but in practice there are still many hardchoices to be made over enlargement, in relation to the countries chosen, to thepace of their admission and to the ultimate borders of the EU. In this the geopo-litical dimension, that is, the effects on outsiders and on the structure of theworld system, has too often been neglected or obscured, with the result that wenow find ourselves in a catch-22, whereby both large-scale enlargement and anydecision to slow it down have the potential to destabilize the EU’s rimland.

Ultimately the citizens of the European Union have to decide whether theyneed collectively to be a major actor in world politics like the United States, withall the advantages and disadvantages that implies, or whether they are willing tosettle for an EU near the centre of a network of international processes butwithout the ability to have a decisive impact on matters affecting security and thepattern of international order. It is not mere chance that this potentially explo-sive issue has barely surfaced thus far. The progress of enlargement, however,will bring it inexorably into the open.

Notes

I am grateful to Jan Zielonka and William Wallace for comments on this chapter, andto Jane Pugh of the London School of Economics’ Cartographic and Design Unit forhelp with the maps.

1 For a discussion of the differences between borders, boundaries and frontiers, seeWilliam Wallace (chapter 5) and Charles Maier (chapter 2) in this volume. The term‘borders’ is used as the reference point here as it refers to the zone encompassing theexact boundary between states, and thus has a technical as well as a legal meaning.

2 Examples of these different kinds of challenges are the books by Jan Aart Scholte,International Relations of Social Change (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1993),David Held, Democracy and the Global Order: From the Modern State to CosmopolitanGovernance (Cambridge: Polity, 1995), and Alexander Wendt, Social Theory ofInternational Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) – although Wendtto some extent comes full circle by showing how some boundaries, both conceptualand political, are both inevitable and desirable (e.g. pp. 193–245 and pp. 211–14).

3 ‘Incidentally’, because the arrival at a new external border will be more a conse-quence than an intention of the enlargement process, which has arguably been drivenon by a series of myopic piecemeal decisions, and been motivated more by generalconcerns about stability than by any clear geopolitical strategy.

114 Christopher Hill

4 The refrain ‘where are we going?’ was common among French soldiers in the PhoneyWar, impatient at being thrown this way and that by the tide of war, and withoutleadership from their generals. It can and should be asked by all those who makegreat decisions without necessarily thinking through (or owning up to) their implica-tions. See Christopher Hill, ‘ “Where Are We Going?”: International Relations andthe Voice from Below’, Review of International Studies, 25 (1999), pp. 107–22.

5 Other implications are the impact of new members on decision-making, and on theresources available for external relations, and the changing image of the EU. Butalmost everything comes down in the end to the question of where the borders settledown, and who is included/excluded.

6 See also Robert Cooper, The Post-Modern State and the World Order (London: DemosPaper no. 19, 1996). Cooper sees the EU as a post-modern polity but is not so idealistabout the idea of openness to the world. For a series of commentaries on his ideas,including the thoughts of the present author, see Guerra e pace nel nuovo ordine inter-nazionale (Rome: Arel Informazioni, 3/98).

7 The reassertion of interest in the Mediterranean, with a ‘societal security’ perspec-tive, dates from the Barcelona Process agreed in November 1995. The CommonStrategy on Russia was launched at the Cologne summit in June 1999. See presidencyConclusions (3–4 June 1999), Annex II.

8 In the Cologne summit, ibid., Annex III.9 See Susan Senior Nello and Karen E. Smith, The European Union and Central and Eastern

Europe: The Implications of Enlargement in Stages (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998).10 Turkey and Cyprus are bracketed together, even though the latter is currently being

considered for entry in the next round of enlargement, because their fates are inextri-cably intertwined and it seems improbable that decisions on the entry of either canbe insulated from matters of geopolitics.

11 Agenda 2000 was the document produced by the Commission in 1997 to set out theEU’s strategy, in particular towards enlargement, for the medium term. See Bulletin ofthe European Union, Supplement 5/97.

12 Thomas Christiansen, Fabio Petito and Ben Tonra, ‘Fuzzy Politics Around FuzzyBorders: the European Union’s Near Abroad’, Cooperation and Conflict, 35: 4 (December2000), pp. 389–416.

13 Pace Samuel Huntington, who argued in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking ofWorld Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), pp. 158–63, that the historicaldivide between the churches of Rome and Byzantium reverberates in the conflicts. Inhis view:

The civilizational paradigm [thus] provides a clear-cut and compelling answer tothe question confronting West Europeans: Where does Europe end? Europeends where Western Christianity ends and Islam and Orthodoxy begin. This isthe answer which West Europeans want to hear … .

Helmut Kohl’s foreign policy adviser, Wolfgang Schäuble, made similar points invarious public speeches.

14 Cited by Norman Davies in Europe: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996),p. 8.

15 Not surprisingly, modernizing Russians, like their Turkish equivalents, wish theircountry to have the possibility of joining the EU, and the division of Europe argu-ment is one of the strongest at their disposal. See the article by the chairman of a keyRussian think-tank, Sergei Karaganov: ‘Building Bridges with Brussels’, FinancialTimes (18 May 2001).

16 In an interview with the Financial Times (28 October 1994), cited in Jan Zielonka,Explaining Euro-Paralysis: Why Europe is Unable to Act in International Politics (London:Macmillan, 1998), p. 77.

The geopolitical implications of enlargement 115

17 See Esther Barbé and Ferran Izquierdo, ‘Present and Future of Joint Actions for theMediterranean Region’, in Martin Holland, ed., Common Foreign and Security Policy: TheRecord and Reforms (London: Pinter, 1997); also Nicola Minasi, I Rapporti tra L’UnioneEuropea ed il Maghreb dalla politica Mediterranea al Partenariato (Rome: LUISS WorkingPaper no. 39/1997).

18 In the tragic events in Algeria over the last decade the EU has managed to alienateboth sides, first by failing to condemn the overturning of a democratic election result,and then by gradually distancing itself from the government’s determination tomatch the rebels’ capacity for terror and atrocity. For the difficulties of understandingthe war in Algeria, let alone influencing it from the outside, see the articles by ClaireSpencer (‘Who Killed the Monks?’) and Marc Marginedas (‘Passive Response SendsWrong Signal’) in The World Today, 54:8–9 (August/September 1998), pp. 203–6.

19 The phrase is Gabriel Munera’s in his Preventing Armed Conflict in Europe: Lessons fromRecent Experience, Chaillot Papers 15/16, Western European Union Institute forSecurity Studies (Paris, June 1994).

20 The five (now six)-member Contact Group was invented in 1994 largely so as to beable to prevent Russia’s alienation over the Balkans, and it implicitly acknowledgedthat neither NATO nor the CFSP was a sufficient instrument for diplomacy in theregion. David Owen, Balkan Odyssey (London: Indigo, 1996), pp. 392–3.

21 On the importance of Russia over Kosovo, see Paul Rogers, ‘Lessons to Learn’, TheWorld Today, 55:8/9 (August/September 1999), pp. 4–6.

22 Keith Kyle, ‘Squall Hits “Year of Cyprus” ’, The World Today, 53:2 (February 1997), p.46.

23 Probably more than 100,000 people have been killed in Algeria, an astonishing figuregiven that full-scale civil war has not broken out. In the Balkans, up to 230,000 peopledied in the 1990s, the majority in Bosnia. I am grateful to Malcolm Madden of theRoyal Institute of International Affairs library for help with these figures.

24 John Mearsheimer, in the New York Times (7 October 1997).25 There remain, however, significant obstacles to this saut qualitatif, not least the great

difficulty most European governments will have in increasing their defence budgets.For a positive view, see François Heisbourg, European Defence: Making it Work, ChaillotPaper no. 42 (Paris: Western European Union Institute for Security Studies, 2000).

116 Christopher Hill

A century ago about half the population of the area under consideration wasidentified with one ethnic minority or another; sixty years ago the proportionwas still about one-quarter.1 Today, although quantitative approximations areextremely problematic, it might be estimated that no more than one-tenth of thepopulation in East Central Europe belongs to an ethnic minority.2 Nevertheless,the problems associated with minorities have not declined proportionately.Unlike immediately neighbouring regions, such as Moldova and the rest of ex-Yugoslavia, minority problems here have not exploded into armed conflict andthey are not likely to do so. However, they continue to weigh considerably on theinternal evolution of the area and on its future relations with the EU.

It might well be argued that the minority issue is a symptom and that theunderlying problem is the dominant conception of the state in East CentralEurope. In this sense, one could say that it is not minorities but majorities thatare the problem. Even more than elsewhere the state here is perceived as theexclusive state of the titular majority. From this perspective, minorities areviewed as peripheral and even illegitimate. Their presence constitutes a reminderthat the state does not correspond to its image of itself and their developmentraises fears that the nature of the state will be put into question. Moreover, onemight add that it is the weakness of the state rather than the strength of theminorities that lies at the root of the problem.

The exclusivist conception of the state, with its consequences for the minorityissue, is a common feature of all the countries under examination here, regard-less of the very significant distinctions in the weight and situation of minoritiesamong them. Four countries (Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Hungary)have minority populations not exceeding 10 per cent of the total population.With the exception of Roma, these minorities are not salient. In four other coun-tries (Slovakia, Bulgaria, Romania and Lithuania) minorities comprise up to 25per cent of the population. Here, certain minority groups constitute compactand distinct societies and they are an important factor in national politics.Finally, in two countries (Latvia and Estonia), minorities – in fact, a singleRussian-speaking or Slavic minority – exceed 30 per cent of the population.

The similarity of attitudes towards minorities as well as the dynamics ofminority life in East Central Europe may explain the similarity of minority

7 Ethnic minorities and long-term implications of EU enlargement

André Liebich

grievances throughout the area. It is therefore tempting to assume that the situa-tion of minority groups is similar in the various countries and that the conditionof the various minorities within each country is also comparable. Such assump-tions would not be justified. There is a considerable gap between theminority-friendly stance eagerly pioneered by Hungary; the reserved and unhur-ried approach of Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovenia; the occasionallytempered hostility of Romania and Lithuania; the underlying animosity ofBulgaria and Slovakia; and the generally confrontational positions of Latvia andEstonia. There is an even greater discrepancy between the situation of minoritiesconnected to Western home countries, such as Germans and Jews, and minori-ties with only regional patrons, such as Hungarians, Poles, Turks and Russians,or no patrons at all, such as Ruthenes, Pomaks or Tartars and Lippovans. Aboveall, there is a profound gulf between the condition, both objective and subjective,of all other East Central European minority groups and the Roma, who happento be by far the most numerous and the most problematic minority.

These numerous divergences imply that it is not practical to seek a unifiedstrategy of coping with the minority issue, just as it is unrealistic to expect thepeaceful assimilation of minorities along imagined Western patterns. In thefollowing pages we shall first examine the historical foundations of East CentralEurope’s specificity with regard to minorities. We shall then look at the main-springs of current minority demands in the context of prevailing legal and policyregimes. Finally, we shall consider the regional and international implications ofminority issues in the foreseeable future.3

Historical background

‘Discontinuity’ and ‘empire’ are two terms that provide the key to the historicalsituation of East Central Europe’s minorities and, indeed, to the history of theregion as a whole. It is these terms too that define the most significant contrastbetween East and West European development.4

West European political and linguistic boundary changes over the centurieshave been moderate compared to those in East Central Europe. They have,nevertheless, been the source of considerable turmoil, and they continue toimpinge upon daily life and politics in Western Europe.5 One can thereforeunderstand the profound impact of repeated and acute boundary modificationsin East Central Europe, continuing virtually up to the present day and farexceeding anything Western Europe has experienced in the last millennium.Comparing maps from one period to another one finds entire countries that aredisplaced. For example, tenth-century Bulgaria appears where Serbia is later tobe found, and thirteenth-century Serbia is located in present-day Bosnia;Poland’s boundaries today resemble those it possessed at the beginning of itsstate existence but they are quite different from those it displayed in the inter-vening thousand years.

Such discontinuities can be attributed in part to the absence of naturalboundaries in the area and to the unstable demarcation among languages and

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dialects, notably Slavic ones. For the most part, however, these discontinuities arehistorically determined. Whereas both Western and East Central Europe wereformed through the invasion or migration of peoples from the East, these move-ments continued to occur in East Central Europe long after they had ceased inthe West. The Magyar presence is the most persistent confirmation of thisreality.6 Whereas in the Middle Ages East Central Europe appeared to beembarking upon a process of state-building that resembled and even anticipatedthat in the West, none of these medieval states survived into the modern period.A sovereign Poland, Bohemia, Hungary and Bulgaria arose almost as early as thepost-Carolingian French state and they preceded British, Spanish and Swedishstatehood. It must be added, however, that these East Central European statesdisappeared and only reappeared at a time when the process of state formationin the West had been almost completed.

What was happening to East Central Europe at the time that Western Europewas developing the modern territorial state, between the sixteenth and the nine-teenth century? Without a single exception the peoples of the area were fallingunder the sway of imperial rule of one sort or another. Once again, the naturalconfiguration of the area favoured such an outcome. ‘The Lands Between’, asthey have been gracefully designated, happen to lie between large and powerfulimperial units.7 From the West, the Holy Roman Empire of the GermanicNation, the Habsburg Empire, Prussia and Germany have all exercised cultural,military and political hegemony over large parts of East Central Europe at onetime or another. From the East, Moscovy, the Russian Empire and the SovietUnion have dominated parts of the area by virtue of their superior force.Moreover, for several centuries, a Southern neighbour, the Ottoman Empire,controlled the Balkans politically and defined them socially. It is salutary to recallthat one of the countries considered here, Bulgaria, was still formally underOttoman suzerainty until 1908.

The implications of these historical processes are significant, for both majori-ties and minorities in East Central Europe. Majorities or the titular nationscorresponding to the states of the area are painfully aware that their states aresmall, weak and fragile, and that, historically speaking, their very existence is anexception rather than a rule. East Central European intellectuals, such as MilanKundera and István Bibó, have remarked on the existential distress of thesesmall nations, where the question of survival – an absurd question for the oldcontinuous states of Western Europe – is posed ever anew.8 Whereas the Englishsing ‘there will always be an England’, the Poles comfort themselves with thelyrics ‘Poland is not yet lost while we are alive’.

Minorities in East Central Europe are living testimony to the meanders of thepast, and perhaps also to the uncertainties of the future. Like archaeologicallayers, they recount a history: that of the Turks in Bulgaria; the Hungarians inRomania and in Slovakia; the Germans in Poland, the Czech Republic and else-where; the Poles in Lithuania; and the Russians in Latvia and Estonia. Moreover,the history they recount is one of past domination. It is the negation of piouslycultivated narratives of continuity and of identity between a land, a state and a

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majority people. Minorities are a disturbing reminder that, in political terms,Slovakia was not always Slovak, the Czech Republic was not always Czech,Bulgaria was not always Bulgarian, and so on. At the very least, they recall thateven recently parts of today’s Poland were not Polish as parts of Romania werenot Romanian. Inasmuch as the legitimacy of state units in East Central Europeis founded, to an even greater extent than in Western Europe, upon myths ofnational continuity, nay, of perennity, minorities are an unwelcome presence.

Current situation

Why have minority issues attained such prominence in the immediate aftermathof the fall of communism? Scholars fret over whether the minority issue is nowone of old wine in new bottles or of new wine in old bottles.9 Meanwhile, expla-nations and interrogations concerning the ‘return of minorities’ continue toabound, usually connected to speculation about post-communist nationalism ingeneral. The early ‘icebox’ theory, according to which the demise of commu-nism ‘unfroze’ hoary national sentiments, turned out to be more successful as animage than as an argument. It was supplanted by the ‘vacuum’ or ‘defaultoption’ theory, which stated that ethnic identity and nationalism stepped into theideological void left by the disappearance of Marxism-Leninism and by theweakness of alternative value systems. Neither explanation has led to much inthe way of a coherent Western policy, other than distaste for manifestations ofnationalism and a vague concern for majority nationalism’s minority victims.10

More satisfying than other explanations has been the ‘ethnic allocation’model, which argues that ethnicity has become one, sometimes the principal,criterion for the distribution of scarce resources in the post-communist coun-tries. The model usually, but not necessarily, points to ‘ethnic entrepreneurs’ askey agents in the process. This approach has the merit of highlighting animportant but neglected fact: minority tensions, such as those we have beenexperiencing in the last years, come to the fore when a preceding equilibrium,however unsatisfactory, has been broken. As the economic, political and socialspheres change radically, groups, like individuals, are obliged to repositionthemselves. They carve out their place in the new order, seek out and defendthe most satisfactory niches, and realign themselves with respect to rivals. Thisis an inherently conflictual process fought for high stakes. Minorities participatein it as do other groups.11 Let us note, in passing, that no new equilibrium hasyet been established in respect to the minority issue anywhere in the post-communist world.

To understand this process fully, it should be noted that the minority questionwas not entirely absent during the communist period, as is sometimes alleged. Tobe sure, state and party control of the media meant that minorities were onlygranted as much attention as the authorities allowed, and minority conflicts, realor potential, were ignored. The range of communist options for dealing withminorities, however, was fundamentally the same as that of their post-communistsuccessors. The communists could ignore the existence of minorities, they could

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coopt and channel minority sentiment in a non-threatening direction, or theycould recognize and formalize the status of minorities by granting themautonomy of one sort or another. Thus, Poland consistently refused to acknowl-edge any sort of German presence. Bulgaria sought to assimilate its Turks andPomaks and, eventually, to expel those who could not be assimilated. Slovaks inHungary, Poles in Lithuania and small minority groups in other communiststates were allowed to set up carefully controlled cultural associations. AsRomania emancipated itself from Soviet tutelage, it curbed the Hungarianautonomy that it had previously granted. On the other hand, Slovenia andSlovakia constituted distinct, ethnically defined units within a federal state, as didthe three Baltic republics in the more restrictive conditions of the USSR.

What has changed today is that it is no longer possible for states to ignore theexistence of minority groups that insist on being heard. In Poland, not only thepreviously unacknowledged Germans and the barely recognized Ukrainians andBelarussians but also the formerly overlooked Kashubes have staked out theirplace on the ethnic landscape.12 The Czech Republic has finally conceded that itstill contains minorities and it has taken the first steps towards giving institutionalrecognition to this fact.13 Hungary has defined a system of minority institutionswhich is both organizationally elaborate and politically marginal.14 In thesecountries minorities are more visible than they were previously. At least poten-tially they have powerful instruments at their disposition, such as free media, anunrestricted right of association and some sympathy abroad, though notmatched by sympathy at home.

In those countries where minorities are more numerous and more prominent,they are more assertive today than they were in the past, they are better orga-nized and they carry definite political weight. From their point of view, however,their actual achievements are disappointing. Thus, the Hungarians of Romaniaand Slovakia, like the Turks of Bulgaria, feel that they have little to show fortheir efforts of the last years, and that whatever specific gains they have madehave not been accompanied by general societal acceptance. In some respects, thesituation of minorities may even have encountered a setback. Because of the fateof the three federal communist states (Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, the USSR),federalism itself or even more mild versions of territorial autonomy havebecome taboo since they are considered stepping-stones towards separatism anddisintegration. Because of the general reassertion of nationalist sentiment, anti-minority political formations find a sympathetic hearing and an electoralfollowing.

The question of economic well-being, factual or perceived, dominates theagenda of post-communism. The experience of minorities in this respect istherefore a key component of their overall situation. Living standards fell radi-cally for all social groups (as opposed to some individuals) with the introductionof the market economy and, for the most part, standards have been rising onlyslowly and hesitantly.15 Economic insecurity remains far higher than it was in thecommunist period. In the light of this situation, the question is not whetherminorities have gained economically but whether they have lost more or less

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than others. Once again, no general answer is possible. A number of minoritieshave been particularly hard hit by the ‘transition’. This has been the case forthose prominently represented in obsolescent sectors of the economy: Turkishagricultural workers in Bulgaria; Russians in heavy industry in the Baltic coun-tries; Hungarians in the primary and secondary sectors in Slovakia. Minoritiesinhabiting advanced areas, such as the Germans in Polish Silesia or theHungarians in parts of Transylvania, have struggled to keep their edge withrespect to the national economy, with varied results.

In the final analysis, however, the economic question as it affects the minorityissue is one of perception. If minorities are seen as profiting from the transitionmore than the majority population (or, at least, suffering less), resentment againstthem ensues. This is particularly relevant for the case of the Roma. By allaccounts they are the most miserable social and ethnic group in the area andtheir overall situation has deteriorated since the social safety-net of communismdisappeared. Yet the Roma minority has become the focus of social frustration,for various reasons. Roma are conspicuously different in terms of consumptionpatterns and life style and they are easily identifiable. Long involved in theshadow economy, they are now also prominently represented in both petty andorganized criminal activities. A well-defined ethnic group that is perceived to bepreying upon the rest of society in order to avoid the rigours of transition is averitable lightning rod for social resentment.16

Tendencies

The premise underlying discussion of EU enlargement in East Central Europe isthat, sooner or later, the outcome of the economic transition will be some sort ofstable and, it is hoped, prosperous economic order. In these future circumstancesit is likely that another dimension of the minority issue, namely that of identitypolitics, will come to the fore. Already today, as the East Central European coun-tries come under the influence of current West European intellectual andcultural values, the politics of recognition and of identity are emerging as a newfeature of the ideological landscape.17

Nationalism, as an expression of the majority’s identity, shows little sign oflosing importance within the political culture of the East Central Europeanstates. Generally speaking, overtly nationalist parties have not fared best since theonset of democratization, but this has been because all other parties havebecome nationalist to a greater or lesser degree. The glorification of nationalhistory and the assiduous restoration of national symbols have been high on theagenda of post-communist governments. Obviously, this has heightened thesense of exclusion among ethnic minorities, but it has also made them receptiveto ideologies and strategies of counter-affirmation.

In response to the persistent dominance of majority groups, and inspired byWestern preoccupation with minority rights and ethnic revival, East CentralEuropean minorities are increasingly receptive to the idea that cultures cannotbe assessed on a scale of ‘higher’ or ‘lower’, that all ethnic groups should be

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Ethnic minorities and implications of EU enlargement 123

recognized as equally worthy of respect, and, in particular, that numbers are notdeterminant of status, so that even small minorities deserve equal recognition.For the moment, these considerations are leading towards demands for equalityof treatment rather than calls for affirmative action (positive discrimination).18

At the same time, they are preparing the ground for a minority agenda basedupon ethnic pride, compensation for past victimhood and redress of presentdiscrimination.

The culture of subjectivity and the politics of identity will not only legitimatedemands based on identity but will also dramatically expand the bases for iden-tity. In addition to traditional religious, language and ethnic bases, identity in thefuture may well be founded on gender, sexual preference or life-style considera-tions. These new identity groups may, in the long run, upstage ethnic minorities,although, in the first instance, they will probably reinforce them and, in thesecond instance, they will supersede them. For example, we shall find not onlyHungarian minority associations in Slovakia but also Hungarian homosexualminority associations as separate groups. There is really no limit to the prolifera-tion of such identity formations. The multiplication of affinities along with thecombination of ‘ressentiment’ and narcissism will provide an abundant andinflammable fuel for minority demands.

The implications of these trends are that minorities will emerge strengthened,both subjectively and objectively. Existing organized minorities will be moreaffirmative in their demands, incipient minorities will develop self-consciousness,new minorities will arise. Forcible assimilation of minorities is already banned, atleast by international convention, and voluntary assimilation will become lessrespectable. To be sure, the visible differences between minorities and majoritiesmay become less noticeable in an increasingly uniform urban and modernsetting. Diminution of objective differences does not mean, however, thatminorities will abandon their distinct subjective identity or the agenda that flowsfrom it.

The process we are describing is a diffuse and inchoate one but it is alreadyperceptible. Poland is witnessing the affirmation not only of its more substantialminorities, such as the Germans, the Ukrainians and the Belarussians, but also ofsuch numerically insignificant communities as the Jews and of groups striving forrecognition such as the Kashubes.19 Hungary’s national minority policy isdesigned to maintain minorities in existence, and these minorities are makingclaims on the national agenda and national budget. The revival of the Rutheneidentity, in part through efforts from abroad, affects Slovakia and Poland as wellas countries outside our purview, notably Ukraine and Yugoslavia.20 In theCzech Republic, Slovaks, indistinguishable in most respects from the Czechs,have organized as an ethnic minority. The relegalization of churches, such as theUniates, and the vigour of Islam have also bolstered ethnic identity. Post-communist national censuses confirm that earlier tendencies are being reversedand that more individuals now choose to proclaim a minority identity, previouslydormant or recently acquired. It remains to be seen whether such developmentswill gravitate towards the realm of symbolic or of effective politics.

Legal and policy regimes

A telling aspect of the minority question in East Central Europe is the discrep-ancy between the spirit of these countries’ constitutional regimes and theinternational legal regimes to which they are ready to subscribe. In no other areais there as profound a gulf between the desire for national self-affirmation andthe wish to integrate into a larger unit.

The preambles of many post-communist constitutions confirm resoundinglythe identification between the political order and the titular nation. The state isroutinely presented as the emanation, the incarnation or the property of themajority nation. Some preambles also seize the occasion to articulate a view ofhistory from which past or present minorities are absent.21 Constitutionsmention national minorities in general terms, sometimes employing circumlocu-tions or alluding to them residually (e.g. ‘citizens whose native tongues are notBulgarian’). They guarantee minority rights for individuals but not for collectivi-ties, thus frustrating a key minority demand. The limitations of these provisionscome to the fore when compared with those of the Hungarian constitution,which specifically states that ‘national and ethnic minorities share the power ofthe people – they are constituent factors in the state’, and which recognizesminorities as collective rights-bearing entities.

Underlying these new constitutions is a Jacobin conception of ‘La République,

une et indivisible’.22 Territorial autonomy is banned, explicitly or implicitly. Theremight well be solid reasons for doing so: autonomous territorial units may simplyreplicate the exclusivist logic of the nation-state on a smaller scale; they invari-ably create new minorities among those not belonging to the titular people ofthe new unit; they may foster a ghetto mentality; they can act as an incitement toseparatism. All these objections to territorial autonomy are weighty enough. Itremains true, however, that territorial autonomy or federalism has functionedsuccessfully as a mechanism for managing minority problems in various parts ofthe world. It is regrettable, though comprehensible in the light of recent experi-ence, that federalism should arouse such panic in the ex-communist states.

Constitutions are not necessarily the best guide to state practice because oftheir general nature and exhortative function. In dealing with minorities manyconstitutions simply refer matters to subsequent legislation, stipulating rights orguarantees ‘as provided by law’. Consequently, confrontation between the stateand its minorities often focuses on particular laws concerning language(Slovakia), education (Romania), citizenship (Estonia, Latvia) or on a combina-tion of these and other specific issues (e.g. toponyms, personal names, flags andother symbols). In most cases what counts is the spirit of the laws and of theirapplication. Inasmuch as trust between the states and their minorities is minimal,however, much energy is dissipated in bickering over the wording and interpreta-tion of these laws.

It is often in response to such disputes that minority issues are international-ized. All the countries discussed here belong to the Council of Europe and to theOSCE, and it is these organizations that have taken an increasing interest insetting norms and in intervening in minority-related conflicts. The Council of

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Europe adopted a European Charter of Regional and Minority Languages(1992), but it has been slow in obtaining acceptance.23 The Council’s FrameworkConvention for the Protection of National Minorities (1995), by virtue of itsbinding character, is heralded as a major breakthrough in minority protection. Ithas been ratified by all the states under discussion here (with the exception, as ofDecember 2001, of Latvia, which has signed but not ratified). The Convention’sfollow-up monitoring missions in adhering states also play a useful role in takingthe pulse of minority problems.24 Since the end of the Cold War the OSCE hasadopted a number of declarations relating to minority protection. Most signifi-cantly, it has established the Office of a High Commissioner for NationalMinorities (headed until July 2001 by the former Dutch Foreign Minister, Maxvan der Stoel, and subsequently by the Swedish diplomat, Rolf Ekeus), which hasworked tirelessly to mediate and report on minority issues throughout the ex-communist world. Of course, there are also UN bodies dealing with minorityissues, notably the sub-committee on minorities within the Human RightsCommission. The EU has only stepped into this area warily and indirectly, byway of the ‘Plan Balladur’ (1995), formally sponsored by the OSCE, which calledupon prospective entrants into the Union to settle among themselves frontier andrelated issues, such as minorities, before proceeding with the adherence process.

The internationalization of the minority issue has created a dilemma for anumber of East Central European states. On the one hand, they resent theoutside interference and the assault on their sovereignty, much as they did in theinter-war period when the League of Nations monitored compliance with theminority treaties imposed upon the East Central Europeans by the victoriousgreat powers. On the other hand, they are keen to argue their case inasmuch asrapprochement with Western countries is their top international priority. Indeed,Hungary has made internationalization of the minority issue a linchpin of itspolicy with regard to Hungarians abroad.

Quite striking is the uncontrite tone of the East Central European states’defence of their minority policies. They appear to be sincerely convinced thatthey are acting in good faith and in a reasonable manner, that minoritycomplaints are exaggerated and stoked from abroad. The contrast between suchattitudes, shared by public opinion, and the growing stridency of minorityspokespersons suggests that the parties to conflict may be growing apart ratherthan coming together. It is indeed true that East Central European minoritygroups are following the lead of Western NGOs and international institutions,which, all too often, have little specific understanding of the area and automati-cally assume strident stances. Moreover, it must be grating for post-communistgovernments to hear ‘standard of civilization’ arguments from countries whereminority conflicts are more violent than any in East Central Europe (NorthernIreland, Corsica, the Basque country) and where instances of deplorable treat-ment of minorities abound (as some critics put it, it is safer to be a Turk inBulgaria than in Germany). At the same time, if the East Central Europeans areindeed seeking Western respect and equal recognition, they cannot avoid havingthe highest Western standards in regard to minorities invoked as a norm.

Ethnic minorities and implications of EU enlargement 125

Relations with neighbouring countries

There is a fundamental difference between the present time and the inter-warperiod, when minorities were last a bone of contention within the area: todaynone of the countries under examination will go to war over the minority issue.In this respect, Hungary’s turnabout has been the most spectacular. Internallarge-scale violence too is not envisaged against minorities. One cannot be ascategorical in regard to border issues but it is only marginal political formationsthat call overtly for border changes and it is assumed that these changes wouldbe carried out peacefully.

At the same time, minority considerations enter into the relations of the EastCentral European countries with each other and with the outside world. Thecase of Hungary is most obvious. The fate of three to four million compatriotsabroad (almost one-third of the population of Hungary itself) has been a domi-nant theme of Hungarian internal and foreign policy under virtually all regimes.Most recently, it has dictated Hungary’s policies in regard to its own internalminorities. Hungary’s generosity towards them was expected to serve as anexample for neighbouring countries and as a basis for reciprocity. In this respect,the experience has been disappointing. The West has applauded Hungarian poli-cies but Romania, Slovakia and Yugoslavia have reacted with suspicion and they,as well as Ukraine, have shown little inclination to follow the Hungarianexample. Within Hungary itself, the vigour with which the question of the dias-pora is pursued varies with the governments in power. As for minority policywithin Hungary, it is difficult to assess to what extent support for it is ‘soft’ ratherthan ‘hard’. If this policy remains unreciprocated among all the countries in thearea, if its beneficiaries show themselves ungrateful, disloyal or demanding and,for whatever reasons, become unpopular (as is already the case for the Roma),one may will ask whether it will persist.

Sooner rather then later, the Hungarian government may be called to presentits accounts with respect to its policies on behalf of the diaspora. It will have toacknowledge that the bilateral treaties signed with Slovakia and Romania, withinthe framework of the OSCE/EU’s ‘Plan Balladur’, have become a supplemen-tary source of dispute as quarrels over interpretation abound.25 The conclusionthat might have to be drawn is that the fate of Hungarian communities in theneighbouring countries depends overwhelmingly on the internal politics of thesecountries. Hungarians in Romania made temporary gains when the DemocraticConvention government came to power in late 1996, but the future under thesecond Iliescu presidency is not at all assured. Improvement of the situation ofthe Hungarians of Slovakia followed the defeat of the Meciar government, butirritants persist under the shaky coalition government of Mikulas Dzurinda.What are the conclusions that Budapest (and the Hungarian minorities) willdraw if it realizes that it is powerless to act as a protector of Hungarians abroad?Already, one may point to the adoption of the so-called ‘Hungarian Status Law’,providing limited quasi-citizenship benefits to Hungarians in neighbouring coun-tries, as an indication of a new approach to the problem of the Hungariandiaspora.26

126 André Liebich

Other East Central European countries have not shown as much interest inthe fate of their co-nationals abroad, which does not mean that they do not havediaspora communities or that they will show forbearance in the future. Poland issympathetic to the plight of Poles in the ex-Soviet Union (one to two millionpeople) and, after first having left the matter to the Church and other voluntaryorganizations, it has recently promulgated a repatriation law limited to Poles inKazakhstan.27 It is relieved that the Polish minority in Ukraine(220,000–400,000) has not become an issue, both because of Ukraine’s policiesand because of the generally good relations between the two countries. Poland isalso satisfied that the Polish minority in Lithuania, after having opposedLithuanian independence and then complained about political discrimination,now appears to be more docile. It is concerned, however, that the repressivepolitical regime in Belarus may force attention upon the Polish minority there(400,000–500,000).

Several countries are suspected of demonstrating concern for their co-nationals abroad only for opportunistic or retaliatory reasons. Slovakiacomplains about the fate of Slovaks in Hungary, although the latter are not onlyfar less numerous than their Hungarian counterparts in Slovakia but they arealso integrated almost to the point of assimilation (which provides additionalgrounds for complaint). Slovenia responds to Italian criticism of its failure tomake amends for the expulsions of Italians and confiscations of property of1945 by evoking the condition of Slovenes in Italy. This Slovene minority(90,000) is thirty times superior in number to the Italians in Slovenia, but theissue only makes a dent in Italian local politics whereas it is of national impor-tance in Slovenia.

Countries outside the area also demonstrate concern for their co-nationals.The most weighty of such cases is that of Russia vis-à-vis Latvia and Estonia(Lithuania’s policies towards its much smaller Russian minority have not drawncomplaints). At present, the key issue is that of granting citizenship to the greatnumber of Russians who settled during Soviet times. Inasmuch as statelessness isa violation of human rights and the citizenship requirements of these Balticcountries are designed to discriminate against a particular category of candi-dates, Moscow’s case for protecting Russians (and other former Soviet citizens) isa strong one. As the issue of citizenship moves towards resolution by way ofinclusion, largely under international rather than Russian pressure, the nature ofthe problem changes.28 These new citizens will be able to run their own candi-dates for national office and they will weigh heavily on political outcomes. If theyorganize along ethnic lines, setting up Russian minority parties and electoral lists,they will end up by transforming these countries into binational and bilingualstates. This is precisely what ethnic Latvians and Estonians are desperate toavoid but, instead of seeking an agreement with their Russian-speakers while thelatter are still disenfranchised, they have been inclined to stall until forced tomake reluctant concessions under international pressure.

Other outside countries are far more discrete in defending their co-nationals.Germany has a long-standing policy of reaching out to Germans abroad,

Ethnic minorities and implications of EU enlargement 127

previously for the purpose of bringing them ‘back’ to Germany, more recently inorder to foster German culture and to promote the welfare of Germansremaining abroad. Germany is treading very lightly in this domain, for historicalreasons. In fact, it does not even need to make much of an effort at protection.The countries of the area (with the exception of Poland, which behaves morereservedly) are only too eager to act benevolently with regard to their localGermans in the light of the economic importance that Germany has for EastCentral Europe. Another outside state that may be returning to parts of the areais Turkey, but, of the countries with which we are concerned, this interest ispotentially relevant only for Bulgaria (other Balkan countries are anothermatter).

Perspectives and conclusions

Let us assume, by way of a thought experiment, that ten years or so from now allthe East Central European countries examined here are members of theEuropean Union. What then will be the situation of ethnic minorities in thisenlarged Europe?

One may suppose that the minority factor will become far more important toEU politics than it is at present. This will occur because trends and realities fromboth parts of the Union will converge in a highly dynamic combination. On theone hand, the Union will contain a significant number of new members withimportant but marginalized minorities. On the other hand, it will be made up ofold members where minorities are more integrated and less numerous but wherea culture of minority promotion and of minority rights has been developing(often in terms of regionalization). West European minorities will find themselvesreinforced, perhaps reinvigorated, and will intensify their strategies aiming atEuropean-wide recognition. At the same time, in the new members of theUnion, minorities will invoke West European precedents and norms to pursuetheir case in favour of an improved status, including greater cultural autonomyand, in some cases, territorial autonomy. In these circumstances it is difficult toimagine the indefinite continuation of what Bruno de Witte, in this volume(chapter 8), has aptly called the EU’s ‘agnosticism’ towards minorities residingwithin its member states.

To be sure, tensions might be reduced by the new element of mobility. In theforefront of those who will avail themselves of the opportunity to cross bordersfreely will be minority members who will gravitate towards the countries of theirlanguage or ethnic kin to take up jobs and, in the long run, to settle down. Thisfactor may, just as easily, operate in a reverse direction. Diaspora communitieshave always been important to the development of nationalism, and today’s easeof communications means that they can play an even greater role in the politicsof the land they have left.29 Moreover, mobility will eventually force a reformula-tion of the very term ‘minority’. At present, though there is no universallyaccepted definition of the term, there is agreement that a minority must bemade up of citizens of the country of residence.30 Thus, Turks in Germany are

128 André Liebich

not a Turkish minority in Germany and the only Polish minority in Germany isthat made up of German citizens, a qualification that limits the weight of thisgroup both numerically and conceptually. Such restrictions will no longer betenable in a Union where everyone shares European citizenship. This does notmean, however, that members of the Union will cease to intervene on behalf oftheir own nationals abroad, along the patterns of earlier interventions on behalfof minorities. In fact, the opposite will probably be the case.

A possible development in this future enlarged Union will be pressure towardsan increase in the number of Euro-regions and other trans-border arrange-ments. At present, Euro-regions and the like are regarded with suspicion by thestates of East Central Europe, as alibis for outside interference and tamperingwith borders. This is why Poland has been unenthusiastic about creating anysuch arrangements in Silesia, Slovakia has refused to consider them for Ruthenia(with Ukraine), and there is nothing of this sort between Hungary and Romania.It would be most encouraging if such resistance could be overcome. The realiza-tion that trans-border cooperation, especially involving ethnic minorities, can bemutually beneficial could alter perceptions significantly. Certainly this is a lesscontroversial project than that of introducing or reintroducing territorialautonomy or federalist structures, which will continue to arouse anxiety.

As the East Central European countries enter the European Union, they willexperience a series of changes affecting their sovereignty and their effectivepowers. Whatever their gains in other areas, they will be weakened qua states,and therefore power relations between majorities and minorities within thesestates, as well as within the EU as a whole, will change. How both parties react tothese changes is a matter for speculation. By way of conclusion, let us recall thatminorities imply majorities, and both assume the one-nation state as the norm ofpolitical organization. Franz Josef spoke of his ‘peoples’ rather than of ‘minori-ties’ within Austria-Hungary, and the Swiss today do not refer to theFrench-speaking or Italian-speaking population as ‘minorities’. In both cases, weare faced with pre-modern political conceptions that, in some curious and as yetundetermined way, may be appropriate for a post-modern political world as well.In the meantime, we have to manage the question of minorities within a stateframework inimical to them.

Appendix I: Statistical note

Minority statistics constitute a great illusion. Under the appearance of scientificcertainty and mathematical precision they conceal, advertently or inadvertently,a world of differing degrees and conceptions of identity, diverging definitionsand unstable classifications. The uncertain or unreliable character of minoritystatistics holds true even if one discounts conscious falsification by state authori-ties, which has not been unknown in the past. Indeed, the obstacles to a reliablecount come both from above and from below.

Census categories are established by state authorities and reflect their vision ofthe state. Instead of documenting reality, some inter-war governments introduced

Ethnic minorities and implications of EU enlargement 129

the amalgamated categories of Czechoslovak and Serbo-Croatian to express anation-building project. In the post-war period, states have sometimes beencreative in inventing census categories, in order to avoid problems of attributionamong established groups, to weaken these groups numerically or to promotenew groupings. This is the origin of the categories of Muslims, in the ethnicsense, and of Macedonians in ex-Yugoslavia. In Romania the authorities havedistinguished between Szeklers and Magyars or Germans and Saxons to diminishthe weight of the larger groups.

Authorities may ask a variety of questions to determine minority status. Themost common criterion is language, but this is often problematic. For example,the main language of most Hungarian Roma is Hungarian, and therefore thenumber of Roma in Hungary is grossly underestimated. Nor is language astraightforward criterion. Some countries ask about mother tongue, which maybe a distant and irrelevant fact, whereas others inquire about language of dailyuse (Umgangssprache), which favours the majority language wherever minoritieswork among majorities. Historically too, East Central Europe has had its shareof minorities defined by non-linguistic, usually religious, criteria, and it cancount individuals who identify with a group whose language they do not know.

Assuming the most open census questionnaires, minority statistics will stillcontain significant variations over time. As in all other polls, respondents oftenprovide the answer that they imagine, rightly or wrongly, the questioner expects.They may do so because they are intimidated, because they wish to discourageprying into their personal lives, or because they seek to project a particular imageof themselves. Self-identification will therefore depend on circumstances, polit-ical and other. For example, it was imprudent to define oneself as German inPoland for much of the post-war era. This ceased to be the case for individualswho wished to avail themselves of the possibility of emigrating to Germany.More recently, it has become a factor of mobility even for those who wish toremain in Poland.

Such variations of identity are all the more prevalent and understandable inareas where people effectively share more than one identity, whether because ofpersonal factors, such as mixed marriages, or political considerations, such asborder alterations and regime changes. The wisest respondents to questionsabout minority identity may well be those unsophisticated individuals who reply:‘we are from here’ (‘Hiesiger’, ‘Tutejsi’).

Appendix II: Statistics

Further to the points we have made above (appendix I), the following statisticsprovide a range of figures. In some cases, we are giving the minimal andmaximal plausible figures. In other cases, we are leaving open the minimum orthe maximum (indicated with a question mark). In those cases where a singlefigure is provided it should be seen as an approximation.

130 André Liebich

Bulgaria

population: 8,500,000area: 110,000 km2

minorities:Armenians 20,000–40,000Greeks approx. 7,000Jews approx. 6,000Macedonians ?–200,000Pomaks* approx. 200,000Roma 300,000–800,000Tartars 6,000–?Turks 750,000–1,000,000*Pomaks are Bulgarian-speaking Muslims.

Czech Republic

population: 10,300,000area: 78,000 km2

minorities:Germans 50,000–150,000Hungarians approx. 20,000Jews approx. 5,000Poles approx. 60,000Roma ?–200,000Slovaks 300,000–500,000

Estonia

population: 1,600,000area: 45,100 km2

minorities:Belarussians approx. 30,000Finns approx. 18,000Jews ?–5,000Russians approx. 450,000Ukrainians approx. 50,000

Hungary

population: 10,400,000area: 93,000 km2

minorities:Armenians ?–3,000

Ethnic minorities and implications of EU enlargement 131

Bulgarians ?–2,000Croats ?–60,000Germans 65,000–200,000Greeks ?–5,000Jews ?–80,000Poles ?–10,000Roma 400,000–800,000Serbs ?–5,000Slovaks 30,000–100,000Slovenes ?–5,000

Latvia

population: 2,700,000area: 64,000 km2

minorities:Belarussians approx. 120,000Jews ?–25,000Lithuanians approx. 35,000Poles approx. 60,000Russians approx. 900,000Ukrainians approx. 90,000

Lithuania

population: 3,700,000area: 65,000 km2

minorities:Belarussians approx. 65,000Jews 5,000–10,000Poles approx. 260,000Russians approx. 350,000Ukrainians approx. 45,000

Poland

population: 39,000,000area: 312,000 km2

minorities:Belarussians 200,000–400,000Czechs approx. 2,000Germans 300,000–800,000Jews 3,000–10,000Kashubes ?–300,000Lithuanians approx. 30,000

132 André Liebich

Roma 15,000–40,000Ruthenes (= Lemkos) ?–30,000Slovaks approx. 20,000Ukrainians 200,000–400,000

Romania

population: 23,000,000area: 237,000 km2

minorities:Armenians 2,000–?Bulgarians 30,000–100,000Croats 7,000–?Germans approx. 100,000Greeks 4,000–20,000Hungarians 1,600,000–2,000,000Jews approx. 10,000Poles 4,000–10,000Russians (& Lippovans)* 40,000–100,000Roma 800,000–2,000,000Serbs 35,000–?Slovaks 20,000–?Turks (& Tartars) 25,000–50,000Ukrainians 70,000–250,000* Lippovans are Russian Old Believers long settled in the Danube delta

Slovakia

population: 5,300,000area: 49,000 km2

minorities:Czechs approx. 60,000Germans approx. 5,000Hungarians 560,000–700,000Poles approx. 3,000Roma 250,000–500,000Ruthenes 15,000–30,000Ukrainians 15,000–30,000

Slovenia

population: 1,900,000area: 20,000 km2

minorities:

Ethnic minorities and implications of EU enlargement 133

Albanians approx. 3,500Croats approx. 55,000Hungarians approx. 8,500Istrians* 5,000–?Italians approx. 3,000Macedonians approx. 4,000Muslims* approx. 27,000Roma 4,000–10,000Serbs approx. 50,000*The census allows for a regional self-identification

Notes

In accordance with the terms of reference of this project, this chapter deals withBulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland,Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia. I am grateful to Giuliano Amato, AlexanderSmolar, Jan Zielonka and other members of the EUI Reflection Group on the Natureof the New Border for comments on an earlier draft of this chapter.

1 As an anonymous reviewer of this volume has remarked, there is a sense in whicheveryone was a minority in the Habsburg and Ottoman empires since even the titularor dominant nations – Germans, Magyars, Turks – did not command a majority.

2 On the difficulties inherent in counting minorities, see appendix I as well as my‘Counting and Classifying Minorities’, in Jasna Adler and Lubor Jílek, eds, Socialisme,cultures, histoire: Itinéraires et représentations (Bern: Peter Lang, 1999), pp. 189–208.

3 Some of these issues are examined in my Les Minorités nationales en Europe centrale etorientale (Geneva: Georg ed., 1997).

4 I have tried to explain some of the historical differences between Eastern andWestern Europe in ‘Nations, States, Minorities: Why is Eastern Europe Different?’,Dissent (Summer 1995), pp. 313–17.

5 The Franco-Germanic linguistic border has been extraordinarily stable over the lastthousand years, with the exception of the region around Brussels, which has thereforebecome a focal point of linguistic tension. John A. Armstrong, Nations BeforeNationalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), p. 25.

6 The Magyars occupied the Hungarian basin in 895 whereas the last Eastern invadersto settle in Western Europe, the Lombards, established themselves in the sixthcentury. See Norman Davies, Europe: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1996), p. 234. For obvious geographical reasons, East Central Europe was subse-quently more vulnerable to invasion from the East than was Western Europe,although the Mongols made it to the Swiss border.

7 Alan J. Palmer, The Lands Between: A History of East Central Europe since the Congress ofVienna (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970).

8 István Bibó, ‘The Distress of East European Small States’, in his Democracy, Revolution,Self-Determination, ed. by Károly Nagy, trans. by András Boros-Kazai (Boulder, COand Highland Lakes: Social Science Monographs and Atlantic Research andPublications, 1991), pp. 13–89. Milan Kundera, ‘The Tragedy of East CentralEurope’, New York Review of Books (26 April 1984).

9 See Ian M. Cuthbertson and Jane Leibowitz, eds, Minorities: The New Europe’s Old Issue(Prague: Institute for East-West Studies, 1993).

10 For some representative formulations of these interpretations see: Jacques Rupnik,‘Eisschrank oder Fegefeur: Das Ende des Kommunismus und das Wiedererwachender Nationalismen’, Transit, 1 (1990), pp. 132–41 and his ‘Le réveil des nationalismes’,

134 André Liebich

in Jacques Rupnik, ed., Le Déchirement des nations, (Paris: Seuil, 1995), pp. 9–40. Thefollowing title is eloquent: Bernard Paquereau, ‘Sous la glace l’histoire. Les rapportsdu nationalisme et du communisme en Europe de l’est’, Le Débat, 84 (1995), pp.105–20. For ethnic nationalism as the ‘default option’, see Jack Snyder, ‘Nationalismand the Crisis of the Post-Soviet State’, Survival, 35:1 (1993), pp. 5–26.

11 On the wider implications of the contemporary East Central European ‘politicizationof ethnicity and ethnicization of politics’ (Joseph Rothschild) or ‘revived versuscontrived nationalism’ (Ivo Banac), see Katherine Verdery’s succinct statement: ‘Theidiom of national difference becomes the means of assigning blame for presentdisaster as well as of establishing who has the purity – both moral and ethnic –needed to govern’ (comments on Eric Hobsbawm in ‘Ethnicity and Nationalism inEurope Today’, Anthropology Today, 8:1 [1992], p. 10. For more specific argumentationon the economic aspect, see her ‘Nationalism and National Sentiment in Post-Socialist Romania’, Slavic Review, 52:2 (1993), pp. 179–203. For an original, moralvariant see also Jiřina Šiklová, ‘The Solidarity of the Culpable’, Social Research, 58:1(1991), pp. 765–73.

12 See Sławomir Lodzinski, ‘The Protection of National Minorities in Poland: Law andPractice after 1989’, in Jerzy Kranz, ed., Law and Practice of Central European Countries inthe Field of National Minorities Protection After 1989 (Warsaw: Centre for InternationalRelations, 1998), pp. 131–85.

13 ‘New Minorities’ Office in Czech Republic?’, RFE/RL Daily Report (31 January 2000),and ‘Government Calls for Ethnic Minorities’ Council’, RFE/RL Daily Report (2November 2000).

14 See Niamh Walsh, Minority Self Government in Hungary; Legislation and Practice (Lund:Raoul Wallenberg Institute [Master Thesis], 2000) available on European Centre forMinority Issues website (<http//www.ecmi.de>) and Andrea Aján, La Protection desminorités ethniques et nationales en Hongrie: Aspects historiques, juridiques et politiques (GenevaGraduate Institute of International Studies [DES thesis], 2000).

15 The economies of all the states examined here suffered calamitous drops (contrac-tions of up to one third and, in the case of the former Soviet republics, one half ofGDP in the early 1990s) compensated by subsequent growth in the single digits (withoccasional relapses into negative figures). See Stanisław Gomułka, MacroeconomicPolicies and Achievements in Transition Economies, 1989–1999 (Geneva: UNECE, 2000) andEconomic Trends in Eastern Europe, 9:3 (2000).

16 In Hungary and the Czech Republic, for example, Roma unemployment rates hoveraround 60 per cent to 70 per cent. In Hungary, Roma life expectancy is about fifteenyears lower than the average. About 60 per cent of the prison population in Hungaryis Roma and some 50 per cent of burglaries in the Czech Republic are committed byRoma. Two recent studies (which avoid some of the negative quantification givenabove) are Dena Ringold, Roma and the Transition in Central and Eastern Europe: Trends andChallenges (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2000) and Report on the Situation of Roma andSinti in the OSCE Area, prepared by the High Commissioner on National Minorities,OSCE (2000).

17 New approaches to minority issues in this perspective have been pioneered by twoCanadian authors: Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994) and Will Kymlicka, MulticulturalCitizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).

18 The option of positive discrimination was already suggested for the area in a casebefore the Permanent Court of International Justice in 1935 concerning Greekminority schools in Albania. The Court ruled that although equality in law precludeddiscrimination, equality in fact might involve the necessity of differential treatment.The suggestion has not been taken up in the post-communist period. On the case, seeAntony E. Alcock, ‘A Reapparaisal of Existing Theory and Practice in the Protection

Ethnic minorities and implications of EU enlargement 135

of Minorities’, in A.C. Hepburn, ed., Minorities in History (London: Edward Arnold,1983), p. 234.

19 For an interesting look at the recent stirrings of Kashub identity, see Brunon Synak,‘The Kashubes During the Post-Communist Transformation in Poland’, NationalitiesPapers, 25:1 (1997), pp. 715–28.

20 Regarding efforts on behalf of the Ruthenes by a dedicated North American ethnicentrepreneur, see Chris Hann, ‘Intellectuals, Ethnic Groups and Nations: Two LateTwentieth-Century Cases’, in Sukumur Periwal, ed., Varieties of Nationalism (Budapest:Central European University Press, 1995), pp. 110–16.

21 One may read the following in the preambles to the constitutions of two new coun-tries, identified with those whom Marx and Engels described as ‘peoples withouthistory’. ‘We, the Slovak Nation, mindful of the political and cultural heritage of ourforefathers and of hundreds of years experience in the struggle for our national exis-tence …’; ‘Proceeding from … the historical fact that the Slovenes have formed overmany centuries of struggle for national liberation their own national identity andestablished their own statehood.’ It should be acknowledged that the Slovak preambledoes mention ‘members of national minorities and ethnic groups living in the terri-tory of the Slovak Republic’.

22 For example, article 1 of Romania’s constitution of 1991 states: ‘Romania is anational state, sovereign and independent, unitary and indivisible’, whereas thepreamble to the Bulgarian constitution of 1991 recalls ‘our irrevocable duty to safe-guard the national and state unity of Bulgaria’ and soon excludes autonomousterritorial units (article 2[1]).

23 Of the states under discussion, as of December 2001, only the Czech Republic,Hungary, Slovakia and Slovenia have ratified the Charter and Romania has signed it.The Charter has been slow to obtain adherence from other European states as well.

24 See further Kinga Gal, ‘The Council of Europe Framework Convention for theProtection of National Minorities and its Impact on Central and Eastern Europe’, VIICCEES World Congress, Tampere, Finland, July 2000.

25 For a legal analysis, see Kinga Gal, ‘The Role of Bilateral Treaties in the Protectionof National Minorities in Central and Eastern Europe’, E/CN.4/Sub.2/AC.5/1998CRP.2.

26 The ‘Law on Hungarians Living in Neighbouring Countries (2001)’ provides somesocial benefits and limited (three months annually) work permits to persons of‘Hungarian nationality who are not Hungarian citizens’. Further on this law, seeAlina Mungiu-Pippidi, chapter 4 in this volume.

27 ‘Polish Repatriation to Focus Mainly on Compensation from Kazakhstan’, RFE/RLDaily Report (9 November 2000).

28 ‘EU Praises Changes to Estonian Language Law’, RFE/RL Daily Report (15 June2000).

29 Over one hundred years ago Lord Acton stated that ‘exile is the cradle of nationality’,but the literature concerning the impact of diasporas on national politics is still rare.For an excellent recent case study, see Loring M. Danforth, The Macedonian Conflict:Ethnic Nationalism in a Transnational World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).

30 International bodies have not succeeded in establishing a universally accepted defini-tion of minorities, in spite of the efforts of two UN rapporteurs, Francesco Capotortiin the 1970s and Jules Deschenes in the 1980s. The definitional problem is thereforenot confined to East Central Europe and a discussion of it would lead us too farastray from our main concern here. Those interested may consult, for example, JohnPacker, ‘On the Definition of Minorities’, in John Packer and Kristain Myntti,eds,The Protection of Ethnic and Linguistic Minorities in Europe (Åbo/Turku: Abo AkademiUniversity, Institute for Human Rights, 1993).

136 André Liebich

The notions of ethnic minority and European Union seem, at first sight, to belong totwo different worlds. The contrast between these two worlds may be illustratedby several contemporaneous pairs of events that occurred during the first half ofthe 1990s:

• On 9 and 10 December 1991, the European Council met in Maastricht andmanaged, with some difficulty, to reach agreement on the Treaty ofMaastricht establishing the European Union and providing, among otherthings, for the creation of a common European currency. I remember oneAmerican journalist, present at Maastricht, criticizing the Heads ofGovernment of the (then) twelve member states for squabbling endlessly overwhat, for her, were technical trifles while at the other end of Europe, sheargued, something much more important for the future of the continent washappening: through the conclusion of the Minsk Agreement of 8 December1991, the Russian Federation, the Ukraine and Belarus had created theCommonwealth of Independent States and proclaimed the end of the SovietUnion ‘as a subject of international law’. Ethnic diversity had, of course, beenone of the principal agents of the dissolution of the Soviet empire, whereas ithad not played any role in the adoption of the Treaty of Maastricht.

• On 1 January 1993, the European Union witnessed an event that, at thetime, was greeted by solemn statements and bonfires lit across Europe(although it seems almost forgotten today): the abolition of border controlson the trade in goods between the member states of the European Unionand the official launch of the Single Market, crowning an intensive period oflegislative activity that had started after the European Commission hadissued, in 1985, its White Paper on the completion of the internal market.On the very same day that border controls were lifted in Western Europe,new borders were drawn further east: the Czech and Slovak FederalRepublic was dissolved into two new states: the Czech Republic andSlovakia. Again, cultural differences were among the principal causes of theseparation.

• On 1 February 1995, the Framework Convention for the Protection ofNational Minorities was signed within the framework of the Council of

8 Politics versus law in theEU’s approach to ethnicminorities

Bruno de Witte

Europe. This international treaty was the culmination of a five-year effort(ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall) to set a pan-European standard onmatters of minority protection; at the same time, it was clear to all that theConvention was primarily meant to deal with one particular part of Europe,namely the Central and Eastern part. The Convention was treading withcare, as shown by its article 21, stating that

nothing in the present framework convention shall be interpreted asimplying any right to engage in any activity or perform any act contraryto the fundamental principles of international law and in particular ofthe sovereign equality, territorial integrity and political independence ofStates.

No such precautions had been taken when drafting the Act of Accessionby which Austria, Finland and Sweden had, just one month earlier, beenadmitted as new members of the European Union. It was clear to thosecountries’ governments and populations that joining the EU implied aserious limitation of national sovereignty, which they accepted – with moreor less enthusiasm – in view of the expected economic benefits of member-ship.

The three contrasting pairs of events described above evoke two verydifferent trajectories: on the one hand, one finds countries of Western Europethat carry forward, or join, a process of intense economic and political integra-tion called the European Union, for which they accept divesting themselves ofcertain paraphernalia of the traditional nation-state, and in which they are nothindered by ethnic minority questions. On the other hand, one finds countries ofCentral and Eastern Europe that remain outside this supranational integrationprocess and many of which are marked by a revival of traditional questions ofnationalism and ethnic conflict.

Today, however, the two trajectories have become tangential and even tend tooverlap. This may again be illustrated by a pair of events that signal the emer-gence of the terms ‘ethnic’ and ‘minorities’ in the official vocabulary of theEuropean Union. On 16 and 17 June 1997, the European Council reached polit-ical agreement on a document that was, some months later, formally signed asthe Treaty of Amsterdam. This Treaty, among many other things, inserted intothe EC Treaty a new article 13, which enables the Council of the EuropeanUnion to ‘take appropriate action to combat discrimination based on sex, racialor ethnic origin, religion or belief, disability, age or sexual orientation’. Less than amonth later, the European Commission, in its opinion on the request for acces-sion to the EU by a number of CEECs, insisted on the importance of what itcalled ‘respect for minorities’ as one of the political criteria for membership ofthe European Union.1

These two recent uses of the terms “ethnic” and “minorities” were made intwo different contexts:

138 Bruno de Witte

• The first was made in the context of the internal evolution of the EuropeanUnion, in which the question of ethnic minorities has long occupied a verymarginal place and is now finally recognized as a matter of concern, albeitwith regard, primarily, to immigrant populations.

• The second was made in the external context of the relations between theEU and its Central and East European partners and candidates for acces-sion; in this context, the position of ethnic minorities has been a relevantfactor for a number of years.

There is, thus, a chronological décalage between the internal and the externalagenda of the European Union. I will, therefore, start by considering the role ofthe ethnic minorities question in the external relations of the EU with the Centraland East European countries (or ‘CEECs’). I will then examine more closely thereasons for the apparent absence, so far, of any internal European Union policyon ethnic minorities. In the final section, I will try to weave the two threadstogether and speculate about the way the European Union will be confrontedwith the ethnic minority question in future years, particularly after its projectedEastern enlargement.

The external perspective: double standard or commonstandard?

The double standard revealed: two meetings in Copenhagenand one in Amsterdam

For the European Union, concern for minorities is primarily an export productand not one for domestic consumption. This fact may be highlighted by lookingat three political documents, adopted within one decade, each of which helpedto define the fundamental values underpinning the European integrationprocess.

• At its meeting in Copenhagen on 29 June 1990, the Conference on theHuman Dimension of the CSCE adopted a text that became known as theCopenhagen Document and is sometimes referred to as a ‘EuropeanConstitution on Human Rights’.2 The Document affirms the link betweendemocracy, the rule of law and human rights and also devotes, within thiscontext, an extensive chapter to the protection of national minorities. Thischapter, although cautiously worded and lacking binding legal force, was thefirst attempt at agreeing an all-European standard on the status and rights ofminorities. In the euphoric post-Berlin-Wall climate of 1990, the commit-ments contained in the Copenhagen Document were subscribed to by allcountries of Europe, including therefore the member states of the EuropeanUnion. These commitments continue to inspire, today, the activities of whatis now called the OSCE, and, more particularly, of its High Commissioneron National Minorities.3

Politics vs law in the EU’s approach to minorities 139

• This common platform accepted by all European countries was trans-formed, at another Copenhagen summit some years later, namely theEuropean Council meeting of June 1993, into political criteria to becomplied with by a particular set of countries, namely those of Central andEastern Europe aspiring to membership of the European Union. Accordingto the European Council conclusions, ‘membership requires that the candi-date country has achieved stability of institutions guaranteeing democracy,the rule of law, human rights and respect for and protection of minorities.’4

Thereby, the complex set of interlocking principles contained in theCopenhagen Document of 1990 was translated into one synthetic formulawith important political implications.

• A slightly different formula was adopted, for the EU’s internal usage, at theAmsterdam European Council of June 1997, as the new text of article 6(1)of the EU Treaty: ‘The Union is founded on the principles of liberty,democracy, respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, and therule of law, principles which are common to the Member States.’ If theseare the principles on which the EU is founded, it is logical that they shouldalso serve as conditions of membership. Indeed, the text of article 49 of theEU Treaty, as modified in Amsterdam, confirms that ‘any European Statewhich respects the principles set out in Article F(1) may apply to become amember of the Union.’ Yet, as we have seen, the formula that was actuallyused for the purpose of the present enlargement process is more demandingas it also includes protection of minorities as one of the indispensablepremises for integration.

Thus, among the famous ‘political criteria’ set out by the European Union asconditions for the accession of the CEECs, or – more generally – for closercooperation with the CEECs, the insistence on genuine minority protection isclearly the odd one out. Respect for democracy, the rule of law and humanrights have been recognized as fundamental values in the European Union’sinternal development and for the purpose of its enlargement, whereas minorityprotection is only mentioned in the latter context. Therefore, its imposition onother countries may seem rather inconsistent or even ‘somewhat hypocritical’,5

and the distinctive treatment meted out to them is strangely reminiscent of theinfamous post-World War I minority protection regime, which collapsed, in part,because it was perceived as a set of unilateral obligations imposed on the newlycreated states of Central and Eastern Europe by the Western victors of thatwar.6

Stages in the EU’s external policy on minorities7

The commitments jointly undertaken by all CSCE states in the CopenhagenDocument of 1990 formed the basis from which the European Union, and itsmember states, gradually developed a set of requirements for groups of coun-tries in Central and Eastern Europe that, taken together after some ten years’

140 Bruno de Witte

experience, may be presented as an embryonic ‘common foreign minoritiespolicy’ of the European Union (although the EU member states notoriouslyhave continued to have divergent views on the political situation in individualCEECs).

Minority protection as a criterion for the recognition of newstates (1991–2)

In response to the eruption of violent conflict in Yugoslavia, the EC memberstates, within the framework that was then called European Political Cooperation(the forerunner of the Common Foreign and Security Policy), convened a peaceconference at the Hague, and an Arbitration Committee was set up, also knownas the Badinter Committee, from the name of its chairman. Through the opin-ions that it gave upon the request of the EC, the Committee developed a smallbody of doctrine on self-determination and minority rights.8 The Twelve (as theythen were) also contributed more directly to international state practice in thisfield through the adoption, in December 1991, of a Declaration on the Guidelines on

Recognition of New States in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Recognition of newstates in this area of the world was made conditional, by the Twelve, on anumber of commitments from the side of the applicants, including respect forhuman rights and ‘guarantees for the rights of the ethnic and national groupsand minorities in accordance with the commitments subscribed to in the frame-work of the CSCE’.9

Putting conditions on recognition of new states was not unprecedented. Whatwas striking was the specific mention made of minority protection as one of theconditions for recognition, particularly as it came from the side of a group ofcountries (the EC countries) that had never before taken, as a group, any internalor international action in the field of minority protection. In reality, the agree-ment on common conditions for recognition was a compromise designed topaper over the differences among European countries over the situation inYugoslavia.10 Moreover, the minority protection criterion was applied inconsis-tently by the EC countries: Croatia was recognized on 15 April 1992, althoughthe Badinter Committee had expressed reservations on its minority protectionlaws; whereas Macedonia complied with all the criteria, according to theCommittee, but was not recognized at the time for other reasons dear to Greece.

The Pact on Stability in Europe (1993–5)

One of the very first joint actions undertaken in the framework of the EU’sCommon Foreign and Security Policy, immediately after the entry into force ofthe Treaty of Maastricht, was the ambitious initiative, inspired by France, toconvene an international conference at which the stability of Europe would beensured by means of a range of bilateral treaties and declarations establishinggood-neighbourly relations between countries of Central and Eastern Europe.There is no doubt that the active role and apparent commitment shown by the

Politics vs law in the EU’s approach to minorites 141

European Union in this matter was a decisive factor in convincing some of theCEECs to start negotiations with their neighbours in preparation for theStability Pact.11 The Pact, as eventually adopted at a conference in Paris in 1995,included only one important new instrument for minority protection, namely thebilateral treaty between Hungary and Slovakia, which was signed on the eve ofthe Paris Conference.12 The negotiations on a similar treaty between Hungaryand Romania were concluded only later, in 1996.13 The Stability Pact wasdeposited with the OSCE, and that organization was entrusted with monitoringthe implementation of obligations contained in it. The European Union itselflost interest in the Pact, and now directs its efforts mainly at bringing aboutreforms in the domestic laws of the CEECs. Yet the spirit of the Stability Pact isstill reflected in the financial support given by the EC Phare programme to cross-border cooperation actions.14

The opinions on accession and the accession partnerships(1997–8)

As mentioned above, the opinions delivered by the European Commission inJuly 1997,15 as to whether the applicant CEECs fulfilled the conditions for beingadmitted to accession negotiations, devoted specific attention to the question ofminority protection. Despite the unsophisticated and fragmentary nature of theCommission’s analysis of the minority issues, two implicit positions can bederived from these opinions. First, in commenting upon the situation in Estoniaand Latvia, the Commission adopted its own definition of minorities: one thatincluded all the communities residing in these countries, without distinguishingwhether their members were nationals of the country or not. This is anapproach that the Baltic governments had always taken care to reject in othercontexts.16 Second, the Commission was apparently not content with the formalrecognition of minority rights in national constitutions and bilateral treaties, butmade a full assessment based on its perception of law and practice. For instance,Slovakia has minority protection clauses in its constitution,17 and had signed itsbilateral ‘Stability Pact’ treaty with Hungary, but the European Commissionnevertheless expressed dissatisfaction with the minority situation there. In theend, Slovakia was the only country that, in the Commission’s view, failed to meetthe political criteria, although the minority question was not the most importantreason for that negative decision.

Today, the policy of ‘conditionality’ continues unabated with both the front-runners and the second-wave applicants, and, indeed, in the relations of the EUwith the successor states of Yugoslavia. The Accession Partnerships adopted in1998 list a large number of ‘short-term’ and ‘medium-term’ priorities for theapplicant states. These priorities include some items in the field of minorityprotection. The short-term priorities for Slovakia include a reform of its laws onthe use of minority languages, whereas Estonia and Latvia must urgently facili-tate the conditions for the naturalization of ‘non-citizens’ (i.e. theRussian-speaking community) and improve their integration by offering them

142 Bruno de Witte

courses in the national language. In the medium term, four other countries (theCzech Republic, Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania) are expected to improve theintegration of the Roma population.18

Latvia and Slovakia, in particular, although they were excluded from the firstround of negotiations, continued to be the object of political pressure to improvetheir minority protection record. At a session of the EU/Slovakia AssociationCouncil in April 1998, the EU ministers reiterated their demand for the urgentadoption of a new law on the use of minority languages.19 A few days earlier, theEuropean Union had expressed satisfaction over a new Action Plan of theLatvian government to accelerate the handling of requests for citizenship.20 Inthe general reports on ‘progress towards accession’, which the Commissionadopted in November 1998,21 satisfaction was expressed about the legal reformsthat Latvia had, in the mean time, enacted, whereas no significant improvementwas found in the protection of minorities in Slovakia (but the change of govern-ment in that country was still too recent to be reflected in the Commission’sfindings). In its general assessment of the record of all applicant countries, theCommission continued to exert pressure on applicant states by referring criticallyto the situation of the Roma in several candidate countries, and by concluding:‘Overall, the problem of minorities continues to raise concerns in the perspectiveof enlargement.’22

Elements of a common European standard

In international relations, there is no rule of formal reciprocity whereby statesare prevented from formulating rules of behaviour for other states that they arenot prepared to follow themselves. Yet, if the European Union institutions eval-uate the treatment of minorities in third countries, can they legitimately ignorethe way in which similar groups are treated inside the European Union? Someyears ago, a member of the European Parliament bravely stated:

[W]e will be equally assiduous at identifying and following up instances ofabuse within the European Community; … as well as examining the situa-tion of the Greek minority in Albania, we also will take an impartial view ofthe situation of the Turkish minority in Komotini.23

That may be the position of some members of the European Parliament, but ithas never been endorsed by the Commission and the Council: what the memberstates do with ‘their’ minorities is none of the EU’s business.

So, is there a blatant double standard in the respect for minorities? Or couldthe EU’s inactivity with respect to its own member states perhaps be justified byarguing that intervention is superfluous in view of the perfectly adequate perfor-mance of each member state with regard to minority protection? That is not soevident, to say the least. When looking at the internal situation in the presentfifteen member states, one should certainly take into account the considerablediversity in the factual situations (ethnic minorities are not present everywhere),

Politics vs law in the EU’s approach to minorites 143

but there are also large differences in the willingness of the various states torecognize minorities, protect their rights and guarantee their political participa-tion. There is, in fact, a sharp contrast between the common regime ofprotection of fundamental rights (where there is considerable similitude betweenWest European countries) and the special case of minority rights (which are stillvery much an idiosyncratic feature of certain countries or parts of countries).The diversity is so great as to discourage any attempt at systematic compar-ison.24 The academic pilgrims from the West who, in the early 1990s, broughttheir ‘model constitutions’ to Central and Eastern Europe did not have a ready-made minority protection model in their first-aid kits25 because such a generallyapplicable model simply did not exist.

Yet one should look beyond the domestic practices of states and also take intoaccount the international commitments undertaken in recent years by all Europeanstates. A common European standard of minority protection may exist after all.It has been developed mainly outside the framework of the EU itself, but withthe participation of its member states, and may therefore legitimately be used bythe EU in its external activities, at least to the extent that the EU states effec-tively comply with that standard. The elements of the European standard will bebriefly considered now.26

Democracy and the rule of law

In the Copenhagen Document of 1990, the participating states recognized, inthe first of the paragraphs dealing with minorities, ‘that the questions relating tonational minorities can only be satisfactorily resolved in a democratic politicalframework based on the rule of law, with a functioning independent judiciary.’27

The consensus on this linkage was new at the time. In previous decades, manyethnic activists and academic experts failed to make a principled distinctionbetween democratic and authoritarian states as far as the treatment of minoritieswas concerned. Often, even in Western Europe, countries like the Soviet Unionand Yugoslavia had been described as showing a better approach to the protec-tion of ethnic diversity than West European countries with their unilateralemphasis on individual human rights. Indeed, Yugoslavia had acted for a longtime, on the international scene, as the champion of minority rights.

Although there may have been some empirical truth in those earlier views,they are now definitely passé. There is now a European consensus that in theabsence of democratic elections, freedom of expression and an independentjudiciary, there is no solid ground for the protection of ethnic minority values.

The protection of human rights

The dichotomy, often made for the sake of convenience, between human rights

and minority rights may be misleading if it hides the fact that a genuine measure ofprotection for minority interests can be brought about simply by applying andcreatively interpreting the fundamental rights granted to all. In fact, European

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states, such as France, that do not have special laws on minority protection giveimplicit protection to minorities by adhering to general human rights standardsas defined by their Constitution and by the European Convention of HumanRights (which they have all ratified). Two examples may illustrate this:

• The Canadian Supreme Court decided in a famous case that freedom of

expression, a general fundamental right, entails the freedom to use thelanguage of one’s choice in private activities, and thereby limited the possi-bility for the Quebec provincial government to impose the exclusive use ofFrench for outdoor commercial signs and, hence, protected the linguisticrights of the English-speaking minority in the province.28

• The Turkish Constitutional Court had ordered the dissolution of the(Kurdish-leaning) Socialist Party because it advocated the transformation ofTurkey into a federal state, which was found to be in contrast with long-established constitutional values. The Socialist Party complained inStrasbourg that this was a breach of its human rights as guaranteed by theEuropean Convention of Human Rights. The European Court held, in itsjudgment of 25 May 1998, that

the fact that such a political programme is considered incompatible withthe current principles and structures of the Turkish State does not makeit incompatible with the rules of democracy. It is of the essence ofdemocracy to allow diverse political programmes to be proposed anddebated, even those that call into question the way a State is currentlyorganised, provided that they do not harm democracy itself.29

And the Court (unanimously!) concluded that the dissolution of theSocialist Party constituted a violation of the freedom of association as guar-anteed by the European Human Rights Convention.30

These examples could be multiplied. It will be interesting to observe thecontribution of the European Court of Human Rights case-law in the years tocome, as many more applications on minority matters are likely to be lodged atStrasbourg from the CEECs. Yet there are some inherent limits to the humanrights approach. They may be exemplified by a decision of the (now defunct)European Commission on Human Rights. There was a complaint by theSüdtiroler Volkspartei (the main party representing the German-speaking populationin South Tyrol) that the new Italian electoral law, by imposing a minimumthreshold for the attribution of seats in Parliament, constituted discriminationagainst minority political parties. The Commission stated that the new electorallaw applied equally to all parties and that ‘the Convention does not compel statesto provide for positive discrimination in favour of minorities.’31 This interpreta-tion is disputable: one could well argue that the principle of equal treatment does

entail a duty for public authorities to differentiate among persons (or, as in thiscase, organizations) in accordance with objective differences among them, and

Politics vs law in the EU’s approach to minorites 145

therefore also a duty to enact special rules enabling the use of minority languagesand, more generally, the development of minority cultures.32 But it certainlymakes things much easier if such positive duties towards minority groups are laiddown explicitly. This leads me to the third layer of the ‘European standard’.

Minority rights

Despite the undeniable differences in the domestic arrangements of the variousstates in both East and West, a European standard in respect of minority rightshas been emerging in recent years. The Framework Convention for theProtection of National Minorities, adopted within the Council of Europe in1995, entered into force on 1 February 1998. It has, to date, been signed by four-teen member states of the European Union and ratified by nine of them. OnlyFrance has neither signed nor ratified.33

What is the content of this emerging minority rights standard? TheFramework Convention contains, first of all, a number of general fundamentalrights that can already be found in the European Convention on Human Rightsbut whose particular implications for the members of a national minority areemphasized. Yet the main contribution of the Framework Convention lies in theformulation of a number of specific minority rights that cannot easily be reducedto the canonical list of general human rights,34 namely a qualified right for indi-vidual members35 of a minority to use their language in dealing with courts, publicauthorities and in the public service media, and a right to receive instruction in thatlanguage in the public education system. Although the Framework Conventionmay seem overly cautious in its wording and too respectful of the states’sovereignty,36 it does constitute an important stage in international standard-setting, to be used and taken further through international recommendations,bilateral negotiations, political pressure and advocacy by NGOs.

The right of citizenship

Citizenship is sometimes presented as ‘the right to have rights’.37 Whereas it istrue that citizenship defines, in a fundamental way, an individual’s membershipof a state community, and serves as a criterion for the attribution of many rights,benefits and duties, it is also true that most human rights, as described in therelevant international and European treaties, apply to all residents of a particularcountry, whether or not they are nationals of that country. Therefore, the possi-bility for members of an ethnic minority to acquire, or keep, the nationality ofthe state where they live ranks lower than the guarantee of human rights in thescale of minority protection instruments. At any rate, no clear Europe-wide (oruniversal) standard has emerged in this respect. The pressure exercised by theinternational community to relax the harsh conditions for naturalization that, incountries such as Estonia and Latvia, make it difficult for Russian-speakingpersons to acquire the nationality of the country are primarily inspired by thewill to prevent the escalation of inter-ethnic tensions and to appease the ire of

146 Bruno de Witte

the Russian government. Political pressure has not been backed by legal stan-dard-setting in this field. There is no generally recognized right for all long-timeresidents in a particular state territory to be eligible for citizenship of thatcountry. Indeed, such a standard would be hard to meet by many WestEuropean countries, whose legal regimes for the acquisition of citizenship arehardly less rigid than those of the Baltic states.

The rules on the acquisition of nationality are relevant because the recogni-tion of minority rights, in contrast to human rights, is often made dependent onhaving the nationality of the country concerned. That, at least, is the interpreta-tion given by many states to the term ‘national minority’ as used in theFramework Convention on National Minorities. Non-citizens are, in their view,not covered by this Convention.38

Autonomy and consociation

So far, I have considered ‘rights’, that is, instruments for the limitation of statepower. A second type of often-used instruments for minority protection or of‘group accommodation’39 are those that involve the sharing of state power, eitherthrough the recognition of autonomous legislative powers to institutions repre-senting ethnic minority interests (autonomy) or by organizing the participation ofethnic minority groups in the decision-making processes at the central state levelitself (consociation). Those are, arguably, the most advanced forms of minorityprotection. Regional autonomy is widely, and increasingly, used in WesternEurope as a means of defusing ethnic minority conflicts, including in such tradi-tionally centralized countries as France and the United Kingdom.40 Yet CEECstend to be rather wary of federal or quasi-federal solutions in general, andspecial ‘asymmetrical’ regimes of autonomy for parts of the country inhabited byminority populations are shunned by those states for fear that this may be aprelude to secession. Currently, there is no clear obligation for states, in generalinternational law, to establish regimes of autonomy for minority groups. Nor hasa common European standard emerged in this respect, at least for the time being.

The Copenhagen Document of 1990 went some way in this direction byrecognizing the ‘right of persons belonging to national minorities to effectiveparticipation in public affairs, including participation in the affairs relating to theprotection and promotion of the identity of such minorities’. This principle isnow echoed in article 15 of the Framework Convention. Yet efforts to go beyondthis general statement, by imposing a specific duty on states to create regimes oflocal or regional autonomy in areas inhabited by ethnic minorities, have notbeen very successful. The only text that goes that far is Recommendation 1201(1993) of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, which providesas follows in its article 11:

In the regions where they are in a majority the persons belonging to anational minority shall have the right to have at their disposal appropriatelocal or autonomous authorities or to have a special status, matching the

Politics vs law in the EU’s approach to minorites 147

specific historical and territorial situation and in accordance with thedomestic legislation of the state.

A ‘Recommendation’ is, as the term betrays, a non-binding text. Yet this partic-ular Recommendation has quickly become famous because of the efforts madeby the Hungarian government to incorporate it as a binding standard in the bilat-eral treaties that it negotiated with Slovakia and Romania. This issue was, indeed,the main stumbling-block during the negotiations, and although the reference toRecommendation 1201 was eventually inserted in both treaties, additional decla-rations specified that this reference did not imply any recognition of a right to aspecial status of territorial ‘autonomy’ based on ethnic criteria.41 All in all, it isquite obvious that European states are still very reluctant to recognize any limitsto their sovereign power to decide their country’s governmental structures.

An all-European consensus exists on the principle that the solution for ethnicconflicts involves the elaboration of rules and institutions that will allow for thepreservation of both the integrity of the state and the identity of the minority. But whatdoes this involve in practice? A major distinction should be made between instru-ments permitting a limitation of state power without affecting the institutionalstructure of the state (‘rights’) and instruments that rearrange the state structuresso as to allow for territorial autonomy or other forms of minority interest repre-sentation. On the former level, a European standard exists, though it is oftenvague and needs to be developed further. On the latter level, no such Europeanstandard has emerged.

The internal perspective: are ethnic minorities a non-issue in the European Union?

The EU is not unfamiliar with tension caused by ethnically inspired conflicts, butuntil today such questions have rarely been lifted up to the Union level. I shallattempt, in this section, to explain some of the reasons why this is so.

The comparative politics and multi-level governance approaches to the study ofEuropean integration, which are both currently fashionable political sciencetheories, invite us to examine the EU by analogy with national political systems,and particularly those of federal states. Now, ethnic minority issues arise infederal systems in two different guises: either some or all of the component unitsact as institutions articulating the interests of particular ethnic groups; or thecentral government intervenes in order to protect ethnic minorities within someof the component units of the system. Both hypotheses could conceivably arisein the European Union as well.

Have the member states of the EU become ‘nationalminorities’?

Let me start by considering the first hypothesis. In federal or regional states oneof the constituent units frequently appears, to itself or to others, as the institu-

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tional representative of a distinct minority group. Thus, the Province of Quebec,one of the founding members of the Canadian federation, is perceived by manyCanadians both inside and outside the province as the institutional representa-tive for the French-speaking community in Canada. In Spain, the Constitutionrecognizes Catalonia, Euskadi and Galicia as Autonomous Communities withlegislative powers, but also as ‘nationalities’ with distinct histories and culturalcharacteristics, and the governments of those Autonomous Communities defendwith pugnacity the cultural characteristics of their territory against the perceiveddominance of the Castillian-speaking majority of the country. In Belgium, totake a final example, the Communauté germanophone is an autonomous unit withdistinct legislative powers but also acts (as its name clearly betrays) as the repre-sentative for the country’s tiny German-speaking minority.

There is no similar ethnic dimension in the relations between the EuropeanUnion and its member states. Although each of the member states’ populationsis, obviously, a numerical minority in relation to the European population as awhole, and although individual countries are frequently outvoted in theEuropean Parliament and the Council and feel their interests are being neglectedin the European decision-making process, this does not mean that any of themember states has become a ‘minority’.

One reason for this is of a formal nature: all member states have preservedtheir status as independent, and equally sovereign, states, a status that finds prac-tical reflection in the requirement of unanimity for all major decisions affectingthe future of European integration (including any revisions of the foundingtreaties and any accessions of new states), in the paramount role of the principleof non-discrimination on grounds of nationality (article 12 of the EC Treaty)and also, at a more symbolic but highly sensitive level, in the recognition of thevarious national languages as co-official languages of the European Union.

Beyond the formal institutional equality of all member states, there is also thehappy political circumstance that no single country or coalition of countries hasever been able to dominate the others so as to impose its views and interests inthe decision-making process. Coalitions between states keep shifting according tothe particular subject matter; there are some stable sub-systems and the Franco-German tandem, in particular, may well play, from time to time, the role of thelocomotive of EU politics, but it would not make sense to describe the politicalrelations between member states of the EU in terms of a stable ‘majority’ pittedagainst one or more structural ‘minorities’.42

The most fundamental reason why none of the member state populations canbe described as an ‘ethnic minority’ is the absence of a clearly dominant cultureamong either the original Six or the present Fifteen, and the firm but long unex-pressed agreement that no such dominant culture should be allowed to emerge.When the European Community was founded, economic cooperation waslaunched against the background of major political objectives, such as the preser-vation of peace or the encapsulation of Germany, but aims of cultural expansionor assimilation were entirely absent. The European unification process, unlikeearlier attempts at political and economic unification within the nation-state

Politics vs law in the EU’s approach to minorites 149

framework, was not thought to require cultural homogenization. The guidingimage of the future Europe was, and still is today, that of a federation of nation-states respecting the existing cultural patterns of its members rather thanreplicating the nineteenth-century nation-state model. In legal-institutionalterms, this meant that education, culture and language were not listed amongthe policy areas falling within the competence of the European Community, andthat the authority of the member states in these matters could be entirelypreserved.

To conclude, there is no evidence so far that, by being part of the EuropeanUnion, the French, or Danish, or Luxemburgian peoples have become ‘nationalminorities’.

A minority protection policy of the European Union?

Let me now turn to the second hypothesis, namely that the European Unioncould be instrumental in protecting the position of ethnic minority groups inside

its member countries, like the Canadian federal government protecting the posi-tion of Indians and Inuits living in the province of Quebec, or the Swiss federalgovernment guaranteeing the rights of the Romansh-speakers, who are outnum-bered by the German-speakers in their home canton of Graubünden.

Again, this analogy does not hold. It was, and is, entirely unacceptable for theEU to interfere in the relations between the central governments of the memberstates and the ethnic minorities living within their borders. This can be seen bothin the institutional structure of the EU and in the actual policies pursued by theUnion.

On the first level, the dominant principle is that of institutional autonomy: theway in which each member state of the European Union defines its own input inEU decision-making is an internal matter that depends only on the constitutionalrules and political practices of that country. Whether ethnic minorities (or,rather, the local and regional institutions representing their interests) should havea role either in defining the position taken by the member state in the EU policyprocess, or in implementing EU policies on the ground, is therefore a matter tobe settled by each country separately. The legal system of the European Uniononly knows the ‘member states’, an abstract denomination that covers bodiesand civil servants acting at many different levels. The right to take part in EUdecision-making bodies and the responsibility to comply with EU obligations isentrusted to whoever is, according to internal rules, entitled to act in the name ofthe state.

The exclusion of any direct participation of regional and local authorities inthe EU decision-making process became increasingly hard to maintain as moreand more member states developed advanced systems of regional or federalautonomy, and as the scope of the EU’s activities spread ever wider, so as to inter-fere with the policies of those regions. After an energetic campaign conducted bythe German Länder and the Belgian Communities and Regions, the MaastrichtTreaty finally granted some institutional recognition to the regional layer of

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government by the creation of a Committee of the Regions, a consultative bodyconsisting of representatives of regional and local bodies, and by allowing statesto be represented in meetings of the Council of Ministers by regional ministers,an option that is currently used (in some policy areas) by Germany and byBelgium. Yet what should be emphasized in the context of this chapter is that theregions, whenever they are mentioned in acts of Community law, are referred toas a global institutional category. There is no special status for regions thathappen to be genuine member states of a federation (as in Germany), or regionsthat represent a constitutionally recognized ‘nationality’ (like Catalonia, Euskadior Galicia). Regions may therefore correspond to an ethnically or linguisticallydefined territory or not, and minority areas may have regional autonomy or not,and this choice is still entirely left to the member states’ internal constitutionalrules. In other words, the Maastricht Treaty did not introduce a European Unionregime for territorial minorities, and the more recent Treaties of Amsterdam andNice have not brought any significant changes either.

The same agnostic attitude pervades the second level, that of the EuropeanUnion’s policies. The European Community, and now also the European Union,can only act within the fields and for the purposes that are defined in theirfounding Treaties. Whereas those fields encompass all types of economic policiesand much more than that, culture, education, media and language policies werenot transferred to the European level and remain basically controlled by themember states, even though there may be occasional interference between therequirements of economic integration and national (or regional) policies ofminority protection.

Ethnic minorities are not entirely ignored by the EU

To the basic picture drawn in the previous section, of ethnic minority questionsbeing a non-issue for the European Union, I will now add a touch of nuance. Iwill, first, mention three specific cases (one might find a few more) in which theEuropean Union has been directly, though modestly, involved with ethnic minori-ties, and then, second, three structural ways in which the European Union ishaving an indirect impact on ethnic minorities and their position within theirrespective states. First the three specific cases:

• The European Community budget has been offering some financial supportto an action programme for ‘the promotion and preservation of regionaland minority languages and cultures’. The importance of this initiativeshould not be overrated. There was no firm legislative basis for it. Theprogramme was started at the insistence of the European Parliament, butnever had the formal approval of the Council of Ministers. The actualamount of the subsidy was modest,43 and was decided year by year, as partof the precarious battle between the European Parliament and the Councilon the EU budget. The action programme is being phased out, and theannounced follow-up programme has not yet been put into place.

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• The EU has played a direct role in one of the main minority conflicts inWestern Europe. The European Initiative for Peace and Reconciliation hasprovided some £234 million between 1995 and 1997 on projects inNorthern Ireland.44 This ad-hoc project was launched, it should be empha-sized, on the express invitation of the United Kingdom and Ireland, andshould therefore not be seen as an attempt by the EU to interfere in theminorities policies of its member states. The European Union was absentfrom the ‘multi-party talks’ that led to the conclusion of the Good FridayAgreement of 10 April 1998, and the European Union is hardly mentionedin the Agreement itself.45 Yet the EC peace and reconciliation programme,and its cross-border programme developed under the Structural Funds,were specifically mentioned by the British Secretary of State as havingcontributed to create the climate in which an agreement could be struck.46

• The latest round of accessions to the European Union led to the inclusion,in the constitutional charter of the Union, of the first direct hint at the exis-tence of ethnic minorities. Special Protocols to the Act of Accession ofAustria, Sweden and Finland were adopted to preserve, against the impactof EU law, the special status of the Aaland Islands (within Finland) and thespecial rights of the Sami people (in Sweden and Finland).47

In addition to these three specific references to minorities, which have limitedimportance, one can identify three indirect channels of EU influence on ethnicminority issues:

• European Community policies that do not have as their objective to affectthe position of ethnic minorities may nevertheless display such effects inpractice.48 This is most obviously so for the cultural and educational actionprogrammes that the EC has launched in the last decade, particularly sincean official green light for those programmes was given by the MaastrichtTreaty. That Treaty provides that the cultural action of the EC shall‘contribute to the flowering of the cultures of the Member States, whilerespecting their national and regional diversity’ (article 151 EC Treaty, asrenumbered by the Treaty of Amsterdam). Regional diversity is thus recog-nized as a common European value worth preserving; this obviouslyincludes territorially based cultural and linguistic differences, and one couldtherefore read in this phrase of the EC Treaty a veiled recognition of therole and place of ethnic minorities in the European integration project. Inpractice, the modest cultural programmes based on this article 151 are notparticularly aimed at minority cultures, although one may note that Ariane,the support programme in the field of books and reading,49 listed, among itsfunding priorities, translations to and from lesser used languages – minoritylanguages not excluded. Ariane is now included in the more encompassing‘Culture 2000’ funding programme of the European Union.50

Similarly, the EC regional policy stimulates economic development inmany parts of the European territory, among which are also areas inhabited

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by ethnic minorities. One particular regional development programme,Interreg, gives special support to cross-border cooperation schemes, andnaturally acquires an ethnic minority dimension in some places along theintra-Union borders, such as between the Spanish and French Basque coun-tries, or between South and North Tyrol.

• More important, perhaps, is the role played by the European Union withregard to immigrant minorities.51 Two categories of such immigrant groupsneed to be sharply distinguished here: European Union citizens (forinstance, the Portuguese community living in Luxembourg) and ‘third-country nationals’ (for instance, the Turkish community living in Germany).Indeed, the very distinction between privileged and ordinary foreigners is aresult of European integration. There are wide-ranging EC rules on the freemovement of persons and non-discrimination on grounds of nationality,which has resulted in the fact that EU citizens from other countries (and alsotheir closest relatives irrespective of their nationality) have the right to betreated, with some minor exceptions, exactly like the host state’s ownnationals. They are the privileged category of foreigners. On a second level,some international agreements concluded between the EC and third coun-tries such as Turkey or Morocco grant limited rights to the citizens of thosecountries in the employment sphere, but nothing is said about the culturalrights of immigrants from those countries. Other third-country nationals(for example, those from sub-Saharan Africa) do not possess rights underCommunity law, whether or not they have a permanent residence permit intheir host state. Of course, nothing prevents the member states fromdeciding, on their own behalf, to extend rights possessed by EuropeanUnion citizens to non-EU nationals, but this only happens occasionally, andfor limited purposes.

Therefore, the distinction between the two types of immigrant groups,although not directly imposed by Community law, is closely related to thecentral objectives of European integration and, to that extent, non-EUnationals may be called ‘Community minorities’: their minority status isrevealed by the existence of a class of ‘privileged’ aliens who have extensiverights under Community law.52 In this respect, the Italian term extracomuni-

tari, which is commonly used to describe migrants from third countries, isrevealing: these persons come from outside the European Community (which isthe literal origin of the term) but, for that reason, they also remain outsidethe national community.

This state of affairs implies that the European Union can no longerignore the questions of immigration and integration of third-countrynationals. More particularly, the creation of an internal market conceived asan area without frontiers would seem to imply the power, for the EU, toharmonize, and improve, the legal status of non-EU minority groups. Yetthe misgivings of some member states about an active role of the EuropeanUnion in this field have until now blocked any major initiatives.

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The Amsterdam Treaty may well give a new impetus to the developmentof a European Union migration policy. On the one hand, the Treaty recog-nizes more firmly than before the EU’s responsibility in matters ofimmigration, including questions relating to the status and rights of immi-grants once they are on the EU territory. On the other hand, the new article13 introduced by the EC Treaty grants to the European Union the power‘to take appropriate action to combat discrimination based on sex, racial orethnic origin, religion or belief, disability, age or sexual orientation’. Thereference to ‘ethnic origin’ must be seen as complementary to ‘racial origin’:what is meant are persons targeted for discrimination on account of theircultural characteristics, whether or not they belong to a different race;indeed, ethnic discrimination is the proper word for what is popularly but incor-rectly called racial discrimination. On 29 June 2000, the Council of theEuropean Union adopted an implementing measure of article 13 in theform of a directive on ‘equal treatment between persons irrespective ofracial or ethnic origin’.53 The effects of this potentially important piece oflegislation will only become visible in some years’ time, but it is clearlyintended to benefit non-EU immigrants, although there is no reason whythe Roma, or indeed the traditional territorially based ethnic minorities,could not also invoke its protection.

• A third indirect effect (but one that is difficult to pin down) is caused by thevery existence of the European Union as a plurinational and multiculturalcommunity of semi-sovereign states. Partly because of events in Central andEastern Europe, separatism and secession are on the European agendaagain, and have been advocated with some vigour by political forces in partsof Spain, Italy, Belgium and the United Kingdom. The European Unionhas, formally speaking, no part in these discussions, and its institutions havebeen careful not to appear to encourage separatist moves in any way. Butthe existence of the EU is an important variable in the separatism debates inWest European countries. From one side, it is argued that establishingnominal sovereignty by means of the creation of a new state is even lessmeaningful in the European Union than elsewhere in the world, because thescope for effective national autonomy is reduced anyway. From the otherside, the reply is that the close insertion of the state within Europe alsomeans that the nation-state can no longer deliver many of the benefits ittraditionally delivered, that national borders have become largely irrelevant,and that the political impulse towards secession need no longer be inhibitedby the fear of economic or welfare costs involved in separation from anexisting nation-state. Scottish nationalists may argue that, if Ireland andLuxembourg can be member states of the European Union, why shouldScotland be excluded? And if, in a few years’ time, Estonia may become amember state of the EU, why not Euskadi as well?

But there is another side to that coin. The European integration process,by promoting a habit of loyal cooperation, both in EU decision-makingitself and in the related mechanisms for coordination at the national level,

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tends to blunt the sharper separatist feelings. More generally, one mightconsider that the capacity to generate sophisticated compromises oncomplex matters, which West European politicians and officials havelearned through their participation in the EU decision-making process, isfundamentally at odds with the radical and uncompromising attitudes tradi-tionally displayed in ethnic conflicts within nation-states. The material andsymbolic rewards offered by European bargaining processes, and the disci-plining effect of those processes, may have contributed (although it would bedifficult to prove this point) to pacifying ethnic minority conflicts in placeslike Catalonia, Wales, South Tyrol and Northern Ireland.

Conclusion: ethnic minorities in an enlarged EuropeanUnion

To conclude this chapter, let me try to bring together the ‘external’ and the‘internal’ stories and imagine what could be the place of ethnic minorities in afuture and enlarged European Union. For the sake of the argument, I will brieflyindicate two contrasting scenarios for the future.

Scenario 1: Phasing out and status quo

In their recent documents addressed to CEECs, references made by theEuropean Union institutions to minority protection standards remain verygeneric. The action expected from these countries is specified, but the instru-ments or standards that serve as the basis of the EU’s exigencies are not named,perhaps for fear that they could return as a boomerang against the EU statesthemselves. Minority protection is, then, an ill-defined political requirement withwhich the CEECs are expected to comply because of the considerable carrot ofaccession offered to them. In the Accession Partnerships, there are even signsthat the EU’s concern with minorities is sliding into the background compared tothe central issue of adjustment to the acquis communautaire. The pragmaticprospect could well be that the remaining sensitive issues (Hungarians inSlovakia, the Russian populations in the Baltic and the treatment of the Roma inseveral countries) will gradually ‘solve themselves’ so that attention can beconcentrated on the economic nuts and bolts of the negotiation process. Once acountry is accepted for membership, this will ipso facto mean that the minorityquestion is settled as far as the EU is concerned. And if CEECs join the EU witha clean slate in respect of their minorities, then there will be no need for theEuropean Union itself to modify its ‘agnosticism’ in respect of minority protec-tion inside the Union. If one adds to that the strong mood of subsidiarity thatpervades the EU at present, with member states being very reluctant to transfernew powers to the European level, then the status quo becomes a likely scenario:in the enlarged EU, ethnic minority questions would remain issues that are basi-cally confined within the domestic jurisdiction and constitutional discretion ofthe states. A marginal supervision of the performance of all states will then be

Politics vs law in the EU’s approach to minorites 155

exercised, not by the European Union, but by the Council of Europe throughthe mechanisms provided under the European Convention of Human Rightsand the Framework Convention on National Minorities.

Scenario 2: A multicultural European Union

The second scenario is that the accession of CEECs will lead to a very differentEuropean Union in which ethnic minority questions will be more prominentlypresent in the institutional system and in the policies of the EU. Once theEuropean Union has let the devil escape from the bottle, through its activistminority policy towards the CEECs, it may be difficult to put it back in afteraccession. Furthermore, the EU itself may well, in the years preceding the nextenlargement, see a greater salience of ethnic minority questions, in respect ofboth immigrant and territorial minorities. Indeed, there is a certain convergenceof ‘traditional’ ethnic minority issues and issues of multiculturalism arising outof immigration. There is a strong current in political philosophy pointing outthat what is at stake, in both cases, and despite the many differences, is the recog-nition of cultural differences in society.54 The reference to ‘ethnic discrimination’ nowinscribed in article 13 of the EC Treaty after the Amsterdam reform is a perfectexpression of this convergence, and means that ethnic minority questions will,one way or the other, remain on the European Union’s agenda for the years tocome. By the next enlargement, the time may be ripe for a major reform thatcould make of the protection of various forms of cultural pluralism a centralconcern of the European Union.

Notes

1 Agenda 2000 – Volume I: ‘For a Stronger and Wider Union’ (15 July 1997), p. 52.2 Arie Bloed, ed., The Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe. Analysis and Basic

Documents, 1972–1993 (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1993), p. 93. This book alsocontains the text of the Copenhagen Document, which can be found, as well, inInternational Legal Materials, 29 (1990), p. 1306.

3 For an analysis of the functions and role of the High Commissioner, see Victor-YvesGhebali, L’OSCE dans l’Europe post-communiste, 1990–1996 (Brussels: Bruylant, 1996),pp. 522–47; and María Amor Martín Estébanez, ‘The High Commissioner onNational Minorities: Development of the Mandate’, in Michael Bothe, NatalinoRonzitti and Allan Rosas, eds, The OSCE in the Maintenance of Peace and Security (TheHague: Kluwer, 1997), p. 123.

4 Conclusions of the Copenhagen European Council, Bulletin of the European Communities6–1993, point I.13.

5 Amaryllis Verhoeven, ‘How Democratic Need European Union Members Be? SomeThoughts after Amsterdam’, European Law Review, 23 (1998), pp. 217ff. (p. 233).

6 The one-sided nature of the minority protection commitments is not due to theactivity of the European Union alone. The work of the High Commissioner forNational Minorities, mentioned above, has also been exclusively concerned withCentral, East European and former Soviet countries. This is due not to anygeographical limitation of the scope of his activities, but to the fact that his office wasset up as an instrument of conflict prevention. It so happens that minority issues in the

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West have not been perceived, rightly or wrongly, as a source of violent conflictsthreatening international stability.

7 See also, for an excellent survey, Gaetano Pentassuglia, ‘The EU and the Protection ofMinorities: The Case of Eastern Europe’, European Journal of International Law, 12(2001), pp. 3ff.

8 See the text of the opinions in International Legal Materials, 31 (1992), pp. 1494ff., andthe comments by Alain Pellet, ‘The Opinions of the Badinter Arbitration Committee:A Second Breath for the Self-Determination of Peoples’, European Journal ofInternational Law, 3 (1992), pp. 178ff. See also the detailed study by Matthew Craven,‘The European Community Arbitration Commission on Yugoslavia’, British Year Bookof International Law, 66 (1995), pp. 333ff.

9 See the analysis by Jean Charpentier, ‘Les déclarations des Douze sur la reconnais-sance des nouveaux États’, Revue générale du droit international public, 96 (1992), pp. 343ff.;for the full text of the Declaration, see Colin Warbrick, ‘Current Developments:Public International Law’, International and Comparative Law Quarterly (1992), 41, pp.473ff. (pp. 477–8).

10 See Rahim Kherad, ‘La reconnaissance des États issus de la dissolution de laRépublique Socialiste Fédérative de Yougoslavie par les membres de l´UnionEuropéenne’, Revue générale de droit international public, 101 (1997), pp. 663ff.

11 Florence Benoît-Rohmer, ‘Le Pacte de Stabilité: la première action “diplomatique”commune d’envergure de l’Union européenne’, Revue trimestrielle de droit européen, 30(1994), pp. 561ff. (p. 574).

12 For the text of the Pact on Stability in Europe, with the full list of ‘agreements,arrangements and political declarations’ annexed to it, see Florence Benoît-Rohmer,The Minority Question in Europe – Texts and Commentary (Strasbourg: Council of EuropePublishing, 1996), p. 81.

13 Treaty on Understanding, Cooperation and Good Neighbourliness between Hungaryand Romania of 16 September 1996, International Legal Materials, 36 (1997), p. 34.

14 Within this cross-border cooperation framework, the actions eligible for EU financinginclude ‘cultural exchanges’ and ‘the development or establishment of facilities andresources to improve the flow of information and communications between borderregions, including support for cross-border radio, television, newspapers and othermedia’ (Commission Regulation No. 2760/98 of 18 December 1998, Official Journal ofthe European Communities [1998], L 345/49 [replacing an earlier Regulation of 1994]).

15 The opinions were published as Supplements to the Bulletin of the European Union(1997).

16 For instance, when ratifying the Framework Convention on National Minorities,Estonia submitted a declaration stating that it understood the term ‘national minori-ties’ as referring only to citizens of Estonia. It should be noted, however, that theHigh Commissioner on National Minorities has repeatedly dealt with the position ofthe Russian-speaking communities of the Baltic countries, without first wonderingwhether they really were ‘national minorities’ in the sense of his mandate, and theBaltic governments did not object to his visits.

17 Indeed, a member of the Slovak Constitutional Court concluded his comparison ofSlovak minority legislation with that of other European countries by stating:

Comparative analysis of the internal legislation of members of the Council ofEurope regarding … the rights of national minorities demonstrates that thelegislation of the Slovak Republic relative to the question studied is entirelycompatible with the laws of other states. (original emphasis)

See J. Klucka, ‘Étude comparative des ordres juridiques internes des pays membresdu Conseil de l’Europe en matière de protection des minorités nationales (avec unaccent particulier mis sur la législation de la République slovaque)’, in Emmanuel

Politics vs law in the EU’s approach to minorites 157

Decaux and Alain Pellet, eds, Nationalité, minorités et succession d’États en Europe de l’Est(Paris: Montchrestien, 1996), pp. 189ff. (p. 205).

18 All these points can be found in the Partnership Decisions adopted by the Council on30 March 1998, Official Journal (1998), L 121.

19 Agence Europe (29 April 1998), p. 7.20 Declaration by the Presidency on behalf of the European Union on Latvia, 17 April

1998, 7676/98 (Presse 101).21 The text of the reports can be consulted on the website of the European Commission’s

DG IA: <http://europa.eu.int/comm/dg1a/enlarge/report_11_98_ en>.22 <http://europa.eu.int/comm/dg1a/enlarge/report_11_98_en/composite/210.htm>23 ‘Human Rights in the World for the years 1989 and 1990 and Community Human

Rights Policy’, Report of 5 August 1991, submitted by Mr Ken Coates on behalf ofthe Political Affairs Committee of the European Parliament, Human Rights LawJournal, 12 (1991) pp. 380ff. (p. 401).

24 But see the typology proposed by Norbert Rouland, Stéphane Pierré-Caps andJacques Poumarède, Droit des minorités et des peuples autochtones (Paris: PUF, 1996),pp.261–305; and by Roberto Toniatti, ‘Minorities and Protected Minorities:Constitutional Models Compared’, in Michael Dunne and Tiziano Bonazzi, eds,Citizenship and Rights in Multicultural Societies (Keele: Keele University Press, 1995), p.195.

25 The expression is borrowed from Yves Mény, ‘Introduction: La greffe et le rejet’, inYves Mény, ed., Les politiques du mimétisme institutionnel (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1993), pp.7ff. (p. 33).

26 For a more elaborate analysis, see Stéphane Pierré-Caps, ‘Peut-on parler actuellementd’un droit européen des minorités?’, Annuaire français de droit international, 40 (1994), pp.72ff.; and Patrick Thornberry, ‘Minority Rights’, in Collected Courses of the Academy ofEuropean Law, Volume VI, Book 2 (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1997), pp. 307ff.

27 Copenhagen Document (see n. 2), paragraph 30.28 Ford v. Quebec [1988] 2 Supreme Court Reports 712. For an exploration of the protec-

tion of language use through freedom of expression, see Fernand de Varennes,Language, Minorities and Human Rights (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1996), pp. 33–53.

29 European Court of Human Rights, Case of the Socialist Party and Others v. Turkey, judg-ment of 25 May 1998 (paragraph 47), European Human Rights Reports, 27, pp. 51ff. (p.85).

30 A similar, somewhat earlier, case involved a member state of the EU. In Greece, apolitician had been convicted for referring to the minority in Western Thrace as‘Turkish’ rather than ‘Muslim’, which is its official denomination according to Greeklaw. In that case, however, for purely procedural reasons, the European Court ofHuman Rights did not reach the question of whether a violation of freedom ofexpression had occurred (Case of Ahmet Sadik v. Greece, judgment of 15 November1996, in European Human Rights Reports, 24, p. 323 – but see the dissenting opinion ofthe judges Martens and Foighel, who do discuss the merits of the case).

31 Application No. 25035/94, Silvius Magnago and Südtiroler Volkspartei v. Italy, decision of15 April 1996, Decisions and Reports of the European Commission of Human Rights 85-A, p.112.

32 For further elaboration of this point, see Bruno de Witte, ‘Le principe d’égalité et lapluralité linguistique’, in Henri Giordan, ed., Les minorités en Europe: Droits linguistiques etdroits de l’homme (Paris: Kimé, 1992), pp. 55ff.; Varennes, Language, Minorities and HumanRights, pp. 77–89; Joseph Marko, Autonomie und Integration: Rechtsinstitute desNationalitätenrechts im funktionalen Vergeleich (Vienna: Böhlau, 1995), pp. 172–94 and276–96.

33 Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities, 1 February 1995,European Treaty Series No. 157. The state of ratifications is taken from the website of

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the Council of Europe (as updated on 11 January 2002): <http://conventions.coe.int/treaty/EN/cadreprincipal.htm>. The other, non-EU, parties to theConvention are: Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, CzechRepublic, Estonia, Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Hungary, Liechtenstein,Lithuania, Malta, Moldova, Norway, Poland, Romania, Russia, San Marino,Slovakia, Slovenia, Switzerland and Ukraine.

34 For this distinction between the rights borrowed from the European Convention onHuman Rights and the specific rights added ex novo by the Framework Convention,see Florence Benoît-Rohmer, ‘La Convention-cadre du Conseil de l’Europe pour laprotection des minorités nationales’, European Journal of International Law, 6 (1995), pp.573ff. (pp. 589–95).

35 Note that the Framework Convention is careful to recognize rights of individuals,rather than of minority groups as such. This is perfectly in line with the West Europeanhuman rights tradition.

36 The Convention was harshly criticized by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Councilof Europe, which, in its recommendation 1255 (1995), included the following para-graph:

The Convention is weakly worded. It formulates a number of vaguely definedobjectives and principles, the observation of which will be an obligation of theContracting States but not a right which individuals may invoke. Its implementa-tion machinery is feeble and there is a danger that, in fact, the monitoringprocedure will be left entirely to governments.

Similar criticism was expressed by Geoff Gilbert, ‘The Council of Europe andMinority Rights’, Human Rights Quarterly, 18 (1996), pp. 160ff. – see particularly hisconclusion on p. 189.

37 As in the title of an article by Erika B. Schlager, ‘The Right to Have Rights:Citizenship in Newly Independent OSCE Countries’, Helsinki Monitor (1997), p. 19.

38 See the separate declarations submitted, upon ratification of the Convention, byAustria, Estonia, Germany and Switzerland (to be consulted on: < http://www.coe.fr/tablconv/reservdecl/dr157e.htm>). This is a very controversial point, becausethe text of the Convention does not specify what must be understood by the term‘national minority’. In fact, providing a clear definition might well have prevented theemergence of an agreement on the Convention’s text! For the view that the term‘national minority’, as used in the Convention, should be understood more broadly asincluding immigrant communities (and Roma and Sinti as well), see John Murray,‘Should Immigrants or Roma and Sinti be Regarded as Minorities?’ in FranzMatscher, ed., Vienna International Encounter on Some Current Issues Regarding the Situation ofNational Minorities (Kehl: N.P. Engel Verlag, 1997), p. 219.

39 This is the comprehensive concept proposed by Asbjørn Eide, ‘GroupAccommodation: National Policies and International Requirements’, in Matscher,ed., Vienna International Encounter, pp. 103ff.

40 For some general considerations, see Vernon Bogdanor, ‘Forms of Autonomy and theProtection of Minorities’, Daedalus (Spring 1997), pp. 65ff.; for more detailed exami-nation of single cases of autonomy regimes established in the course of the twentiethcentury, see Ruth Lapidoth, Autonomy: Flexible Solutions to Ethnic Conflicts (Washington:United States Institute of Peace Press, 1997). A collection of papers offering acomplete tour d’horizon is Markku Suksi, ed., Autonomy: Applications and Implications (TheHague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1998). A number of reports on single countries of Western,Central and Eastern Europe were published in Local Self-Government, Territorial Integrityand Protection of Minorities, Conference Proceedings, Lausanne, 25–7 April 1996(Strasbourg: Council of Europe Publishing, 1996).

Politics vs law in the EU’s approach to minorites 159

41 See, for more details, Patrick Thornberry, ‘Images of Autonomy and Individual andCollective Rights in International Instruments on the Rights of Minorities’, in Suksi,ed., Autonomy, pp. 112–16.

42 See the analysis, written in 1990, but still broadly valid today, by Philippe deSchoutheete, ‘The European Community and Its Sub-Systems’, in William Wallace,ed., The Dynamics of European Integration (London: Pinter Publishers, 1990), pp. 106ff.

43 In the EU budget for 1998, 3,600,000 Ecu were allocated to this programme (budgetline B3–1006). Compare, for instance, with the 987,000,000 Ecu allocated in thesame budget to subsidies for tobacco production.

44 See Cathal McCall, ‘Postmodern Europe and the Resources of Communal Identitiesin Northern Ireland’, European Journal of Political Research, 33 (1998), pp. 389ff.; and,for the general context of the EU’s role in Northern Ireland, James Goodman,Nationalism and Transnationalism: The National Conflict in Ireland and European UnionIntegration (Aldershot: Avebury, 1996)

45 Agreement between the Government of the United Kingdom and the Governmentof Ireland, with (in Annex 1) the ‘Multi-Party Agreement’, International Legal Materials,37 (1998), p. 751. The minority protection aspects of the Agreement are discussed byGeoff Gilbert, ‘The Northern Ireland Peace Agreement, Minority Rights and Self-Determination’, International and Comparative Law Quarterly, 47 (1998), pp. 942ff.

46 See. the speech by Mo Mowlam, British Northern Ireland Secretary, in the EuropeanParliament on 29 April 1998, as reported in Agence Europe (30 April 1998), p. 2.

47 Protocols 2 and 3 to the Treaty of Accession, Official Journal of the European Communities(29 August 1994), C 241/352.

48 On what follows, see also María Amor Martín Estébanez, ‘The Protection ofNational or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities’, in Nanette A. Neuwahl andAllan Rosas, eds, The European Union and Human Rights (The Hague: Kluwer LawInternational, 1995), pp. 133ff. (pp. 142–54).

49 Official Journal of the European Communities (1997), L 291/26.50 Official Journal of the European Communities (2000), L 63/1.51 The question whether immigrant populations, some of them at least, can be defined

as ‘ethnic minorities’ is not uncontroversial. That definition is used in the legal andadministrative language of some countries (e.g. the United Kingdom and theNetherlands) but not of others (France and Germany). In the social science literature,though, the use of the term ‘ethnic minorities’ for migrant communities is generallyaccepted; see, among others, Stephen Castles and Mark J. Miller, The Age of Migration– International Population Movements in the Modern World (London: Macmillan, 1998),chapter 2.

52 See Tamara K. Hervey, ‘Migrant Workers and Their Families in the EuropeanUnion: The Pervasive Market Ideology of Community Law’, in Jo Shaw and GillianMore, eds, New Legal Dynamics of European Union (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp.91ff. (pp. 95–102).

53 Official Journal of the European Communities (2000), L 180/22.54 See, among others: Charles Taylor, ‘The Politics of Recognition’, in Charles Taylor,

ed., Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition (Princeton: Princeton University Press,1992), pp. 25ff.; Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of MinorityRights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995); Perry Keller, ‘Re-thinking Ethnic andCultural Rights in Europe’, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, 18 (1998), pp. 29ff.

160 Bruno de Witte

An immense increase in transnational population flows worldwide in recentdecades as a consequence of and a contributor to accelerating globalization hasmade international migrations a priority issue in the economies and politics ofsender and receiver societies and a hotly debated subject in international rela-tions.1 Millions of people have moved across statal borders on the EuropeanContinent. Reflecting the global pattern, most of these migrations move‘compass-like’ from South to North and from East to West (E–W). E–W flowsand their potential growth have been a sensitive issue in the negotiations betweenthe European Union and the East Central European candidate members toenlarge EU borders eastward.2

The issue of concern for the EU negotiators and West European publicopinion addressed in this chapter are the potential migratory consequences ofincluding three East Central European (ECE) countries – Poland, Hungary andthe Czech Republic – in the European Union. Considering the complexity ofconditions shaping transnational migrations3 and the ‘fluxibility’ of processestransforming Eastern Europe, only tentative, ‘open-ended’ prognoses contingenton the specified configurations of circumstances can be formulated; they shouldbe treated as such by the reader.

Regarding the temporal framework of the EU eastward enlargement and theproposed appraisal of future transnational migrations, I have assumed theinformal opinion among EU member governments that the formal accession tothe European Union of Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic will be delayedbeyond the ‘official’ date of 2004; the resulting freedom of movement, work andsettlement of people within the new Union borders will be suspended for a transi-tional period of no less than ten years from this accession.4 Potential transnationalmigrations from and into the newly acquired eastern parts of the EuropeanUnion are discussed within a 2000–15 temporal framework. Because of thespecific characteristics of post-1989/90 transnational migrations, whose currentvolume, mechanisms and destinations have served as the basis for evaluatingfuture trends in that region, the concept of migration as used in this analysis denotesone-way and repeated movements across nation-state boundaries for purposesother than (1) exclusively tourism and (2) cross-border shopping trips for indi-vidual/household needs, regardless of migrants’ political (legal or undocumented)

9 Transnational migration inthe enlarged EuropeanUnion

Ewa Morawska

status and the duration of sojourns abroad. The primary focus of this discussion ison the main types of transnational movements and on the common features of themacro- and micro-level contexts and mechanisms that generate transnationalmigrations from and into East Central Europe. Within the limited scope of thischapter, however, and to the extent the unsystematic data permit, the relevantdifferences between particular sender and receiver countries are noted.

The sources used for this chapter have included: statistical reports publishedregularly by EU and sender and receiver country government agencies on inter-national migrations into and out of East Central Europe from the early 1990s tothe present; twenty-odd survey and ethnographic studies conducted during the1990s in East Central and Eastern European sender and Western destinationcountries of (e)migrants; existing prognoses of future E–W migrations commis-sioned from scholar specialists by the European Union and internationalorganizations (Council of Europe, World Bank, IOM, ILO) and state nationalinstitutions;5 press reportages and secondary analyses thereof on the potentialECE migrants’ projects and preparations for transnational travels; prognosticanalyses of the economic transformation processes in East Central and EasternEuropean regions and countries, and, in particular, the effects of privatizationand foreign investment on domestic labour markets and wages; and personalcorrespondence and informal interviews with fourteen scholar and policyspecialists on the EU enlargement, migration and development, the new ECEeconomies and the economic and migration pressures in the CIS.

The main conclusions I have derived from these sources can be summarizedas follows. As part of the global population movements that result from andcontribute to growing interconnectedness among different world regions,transnational migrations from and to East Central Europe constitute an integralelement of that region’s progressive incorporation into the world-system and, inthe case considered here, the European Union. As such they will persist, makingthe interstatal boundaries within the enlarged European Union after its eastwardexpansion (when it eventually takes place) naturally and unavoidably transna-tional by linking, rather than separating, the territories and residents on two sidesof the borders through work, shopping and entertainment mini- and mezzo-regions. At the same time, although some kinds of westbound movement of EastCentral Europeans and some migrations from the East and South into EastCentral Europe are likely to maintain their current volume or even increaseduring the transitional period, even combined they will not approximate theavalanche of ‘five to seven’ million or ‘twenty to forty’ million predicted by somealarmed West European commentators. Those that do occur will be composedpredominantly of temporary, short-term income-seeking migrants who will drawfrom their home countries any public welfare provisions they receive, such asmedical insurance, unemployment benefits and social security. They will leavetheir families behind during their sojourns abroad and will not require socialwelfare provisions, parental care and public education services from the hostcountry, as some analysts of the ‘burdensome consequences’ of these migrationsfor the EU nation-states have worried they would.6

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Specifically, one of the two most common types of post-1989/90 westboundmigrations of East Central Europeans, the short-term, income-seekingArbeitstourismus of transnational migrants, who remain and engage in workabroad without appropriate immigration documents, and a much smaller tempo-rary migration of formally contracted ECE workers, are likely to retain ingeneral their current volume, destinations and characteristics. The other mostcommon category of cross-border travellers, Handelstourismus, who circumventcustoms regulations by hiding the quantity of merchandise they carry orsmuggle, will decrease in volume – in fact, the decline is already underway – tothe extent that the functions performed by the individual transnationalentrepreneurs (a large proportion of whom operate in the border regions) arebeing replaced by economic micro- to mezzo-regions with well-developedcommercial infrastructures merging both sides of the border. At the same time,professional westbound travels of highly skilled East Central Europeans are onthe increase.

While continuing to send income-seeking migrants to the West, since the1990s East Central Europe has emerged as a new (im)migration pole attractingmigrants from the East and West. Legal and undocumented income-, transit-and asylum-seeking (im)migration from territories of the former USSR,Romania, former Yugoslavia and easternmore parts of the Asian Continent,Africa and the Middle East may first decrease as the result of border controlstightened by ECE states seeking to comply with the EU acquis, but will probablygradually rebound, ‘pushed’ and ‘pulled’ by economic incentives in sender andreceiver regions and facilitated by organized and informal social networks ofassistance, or forced by ethno-religious conflicts and political turmoil in refugees’home countries. At the same time, legal and undocumented employment-seekingmigration to ECE from the West (primarily the European Union) will likelyintensify. Intra-regional employment-seeking migration between ECE countriesshould also increase.

In the remainder of this chapter I discuss, first, westbound migrations ofECE tourist-workers (because of their declining volume, cross-border travels oftourist-traders are not considered), then the main types of migration from EastEastern Europe (EEE) and Third World countries to and across East CentralEurope, and, finally, eastbound (to East Central Europe) transnational travels ofWesterners (West Europeans and North Americans).

Westbound transnational migrations of East CentralEuropeans

Clandestine income-seeking travels of ECE tourist-workers have been directedprimarily to Western Europe (85 per cent), especially to nearby Germany andAustria, and then to Scandinavia, France, the Benelux and, increasingly, Italyand Greece; also to North America (15 per cent). Current estimates of thenumber of these Arbeitstouristen are about 600,000–700,000 annually from theentire region, with average sojourns in Western Europe, often repeated a few

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times a year, lasting between three and a half and four and a half months (inNorth America average sojourns last longer: between six and twelve months). Incomparison, ECE contract workers legally employed in Western Europe at anygiven time during the year have numbered about 300,000 in total. It may benoted that the total number of work-seeking migrant citizens of ECE countriesin the West in the late 1990s was only slightly higher than the combined numberof registered (450,000–500,000 annual inflow) and undocumented worker (esti-mated at 250,000–300,000) Western (fifteen EU countries plus Switzerland andNorway and the United States) migrants in the European Union.7 Of the threecountries considered here and in proportion to the total volume of internationalmigration from each of them, Poles have engaged in such indocumentado workduring their sojourns abroad considerably more than either Czechs orHungarians.

Asked about the purposes of their international travels, nearly all respondentsin studies of westbound Arbeitstouristen conducted in recent years, returned andpotential migrants alike, have pointed either to the necessity to make additionalmoney to ‘make ends meet’ (about 60 per cent) or to the desire of dorobic sie

(Polish), significantly to elevate their socioeconomic status through the accumula-tion of material goods (about 40 per cent).8

Analyses of the mechanisms of post-1989/90 transnational income-seekingmigrations of ECEs have pointed to the following factors. In the political spherethe major contributors have been the ‘domestication’ of passports after thecollapse of communist regimes (previously, passports were granted for specificreasons upon application and were surrendered to state authorities upon return)and the elimination by most West European countries of entry visas for short-term ECE visitors (up to three months). In addition, a relatively lesserpoliticization of international tourism vis-à-vis other types of migration by thereceiver states has allowed ECE –W income-seekers to use tourism as a conve-nient ‘screen’ for the main purpose of their transnational travels. Finally, ‘gaps’in the receiver states’ immigration policies resulting from the multiple, oftencontradictory, interests involved in deciding these policies9 have further facili-tated undocumented income-seeking sojourns of ECE Arbeitstouristen. Thegeographic proximity between their home and (most popular) destination coun-tries, made closer by rapid advances in communication and transportationtechnologies, has made it easy for these migrants to avoid the existing controls bymoving back and forth across borders.

Concurrent with these facilitating circumstances, the economic conditions inboth the sender and the receiver societies have been of crucial importance ingenerating income-seeking westbound transnational travels of East CentralEuropeans. On the side of the sender societies, the primary ‘push’ factors havebeen the enduring E–W disequilibrium in economic performance (measured bythe per capita GNP, the ratio was 1:3 in 1996, a minimal improvement since1910, when it was 1:3.7) combined with structural relocations and material hard-ships affecting large segments of the region’s populations that have accompaniedthe post-communist transformation.10 The supply of income-seeking migrants

164 Ewa Morawska

on the ECE side has been met with increased demand in receiver, Western soci-eties for undocumented, cheap and dispensable labour for construction work,personal services and small shops and for buyers and sellers of contrabandmerchandise. The core Western economies have already nearly completed whatthe post-communist ones have only begun, that is, post-industrial restructuring,or a shift to short-term production of services based on small and versatilecompanies and the accompanying rapid growth of an informal sector offeringvariable, usually substandard, wages and no employment security, which isunattached to the legal-institutional structures of the fiscal and welfare systems.11

Other, micro-level factors have been instrumental in stimulating, channellingand sustaining transnational income-seeking travels of ECEs since the 1990s. Asstudies demonstrate, the critical role in shaping people’s decisions to move anddetermining destinations and volume of movement has been played by localmigration traditions and social support networks on both sender and receiversides of the migration circuit.12 Depending on the vitality of migratory tradi-tions in the region that often stretch back to the beginning of the twentiethcentury, between 33 per cent and 66 per cent of post-1989/90 ECE tourist-workers have relied on information and assistance in planning and executingtheir transnational travels provided by family members or friends in the homecountry who either had already worked in the West themselves or had helpful‘connections’ there. Between 40 per cent and 70 per cent have been helped bykin or acquaintances sojourning abroad as temporary indocumentado workers orresiding there permanently.13

The major macro- and micro-level mechanisms identified above that havesustained income-seeking transnational migrations of East Central Europeanssince the 1990s, such as the push-and-pull economic processes on the sender and receiver sides of the migration circuit, and well-established networks ofassistance along the accustomed paths of cross-border migration, will continue.Let us consider more closely first the sustaining forces of these migrations and, then, the developments likely to constrain its further growth during thedecade after the formal accession of the three ECE countries to the EuropeanUnion.

Should ECE economies grow at steady 6 per cent rate annually, the GNPs ofECE states would need twelve to thirteen years to reach the present levels ofnational output in Portugal or Greece, the poorest EU member countries thatstill regularly send their migrant workers abroad. Nineteen to twenty years wouldbe required to reach those of Austria or Great Britain. If, however, these coun-tries develop at their median rate of 1996–8, it will take the three new ECEmember states of the European Union thirty years to catch up if they maintain a5–6 per cent annual growth rate. Economists opine that even with increasedfinancial assistance from the European Union for the new members, maintainingsuch a high growth rate is rather unlikely in view of the rapidly growing deficitof foreign trade, too low shares of investment in the GNPs and too slow incre-ments in productivity in all three ECE countries.14 Although with the growth ofECE economies a dramatic ECE–West wage discrepancy will gradually

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diminish, the latter will remain wide and, thus, function as a push/pull factorthroughout the transitional period. (Even if by 2010 it reaches the current ratiobetween Portuguese or Greek and German wages, the disparity will still be awide 1:3–4, a sufficient motivation to travel for many an experienced migrantwith established contacts in occupational niches abroad.)

The steadily growing foreign investment in East Central Europe brings intothe region sought-after services and consumer goods and very much neededmodern technologies and management know-how. But thus far it has not resultedin the creation of a large pool of new jobs and is not expected to contributesignificantly to it during the coming decade. In 1998 foreign-investment compa-nies in East Central Europe employed no more than 3.5–4.5 per cent of thenational workforce in each of the three countries considered here. As indicated instudies, most foreign investors are interested in funding small- to middle-sizeenterprises employing between five and fifty people in localities with low unem-ployment, preferably large urban centres.15

Locally owned private firms in East Central Europe multiply very quickly, butmost of them are small (up to ten employees), and the turnover is rapid. In theassessment of students of ECE economic transformation, the quickest growth ofemployment opportunities in these firms has occurred in the rapidly expandinginformal sector. Although jobs in the expanding informal sectors of privatizedECE economies can be expected to become increasingly available with time,they are usually seasonal or temporal and, thus, do not constitute a stable sourceof income. Experienced migrants holding such jobs will, therefore, be likely totreat them not as a replacement for but as a supplement to their accustomedshort-term income-seeking sojourns abroad. Conversely, the great majority ofPoles, Czechs and Hungarians who in recent surveys of ECE migratory inten-tions admitted they contemplated possibilities of future short-term migration tothe West to earn money think of it as a supplement to (not the replacement of)their home-country earnings.16

The continued informalization and internationalization of Westerneconomies confronted with intensified global competition in deregulated marketsand the resulting contraction of the influence of the states on nationaleconomies, as well as the rapid ageing of the working-age population in the EU,should sustain rather than temper SE–NW income-seeking migrations fromabroad. The EU Freedom of Services (Employee Posting) Act, passed in 1971 asa step toward the greater economic integration of the European Union, hasbeen implemented in individual member-country labour markets only since themid-1980s. As a result, highly developed member countries such as Germanyand Austria opened to employers from the much cheaper labour markets ofGreece, Portugal and Spain. Subcontracted by German and Austrian firms ontheir home-country standards, workers from these countries are paid much lowerwages and, because they receive social benefits at home, require no such contri-butions from host employers.

In response to the protests against this transnational labour by native formal-sector workers in Germany, who view it as unfair competition, and modelled on

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the regulations introduced in other EU countries to deal with the same problem,the collective wage agreements law was passed in 1996; it includes a minimumwage and applies also to employees posted from abroad. It has, however, beennotoriously violated by employers, and effective enforcement by state agencieshas been almost impossible, if only because of the number of potential culpritsto investigate and prove guilty. In Berlin, for example, there were in 1998 about100,000 construction sites (with a 50 per cent annual turnover rate) and evenmore household repair and food service establishments, small suppliers andretailers of articles of everyday use and transport companies – all renowned forinformally employing low-wage foreign workers. In this situation ECEArbeitstouristen, who accept even lower remuneration than do workers from thepoorest EU member states (and who will continue to do so until their homecountries’ development reaches the level of these poorest states) and very badworking conditions to accumulate as much savings as possible in a short time,should remain in demand by native employers.17

In addition to West European employers’ interest in reducing productioncosts and increasing the competitiveness of their firms, and ineffective, poorlyenforced state controls of the growing informal economy, the demand forpersonal services in West European countries has been sustained by the rapidageing of the EU population combined with greatly increased full-time partici-pation in the labour market of women who have traditionally performed‘nurturing labour’ for their families, health care and office maintenance andcustodial staff that is not met by native workers. Both the ageing process (in theyear 2010 close to one-third of EU population will be 65 years of age or over)and the demand for inexpensive and flexible personal services in WestEuropean countries will continue in the future. Undocumented migrants,predominantly women (about 40 per cent of ECE tourist-workers in the 1990s)and students seeking seasonal employment, satisfy these labour demands andconsiderably reduce native middle-class expenses for home maintenance, care ofchildren and the elderly, and the like.18

Forty per cent of East Central Europeans (Poles ranking the highest andHungarians the lowest) who contemplate future westbound income-seekingmigrations expect help from relatives and friends at home or in the destinationcountry to realize these plans.19 When the informal economic sector in thereceiver societies remains the main opportunity for ECE migrant workers toearn sought-after income in the West – owing to high structural unemploy-ment in Western Europe, the current, limited quotas of contract workers fromEast Central Europe are unlikely to be increased in the near future (see below)– reliance on the existing personal networks of assistance or the well-testeddojścia (informal connections) and kombinacje (shady arrangements, as inwheeling and dealing) informed by the beat-the-system/bend-the-lawentrepreneurial spirit of Soviet-era provenance should continue as the impor-tant resource in arranging for jobs and lodging abroad. The previously notedinformalization of ECE economies as they adopt the Western model of post-industrial capitalism will provide the supporting environment for this

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embedded popular orientation-cum-practice of ‘working the system’ by relyingon personal connections and using roundabout or outright illegitimate meansto achieve one’s purposes.

Thus far I have focused on the circumstances likely to uphold the presentvolume, destinations, and major characteristics of ECE–West work-seekingmigrations during the transitional period after the formal accession to theEuropean Union of Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic. It is, then, legiti-mate to ask what will prevent these migrations from swelling above their currentvolume if so many forces combine to sustain them? What factors are likely toimpede such growth? A few studies of future migration plans of East CentralEuropeans have also investigated the reasons of those (the majority) who did notconsider such travels. The three most common reasons (with no country differ-ences) have been: family obligations, unwillingness to take risks and facedifficulties connected with such undertakings, and already having a secure job orone promising better rewards in the future. Interestingly, a high, 50–60 per centof respondents mentioned ‘lack of respect’ for foreigners in West Europeancountries as the reason for remaining at home.20

Other factors are likely to restrain further growth of ECE–West income-seeking migrations in the time framework considered here. The competition inthe informal sector of host economies accessible to these tourist-workers, espe-cially with (im)migrants from Third World countries where living standards areconsiderably lower than those in East Central Europe, will keep wages down. Asthe transformation progresses, wages in ECE migrants’ own countries willincrease, reducing the discrepancy between home and host societies and, thus,the motivation of people without migration experience to invest considerableenergy in organizing the trips.

Exploitative working conditions in West European informal economies relatedby those who experienced them should be an additional disincentive to manywho are unwilling to subject themselves to the stresses of undocumented sojournsand informal work. (One-third of those uninterested in migrating who mentioned‘bad experience of others’ as a disincentive probably had this aspect in mind.)21

Obtaining these competitive and exploitative jobs in the informal sector ofthe destination country will require, as it does now, reliance on personal assis-tance networks. Because they are by nature locally confined and already serve avery large number of migrants, they are likely to reach saturation sooner ratherthan later. Considering that occupational niches carved out by ECE tourist-workers in the informal economies of West European receiver countries havebeen unstable and shallow and that personal dojścia and kombinacje are a sine qua

non condition of accessing this informal job market, the inability of the assistancenetworks effectively to process, as it were, new clients should put a ceiling onfurther growth of these migrations.22

Finally, a universal impediment to (voluntary) migrations everywhere and atany time is the social-cultural value of remaining in one’s familiar place.Considering the widespread misery in the world or mere dissatisfaction with one’sstation in life, most people should set themselves – and remain – in motion in

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search of a better life elsewhere. In fact, only a minority of the disaffected decideto move. Most people are risk-averse and, thus, reluctant to move to another loca-tion even if they expect their quality of life would improve there, as they areaware of the (real or imagined) risk involved. They also have important vestedinterests, emotional and instrumental, in their own habitats: the experience-nearfamiliarity with the language, cultural rules and regulations patterning social lifeand the practical know-how of their applications; material and occupationaladvantages derived from the insider position; social acceptance and respect; theloyalty of long-time friends; a sense of security.23 East Central Europeans are, ofcourse, no different in this regard from their fellow-humans everywhere else, and,like everywhere else, the attachment to place and its many rewards have kept andwill continue to keep most of them at home even in the context of open borders,push/pull economic pressures and increased aspirations to a Western-style stan-dard of living.

One more category of transnational travellers, ‘documented’ or legal migrants,requires comment. It is composed of two groups: temporary industrial andseasonal agricultural contract workers, and highly skilled professional migrants.As I suggested earlier, the former group is likely to retain its current volume,whereas the latter will grow in numbers. Because of high structural unemploy-ment in the country, Germany, the host to the great majority of ECE contractworkers, decided in the mid-1990s to reduce the number of this contracted work-force. As the result of bilateral negotiations with each of the affected countries,however, for political (rather than economic) reasons these quotas were againincreased to their current number of about 260,000 from the entire ECE region.Considering Germany’s long-term economic problems, it is unlikely this alloca-tion will increase any further in the near future; rather, the German governmentprefers financially to subsidize job-generating projects in the ECE countries them-selves.24 For similar reasons of high domestic unemployment, further increases inECE contract-worker quotas in other West European countries seem also unlikely(they currently total about 40,000). Continued increase in this type of work-related migration can be expected, however, between the three ECE countriesthemselves. In each of these countries in 1996 there were 10,000–15,000 (total)contract/seasonal workers from the remaining two, not a large number, but it hasmore than tripled since the early 1990s and further growth is expected.25

Highly skilled international travellers, the second group considered here, bythe late 1990s constituted about 12–14 per cent of the total number of post1989/90 westbound migrants from each of the three ECE countries. These arepredominantly young (most are under 35) professional managers of successfulprivate businesses, service and production centres, including those owned byEast–West joint-venture and multinational companies that employ increasingnumbers of highly skilled native East Central Europeans competent in foreignlanguages; also scientists and researchers, including graduate and postgraduatestudents on Western fellowships.

The progressive incorporation of ECE economies into the global capitalistsystem and several EU and individual-country policies in Western Europe and

Transnational migration in the enlarged EU 169

North America to facilitate the flows of highly skilled migrants and variousexchange programmes for researchers and students will, expectedly, contributeto further growth of this movement. Although it has significantly diminishedsince 1989/90, some ‘brain drain’ from East Central Europe still exists and islikely to continue in the near future, depleting especially members of theyoungest cohorts among highly skilled international migrants, namely graduateand postgraduate students, who leave on Western fellowships and upon gradu-ation there search for – and often find – jobs in the West that offer greaterprofessional opportunities and much higher salaries than those available athome.26

Transnational movement into and through EastCentral Eurorope of East Eastern European and ThirdWorld (im)migrants

(Im)migration into East Central Europe from increasingly remote parts of theworld has been a growing new phenomenon since the early 1990s and informa-tion about this movement has been more limited and less systematic than forwestward migrations of East Central Europeans. In comparison with the latter,the recent migrations into East Central Europe have been more differentiated inkinds and more complex in characteristics.27 Temporary cross-border migrationsinclude short-term undocumented income-seeking Handels- and Arbeitstouristen,mainly from Ukraine, Lithuania, Russia and Romania; and individual and orga-nized (trafficked) illegal transit migrants heading to Western countries, primarilyfrom territories of the former Soviet Union, Southern Europe, Asia, Africa andthe Middle East. A considerable proportion of the detained transit migrantsrequest political asylum only to disappear soon after they apply. Long-term andpermanent (im)migration includes ethnic resettlers or repatriates from the East(the majority) and the West and, partially overlapping with transit migrants,refugees and asylum seekers from the neighbouring regions and more remoteparts of the world; and permanent and long-term settlers, legal and undocu-mented, from the neigbouring eastern and southern countries and, increasingly,from as far east as Asia.

An estimated nine to ten million crossings of EEE/ECE Handels- (the majority)and Arbeitstourismus occurred in 1996 (a fivefold increase since 1990). As withECE–West migrations of these two kinds, multiple cross-border travels have beencommon, on the average four to five times a year.28 Like ECE quasi-tourists in theWest, these EEE migrants have found employment in the informal economies ofECE societies. In growing demand by new capitalist enterprises in the receivercountries, EEE tourist-workers find jobs mainly in agriculture, and also in handi-crafts, services and (primarily women) in small garment-manufacturing shops.The largest numbers of them, currently estimated at 600,000–700,000 each year,come to Poland. EEE Arbeitstouristen work for about one-half of the wagesreceived by natives for comparable work and are unprotected by union agree-ments or any other social coverage.

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In the later 1990s, ECE states tightened controls of their eastern andsouthern borders in compliance with the ‘security’ and ‘home affairs’ acquis

communautaire of the European Union. Specifically, stricter visa requirements(issued only upon the procurement of formally registered invitations) for short-term tourist visits have been instituted along with the requirement for foreignvisitors to demonstrate adequate per diem funds for their sojourns. As the result,undocumented trade in the borderland areas has considerably decreased(accompanied by protests from citizens on both sides of the borders who haddrawn considerable profits from it). The number of worker-tourists has probablyalso diminished (although I have not found any reliable information to thiseffect).29 The latter is likely, however, gradually to rebound.

Several factors combine to weaken the long-term effectiveness of theseincreased controls. The corruption of EEE state officials on one side of theborders is ubiquitous, and it is quite entrenched (although comparatively lesspervasive) on the ECE side as well.30 Second, the genuine desire of ECE coun-tries to join the European Union and to comply with its acquis notwithstanding,their important political and economic interests dictate that they maintain goodrelations with their eastern or southern neighbours that are supportive of theprocesses of demoratization there and the increasing economic exchange withthese countries. Regulations prohibiting the free movement of people acrossborders, particularly international tourism, thus far the least politicized kind oftransnational migration, do not serve either of these two purposes and are likelyto be contested in the negotiations with the EU, especially by Poland, whichborders three EEE nation-states and draws significant, transformation-enhancing profits from hosting EEE informal-sector worker- andtrader-migrants. Set against each other, all these factors generate multipletensions that, in turn, will create gaps and loopholes in the ECE countries’ immi-gration policies (just as they do in the policies of the current member states ofthe European Union).

The deepening economic crisis in the countries from which most of theseincome-seeking worker-tourists originate has been reflected in declining produc-tion figures, diminishing taxes paid to state treasuries, rapidly declining exports,high instability in financial markets and, not least, the pervasive criminalizationof the economy. In view of these trends, observers of the transformationprocesses in the former Soviet bloc agree that, during the next decade or evenlonger, the developmental disparity between East Central and East Eastern partsof the region will most likely increase.31

The continued malfunctioning of EEE state apparatuses, and, of specificconcern here, irregularly paid wages in state-owned companies (still the largestemployer), will keep the population busy earning income from shabashka or ‘kick-off ’ jobs in their home-country informal economies.32 If the economic declinecontinues or even gradually reverses, profits from the earnings accrued by EEEmigrants from illicit work in ECE countries, presently four to twelve times higherthan the monthly remuneration they receive at home, will become even larger.The ‘pull’ of such opportunities in the neighbouring ECE countries, further

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strengthened by growing consumer appetites fed by the Western advertisementsand entertainment programmes watched avidly by residents of East EasternEurope since the fall of communism and the subsequent spread of cablenetworks, will most likely attract more migrants.

Like their ECE neighbours, in preparation for and during their cross-borderincome-seeking sojourns present-day EEE–ECE trader- and worker-tourists haveused the well-tested resources of blat or an exchange of personal ‘favours ofaccess’, relying on their fellow ethnics in receiver societies, friends and neigh-bours who have travelled before or are currently abroad, or direct contacts withECE employers eager to increase their profits by hiring undocumented, cheapforeign labour.33 Unlike the support networks of westbound ECE migrants,however, much more recent ‘connections’ of EEE–ECE travellers are far fromsaturation and are capable of expanding on both sides of the border so as tochannel more people in the future.

In her recent study of illicit income-seeking EEE quasi-tourists in Poland,Krystyna Iglicka found a considerable number of those travellers – especiallyamong the most highly educated migrants with a knowledge of foreignlanguages – for whom, according to their own statements, work in East CentralEurope was merely a training ground, as it were, in preparation for a move tothe informal economic sectors in the West.34 Undoubtedly, many of them willnot realize their plans, getting caught at some point in their journeys and beingsent back (and back again) to their home countries, but more than a few of themwill succeed.

Illegal ‘transit travellers’ from south-eastern parts of the world heading toWestern Europe (and further on to North America) have constituted the secondmajor category of present-day temporary migrants into East Central Europesince the 1990s. It is estimated that 25,000–30,000 of these transit migrantsdetained annually at the borders or inside each of the three ECE countriesrepresent no more than 25–30 per cent of the total number in the region. About15–30 per cent of these westbound migrants, according to current estimates ofECE border guards, arrive in East Central Europe in organized groups. Whendetained at the entry borders, transit migrants usually request asylum (anddestroy personal documents, if they have any, to avoid deportation to their homecountries), after which they disappear within the receiver ECE country, wherethey await passage to the West.35

None of the three ECE countries has thus far been found in satisfactorycompliance with the acquis communautaire in matters of ‘security’ and ‘transna-tional movement of persons’ focused specifically on frontier controls and thefight against transnational crime, but sincere efforts are being made to makefrontier controls more effective. While they are likely to result in decreased indi-vidual transit migration (there are actually indicators that a decline has alreadybegun), these efforts will probably prove less effective in the reduction of orga-nized transit.36

First, the pool of motivated potential SE–NW migrants worldwide is verylarge and, as the swelling ‘compass’-population flows everywhere indicate, when

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some compatriots succeed in making the trip, their kin and neighbours tend tofollow, regardless of the failure of others. Second, criminal courier networks thatoperate this transnational transit are very well organized and have the profes-sional know-how to evade, get ahead of or, when caught, deal with the controlsof the countries they move through. In addition, the rewards for these operationsare very high: a single passage from Asia to East Central Europe costs$5,000–$10,000 and from South Europe, $2,000–$5,000, which, consideringthat transit migrants are convoyed in groups of between fifteen and twenty-fiveto forty people, means enormous profits to be shared among the traffickers.37

The third factor that will undermine the effectiveness of strengthened controls isthe already mentioned corruption of East Eastern Europe, and, if to a lesserextent, of ECE officials responsible for controlling cross-border movement. It isunlikely to be eliminated in the near future and is especially susceptible to highmonetary rewards (and not-to-be-dismissed threats) from the organized crimeworld.

The (im)migration of political refugees and asylum seekers into East CentralEurope since the 1990s can be considered intermediate between temporary andpermanent types of migration because of its ‘unfinished’ character (should thesituation in their countries improve, those involuntary or semi-voluntarymigrants might decide to return home). Since the cessation of war hostilities inthe former Yugoslavia, the flow of refugees from that region has significantlydiminished, while the numbers of Afghan, Chechen, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankanand, more recently, African (im)migrants have increased. As indicated by theconsiderable proportion of asylum applicants who have vanished, this categoryhas overlapped with the illegal transit movement. As they have tightened controlsof their borders in an effort to comply with the frontier security acquis of theEuropean Union, especially in view of the expanding illegal transit migrationthrough East Central Europe to the West, in the last few years all three ECEstates have significantly reduced, by one- to two-thirds in comparison with theearly 1990s or to 5–6 per cent of the total volume of applicants, the number ofasylums granted.38

The refugee and asylum policies in East Central Europe at present seem to bethe most problematic among the (im)migration-related laws and regulationsimplemented in the preparation for EU accession. The basic problem inheres inthe acquis itself and, specifically, in its apparently contradictory requirements forthe implementation of policies promoting humanitarian standards such as hospi-tality to people in need of international protection, on the one hand, and, on theother, compliance with mainly restrictive measures for fighting undocumentedand unwanted immigration by imposing strict visa requirements (impossible forrefugees on the run to fulfil), the ‘safe third-country’ rule and readmission agree-ments (allowing the immediate return of asylum seekers at the border). TheNGOs (especially the UNHCR and the Helsinki Committee) in ECE countrieshave already been protesting the unlawful (according to international humanrights agreements) handling of asylum procedures, while local liberal opinionhas voiced concern about the danger from such restrictive policies on the

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fundamental issue of human rights for the barely begun processes of democrati-zation of sociopolitical institutions and cultures in the region.39

Neither the contradictions within the acquis nor the disagreements among theorganized interests and public opinion shaping ECE country immigration poli-cies and generating ‘gaps’ in their execution can be expected to disappear oreven significantly diminish in the near future; they have certainly persisted in theEuropean Union despite systematic efforts to construct one common and effec-tive policy for the region. At the same time, in East Eastern Europe andSouthern Europe actual and potential ethno-religious and national conflicts andpolitical instabilities are likely to continue to send out refugees. There is also, ofcourse, the rest of the world with many volatile places and many potential fugi-tives for whom Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, already recognized asfeasible destination or transit countries, will become migration targets shouldthese potential (e)migrants decide or be forced to move. With increased controlsstill offering loopholes, the influx into East Central Europe of refugees andasylum seekers from increasingly remote regions of the world is not likely todiminish and will probably continue to grow.

The major trends in the (im)migration of permanent and long-term settlerssince the 1990s have been, first, a rapid increase after the collapse of communistregimes in the region and, since the mid-1990s, a decline in ethnic resettlementsinto East Central Europe from neighbouring eastern and southern countries,primarily into Hungary (from Romania, former Yugoslavia and the formerUSSR) and Poland (from the former USSR), and second, the acceleratingincrease in permanent and long-term settlement in Poland and the CzechRepublic of residents of the former Soviet Union (primarily Ukraine, Russia,Belarus and Armenia), whose total numbers tripled between 1993 and 1997, andin all three ECE countries from Asia (primarily Vietnam and mainland China),whose numbers more than doubled in the same period. The Czech Republic hasreceived the largest influx of all these settlers: by 1998 more than 80,000 offi-cially recorded EEE and Third World (im)migrants (and 125,000 with Slovakstreated as foreigners since 1993) resided there, more than 50 per cent of whomwere Ukrainians and about 20 per cent Vietnamese. Nearly one-half of thosesettlers have concentrated in Prague, about 10 per cent of whose residents(including Western sojourners) are now foreign-born. In Poland in 1998, legalEEE and Third World long-term and permanent residents, mainly Ukrainians,Russians, Vietnamese and Armenians, numbered more than 40,000, and inHungary (excluding ethnic Hungarian immigrants) 25,000–30,000, consistingprimarily of long-term residents from the former Yugoslavia, China, Ukraineand Russia.40

Short-term contract workers have constituted another category of legal EEEand Third World residents in East Central Europe. Following the intermissionafter the demise of communist regimes in East Central Europe and the subse-quent invalidation of pre-existing labour contracts with Soviet bloc and othersocialist countries, since the mid-1990s, their numbers have been on the increaseagain. Like long-term and permanent settlers, most of them come from Ukraine,

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Russia, Belarus, Vietnam and (mainland) China, and, in Hungary, fromRomania and Yugoslavia (mainly ethnic Hungarians). In 1998 there was a totalof more than 50,000 of those contract workers in the Czech Republic, Hungaryand Poland, which represented a general increase of 25–30 per cent since 1994.I have included short-term EEE/Third World-ECE workers here rather than ina category of temporary migrants because of their considerable interpenetrationwith long-term and permanent settlers.41

Present trends in permanent and long-term (im)migration to East CentralEurope from Eastern and Southern Europe and Asia – that is, a decline in ethnicresettlements and, after a period of stabilization owing to stricter immigrationpolicies of ECE states, a redeveloping immigration of foreign settlers – can beexpected to continue. Both processes are, of course, contingent on the politicalstability in sender societies/regions; intensification there of ethnic conflicts andpolitical turmoil would likely reverse the decline in ethnic resettlements andaccelerate immigration of foreign settlers. The attraction of ECE growingeconomies (and the informal sectors therein) and the much higher earnings thanthose available at home will exert a stronger ‘resettlement pressure’ or bringmore foreign than ethnic immigrants because the more entrepreneurial, mobilemembers of the latter group have either already emigrated or (like ethnicHungarians from Romania and the former Yugoslavia) have the opportunity tomake short-term income-earning sojourns in ECE countries without leavingtheir homes for good. The already established but not yet saturated informationand assistance networks should attract more migrants and facilitate their move-ment through and around the gaps and loopholes in ECE countries’immigration policies.

Excluding major natural or military disasters in the former Soviet Union thatwould force hundreds of thousands of people to flee, none of the types oftransnational movement whose future increase I have evaluated as probable islikely, however, to generate a multimillion-strong influx of (im)migrants into EastCentral Europe and, further west, into the European Union. Although they willremain, as I have argued, sufficiently porous to allow for the continuation andeven some expansion of present undocumented migrations, technologicallymodernized and tightened controls of the future eastern borders of the enlargedEuropean Union implemented with the cooperation of Western European andECE governments should be effective enough to stop an avalanche of undocu-mented migrants in any of the main categories considered. Since the collapse ofthe Soviet Union, large numbers of its former citizens, especially Russians andUkrainians, have been migrating in search of (formal- and informal-sector) workacross the borders of new independent nation-states that have replaced theUSSR. In fact, the total volume of internal migrations within the former SovietUnion has been considerably larger than that of westbound flows into EastCentral Europe, and it is expected to increase further, especially to WesternSiberia and the Central Chernozem region,42 siphoning off part of the potentialwestward movement of income-seeking East Eastern Europeans. Although stillunsaturated, support networks ‘carrying’ EEE undocumented income-seeking

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migrants to East Central Europe (and further to the West) will not be able toassist millions. The recent increase of anti-foreign sentiments among ECEnationals (apparently more intense in Hungary than in either Poland or theCzech Republic) accompanying the growing presence of East and SouthEuropean and Third World (im)migrants in their countries and, in particular,tightened border controls by ECE states may dissuade some potential trav-ellers.43

Finally, the same reasons that, as I argued earlier, prevent most East CentralEuropeans from moving and thus limit the scope of international migrations –attachments to family, friends and familiar surroundings, unwillingness to takerisks, fear of the unknown – have similar effects on their eastern neighbours.Risk aversion and fear of the unknown may actually be a more potentconstraining factor among East Eastern Europeans than among East CentralEuropeans, thus preventing transnational migrations in search of better fortunesfrom turning into an overwhelming flood. They have been sustained by longtraditions of quietism and what Vladimir Shlapentokh44 calls the ‘extraordinarypatience’ of the majority of Russian and eastern (Orthodox and more Russified)Ukrainian populations in putting up with adversities rather than reaching fornew, radical means of countering them.

Transnational West–East migration

Since the 1990s East Central Europe has experienced an influx of temporaryand permanent (re-)expatriates from the West. Most of them come fromGermany, Austria, the United States, Great Britain and France. They arecomposed about equally of ECE émigrés from the communist era45 – somereturning for good, but, more commonly, shuttling back and forth between theirhome and adopted countries – and non-ECE Western expatriates. Unlike west-bound East European migrants, most of whom have elementary or high schooleducations, the great majority of Western–ECE (im)migrants are college-educated people with professional skills. Interestingly, growing numbers of themhave been employed in recent years in ECE informal economies as undocu-mented workers.

In 1996 Western residents in East Central Europe officially registered after1989/90 numbered about 120,000, or nearly three times more than three yearsearlier. About half of them had lived in the Czech Republic and the remainderin about equal proportions in Hungary and in Poland. As the economic transfor-mation of ECE societies and their legal/political cooperation with the EuropeanUnion progress over time, more Western specialists in various fields can beexpected to migrate to the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland for shorter andlonger sojourns.

The undocumented Western ‘workforce’ in East Central Europe has onlyrecently begun to attract attention from receiver-country law enforcement agen-cies and the media. Current estimates by Poland’s National Bureau of Labour ofillegally employed Western migrants in that country put their numbers at more

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than 50,000; about 40,000 has been reported for the Czech Republic. (I have notbeen able to obtain the information for Hungary.) Among the illegally employedforeigners uncovered by Polish police in 1998, Westerners – primarily Germans,Austrians and British – constituted 15 per cent.46

The West–East migration of highly skilled undocumented migrant-workershas been instigated by both the sending and the receiving sides of this transna-tional movement. The structure of unemployment in Western Europe, alreadywell advanced in post-industrial capitalism, has been different from that in theeastern parts of the Continent, where deindustrialization has begun onlyrecently in that highly skilled employees have been more affected than low-skillmanual workers. Formal and, of concern here, informal-sector work-seekingmigrations of highly skilled West Europeans have been a common phenomenonwithin the European Union, and their recent appearance in East Central Europecan be viewed as a reflection of that region’s progressive incorporation into theEuropean and larger, global system of internationalized, two-prongedeconomies.

In transforming ECE receiver societies, highly skilled Western experts arevery much in demand. Undocumented Western specialists have been especiallywelcome as consultants, managers, advertisement and PR specialists, ‘contacts’for Western markets, and so on, in small-scale foreign and joint-venture compa-nies and also in newly founded ECE-owned enterprises, and as private foreignlanguage tutors to native businessmen and managers. In addition to neededskills, they bring to their employers, who are unable to compete with large (espe-cially multinational) companies, significant savings on salaries (lower than thosepaid to their officially employed compatriots with comparable skills) and socialbenefits (received in their home countries). As long as the above inducements arepresent and the immigration controls remain ‘gappy’ – and these conditions canbe reasonably expected to last on both sides of the West–East migration circuit –informal employment of Western migrant specialists in ECE is also likely toincrease.

Conclusion

I have evaluated future trends in transnational migrations from and into Poland,Hungary and the Czech Republic during the transitional ten-year period afterthe presumed formal admission of these countries into the European Union in2005, during which the right of free cross-border settlement and employment ofcitizens of the newly admitted and old member states would be suspended. Thequestion that begs consideration is what next, after the termination of this transi-tional period?

Two possible scenarios for this post-2015 future from the viewpoint ofpresent-day realpolitik represent, respectively, the ‘best feasible’ and ‘the moreprobable’ development. (Superstitiously I leave out worst-case developments suchas a deep economic decline and/or destabilization of democracy in East CentralEurope by domestic or external forces that would lead to the stalling or the

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reversal of the multitrack transformation in that region; or, on the EU side, asevere economic recession in Western Europe or a profound political crisis withinthe European Union that would undermine or interrupt the enlargementprocess.)

The first scenario is the best-feasible (for ECE candidate-countries) version ofa ‘multi-speed Europe’, as Bart Kerremans has called the situation postulated bydifferent West European politicians in which ‘a core group of [old-member]countries integrate further and leave the others in the current EU structures.’47

Continued growth and effective restructuring of ECE economies during the‘catch-up’ decade, and a conclusion of the negotiations between EU authoritiesand ECE countries satisfactory to both sides (perhaps with the input of human-rights NGOs and Western public opinion opposed to a ‘fortress Europe’)regarding candidates’ compliance with the acquis communautaire, lead in 2015 orshortly thereafter to the acquisition by Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republicof the ‘horizontal-integration’ rights and obligations accorded full members ofthe European Union, including the freedom of EU member-country citizens tomove, work or settle anywhere within EU boundaries. As a result, the neweastern EU frontiers gain and the old western ECE borders lose importance asthe political and economic dividers. At the same time, the ‘vertical-integration’rights of decision-making in EU institutional bodies and EU monetary andforeign policy remain temporarily (but without a delimited schedule) confined, orpartially confined, to all or a nucleus group of the most powerful old-memberstates.

In this scenario, an enlarged Europe experiences so-called hunchback migra-tion,48 that is, an immediate increase in international ECE–West flows triggeredby the lifting of free movement restrictions followed by a reduction in migrationvolume. Transnational movement continues, however, prompted by densifiedECE–West European integration, or interconnectedness, to which it itselfcontributes.

Business/employment-related East–West and West–East transnational travelsof highly skilled migrants actually increase, and because ECE workers in thiscategory remain less costly to employ than their West European counterparts,the competition and, possibly, national/regional conflicts intensify in the EU’shighly skilled labour market. Restructured ECE economies generate post-industrial jobs in formal and informal sectors, and housing shortages (notoriousunder the communist regime and still persistent through the first decades after itscollapse) are finally overcome, and internal and intraregional employment-related mobility within East Central Europe considerably increases. The growthof economic mezzo-regions that integrate expanded borderlands, up to 400 kilo-metres on each side of the neighbouring ECE and West European countries,creates employment opportunities for local populations that increase cross-border job commuters.

Diminished in numbers in comparison with the earlier period because ofexpanded internal and intraregional employment opportunities, subcontractedECE migrant-workers employed in West European informal economies replace

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Arbeitstouristen not only in name but also in socioeconomic composition as theyare now drawn primarily from among the new impoverished social groups andunderdeveloped regions of ECE post-industrial societies.49 They now travel notonly to neighbouring Germany and Austria (where service workers are neededbecause of the rapidly ageing populations but where they must compete with stillcheaper Third World [im]migrant labour), but increasingly to Italy, Greece,Spain and Portugal. Employed in these countries at lower than domestic wages,they generate complaints from natives similar to those voiced today by Germanand Austrian workers about informally subcontracted Greek and Portuguesemigrants.

In the situation of free movement within the enlarged European Union, theeastern and southern borders of new EU member states, already tightened inthe transitional period, are guarded with redoubled efforts particularly againstorganized traffic of undocumented EEE and Third World migrants headingtoward the western parts of the Continent. This results in increased detentionsof such travellers but does not eliminate the transit. Short-term contract andundocumented EEE/ECE migrant workers and refugees settling in East CentralEurope are viewed with concern by first-rank member-countries of a multi-speed Europe as ever-potential encroachers but are left alone as long as theyremain in its eastern parts.

In ECE countries EEE/Third World (im)migrants constitute a considerablepresence. First-generation settlers bring in their relatives in accordance with EUfamily reunion policies, from different parts of the world come (and keepcoming) asylum seekers whose requests must be processed according to interna-tional laws and EU regulations, and undocumented migrants sneak in throughstill leaky eastern/southern borders. The (im)migration issue divides interestsand opinions in ECE societies along lines similar to those that have divided WestEuropeans. Generally supportive of this presence are informal-sector employers,economists who see these (im)migrants as contributing to their countries’ growth,and liberal political and intellectual circles, whereas ‘Hungary for Hungarians’and ‘Poland for Poles’ nationalists advocate strict immigration controls anddeportations of illegal foreign residents.

More probable is a post-2015 scenario in which the extension to ECE coun-tries of the ‘horizontal’ rights and obligations such as the free transnationalmovement of persons and trade is delayed beyond the repeatedly postponedtimetables. (Flowing primarily West to East, capital would most likely beexcluded from these restrictions.) Three (likely intertwined) problems wouldcause this situation. First, one or more ECE countries may fail to comply to thesatisfaction of the responsible EU institutions with either part of the ‘parallelprinciple’ introduced at the 1999 EU summit in Helsinki as the basis for evalua-tion of candidates’ readiness for membership: implementation of the specificparts of the acquis and – a new requirement more difficult to meet outside of theEU structures – demonstration of minimum acceptable levels of environmentalprotection, transportation infrastructure, food production regulatory codes, andso on. (Since the EU Agenda 2000 envisions subsequent enlargements not

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individually but as groups-of-countries,50 such an evaluation of one countrywould most likely hinder acceptance of the remaining two.) Second, repeateddelays may result from a prolonged impasse in intra-Union negotiations of thepending reform of the EU budget, specifically the redistribution of structural-reform funds assigned to lesser developed EU members (to include, besideslong-term South European, also new East Central European recipients) and ofthe contributions toward this purpose by richer countries. Third, there may be apersistence of the opposition by particular EU member states or ECE countriesto specific items/aspects of the free movement acquis (e.g. free trade in some agri-cultural products) perceived as detrimental to the interests of their nationaleconomies or occupational strata.

The prolonged-delay scenario would not change the basic mechanisms anddirections of international migrations from and to East Central Europe, andE–W borders would remain transnational against the restrictions. But the overallcosts of persistent constraints would surpass the advantages. To the disadvantageof both sender and receiver countries it would, of course, limit the exchange ofhighly skilled migrants and make the control of E–W international ‘migrantcrime’ less effective or Europe’s eastern borders more porous to organized traf-ficking in human beings, drugs and stolen merchandise. As in the first scenario,however, assuming continued economic growth in the region, internal and intra-and mezzo-regional migrations of ECEs would increase significantly, while ECEArbeitstouristen, probably in reduced numbers, would continue their income-seeking migrations in search of income in the informal sectors of Westerneconomies. As in the first scenario, too, the presence of EEE and Third Worldsettlers and refugees in Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic would growlarger and become a divisive issue in immigration policy-making and publicopinion in each of these ECE countries.

In both cases, whether integrated as lower-rank members into a multi-speedEuropean Union or kept nit ahin nit aher (neither here nor there) at its threshold,ECE countries would remain poor cousins to their Western partners. The lattersituation, however, would be not only more ‘wasteful’ economically but alsomore harmful politically for both eastern and western parts of Europe. Evenwith vertical-integration constraints, the free movement of persons within theenlarged European Union would stimulate professional and social contactsamong students, civil servants, local- and regional-level organizational leadersand professionals from eastern and western parts of the Continent. Suchsustained exchanges would create dense institutional and informal networks ofsupport for the consolidation of democratic societies and cultures in East CentralEurope. These networks could also be used to lobby for gradual elimination ofvertical inequality within EU structures. With increased contacts between ECEcountries and their eastern and southern neighbours, these contacts would alsoextend farther east and south, strengthening there the democratic ideas and theknow-how of their implementation. In the prolonged suspension of the rights offree movement scenario, all these contacts would be considerably sparser andless systematic and their effects much more limited.

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More importantly, an indeterminate delay of the integration would bestrongly demoralizing and alienating to ECE political parties and public opinionsupportive of the accession. (Although they would occupy a lower-rank positionin a multi-speed Europe, ECE countries would share their ‘vertical exclusion’with less powerful and poorer EU member states.) The credibility of pro-Europepolitical parties in East Central Europe, sustained during the catch-up decade ofeconomic growth assisted by EU funds in the expectation of full-rights integra-tion at the conclusion of the transitional period, would be seriously undermined,leaving public space and disenchanted public opinion to anti-Western national-istic groups and sentiments. Considering that in the enduring nationalisttraditions in eastern parts of the Continent (Czechs possibly excepted) anti-Western has been synonymous with anti-liberal-democratic, such politicalreorientation brought about by the prolonged delay in the integration into theEU of the first countries from the eastern part of the Continent would under-mine, in turn, the consolidation of democracy in that region and, thus, chancesfor a peaceful coexistence of all Europeans.

Notes

1 On the volume, mechanisms and destinations of contemporary global migrations,see, e.g., Tomas Hammar, Grete Brochmann, Kristof Tomas and Thomas Faist, eds,International Migration, Immobility and Development (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1997); Wayne Cornelius, Philip Martin and James Hollifield, eds, ControllingImmigration: A Global Perspective (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994);Stephen Castles and Mark Miller, The Age of Migration: International Population Movementsin the Modern World (London: Macmillan, 1993); Mary Kritz, Lin Lean Kim andHania Zlotnik, eds, International Migration Systems: A Global Approach (Oxford: ClarendonPress, 1992).

2 On contemporary E–W migrations, see Tomas Frejka, ed., International Migration inCentral and Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States (New York andGeneva: UN Economic Commission for Europe, 1996); Mirjana Morokvasic, ‘Entrel’Est et l’Ouest, des migrations pendulaires’, in Mirjana Morokvasic and HedwigRudolph, eds, Migrants: Les nouvelles mobilités en Europe (Paris: Éditions L’Harmattan,1996), pp. 119–58; Ewa Morawska and Willfried Spohn, ‘Moving Europeans:Contemporary Migrations in a Historical Perspective’, in Wang Gungwu, ed.,GlobalHistory and Migrations (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), pp. 23–61; Trends inInternational Migration. Continuous Reporting System on Migration (Paris: OECD, 1998). Onwestbound population movement as a sensitive issue in the enlargement negotiations,see Bart Kerremans, ‘Eastward Enlargement and the Dilution of the EuropeanUnion’, Problems of Post-Communism (September/October 1997), pp. 44–54; SandraLavenex, ‘Asylum, Immigration, and Central-Eastern Europe: Challenges to EUEnlargement’, European Foreign Affairs Review, 3:2 (1998), pp. 275–94; Rey Koslowski,‘European Migration Regimes: Emerging, Enlarging, and Deteriorating’, Journal ofEthnic and Migration Studies, 24:4 (1998), pp. 735–49.

3 For reviews of these contributing elements and major (im)migration theories, seeDouglas Massey, Worlds in Motion: Understanding International Migration at the End of theMillennium (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Hammar et al., eds, InternationalMigration.

4 The officially endorsed Agenda 2000 Blueprint for Enlargement (1997) sets this date for2003. Recently, however, EU officials have repeatedly mentioned in public the proba-bility of a delay in this agreed-on timetable owing to the necessity of carrying out the

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reforms of EU budgetary and agricultural policies before admitting new members(see The Economist editorial on 7 November 1998, ‘Widening the European Union –But Not Too Fast’ [p. 51] ). On ‘gradual integration’ of the new member countriesinto the European Union, see Christopher Preston, Enlargement and Integration in theEuropean Union (London: Routledge, 1997); Kerremans, ‘Eastward Enlargement’;Migration and Asylum in Central and Eastern Europe, Working Paper (Strasbourg: EuropeanParliament, Directorate General for Research, 1998); Wernee Weidenfeld, ed., A NewOstopolitik: Strategies for a United Europe (Gutersloh: Bertelsmann Foundation Publishers,1997).

5 Unfortunately, most of these prognoses have shortcomings that make their utilityrather limited, either due to the exclusive focus on legal migrants (a large majority ofECE cross-border travellers are undocumented); the lack of distinction betweenpermanent and temporal migrations (most of contemporary ECE migrations havebeen short-term, back-and-forth travels); the reliance on respondents’ declaredgeneral ‘wish to travel abroad’ as the basis for the assessment of the actual migratorypotential. I have selectively used the parts of these reports that, in my judgement,were not or only minimally affected by those shortcomings.

6 For critical assessments of the ‘flood from the East’ prognoses, see Richard Baldwinand Pertti Haaparanta, eds, Expanding Membership in the European Union (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1995); Trends in International Migration. Continuous ReportingSystem on Migration (Paris: OECD, 1998); Thomas Bauer and Klaus Zimmermann,‘Integrating the East: The Labor Market Effects of Immigration’, SELAPO Seminarfor Labor and Population Economics (Working Paper No.8, 1997); DietrichThranhardt, ‘European Migration from East to West: Present Patterns and FutureDirection’, New Community, 22:2 (1996), pp. 227–42.

7 Information on registered West–West migration was compiled from Trends inInternational Migration (1998); Eurostat Yearbook (Luxemburg, 1997); Council of EuropeReport on Europeans Living Abroad (1996). Figures on undocumented worker migrantsfrom member countries in the European Union are my (conservative) estimate andare confirmed by my European colleagues, who are migration specialists, as ‘possible’or ‘likely’ but unfortunately, no more reliable data exists at this moment.

8 Social surveys, ethnographic studies and field reports that served as sources for thisand the following information about ECE (and later EEE) migrants’ purposes,support networks and orientations informing their actions include (in alphabeticalorder): Mariola Balicka, ‘Przemyt bez granic’, Polityka (4 January 1997), pp. 61–5;Barbara Cieślinska, Małe miasto w procesie przemian w latach 1988–1994 (Białystok:Wydawnictwo FUW, 1992); Norbert Cyrus, ‘Zur Situation irregularer polnischerZuwanderinnen in Berlin’, Bericht der Berliner Fachkomission ‘Frauenhandel’ (Berlin, 1997)and ‘In Deutschland arbeiten und in Polen leben: Was die neuenWanderarbeiterInnen aus Polen bewegt’, in Zwischen Flucht und Arbeit: Neue Migrationund Legalisierungs debatte, ed. by Büro Arbeitschwerpunkt Rassismus- und Fluchtlingspolitik(Hamburg: Verlag Libertore Assoziation, 1995); Ewa Domaradzka, ‘PolacyZatrudnieni Zagranicą i Cudzoziemcy Pracujący w Polsce’, Polityka Społeczna,274/275 (November–December 1996), pp. 16–18; Dusan Drbohlav, ‘UkrainianWorkers Operating in the Czech Republic’, paper presented at the ‘Conference onCentral and Eastern Europe: New Migration Space’ ( Pułtusk, Poland, 11–13December 1997); Krystyna Iglicka, ‘The Economics of Petty Trade on the EasternPolish Border’, in Krystyna Iglicka and Keith Sword, eds,The Challenge of East–WestMigration for Poland (London: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 120–44; Malgorzata Irek, DerSchmugglerzug (Berlin: Das Arabische Buch, 1998); Ewa Jazwinska and Marek Okólski,Causes and Consequences of Migration in Central and Eastern Europe (Warsaw: Institute forSocial Studies/University of Warsaw, 1996); idem, eds Ludzie Huśtawce, (WarsawScolar, 2001); Bożena Karpiuk, Emigracje Zarobkowe Mieszkańców Siemiatycz do Brukseli,Ph.D. dissertation (Filia Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego w Bialymstoku, 1997); Wojciech

182 Ewa Morawska

Markiewicz and Jacek Żalikowski, ‘Wlew z Przemytu’, Polityka (25 July 1998), pp. 6–8;Frauke Miera, ‘Are Recent Migrants to Berlin Part of a Polish Community?’, paperpresented at the ‘Conference on Central and Eastern Europe: New Migration Space’( Pułtusk, Poland,: 11–13 December 1997); Władysław Misiak,. ‘Losy i AktywnośćPolaków w Berlinie (Analiza Wyników Badań 1994r)’, Słowo, special issue on Poles inBerlin (Berlin: Polskie Duszpasterstwo Katolickie, 1995), pp. 23–65; Rajmund Mydeland Heinz Fassmann, Nieleglani Robotnicy Cudzoziemscy i Czarny Rynek Pracy (Cracow:Institite of Geography of the Jagiellonian University, 1997); Ewa Ornacka and JacekSzczesny, ‘Gastpracownicy’, Polityka (20 December 1998), pp. 26–8; TadeuszPoplawski, ‘Strategie Migracyjne i Sieci Powiazan’ (unpublished manuscript, 1995);Serhyi Pyrozhkov, Causes and Consequences of Emigration from Central and Eastern Europe:The Case of Ukraine (Report to the UN Economic Commission for Europe, 1995);Krystyna Romaniszyn, ‘Wspòłczesna Nielegalna Migracja Zarobkowa z Polski doGrecji w Perspektywie Procesu Integracji Europy’, Migracje i Społeczenstwo, 2 (1997),pp. 153–64; Wiltrud Schenk, ‘Grenzgegerinnen’, Beitrage zur Feministische Theorie undPraxis, 34 (1993), pp. 70–8; Beata Siewiera, ‘Les immigrés polonias sans documents’,in Johan Leman, ed.,Sans documents: Les immigrés de l’ombre (DeBoeck Université, 1995),pp. 71–112; Audra Sipavicene, International Migration in Lithuania: Causes andConsequences (Report to the UN Economic Commission for Europe, 1995); KeithSword, ‘Cross-Border “Suitcase Trade” and the Role of Foreigners in Polish InformalMarkets’, in Iglicka and Sword, eds, The Challenge of East–West Migration, pp. 145–67;Ewa Wilk, ‘Turysta czyli Zawodowiec’, Polityka (24 August 1996), pp. 52–3; GrzegorzZietkiewicz, Polen in Berlin-Polacy w Berlinie (Berlin: Die Ausländerbeauftragte desSenats, 1996).

9 Cornelius et al., eds, Controlling Immigration; Virginie Guiraudon, International HumanRights Norms and Their Incorporation: The Protection of Aliens in Europe (EuropeanUniversity Institute Working Paper, EUF 98/4, 1998).

10 GNP rates estimations from Ivan Berend, Central and Eastern Europe, 1944–1993: Detourfrom the Periphery to the Periphery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996);Gudrun Biffl, ed., Migration, Free Trade and Regional Integration in Central and EasternEurope (Vienna: Verlag Osterreich, 1997); Stanley Black, ed., Europe’s Economy LooksEast (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Steven Turnock, The EastEuropean Economy in Context (London: Routledge, 1997); Czarina Wilpert, ‘The NewMigration and the Informal Labour Market in Germany’ (unpublished manuscript,1998); Morawska and Spohn, ‘Moving Europeans’. It should be noted, however, thatthere are differences between countries in the level of economic development withinEast Central Europe: the 1995 per capita GNP in the Czech Republic, for example,was 45 per cent (it has since decreased by seven points as the result of the economicdifficulties in this country) and in Poland 33 per cent (it has since increased by twopoints) of the average figure for Western Europe and the United States combined.

In 1996 the unemployment in East Central Europe ranged, depending on subre-gions, between 10 per cent and 35 per cent, while 20–5 per cent of the employedpopulation in each of the ECE countries had lived below the poverty level, and closeto one-third experienced difficulties in making ends meet. Information compiled fromTurnock, East European Economy in Context; Mieczysław Bąk, Przemysław Kuławczukand Ireneusz Hampel, eds, Deregulacja Rynku Pracy (Warsaw: Institute for PrivateEnterprise and Democracy, 1997); Janos Hoos, ‘Country Report: Hungary’, Journal ofTransforming Economies and Societies (Spring 1997), pp. 54–67; Endre Sik, ‘The Social,Economic and Legal Aspects of Migration in Contemporary Hungary in Relationwith the Accession to the European Union’ (unpublished manuscript, 1998); andoccasional press reports.

11 On the informal economy in post-industrial capitalism, see Alejandro Portes, ManuelCastells and Lauren Benton, eds, The Informal Economy (Baltimore: Johns HopkinsUniversity Press, 1989); Saskia Sassen, ‘Immigration and Local Labor Markets’, in

Transnational migration in the enlarged EU 183

Alejandro Portes, ed., The Economic Sociology of Immigration (New York: Russell SageFoundation, 1995), pp. 87–127. This informalization, it should be noted, has affectedspecific regions and cities of the European Union unevenly – more so theMediterranean than the Nordic regions and global cities (such as Berlin or London)than cities less ‘densely’ connected to the world economy.

12 On the importance of local migration traditions and social support networks inshaping past and present transnational migrations (not unique to East CentralEurope), see Massey, Worlds in Motion; Hammar et al., eds, International Migration; EwaMorawska, ‘The Sociology and Historiography of Immigration’, in Virginia Yans-McLaughlin, ed., Immigration Reconsidered: Sociology, History, and Politics (New York:Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 187–241.

13 As studies show, there are local areas in East Central Europe traditionally sendingincome-seeking migrants to particular destinations in the West: in Poland, forexample, the Podhalans have travelled to Lower Austria and to Chicago, thePolesians to Belgium and France, those from the Poznań province to Berlin inGermany. In contrast, the poor Swietokrzyskie voivodship or the Ciechanow andOstroleka counties, which suffer high unemployment but do not have ‘their own’well-travelled paths of transnational movement, do not send many migrants abroad.Data from Jazwinska and Okólski, Causes and Consequences of Migration; Marek Okólski,‘Regional Dimension of International Migration in Central and Eastern Europe’,Genus, LIV:1–2 (1998), pp. 11–36.; Cieslinska, Male miasto w procesie przemian; Karpiuk,Emigracje Zarobkowe Mieszkancow; Siewiera, ‘Les immigrés polonias sans documents’;Poplawski, ‘Strategie Migracyjne i Sieci Powiazan’; Mydel and Fassmann, NieleglaniRobotnicy Cudzoziemscy; this author’s ongoing study of the Polish colony in Berlin. For asimilar differentiation in Hungary, see Agnes Hars, ‘Hungary and the Enlargement ofthe European Union’ (unpublished report for the World Bank, 1998); in the CzechRepublic, see Regional Development: Central and Eastern Europe, The Impact of theDevelopment of the Countries of Central and Eastern Europe on the Community Territory(European Commission Regional Policy and Cohesion Studies, 1996). HeinzFassmann and Christiane Hintermann, Migrationspotential Ostmitteleuropa (Vienna: ISR-Forschungsberichte, Working Paper No. 15, 1997) discuss subregional differences inmigratory flows in all three countries.

14 The GNP growth rates are compiled from Weidenfeld, ed., A New Ostpolitik; ExportMarketing, ‘10 Lat za Grekami’, editorial (1 November 1998); Regional Development:Central and Eastern Europe. The unlikely maintenance of the high rate is from Black,ed., Europe’s Economy Looks East; Turnock, East European Economy in Context; EuropeanEconomy 1996; Randall Filer, ‘The Role of Labor Market Institutions in Creating aDynamic Labor Market’, and Marek Góra, ‘Rynek Pracy w Świecie CiagłejRestrukturyzacji’, both papers presented at the Conference on The Creation of NewJobs and Economic Restructuring in Poland (Warsaw: The Case Foundation, 23–24October 1998).

15 Information compiled from Turnock, East European Economy in Context; StanleyPaliwoda, ‘Capitalizing on Emergent Markets in Central and Eastern Europe’, inWilliam Nicoll and Richard Schoenberg, eds,Europe Beyond 2000: The Enlargement of theEuropean Union Toward the East (London: Whurr Publishers, 1998), pp. 223–37;Mieczysław Bąk and Przemysław Kulawczuk, eds, Wpływ Inwestycji Zagranicznych naGospodarkę Polski (Warsaw: PAIZ, 1996); Maria Jarosz, ed., Foreign Owners and PolishEmployers of Privatized Enterprises (Warsaw: Institute of Political Studies Polish Academyof Sciences, 1997); Regional Development: Central and Eastern Europe; Gabor Hunya,‘Foreign Direct Investment and Its Effects in the Czech Republic, Hungary, andPoland’, in Gudrun Biffl, ed.,Migration, Free Trade and Regional Integration in Central andEastern Europe (Vienna: Verlag Österreich, 1997), pp. 137–74; Daniela Bobeva,. ‘PolicyImplications of Foreign Direct Investment in the Czech Republic, Hungary, andPoland’, in Biffl, ed.,Migration, Free Trade and Regional Integration, pp.175–8; Jean-Pierre

184 Ewa Morawska

Garson, Dominique Redor and Georges Lemaitre, ‘Regional Integration and theOutlook for Temporary and Permanent Migration in Central and Eastern Europe’,in Biffl, ed.,Migration, Free Trade and Regional Integration, pp. 299–334; David Dyker andStanisław Kubielas, ‘Technology Patterns in the Globalization of the PolishEconomy’, Warsaw University Faculty of Economic Sciences, Economic DiscussionPaper No. 42. (1998). Also my personal correspondence and interviews with Polishand Hungarian economists – authors of the studies cited here.

16 On large and growing informal sectors in post-communist economies in the region,their size, endurance, and employee profiles see Istvan Gabor, ‘Modernity or a NewKind of Duality? Second Thoughts About the “Second Economy”’, in Janos MatyasKovacs, ed.,Transition to Capitalism? (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers,1994), pp. 3–20; Endre Sik, ‘From Multicolored to the Black and White Economy:The Hungarian Second Economy and the Transformation’, International Journal ofUrban and Regional Research 18:1 (1994), pp. 46–68; Endre Sik, ‘Network Capital inCapitalist, Communist and Post-Communist Societies’, International Contributions toLabor Studies, 4 (1994), pp. 73–93; Endre Sik, ‘The Size of the Unregistered Economyin Post-Communist Transformation’ (unpublished manuscript, 1994); Szara Gospodarkaw Polsce: Rozmiary, Przyczyny, Konsekwencje (Warsaw: Studia i Prace Zaklady BadanStatyst.-Ekonom. GUS i PAN, zeszyt, 1996), p. 233; Bąk et al., eds, Deregulacja RynkuPracy; Judit Juhasz, ‘Survey of Illegal Labor Migration and Employment in Hungary’(unpublished report for the World Bank, 1998); Kovacs, ed., Transition to Capitalism?;Hidden Economy in Hungary (Budapest: Hungarian Central Statistical Office, 1998). Ontemporary income-seeking purposes of ECE westbound migrants, see MigrationPotential in Central and Eastern Europe (Geneva: IOM, 1998); Fassmann andHintermann, Migrationspotential Ostmitteleuropa; Hars, ‘Hungary and the Enlargementof the European Union’; Sik, ‘The Social, Economic and Legal Aspects of Migrationin Contemporary Hungary’.

17 Information on the Freedom of Services Act and its implementation in the individualmember countries from Uwe Hunger, ‘Social Citizenship and TransnationalMigration: The Political Economy of Temporary Labor Migration within theEuropean Union’, paper presented at the conference on Migration and the Welfare inContemporary Europe (Florence: European University Institute, May 1998); on theFSA consequences for German construction industry, and on the informal-sectoreconomy in Berlin, see Wilpert, ‘The New Migration and the Informal LabourMarket in Germany’; see Norbert Cyrus, ‘In Deutschland arbeiten und in Polenleben’; Bauer and Zimmermann, ‘Integrating the East’.

18 See David Coleman, ‘Contrasting Age Structures of Western Europe and EasternEurope and the Former Soviet Union: Demographic Curiosity or Labor Resource?’Population and Development Review, 19:3 (1993), pp. 523–51; Trends in InternationalMigration (1998); Black, ed., Europe’s Economy Looks East; also Elmar Honekopp,‘Labour Migration to Germany from Central and Eastern Europe: Old and NewTrends’ (Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung Nurnmerg, Working PaperNo. 23, 1997); Michael Bommes and Jost Halfmann, eds, Migration in nationalenWohlfahrtsstaaten. Theoretische und Vergleichende Untersuchungen (Osnabrück: University ofOsnabrück Press, 1998); Keith Banting, ‘Social Rights and the Multicultural WelfareState’ (Florence: European University Institute, Forum on International Migrations,Working Paper MIG/43, 1998).

19 Migration Potential in Central and Eastern Europe; see Fassmann and Hintermann,Migrationspotential Ostmitteleuropa.

20 Migration Potential in Central and Eastern Europe; Fassmann and Hintermann,Migrationspotential Ostmitteleuropa.

21 See Migration Potential in Central and Eastern Europe; Thomas Bauer, Andreas Million,Ralph Rotte and Klaus Zimmermann, ‘Immigrant Labor and Workplace Safety’,Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit (Working Paper No. 16, 1998).

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22 On the saturation of transnational support networks, see Massey, Worlds in Motion; alsoMarek Okólski and Dariusz Stola, ‘Migracje Miedzy Polska a Krajami UniiEuropejskiej w Perspektywie Przystapienia Polski do UE’ (unpublished report forKPZK PAN, 1998).

23 For an excellent discussion of different rewards from immobility, see Hammar et al.,eds, International Migration.

24 See Hedwig Rudolph, ‘The New Guestworker Schemes in Germany and TheirImplementation’, paper presented at the conference on Dilemmas of ImmigrationControl in a Globalizing World. (Florence: European University Institute, 11–12 June1998); Honekopp, ‘Labour Migration to Germany from Central and EasternEurope’.

25 The data and prognosis from Trends in International Migration (1998); Turnock, EastEuropean Economy in Context; Marek Okólski, ‘Recent Migration in Poland: Trends andCauses’, in Iglicka and Sword, eds, The Challenge of East–West Migration.

26 Estimates compiled from Zsuzsa Berencsi and Endre Sik, ‘Intentions to Emigrate andto Work Abroad in Hungary in 1993–1994’, in Maryellen Fullerton, Endre Sik andJudit Toth, eds, Refugees and Migrants: Hungary at a Crossroads (Budapest: Institute forPolitical Science of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 1995), pp. 129–42; JuditJuhasz, ‘Hungary’, in Frejka, ed., International Migration in Central and Eastern Europe andthe Commonwealth of Independent States, pp. 69–80; Vladimir Cermak, ‘Talents inMigration Process’, and Eva Uhlirova, ‘Potential Emigration from Prague after the“Velvet Revolution”, both papers presented at the International Conference ‘Centraland Eastern Europe New Migration Space’ ( Pułtusk, Poland: 11–13 December1997).

On highly skilled ‘brain drain’ (e)migration from East Central Europe during the1990s, see Dominique Redor, ‘Les migrations de specialistes hautement qualifiésentre l’Europe centrale et l’Union Européenne: analyse et perspectives’, Revue d’étudescomparatives Est–Ouest, 3 (Septembre 1994), pp. 161–78; Mary Redei, ‘Hungary’, inSolon Ardittis, ed., The Politics of East–West Migration (London: St Martin’s Press,1994), pp. 86–97; Felicitas Hillmann and Hedwig Rudolph, Jenseits des Brain Drain: ZurMobilität westlicher Fach- und Führungskrafte nach Polen (Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin FurSocialforschung, Working Paper FS I, 1996), pp. 96–103. See Janusz Hryniewicz,Bogdan Jatowiecki and Andrzej Mync, Ucieczka Mozgow z Nauki i Szkolnictwa Wyzszegow Polsce w latach 1992–1993 (Warsaw: Studia Regionalne i Lokalne UW, 1994);Barbara Rhode, ‘Brain Drain, Brain Gain, Brain Waste, Reflections on theEmigration of Highly Educated and Scientific Personnel from Eastern Europe’, inRussell King, ed., The New Geography of European Migrations (London: Belhaven Press,1993), pp. 228–45; Trends in International Migration (1998); Activities of the Council ofEurope in the Migration Field (Strasbourg: Council of Europe, 1998).

27 Jewish emigrants from the former Soviet Union, the majority of whom leave for theUnited States, Israel and, increasingly in the last decade, Germany, have beenexcluded from this discussion.

28 This and the following information compiled from Marek Henzler, ‘Unia od Bugu’,Polityka, (February 23, 2002), pp. 38–41; Iglicka, ‘The Economics of Petty Trade’;Sword, ‘Cross-Border “Suitcase Trade” ’; see also Pyrozhkov, Causes and Consequences ofEmigration; Dariusz Stola, ‘Income-Seeking Foreigners in Poland in the 1990s: Quasi-Migrants from the Former USSR’, paper presented at the ‘Conference on Central andEastern Europe: New Migration Space ( Pułtusk, Poland, 11–13 December 1997);Activities of the Council of Europe in the Migration Field (Strasbourg: Council of Europe,1998); Dusan Drbohlav and Ludek Sykora, ‘ Gateway Cities in the Process of RegionalIntegration in Central and Eastern Europe: The Case of Prague’, in Biffl, ed., Migration,Free Trade, and Regional Integration in Central and Eastern Europe, pp. 215–38; Fullerton et al.,Refugees and Migrants; Sipavicene, International Migration in Lithuania; Anatoli Vishnevskyund Zhanna Zayonchkovskaya, ‘Auswanderung aus der fruheren Sowjetunion und den

186 Ewa Morawska

GUS-Staaten’, in Heinz Fassmann and Rainer Münz, eds, European Migration in the LateTwentieth Century (Aldershot: Edward Elgar: 1994), pp. 365–90. Specifically onRomanian trader- and worker-tourists in Hungary, treated here jointly with EEEs, seeRachid Benattig and Olivier Brachet, ‘Les dynamiques migratoires roumaines’,Migrations Études, 81 (July–August 1998), pp. 1–12; Gheorghiu Dorel, ‘Romania’(unpublished report prepared for OECD: October 1997).

29 On the basis of a longitudinal survey of ‘comecons’ (international street bazaars) and‘slave’ markets (well-known places in the cities where informal labour is hired) inHungary, Endre Sik (‘The Social, Economic and Legal Aspects of Migration inContemporary Hungary’) has concluded that the number of undocumented Handels-and Arbeitstouristen decreased between 1995 and 1998. Because the survey consisted ofself-administered questionnaires (with a response rate of 28–32 per cent) filled out bylocal authorities – the host-country representatives, undocumented tourist-workers/traders and their local partners try to stay out of sight at all costs – and, in addition,comecons and slave markets in the capital city of Budapest with the largest informalsector were not included in the sample, I am not convinced that these findings areindeed representative.

30 See Hars, ‘Hungary and the Enlargement of the European Union’; Maria Los,‘ “Virtual” Property and Post-Communist Globalization’, Demokratizatsiya. The Journalof Post-Soviet Democratization, 6:1 (1998), pp. 77–86. Specifically on corruption ofborder officers, see Marek Jerczynski,. ‘Patterns of Spatial Mobility of Citizens of theFormer Soviet Union’, in Iglicka and Sword, eds,The Challenge of East–West Migration,pp. 105–19.

31 For the assessment of the economic and political situation and prognoses for EEEcountries, see Peter Reddaway, ‘Possible Scenarios for Russia’s Future’, Problems ofPost-Communism (September/October 1997), pp. 38–43; Black, ed., Europe’s EconomyLooks East.

32 On these activities of Russians and Ukrainians in the 1990s, see Ellen Buslayeva,Social Assessment of Coal Industry Restructuring in Ukraine: Migrating Adverse Social Impacts(Report for World Bank, 1998); Aleksander Pumpiański, ‘Wypłata pod Stołem’,Polityka (14 March 1998), pp. 34–5; Alena Ledeneva, Russia’s Economy of Favors (NewYork: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

33 Information about widespread use of personal networks by EEE income-seekers inEast Central Europe from Mieczysław Bąk, ed., Nieformalny Rynek Pracy (Warsaw:Oficyna Naukowa, 1995). Szara Gospodarka w Polsce: Rozmiary, Przyczyny, Konsekwencje;Praca Nierejestrowana w Polsce w 1995 Roku (Warsaw: Głowny Urzad Statystyczny,Departament Pracy, 1996); Marek Grabowski, Ukryte Dochody i Nierejestrowany RynekPracy w Polsce (Gdańsk/Warsaw: Instytut Badań nad Gospodarką Rynkową, 1994);Biuro Kontroli Legalności Zatrudnienia (Warsaw: Departament Pracy. SprawozdanieRoczne, 1997); Pyrozhkov, Causes and Consequences of Emigration; Sipaviciene,International Migration in Lithuania; Buslayeva, Social Assessment of Coal IndustryRestructuring.

34 Iglicka, ‘The Economics of Petty Trade’.35 Information on transit travellers compiled from Marek Okólski, ‘Combatting Migrant

Trafficking in Poland’, paper presented at the ‘Regional Seminar on MigrantTrafficking through the Baltic States and Neighbouring Countries’ (Vilnius,Lithuania: 17–18 September 1998); Judit Juhasz, ‘Illegal (Im)Migration to Hungary’(unpublished paper, 1998); Rachid Benattig and Olivier Brachet, ‘Les dynamiquesmigratoires roumaines’, Migrations Études, 81 (July–August), pp. 1–12; Dorel,‘Romania’; European Committee on Migration, Recent Developments in Policies Relating toMigration and Migrants (Strasbourg: Council of Europe, 1998); John Salt, Current Trendsin International Migration in Europe (Strasbourg: Council of Europe, 1997); DanaDiminescu, ‘Trajectorie migratoire et economie de la migration: l’exemple roumain’(unpublished manuscript, 1998); see also Eberhard Bort, ‘Illegal Migration and Cross-

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Border Crime: Challenges at the Eastern Frontier of the European Union’ (unpub-lished manuscript, 1998).

On worldwide human trafficking, see Claire Sterling, Thieves’ World: The Threat ofthe New Global Network of Organized Crime (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994); DavidKyle, ‘Transparent Economies and Invisible Workers: Human Smuggling underGlobal Economic Liberalism’, paper presented at the ‘Conference on Dilemmas ofImmigration Control in a Globalizing World’ (European University Institute,Florence, 11–12 June 1998); James Walsh, ‘Alien Smuggling: East to West’, MigrationWorld, XV:1 (1998), pp. 13–17; John Salt and Susanne Schmid, ‘Trafficking inMigrants: A Preliminary Literature Review’, paper presented at IOM Workshop onTrafficking (Warsaw: 8–9 June1998);Organized Crime Moves Into Migrant Trafficking (IOMQuarterly Bulletin, No. 11, 1996); Fabrizio Calvi, L’Europe des parrains: La Mafia à l’assautde l’Europe (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1993). On asylum requests and discontinuations inPoland, see Zbigniew Pruchniak, Anna Zawalak and Małgorzata Andrulonis, Poland:Statistical Data on Asylum Seekers and Refugees, 1993–1997 (Warsaw: Department forMigration and Refugees, 1999).

38 Migration and Asylum in Central and Eastern Europe; Trends in International Migration (1998);Marek Okólski, ‘Emergence of the Countries of Central and Eastern Europe asCountries of Immigrants and Transit’, paper presented at the ‘Colloquy onMigration in Central and Eastern Europe: New Challenges’ (Committee onMigration, Refugees and Demography Parliamentary Assembly, Council of Europe,Warsaw, 17–19 December 1998); Pruchniak et al., Poland; Zdenek Pavlik and JarmilaMaresova, ‘Former Czechoslovakia’, in Solon Ardittis, ed., The Politics of East–WestMigration (London: St Martin’s Press, 1994), pp. 111–25; Tomasz Kuba Kozlowski,‘Migration Flows in the 1990: Challenges for Entry, Asylum and Integration Policy inPoland’, in Iglicka and Sword, eds, The Challenge of East–West Migration, pp. 45–65;Juhasz, ‘Survey of Illegal Labor Migration and Employment in Hungary’; Salt,Current Trends in International Migration in Europe.

39 See Lavenex, ‘Asylum, Immigration and Central-Eastern Europe’; also BoldizsarNagy, ‘Can the Hungarian Migration Policy be Moral?’ in Maryellen Fullerton,Endre Sik and Judit Toth, eds,From Improvisation toward Awareness? Contemporary MigrationPolitics in Hungary (Budapest: Institute for Political Science of the Hungarian Academyof Sciences, 1997), pp. 157–64; Paul Latawski,. ‘Straz Graniczna: The Mission,Structure, and Operations of Poland’s Border Guard’, in Iglicka and Sword, eds, TheChallenge of East–West Migration, pp. 90–104.

40 Hungary’s new (1996) immigration law sets the annual quota of 2,000 permanentresidence permits for immigrants (ethnic Hungarians are not subject to this restric-tion), but imposes no limitation on long-term permits. In practice, however, nearly allapplications for permanent residence submitted since 1996 have been approved (afterTrends in International Migration [1998], pp.117–18). On the influx into ECE countriesof (im)migrants from EEE and Asia see note 38 above.

41 The figures on contract workers are compiled from Trends in International Migration(1998); European Committee on Migration, Recent Developments; on undocumentedsettlers and the interchange between this and officially registered groups fromDrbohlav, ‘Ukrainian Workers Operating in the Czech Republic’; Pal Nyiri, ‘NewChinese Migrants in Europe: The Case of Chinese Community in Hungary’(unpublished manuscript, 1998); Okólski, ‘Combatting Migrant Trafficking inPoland’.

42 See Elena Kirillova, ‘Temporary Labor Migration from Ukraine to Russia’, paperpresented at the ‘Conference on Central and Eastern Europe: New Migration Space’( Pułtusk, 11–13 December 1997); Buslayeva, Social Assessment of Coal IndustryRestructuring; see also Valentina Bodrova and Tatjana Regent, ‘Russia and the CIS’ inArdittis, ed., Politics of East–West Migration, pp. 98–110; Zhanna Zayonchkovskaya,‘Recent Migration Trends in Russia’, in George Demko, Grigory Joffe and Zhanna

188 Ewa Morawska

Zayonchkovskaya, eds,Population Under Duress: The Geodemography of Post-Soviet Russia(Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999), pp. 107–36.

43 See Sik, ‘The Social, Economic and Legal Aspects of Migration in ContemporaryHungary’; Krytyna Slany, ‘The Attitudes and Patterns of Behaviour of Poles towardsForeigners in the Light of Recent Studies’, in Iglicka and Sword, eds, The Challenge ofEast–West Migration, pp. 206–23.

44 Vladimir Shlapentokh, ‘Russian Patience: A Reasonable Behavior and a SocialStrategy’, Archives Européennes de Sociologie, XXXVI (1995), pp. 247–80.

45 A total of more than three million citizens of Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakiacombined (Poles making up more than a half of that number) either stayed on in theWest as so-called displaced persons (DPs) after the conclusion of World War II andthe imposition of communist rule in East Central Europe or left during the fifty yearsit endured. Since 1989/90, encouraged by post-communist governments in theirnative countries eager to establish links with potential political allies to help negotiatereintegration with the Western world and hoped-for investors in the transformingECE economies, considerable numbers of those highly skilled émigrés have eitherrepatriated or come to their native countries on professional longer sojourns.

46 Figures for registered Western residents in East Central Europe calculated from Trendsin International Migration (1998); Trends in International Migration. Continuous Reporting Systemon Migration (Paris: OECD, 1994); Eurostat Yearbook (1997); Report on Europeans LivingAbroad (Brussels: Council of Europe, 1996); Hillmann and Rudolph, Jenseits des BrainDrain; Dusan Drbohlav, ‘International Migration in the Czech Republic and Slovakiaand the Outlook for East Central Europe’, Czech Sociological Review, 3:4 (1994),pp.134–54; Drbohlav and Sykora, ‘Gateway Cities in the Process of RegionalIntegration’; Jarmila Maresova, ‘Czech Republic’, in Frejka, ed., International Migrationin Central and Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States, pp. 49–56. Theyhave been employed in a variety of positions in multinational companies and otherforeign production and service firms, international organizations (most commonlyOECD, GATT, IMF, World Bank, UN Development Programme, American Agencyfor International Development and NGOs), EU representative, funding andconsulting agencies, and as specialists, consultants and teachers of the marketeconomy and effective management to ECE businessmen, international lawyers,political scientists and organizational sociologists (see Geoffrey Pridham and TatuVanhanen, eds, Democratization in Eastern Europe: Domestic and International Perspectives[London and New York: Routledge, 1994] ; Michael Kennedy and PaulineGianoplus, ‘Entrepreneurs and Expertise: A Cultural Encounter in the Making ofPost-Communist Capitalism in Poland’, East European Politics and Societies, 8:1 (1994),pp. 58–93; Cermak, ‘Talents in Migration Process’). Estimates of undocumentedWestern migrants in East Central Europe from Ornacka and Szczęsny,‘Gastpracownicy’; Drbohlav Dusan and Endre Sik (personal communications to theauthor).

47 The idea of a multi-speed Europe has its origins in the so-called ‘Schäuble–Lamerspaper’, an unofficial 1994 report on the EU by two German CDU leaders, WolfgangSchäuble and Jan Lamers, in which they propose the formation of a European‘nucleus’ (consisting of Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, andLuxembourg) in order to avoid the dilution of the EU structures. A similar idea ofEurope of ‘concentric circles’ was also proposed in the same year by the then FrenchPrime Minister, Eduard Balladur – after Kerremans, ‘Eastward Enlargement’, p. 51;citation from ibid., p. 44.

48 Kenneth Hermele, ‘The Discourse on Migration and Development’, in Hammar etal., eds, International Migration, pp. 133–58.

49 On the emergence of ‘new poverty’ in capitalist East Central Europe in the 1990s,see Stanisława Golinowska, ‘Poverty in Poland During the First Half of the Nineties’,in Stanisława Golinowska, ed., Social Policy Towards Poverty. Comparative Approach

Transnational migration in the enlarged EU 189

(Warsaw: Instytut Pracy i Spraw Socjalnych, 1996), pp. 67–82; Ivo Bastyr andMagdalena Kotynkova, ‘Social Reform in the Czech Republic: Subsistence MinimumFunctions’, and Endre Sik, ‘The Social Consequences of Unemployment’, both inGolinowska, ed.,Social Policy Toward Poverty, pp. 83–108 and 38–52, respectively; Hoos,‘Country Report: Hungary’; Roland Habich and Zsolt Speder, ‘Winners and Losers:Transformational Outcomes in a Comparative Context’, in Tamas Kolosi, IstvanToth and Gyorgi Vukovich, eds, Social Report 1998 (Budapest: Tarki, 1999), pp.123–50; Michael Forster, Peter Szivos and Istvan G. Toth, ‘Welfare Support andPoverty: The Experiences of Hungary and the Other Visegrad Countries’, in TamasKolosi, Istvan G. Toth and Georgyi Vukovich, eds, Social Report 1998 (Budapest: Tarki,1999), pp. 293–309.

50 Agenda 2000: A Blueprint for Enlargement (EIU European Policy Analyst, 1997).

190 Ewa Morawska

To put migration and crime into the same heading should sound an alarm inmost readers’ heads. Part of this chapter indeed argues that linking the issues ofmovement of persons and cross-border crime should be strictly limited to theone connection that exists between the two: the (in)human trafficking of refugeesby organized criminal gangs. Otherwise, one can assess both, migration andcrime, as challenges that influence, and will continue to influence, border poli-cies, particularly at the present and future eastern frontiers of the EuropeanUnion.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, frontiers have increasingly returned to thepolitical and academic discourse in Europe.1 It is easy to understand why. Newinternational frontiers have been created (e.g. the Baltic states, ex-Yugoslavia; the‘velvet divorce’ of Czechoslovakia or Moldova), some by democratic agreement,others as a consequence of war. ‘Old’ boundaries have changed their functionfundamentally, particularly in the case of the former Iron Curtain. At the sametime, the rhetoric about a borderless Europe within the European Union hasbeen, at least partially, translated into reality. Since March 1995, the 1985Schengen agreement and the 1990 Schengen convention have been progressivelyimplemented, blurring the distinction between international and sub-stateboundaries within the EU, and creating a common external border regime for‘Schengenland’.

Yet the vision of open borders and its realization is not solely seen as a posi-tive development: anxieties and even fears have accompanied it:

In many countries, citizens have become fearful that they are now beinginvaded not by armies and tanks but by migrants who speak otherlanguages, worship other gods, belong to other cultures and, they fear, willtake their jobs, occupy their land, live off their welfare system and threatentheir way of life, their environment, and even their polity.2

Would open borders be an invitation for criminals to cross freely (drug traf-ficking, cigarette and car smuggling, human trafficking, illegal weapons trading,money laundering, etc.) and illegal immigrants and ‘fraudulent asylum seekers’3

to move easily between one European country and another?

10 Illegal migration and cross-border crimeChallenges at the eastern frontier ofthe European Union

Eberhard Bort

The Schengen process requires that the abolition of border controls at theinternal frontiers be matched by a standardized strengthening of controls at theexternal frontiers of ‘Schengenland’. Thus, the eastern frontier of the EuropeanUnion, opened in 1989/90 from the East, has subsequently undergone a degreeof closure from the West. How does that match attempts at developing institu-tionalized cross-border cooperation along that frontier?

As most of the eastern neighbours of the European Union have applied formembership, and negotiations for accession commenced in 1998 with five ofthese applicant states (Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovenia andEstonia), and in March 2000 with another four (Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria,Romania), as well as with Malta and Cyprus, the erstwhile Iron Curtain (withthe obvious exception of the frontier dividing Germany during the Cold War,which in 1990 ceased to be an international frontier) is destined to become aninternal EU boundary before the end of the first decade of the newmillennium.4

Part of the accession process is the demand by EU member states and by theEU itself that the applicant states police their eastern frontiers efficiently.Schengen standards, in other words, are being exported eastward in order tosecure the future eastern frontier of the European Union.

The main issues at stake are immigration and crime, reflecting the markedgradient in economic performance and living standards at this frontier.5 Againstthis backdrop of an economic divide (even greater at the Mediterranean frontierof the European Union than along its eastern borders, and replicated at thefuture eastern frontier of the EU further to the east), organized crime, involvingthe smuggling of both illegal goods and illegal persons, is perceived as a threat toWestern societies and their standard of life. Moreover, economic divides aremaking cooperation difficult between law enforcement authorities across thefrontier, particularly where corruption blurs the boundaries between the so-called ‘forces of law and order’ and the lawbreakers.6

There is no internationally accepted clear-cut definition of organized crime.The best description so far was formulated by a working party of police andjudicial authorities in 1990. According to this informal text, the main features oforganized crime are:

the pursuit of profit or power by the planned commission of crimes which,when taken singly or together, are of a serious nature, involving cooperationby more than two persons working as a team over a long or indefiniteperiod, where such cooperation involves: (a) the use of commercial or quasi-commercial structures, (b) the use of violence or other methods ofintimidation, or (c) the exercise of influence on the political process, themedia, judicial authorities or the functioning of the economy.7

Minority problems (600,000 Hungarians live in Slovakia, 2.7 million inRomania8) could become exacerbated by new dividing Schengen frontiers if, say,Hungary was in, but its neighbours were denied membership. This in turn

192 Eberhard Bort

could, as the wars in the Balkans – from Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina toKosovo and Albania – have demonstrated, produce further migratory pressure.

The emerging intricate, and sometimes unclear or even contradictory, pictureof conflicting functions of frontiers, especially at the external frontiers (and theexpected future frontiers) of the EU – trying to reconcile the desire for enhancedcooperation and integration (requiring open frontiers) and the perceived need forsecurity (requiring limits to this openness) – results in a political discourse high-lighting the issue of migration and the need for harmonized and strict identitycontrols, at the borders and beyond, in what has been called a return to spatialapproaches to security and control, including border zones and police coopera-tion far beyond national frontiers.

The Schengen process

When the 1985 and 1990 Schengen agreements came into force in 1995, theywere intended to cope with the effects of dismantling identity checks on frontiersbetween member states by consequent strengthening and harmonization ofchecks at the external frontier.9 Since free movement of persons also implied thefree movement of criminals, persons wanted for serious criminal offences,persons in need of protection or personae non grata were reported through theSchengen Information System (SIS), available on-line in all the member statesand at the major ports of entry to the EU. There were, in 1999, about 45,000on-line access points and about fourteen million records.10 A rapid responsesystem (the Sirène offices) was put in place in member states to act in case of anytransfrontier criminal threat, or in case additional information was requiredabout persons or about the legality of a request.

This system inevitably had an effect on the neighbouring states of theEuropean Union and even on distant states that had privileged relationships withmembers of the EU – such as those between the Latin American and the Iberianstates. Millions of people who could previously enter states without a visa foundthis was now a requirement because the Schengen agreements included a visapolicy common to all Schengen states. Criminal law enforcement cooperation (ifone excludes the often rudimentary exchange of information through Interpol)remained on a bilateral basis between member and non-member states of theEU, but the latter became aware of a new system of closer cooperation betweenthe member states in this domain, reinforced by a new non-operationalEuropean police office, Europol, in the Hague.

At a meeting of Ministers of the Interior of all twelve Schengen states inBerlin in December 1998, visa harmonization was declared a top priority. Areduction of the ‘grey list’ was agreed (the original intention had been to abolishit altogether by 1 January 1999)11 aiming at a common visa regime in‘Schengenland’, with a ‘black list’ of countries from where visas are required forone and all of the Schengen states, and a ‘white list’ of states where none arerequired, ending the problem that people from ‘grey list’ countries might havevisa-free entry in one or some of the Schengen countries, but not in others, but

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are then able to move freely because control of persons has been abolished at theinternal Schengen frontiers. At the same meeting, the ministers decided thatcontrol of persons would remain in place at Greece’s frontiers, which had notpassed the efficiency test of the Schengen inspection group.12

The eastern frontier

When Austria and Italy implemented Schengen (between 1 October 1997 and 1April 1998), another part of the former Iron Curtain, opened initially byHungary at its frontier with Austria in 1989, became the external Schengenfrontier of the EU. This was feared as a threat to cross-border relations in theneighbouring states to the east. And when there was a trial run of Schengenexternal frontier controls at the Italian–Slovene border in October 1997, thiscaused considerable disruption.13 Yet by April 1998, the expected barrier did notmaterialize – at least not to the extent expected.14 The Slovenian border authori-ties had taken the Schengen threat seriously, had persuaded their owngovernment to adopt the Schengen criteria (of identity and customs checks) attheir Croatian frontier, and had convinced the Italian, Austrian and EU authori-ties that Slovenia has – in practice – implemented Schengen (without being partof it) at its external non-EU frontiers. This, obviously, made it possible forcontrols at its Italian and Austrian frontiers to remain relatively flexible, evenafter Schengen had become fully operational.

Yet this does not obscure the unease felt on the other side of the EU externalfrontier about the Schengen process. From Poland to Slovenia, there has beenconcern at being obliged to implement Schengen norms – in the negotiations ofwhich these countries had no right to participate.15

Slovenia may have been successful in saving its partially open frontiers withItaly and Austria, yet at a price. Slovakia, as could be experienced when crossingfrom Bratislava to Vienna, was much less successful – or did not try, under theMeciar administration, as hard to implement Schengen-type frontier controls atits eastern frontier. Compared to cooperation between the border authorities inGermany, Poland and the Czech Republic, which seem further developed –regular meetings, comparing notes, frequent communications, common trainingand exchanges – the south-eastern external frontiers seem to lag behind. Thiscan be seen, for example, at the Austrian–Slovak crossing of Berg/Bratislava,where communication between both sides is, even after the Meciar regime wasousted, less common and has often to be conducted indirectly via Vienna andBratislava. From the Austro-Hungarian border (historically, certainly one of themost symbolic frontiers of Europe) long queues are being reported sinceSchengen was fully implemented by Austria, caused by Austrian border police, anew special police force with a ‘martial outlook’.16

All the accession states with whom negotiations started in 1998 and 2000respectively are under increasing pressure to police their eastern frontiers effi-ciently. This seems to have resulted in far-reaching changes of border controls,particularly in Poland, but also in the Czech Republic and Hungary. Any closing

194 Eberhard Bort

of the Hungarian–Romanian frontier, for example, has implications for the largeHungarian minority in Romania. The Schengen agreements thus cast theirshadow beyond the present European Union.

EU Commissioner Hans van den Broek, for example, told the Polish govern-ment that Poland’s chances of joining the EU depended to a large degree onhow well it could police its borders.17 The strengthening of Poland’s easternfrontier is seen – particularly in Germany – as the necessary attempt to erect afirst serious obstacle to illegal migration and illegal trade from east to west.

The Saxon Minister for the Interior supported the wish of applicant states inEast and Central European countries to participate in the Schengen InformationSystem and maintained that a full link to the Strasbourg-based computer systemcould be installed by mid-1999.18 By 2001, it had not happened. It is well knownthat the SIS computer had difficulties in coping with the Scandinavian enlarge-ment of Schengen, let alone its extension to the east. By the end of 2001, theSchengen Information System operated in thirteen EU member states and inNorway and Iceland. Two initiatives were launched by Belgium and Sweden inJune 2001 for the development of a second-generation SIS II capable of oper-ating in an enlarged EU.

Tightening the external frontiers is an expensive business for the accessionstates. There is the economic price for these measures. Poland introduced a newaliens law at the beginning of 1998, which led to protests from Russia; severalborder crossings were blocked by Russians. Belarus temporarily withdrew itsambassador from Warsaw. But there was also protest from Polish traders whodepend on cross-border traffic. Ukrainians and Lithuanians have since had toprove that they have sufficient means to sustain themselves in Poland. Russiansand Belarusians must have Polish invitations or pre-paid hotel-vouchers if theywant to cross into Poland.19 Poland did not follow the demand by EU spokesper-sons to introduce visa requirements analogous to the EU, because the limitedrestrictions it implemented already affected sales to visitors from Russia andBelarus (and Germany). The informal export trade is estimated to earn Poland£5.9 billion per annum.20 In east Poland, more than 1,000 local tradersprotested against the ‘economic catastrophe’ caused by tighter border controls.Incomes in eastern border towns dropped dramatically and unemployment rose.There was a sharp fall in trading not only in the border areas, but also atWarsaw’s economically important ‘Russian bazaar’. Here, trading fell by about30 per cent after the introduction of the new aliens law and the new visa regime.In 1997, the turnover of the Warsaw bazaar was, according to Poland’s MarketEconomy Research Institute, in the region of £350 million.

There are also the costs of investing in new and modernized border check-points. Marek Bienkowski, in charge of the Polish border guards, announced thebuilding of fifteen new border crossings on the eastern frontier by 2001, alongwith an increase of the number of border guards and the installation, aided byEU PHARE money, of electronic passport-reading equipment at border check-points. Immediately after the opening of the border in 1989, the Czech Republicstarted a programme of renovating and enlarging border crossings along the

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frontier with Germany, which has led to Rozvadov/Waidhaus now functioningas a motorway crossing. Using European PHARE money, Hungary has under-taken to open three new border crossings on its Romanian border, two on itsUkrainian border, one on the Slovene border, as well as upgrading Rajika on theSlovak border as a motorway crossing

Furthermore, there are problems of policing, because Poland’s eastern neigh-bours cannot, or will not, cooperate. ‘Chaos and corruption’21 was the verdict ofthe respectable Süddeutsche Zeitung, summing up the situation at the frontiersbetween Poland and Kaliningrad in the north, as well as Lithuania, Belarus andthe Ukraine, not necessarily at all control points, but concerning the large ‘greenborder’ – 407 kilometres with Belarus, 526 kilometres with the Ukraine. InBelarus, as during the Soviet era, the army still exercises a measure of controlfrom the east, but the Ukrainian side is totally deficient in their policing of theborder. When Ukrainian frontier guards ceased to receive their salaries in 1997,they were wont to recoup the money by assisting illegal migrants to cross thefrontier. But corruption is supposed to be widespread on both sides of thePolish–Ukrainian border.22

As frontiers are only controllable if there is cooperation with the other side,Poland attempts a delicate balancing act – stabilizing and effectively controllingthe borders (during the 1990s, more than 80,000 ‘illegals’ were arrested at thePolish–Ukrainian border alone),23 but avoiding total closure towards the east:‘Poland, too, does not want barriers at its eastern frontiers,’ Poland’s ForeignSecretary, Bronislaw Geremek, stressed on a visit to Bonn in November 1997.24

And the Minister for Europe, Ryszard Czarnecki, used the image of a tightlycontrolled border that could, at the same time, function as a bridge to the largemarkets of Russia, Belarus and the Ukraine. Stabilizing the states that haveemerged from the rubble of the Soviet Union, he stated, must be in bothPoland’s and the West’s interest.25 As the less than satisfactory situation at thePolish–Ukranian border continues, and as the Ukraine seems far from becominga candidate for EU accession, Poland seems increasingly inclined unilaterally toharden the frontier.26

The figures of illegals arrested at the 810-kilometre-long Czech–Germanborder had reached 43,000 in 1993, but had then declined to 19,000 in 1995(nearly back to the level of 1991). A first attempt at explaining this was to creditthe new international frontier between the Czech Republic and Slovakia (sincethe beginning of 1993) for effecting that fall in numbers, the new border actingas a filter for the Czech–German frontier.27 But there seems to be reluctance onboth sides of that new frontier to introduce rigorous measures (hardly anybodyin the area can envisage the Czech–Slovak border as a future external frontier ofthe EU),28 and since 1996 the numbers have risen again so that the Departmentof Migration in Prague now considers the effects of the drastic tightening of theGerman asylum laws in 1993 as the main reason for the temporary decline ofarrests. In 1997, there were 29,339 arrests, in 1998 the figure reached nearly40,000. Among them are illegal migrants from further east and from Turkey, butthe main group, since the beginning of the Kosovo crisis, have been ethnic

196 Eberhard Bort

Albanians from Kosovo using, according to Czech police, a ‘human-smugglingpipeline running through the former Czechoslovakia’.29 Kosovo Albanians andother refugees from former Yugoslavia are, in most cases, bound for Germany,where ‘colonies’ of their compatriots already exist: 72.2 per cent of the illegalmigrants have Germany as their destination – 60 per cent of them cross intoSaxony. Mostly, they try to cross in groups, aided by organized human smugglers,paying up to £5,000 for their services. Between January and September 1998,more than 650 ‘Schleuser’ (criminal human traffickers) were arrested at thisborder.30 To get a better perspective on these figures, they ought to be seenagainst a backdrop of no less than 210 million legal crossings of the Czech fron-tiers in 1997.

As has already been mentioned, if Hungary joins the European Union (andSchengen, which has been integrated into the acquis communautaire in the 1997Amsterdam Treaty on European Union), this could ‘cut off ’ the sizeableHungarian minorities in Slovakia and Romania. And while Slovakia, with itsnew government after Meciar, might rejoin the ‘fast-track route’ to EU member-ship,31 there is little hope that Romania would do likewise.

Estonia, the fifth applicant state likely to be an early entrant to the EU, is alsoin a difficult position. Like the other candidates for EU membership, it is underparticular pressure to strengthen its border controls and bring them in line withSchengen procedures as part of the negotiation for membership process, but thiscould cause difficulties if it is not synchronized with Latvia and Lithuania.

Moreover, Estonia is on extremely bad terms with Russia, mainly, theRussians argue, because of the precarious status of the Russian third of theEstonian population being discriminated against in terms of language, minorityand citizenship rights, a point supported by the concern shown by the EU andthe Council of Europe. Estonians counter that Russia has unilaterally fortifiedthe border (against international usage, where border demarcations are set inconsultation with neighbours), a border formerly purely administrative, betweentwo Soviet republics, and resulting from an imperial transfer of territory afterWorld War II, when Stalin forced a large strip of Eastern Estonia to be ceded toRussia. Russia has insisted on this borderline, even after the fall of communism.(Estonia has relented on the demand for a return of this land to comply with EUconditions for accession, i.e. no claims to foreign territory, but still Russia refusesto sign the negotiated settlement – which, in turn, is seen by Estonians as aRussian threat of keeping all options open.)

It is a highly ‘unnatural’ and martial border (leading in one case straightthrough the middle of an Estonian house), characterized by watchtowers,barbed wire and a no-man’s-land – for some commentators most reminiscent ofthe Iron Curtain. The situation is further exacerbated by the fact that, since1996, the Russian border region of Pskov has been represented by GovernorYevgenii Mikhailov (re-elected in November 2000), an ultra-nationalist ofZhirinovsky’s Liberal Democratic Party, which calls for the restoration of theSoviet-era borders. Russia is still determined to block the Baltic states’ desire tobecome members of NATO and has instead proposed a Pact of Regional

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Security and Stability. But only Lithuania has, in October 1997, signed a bordertreaty with Russia. Still, manoeuvres by the Russian army close to theBelarus–Lithuanian border in the autumn of 2000 were viewed, particularlyagainst the debates about the status of Kaliningrad, with mixed feelings in allBaltic states.32

All the Baltic states are regarded as highly permeable transit countries forillegal migrants. But in view of EU enlargement, potential legal labour migra-tion within an enlarged EU has also caused concern, particularly amongConservative politicians in Germany, who see huge problems if EU enlargementtowards the East does not go hand in hand with very long transition periodsbefore the introduction of free movement of people. They argue that an addi-tional 340,000 to 680,000 work migrants annually would put problematicpressure on the ailing labour markets of Western Europe. The ChristianDemocrats have therefore demanded that freedom of movement can onlybecome operational by 2015 at the earliest.33 The Bavarian government orches-trated these fears by issuing a statement that they expected another two millionethnic Germans from the former Soviet Union to exercise their right to come toGermany.34 The debate about the changes of citizenship laws proposed by theGerman ‘red–green’ government and particularly the proposal of dual citizen-ship provoked highly speculative figures of a potentially massive influx ofrelatives of foreigners with dual citizenship in Germany, especially fromTurkey.35 Politicians of the Bavarian CSU conjured up a figure of up to 600,000additional immigrants. Yet, as Klaus Barwig showed, this was a ‘horror scenario’without any foundation. He calculated a realistic number as being closer to4,000!36

But this is not just a phenomenon of the xenophobic German right. People inthe Austrian borderlands, for instance, seem even more reluctant to welcomeHungary as a new EU neighbour:

Many Austrians actively oppose it, especially those living in border regionssuch as Burgenland, in the belief that free labour migration will endangertheir jobs and an increased flow of refugees put pressure on alreadystretched Austrian capacity to receive the 500,000 or so people they haveabsorbed in recent years.37

Yet all these figures, and the fears based on them, seem to ignore the fact that, inGermany for instance, the data for 1997 indicate that more foreigners left thecountry than entered it: 615,000 new arrivals were outnumbered by 637,000who left.38 They also seem to ignore that the ‘wave’ of labour migrationpredicted when Spain and Portugal joined did not materialize.39

Migration, not always distinguishing between legal and illegal, has thusbecome a dominant theme in public debate across Europe. The past few yearshave seen a barrage of alarmist news about millions of people waiting to crossthe frontiers of Europe, some legally, most of them illegally. In August 1998, itwas reported that the secret services (no clearer specification was given) were

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warning that there was sustained migratory pressure on the European Unionfrom the East and from the South.40 Figures were given: 2.5 to 3 million poten-tial migrants in Russia, Belarus and the Ukraine, intending to emigrate via theBaltic states to Scandinavia; in Kiev alone, 200,000 migrants were reported to bewaiting for human traffickers to smuggle them to Western Europe; 500,000ready to go in Poland; in Turkey, according to the same sources, there arepresently up to one million illegal residents whose ultimate aim is reaching theWest. A recent survey, published in January 1999 and conducted in all the majorsender countries by the European Observatory for Migrations, contradicts theseprognostications, suggesting that the propensity to emigrate is high, but that thepotential immigrants want to go to the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealandrather than to Germany, France, let alone the UK. The InternationalOrganization for Migration (IOM) comes to a similar conclusion in an extensivestudy presented at their headquarters in Geneva: it is improbable, the studyargues, that Western Europe will be flooded by mass immigration. What has tobe reckoned with is that many from Eastern Europe will seek temporary employ-ment in the West.41

What is apparent is that people in Europe seem to harbour an unfocused,general anxiety about frontiers no longer providing the protection they once did.Organized cross-border crime, trafficking of drugs and other smuggled goods,and organized human trafficking seem to indicate that frontier controls are nolonger as effective as they once were. This may be changing as populationsbecome more accustomed to the absence of frontier controls at the internal fron-tiers. This absence is widely welcomed in frontier regions. In general, the French– normally very sensitive to these matters – seem to have adopted a reasonablyrelaxed attitude about open frontiers, and those living in the frontier regionsseem very pleased with the new situation. Law enforcement agencies seem tohave adapted to the new situation without undue difficulty. The nature of fron-tiers is perceived as changing. New information technology for surveillance andidentity control is widely seen as a key factor in securing efficient frontiercontrols.

A final paradox is that policing internal as well as external frontiers has alsoentailed the creation of border zones – sometimes referred to as a return of thelimes42 – where random checks are allowed.43 In April 1997, the AustrianSecretary of State in the Ministry of the Interior revealed that, with the imple-mentation of Schengen in October 1997, a 30-kilometre-wide ‘security veil’would be installed along the German border, with a significantly increased policepresence, and that German police could pursue criminals unlimited by spaceand time in Austria.44 Dr Horst Eisel, Assistant Director for Frontiers at theGerman Ministry of Internal Affairs, has put it thus:

The spatial approach clearly ought to take precedence over the purely linearapproach to geographic boundaries. The latter is no longer a match fortoday’s challenges, because individual and collective security begins beyondour borders and continues well on this side of them.45

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Cross-border crime

The European, reporting on Europol, painted a glaring picture of

a grim post-Cold War pattern of crime… , with gangsters from the formerSoviet bloc having a stranglehold in the West on prostitution, racketeeringand the trade in stolen cars. Drugs are also pouring in from the east, withPoland now the third largest producer of amphetamines.46

Indeed, the real existing dangers of cross-border crime must not be underesti-mated. Leslie Holmes has argued that, ‘at their most extreme, substantial rises inthe proportion of illegality in international economic activity can destabilisenational economies.’47 The rise in internal and cross-border crime in EasternEurope, and particularly in the countries of the former Soviet Union, can bepinned down to the difficult transitional situation in these countries: post-communist states attempting, in Claus Offe’s term, a ‘triple transition’: the rapidand simultaneous transformation of their political systems, their economicsystems and their boundaries and identities.48

This ‘triple transition’ is grafted upon a pre-1989 experience under commu-nism, where corruption and dodging the state were part of the political culture,‘creating an environment of institutionalised illegality’.49 Economic decline hadlong laid the foundations of a flourishing shadow economy, before the fraughttransformation into market economies provided new opportunities for criminalsto exploit deficiencies in inadequately regulated markets that could not matchdemand and supply. Yet this is not just an internal problem of the post-communist countries. There seems to be widespread interaction between orga-nized criminals in post-communist states and established criminal structures inthe West, as ‘all sorts of crime can cross borders.’50

• Street prostitution has been visibly increasing on the German–Polish andGerman–Czech borders, as well as on the Austro-Czech and Austro-Slovakborders.51

• Prague is reported to have become a centre for money laundering for theChechnya mafia, operating from there in conjunction with dubiousLiechtenstein firms.52 Large-scale money laundering, one of the chief oper-ations of transnational crime, has been made easier, some sources argue,with the introduction of the euro. The financial service centres of Geneva,Zurich, Zug and Lugano in Switzerland are, according to a report by theFederal Police Office in Berne, affected by organized money laundering.More than 150 persons and 90 firms resident in Switzerland are suspectedto have dealings with the Russian mafia.53 A report of Confcommercio, anumbrella organization of Italian tourism, catering and trade organizations,claimed that up to one-fifth of the banks, restaurants and bars, estate agen-cies, gold and antiques businesses, travel agencies and shops in Italy were inthe hand of organized criminals: 15 per cent of all hotels, 24 per cent of all

200 Eberhard Bort

building sites, 25 per cent of financial services and 70 per cent of thecement market and of the manufacturing of imitation brand clothing.54

• Concerning the border between Slovakia and Austria, the Austrian Kurier

reported exhaustively on the ‘Bratislava Connection’, the cross-border ‘drugtourism’ between Bratislava and Vienna (only 60 kilometres apart). Not only,according to the Kurier, is Bratislava a centre for the ‘car-smuggling mafia’,the city’s ‘by far largest economic branch’ is organized drug trafficking anddrug-related crime, based foremost on the heavy price difference betweenthe two cities. The situation is worsened by ‘insider views’ that the police onthe Slovak side are corrupt, so that little can be done against the ‘avalancheof drugs’ coming through Bratislava.55 The classic ‘Balkan route’ fromTurkey through Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Austria has, partly as a reaction tothe Yugoslav wars, split into two: a southern route via Greece and Italy; anda new northern route via Ukraine and Poland.56

• One of the most frequent features is passport forgery. In 1997 alone, Germanborder police confiscated 1,700 false passports at the Polish border, mostlyinvolving Polish citizens. But the real problems are passports that are stolen,issued under false names by the authorities or sold to potential illegalmigrants. These are hard to detect at the routine controls, even when fedthrough the Schengen computers.57

• Illegal trade in arms and weaponry, and smuggling of nuclear substances,across the Iron Curtain was deemed impossible; now, customs officers at theGerman frontiers can hardly contain their amazement at what is beingsmuggled – quantities of up to 1,000 rounds of ammunition, anti-tankweapons and hand grenades, often in small cars, adding to the danger ofexplosions in case of an accident.58

• The organized human trafficking syndicates, often operating from places likeMoscow or Minsk, but also from Georgia, Armenia and Asian countries, usethe infrastructure of Red Army barracks and former Intourist agencies andthe latest in navigation technology.59 It is estimated that human traffickingearns these organized, criminal cartels up to $5 billion a year.60 The most‘popular’ routes for human trafficking, according to the Bundesgrenzschutz, arethe ‘eastern channel’ (Almaty, Moscow, St Petersburg, Minsk, Vilnius) andthe ‘Balkan channel’ (Romania, Hungary, Moldova, Russia, Ukraine,Poland).61 The Süddeutsche Zeitung noted the connection between the drastictightening of the German asylum laws in 1993 and the increase of illegalmigration. As the door was closed in the face of asylum, refugees have beendriven into the arms of unscrupulous human smuggling organizations,paying up to £5,000 per head for their services.62 In January 1999, a majortrial began in Amberg, Bavaria, involving seven Vietnamese and oneGerman accused of having smuggled more than a hundred illegal migrants– mostly Chinese – across the Czech–Bavarian border.63

Again, it must be stressed that, as put by Achim Hildebrandt of the GermanProject Group on Visa Harmonization in the Ministry of the Interior, ‘the

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migrant is not the criminal; he or she is the victim of crime.’64 If there is aconnection between illegal migration and organized crime, it is human traf-ficking. And human trafficking is a consequence not of open borders, but ofclosed borders. By tightening border control, would-be refugees are driven intothe arms of organized human smugglers.

Undoubtedly, the discourse of migration control has become intricatelylinked with the discourses on crime and security in what Jef Huysmans andDidier Bigo have both called a process of ‘securitization’.65 Security has becomea much broader concept, compared with the focus on military concerns thatdominated the discourse until the changes of 1989/90, encompassing new risksand threats to society, the economy and the polity itself.66 This constitution of asecurity continuum, including the control of frontiers and immigration amongpolice activities in the fight against crime, is, Bigo argues, ‘not a natural responseto the changes in criminality’, but rather a proactive mixing of crime and immi-gration issues.67 Barry Buzan has coined the term ‘societal security’, describingthe shift of security concerns from protection of the state to protection againstthreats, or perceived threats, against society and identity, or the identity andsecurity of groups within a society.68

In the notorious strategy paper concerning the Geneva Convention, whichthe Austrian government formulated during Austria’s presidency of the EU (andwhich was withdrawn after paramount criticism), the whole refugee problematicwas categorized under ‘illegal migration’, and migration policies were explicitlywith linked policies against organized crime.69 Yet the Dublin Convention andthe Schengen agreements had already equated the threat of migration with thefight against drugs, acts of terrorism and international, cross-border and orga-nized crime.

Refining border controls as a means of exclusion can be seen as a response tothe threat to societal security. Yet reinforced borders, a fortress mentality,although being often invoked when Schengen is criticized, are no longer reallyconceivable as practical solutions for internal security needs. It is undeniable thatthe security of individuals has become deterritorialized.70 Internal security nowimplies collaboration with foreign countries and is thus linked to foreign policy,and the 1980s and 1990s marked the beginning of a public debate on policing,coinciding with the emergence of discourses on urban insecurity and the city, onthe one hand, and on stopping immigration of unskilled workers, on the other.71

Agitated by the media coverage of the dangers posed by illegal migration andcross-border crime, particularly in the borderlands press, connecting crime andmigration, ‘civic guards’ were formed on the German side of theGerman–Polish border in 1998, subverting the authority of the state and its lawenforcement agencies. This, despite the fact that the statistics show no higherrate of criminality in the border region than in the rest of the country.72

A particularly sad chapter are the casualties at the border, particularlyrefugees drowning in the Oder and Neisse rivers, led by their smugglers toremote river banks and dangerous currents because these are the least policedspots of the border. Nearly a hundred corpses have been fished out of the rivers

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in the past few years, a watery grave putting an end to journeys that often hadcovered thousands of miles.73

There have been two predominant modes of reaction to the challenges ofcross-border crime: increased security protection at borders (yet not necessarilyrestricted to the actual borderline) and increased international cross-bordercooperation.

The former, ‘law and order’, German Minister of the Interior, ManfredKanther, called the borderlands to the east of Germany a ‘crime zone’.74 Hepointed out the increase in cross-border crime in general (Russian mafia,cigarettes and car smuggling, drug trafficking, illegal weapons trade, fraud andmoney laundering, and smuggling of human beings), but with an emphasis onsecuring the borders against criminals, human trafficking and illegal immigra-tion.75

In an attempt to combat the rise in cross-border criminality, police forces areincreasing their cooperation across frontiers. Cooperation between border policeat the German–Polish and the German–Czech borders is already highly devel-oped, with permanent exchange of notes, common training and dailycommunication.76 At the Austro-Slovak and Austro-Hungarian frontiers, this ismuch less the case. In 1996, the European Commission started to sponsor semi-nars and a placement scheme for EU border police, with the intention to createan institutionalised network of exchange and cooperation.77 Seminars on detec-tion of fraudulent documents are being held, and the collaboration between, forinstance, car rental firms and police organizations in the East and CentralEuropean states are being intensified, which has already led to arrests anddisruption of routes.78 This is not only happening in an internal Europeancontext. The US State Department has invested more than $8 million in policetraining in Hungary. In 1995, the International Law Enforcement Academy(ILEA) was founded in Budapest, offering eight-week courses for law enforce-ment agents from Hungary and other East Central European states,concentrating on combating terrorism, drug-related crime and economic crimi-nality. This seems to go hand in hand with a much-needed improvement theHungarian government provides for its underpaid – and allegedly corrupt –police force, and efforts to establish closer cooperation between the secretservices in the East and in the West.79

There are signs of success. Police cooperation along the so-called ‘Balkanroute’ resulted in the biggest-ever seizure of heroin in 1998, 8,112 kilograms, up17.3 per cent compared with 1997.80 Liaison officers from Germany have beensent to Turkey and ten other states in Central and Eastern Europe. Along the‘Balkan route’, 1,736 alleged drug traffickers were registered in 1998, against afigure of 1,482 in 1997.81 Seizure of hard drugs was up 3 per cent from 1997 to1998, with seizures of Ecstasy pills up 35 per cent, while the volume of inter-cepted hashish and marijuana doubled.82

How big the threat of organized cross-border crime really is is ‘a matter ofjudgement rather than fact’.83 It is noteworthy, though, that a survey of crimestatistics in Central and East European states revealed, despite the proviso of

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their actual accuracy, that ‘crime rates in the post-communist states haveremained considerably below those of many leading Western states.’84

Sometimes one cannot but feel that the campaign against organized crimehas had to serve as a surrogate for the Cold War enemy which had vanishedafter the fall of the Wall: ‘The defeat of communism has created a “threatvacuum” that has given rise to a search for new enemies.’85 The police, PeterCullen has argued, ‘have an obvious institutional interest in painting the pictureblacker than the reality’.86 The discourse on organized and cross-border crimehas undoubtedly been instrumentalized by law enforcement authorities ‘toendorse the “modernization” and “professionalization” of the German policeforce and to legitimize the extension of its arsenal of legal investigative tools toinclude, for example, electronic surveillance’.87 The question is, furthermore,whether the investment in control, particularly at the eastern frontier of the EU,delivers value for money.

At the eastern borders of Germany there is a higher concentration of borderpolice than at any other border of Europe. Following German unification, themanpower of the Bundesgrenzschutz (BGS) was nearly doubled between 1989 and1997, from 24,982 to 40,100 border guards; the budget of the BGS rose in thesame period from £0.43 billion to £0.96 billion. Surveillance technique is stateof the art, and highly expensive. One thermo-nightsight spyglass costsc.£70,000.88

All this in order to make the net tighter. Yet even hardliners like Kanther hadto admit that there are limits to control. A democratic country, eschewing wallsand barbed wire, would, he conceded, not be able to have a hermetically closedfrontier.89 In the long run, intensified police and security cooperation seems farmore promising than concentrating on border security, with its drawbacks incross-border communication and cooperation.

Cross-border cooperation

Cross-border regionalism has flourished over the past two decades, beginning inthe heartlands along the western border of Germany, and taking a new step inthe 1990s, when – in response to the opening of the Iron Curtain – Euroregionswere set up from the Finno-Russian border down to Austria, Slovakia, Hungaryand Slovenia.90

Peripheral borderlands are one of the legacies of the nation-state, and partic-ularly along the East–West divide (see the German ‘Zonenrandgebiet’). It is becauseof the memory of that fact that the new rhetoric of the lasting importance ofthe nation-state is viewed with scepticism in the borderlands of Europe.Regionalism, and in particular cross-border regionalism, has been seen as a chal-lenge to traditional notions of state sovereignty,91 but also as a tool to developformerly peripheral regions. Wherever possible, Euroregions are based oncommon cultural and historical experience, but primarily they are a pragmaticeconomic enterprise for economic development, funded by the European

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Union’s Interreg and PHARE programmes. (The Czech Republic, for example,received 340 million ecu through PHARE between 1995 and 1999.92)

The establishment of cross-border cooperation seems to show that a transla-tion of practical concerns from West to East is well underway. The frequentlyexpressed need for cross-border cooperation (environment, infrastructure,tourism, security) matches certain regional reform concepts, devolving planningauthority and decision-making processes to the regions. The regional contextmay also be more conducive to solving problems of national minorities and evenprovide regional solutions for international problems. Regionalization and ‘inte-grated borderlands’,93 rather than a nineteenth-century model of thenation-state, could offer a more tranquil future for non-homogeneous states withlarge ethnic minorities within their borders.

Cross-border regionalism seemed to develop, for instance, in theGerman–Czech borderlands despite the fraught negotiations between Germanyand the Czech Republic about coming to a final agreement about the propertyof, and compensation for, the Sudeten Germans. The accord of January 1997took nearly a year (and changes in government on both sides) to be fully imple-mented, but it is generally seen as opening up new opportunities for intensifiedcross-border cooperation.94

There are, however, reasons for being cautious about a simple transfer ofWestern models to the Eastern borderlands. Different centre–periphery relationsought to be considered. Jutta Seidel of the State Chancellery of the Free State ofSaxony, speaking about her experience in organizing transfrontier cooperationbetween Saxony and Poland, and Saxony and the Czech Republic, emphasizedthe initial difficulties that had to be overcome and that resulted from administra-tive centralization in the Czech and Polish Republics. According to Seidel, ittook years to create trust and willingness in Warsaw and Prague to allow theirwestern border regions a degree of planning autonomy that would allow them tonegotiate directly with their German counterparts.95

The potential of conflict between centre and periphery may be exacerbatedby the major differences between the situations in the West and the East. Whilein the West, especially along the German frontier, states with roughly similarwage levels and costs of living started collaborating across their borders afterWorld War II, the eastern frontier of the European Union became, under theconditions of the Cold War, a profound economic frontier.96 If problems ofextreme economic inequality have caused anxieties among the countriesbordering the EU to the east about economic and political subordination,97 areother regions within Poland, the Czech Republic and other Central and EasternEuropean countries not confronted by a similar question: why should the regionsbordering on the EU be privileged by cross-border incentives? In other words, isthe newly emerging, perhaps common, identity of the transfrontier regions aforerunner for integrating into the EU the whole of the states concerned, or doesit reinforce the considerable disparities between East and West, town andcountry, within the applicant states? Does it cause resentment against these

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apparently privileged regions and, by challenging state centralism, cause a threatto the integrity of the state itself ?98

On aggregate, cross-border cooperation is undoubtedly deemed to be a posi-tive force,99 enhancing communication and collaboration, and thus adding tostability and, by implication, to control. Here, in the borderlands, any functionalchange of frontiers is felt immediately, whether it has been the implementationof Schengen or whether it will be the opening of borders as a consequence ofEU accession. Institutionalized cross-border cooperation is a laboratory forEuropean concepts to deal with these questions.100

The implementation of Schengen and the accession process of CentralEuropean states to the European Union, highlighted by the establishment ofthese Euroregions, which, in order to function effectively, require a high perme-ability of borders – the border as bridge, as communicative channel rather thanbarrier – add up to a confusing, sometimes even contradictory and ambiguous,picture of a frontier with elements of both openness and closure.101

A ‘fuzzy logic’

Migration control may well be a myth,102 but it plays a major role in the securitydiscourse about EU enlargement and the future of the EU’s external frontierregime. Some tentative conclusions can be drawn for future policies concerning‘the new frontier’ in the East:

• Vague security fears have to be measured against ‘real’, empirical figures.The mixing of perception and realities can lead to symbolic politics, which,though appearing to be remedies against perceived threats, may prove, inthe long run, counter-productive to stability and prosperity in the macro-region, as they might hinder the development of cross-border cooperation,and thus greater stability in the macro-region.

• Financial and organizational support for the economies and the institution-building processes of civil society in the post-communist countries shouldtherefore have priority as their present deficiencies, in combination with thegap in prosperity between East and West, are the main sources of organizedcrime structures.

• A balance needs to be struck between addressing the need for security and therole border controls play, on the one hand, and the need for open frontiers toallow for the economic development across those borders, on the other.

• Security at and beyond borders can best be guaranteed through coopera-tion. Closed borders are not an option. Security cooperation can best beachieved in a climate of converging economic indicators.

• Getting used to open frontiers is a learning process in a time of transition,where new identities and roles are being shaped. This has been shown at theinternal frontiers of the EU, where initial fears have receded.

• There will have to be transition periods before the present external frontiercan become a fully integrated internal EU frontier.

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• Organized crime and issues of migration should be clearly separated, withthe exception of illegal trafficking (where the smuggler, not the smuggled, isthe criminal).

• Human trafficking is a consequence of frontier restrictions, rather than ofopen borders. The higher the obstacles for border crossings, the greater theneed for the ‘illegal’ to seek the aid of ‘experts’, and the higher the price,and the risk for the illegal immigrant.

In 1998, The Economist referred to the different time zones and the differenteconomic zones at the Estonian–Russian border.103 Not only do people on bothsides of this border live in different actual time zones, they – and they share thisexperience with many other border regions in East Central Europe – also live,figuratively speaking, in different time zones, in different phases of development.

The Tampere Declaration of EU heads of state signed in October 1999marked a step in the direction of dealing with migration and border controls lessin terms of threats than in terms of regulated immigration, emphasizing indi-vidual rights and cross-border cooperation. Freedoms can be abused. This abuseneeds to be kept as minimal as possible. But combating it must not itself becomea threat to those freedoms. A free society, Didier Bigo reminds us,

is one with open frontiers and plural identities. This implies both thatbehaviour is adaptable and that there must be acceptance of illegality at themargins. Whether European politicians accept it or not, a free society nowimplies tolerance of international phenomena decoupled from territory,characterised by transnational networks and the penetration of nationalterritories.104

Looking at the present and future eastern frontiers of the EU, one mightconclude with Michel Foucher’s notion of borders being ‘time inscribed intospace or, more appropriately, time written in territories’.105 Borders, in otherwords, are temporary, functional arrangements, and they might function in prag-matic, if contradictory, attempts at reconciling the demands of security and ofeconomic and civic development. In a Central Europe that embarked on funda-mental changes in 1989/90, ‘a ‘fuzzy logic’, less rational, less rigid, but allowinghistorical transition to take place’,106 may be a necessary condition we have tolive with for the foreseeable future.

Even after the next wave of enlargement, there will be some ‘grey zone’between the EU and Russia. Russia itself seems excluded from future EUmembership, but what about Belarus and the Ukraine, or Moldova?107 The finalcontours of the EU are not agreed. Their definition remains ‘a matter of politicsand ideology’,108 rather than mere geography.

Notes

1 See, for example, Michel Foucher, Fronts et frontières: Un tour du monde géopolitique (Paris:Fayard,1990); Hastings Donnan and Thomas M. Wilson, eds, Border Approaches

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(Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1994); Silvia Raich, Grenzüberschreitendeund interregionale Zusammenarbeit in einem ‘Europa der Regionen’ (Baden-Baden: Nomos,1995); Malcolm Anderson, Frontiers: Territory and State Formation in the Modern World(Cambridge: Polity, 1996); Liam O’Dowd and Thomas M. Wilson, eds, Borders,Nations, States (Aldershot: Avebury, 1996); György Éger and Josef Langer, eds, Border,Region and Ethnicity in Central Europe (Klagenfurt: Norea, 1996); Paul Ganster, AlanSweedler, James Scott and Wolf-Dieter Eberwein, eds, Borders and Border Regions inEurope and North America (San Diego: San Diego State University Press, 1997);Raimund Krämer, Grenzen der Europäischen Union (Potsdam: BrandenburgischeLandeszentrale für Politische Bildung, 1997); Gerhard Brunn and Peter Schmitt-Egner, eds, Grenzüberschreitende Zusammenarbeit in Europa – Theorie – Empirie – Praxis(Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1998); Beate Neuss, Peter Jurczek and Wolfram Hilz, eds,Grenzübergreifende Kooperation im östlichen Mitteleuropa (Tübingen: Europäisches Zentrumfür Föderalismus-Forschung, 1998); Malcolm Anderson and Eberhard Bort, eds, TheFrontiers of Europe (London, Pinter, 1998); Philomena Murray and Leslie Holmes, eds,Europe: Rethinking the Boundaries (Aldershot: Ashgate,1998); Mike Mannin, ed., PushingBack the Boundaries: The European Union and Central and Eastern Europe (Manchester:Manchester University Press, 1999); Martin Pratt and Janet Allison Brown, eds,Borderlands Under Stress (London: Kluwer Law International, 2000); Malcolm Andersonwith Eberhard Bort, The Frontiers of the European Union (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001).

2 Myron Weiner, The Global Migration Crisis: Challenges to States and to Human Rights (NewYork: HarperCollins, 1995), p. 2.

3 Patrick Fitzgerald, ‘Repelling Borders’, New Statesman & Society (17 February 1995).4 Simultaneously, and more quickly, NATO enlargement took place. On 1 April 1999,

Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary joined the alliance. Yet further easternenlargement of NATO seems stalled for the time being. See Adam Daniel Rotfeld,ed., The New Security Dimensions. Europe after the NATO and EU Enlargements (Stockholm:SIPRI, 2001).

5 See Krämer, Grenzen der Europäischen Union, pp. 68–88. See also Didier Bigo (chapter11) in this volume.

6 As in the case of the Ukraine, which in the late 1990s failed to pay their frontierguards’ wages. See Jakub Boratynski and Grzegorz Gromadzki, The Half-Open Door:The Eastern Border of the Enlarged European Union (Warsaw: Batory Foundation, 2001).

7 Hans-Ludwig Zachert, ‘Die Entwicklung der Organisierten Kriminalität inDeutschland’, Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, 23 (1995), p. 13.

8 Paul Gillespie uses that figure for Romania (‘Hungary Presses Reluctant EU forAccession Date’, The Irish Times, 16 January 1999); Romanian sources, citing thecensus of 1992, speak of 1.62 million Hungarians living in Romania. See JürgenNowak, Europas Krisenherde (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1994), p. 133, who alsogives the figure of 570,000 Hungarians in Slovakia, according to the census of 1991(p. 135). Alasdair Stewart gives the Hungarian minority in Romania as ‘numberingsome 2m’: Migrants, Minorities and Security in Europe: Conflict Studies (London: ResearchInstitute for the Study of Conflict and Terrorism, 1992), p. 8; see also GeorgeSchoepflin, ‘Hungary and its Neighbours’, Chaillot Paper, No.7, Paris, Institute forSecurity Studies of WEU (May 1993), p. 37; and Pál Dunay, ‘Hungarian–RomanianRelations: A Changed Paradigm?’, Chaillot Papers, No. 26 (Paris: Institute for SecurityStudies of WEU, June 1997), p. 6 – both tending towards the unofficial two millionfigure. See also Judy Batt, ‘The Politics of Minority Rights in Post-CommunistEurope: The Hungarians and “Autonomy” ’, in Finn Laursen and Søren Riishøj, eds,The EU and Central Europe: Status and Prospects (Esbjerg: South Jutland University Press,1996), pp. 45–58, and André Liebich (chapter 7) in this volume.

9 Legal and institutional aspects of the European border regime are discussed in moredetail in Malcolm Anderson’s contribution (chapter 12). See also Jörg Monar,

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Enlargement-Related Diversity in EU Justice and Home Affairs: Challenges, Dimensions andManagement Instruments (The Hague: Scientific Council for Government Policy, 2000).

10 Evidence to the House of Lords, Select Committee on European Communities Sub-Committee F (9 January 1999).

11 See Anne Schmidl-Wrulich, ‘Die von der Österreichischen Präsidentschaft erzieltenErgebnisse’, in Monica den Boer, ed., Schengen’s Final Days (Maastricht: EuropeanInstitute for Public Administration, 1998), pp. 67–75.

12 Greece started to participate in the Schengen procedures on 1 December 1997. See‘Personenkontrollen bei Griechenland-Reisen bleiben’, Süddeutsche Zeitung (17December 1998).

13 Melita Richter-Malabotta, ‘Some Aspects of Regional and Transfrontier Cooperationin a Changing Europe’, in Malcolm Anderson and Eberhard Bort, eds, Schengen and theSouthern Frontier of the European Union (Edinburgh: ISSI, 1998), pp. 41–72; especially pp.65–7.

14 See Marko Gasperlin, ‘Schengen Needs Modification: A Slovenian Perspective’, inMalcolm Anderson and Eberhard Bort, eds, Schengen and EU Enlargement: Security andCooperation at the Eastern Frontier of the European Union (Edinburgh: ISSI, 1997), pp.102–3.

15 A point emphasized by Jacek Sarjusz-Wolski in a lecture for the Europa Institute inEdinburgh (30 April 1998).

16 Michael Frank, ‘Da gerät Europa an seine Grenzen’, Süddeutsche Zeitung (5 January1999).

17 Die Welt, 17 February 1998.18 See Statewatch (November/December 1997), p. 9.19 Ian Traynor, ‘Fortress Europe Shuts Window to the East’, The Guardian (9 February

1998).20 Ibid.21 ‘Deutsch–polnische Hausaufgaben’, Süddeutsche Zeitung (20 August 1998).22 See Thomas Urban, ‘Nach Westen isoliert’, Süddeutsche Zeitung (18 September 1998).23 Maria Kazmierczak and Hermann Schmidtendorf, ‘Polen wirbt im Westen für die

Ukraine’, Die Welt (2 January 1999); but note that in the figure of 80,000 all borderincidents are counted (i.e. invalid passports, incomplete personal identity papers, etc.),which reduces the figure of migrants arrested for illegally attempting to cross theborder to 30,000–40,000.

24 Quoted in ‘Kohl sagt Polen Unterstützung zu’, Süddeutsche Zeitung (20 November1997).

25 ‘Deutsche profitieren von Polens Beitritt’, Süddeutsche Zeitung (9 April 1998).26 See Klaus Bachmann, ‘Rauer Wind aus Westen: In Polen wächst die Ernüchterung

über die Ukraine’, Frankfurter Rundschau (15 September 2000).27 See Eberhard Bort, ‘Coping with a New Situation’, in Malcolm Anderson and

Eberhard Bort, eds, Boundaries and Identities: The Eastern Frontier of the European Union(Edinburgh: ISSI, 1996), pp. 61–2.

28 See Peter Brod, ‘Ideal für illegalen Transit’, Süddeutsche Zeitung (31 October 1998).29 Kate Connolly, ‘Hundreds Held in Border Logjam’, The Guardian (9 October 1998).30 Figures supplied by Dr Milos Mrkvica, interviewed by Eberhard Bort, Prague (24

September 1998). See also Martina Fietz, ‘Warum Tschechien in seine Grenzeninvestieren muß?’, Die Welt (20 October 1998).

31 Paul Gillespie, ‘Not Much Success as Czechs Find Fruits of Democracy Sour’, TheIrish Times (9 January 1999).

32 Thomas Urban, ‘Durchmarsch nach Königsberg’, Süddeutsche Zeitung (12 September2000).

33 Martin S. Lambeck, ‘Union sieht Gefahren bei Ost-Erweiterung’, Die Welt (8 July1998).

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34 Peter Schmitt, ‘Noch zwei Millionen “Russlanddeutsche” ’, Süddeutsche Zeitung (9January 1999).

35 For the background, see Douglas B. Klusmeyer, ‘Aliens, Immigrants, and Citizens:The Politics of Inclusion in the Federal Republic of Germany’, Daedalus 122:3 (1993),pp. 81–114. Since 1 January 2000, the new German citizenship law gives dual citi-zenship to every child born in Germany of foreign parents. Yet, by their twenty-thirdbirthday, these holders of dual citizenship will have to give up their parental citizen-ship, otherwise they will automatically lose their German passport.

36 Klaus Barwig, a migration expert of the Catholic Academy of Stuttgart-Hohenheim,quoted in Heribert Prantl, ‘Wieviel Nachzug?’, Süddeutsche Zeitung (22 January 1999).

37 Gillespie, ‘Hungary Presses Reluctant EU for Accession Date’.38 ‘Immer mehr Ausländer verlassen Deutschland’, Die Welt (31 July 1998).39 Karin Kneissl, ‘Die Grenze im Kopf wird lange bleiben’, Die Welt (24 October 1998).40 Peter Scherer, ‘Geheimdienste schlagen Alarm’, Die Welt (21 August 1998).41 Alfred Zänker, ‘Die meisten Migranten kommen zum Arbeiten nach Deutschland’,

Die Welt (20 March 1999).42 Michel Foucher, ‘The Geopolitics of European Frontiers’, in Anderson and Bort, eds,

The Frontiers of Europe, pp. 235–50.43 Schengen envisages a 20 kilometre border zone, but in reality the whole of Bavaria,

for instance, is now defined as a ‘border zone’.44 See Claus Pándi, ‘Bayerische Polizei bekommt in Österreich mehr Kompetenzen’,

Neue Kronen Zeitung (17 April 1997).45 Quoted in Patrice Molle, External Borders Pilot Project: Placement Report (Strasbourg:

Centre des Études Européennes, 1996), p. 6.46 Victor Smart, ‘Europol Warning on Eastern Mafias’, The European (31 August 1995).47 Leslie Holmes, ‘Crime, Corruption and Politics: International and Transnational

Factors’, in Jan Zielonka and Alex Pravda, eds, Democratic Consolidation in EasternEurope: International and Transnational Factors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p.193.

48 Claus Offe, ‘Capitalism by Design? Democratic Theory Facing the Triple Transitionin Eastern Europe’, Social Research, 58:2 (1996), pp. 3–13.

49 Mark Galeotti, Cross-Border Crime and the Former Soviet Union (Boundary & TerritoryBriefing), 1:5 (Durham: International Boundaries Research Unit, 1995), p. 1.

50 Ibid., p. 6.51 See Maik Brandenburg, ‘Ein Koffer voller Sicherheit’, Die Welt (30 June 1998).52 Ibid.53 Bernadette Colonego, ‘Die Russenmafia schwärmt für die Schweiz’, Süddeutsche Zeitung

(20 March 1999).54 See Klaus Brill, ‘Die Mafia sitzt mit am Tisch’, Süddeutsche Zeitung (17 March 1999).55 Michael Berger, ‘Die Bratislava Connection’, Kurier (20 April 1997).56 Hans-Werner Loose, ‘Neue Schmuggelwege auf der Balkanroute’, Die Welt (12 March

1999).57 J. Schreiber, ‘Mit gefälschtem Pass nach Deutschland’, Die Welt (9 March 1998); see

also Peter Scherer, ‘Mit Zollblau gegen Dokumentenfälscher’, Die Welt (5 March 1999).58 See Eberhard Bort, ‘200 km Eastern Frontier of the EU’, in Anderson and Bort, eds,

Boundaries and Identities, pp. 71–80, especially p. 73.59 Peter Scherer, ‘Geheimdienste schlagen Alarm’, Die Welt (21 August 1998).60 Peter Scherer, ‘Zustrom von Illegalen wächst’, Die Welt (16 June 1998).61 Peter Scherer, ‘Schleuser gehen jetzt Weg über Tschechien’, Die Welt (13 October

1998).62 Christoph Schwennicke, ‘Abwehrmauer an den Ostgrenzen’, Süddeutsche Zeitung (3

January 1997). For reports on human trafficking, see also Jens Schneider, ‘Spezialistenfür Grenzfälle’, Süddeutsche Zeitung (3 September 1998); and Hans-Werner Loose,‘Schmuggelware Mensch’, Die Welt (8 September 1998).

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63 See Franz Pfeiffer, ‘Schleuserbande vor Gericht’, Süddeutsche Zeitung (13 January 1999).64 Remark made at the Colloquium ‘Schengen Still Going Strong: Evaluation and

Update’ (5 February 1999).65 Didier Bigo, ‘The Landscape of Police Cooperation’, in Eberhard Bort and Russell

Keat, eds, The Boundaries of Understanding (Edinburgh: ISSI, 1999), pp. 59–74 (p. 69).See also Jef Huysmans, ‘Migrants as a Security Problem: Dangers of “Securitizing”Societal Issues’, in Robert Miles and Dietrich Thraenhardt, eds, Migration and EuropeanIntegration: The Dynamics of Inclusion and Exclusion (London: Pinter, 1995). See also JefHuysmans, ‘The European Union and the Securitization of Migration’, Journal ofCommon Market Studies, 38:5 (December 2000), pp. 751–77.

66 See Jan Zielonka, ‘Europe’s Security: A Great Confusion’, International Affairs 67:1(1991), pp. 127–37.

67 Bigo, ‘The Landscape of Police Cooperation’ , pp. 67–8.68 Barry Buzan, People, States and Fear: An Agenda for International Security Studies in the Post-

Cold War Era (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), pp. 18–19.69 See Heribert Prantl, ‘Europa verschließt sich Flüchtlingen’, Süddeutsche Zeitung (3

September 1998).70 Bigo, ‘The Landscape of Police Cooperation’, p. 73.71 See, for example, Malcolm Anderson, Monica den Boer, Peter Cullen, William

Gilmore, Charles Raab and Neil Walker, Policing the European Union: Theory, Law andPractice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995); see also Jim Sheptycki, ‘TransnationalPolicing and the Makings of a Postmodern State’, British Journal of Criminology, 35:4(1995), pp. 613–35, and ‘Law Enforcement, Justice and Democracy in theTransnational Arena: Reflections on the War on Drugs’, International Journal of theSociology of Law 24 (1996), pp. 61–75.

72 Marina Mai, ‘Die Hilfssheriffs’, Die Woche (3 April 1989); Marion Mück-Raab,‘Kleingärtner an der Neiße haben aufgerüstet’, Süddeutsche Zeitung (27 March 1998).

73 See Olaf Kaltenborn, ‘Die neue Todesgrenze an der Neiße’, Süddeutsche Zeitung (12June 1997); and Markus Lesch, ‘Die Eltern ließen ihr totes Kind zurück’, Die Welt (14January 1998).

74 Peter Scherer, ‘Kanther verstärkt Sicherung der Ostgrenzen’, Die Welt (8 May 1996).The conservative Welt coined the phrase ‘kriminalgeographisch hochsensibel’ for theexternal frontier of Saxony (‘Kanther kündigt schärfere Kontrollen an’, Die Welt, 19September 1998).

75 Martina Fietz, ‘Kanther will europäische Sicherheitszone’, Die Welt (2 July 1998).76 Ibid.77 See Molle, External Borders Pilot Project.78 Stefan Simon, ‘Wenn der Mietwagen nie mehr auftaucht’, Süddeutsche Zeitung (3

November 1998).79 Thomas Becker, ‘Wo Polizisten pauken müssen’, Süddeutsche Zeitung (7 January 1999).80 Peter Scherer, ‘Türken kontrollieren Drogenrollbahn durch Europa’, Die Welt (1

March 1999).81 Ibid.82 Loose, ‘Neue Schmuggelwege auf der Balkanroute’.83 Holmes, ‘Crime, Corruption and Politics’.84 Ibid.85 John Esposito, ‘Political Islam: Beyond the Green Menace’, Current History 93:579

(1994), p. 19.86 Peter J. Cullen, ‘Crime and Policing in Germany in the 90s’, Institute of German Studies

Discussion Paper series (IGS), No. 13 (University of Birmingham, 1997), p. 5.87 Klaus von Lampe, ‘Understanding Organized Crime: A German View’, paper

presented at the Annual Meeting of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences,Boston (7–11 March 1995), extended version, p. 2. See also Heiner Busch,

Illegal migration and cross-border crime 211

‘Organisierte Kriminalität: Vom Nutzen eines unklaren Begriffs’, Demokratie undRecht, 20 (1992), pp. 374–95.

88 Mai, ‘Die Hilfssheriffs’.89 Scherer, ‘Kanther verstärkt Sicherung der Ostgrenzen’.90 See Eberhard Bort, ‘Mitteleuropa: The Difficult Frontier’, in Anderson and Bort, eds,

The Frontiers of Europe, pp. 91–108.91 Eberhard Bort, ‘Crossing the EU Frontier: Eastern Enlargement of the EU, Cross-

Border Regionalism and State Sovereignty’, Interregiones 6 (1997), pp. 20–31.92 Wolfgang Jung, ‘Grenzverkehr’, Süddeutsche Zeitung (11 November 1998); see also

Neuss et al., eds, Grenzübergreifende Kooperation im Östlichen Mitteleuropa.93 Oscar J. Martínez, ‘The Dynamics of Border Integration: New Approaches to

Border Analysis’, in Clive H. Schofield, ed., Global Boundaries (London: Routledge,1994), pp. 1–15.

94 Peter Schmitt, ‘Neue Chancen für “Euregio Egrensis” ’, Süddeutsche Zeitung (27January 1997).

95 Jutta Seidel, in conversation with Malcolm Anderson and Eberhard Bort,Edinburgh (13 May 1996).

96 See Josef Langer, ‘The Meanings of the Border in Central Europe’, in Éger andLanger, eds, Border, Region and Ethnicity in Central Europe, pp. 49–67; see also Krämer,Grenzen der Europäischen Union, particularly pp. 68–88.

97 Anderson, Frontiers, p. 180.98 See Michael Dauderstaedt, ‘Ostmitteleuropas Demokratien im Spannungsfeld von

Transformation und Integration’, Integration, 4 (October 1996), pp. 208–23.99 Particularly in an external and comparative perspective, as in Anthony Asiwaju,

‘Public Policy for Overcoming Marginalization: Borderlands in Africa, NorthAmerica and Western Europe’, in Sam Nolutshungu, ed., Margins of Insecurity:Minorities and International Security (Rochester, NY: Rochester University Press, 1996),pp. 251–83 especially pp. 272–8.

100 See Jung, ‘Grenzverkehr’; see also Eberhard Bort, ‘Boundaries and Identities: Cross-Border Cooperation and the Eastern Frontier of the European Union’, in NadaSvob-Dokic, ed., The Cultural Identity of Central Europe (Zagreb: Culturelink/Institutefor International Relations, 1997), pp. 133–44.

101 Malcolm Anderson, ‘Transfrontier Cooperation: History and Theory’, in Brunnand Schmitt-Egner, eds, Grenzüberschreitende Zusammenarbeit in Europa, pp. 78–97.

102 Didier Bigo, ‘Frontiers and Security in the European Union: The Illusion ofMigration Control’, in Anderson and Bort, eds, The Frontiers of Europe, pp. 148–64.

103 ‘Good fences’, The Economist (19 December 1998).104 Bigo, ‘Frontiers and Security in the European Union’, p. 161.105 Foucher, ‘The Geopolitics of European Frontiers’, p. 249.106 Michel Foucher, ‘Europe and its Long-Lasting Variable Geography’, in Bort and

Keat, eds, The Boundaries of Understanding, pp. 163–9 (at p. 169).107 See Hans-Hagen Bremer, ‘Paris und Berlin begrenzen EU: Gemeinsame Studie lässt

Russland und Ukraine aussen vor’, Frankfurter Rundschau (4 July 2000).108 William Wallace, The Transformation of Western Europe (London: Pinter, 1991), p. 8.

212 Eberhard Bort

Policing by network, policing by remote control: these are the new forms ofcontrol and surveillance in European societies. They presuppose numerouschanges: in targets, technology, control points and conceptions of security. Thesechanges are exported towards the Central and East European Countries(CEECs), but often without a clear understanding of the norms and intereststhat are at stake. The official discussions give rise to myths concerning the secu-rity deficit, a global mafia threat, and efficiency of the external border controlsthrough the Schengen Information System. They bring with them the belief inan homogeneous internal area without border checks and a strong externalborder, even though the actual practices of policing show the contrary. Externalborder controls are weak but a lot of internal controls continue to exist, even ifthey are privatized or de-localized. Controls have also already been launched inthe countries on the periphery of the European Union by the strategy ofpolicing by network and surveillance at a distance.

Before we can understand the effects on the CEECs of these new forms ofpolicing it is necessary to describe them and their effects on the EU countries. Ina nutshell, the activities of police forces, whether they are initiated by homeaffairs or justice departments, have been extended along two lines. First, theextension of police activities reaches beyond national borders, namely by the estab-lishment of interconnections between the different countries. Second, new formsof control have considerably extended the sphere of police activity beyond crime

control. The term ‘internal security’ or ‘internal affairs’ in use throughout Europeis an indicator of this double extension, which is both geographical (throughincreased European cooperation) and structural (in the light of the new tasksassigned to the different security agencies).

The geographical extension and the consequent redefinition of spheres ofcompetence have been much discussed, especially the causal link betweeneconomic globalization, the increase in crime and the need to create a Europeanpolice authority. Europe is presented alternatively as a ‘sieve’ or as a ‘fortress’ bythose wishing to stress either the need to strengthen controls or the dangers toindividual liberties brought about by strengthening of controls. However, the

debate concerning fortress Europe has little point given that there can be no control ofland borders in Europe without changing the whole economic and political

11 Border regimes, policecooperation and security inan enlarged European Union

Didier Bigo

system.1 Thus, the practical implications of the theoretical transfer of internalborder controls to the external borders of Europe have not been correctlyassessed. Preoccupation with geographical extension has meant that there hasbeen little discussion about the essential problem, which is the development ofpolice activities in relation to the control of transnational flows of people and thesecurity aspects of immigration and even human rights.

The label ‘internal security’ at the EU level has, however, created a new defi-nition of police activities in all the different countries. It has carved out, throughthe numerous police activities of each European country with their strong indi-vidual differences, a common basis for action in the fields of terrorism, drugtrafficking and organized crime, which excludes some of the specificities of eachcountry, but adds the common task of border surveillance and immigrationcontrols. Within the European Community, legislation and the political debatesconcerning internal security have resulted in the Trevi informal agreement, theSchengen convention and Maastricht. They have created a continuum of internalaffairs that include: the fight against terrorism and drug trafficking, domestic andinternational organized crime, and illegal immigration, as well as the surveillanceof cross-border movements (migrants, asylum seekers, travellers). The latter evenstretches to persons who do not conform to the law-enforcers’ image of ‘normal’national identity (e.g. young people of immigrant extraction, minority groups,etc.). Even if Amsterdam and Tampere, by distinguishing between first- andthird-pillar activities, have the effect of removing the link between asylum,migration and cross-border activities, on the one hand, and crime control, on theother, it seems that the Commission still has difficulty in creating an alternativedebate to that of the ‘necessity’ of compensatory measures with regard tofreedom of movement.

This debate on compensatory measures and the security deficit created by theopening of the internal borders is one of the strongest myths of EU self-presentation. It is argued that the very nature of criminal activities – or what areclaimed to be such – has rapidly evolved in the last thirty years, providing theexplanation for the changes within police forces. Drug trafficking, cross-bordercrimes, the globalization of terrorism and mafia activities are always quoted toexplain the transnationalization of the police and the development of policenetworks at the European level. However, even if there is some truth in the ideathat police forces seek to adapt constantly to what they perceive, or what ispresented to them, as an objective threat (terrorism, mafia, organized crime),there are doubtless other reasons for this Europeanization of police activity. Themost important of these reasons are:

• the struggle between and within various bureaucracies and services (police,customs, secret services, armed forces), and their competition for budgetsand legitimacy – this obliges them to find more and more ‘European part-ners sharing the same vision’ concerning the nature of the threat in order toimpose their point of view at the national level;

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• the move towards larger budgets for technological surveillance at a distance(information technology, satellites, non-lethal weapons, etc.).

Leaving behind the debates of politicians on why the security deficit calls forEuropeanization, we need to understand how the process of convergence andconflicts between the different official or private agencies of any one country andthose between all or any of these agencies of another country leads to networksof policing focusing on the practices of surveillance: how to check, codify, clas-sify, identify or categorize population movements and how to organize them;how to deter them from choosing the European territory as a point of arrival;how to exercise mobile surveillance adapted to these movements; how, if thesepopulations cannot be massively expelled, to stabilize and normalize them.

This is the type of knowledge that they share and exchange. It is often verytechnical and far removed from the rhetoric concerning rule of law in policing ordemocratic and community-based policing. Each agency (the different nationalpolice forces, customs officers, immigration services, the diplomatic service andeven the armed forces) presents its own solutions and considers itself as the morecompetent. However, this extension of activity, which favours a new conceptionof surveillance, especially benefits the interior ministries and ministries that areresponsible for police with military status or border guards, in so far as they haveestablished, in parallel with this extension, a network of relationships betweenofficials responsible for European police cooperation. This gives them an excel-lent awareness of the situation existing beyond their own borders. The result is toconfer considerable expertise in foreign affairs on such ministries – one mighteven speak of an ‘internationalization’ of home affairs departments.

This process occurs to the detriment of social ministries (health and employ-ment) or specialized ministries such as European Affairs. As a result, the spheresof activity of internal security ministries overlap those of ministries such asForeign or European Affairs that have international responsibilities. Thus, theformer do not hesitate to take initiatives in the fields of immigration or foreignpolicy when the policies in question can have repercussions on internal security.They become essential counterparts of the leaders of countries generatingstrong emigrant flows or intervene directly when these countries are undergoinga political crisis. Conventional distinctions between domestic and foreign affairsthus lose their significance. Traditional points of reference and conventionaldelimitations between spheres of bureaucratic activity have been modified. Withrespect to the CEECs, it is important to understand the pre-eminence of interiorand even defence ministers over foreign affairs ministers on these subjects.

The events of 11 September in the US will accentuate this tendency to givemore and more responsibility to security professionals with respect to otherministries. The question of freedom of movement is now directly addressed as adanger, a security risk. Within the security profession, the relationships betweenthose responsible in the ministries of defence and the intelligence services andthose dealing with the ministries of interior and justice have changed. The

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second-pillar groups from the council want to impose their view on the third-pillar groups and the Commission (DG Justice of Home Affairs) to try to modifythe way Europol deals with terrorism. They want criminal police to accept infor-mation from the intelligence community without questioning the origin of thesources. The framework for cooperation within police networks – which wasbased on mutual trust and which prevented the participation of intelligenceservices – is now under discussion. The pressure on NATO to take over responsi-bility for the struggle against terrorism reinforces the positions of thesecond-pillar groups. Of course, if Europol were to follow this line, its relation-ship with, first, Eurojust and, second, the European Court of Human Rightswould also change. The judiciary would not agree to ‘intelligence sharing’ thatcould put people under surveillance without any evidence at the prosecution level.The fragile legitimacy of police cooperation and European police institutionscould disappear if too many mistakes are made by following the ‘intelligence’dream of a global surveillance of large groups of Muslim communities, or even ofother ‘foreign’ groups coming from the Far East or Basque country.

The second element comes on the other hand from the third-pillar groups inthe wake of the events of 11 September. It is the desire to enlarge the definitionof terrorist offences in such a way as to equate the struggle against terrorismwith the upsurge of violence in transnational protest and thus to link New Yorkwith Genoa. Here, also in the name of greater efficiency, security professionalsare demanding more freedom in their investigations and less judicial control.They are trying to take advantage of the situation to solve other problems, butthis is likely to prove counter-productive because they will only succeed in blur-ring the lines between terrorism and protest. In the longer term this will have anegative effect on people’s willingness to cooperate because the unanimity onfinding those responsible for the New York and Washington bombings will not bethe same for searching out those blamed for nationalist struggles or open andminor forms of anti-globalization violence.

This is not a temporary phenomenon. On the contrary, it is possible to deter-mine the long-term tendencies of this extension of the functions of the policebeyond national frontiers and into new forms of surveillance within our societies.These tendencies are not all linked to European construction, but result alsofrom the evolution of the means of controlling international flows of goods,capital, information and persons as well as infighting within the security agen-cies. There is a progressive movement away from methods of surveillanceestablished by nation-states, such as national identity cards and border controlsof foreign citizens. In the 1970s, the security agencies began to establish inter-connecting systems in order to create a worldwide network based on computer records,on the presence of liaison officers in foreign countries and on close European collab-oration. The connections made by agencies and politicians at the EU level –following the example of the US – between terrorism, drugs, crime, delinquency,border surveillance, the fight against major trafficking, and control of illegalimmigration widen the spectrum of public security to encompass different activities.Information and military activities to counter clandestine organizations from

216 Didier Bigo

abroad, which use political violence against national citizens or which use thenational territory as a transit zone or for the sale of drugs, usually fall into thedomain of customs officers (border controls, the fight against trafficking,economic intelligence, etc.). They find themselves drawn into internal securityand surveillance activities, which are increasingly delegated to private operatorson a local scale. The connection is stronger when the different agencies employthe same technologies and know-how (fingerprinting, unforgeable IDs, comput-erized tracking of entrance, residence, accommodation and exit, setting upexpert IT systems, satellite surveillance, widespread data-stocking, etc.).

The price of this new method of policing, which is less concerned with territo-rial surveillance, has been looser and less systematic attention to individualsurveillance. The result for the great majority of people has been greater freedomof circulation within Europe. However, the prior designation of groups requiringcloser surveillance, such as immigrants or ethnic minorities, has introduced anelement of discrimination, especially since these groups are not the only potentiallycriminal ones. The overlap between crime control and immigration control hasmodified the whole rationale and effectiveness of surveillance as well as causing aviolent reaction from groups targeted for special surveillance. It involves more andmore military technology and proactive surveillance from the secret services anddiminishes the role of criminal or judicial police. At any time, however, the thrust ofthese new conceptions of surveillance can be altered in the interests of the differentpoliticians in each country. Nothing is stabilized but there is a strong tendency touse technology as well as networking as a technique of policing.

In brief, policing is now carried out using networks. There are networks ofbureaucratic organisations in which customs officers, immigration offices,consulates and even private transport companies and private security companiesjoin forces with national and local police forces. There are networks of informa-tion technology based on the creation of national or European data files onwanted or missing persons, on those who have been denied residence, expelled,turned back at the frontier or refused asylum (SIS, Interpol and Europol files).There are networks of liaison officers who have been sent abroad to representtheir governments. They enable information exchange as well as networks ofsemantics in which new doctrines and new concepts on conflict and politicalviolence are developed. Remote policing is ever more pervasive with work doneoutside the national territory and with the help of technology. Security checksare no longer necessarily done at the border on a systematic and egalitarianbasis, but can be carried out further downstream, within the territory, within theborder zone, or even upstream, with police collaboration in the immigrants’home country, through visa-granting systems and through readmission agree-ments. The analysis has been distorted for a number of reasons: the belief that‘technology’ is by definition the solution for better control and surveillance; thebelief that the ‘new threats’ are also highly technological (nuclear, bacteriologicalor chemical bombing as well as computer crime); and the need to compete formoney on these topics. The US, the EU, NATO and Interpol have all made thesame mistakes because they belong to the same field of ‘professionals of unease

Border regimes, police cooperation and security 217

management’. They are prisoners of their vision of the revolution in militaryaffairs and high-tech warfare and they forget to look at the real actions of clan-destine organizations, which are largely more simple, but nevertheless highlydestructive. It is not certain that they have learned from the attacks in the USbecause they propose as a solution more of the same – more technology,computer data banks and satellite surveillance. However, such solutions are atthe origin of their errors. They refuse to return to what they call ‘old-style’surveillance through human infiltration because it is human cost-consuming, andbecause those recruited by the intelligence services prefer to sit in front of acomputer in Washington rather than spend years inside Afghanistan. They thuspromote abroad their conception of ‘high-tech’ security where they can be surethat the provider of technology is always in a better position than the user of thistechnology. The result is asymmetrical cooperation with CEECs.

From this perspective, the purpose of this chapter is to formulate a series ofpreliminary questions on the underlying principles governing control in a Europethat includes CEECs, and to do so by focusing the research on police coopera-tion. It will consider both practical methods and the probable consequences ofcontrol. This chapter is based on the sparse documentation available in thisparticular field and is supplemented by three months’ worth of conversations ande-mails with a score of police and military chiefs from both EU member states(France, Germany, United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, Greece)and some of the countries in the first wave of EU enlargement (Poland, theCzech Republic, Hungary, Estonia – I have no information from Slovenia,Cyprus or Malta). Thus it is not so much a description of current relationsbetween the EU and the CEECs as a preliminary study of the implications forthe implementation of the third pillar in a twenty-member European Union.2

My intention is to identify the perceptions of those involved in cooperation ona daily basis in order to highlight a series of problems that are often overlooked,even though they affect cooperation practices. Such problems include mutualtrust (or lack of it), corruption, markets and state interests, as well as the ambi-guity of objectives concerning the link made between transborder crime andpopulation flows. The legal complexity of the issues raised by the post-Amsterdam third pillar (shared Commission and Council competencies, thestatus of Europol, the Schengen acquis, etc.) has tended to overshadow otherconcerns. Indeed, the actual purpose and legitimacy of setting up police andlegal collaboration is often simply forgotten in the eager discussion of the meansof doing so. Consequently, enlargement is only judged according to its implica-tions for relations between the Commission and the Council, for community andintergovernmental considerations, for the balance between the pillars and quar-rels over areas of competence. However, it may also be useful to look at thesubstance of the cooperation, at the sociological profile of the actors involved, atthe legitimacy of such an evolution. Even a rather fragmentary analysis of therelevant actors’ norms, ideas and interests may enable us to pose other questions.These are not without interest, even though they are less Euro-centric and not sodirectly tied to the current legal debate.

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In order to do so, I will begin by describing the various forms of police coop-eration with CEECs and their purpose. I will try to show the importance ofdirect contacts between police officers from EU countries and acceding countriesand emphasize the informal nature of this cooperation. I will consider the inter-ests of the different security industries and how the zones of influence thatWestern governments want to create are related to the implementation of thethird pillar and are not confined to matters relating to the second pillar. I willshow how institutional cooperation raises a contradiction between the objectivesof crime prevention and the objectives of the prevention of immigration andmass population flows.

At the heart of this contradiction lies the right to freedom of movement, onthe one hand, and the devices of control related to the shifting Schengenborders, on the other. Enlargement upsets the already precarious balancebetween freedom of movement and security. It uncovers the extent to which weare dependent on the myths we propagate and the fears we have.3

What are we really trying to export to CEECs? Our democratic practices, ourcontrol technologies, or our fears of the Other? Is organized crime a problem initself or is it being used also as a pretext for tighter border controls to blockpopulation flows? What kind of analysis are we carrying out in respect of orga-nized crime, and what are the consequences of this analysis on the image of thepolitical structures of the countries in which that crime is able to develop? Towhat extent can one have confidence in CEEC police forces, and to what extentis this mutual? Is there not an attempt to deflect the basic contradictions inrespect of population flow management onto the new entrants, the CEECs,which will be in charge of a large part of the new external borders of the EU?No amount of militarized technology can solve these problems. We must recon-sider our own failures and limitations before exporting them as solutions.

Police cooperation with the CEECs: between trust andobligations

Current methods of police cooperation

There are three different types of police cooperation: operational, technical, andinstitutional, each of which poses its own particular problems. These three typesof cooperation already exist among EU member countries.

The first type dates back to the creation of national police forces. It is oftenbilateral and, with the creation of the Trevi group, the Palma agreement and thenegotiations for the Schengen convention, it has found a new lease of life in theprevention of terrorism and drugs trafficking as well as in border control. Thismodern form of operational cooperation dates back to 1984–6. Since then,Europeanization has emerged as the forum for cooperation, overshadowing bothtransatlantic and worldwide cooperation, and weakening governments’ sovereignstandpoints on national police forces. Cooperation at European level is nowaccepted, although some are sceptical about its actual impact.4

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Policing methods within these specialized fields have been transformed byinformal contacts between European police officers, by the creation of liaisonofficers and later of police attachés to reinforce cooperation, and by the installa-tion of computer systems that can be connected up only via trusted humanintermediaries. There is new know-how based on exchanges of experiences, andit is considered to be an integral part of any modern democratic police force.5

The second form of cooperation has also existed for some time, but it hasbeen more important for relations between EU police forces and their ex-colonies or certain Third World countries (in the 1960s for France and theUnited Kingdom, much more recently for Germany) than between EU states.The aim of this technical assistance and training cooperation is to extend one’szone of influence in equipment, technology or specific know-how (French-stylepeacekeeping, English-style community policing, German information tech-nology, Italian anti-Mafia methods). There is no convergence towards a uniqueEuropean police model. Each country clings to its own particularity and tries topromote this abroad as being the best model. Indeed, the acceptance by a CEECof a particular model is used as an argument for its wider implementation insidethe actual EU. The end of bipolarity opened up the CEECs to this particular‘training market’ in their search for other policing models.

The third form of cooperation requires acceding countries to accept anumber of principles or norms that are both non-negotiable and a condition ofentry. This form of cooperation has implications for the Union itself. It presup-poses uniform application within the Union that future member states wouldalso have to accept. But internal differences undermine the credibility of thenotion that there is uniform application, despite the fact that all discourse oninstitutional cooperation appears to suggest the contrary.

Operational cooperation: the importance of mutualconfidence

Operational cooperation with CEECs is not a new phenomenon. Even duringthe Cold War, criminal investigations officers were occasionally known to coop-erate, and since 1992 there have been bilateral exchanges of know-how andtechnology. In France this cooperation has been channelled through the SCTIP(Service de Cooperation Technique Internationale de Police – police department for inter-national technical cooperation), which at the time created a division forcooperation with Eastern European countries. In Germany this cooperation iscarried out through the BKA (Bundeskriminalamt – federal police), the BGS(Bundesgrenzschutz – border police) or regional transborder police.

EU member states prefer to act individually and maintain bilateral relationswith CEECs. In France, numerous visits and contacts led in 1994 to collabora-tion with the new CEEC chiefs of police (particularly with the police forces ofPoland and the Czech Republic, held to be more respectable than theirRomanian or Ukrainian counterparts). France has sent specialists from narcoticsand organized crime divisions, making sure not to recruit from the DST (Direction

220 Didier Bigo

de la Surveillance du Territoire – counter-spy intelligence service) or the RG(Renseignements Généraux – intelligence service). The French have emphasized theiroperational techniques in the fight against serious crime and drugs. Liaison offi-cers have been sent to CEECs since 1994, followed by police attachés in 1997.Despite being limited by the small number of police officers who speak thelanguages of these countries, this cooperation is on the increase and the SCTIPhas recently taken over the management of the various embassy attachés.6 Theaim is to increase information exchange, to cooperate on controlled deliveriesand undercover surveillance, and to demonstrate the efficiency of French crime-fighting techniques.

Germany is undoubtedly the European country that has invested the mostmoney and men in operational cooperation with the CEECs, followed by Franceand the United Kingdom. Austria invests substantial efforts bearing in mind itssize and capacity. The CEECs try to maintain links with all the differentEuropean police forces so as not to depend on one single partner. Nevertheless,there are marked zones of influence: Poland and the Czech Republic mainlywork with Germany and the United Kingdom; France is more involved inRomania and is trying to get a foothold in Hungary; Austria already has stronglinks with Hungary, and the United States, with its FBI Academy, also plays theHungarian ‘card’ for influence in the CEECs.

This level of analysis of the member states’ strategies is not sufficient. Weneed to analyse the strategies of different bureaucracies. Very often, in contrastto those responsible for foreign affairs, police and security agencies continue toprefer bilateral operational and informal cooperation as this allows them to buildup a relationship with their partners. As was the case in the past when there weretwelve member countries, police officers in the field are increasing the number ofinformal contacts and have little faith in the EU’s legal norms and the politicaltexts signed by their states. Some officers, at ground level, even fear that Europolwill use these texts to claim the right to define EU interests in police cooperation,thus trying to replace bilateral cooperation by an homogeneous network underits own control. According to various interviews with police officers from boththe EU and CEECs, Europol is seen as the by-product of German ambitions onthe grounds that its director is of German nationality.

Although CEEC police forces do not have direct access to the SIS or Europol,they can often get hold of information. Through informal exchanges with policeofficers who do have access to these computers and because they themselves areparticularly good at providing information on drugs routes, they can ask forcounterpart information. Nevertheless, CEEC police forces complain of the lackof Western reciprocity and express regret at not having enough liaison officers inWestern countries. Apparently Poland is the only country with liaison officers inGermany at the level of the border Länder. Elsewhere, bilateral cooperation hasyet to deliver, and CEEC governments complain of the imbalance between thenumber of EU police officers on their territory and the number of their ownrepresentatives (police officers or diplomats) invited to EU countries.

With respect to relations with international police organizations, it should be

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pointed out that the success attributed to Europol in the discovery of the ‘Balkanroad for drug trafficking’ is due to the exchange of information with CEECpolice forces. Nevertheless Europol is limited by its mandate, and the sensitivityof its data makes it loath to share information. Some governments or policechiefs do not want to commit themselves too far in their cooperation with theCEECs.

Interpol, in contrast, has been quick to open its doors to CEEC police officersto exploit its comparative advantage vis-à-vis Europol. This organization uses itsworldwide structure to build strong links with Russian and CEEC police forces inthe hope of becoming the hub of information exchange, over and above Europol.

Operational cooperation among police officers does well when they trust eachother and when they are dealing with specific criminal matters. In this case,exchanges are informal and operate at bilateral or even multilateral levels.However, with regard to the immigration and anti-terrorism police squads, aswell as with respect to problems of minorities relations, the subjects tend to bemore political. They often rise above the police level to involve diplomatic chan-nels and government exchanges.

Technical assistance and training: the importance of modelsof influence and competition between states

Technical assistance is based on training sessions, contact between police (orcustoms or military police) academies, and radio contact in transborder opera-tions. Politicians are involved to an extent but implementation is basically apolice matter.

There are two types of training sessions: those whose aim is to provide aninstitutional framework and promote a certain concept of the rule of law, andthose whose aim is to train CEEC police forces in sophisticated techniques. Thefirst type are often held by lawyers with an emphasis on data protection and civilliberties. The second type are carried out by police officers and provide trainingon the latest methods for detecting weapons, explosives and drugs or techniquesto prevent money laundering.

With respect to transborder operations, Germany and Austria plan to traintheir neighbours’ police forces and probably to set up joint police stations (orpolice and customs cooperation centres) on the border, as they did on theirwestern borders.

Clearly there are government strategies involved in both cases. DifferentWestern police models (and concepts of the rule of law) compete with oneanother. There are economic interests at stake. There are also longer-term strate-gies at work.7 There is competition between German, British and French policemodels and they try to use these training sessions as a vector of influence. Theintensification of exchanges between national or local police academies is a goodindicator of how much is at stake. The desire to establish democratic norms isnot necessarily at issue, but a lucrative trade in security technology and a beliefin the comparative efficiency of one’s own national model can lead to a strong

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bias. The Americans also have an important role in training and influence.8 Theofficial idea is to transfer norms, practical know-how and technology in order tomake the police forces of future member countries more efficient.

Training sessions are organized bilaterally, at European level, or under theauspices of UN CIVPOL operations: aid for transition to democracy andvarious development programmes for the prevention of organized crime.9 Themoney to be made from internal security technology (IT equipment, remote-tracking technology, airport equipment, computerized identity cards) plays nosmall part in cooperation strategy. Western countries and their private or quasi-public companies compete for this market, and sometimes lessons held bypolice officers for CEEC officers concerning rule of law are transformed intosales promotions for their own equipment. Aid is directly linked to sales ofequipment produced by their companies. Moreover, immigration control andpolice cooperation with liaison officer access to sensitive data is linked to accep-tance of their police models. The fight against organized crime is often a frontfor concern over migration flows, and the solution proposed for organizedcrime, namely tighter security on external borders, pulls the wool over thepublic’s eyes. Increased border security reassures the public but it is ineffectivein both the prevention of crime and the prevention of transnational populationflows.

The political rhetoric does not reflect the strategies of the different services.Despite declarations that uniform policy is being implemented throughout theEU, police models and methods differ substantially between countries.

Germany proposes a model of proactive, highly computerized policing thatrelies heavily on strategic analysis. This model is governed by the law and theclear-cut division of competencies between its different organizations. Unlike theAmerican model, it makes little use of undercover techniques. France promotes apragmatic model that focuses more on operations and men than on strategy andintensive use of IT. Its mixed model of national and local police is presented asan advantage and they emphasize its possible transferability from external secu-rity missions to internal ones. Like Germany and France, Britain is also trying toget into this market and uses the reputation of both Scotland Yard and Britishprevention of terrorism (IRA) to promote specific technology and organizationalstructures. Britain often acts in unison with the United States.

There is an intense battle over the development of the organizational normsthat will dictate CEEC preferences. This threatens to shatter the image of asingle democratic police model in the EU and also gives the CEECs an opportu-nity to play one EU country off against another. To a lesser degree, otherWestern services also try to compete for markets and highlight their specificityand their originality: the overthrow of dictatorships and their experience ofdemocratic transitions in the case of Spain and Greece; the fight against theMafia in the case of Italy. However, competition is dominated by the mainpolice forces of the United States (FBI, Drug Enforcement Agency), Germany(BKA, BGS), France (SCTIP) and the United Kingdom (Narcotic InformationService), and it proliferates in other areas at service level by the inclusion of

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customs, military status police and intelligence services or the armed forces.Each service makes the most of its own specificity and its comparative advan-tage, in terms of resources, within a specific ‘security field in Europe’.10

Clearly there is no consensus among EU governments on the content ofpolice training sessions or on the methods of organization against crime andinvestigation techniques. It would be interesting to put together a comparativestudy of the CEECs’ police or military training programmes carried out by thevarious EU countries and the US in order to make a more rigorous analysis ofthe ‘norms’ passed on by these training sessions and to identify governments’more indirect strategies. Despite ambitious projects established in 1995–6, therole of the European Union is not central at this level. The EU has not beenable to agree on setting up a police academy worthy of the name and up to thestandards of the American one.

Seminars, however, do take place in Poland and Hungary. The Commissionhas also helped to set up seminars on border control in Strasbourg in order toshare its experiences, but these seminars are not terribly influential, particularlyin comparison to bilateral action that focuses on operational practices.

Such contradictions leave CEEC players in a position of relative strength.They can take advantage of the competition among Europeans, which is madeall the stiffer by the strong American presence in the sector (FBI Academy inHungary). As Eberhard Bort points out (chapter 10), the US has invested morethan $8 million in the ILEA (International Law Enforcement Academy) inBudapest. This is seen not only as a means to combat crime but also as a way oftraining CEEC police forces in American methods rather than leaving it to theEuropeans. The Americans are keen to outdo the others and have made thistraining a strategic objective. Hungarian leaders receive this interest with mixedfeelings. They are clearly sceptical about any help in moving towards democracy.They interpret all action by American or European governments as a form ofneo-colonialism and as a recycling of systems that have already been tried out inthe Third World and are now being forced onto them.

As is the case with respect to operational cooperation, training cooperationcan easily take place without any institutional agreement and many police offi-cers in the field are wary of institutionalization (EU authorities). They are infavour of flexible bilateral relations according to the so-called ‘national interests’of the different countries and against the formalism sought by lawyers andforeign affairs officials. They are sceptical about agreements signed at EU level.

Some British and French police officers support what, in legal language, isdescribed as an ‘intergovernmental’ position, although in fact this is basically anexpression of their general distrust concerning judicial and formal agreements(and not simply a distrust of the Court of Justice or the Commission). They arenot convinced that crime that ignores borders can only be dealt with by aEuropean police force. That would only make sense if there were a Europeanstate with one government and one parliament with real control over policeorganizations. In its absence, there is a risk of those organizations becomingautonomous. As they explain in interviews, enlargement increases the risk of an

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autonomous organization given that the means of control and lines of appealare currently so dispersed. The danger is that Europol will determine the normsof international police cooperation at European level according to its own inter-ests and infighting. Nevertheless, in the opinion of many police officers,institutional cooperation should concentrate more on judicial matters than onpolice cooperation, because this forms the basis for any criminal police coopera-tion.

Institutional cooperation: the normative path toEuropeanization

Institutional cooperation with CEECs in police matters is only just beginning.The pre-accession pact on organized crime was one of the first documents tobring them to the negotiating table.11 But the conditions of this ‘pact’ are diffi-cult to realize and it is not certain whether convergence will go beyond judicialagreement to the homogenization of practices or whether it will remain a simpleformality. This issue is often overlooked and the only concern seems to be thetimely signing of an agreement. The Commission (and the Council) seem to bemostly interested in the normative aspect. The signing of conventions and textsis regarded as a political guarantee, a sign of goodwill on behalf of futuremembers. There is little concern, at least officially, over whether the transforma-tions are effectively carried out. The debate is essentially a legal one. But can itremain so?

The conditions of pre-admission impose at least six criteria that CEECs needto fulfil on organized crime: (1) an efficiently structured police organization withall necessary powers; (2) qualified personnel and technical equipment needed tocombat crime; (3) an appropriate legal system and sufficient legal grounding; (4)practical capacity of the relevant services to fight crime and prevent drug addic-tion; (5) rigorous gun legislation; and (6) infallible protection of computer data.In other words, they are subjected to a series of criteria that would make themmodels of behaviour even in comparison to established democracies. In so doing,EU members assume that the problems of transition and of adapting the policeforces and various security agencies have already been solved.

But is this reasonable? It is not the purpose of this chapter to analyse theprocesses at work in the transformation of the social practices of bureaucraciesany more than it is to study the relations of these police forces with the differentsectors of their societies.12 More research should be done on this subject in rela-tion to the ‘models’ proposed by Western governments.

The behaviour of police forces in democracies is not as transparent as wewould like to believe. What are the real practices of security agencies indemocracies and how can efficient crime prevention and necessary freedomsbe reconciled? What importance do security agents give to the notion ofliberty when it clashes with the quest for efficiency? What can be said of theproposed norms when examining the social practices of Western countries? Towhat extent are norms respected concerning the professional code of ethics,

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non- invasion of privacy, the presumption of innocence, the preference for lawagainst illegal efficiency? Do they lead to different practices or are they thebasis of a more elaborate system of justification?

The cooperation provided for by the pre-accession pact on the prevention oforganized crime brings together the various recommendations of G7/G8 (espe-cially the groupe de Lyon) and requires the CEECs to adhere to them. But EUcountries themselves find it difficult to transform these recommendations intoactual practices. How far should the CEECs be held responsible for the applica-tion of these recommendations? The paradox is that by demanding too much ofthem, the EU may end up demanding nothing at all as it will be satisfied simplywith formal assent; the actual application will scarcely be looked into. Isn’t thatwhat already happens within the EU before enlargement?

In demanding more information exchange, more reliable organizations andbetter technical competence, EU countries show that their idea of cooperation isthat CEECs need to pull themselves up to EU standards. This imbalance casts ashadow on the idea of the reciprocity of information exchange.

The ambiguity of relations between CEEC and Western police forces lies inthe fact that the latter want to give CEEC officers advice and advocate coopera-tion but at the same time they are reluctant to put their trust in them and are notprepared to work on a reciprocal basis. The advice given becomes a form ofpressure that is not always well accepted by the CEEC agencies. There is littlescope for innovations or initiatives of their own, even ones that might reflecttheir specificity, and their democratic capacity is measured by how well theyadapt to the model imposed upon them. Cooperation is transformed into anunequal relationship in which they are expected to obey. This is not wellreceived. Even if CEECs recognize their own weaknesses, they are not impressedby the strengths of West European countries and are not prepared to follow theirlead. The American model often seems more coherent and less ‘hypocritical’than those from the EU.

US agents have long experience of non-colonial but non-reciprocal relations(US–Mexico or US–Colombia) and they play that game quite well. This is notthe case for EU police forces with regard to CEECs. Heads of security agenciesin EU countries complain of the possible discrepancy between police practices(in terms of both efficiency and the protection of basic rights) and the textssigned by the political leaders of the countries in question. In their view,European diplomats and lawyers do not have sufficient understanding of thesubject and are too formalistic; failing to ensure that the CEECs have the meansto implement the texts. They often cite the example of the complex relationshipbetween the United States and Central America to highlight the problem of theattainable level of confidence between EU and future-member police forces.Some officers believe that cooperation is good and getting better all the time.However, others, speaking off the record, bring up the issue of CEEC policeaccess to sensitive data (particularly in relation to the development of Europol),their role in Schengen and the dangers of infiltration by criminal networks. Fortheir part, the CEEC police forces are extremely sensitive about this subject and

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concerned for their reputation, which explains the kind of diplomatic double-talk that avoids the issues most hotly debated by the people concerned. But this‘question of confidence’ must be posed.

Although some reject the strong institutionalization of police cooperation,there is rarely any opposition to European institutional cooperation in legalmatters. Penal cooperation is an essential element of police cooperation andmainly achieved through the institutions. It would be difficult to work togetherwithout some common penal incrimination of organized crime or otheroffences. But despite their efforts, EU members have not been able, or have notwanted, to agree on a common definition and so make up for this lacuna byquoting all the appended texts that condemn acts under the general heading ofcriminality. Terms such as organized or serious form of criminality (a formulathat includes both organized and non-organized crime) are symptomatic of theirindecision. This state of affairs is unsatisfactory and there have been many callsfor a uniform definition of crime. The problem with this, however, is that legalharmonization would ignore the heterogeneity of the social practices of crime inthe various countries. The desire to reach a common definition at all costs couldlead to a distorted view of the phenomenon itself if the overriding ambition is tounify what is, in fact, heterogeneous. After the question of mutual trust in opera-tional cooperation, this is perhaps one of the most important issues at stake inthe process and needs to be examined. Enlargement leads to texts that, in anattempt at synthesis and consensus, become more and more general and less andless in touch with social practices. The building of unity by means of the fairlyartificial creation of a convergence of threats or of a new enemy is a process thatneeds to be carefully studied.13

By including the issue of Schengen and its acquis, Amsterdam institutional coop-eration has renewed some of the ambiguity of Maastricht and has re-establisheda link between police cooperation, migration flows and border issues. The inclusionof Schengen has made matters even more complicated than they were underMaastricht (if that is possible), despite the fact that its very objective was to clarifyand simplify the relationship between the pillars. Disagreements over the legallyconstraining nature of the decisions and over the distribution of the various acquis

means that, after Amsterdam, for important points of regulation of practices, theSchengen acquis remain within the third pillar. Thus the pessimistic hypothesis aboutthe Treaty of Amsterdam is likely to be confirmed.14 Police and judicial coopera-tion will continue to depend upon a vision that constructs a dubious generalizationbetween crime and migration. It will be based more on dealing with the fears andworries of Western countries than on the identification of crime problems.

The move towards more solidarity and integration among member countriesinherent in the first pillar will be undermined by the spirit of distrust in the third.This is not because of crime itself, but because it will be imported into the firstpillar through the domains of migration and transborder flows. Institutionalcooperation with CEECs will only be judged relevant if it corresponds to theunspoken elements of Western policy on migration, and under the cover ofarguments for the prevention of organized crime.

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But what exactly are we trying to solve, and by what means? These are twoessential issues at stake in enlargement that force current EU members toexamine their own practices.

In this second part of the chapter I will pose several questions on the complexinterplay of the norms we suggest, the norms we follow, the practices we adopt,the myths we propagate and what effects of reception, reproduction and resis-tance these might entail. As before, I will avoid entering into a theoreticaldiscussion of the relationship between values, ideas, norms and interests, ideolo-gies and practices, power and resistance, importation or hybridization, etc. I willsimply identify different levels of problems and different ways of posing theproblem.

Organized crime: the main focus of cooperation withCEECs?

Is the ‘question’ of organized crime and the ‘response’ to it at the heart of therelationship between Western and CEEC police forces? Practically every agentin the field of security automatically thinks so; their vision is organized that way.They think there is a threatening reality that must be combated by the develop-ment of state-coordinated public policy. I have already questioned the way thisproblem is formulated and the assumptions that it makes.15 Security agencies donot simply respond to threats; they take part in creating them by objectifyingthem in their routine work, in the way they put their statistics together, in thehierarchy given to different dangers, in the priorities they set, in the technicalsolutions available, in the know-how they think they possess.

I do not share the view of some experts who believe that organized crime canbe intrinsically defined as a social reality ‘independent’ of the security field,whose sole origin lies in the practices of ‘underworld’ actors. But, even if thiswere true, it is too simplistic to think that tighter border control, with the use oftechnology and the military, will stop it. It is more appropriate to coordinateintelligence and to infiltrate. So why do so many agents support the first solu-tion? To what extent is concern over organized crime useful to certain services(in terms of missions and budgets) or politicians (dealing with fears over differ-ence, immigrants, foreigners)? It can, for instance, be seen as one way offurthering technology, to the advantage of a few private and quasi-publiccompanies. Aren’t the fears of citizens and their representatives strengthened byexaggerating the dangers?

The answer depends on one’s view of whether or not organized crime ishighly transnational. Does it operate on a transborder scale within a limitedarea, or does it operate on a continent-wide scale? American intelligence servicediscourse tends to speak of global terrorism, global mafia and transnationalorganized crime (TOC), but there is little concrete evidence of this andEuropean police forces doubt that there is such a degree of organization. Ofcourse, there are local forms of organized crime, such as the Sicilian Mafia,Neapolitan Camorra or Japanese Triads, but the connections between them are

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weak. Furthermore, the response to them also depends on the belief that themost dangerous and sophisticated mafia organizations use the police’s ownundercover methods against them and manage to infiltrate the police and localor national politics. But are they that powerful? Isn’t it more a case of the policeseeing in their adversaries the very characteristics that they would like to possessthemselves?

Beliefs on the origins of organized crime

The image of a mafia that has invaded Russian political circles and then spreadto CEECs remains one of the most potent images portrayed by politicians, jour-nalists and a minority of security agents (usually those furthest from the field orworking in different specialized sectors). This image nevertheless forms the basisfor the main argument in security debates and it combines with or replaces fearsover migration flows from Russia. Yet associating the Russian polity with orga-nized crime in this way is a complex matter.16

There are criminal activities in Russia, and their extent is all the moresurprising since communist propaganda deliberately played down criminality tomake us believe in the virtues of socialism. However, these activities are concen-trated within Russian territory and their exportation is far from proven. Even iftrue, it would be in no way peculiar to Russia. Thus although there are suspi-cions of money laundering, ties with tax havens, with the US and with Germany,the activities of the Russian mafia outside its territory are probably fairlylimited.17 In France, inquiries carried out by criminal investigations police haveshown that French territory serves as a holiday resort for Russian nouveaux riches

but that mafia activity is virtually non-existent and is a product of journalisticimagination in search of an exciting subject.18

In Germany and Belgium there are more concrete signs of infiltration, butthey also remain fairly limited. It would also be an exaggeration to say that thePolish or Hungarian mafia are a conduit for the Russian mafia. Once again, aparticular phenomenon (in this case, the trafficking of stolen cars between 1992and 1995) has been extrapolated to establish a theory of a global mafia linkingcriminal milieus. Since 1996, following the setting up of car-assembly plants inRussia that cater to the needs of rich Russians, there has been a fall in the trafficof stolen cars. But once ideas on global mafia have been formed, they are self-perpetuating through the ‘simple rationalization’ of events often based uponconspiracy theories creating an invisible and all-powerful adversary (AFSP roundtable on the enemy within).

Like EU countries, CEECs have problems with criminality and significantproblems linked to structural transformations in the economy and the labourmarket, but they are not a conduit for Russian criminality and should not beseen as threatening an invasion of Western countries through crime and/orimmigration. Yet this is how they are viewed by a significant fringe of those inthe field of security who have no qualms in calling for a ‘buffer zone’ that wouldkeep Western countries from coming into contact with the dangers of the East.

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Ideas are forming on the need to ‘hold’ and ‘control’ borders in the name ofsovereignty or the safeguarding of national identity. The image of a fortress oran electronic wall is valued as a protection against an ‘invasion’ seen as either‘massive’ (people fleeing war or repression) or ‘creeping’ (illegal or even legalmigration, which is seen as a threat if migrants refuse give up certain values fromthe old country).19 Such security ideas and debates have been increasingly criti-cized but their symbolic effect has not been reduced.20 This forms the basis for awhole series of more or less well-reasoned fears over CEEC entry to the EU.

Before or even while ‘we’ criticize ‘them’, we need to understand and classifyour own fears by analysing who voices them, what they are based upon, to whatextent they influence discussions between EU members and CEECs, and to whatextent they may affect CEEC rights.

Fear of corruption in the future member-state police forcesand organized crime

As was said earlier, when EU police officers are asked about their fears overCEECs, they all mention corruption and the infiltration of CEEC police forcesby the mafia. What Western security agencies fear is that when they work withCEEC police forces and give them information, that information may well endup in the hands of mafia organizations. Their suspicions are confirmed by thefact that when Central and East European states or organizations are accused ofsuch practices, their reaction is to defend their own case whilst giving credit to thegeneral theory of overall corruption by accusing the other services or CEECs.21

There are many reasons given to explain the corruption: lack of finance; latepayment of salaries in certain countries; new habits of capitalism where every-thing can be bought; the weak notion of public service wrongly associated withsocialism. The ‘weakness of the state’ and public regulations and even mafiacontrol of central political power (in other countries) are also used to explaininfiltration.

This lack of trust and solidarity among CEECs affects their internationalcredibility and increases Western distrust. That is why one of the Commission’spriorities must be to create the conditions of mutual trust that are currentlylacking. This would entail an energetic fight against presenting security issues ina way that spreads unreasoned fear.

Of course, the situation differs from one country to another. There is a corre-lation between those countries that are the first in line to be admitted (with theexception of Cyprus), and those with the least risk of conflict with minorities,political upheaval, migration flows, organized crime or terrorism.

Poland has made some effort to improve the credibility of its security forces,as have the Czech Republic and, more recently, Hungary. Slovenia has alsomade an effort in wanting to show that it is already prepared for Schengen.Various countries have emphasized their techniques and repackaged the imageof their police force, calling upon specialists in image creation from the privatesector. Criminal investigations police have distanced themselves from the intelli-

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gence services and former militia by pointing out how little they were involved inthe former regimes. Services specialized in narcotics claim to be a new genera-tion of police officers, trained in modern investigation methods, very often aftera course in the United States. The language of policing has changed andadapted to Western models: community policing, proactive methods, sophisti-cated surveillance technology in ports and airports. Acceptance of Westerntechnology is often seen as a sign of modernization and hence democracy,although the correlation is highly questionable.

CEEC governments will have to impose visa requirements for certain coun-tries and take restrictive measures against illegal immigration from outside thecommunity. They will need to be equipped with the IT needed for the SIS andhave legislation in place on data protection. However, despite what agents fromthe security field may claim, such measures will not necessarily have an impactupon their behaviour towards minorities and migrants. Technology and democ-racy do not always go hand in hand. If CEEC intelligence services have access tothe SIS, which already has over eight million entries and will soon reach fourteenmillion, will it be used for other ends than those intended? Certain NGOs havealready signalled their unease.22

How will anyone determine how strict or lax controls of migrants fromoutside the community are, or how effective the detection of false documents is?CEEC police forces will be judged by Western security agencies, by governmentsof the EU members and by NGOs. Their opinions will differ. They will be opento accusations of being both lax and arbitrary. One side is worried about thepossible ill treatment of minorities and of asylum seekers from outside thecommunity. The other side wonders just how far they can trust badly paid policeofficers who may be bought off by smugglers. At the same time, lawyers anddiplomats argue that the new governments must be trusted to manage theirpolice forces. A lack of trust would lead to a politically untenable situation ofcooperation substitution whereby, de facto, the role of liaison officers fromWestern countries would be to observe, control or even direct as much as toadvise.

Furthermore, the fixing of efficiency standards assumes that all countries,both CEECs and current members, will adhere to them. But are they preparedto do so? Would we accept having our own police forces inspected by foreigngovernments and forces? Countries like the United Kingdom (or France) thatadopt an intergovernmental approach will surely refuse, and once the CEECshave joined the EU it seems likely that they will reinforce an intergovernmentalstance on police matters. They do not appear to favour a Europol that is eithertoo powerful, too German or too interfering.

Fear of the migration invasion, Schengen and the moving ofthe Union’s ‘external’ border

As Malcolm Anderson points out, borders are complex institutions and anyalteration necessarily carries certain consequences. Borders are identity markers,

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a means of protection, junction points, solidarity boundaries and demarcationsof competence and the power to sanction.23 As long as borders demarcate thenation-state, these different functions more or less coincide. However, given thecurrent distinction between the EU’s internal and external borders and thedecoupling of territorial and identity controls, our frame of reference needs tobe changed. How can we manage the protection of territory in a world without‘borders’? As the role of external security linked to the risk of conventional warin Europe declined, the role of internal security was revived by playing on fearsof loss of national identities through large-scale immigration and populationmovements. There was talk of insufficient security and people’s fears hingedupon links between immigration, crime, political violence, unemployment anddeficits in social welfare.

I have explained in detail how this continuum of threats to security is puttogether and how it shapes a vision of a world that is threatened from withoutand within by highlighting transnational phenomena, e.g. violence from theMiddle East, drugs rings, modern slave-trade, illegal immigration, refugeesfleeing political persecution or war. This (in)security continuum has graduallyforged a link between security and migration (even asylum) that works on threelevels. On an ideological level there has been a marked decline in the idea thatthere is a contradiction between security and liberty. This notion has beenreplaced by a conviction that security guarantees liberty. On a normative levelthe creation of statistical instruments and laws and regulations link the twophenomena. On an instrumental level each country puts policies in place in thename of European constraints.24

The original idea of a state delimited by EU borders with a uniform regimeof external (increased control) and internal relations (freedom of movement)soon gave way to a series of complex relations between the different membercountries.25 Some, such as the UK or Ireland, oppose any change. Others willonly accept change if there is some form of compensation. None interpret thesafety clauses in the same way (Schengen countries, French attitude). Over theyears Schengen has done more to shape the debate on the justification ofcontrols than it has to establish freedom of movement. It has been much less alaboratory for the idea of a community of European citizens than a source ofopposition to it. It has short-circuited the Commission by quickly developing arationale of surveillance and control that limits freedom of movement in prac-tice. The idea behind Schengen is to make border control coincide with thedeployment of migration-flow police, made up, in the absence of federalization,of cooperating national police forces from all member states. Yet there is still amyth of Schengen as the laboratory of the EU and as the bearer of the values offreedom of movement that makes it difficult to uncover these strategies ofcontrol.

Enlargement now alters the balance of relations between the geography ofthe external border and its function, strongly advocated by some governments, asa barrier to migration flows. This poses a serious problem for those behind thecreation of Schengen.

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The first consequence of EU enlargement for internal security matters lies inthe change in the geographical area and in the people to be monitored andcontrolled. Theoretically, as members of the community, CEEC citizens will nolonger be the object of any particular surveillance and will not only be free intheir movements, but will also, under certain conditions, be able to settle incountries that currently protect themselves from migration flows from these verycountries.This should make controls much easier as the new borders further tothe East are currently far less active. Intra-community flows will greatly outweighflows at the community’s periphery.

This tendency will be reinforced once Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic,Slovenia, Estonia and Cyprus have been integrated. If the priority is freedom ofmovement and the creation of solidarity among European countries, then thesituation calls for some rejoicing. If, on the other hand, the idea (hidden behindSchengen) is to protect prosperous countries from flows from poorer countriesand to create common policy in immigration countries towards emigrationcountries, enlargement will profoundly alter the balance of relations. For the firsttime, the Schengen area will include both immigration and emigration countries.

The external border will no longer correspond to migration concerns. It willcontinue to function with respect to flows from further afield, i.e. Asia, Africa,etc., but because it will have moved further to the east it will be ineffectual inrelation to the economies of Western Europe. Western countries can react in twoways. They can accept this state of affairs and clearly favour migration withinthe EU. Or they can reinstate controls on internal borders, or at least on borderswith emigration countries, which is what the CEECs are likely to remain forsome years to come despite the changes currently taking place. This would haveto be done under the pretext of a special exemption to avoid awkward questionsbeing raised about the historical (and colonial) ties with countries south of theMediterranean.

Although Germany would be little affected by this evolution, the same cannotbe said for France and the United Kingdom. Unlike Germany’s intra-community ties, their strongest ties will continue to be with countries outside thecommunity. Relations with the East and South will change, as will relationsbetween Germany and its partners.

Immigration and emigration countries within one area?

Although one might hope that a strong spirit of integration within the EU wouldhelp CEECs by giving their citizens rights and guarantees on movement andsettlement that they otherwise would not have had, it seems that a lot of politicalparties, including some in power, as well as security agencies have a tendency tolink migration from CEECs to organized crime. Such criminal activities includetrafficking in works of art, stolen cars, prostitution, the heroin trade in theBalkans, as well as money laundering and mafia activity linked to Russian capi-talism. Those who make that link call for greater internal control within the EUdirected towards CEEC citizens.

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Although it is seldom brought to the fore, such an (unofficial) view is commonamong security agencies and has become one of their points of reference. Itexplains security agents’ misgivings about the rationale behind ‘Europe’ andmore particularly about the power of the Court of Justice actually to assess theiractions. What is at stake is not so much an issue of sovereignty as an unwilling-ness to exercise transparency or explain motives hidden behind the reason ofstate. The contradiction between the logic behind the first pillar (economy, inte-gration, citizenship) and the third (security and migration) is not dispelled byenlargement and the Treaty of Amsterdam. Quite the contrary.

Police officers in the field support the idea of a return to tighter nationalcontrols – which in practice would be at odds with freedom of movement – notbecause of organized crime but because of immigration. Others see the solutionin a reinforced informal Schengen where immigration countries would cooperateagainst emigration countries within the official Schengen. This would create thefamous buffer zone and a system in which the entry of CEECs would be noguarantee of freedom of movement for their citizens.

There is no shortage of reasons, both good and bad, for setting up a systemthat will alter the regime of controls, thus ‘abandoning the Schengen discoursewhich justifies the tightening of controls at external borders by abolishingcontrols on internal borders’. Such a system would be comprised of a series ofsluice-gates with various levels of border control according to a country’s pros-perity. External borders would be maintained and even tightened, with the helpof Western technology and using personnel with the military know-how thatCEEC security agents exercised in former times. At no stage, however, wouldthere be any compensation in the form of freedom of movement.

This is all the more important given that the EU’s final border has not yetbeen traced and the first wave of new entrants will shape future relations with theones that follow. The reasoning that Romania or Ukraine will enter under thesame conditions as Poland creates new fears. There is talk of the risk of internalconflict in these countries due to their problems with minorities once they jointhe EU.26 Freedom of movement will have had its day. It will apply to somesections of the Union’s membership but not to others. How should we react tothis argument that destroys the European idea? Can we accept a division of anenlarged EU into two zones, one with freedom of movement and one without ?

Transformation of CEECs and the sluice-gates hypothesis

Many diplomats hope to avoid this contradiction that plays into the hands ofthose playing the security card. They argue that distrust at official level based onsecurity fears undermines freedom of movement. They try to ignore or belittlethe problem, despite the fact that some, albeit marginal, politicians have adoptedthis discourse as their own. According to diplomats, the very nature of migrationflows from CEECs is changing, so the situation is only transitory. Provided thatCEECs manage, through economic development, to keep their populations athome, they will soon become immigration countries rather than emigration

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countries and our concerns over migration will focus on the external border. Infuture the problem will be more one of transit across their territory rather thanone of migration within the EU.

Recent trends highlighted in official reports are encouraging. We are far fromthe apocalyptic predictions of the Berlin Conference of 1994, and although itcontinues to be a point of reference for G8 and the European Council, sociologicaldescriptions have shown that migration tends to fluctuate. Transborder crossingsare principally a form of commercial tourism to supply the local transbordereconomy.27 Nevertheless, it is quite reasonable to assume that the current flowfrom CEECs to Western countries will not dry up upon their entry into the EU.

In that case, the European Union would form an area with enormous differ-ences in economic development and a preference for ‘internal’ migration overmigration from outside. Its rationale would resemble NAFTA, and this wouldagain raise questions on the issue of freedom of movement for individuals withinthis area.

Militarization of external borders through technology: not asolution

The issues at stake in the militarization of borders, with the increasing interven-tion of armed forces in the control of transnational population flows, have beenstudied in some depth. The research focuses on a comparative analysis of thesituations in America at the Mexican border, in Germany at the Polish border, inAustria at the Hungarian border, and in Italy at the Straits of Otranto. It alsocovers armed forces’ participation in domestic operations, such as the Vigipirateoperation in France, which has been in place since 1995, various anti-Mafiaoperations in Italy (the most famous being Vespri Siciliani) and the NorthernIreland situation in the United Kingdom.

The stakes involved concern the use of the most sophisticated technology(helicopters, radar, night vision, video surveillance, heat detectors, telecommuni-cations tapping, high-speed intervention vehicles), personnel training and therelationship between the army, ‘mixed’ forces and the police. They also concernissues of freedom and democracy as they undermine the principle of non-inter-vention of the military in domestic civilian life. These points are outside thescope of this chapter.28

Suffice it to note that Poland is already on its way to militarizing its borders,and the head of border control clearly entertains the possibility of using avail-able military equipment to secure the eastern border as it is impossible to do soby more traditional means. Furthermore, Poland has called for American andGerman help in setting up an electronic border (heat detectors, night surveil-lance, etc.). Hungary is also interested, provided the United States can give ittechnical assistance, and Slovenia has approached commercial companies tosupply the necessary equipment. Even Estonia is considering such action,although such a move certainly would not ease their relations with Russia. As for

Border regimes, police cooperation and security 235

Cyprus, it plans to increase its forces, not as a defence against Turkish invasion,but to fight against traffickers and illegal immigration.

The militarization of borders through the intense use of warfare technologyredeployed in the surveillance of transborder flows is seen by many professionalsas the solution to the problem. In fact militarization creates more problems thanit solves. It is very expensive for public coffers even if it does bring returns forprivate companies. It creates arbitrary situations in certain enclosed areas such asairports, ports and certain border crossing-points. However, it cannot manageand control all unauthorized crossing-points and therefore does not provideeffective protection. Determined individuals will continue to cross borders if theywant to. Land borders cannot be closed off in their ‘green zone’ without anunacceptable increase in personnel costs. Militarization also leads to furtherconfusion in distinguishing between migrant and enemy and can encouragefragile democracies to slip back into authoritarian habits. After the rapid demili-tarization of borders, we could be insidiously sliding towards remilitarizationinvolving the same people but with different uniforms. That could have seriousconsequences in terms of infringements of human rights for those from outsidethe community. Under what conditions will people be turned back at the easternborders in Poland or Slovenia, and what rights will asylum seekers have? It is notnecessarily a good idea to direct the armed forces of these countries towardsinternal issues and border protection. It would be better to train police forces tohave greater respect for human rights. Militarization also encourages countrieswith powerful NGOs to transfer external border management onto their neigh-bours, thus avoiding any internal protest. We have called this remote policing orremote security control.29

CEEC police officers in the field get the impression that they are being forcedinto police practices that are out of step with the discourse on democracy, partic-ularly when it comes to immigration and asylum. They feel that they are beingmade to do the ‘dirty work’ of blocking population flows at their borders. Therecent Western reaction to the Kosovo situation, with a general refusal to acceptrefugees in anything but the smallest doses, is seen as a clear sign of hypocrisy.The most critical among them feel that EU officers want to replace them in theirwork while imposing responsibilities upon them when serious problems arise.Tighter controls have already upset the bazaar economy that had sprung up onPoland’s eastern border and created tension with its neighbours. The Germansgive the Poles little credit for exercising tighter control, despite the fact that theyrecently experienced similar problems themselves and were considerably moreconciliatory towards the Poles than they expect the Poles to be towards theireastern neighbours, particularly Ukraine. There are signs of disillusionment inthe interviews with CEEC police officers. They have realized that this is the pricethey have to pay if they want to join the EU. Membership is desired foreconomic reasons but enthusiasm for EU values has waned. Those currentlyengaged in the process of joining the EU are already thinking about futureenlargement and are adopting the same strategies with the future members, theirterritorial neighbours to the east and south-east.

236 Didier Bigo

CEECs and the right to freedom of movement

The right of European citizens and legal residents to move and reside freelywithin the territory of the EU is one of the most important assets of EU democ-racy. At the normative level, this right cannot be undermined by the creation ofsecond-class citizens in Eastern Europe without seriously damaging the princi-ples of the EU and creating significant resentment. But is it possible toimplement this right in the short term? The debate centres on the core values wewant and their practical possibilities.

For people who believe in human rights, EU enlargement can only proceed ifall citizens of the future Union are treated equally. This means that article 62will apply to all citizens and that there will be no control of individuals crossinginternal borders.

European solidarity is weakened by the increase in alarmist discourse, be itofficial or unofficial, on the risks that current members run in letting CEECs joinin the near future. Controls within the Schengen area between immigration andemigration countries are justified on the grounds of a ‘migration risk’ or the riskof ‘organized crime’.

Migration flows are not themselves directly correlated to security or danger,nor is it possible to block them with a system of border controls. Moreover, itwould be difficult to require more of CEEC partners in terms of control, secu-rity and democratic transparency than is current practice within the EU. Theycannot be expected to apply the norms laid down by the European institutions tothe letter, especially if current member states like the UK often do little to applythem themselves. (See various practices in border and other forms of control thatcurrently undermine the everyday reality of freedom of movement within theSchengen area.)

The principle of the right to freedom of movement for all future EU citizensmust take precedence over the fears that feed the security debate. These fears areoften the product of over-generalizations based upon concrete examples that,although exact, are statistically insignificant. Media interest generates belief intheir importance and creates greatly disproportionate distrust of foreigners or ofthose perceived as foreign. It is humiliating for those who are permanentlysuspected of being potential criminals simply because of their nationality or thecolour of their skin.30

The image of the EU depends on the myths that it can project outside itsterritory to promote its values. It cannot claim to be the cradle of democracy, the

place to settle, and at the same time create strictly internal myths to strengthenunity in the face of an imaginary enemy. It is typical of the profound naïvety ofcertain leaders’ short-sighted cynicism to believe that the security myth will notaffect the image of democracy both outside and within the EU.31

Given the changing notions of state, sovereignty, identity, border and securitylinked to transnationalization and the age of risk, it is illusory to continue tofunction according to an internal–external diptych. They are not two separateworlds, and an action in one will have repercussions in the other. Security issuesare affected by the blurring of the differentiation between internal and external.

Border regimes, police cooperation and security 237

Conclusion

In conclusion, to give the European project a renewed positive image, we mustput as much energy as possible into fighting the negative images and dispropor-tionate fears that drive cooperation policies. The new members must be givenequal rights. More specifically we must make sure that the right to freedom ofmovement is effectively implemented. A useful initiative would be to create aEuropean committee based on a network of NGOs, national MPs and membersof the security field, which could check on this implementation. A monitoringbody should be set up to identify the problems encountered and the obstaclesplaced in the way of freedom of movement.

Notes

1 Didier Bigo, ‘L’archipel des polices’, Le Monde Diplomatique (October 1996).2 I interviewed approximately eighty persons (by phone, email or face-to-face) whom I

knew from previous research. Of course, it is risky to make generalizations from thispanel, but at the same time, it is rare in the police research field to find so manypeople who are willing to give their own views and openly to discuss visions that areat odds with those of policy-makers and bureaucrats. I do not endorse everythingthey say in the interviews, but I think it is important to know that the golden legend ofever-improving cooperation between more and more countries is, for good reasons,not shared by the people in charge of implementing the general agreements createdby diplomats.

3 Paul Veyne, Les Grecs: ont ils cru à leurs mythes? (Paris: Seuil, 1983).4 Interviews (see note 2).5 Didier Bigo, Polices en réseaux: L’expérience européenne (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 1996).

See also Neil Walker, ‘The Problem of Trust in an Enlarged Area of Freedom,Security and Justice’, paper presented at the Robert Schuman Centre’s ‘Conferenceon Justice and Home Affairs in the Process of the EU’s Eastward Enlargement’(Brussels, 30–1 May 2001).

6 Didier Bigo, ‘Liaison Officers in Europe: New Actors in the European Security Field’,in James W. Sheptycki, eds, Issues in Transnational Policing (London: Routledge, 2000),pp. 67–100.

7 Clifford Shearing, Reinventing Policing: Policing as Governance, Police Change, Changing thePolice. International Perspectives (New York: Garland Publishers, 1996).

8 Ethan A. Nadelmann; Cops across Borders: the Internationalization of US Criminal LawEnforcement (Pittsburgh: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993).

9 UN, G7/G8 Programme on Organized Crime.10 Didier Bigo, ‘Frontiers and Security in Europe’, in Malcolm Anderson and Eberhard

Bort, eds, The Frontiers of Europe (London: Cassel Academic/Pinter, 1998).11 European Union 8331/98 Council CRIMORG 72 version 19/05/98.12 Fabien Jobard, Projet sur les polices allemandes et la transition démocratique (Berlin: WZB,

1999). See also Neil Walker, Policing in a Changing Constitutional Order (London: Sweet &Maxwell, 2000).

13 Remy Leveau, ‘Les musulmans en France’, in Kastoriano Riva, ed., Quelle identité pourl’Europe? Le multiculturalisme à l’épreuve (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 1998). Dal LagoAlesandro, Non persone: L’esclusione dei migranti in una societa globale (Milan:Feltrinelli,1999).

14 See Christian Lequesne and Françoise de la Serre, eds, Quelle Union pour quelle Europe?(Brussels: Complexe, 1998).

238 Didier Bigo

15 See Virginie Guiraudon and Christian Joppke, eds, Controlling Migration in Europe(London: Routledge 2001).

16 Gilles Favarel Garrigues and Myriam Desert, ‘Les capitalistes russes’, ProblèmesPolitiques et Sociaux (1997), p. 789.

17 See Leslie Holmes, ‘Crime, Corruption, and Politics: Transnational Factors’, in JanZielonka, ed., Democratic Consolidation in Eastern Europe: International and TransnationalFactors (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2001), pp. 192–3.

18 Interviews (see note 2).19 Didier Bigo, ‘Europe passoire et Europe forteresse: la sécurisation/humanitarisation

de l’immigration’, in Andre Rea, ed., Immigration et Racisme en Europe (Brussels:Complexe, 1998). See also Eberhard Bort (chapter 10) in this volume.

20 See the issue of Cultures & Conflits: ‘Sécurité et immigration’ (1998).21 Interviews (see note 2).22 ECRE, European Parliament report, Statewatch.23 Malcolm Anderson, Frontiers: Territory and State Formation in the Modern World

(Cambridge: Polity, 1996). See also Jan Zielonka’s introductory chapter in thisvolume.

24 Didier Bigo, L’Europe des polices et de la sécurité intérieure (Brussels: Complexe, 1992);Didier Bigo, ‘The European Internal Security Field: Stakes and Rivalries in a NewlyDeveloping Area of Police Intervention’, in Malcolm Anderson and Monica den Boer,eds, Policing across National Boundaries (London: Pinter, 1994); Bigo, Polices en réseaux.

25 See Malcolm Anderson (chapter 12) in this volume.26 Hungarian minority in Slovakia and Romania; Roma and ethnic Albanians in the

Balkans – see Anderson and Bort, eds, The Frontiers of Europe.27 See European Parliament libe 104, civil liberties, Migration and Asylum in Central

and Eastern Europe.28 Direction des Affaires Stratégiques report 1999: Didier Bigo, Anastasia Tsoukala and

Jean Paul Hanon, ‘Rapport DAS. Les implications pour la Défense des questions desécurité intérieure, approche comparée’, La participation des militaires aux questionsde sécurité intérieure .

29 Bigo, ‘Europe passoire et Europe forteresse’.30 See fourth meeting report, Batt Judy, ‘Mobility in an enlarged EU’, Florence: IUE,

19/04/99.31 The question of how to give citizens greater physical protection without putting at

risk the very foundations of democracy became extremely urgent in the aftermath ofthe terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001. See, e.g., Nicole Gnesotto, ‘Terrorism andEuropean Integration’, Institute for Security Studies Newsletter, 35 (October 2001), p. 1.

Border regimes, police cooperation and security 239

This chapter is speculative because it addresses some of the Justice and HomeAffairs arguments that may be made over the next decade. Some developmentswill have specific implications for those countries of East Central Europe negoti-ating as the next entrants to the EU. The exact nature of the futuredevelopments obviously cannot be known, although certain key elements, in theabsence of a political cataclysm, are stable. These stable elements include:enlargement of the EU to the five East Central European candidate members;maintenance of the Pillar system in the European Union so that policiesinvolving frontier issues will continue to be divided between the three Pillars;reinforcement of police and judicial cooperation within the EU; and continuingpressure to formulate common external and security policies to address problemsin the neighbourhood of the EU.

However, there are areas of very considerable uncertainty: the implications ofthe new Justice and Home Affairs (JHA) provisions in the Treaty of Amsterdamand the Tampere programme; entry dates of the applicant states, the transitionalarrangements and the conditions for entry (in the sense of acquis communautaire);effects of entry on national and cultural identities, and the ways in which ‘iden-tity’ politics will be used by the various political forces in play; the evolution ofglobal political and economic balances with decisive effects on the EuropeanUnion, and local situations including border regimes; and crises in EasternEurope and in Russia, creating turbulence threatening the interests of the EUand the candidate members.

Shared perceptions of frontiers?

Governments of the EU do not have an elaborate doctrine about frontiersbecause their frontiers are regarded, above all, as legacies of history.Explanations of the reasons for official positions adopted on frontier policy areusually brief and have the nature of assertions rather than explanations. In theBritish case, examples are Prime Minister Thatcher’s assertion in her Brugesspeech that the maintenance of frontier controls are ‘plain common sense’, tothe Labour Party’s terse commitment in its 1997 election manifesto that ‘weintend to retain controls on persons at our frontiers.’ The reasons given are that

12 The future border regime ofthe European UnionEnlargement and implications of theAmsterdam Treaty

Malcolm Anderson

Britain is an island and therefore its frontiers are easy to control; it is the tradi-tional way of doing things and avoids controls in the interior of the country that,inter alia, might damage race relations.1

There are none the less features common to all the member states. SinceWorld War II, there have been deeply-rooted dispositions in favour of inviola-bility of frontiers, whilst accepting the principle of the self-determination ofpeoples when this becomes necessary (recognition of the ‘velvet divorce’ inCzechoslovakia, acceptance by the UK of the right of secession of NorthernIreland). There is also a widely held view that frontiers are inseparable from theentities that they enclose. This conviction was expressed in 1997 by Danes whoattempted to form a human chain along the frontier with Germany under theslogan ‘the frontier must stay’. For the majority of Danes, the frontier is the limit,the symbol of the nation and of national sovereignty; the maintenance of terri-torial sovereignty is the necessary condition of true democracy. This conviction,which is difficult to defend when the problems facing Denmark cannot bemanaged within the national framework, is none the less shared by large popula-tions within the EU.

A widely diffused attitude among the populations of Europe links frontiers tothe notion of security – in a broad definition of the term – against unwantedforeign intrusion: defence of physical and psychological security, of economicinterests, of languages and cultures. This attitude persists even after the frontiercan no longer be used for these purposes: on the Franco-Italian and Franco-Spanish frontiers frequently voices are raised that the French state ought toprotect specific interests affected by the economic activities of Italians andSpaniards, despite the existence of the Single Market.

A consensus exists among governments, supported by large majorities inpublic opinion, that the external frontier of the EU should be an effective barrieragainst illegal immigration. Although the dominant rhetoric about immigrationvaries according to time and according to country, restrictive attitudes predomi-nate. This is amply illustrated by the ways in which asylum seekers are viewedand treated.2

In general terms, member states share certain basic principles (rule of law,parliamentary democracy, respect for human rights, private property as the basisof market economies …) so that the significance of the external frontier variesaccording to the degree to which the neighbouring state adheres to these princi-ples. For example, the external frontier with Switzerland and Norway is vieweddifferently from that with Morocco and Russia.

Problems of control of the external frontier seen fromthe point of view of the EU member states

Five problems of controlling the external frontier will persist: the impossibility ofcontrolling migratory flows purely by police methods; uneven distribution of thecosts of policing the external frontier; the low level of mutual understanding ofthe problems between member states; the coordination of police control of the

The future border regime of the European Union 241

frontier and other systems of police cooperation; and the difficulty of repressionof transfrontier fraud.

The Italian example illustrates the impossibility of controlling the externalfrontier by police methods without using unacceptable levels of force. TheStraits of Otranto mark the deepest gulf between the standards of living of twoEuropean countries. The inevitable result is a strong desire by Albanians to crossto Italy. Professional smugglers have acquired fast boats to deposit migrants onthe Italian coast. This has attracted immigrants from other parts of the worldwho wish to enter the EU. Despite the use of high-technology surveillance andtracking devices, the mobilization of the Italian customs and navy, and surveil-lance operations in Albanian ports, a high proportion of these illegalimmigrants reach the Italian coast. Italy has a similar problem with immigrantsarriving from Africa on the islands of Lampedusa and Sicily.

In addition, large and unseaworthy vessels packed with illegal immigrantsarrive in Italian coastal waters from the Middle East. Italy cannot stop forciblythis flow of immigrants except by using methods that conflict with basic humanrights. Whether over the land frontier or the sea frontier, illegal immigrantsenter Italy and turn up in other EU member states. The arrival of clandestineimmigrants either hidden in lorries at the land frontiers or on the coastsattracts hostile media attention. Italy, like any transit country for illegal immi-grants, has been accused of being lax.

Unwelcome influxes of immigrants affect the interests of all member states,but the problems on the ground are often poorly understood or misinterpreted.The specific problems of flows of illegal immigrants that are impossible to stopby conventional frontier controls are interpreted differently by differentmember states, usually as a function of whether the flow is likely to affectthem.

EU immigration control is still defective in several respects. There are not yetreliable and comparable statistics on the ways in which illegal immigrants gainentry (or, indeed, about border checks). Such statistics are essential for an accu-rate evaluation of the costs of controlling illegal immigration and efforts arebeing made to establish them. Like Italy, the majority of EU countries riskbecoming either the destination of unexpected flows of illegal immigrants ortransit countries to other destinations. A rapid and coordinated EU political,economic and diplomatic reaction to immigration problems has not yet beenachieved, although, in the wake of fifty-eight deaths of Chinese illegal immi-grants in Dover in June 2000, progress has been made. The High-LevelWorking Group on Asylum and Immigration has set in motion a ‘cross-Pillar’comprehensive approach to the problem. The systems for exchange of informa-tion – Interpol, Europol and Schengen – about criminal activity related to theexternal frontier (drug trafficking, money laundering, trafficking in humanbeings, organized and large-scale theft, financial fraud) are not at the momentcoordinated. Europol and Schengen are in their infancy and there are legal,political and technical problems in the way of systematic coordination betweenthem, and between them and Interpol.

242 Malcolm Anderson

The problems of customs fraud (fraudulent certificates of origin on agricul-tural products to obtain EU subsidies, and many other traffics such as the importand clandestine re-export of cigarettes) are regarded with varying degrees ofseriousness across the EU. Problems of fraud change over time according to thecriminal opportunities provided by national and European legislation. Customspowers vary – French customs have powers across the whole national territorywhereas German customs only have powers over goods attracting the commontariff at the external frontier. Harmonized customs powers have been discussedfor some time but not yet achieved. Generally speaking, problems associated withmovement of goods, other than illegal drugs, excite less public concern than doimmigration issues.

The Treaty of Amsterdam

Two aspects of the Treaty received much comment. It made very little progresson the kind of institutional reform necessary for enlargement (partially achievedby the 2000 negotiation of the Treaty of Nice), and the Pillar structure of theUnion was confirmed. However, the Justice and Home Affairs provisions (furtherdeveloped in the Tampere programme3) are potentially of considerable impor-tance because of the Treaty basis for Europol, the integration of the Schengenacquis into the Union, and judicial and police cooperation in criminal matters –articles K.1, 2 and 3 of the Treaty of Maastricht (see appendix). There is,however, institutional complexity in the general area of policy to do with frontiersand frontier security. Frontier policy, broadly conceived, is distributed across PillarI (immigration, asylum, visa policy, free movement, trade), Pillar II (commonforeign and security policy) and Pillar III (police and judicial cooperation).

In Pillar I there is a federalist dynamic since policy is adopted according tothe community method of initiative by the commission, approval by the Counciland Parliament, and subject to the adjudication of the European Court ofJustice. In the area of free movement, Pillar I will assume greater importanceand the potential for a considerable advance in the federal element of the EU ispresent. This is the domain that the candidate countries have to take particu-larly seriously (see the next section). Pillar II policy-making could be the mainlocus of general policy concerning border regimes on the eastern frontier,including elements of judicial and police cooperation. Political will is essential toinfuse some substance to the aspiration to a common foreign and security policyfor the eastern borderlands. This will is weak but may emerge as a result ofexternal challenges, which collectively affect the interests of the major memberstates.

Since the disintegration of the communist bloc, there is now a lack of aclearly defined and menacing military security threat. It has therefore been diffi-cult to establish a new security doctrine and even a sufficiently precise definitionof security interests. When the term ‘insecurity’ is used by EU member states,with the exception of Greece, it generally refers to concerns about crime such asdrug trafficking and traffic in illegal immigrants, the impact of social tensions

The future border regime of the European Union 243

and problems of crime and disorder from fractured societies ‘spilling over’ intothe EU. In particular cases, it refers to the effects of armed conflict in the widerneighbourhood of the EU – in Algeria, Bosnia, Kosovo and the Kurdish regionsof Turkey and Iraq.

Criminal problems and political violence can be regarded as Pillar III mattersbut they overlap with Pillar II. Current uncertainty about the very concept ofsecurity has been a contributing factor to the hesitant development of thecommon external and security policy. Moreover, the pressure to develop such apolicy that would have otherwise been felt by the EU has been lessened by theexistence of NATO, which has built a bridge with Russia and could acceptmembers from East Central Europe with relative ease. The Blair initiative in1998 (the Anglo-French St Malo Declaration) suggesting a re-launch of acommon security policy, by proposing that EU military forces could becommitted outside the NATO framework, encountered political and technicaldifficulties in 2000–1 after the announcement of a European Rapid ReactionForce. The possibility of rapid intervention in situations of crisis and disorder inthe so-called ‘shatter zone’ between the Baltic and the Balkans could give animpetus to the development of the EU as a genuine independent force in inter-national politics, but this has yet to be put to the test. A Common Foreign andSecurity Policy is an aspiration but not yet a reality, which may result in undueweight being given to JHA cooperation to protect the security of the EU.

Well-known attempts, by Barry Buzan and others, have been made to extendthe scope of the understanding of security into what has been described as ‘soci-etal security’ – threats to the environment, to human rights and to cultures.4 Thishas particular relevance to the eastern frontier of the EU. Since the Chernobyldisaster of 1986, there have been insistent voices raised to press for the inclusionof environmental threats in the area of security policy. The Finnish President,Marrti Ahtisaari, said in November 1997 that the threat from Russian pollutionwas his greatest security problem, and added: ‘I would be much happier if I couldclean up the Baltic and swim in the sea than join NATO.’5 However, in terms ofEU policy-making, environmental policy belongs squarely within Pillar I, thecoordination of international efforts of multilateral cooperation within Pillar II,and the repression of criminal acts that lead to pollution within Pillar III.

The first Pillar, Schengen and Europol

The Schengen system, distributed between Pillar I for freedom of movementissues and Pillar III for police and judicial cooperation, is sometimes perceivedby the candidate members as an imposed regime. It is the key element in theborder regimes that are being established on both internal and external frontiers.Europol, because its objective is to fight transfrontier crime, is less sensitive interms both of potential tension with the EU candidate states and of the practiceof border controls. However, Europol indicate an important general point: thattransfrontier criminal activities must increasingly be policed by forms of coordi-nation other than border checks.

244 Malcolm Anderson

The Schengen Agreement and Convention developed from the merger of anumber of Common Travel Areas among European states. The originalSchengen Agreement, in 1985, brought together the Benelux Common TravelArea with the proposed ‘open frontier’ agreement between France andGermany. The long-standing Nordic Common Travel Area provides for openfrontiers between Denmark, Sweden, Finland (now all members of theEuropean Union), Norway and Iceland; its merger with the Schengen CommonTravel Area has necessitated special arrangements with the two non-EuropeanUnion states. The United Kingdom has maintained a Common Travel Areawith Ireland since 1921, although neither country is yet prepared to dismantleborder controls with its partner.

The debate on Schengen has focused within the EU on the strict control ofimmigration, the number of asylum seekers, the alleged creation of a ‘fortressEurope’, and the controversial links implied between security, criminality andimmigration. In the candidate countries, the main issue has been that theSchengen external frontier is a ‘hard’ frontier, a serious and potentially disruptivebarrier between them and neighbouring states. This affected the relationsbetween the candidate countries and the EU member states as the Schengencontrols were put in place, and, as these countries become integrated into theEU, it affects the relations between them and their eastern neighbours.

In brief, the 1985 Schengen Agreement and 1990 Convention have as theiraim the creation of an area without internal border controls, with compensatorymeasures to increase security at the external frontier and supporting measures tofight illegal immigration, exchange information through a computerizeddatabase (the Schengen Information System), increase cooperation betweenpolice forces and facilitate judicial cooperation. The Schengen agreements areintended to be ‘compensatory measures’ for the ‘security deficit’ resulting fromthe abolition of frontier controls at the internal frontiers.

The objective of the Schengen arrangements is to create an area of freemovement by removing controls at the common borders of the participatingstates; to compensate for the lifting of these controls, external frontiers controlsare strengthened and standardized, and are accompanied by an array of‘flanking’ measures designed to enhance security and improve cooperationwithin the Schengen area. The Schengen countries also explicitly recognize thatthey should move towards a common visa, asylum and immigration policy. Acoordinating committee and technical inspections ensure that member countriesmeet the standards required for controlling the common external frontier. ATask Force of senior law enforcement officers has been set up to exchange infor-mation about clandestine immigration with a view to dismantling organizedrings that smuggle people into the EU. (This Task Force has achieved onlymodest results, probably because smuggling is less organized than had beensupposed.)

From the policing point of view, the great advantage of Schengen is on-lineaccess to national Schengen databases that communicate and receive informa-tion and enquiries from the central database in Strasbourg (which has about

The future border regime of the European Union 245

eight million entries). All significant ports of entry have to have this on-linefacility, and in some countries it is widely spread: in France, for example, thereare 14,000 access points. An upgraded database (Schengen II) is currently undernegotiation and may solve some outstanding problems such as relations with theEuropol database and the location within the Pillar structure of the SIS.

Europol is, for the time being, a less constraining and problematic form ofcooperation for the candidate states. It is still at a relatively early stage of devel-opment and, at the moment, goes little further than being a European equivalentof Interpol, although more ambitious claims are made in its annual reports. Itwas formally initiated by the setting up in 1992 of a Europol preparatory groupin Strasbourg by an EC ministerial agreement. This group drew up a brief forthe terms of reference of a European law enforcement body and its methods ofoperating. Although it was hailed by Paul Quilès, the French Minister of theInterior at the time, as the ‘embryo of a European Police’, subsequent progresswas slow.

Eventually, after difficult negotiations concerning accountability, judicialcontrol, management, staffing levels, financial arrangements, communicationsinfrastructure, information technology requirements, as well as data protection,the Europol Convention was agreed in 1995.6 The UK was the first to ratify theConvention (with an important, and potentially troublesome, opt-out concerningthe role of the European Court of Justice in interpreting the Convention) and allother member states subsequently did so – making it the only Pillar III conven-tion to be ratified by 2000. In essence, it is an office for exchange of information,analysis of criminal intelligence and for requesting national authorities to launchinquiries – but there is important (German) pressure to emphasize an opera-tional role, a concept open to more than one interpretation.

Although there is potential for further development, Europol will not be forsome time a centrally important instrument in assisting inquiries into complexcriminal conspiracies. The reasons for this are as follows. First, it is only involvedif more than two member states are concerned by a criminal act. Second, ithas modest resources in terms of professional personnel, which are not on thescale of criminal investigation departments of medium-sized European cities.Third, the list of crimes in which Europol may be involved, ranging from finan-cial crime to (in the near future) terrorism, from drug trafficking to paedophilia,from theft of works of art to arms trafficking, from illegal movement of nuclearmaterials to trafficking in body parts, is extremely ambitious and it is difficult toenvisage how Europol can play more than a minor supportive role in the effortsto repress them. Fourth, the holding of data on individuals and of historical datais severely circumscribed by data protection rules. Fifth, there is only a smallchance that Europol, in the foreseeable future, will lead or participate in a majorway in criminal investigations because its officials lack police powers and have tobe invited by national authorities to participate in investigations as advisers. Sixth,although analysis of criminal intelligence is envisaged as a major role, there areserious practical difficulties in transnational sharing of sensitive intelligence.

The difficulties for the candidate countries posed by EU law enforcement

246 Malcolm Anderson

cooperation are of various kinds. The first difficulty is the existence of varioussystems of law enforcement cooperation: Interpol, Europol, other multilateralsystems, and bilateral arrangements. New EU members have even greater diffi-culty than established members of coming to grips with this complexity.

The second difficulty for the candidate states is that the Schengen acquis willcontinue to develop in the years before accession. The opportunities for thecandidate countries to influence the content of the Schengen acquis will bestrictly limited. It may be perceived as a system that has been set up to defendthe interests of existing members and does not sufficiently take into account thespecific requirements of candidate members.

The third difficulty is that all institutionalized forms of police cooperationinevitably encourage a penumbra of informal arrangements. Without someinformal channels of communication, it is difficult for institutionalized forms ofcooperation to function efficiently. But informal systems of cooperation neces-sarily involve privileged and exclusive relationships. These develop in three mainways. An elite network will influence the general policy of cooperation – this islikely to be composed of the same European elements that have had most influ-ence within Interpol.7 Networks dealing with particular criminal problems –fraud, money laundering, drug trafficking, etc. – are a feature of the currentsystem. Networks based on geographical proximity to confront a series oflocal/regional problems are already common. Criminal investigators are highlypragmatic and form alliances where they must, but informal networks are likelyto be led by people from countries with strong police traditions and long practicein international contact-making. These are not likely to include people from theEU candidate countries.

Problems of the EU eastern frontier and the EUcandidate countries

An abundant literature already exists on the transition from communism, nation-alism, minorities, migratory movements, economic reform and restructuring, thedisintegration of Yugoslavia, security questions and the enlargement of NATO,and relations with the EU.8

JHA cooperation does not and cannot by itself provide the solutions to theproblems of the relations within the candidate countries and between them andtheir neighbours to the east. Most of the issues are related to the economic glacisrepresented by the existing eastern frontier of the EU and could be much attenu-ated if the economic differentials were reduced. Economic differences do not, ofcourse, explain all the political and social forms that problems may take; theseare influenced by cultural and historical factors, as well as by unforeseen events.The complementary role, to other forms of rapprochement, that JHA coopera-tion plays is recognized in the ways in which the enlargement process is handledand the way in which common strategies concerning third countries – in partic-ular, Russia and the Ukraine – have been agreed. None the less, certain sensitiveissues will probably dominate the political agenda.

The future border regime of the European Union 247

Migration of people is likely to be the first of these. It has been, and willcontinue to be, perceived in EU countries as, above all, a problem for receivingcountries. It has progressively been conceived as a security problem9 because ofdubious links made between immigrants and illegal trafficking, crime, violenceand urban decay. There have been cyclical anxieties in the EU member statesabout a ‘flood’ of immigrants from the east, fuelled by the actual arrival ofimmigrants, by hypothetical analyses of possible arrivals and by debates overhow to tackle the problem of illegal immigration. The term ‘flood’ is usually agross exaggeration of the scale of the problem, although there are exceptions.For example, dismantling the Berlin Wall and the heavily guarded frontierdividing the two Germanies enormously increased the flow of asylum seekersand illegal immigrants into Germany.

Leakage of clandestine immigrants through the present and the future EUeastern external frontier is inevitable. Some of the movement of people west-wards, whether from the candidate members or from countries further to theeast, is bound to be associated with criminality. Wealth differentials are a majorfactor in certain forms of crime: crimes against property, prostitution (which isnot always classified as illegal, although deriving profit from it usually is), illegaltraffics, especially in drugs. However, there is a high risk that the dominantdiscourse about crime problems will emphasize the importance of repression. A‘security first’ discourse is dangerous because it identifies criminality with Polesand other eastern neighbours, not with structural economic problems. The solu-tion, as the relations of the United States with its southern neighbours haveamply demonstrated, does not reside in political pressure on countries to takemore repressive action, or heavy-handed policing including direct intervention inneighbouring states, flanked by increased foreign aid to domestic police agencies.This policy may paradoxically help to embed criminal organizations in societiesin which many people feel alienated both by foreign interference and by policerepression.

In addition to crime problems, there is the difficult legacy (or legacies) ofhistory in the Eastern borderlands of the EU and in the candidate countries.The re-alignment of frontiers in the immediate post-World War II period hasbeen officially accepted by all EU member and candidate states but discordantmemories remain in popular sentiment. The justice of what happened is vieweddifferently on different sides of frontiers; painful and strong sentiments arise onspecific matters (such as the fate of German cemeteries where there are nolonger any Germans). These sentiments enter into controversies over what to doabout practical matters such as property rights. The restoration of individualGerman property rights for those dispossessed in the immediate postwar periodposes greater problems than benefits but hopes (and fears) are still alive thatsome restitution will be made.

Historical memories create fertile ground for political mobilization aroundold, re-created and possibly new identities, with complex effects on territorialpolitics and border regimes. Moreover, there are always losers as well as gainersin transformation processes. Regional imbalances in the costs and benefits of EU

248 Malcolm Anderson

membership will inevitably provoke conflict and could reignite old animosities.The exacerbation of minority questions10 may create public order problemsthat, at the very least, complicate cooperation in Justice and Home Affairs.

Scenarios for future development of cooperation inJustice and Home Affairs

At present, there are political limits to possible JHA cooperation in the EU. Nomember state, despite the ambition of the Amsterdam Treaty to create an areaof freedom, security and justice, will consent to hand over to the EU the respon-sibility for public order on its territory without a firm guarantee of theunqualified solidarity of the other member states. The member states do notcurrently consider this is likely to be forthcoming, for a variety of reasons (notexplored in this chapter). Moreover a sense of solidarity is unlikely to increase,and may diminish, as a result of enlargement. There are three possible scenariosfor JHA cooperation for the first decade or so of the century. One scenario,beloved by Eurosceptics – regression to a system of competing states in whichthe EU is either marginalized or disintegrates – is excluded as unrealistic.

In considering these scenarios, there are three elements that will be presentwhichever scenario approximates more closely to events as they unfold. The firstis the theme of reinforced cooperation between certain member states – animportant aspect of the Amsterdam Treaty, although restricted by the require-ment that at least eight states must participate. This allows a group of states togo further and faster than the others in JHA cooperation. The acceptance ofUK, Irish and Danish opt-outs was an example of the kind of flexibility that thecontracting parties envisaged. This flexibility will affect the new member states,even though they have to accept all the acquis, because faster development ofcooperation between core member states may exclude them or they may excludethemselves. In the former case it may be either because the older membersconsider the systems of the new members to be not sufficiently trustworthy orbecause they lack certain technical capacities; in the latter case, it may be eitherbecause the new members are unwilling to give up too much of their recently re-acquired sovereignty and independence of action or because specificimmigration and internal security issues require local solutions.

The second element stems from the principles of rule of law and respect forhuman rights that are written into the Treaty of Amsterdam and that arecontained in the (non-justiciable) Charter of Human Rights approved by the2000 Nice conference. This opens up the possibility of European Court ofJustice action in areas concerning rights of individuals, independence of thejudiciary and behaviour of executive officials in the field of public order. Theimplications of the integration of fundamental rights into the EU framework arepotentially very great because it may allow the ECJ to decide on the legality ofactions in criminal matters by courts and police in the member states. For candi-date members this introduced another area of uncertainty about what they arecommitting themselves to in joining the EU.

The future border regime of the European Union 249

The third element is that the new member states will have responsibility forthe eastern frontier of the EU (along with Finland, which, unlike them, has longexperience of administering, and paying for, a tightly controlled frontier). Thisposes problems of the maintenance of common standards, trust betweenmember states and financing of an onerous responsibility.

The first scenario envisages the continuation of the status quo (in which muchhas been achieved in the fields of police and judicial cooperation). The arrange-ments already in place are given time to mature but there are no new transfers ofsovereignty to the EU. The basis of cooperation remains intergovernmental, andwhere areas are already subject to community procedures, majority voting isdelayed. The Schengen acquis remain in Pillar III and each state remains respon-sible for the EU external frontier situated on its territory. The safeguard clause(article 2.2 of the Schengen Convention) that permits states to reimpose system-atic controls at the internal frontier stays in force. Informal cooperation oncontrol of frontiers is allowed to develop and exchanges take place betweenimmigration and police officers, along the lines already developed for customs inthe Mathaeus programme.

On asylum and immigration the unanimity rule continues to apply for EUmeasures after the expiry of the five-year delay for the introduction of majorityvoting envisaged by the Treaty of Amsterdam. In other words, the implementa-tion of the action plan on asylum and immigration proposed by the EuropeanCommission conforms to this scenario: an agreed list of countries from whichindividuals cannot seek asylum; constitution of a database of asylum seekers;common regulations for entry and residence; a uniform visa; a uniform policyfor readmissions and for the return of illegal immigrants; and strengthening ofsolidarity to combat clandestine immigration.

On police cooperation the facilities for cross-border surveillance and hotpursuit are implemented Europol functions according to the Treaty ofAmsterdam, with criminal investigations entirely under the control of nationalauthorities and the establishment of observatories (like the Lisbon observatoryon drugs) based on new conventions.

Judicial cooperation is advanced by the ratification and/or entering into forceof Pillar III conventions already negotiated: mutual legal assistance, two conven-tions on extradition. The action programme of the Council and the Commissionalso includes: the establishment of Eurojust to coordinate transfrontier prosecu-tions; a European judicial network for criminal and civil matters; strengtheningof the measures for the repression of money laundering; mutual recognition ofjudgements and sentences of courts; facilitating cooperation between ministriesof justice and judicial authorities, or equivalent competent authorities inmember states.

This scenario does not require reform of national and European institutions.The continuation of the present system can overcome the rigidity of theunanimity rule through cooperation between a restricted number of states. Thiscontinuation would strengthen the Council and, to a lesser extent, theCommission with utilization of its power of initiative and as the repository of

250 Malcolm Anderson

information through ‘observatories’ and the collection of statistics, but therewould be a persistence of a lack of transparency in the arrangements for cooper-ation. National parliaments play a key role in the accountability of the agents ofcooperation, and this is a role that they have not yet exercised effectively. TheEuropean Parliament would not have any power of decision except through itsbudgetary powers.

The second scenario is the development of new forms of cooperationbetween national police and judicial agencies, and supranational intelligenceagencies; in addition, EU norms in criminal matters and the approximation ofnational laws would be developed. This scenario corresponds to a ‘maximalist’interpretation of the Treaty of Amsterdam. In this scenario, some supranationalarrangements for external frontier control can be envisaged through qualitativenorms for national agencies responsible for the external frontier and sanctions(imposed by a qualified majority) when they are not met. On asylum and immi-gration, qualified majority voting would be adopted after the transitional periodof five years. Common rules, with sanctions imposed for non-compliance, wouldbe established for entry of foreigners, long-term residence, family reunification,movement of third-country nationals resident in the EU, and procedures for thereception of asylum seekers and the granting of refugee status.

On police cooperation Europol would be given powers for initiating criminalinvestigations by national authorities; agents of Europol would use the possibilityopened up in article 30 of the Treaty of European Union to participate innational inquiries; joint police operations between different states would beprovided with a legal basis to investigate certain forms of criminality; coopera-tion in frontier regions would develop beyond the existing joint police stations.European norms of professional police conduct and police efficiency would bedeveloped and inspections would take place to ensure these standards were met.The states would have the right to bring a case against a neighbouring state ifthe Schengen norms were not respected.

In judicial cooperation, there would be a movement towards qualifiedmajority voting after the transitional period of five years. Extradition in itspresent form would be abolished in favour of a common procedure of chargingsuspects and the automatic transfer of suspects to the court with jurisdiction inthe case. Rogatory commissions would disappear and investigating magistrateswould address requests directly to the law enforcement authorities of anotherstate. They could also address an EU agency composed of magistrates drawnfrom all the member states, which would assist with the interpretation of legaltexts and the translation of requests. This agency would also be charged withsupervising the follow-up of requests for assistance. There would be a commondefinition of national interest when it is used to refuse requests for assistance.Harmonization of law would be achieved in the fields of organized crime, drugtrafficking and terrorism.

The impact of this scenario on national and European institutions would beconsiderable. Putting in place sanctions against both national agencies and stateswould require a revision of the treaties and a new culture of European public

The future border regime of the European Union 251

order. The development of a common system of charging suspects and commonprocedures in the field of immigration and asylum would have a radical impacton national legal codes.

The third scenario marks a sharp break with the first two because it would bea decisive move towards federal structures, with the establishment of operationalinstruments at the EU level. The management of the external frontier would behanded over to a supranational agency. The principal responsibility of thisagency would be the repression of clandestine immigration, although nationalagencies could retain the responsibility for expelling the immigrants found. Inthe domain of policing, a European police would be established that wouldenforce a European criminal law. This police, directed by a European policechief, would have sole responsibility in its domain of competence but would dele-gate most of the operational tasks to national police agencies. For certainprocedures, such as search and entry, the EU police would need the agreementof the national jurisdictions. The European Court of First Instance would adju-dicate conflicts of competence.

Judicial cooperation would be defined in areas where criminal activity clearlycrossed national boundaries or where offences were committed against the EUitself: drug trafficking, corruption, money laundering, forging euros, fraudagainst the EU budget. These matters would be dealt with by Pillar I. The ECJwould be competent for interpreting the European criminal law. All the rightspresently available to individuals under the European Convention on HumanRights would be incorporated into EU law. A public prosecutor’s office would beset up at the European level with access to the office by the European police,national police and victims of crime. The Court of First Instance could adjudi-cate conflicts between national prosecution services and the Europeanprosecution service. When an inquiry was complete, the accused could be sentfor trial before national courts.

This scenario would require very considerable powers of imagination andinvention at the level of the European institutions. Procedures for appointingand for the accountability of the European police chief and the European prose-cutor’s office would have to be established. A European Court of Appeal wouldalmost certainly be necessary. The organization of the ECJ and, particularly, theCourt of First Instance would have to be modified. National jurisdictions wouldhave to adapt to procedures and structures for which there was no precedent innational arrangements. The possibility of this scenario in the foreseeable futureis remote, particularly as developments to date have been incremental smallsteps.

However, the quest for effectiveness could lead the EU to approach thisscenario through the increased competence of Europol and the harmonizationof laws. The emergence of a common immigration policy could lead to a certainfederalization of immigration police. In other words, the adoption of part,rather than the whole, of this scenario is possible. In the absence of a strategicvision shared by all the dominant political forces in Europe, the stability of asystem based on the whole scenario would be in doubt. It would require a strong

252 Malcolm Anderson

democratic element and a highly developed sense of European identity to give itlegitimacy, and, at the moment, this is scarcely conceivable. For new memberstates the acquis that they would have to accept is of very low effectiveness andwould probably not have much public support.

Conclusion: the problem of the timetable

Between 1997 and 2000, the European Commission reported increasingly satis-factory progress in JHA in the candidate countries of East Central Europeselected for the first round of EU admission, whilst noting the persistence ofcertain criminal problems and flaws in the police and judicial systems. The confi-dential assessments of the Council of Ministers are thought to be much moresevere. During the ‘pre-adhesion’ phase, which opened in November 1998, thecountries have to adopt all the rules, the whole acquis communautaire, of the EU.No opt-outs are possible for new members in the way they have been for existingmembers. The room for manoeuvre to defend national interests – transitionalarrangements – is not available in JHA. Over this whole area, they have toconform to all the rules at the date of entry. In dismantling border controls, therewill be no fixed transitional period, but a decision will be taken by the Council ofMinisters at an unspecified date that new members have satisfied the necessarytechnical conditions.

Even after the Nice conference the date of entry for the candidate membersremains uncertain, although it is now thought that the first countries will enterbetween 2003 and 2005. The timetable is not dependent on JHA cooperationbut it is dependent on the reform of the Common Agricultural Policy, the systemof financing the EU and the reform of its institutional arrangements. All threedossiers are very difficult and involve crucial national interests of the existingmember states. They are also of great importance to the candidate members,who stand to gain from the CAP (even though they cannot enjoy the existingcompensation payments) and structural funds but will almost certainly see valu-able prizes snatched from them by EU reform before they enter. On theinstitutional arrangements, decisive progress was made in the Nice Treaty butdifficult details remain.

The problem for the candidate members is that their de facto integration intothe economy of the EU proceeds apace but preserving majority support by theircitizens for EU entry may become more difficult as time passes. This will beparticularly the case if the material benefits to be gained from entry become lessobvious by comparison with the already existing benefits of proximity to EUmarkets, direct investment flows from EU member countries and liberalization oftrade. Parts of the acquis communautaire that seemed imposed, rather than obvi-ously beneficial and freely accepted – and Schengen has been singled out in thischapter as an example – could produce a lowering of support over time for EUentry in the candidate countries. The problems of phased entry may also causehostile feelings to emerge. Transitional periods are likely in the areas of agricul-ture and structural policy, which will seem to deprive the candidate members of

The future border regime of the European Union 253

the fruits of membership. Delayed introduction of free movement of personsmay appear discriminatory even though the governments of the new membersmay understand the reasons for it.

The longer entry is delayed, the greater becomes the volume of the acquis

communautaire. Although the acquis in the field of JHA has often, in the past,seemed a marginal issue, the scenarios sketched above indicate that this is nolonger the case. It is an increasingly important domain of debate and policy inthe EU, and some aspects of it, such as the acceptance of mutual recognition,could be described as a time-bomb ticking away under all EU members. ThePillar I areas of immigration and free movement are equally sensitive and theconcerns of the candidate members in these areas must be heard. Care will haveto be taken that the development of systems of cooperation do not appeardiscriminatory and oppressive to the candidate states. Entry into the EU repre-sents a considerable loss of sovereign independence for these countries, whichhave only recently re-acquired it – this means that political turbulence is an ever-present possibility.

Appendix

Treaty of Maastricht (main articles on JHA)

Article K.1

Without prejudice to the powers of the European Community, the Union’sobjective shall be to provide citizens with a high level of safety within an area offreedom, security and justice by developing common action among the MemberStates in the fields of police and judicial cooperation in criminal matters and bypreventing and combating racism and xenophobia.

That objective shall be achieved by preventing and combating crime, orga-nized or otherwise, in particular terrorism, trafficking in persons and offencesagainst children, illicit drug trafficking and illicit arms trafficking, corruption andfraud, through:

closer cooperation between police forces, customs authorities and othercompetent authorities in the Member States, both directly and through theEuropean Police Office (Europol), in accordance with the provisions ofArticles K.2 and K.4;

closer cooperation between judicial and other competent authorities ofthe Member States in accordance with the provisions of Articles K.3(a) to(d) and K.4;

approximation, where necessary, of rules on criminal matters in theMember States, in accordance with the provisions of Article K.3(e).

Article K.2

1. Common action in the field of police cooperation shall include:

(a) operational cooperation between the competent authorities, including

254 Malcolm Anderson

the police, customs and other specialized law enforcement services of theMember States in relation to the prevention, detection and investigation ofcriminal offences;

(b) the collection, storage, processing, analysis and exchange of relevantinformation, including information held by law enforcement services onreports on suspicious financial transactions, in particular through Europol,subject to appropriate provisions on the protection of personal data;

(c) cooperation and joint initiatives in training, the exchange of liaisonofficers, secondments, the use of equipment, and forensic research;

(d) the common evaluation of particular investigative techniques in rela-tion to the detection of serious forms of organized crime.

2. The Council shall promote cooperation through Europol and shall in partic-ular, within a period of five years after the date of entry into force of theTreaty of Amsterdam:

(a) enable Europol to facilitate and support the preparation, and toencourage the coordination and carrying out, of specific investigativeactions by the competent authorities of the Member States, including opera-tional actions of joint teams comprising representatives of Europol in asupport capacity;

(b) adopt measures allowing Europol to ask the competent authorities ofthe Member States to conduct and coordinate their investigations in specificcases and to develop specific expertise which may be put at the disposal ofMember States to assist them in investigating cases of organized crime;

(c) promote liaison arrangements between prosecuting/investigating offi-cials specializing in the fight against organized crime in close cooperationwith Europol;

(d) establish a research, documentation and statistical network on cross-border crime.

Article K.3

Common action on judicial cooperation in criminal matters shall include:

(a) facilitating and accelerating cooperation between competentministries and judicial or equivalent authorities of the Member States inrelation to proceedings and the enforcement of decisions;

(b) facilitating extradition between Member States;(c) ensuring compatibility in rules applicable in the Member States, as

may be necessary to improve such cooperation;(d) preventing conflicts of jurisdiction between Member States;(e) progressively adopting measures establishing minimum rules relating

to the constituent elements of criminal acts and to penalties in the fields oforganized crime, terrorism and illicit drug trafficking.

The future border regime of the European Union 255

Notes

1 For the fullest account to date of these reasons, see the White Paper, Fairer, Faster,Firmer – A Modern Approach to Immigration and Asylum CM 4018 (July 1998).

2 The special number of Cultures et Conflits, 23 (1996) (‘Circuler, enfermer, éloigner’) isparticularly informative on this topic.

3 Presidency Conclusions, Tampere European Council (SI (1999) 800), Brussels (16October 1999).

4 See Ole Waever, Barry Buzan, Morten Kelstrup and Pierre Lemaitre, Identity,Migration and the New Security Agenda in Europe (London: Pinter, 1998) for the concept ofsocietal security. See also Jef Huysmans, ‘Dire et écrire la sécurité: le dilemmenormatif des études de sécurité’, Cultures et Conflits, 31–2 (1998).

5 Financial Times (25 November 1997).6 Council Act of 26 July 1995 drawing up the Convention based on article K.3 of the

Treaty of European Union, on the establishment of a European Police Office(Europol Convention), OJ C 316 (27 November 1995), 1–31.

7 Malcolm Anderson, Policing the World: Interpol and the Politics of International PoliceCooperation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 90–100.

8 See Bigo (chapter 11), Bort (chapter 10), Morawska (chapter 9) and Mungiu-Pippidi(chapter 4), this volume, for a fuller treatment of the issues in this section.

9 For the exploration of this dubious link, see the eight contributions to ‘Sécurité etimmigration’, Cultures et Conflits, 31–2 (1998).

10 For a useful survey, see André Liebich, Les Minorités nationales en Europe centrale et orientale(Geneva: Georg, 1997). See also Liebich’s contribution in this volume (chapter 7).

256 Malcolm Anderson

Accession Partnerships 142–3, 155; Act ofAccession 138; European accessionnegotiation, corruption andaccountability 66

accountability 62, 66, 72, 251–2acquis communautaire 8–9, 61, 72–3, 155,

163, 171; core acquis 49; ECE countriesand 172–4, 178, 240, 253

Adenauer, Konrad 88–9Africa 28, 30, 163, 170, 233, 242Agenda 2000 8, 61, 81, 100, 115n.11, 179,

190n.50Ahtisaari, Marrti 244Albania 41, 47, 54, 90, 100, 109; Albanian

and Kurdish refugees, EU and 106; ruleof law 63; smuggling migrants to Italy242; workers from in Greece 60, 143

Algeria 88, 105, 111, 244American Civil War 22, 25; American

revolution 4, 21Anderson, Malcolm 5–6, 13, 43, 231Anglo-French declaration at St Malo

(November 1998) 99, 244applicant countries: Accession Partnerships

142–3, 155; border controls and visaregimes 66–7; disparities between205–6; eastern frontier of EU (withFinland) 250; flexibility and 249;history in Eastern borderlands 248;problems of 247–9; right path to EUmembership 90–91; rules of acquiscommunautaire and 253; Schengen acquis54–5, 58, 69, 195; selected indicators57; vicinities are lasting realities 69

Arbeitstouristen 163–4, 167, 170, 179–80Argentina 25Armenia 110, 174Asia 28–30, 163, 170, 174, 233; Asia-

Pacific Rim 99

Association Agreements 79, 90–91asylum, immigration and 64, 252; transit

migrants 172; unanimity rule, asylumand immigration 250

asylum seekers: fraudulent 191;immigration controls 2; policing and214; political refugees and 173, 232;Schengen and 245; treatment of 241

‘Atlantic Community’ 35, 78–9Australia 49, 80, 199Austria 23, 49, 138, 152; émigrés from

communist era 176; Freedom Party 44;immigration and 57–8, 163; Schengen194; service workers needed for ageingpopulation 179; wage level 65, 165;work permits 58

Austro-Hungarian confines 39, 44, 203Azerbaijan 80, 110

Badie, Bertrand 43Badinter Committee 141Bakunin, Mikhail 25Balkans 9, 11, 53, 108; ‘Balkan route’,

police cooperation and 203, 222, 233;boundaries and war 39–40, 88, 96, 100,193; Eastern Balkan countries 62(black-listed by EC 56); EU and NATOand 47; Europe’s relative impotence 99;former Ottoman-dominated territories71; Russian policy in 109

Baltic states 47, 51, 57, 68–9, 105, 108,127, 142; frontier 191; NATOmembership and 197; Russians in 155;transit for illegal migrants 198–9

Barcelona process (1995) 92, 104, 111–12Bartolini, Stefano 5Barwig, Klaus 198Basque country 125Bavaria 198

Index

bazaar economy 195, 236Beck, Ulrich 44Belarus 49, 67, 100, 102, 108, 174–5;

borders and 195–6; EU membershipapplication 207; migration from 199;Polish minority in 127

Belgium 19, 58, 149–51, 154, 195Benelux states 93, 163; Benelux Common

Travel Area 245Berlin: Berlin Conference (1994) 235;

Berlin construction sites 167; BerlinWall 1, 32, 139–40, 191, 248; meetingof Schengen states (December 1998)193

Bibó, István 119Bienkowski, Mare 195Bigo, Didier 5, 8, 11–12, 202, 207Binckey, Robert 23–4Bismarck, Otto von 27Blair, Anthony (PM UK) 31, 244Bodin, Jean 20Bohemia 88, 119borderless world 42, 191borders: agricultural people 40;

approaches to problem 41–2; as bridges206; controls as means of exclusion202; definitions 3, 51; difficult toenforce 64; East European borders 54;elusive for unidentified object 45–9;empires, borders and 39, 43;Estonian–Russian border, different timeand economic zones 207; foreign policyand 95; France–German border 54;German–Czech border 203, 205;goodness-of-fit comparable to WestEuropean 52–5; hard border, membersand non-members of EU 2, 245;identity markers 231–2; imaginedborders, real borders and 56; internaland external characteristics 2; linesrather than zones 43; militarization ofexternal through technology 235–6;Polish–German border, border guards11, 85; Polish–Ukranian border 196;political violence, borders and 232;sharp or fuzzy European? 102–3;systems and 4–7; technical problemswhen EU frontier moves 105, 232;‘time inscribed into space’ 207;transportation and 4; unemployment,borders and 232; ‘wealth’ border 52;Western European borders, naturalthrough evolution 53

Bort, Eberhard 5, 10

Bosnia 47, 90, 103, 109, 112, 118, 244;Bosnia-Herzegovina 46, 193

boundaries 4–5, 40–45, 84Britain see UKBroek, Hans van den 195Brussels: domestic administrative

corruption and 65–6; enlargement anddemocratic deficit 70; idea of zone 35;map and border of Europe 51

Bulgaria 24, 51, 56–7; borders 73;corruption and accountability 62;election (2001) 70; EU membershipapplication 9, 47, 49, 100–1, 103, 192;EU’s common visa regime 85, 106;minority population 59–60, 117–19,128, 131, 143; Ottoman Empire and119; rule of law 63; secure passport 68;state of judiciary 65; Turks and Pomaksin 121; visa regime 67; Workers for EUand 59

Bundesgrenzschutz (BGS- border police) 220,223; German unification and 204

Bundeskriminalamt (BKA – federal police)220, 223

Buzan, Barry 202, 244Byzantine empire 80, 86

Calvin, John 89Canada 19, 23, 25, 199; Canadian

Supreme Court, Quebec provincialgovernment 145

Cannes decision 95CAP 34, 58, 112, 253Caps, Stéphane Pierre 44Catalonia 149, 151, 155Cavour, Count 22–4, 26CEECs 155–6, 205; accession to EU and

105, 138; Copenhagen Document(1990) and 140–1, 145; EU police andfears over 230; institutional cooperationand Western policy on migration 227;interviews with and EU members 218;migration from linked to crime 233;operational cooperation with 220–1;policing 213, 219; relations withWestern police 226; right to freedom ofmovement 237; sensitive data and 226;Stability Pact and 142; transformationof and hypothesis of sluice-gates234–5; visa requirements 231

Central and East European countries seeCEECs

Central Europe 9–11, 21, 23; 1980s

258 Index

emergence 85; cultural borderargument and 56; enlargement alwaysan option 47; expectations of EUmembership 99–100; first wave of newentrants to EU 96–7; problems ofborders 69

Central Treaty Organization 79centre, periphery and 44, 46, 205CFSP 9, 102, 107–8, 113, 141; an

aspiration not reality 244Charter of Human Rights 249China 87, 174–5; Chinese illegal

immigrants (Dover June 2000) 242Christiansen, Thomas 12CIS countries 67–8, 137citizenship 34, 44Clinton, President 40–1Cold War 7, 28–9, 51, 105, 205; buffer

zones 98; cooperation with CEECs220; effect of end of 85–6; Europe and1, 45, 78, 80; organized crime assurrogate for 204; OSCE since end of125; pattern of crime 200; securityrelationships in aftermath 98; WesternEurope and 79, 81

Cologne European Council (June 2000)107

Committee of the Regions 151Common Agricultural Policy see CAPcommon European currency 137common European standard 143–4;

autonomy and consociation 147–8;democracy and rule of law 144;minority rights 146; protection ofhuman rights 144–6; right ofcitizenship 146–7

Common External Tariff, customs duties84

Common Foreign and Security Policy seeCFSP

(Common Travel Area), Schengen and 245Commonwealth of Independent States see

CIScommunism 28, 56, 67, 247; aftermath

120–1, 174; propaganda and crime229; ‘threat vacuum’ after defeat 204,243; ‘triple transition’ 200

Conference on Security and Cooperationin Europe see CSCE

Copenhagen, Conference on the HumanDimension of CSCE (1998) seeCopenhagen Document

Copenhagen Document 139–40, 144, 147

corruption 192, 200, 218, 230;accountability and 62, 66

Corsica 125Council of Europe 47–8, 78–80, 124–5,

162Crete 111crime 2, 55, 59, 85, 105, 204, 242; cross-

border 11, 191–3, 199, 200–6, 214,218, 232; formal barriers, criminals and55; immigrants and 248; need fordefinition 227, Roma and 122; see alsoorganized crime; transnationalorganized crime (TOC) 228;transnational transit, criminal couriernetworks

criminal courier networks, transnationaltransit 173

criminal police, information fromintelligence community 216

Croatia 13, 56, 62–3, 67, 90, 103, 193cross-border regionalism 204–5CSCE 80, 82Cullen, Peter 204culture, division of East from West 55–61Cyprus 79, 90–91, 100–1, 108, 110–11,

112; EU membership and 192, 230;increase in forces 236

Czarnecki, Ryszard 196Czech Republic 13, 41, 89, 137; border

controls 194–6, 205; contract workers175; EU environmental protection for106; EU membership application 49,57, 62, 100–1, 161, 178, 192, 233;(im)migration and 161, 168, 174, 180;minority population 60–1, 67, 117–18,121, 123, 131, 143; NATOmembership and 72, 108; PHARE and205; police cooperation with 220–1;security forces 230; undocumentedWestern ‘workforce’ 177; visa policy 67;workers for EU and 59

Czech–German border 196Czechoslovakia 52, 121, 197; velvet

divorce 191, 241

Dayton accords 47, 112de Witte, Bruno 8Delors, Jacques 38, 45–6, 48democracy 8, 70, 122, 237; CEEC police

and immigration 236democratic deficit, EU and member

governments 70Denmark 58, 83, 88, 150, 241, 249

Index 259

Díaz, Porfirio 25differentiation 43, 100, 102, 145, 237Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST –

counter-spy intelligence service) 220–1Disraeli, Benjamin 27drug trafficking 191, 201–3, 214, 216–17,

233, 242–3, 246–7; harmonization oflaw 251

Dublin Convention 64, 202

East Central Europe see ECEEast Eastern Europe see EEEEast Germany, West Germany 55Eastern Europe 10–12, 67, 96, 205; after

(1989) 70; building institutional socialcapital 66; Christian Orthodox andMuslim 71; colony 52–3; crises 240;critics of enlargement 69; empires onperiphery of West 87; Europeanidentity 56; EU’s preoccupation with111; frontier of 194–9, 247–9;homogeneity after World War II 33;mass migration fear 10; rule of law 63;workers in EU 59; ‘wrong’ borders 9

ECE: accountable governments and publicagencies 62; anti-foreign sentiments176; cheap foreign labour and 172;controls of eastern and southernborders 171; corruption andaccountability 62; crime rates 204;democratization of sociopoliticalinstitutions 174; different time andeconomic zones 207; (im)migrationinto, new phenomenon since (1990s)170–2, 175–6; informal economies of170, 175; internationalization ofminority issue and 124–5; lawenforcement 203; ‘marches’ 3;migration and 161; NATO and 244;negotiations to enter EU 240; NGOsand 125, 178; post-industrialism 178–9;refugee and asylum policies 173; ‘rejointhe West’ 78; shadow economy,economic decline and 200; short-termcontract workers 174; undocumentedWestern specialists 177; westboundtransnational migrations 163–70;Western images after (1945) 90

EEC’s Association Agreements, Greeceand Turkey 79

EEE: corruption of officials 171; income-seeking migrants to ECE 175–6, 180;

refugees from 174; settlers and refugees180

Egypt 24Eisel, Dr Horst 199Ekeus, Rolf 125enlargement 3, 7, 48, 96, 227–8, 234;

balance between freedom of movementand security 219, 232–3; criminalityand 59; crisis within EU and 178;Eastern border and 51; environmentalproblems from Eastern Europe 106;equal treatment for all citizens 237–8;ethnic minorities and 117–18, 128;Eurobarometer poll on 70; foreignpolicy 95–6; how it is judged 218;immigration and 57; internationalleverage for EU 9; one-size-fits-all 72;open-ended 45; ‘others’ created by 105;problems of 105, 249; risk ofautonomous organization in policing224–5; rolling 90; terrorism and 106

environmental standards 8, 244Erasmus programme 34Estonia 57, 59, 100–1, 108, 117; border

control 235; EU membership and 192,197, 233; minorities in 4, 131, 142;naturalization of ‘non-citizens’ 142,146

ethnicity , closer surveillance of 217;double or common standard 139–40;‘ethnic allocation’ model 120; ethniccleansing 53; ethnic discrimination 156;‘ethnic entrepreneurs’ 120; ethnicminorities in ECE 117–18; ‘ethnic’ and‘minorities, EU and 138; ethnicity,territory and 33, 57; historicalbackground 118–20; legal and policyregimes 124–5; perspectives andconclusions 128–9; racialdiscrimination154; relations withneighbouring countries 126–8;tendencies 122–3

EU 48, 82, 93; admission criteria andimplementation 8; aggrandizementterritorial and communitarian 97;Algerian civil war and 105;ambivalence about eastern enlargement85; ‘an unidentified political object’ 45;concern about East European borders67, 248; cooperation with Russia andUkraine 73; dilemmas of realism and112; Eastern neighbours andmembership 192; immigration control241–2; importance of external

260 Index

boundary 97–8; independence fromUnited States 99; ‘internal security’214; law enforcement cooperation,difficulties 246–7; major player inEurasia 107; membership, costs andbenefits 248–9; migratory pressurefrom East and South 199; minorities139, 151–3, 249; mistake of high-techwarfare 217–18; national languagesand 149; new border issues 1–2; newspaces and new differentiations 47;numbers of Roma in selected EUcountries 60; partial members andEuropean Parliament 35; ‘privilegedpartnership’ 92; redistributivecommunity 34; regulation of workpermits 58; relation between centre andperiphery 46; revenue of 83–4; ‘rolling’border 35; South-Eastern Stability Pactand 91; state-like qualities 83; status of5–6, unworkable without clearboundaries 78–9; see also enlargement;Structural Funds

EU borders, enlargement and 3; futureshape of 13–14, 232; nature of 10–13;scope of 7–10

EU and ethnic minorities 137–9; double orcommon standard 139–40; minorityprotection as criterion for recognition141; opinions on accession andaccession partnerships 142–3; Pact onStability in Europe (1993–5) 141–2;stages in external policy 140–1

EU Freedom of Services (EmployeePosting) Act (1971) 166

EU-endorsed Stability Pact 69EU–Macedonia agreement 73‘EurAfrique’ 99Euro, the 57Euro-Mediterranean Partnership 99, 104‘Euro-paralysis’, identity and democracy

85Euro-polity, unbounded entity with fuzzy

borders 14Eurodac Convention 64Eurojust 64, 216, 250Europe, beyond European frontier 32–5;

definition 88; frontier divides peoples18; frontiers in the past 85–90; fuzzyborders of 79–82; ‘hard’ externalboundary at various stages 100;identified with EU 81; imaginary space82; nineteenth-century was the West87; Russia, division between 103;

security agents and 234; security andfrontiers 241; shape of future? 112–14;Western Christendom 90; where does itend? 17

‘Europe without shores’ (‘L’Europe sans

rivages’ ) 45, 78European accession negotiation,

corruption and accountability 66European Charter of Regional and

Minority Languages (1992) 125European Community 78European Convention of Human Rights

81, 145, 156European Council (Copenhagen 1993) 8,

54, 57, 95, 103, 140European Court of Appeal 252European Court of First Instance 252European Court of Human Rights 216European Court of Justice 246, 249, 252European Free Trade Area 80European Human Rights Convention 145European Initiative for Peace and

Reconciliation 152European integration 1, 45; delay

demoralizing to ECE 181; institutionaltransformation and 61; separatistfeelings and 154–5

European Monetary Union (EMU) 34, 51European Observatory for Migrations 199European police authority 213European Police College 64European Political Cooperation 141European Rapid Reaction Force by (2003)

107, 244‘European Security and Defence Policy’

102European, The 200European Union citizens 153Europeanization 61, 87, 214–15, 219Europol 64, 66, 85, 193, 200, 217–18, 252;

CEECs fears of 221–2, 231; criminalactivity and frontiers 242, 251;European Interpol 246–7; level ofinternational police cooperation 225,244; Schengen and 244–7; terrorismand 216; treaty basis for 243

Euroregions 204, 206Eurosceptics 249Euskadi 149, 151ex-Yugoslavia see former Yugoslaviaexclusion 1–2, 44, 78, 92, 202‘external nationalism’, ‘lack-of-fit’ and 53

Index 261

fascism 28, 31, 98Field of Blackbirds 33Finland 58, 79, 83, 138; Aaland Islands

and Sami people 152First International 25fiscal boundaries, modern state and 83Fordism 5, 28–30foreign, definition 95foreign direct investment 56–7, 72, 253formal barriers, criminals and 55former Soviet Union 38, 170, 174–5former Yugoslavia 38, 62, 72–3, 100;

conflict in 92–3; difficult borders 54;EU membership and 106;(im)migration 163, 174–5; minorityproblems 117; refugees and 173

‘fortress Europe’ 2, 99, 178, 213, 245Forward Studies Unit (1999) 52Foucault, Michel 29Foucher, Michel 46, 207Framework Convention for the Protection

of National Minorities (1995) 125, 137,146–7, 156, 158–9n.33

France 19, 35, 87, 88, 93, 104, 150;borders and 38; émigrés from communistera 176; first national map (1525) 20;immigration 163, 199; les frontières, s’enfout! (to hell with borders!) 39;Mediterranean security and 111;minority protection 145–6; Mitterrandand 31; policing and 223, 231;reactions to enlargement 233; SCTIPfor cooperation with CEECs 220; workpermits 58

France–German border, East Europeanborders 54

Franco, General 80Franco-Italian frontier 241Franco-Spanish frontier 241fraud 64, 203, 242–3, 247free movement of persons 9, 180, 237;

effect of delay 254Freedom House-SAR survey (March 2000)

53–4French revolution 4, 21‘front’, ‘frontier’ 42frontiers, Americans and 17–18, 39;

control of external by supranationalagency 252; control of external as seenby EU members 241–3; history’sorphans 33; policy distributed acrossPillar I 243; shared perceptions of240–1; territory and 17–21

‘fundamentalism’ 32

Galicia 149, 151Garibaldi (Southern Italy) 27Gelliner, Ernest 53Geneva Convention, Austrian presidency

of EU 202Genoa 216geographiers, frontier and 18geopolitics, enlargement by stages and

99–102; grand strategy and geo-economics 97–9; meaning 98; newborders and 96

Georgia 91–2, 110Geremek, Bronislaw 196German Bund 24German government, movement of labour

and 9German Länder 150, 221German Project Group on Visa

Harmonization 201German unification, Bundesgrenzschutz

(BGS) 204German–Czech border 203, 205German–French reconciliation 54German–Polish border 54, 85, 202–3Germany 23, 24, 27, 85, 87, 118–19, 151;

contract workers 169; cooperation withCEECs 221–2; Drang nach Osten 40;émigrés from communist era 176;Germans abroad and 127–8; jussanguinis 33; policing 204, 223; Polishimmigration fear 59; relations withPoland 236; residents from Hungary10; service workers needed for ageingpopulation 179; threat of immigration57–8, 163, 248; tightening of asylumlaws (1993) 196, 201; transition periodbefore free movement of people 198;work permits 58

Gettysburg 33Gibraltar 84Giscard d’Estaing, Valéry 38global terrorism 228globalization 2, 4–5, 29, 39, 43–5, 95;

bribes as downside 64; economic andincrease in crime 213; nationalism and48; territorial jurisdictions and 85;transnational population flows 161;victims of 31

‘golden banana’ from Barcelona toLivarno 99

good fences, good neighbours? 66–9Good Friday Agreement (10 April 1998)

152

262 Index

good governance, set of institutions thatstructure political life 61–2

Gorbachev, Mikhail 82, 88, 98Grabbe, Heather 48gradualism, map of Europe and 97Great Britain see UKGreat Depression, territorial governance

and 28Great Power (Grossraum) 42Great Powers, the 53Greece 24, 58, 60, 68, 71, 84, 86, 95;

association agreement 90; ‘Atlantic’Alliance 79; border with Turkey 88;control at frontiers 194; migration 163,165–6; policing 223; pressure onTurkey 110; role in Cyprus 101; wastedstructural aid programmes 73

‘grey list’ 193Guéhenno, Jean-Marie 13Guillaume, James 25

Habermas, Jürgen 33Habsburgs 20–1, 23–4, 53, 119Haider, Jörg 31, 44, 71Handelstourismus 163, 170hard border, members and non-members

of EU 2, 245Hassan, King (Morocco) 104Hassner, Pierre 5–6, 8–9, 11, 13Havel, Václav 8, 56Helsinki summit (December 1999) 38, 47,

51–2, 54, 56–7, 173; ‘parallel principle’179; Turkey as eligible for EUmembership 91, 110

Heywood, Paul 53High Commission on National Minorities

139High-Level Working Group on Asylum

and Immigration 242high-tech security 218Hildebrandt, Achim 201Hill, Christopher 5, 7–8, 10–12Himalayas 42historians, frontiers and 20Hobbes, Thomas 20Holmes, Leslie 200Holmes, Stephen 65Holy Roman Empire 86, 119Home and Justice items 62Hughes, Kirsty 48Human Rights Commission 125human trafficking 191, 197, 199, 201–3,

207, 232, 242–3

‘Hungarian’ Romanians, problem of 97,195

Hungary 22, 23, 25, 49, 57–8, 62, 79, 88;border controls 194, 196, 235; borderwith former Yugoslavia 55; contractworkers 175; EU environmentalprotection 106; EU membershipapplication 161, 178, 192, 233; externalnationalism 54; homosexualassociations 123; (im)migration and161, 167–8, 174–5, 180;internationalization of minority issue125; law enforcement agents 203;minority population 13, 60, 117–19,124, 126, 131–2; NATO membershipand 108; police seminars 224; problemswith Romania 109; rule of law 63;security forces 230; Status Bill 55, 68,74, 126; struggle to keep borders open67; Turks pushed out 21; USA policetraining in 203, 221, 224; workers forEU and 59

Huntington, Samuel 56, 88; ‘The Clash ofCivilizations’ 87

Huysmans, Jef 202

Iceland 81–3, 97, 108, 195identities, fragmentation 45‘identity’ politics 13, 113, 122–3, 240Iglicka, Krystyna 172imagined borders, real borders and 56immigration 44, 215, 243, 252; borders

and 232; closer surveillance of 217;closure to 47; common policy 252;controls 2, 214, 217; criminalizing 85;documents on concept of 64; illegal 92,111, 191, 202, 214, 232, 241–2, 248;potential from the East 59; pressures onEU border 72; regulated 207; Schengenand 245; third-country nationals and153

immigration and emigration countries,within one area 233–4

imperialism 28Inca 18inclusion, exclusion 78, 92India 20, 31Indian Mutiny 23, 25Industrial Revolution, spread of 87informal sector of economies 166–8, 170,

175‘insecurity’, definition by EU members 243

Index 263

inside/outside distinction, EU and NATO83

‘intelligence’ dream, global surveillance ofMuslim communities 216

interdependence 2, 5, 44interest groups 62Inter-governmental Conferences, EU

enlargement and 91, 110international conflict, scapegoating

outsiders 104international cross-border cooperation

203, 204–6International Labour Organization (ILO)

162International Law Enforcement Academy

(ILEA Budapest) 203International Organization for Migration

162international travellers, highly skilled from

ECE 169internationalization 124–5, 215interpenetration, interior and exterior of

states 44Interpol 193, 217, 222, 242, 246–7INTERREG 12, 153, 205‘invention of the Frontiers’ 21IOM 162, 199Iran 110Iraq 2, 110, 244Ireland 20, 58, 84, 152, 154, 232, 249Iron Curtain 32, 45, 78, 191–2, 194, 197,

204Islam 86, 104, 123Isle of Man 84Israel 79, 106, 110Italy 23, 24, 80, 88, 104; Algeria and 5;

Confcommercio on crime 200–1;Mediterranean security 111; migrationto 163; policing and fight against Mafia223; problem of controlling externalfrontier 242; revolution (1848) 21;Schengen member and Albanians 54,194; separatism 154; Slovenes in 127;transit country for immigrants 242;work permits 58

Japan 25, 80Japanese imperialism 98Jews 33, 89, 118, 123, 131–3JHA 13, 59, 62, 240, 244; acquis 51, 65–6,

73; applicant countries and 247;institutional development andimplementation 65; scenarios for future

development of cooperation 249–53;Tampere programme and 243

Jonas, Hans 43Joregensen, Knud Erik 12Josef, Franz 129Juárez, Benito 25judicial cooperation, qualified majority

voting 251Justice and Home Affairs see JHA

Kant, I. 6, 43, 88Kanther, Manfred 203–4Kashubes 121, 123Keremans, Bart 178Kohl, Chancellor 31kombinacje (shady arrangements) 167–8Korea 98Kosovo 46, 54, 62; Albanians migrating to

Germany 197; rule of law 63; war 57,70, 90, 100, 109, 193, 196, 244; war,aftermath of 9, 47, 51; Westernreaction to refugees 236

Kundera, Milan 119Kurier, ‘Bratislava Connection’ 201Kyle, Keith 111

Labour Party (1997), frontiers and 240‘Lands Between, The’ 119language use, centre and periphery 30Latin America 29–30; Iberian States 193Latvia, EU membership application 57,

100–1, 192, 197; minorities in 117,124–5, 132, 142–3, 146

League of Nations 125Lebanon 44Lebensraum 28, 98Leninists, dependency theorists and 30Lichtenstein 84Liebich, André 9limes (Roman concept) 3, 18–19, 39, 199limite (French concept) 18Lippovans 118Lithuania, border treaty with Russia 198;

cross-border migrations 170; EUmembership application 57, 59, 100–1,192, 197; minorities 117–18, 121, 127,132

Luhmann, Niklas 83Luxembourg 58, 150, 154

Maastricht Treaty 51, 84–5, 96, 137, 141,214; ambiguity of 227; Committee ofthe Regions 150–1; Europol 251

264 Index

Macedonia 47, 73, 141; Bulgarian borderand 68; EU and 90, 106, 109; rule oflaw 62–3

mafia activities 200, 213–14, 223, 228–9,233

Magyars 24–5, 55, 119, 134n.6Mahgreb 90, 104, 111–12Maier, Charles 4, 6, 13, 97majority voting 250male bread-winner family 28Malta 90, 96, 111, 192‘mani pulita’ (‘clean hands’) coalitions 66map, cousin to the landscape 20marche (French concept) 3, 18Maria Theresa’s cameralist administration

21Marshall Plan aid 80Marxists 25Mathaeus programme 250Maxwell, James Clerk 22Mearsheimer, John 112Meciar administration (Slovakia) 194, 197Médecins sans frontières 39, 43Meiji Restoration (1867–8) 23‘membership action programmes’ 91mental maps, decision makers 96; physical

geography and 88mercantilism, wealth a national resource

21Metternich, Count 89Mexico 23, 73; French imperial ambitions

(1867) and 25Middle East 106, 163, 170, 232migrants 47, 230; educated ‘professional’

172; illegal 196, 198; transit 172;victims of crime 202

migration 2, 10, 40, 44; control may bemyth 206; crime and 191, 207; fear ofinvasion 231–3; flows from CEECschanging 234–5; ‘hard shell’ 99;hunchback 178; international 161;political refugees 173; problem of 248;transnational West-East 176–7

‘migration targets’ 174Mikhailov, Yevgenii 197Miller, William 53Miloševic dynasty 51, 73Minsk Agreement (December 1991) 137Mitteleuropa, prejudice against Slavs and

Jews 89Mitterrand, President 91modern polity, necessity for have clear

borders 83–5Moldova 49, 51, 54, 68, 117; EU

membership application 100, 207;frontier 191; price tag for felonies 64

Monaco 84Monar, Jörg 62money laundering 191, 200, 203, 229, 233,

242, 247, 250Morawska, Ewa 5, 10–11Morocco 7–8, 97, 104, 111, 153, 241‘multi-speed Europe’ 178, 181multiple ethnicity 24‘multiverse’, ‘universe’ 42Mungiu-Pippidi, Alina 8–9, 11

NAFTA 19, 235national centralization, imperial models of

control and 24national economic sovereignty, erosion of 5national identity cards 216nationalism 48, 53–4, 247; diaspora

communities and 128–9; majority’sidentity 122

NATO 46–7, 78, 82, 100; article Five 83;bombing of Serbia 86; bridge withRussia 244; CFSP and 102, 113;defining institution 93; enlargement of38, 48, 72–3, 247; EU inability tosupplant 98; impact of EU’s defencedimension 106–7, 112–13; Kosovo warand 70; mistake of high-tech warfare217–18; Portugal 80; prospect of fullmembership 90; South-Eastern EuropeStability Pact and 91; terrorism and216; Turkey and 92; WEU and 108

naturalization 142, 146–7Nazism 98Neckel, Sighard 44Netherlands 58, 88Neumann, Iver 86, 89new administrative elites, power and 26new industry (1850s and 1860s) 26new sites of growth 30‘new threats’, technological 217New York 30, 216New Zealand 80, 199NGOs 31–2, 238; accountability and 62,

72; human-rights 178; militarization ofborders and 236; minority rights and146; unease about CEEC and SIS 231;Western and ECE minority groups 125

nomads 19–20, 40, 43North Africa 112North American bison 18Northern Ireland 111, 125, 152, 155, 235

Index 265

Norway 66, 81, 83, 103, 164; associatemember of WEU 108; frontier 241;SIS in 195

observatories 250–1Offe, Claus 200Office of a High Commissioner for

National Minorities 125‘offshore’ financial centres, relationship to

EU 84oil crises (1970s) 29old aristocracies, land and 26open-ended incrementalism, advantages

10Orbán, Viktor (Hungarian PM) 55organization for Economic Cooperation

and Development (OECD) 80Organization for European Economic

Cooperation 79–80organization on Security and Cooperation

in Europe see OSCEorganized crime 13, 192, 202, 214, 219;

beliefs on origins of 229–30; CEECsand 225–6, 228–9, 233; fear ofcorruption in future member police230–1; harmonization of law 251;issues of migration and 207, 223, 233;transnational 228

Ortelius, atlases 20OSCE 47, 80, 92, 107, 109; minority

protection and 124–5, 139; StabilityPact (1993–5) 142

‘other’ alienated Europe 103, 219‘other’ as geopolitical problem 104–5‘otherness’ 97Ottoman empire 24, 53, 57, 87, 89, 103,

119

Pact of Regional Security and stability(Russia) 198

paedophilia 246Palma agreement 219Paris Commune (1871) 25Paris conference (1995) 142Partnership for Peace 109passport forgery 201patterns of association 92Peace of the Pyrenees (1659) 20penal cooperation, police cooperation and

227peripheral borderlands, nation-state and

204periphery, centre and 44, 46, 205

Perroux, François 45PHARE programmes 65, 72, 142, 195–6,

205Pharmaciens sans frontières 39‘Plan Balladur’ (1995) 125–6Poland 33, 79, 86, 88–9; border controls

194–5, 205, 235; border with Ukraine55; boundaries 118; contract workers175; corruption and accountability 62;EEE quasi-tourists 172, 174; EUconcern about borders 67; EUenvironmental protection 106; EUmembership 13, 49, 57–8, 71, 100–1,161, 178, 192, 233; (im)migrationpotential 59, 174, 180, 199, 248; keystate in power politics (1939) 98;migration and 161, 167–8; minoritypopulation 21, 117–19, 123, 128,132–3; National Bureau of Labour onWestern migrants 176–7; NATOmembership 108; Poles in ex-SovietUnion 127; police cooperation and220–1; police seminars 224; problem ofagriculture 72; Schengen and 194;security forces and 230; workers for EU59

Poland and Ukraine, visa requirementbetween 11, 85

Poland’s Market Economy ResearchInstitute 195

policing, current methods of cooperationwith CEECs 219–20; European policeof European criminal law 252;institutional cooperation 225–8;networks and 213, 217, 247; on-lineaccess to national Schengen databases245–6; operational cooperation 220–2;technical assistance and training 222–5

policy of ‘conditionality’ 142Polish–German border, border guards 11,

85Polish–Ukrainian border 196political violence, borders and 232Pomaks 118, 121Portugal 58, 80, 84, 96, 165–6, 198Portuguese and Azorians, cleaning women

19positive discrimination 123, 136n.18post-1968 post-materialist ideologies 52post-Amsterdam Treaty, legal complexities

raised 218post-Cold War Europe 78, 81post-communist countries 57, 120–1,

123–5, 200, 204

266 Index

post-modernism 29, 40, 97post-war world, geopolitical understanding

of 98process of ‘securization’ 202Province of Quebec 145, 149–50push/pull economic pressures, Western-

style standard of living 169Putin, Vladimir 88

Qaddafi’s Libya 111qualified majority voting, asylum and

immigration 251‘quasi-species’ 42Quilès, Paul 246Quing dynasty, Taiping rebellion 23

railroads, creating modern territoriality(1850–80) 21–7

rapid response system (Sirène offices),transfrontier threat and 193

Reagan, Ronald 31realpolitik 2, 10, 103; scenarios for post-

2015 177–81Recommendation 1201 (1993) 147–8redistribution, insiders/outsiders and 84religious cleansing 53remote policing 217‘République une et indivisible’ 124Retaillé, Denis 45‘return of minorities’ 120‘return to Europe’ concept 81‘rights of free movement’ scenario 180Rochau, August Ludwig von 22Roma 59–61, 117–18, 122, 126, 131–4,

143, 154–5Roman, Orthodox churches 104Romania 24, 51, 56–7; border with

Moldova 55; corruption andaccountability 62; dissatisfaction withborders 54; elections (2000) 57, 70; EUmembership application 9, 47, 49,100–1, 192, 197, 234; EU’s commonvisa regime 85, 106; Hungarians livingin 192; immigration potential 59, 163,174; inter-ethnic problems solved 70;migration 170, 175; minoritypopulation 59–60, 117–18, 124, 126,133, 143; police cooperation 221; ruleof law 63; state of judiciary 65; viewson Hungarian Status Bill 68; visaregime 67; workers for EU 59

Romans, idea of frontier 18

Rousseau, J.-J. 6; Discourse on the Origin ofInequality 41

Ruggie, John Gerard 6–7, 43, 45–6Russia 2, 72, 100, 106, 247; Asian country

with Europeanized elite 89; BalticStates and 69; British and Germanentrepreneurs before (1914) 87;Chechnya and 48; citizenship issues 35,127; Common Strategy by EU 99;empire and 39; Estonia on bad termswith 197, 235; EU enlargement and 97,102–3, 105, 108–9; external frontier241; JHA and 247; mafia 229, 233;membership of EU and 9, 92, 207;migration 170, 174, 199; Orthodoxrulers 86; OSCE and 107; protest atborders 195; role after fall ofConstantinople 89; us and themattitude 105; Western assistance for lawenforcement 65–6; Westernizers 81, 88

Russia and EU, security threats to eachother 12

Russian, Trans-Siberian railway 23Russian empire 53, 119Ruthenes 118, 123

‘safe third-country’ rule 173sans frontièrism (borderlessness) 39Sardinia 111Savoy 88Scandinavia 24, 163, 199Schäffle, A.E. 22Schäuble, Wolfgang 90Schengen: acquis 1, 66; applicant countries

and 54–5, 58, 206, 253; asylum policy245; borders and 2, 7, 9–10, 13, 32, 41,47, 231–3; borders, justification forcontrols 232; borders, problems of 49,218; continued development 247; EUand 243; implementation since (March1995) 191, 193–4, 206; JHA acquis and66; migration and 202, 245;negotiations for 219; Pillar III 227, 250;policing and 214; problem ofcriminality and 59, 242; reinforcedinformal 234; seen as imposed regime244; Slovakia and 68; visa policy 193,245

‘Schengen Europe’, ‘Maze Europe’ 13Schengen information System see SIS‘Schengenland’, controls at external

frontiers of 192–3Schmitt, Carl 44; Der Nomos der Erde 42

Index 267

Scotland 154Scott, James C. 21SCTIP 220, 223seasonal agricultural contract workers 169Second World War see World War IIsecurity: cooperation and 206; internal,

collaboration with foreign countries202; links with criminality andimmigration 245; wider definitions andbigger problems 105–8

security deficit 213–15, 245sensitive intelligence, transnational sharing

and 246September 11 (2001) 2, 49, 104, 106, 112;

danger of enlarging definition ofterrorism 216; security professions and215

Serbia 13, 24, 33, 41, 46–7, 51, 69;Bulgaria and 118

Service de Cooperation Technique Internationale dePolice see SCTIP

shabashka (‘kick-off ’ jobs) 171shadow economy, economic decline and

200‘shatterbelts’, geopolitical regions and 99,

244Shlapentokh, Vladimir 176Siberian fur animals 18Sicily 111Siedel, Jutta 205Sieur de Beauplan map (Ukraine) 20Single Market 112, 137, 241SIS 63–4, 66, 78, 85, 106, 193, 195;

CEECs and 213, 231; cooperationbetween police and 242, 245; networksand 217; second-generation (SIS II)195, 246

Slovakia 2, 54, 59, 89, 137; EUmembership application 49, 56–7,100–1, 197; Hungarians in 155, 192;minority population 60, 117–18, 121,123–4, 126, 133, 142–3; rule of law 63;Schengen and 194; ‘Slovak Card’ 68;Slovaks in Hungary 127; wage level 65

Slovenia 69, 97; border control 235; EUmembership application 57, 62, 100–1,108, 192, 233; minority population117–18, 121, 133–4; Schengen 194,230; visas for Romanians andBulgarians (2000) 67

social democratic parties 28social science, clear and distinct

boundaries 29social welfare deficits 232

socialist parties, market solutions 31‘societal security’ 202Somme 33South Asians, physicians in New England

19South Tyrol 155South-Eastern Europe 69, 72; transparent

and effective judiciary 72South-Eastern Europe Stability Pact (1999)

73, 91, 109Southern Europe 170, 174sovereignty 20, 39Soviet Union 29, 31, 82, 144Spain 58, 80, 84, 88, 96, 104, 119;

Autonomous Communities 149;Gonzàlez, Suàrez 31; Mediterraneansecurity and 111; migration 166, 198;policing 223; separatism 154

Spanish–Spanish reconciliation 54Special Protocols to the Act of Accession

152‘special relationship’, EU and 103Spinoza, B. 41stagflation (1970s) 29Status Bill (Hungary) 55, 68, 74, 126steamboats 21Strasbourg 195, 224, 245–6street prostitution 200, 233strong media 62Structural Funds 34, 56, 84, 152, 253sub-Saharan African nationals,

Community law and 153Süddeutsche Zeitung 196, 201Südtiroler Volkspartei 145Suez 98, 112Sully, Duc de 88supranationality 31–2, 98, 113‘suspect’ Western club 9Sweden 58, 83, 88, 119, 138, 195; Sami

people 152Switzerland 24, 81, 84, 88, 100, 103, 150;

external frontier 241; migration to 164;Russian mafia and 200

symbolic politics, realpolitik and 2, 10Syria 110

Tampere 96Tampere Council (1999) 13, 64, 207, 214,

243Tartars 118Task Force of senior law officers 245‘tax havens’ 84Taylor, Paul 84

268 Index

technology, focus on networks 30telegraph 21–2temporary industrial contract workers 169,

174–5territorial nationalism, memories of

historical greatness 54‘territorialists’, ‘globalists’ 6, 29–32;

identity space and decision space 31–2territoriality 19, 21, 28, 34territoriality triumphant (1880–1968) 27territorially defined demos 13terrorism 2, 13, 202, 214; Europol and

216, 246; globalization of 214, 228;harmonization of law and 251; post-11September 49, 104; protest and 216; seealso September 11

Thailand, King Mongut and 23Thatcher, Margaret 31, 240‘third-country nationals’ 153Third World, (im)migrant labour 173–4,

176, 179–80; policing by EU 220, 224trade unions 28Trail of Tears 33training sessions, technical assistance for

police 222, 224trans-border cooperation, ethnic minorities

and 129Transcaucasus 106, 110transition, minorities and 122transnational migrations 161–3transnational organized crime (TOC) 228transnational transit, criminal courier

networks 173transnationalization 214, 237Treaty of Amsterdam 13, 138, 140, 151–2,

214; EU migration policy 154, 197;JHA provisions 240, 249, 254–5;majority voting and 250; ‘maximalist’interpretation 251; Pillar I (economy,integration, citizenship) 234, 243–7,254; Pillar II (common foreign andsecurity policy) 216, 219, 243–4; PillarIII (security and migration) 216,218–19, 227, 234, 243–4, 246, 250

Treaty of European Union see MaastrichtTreaty

Treaty of Nice 151, 243, 249, 253Treaty of Paris 80Treaty of Rome 7, 45, 79–80, 84Treaty of Verdun (843) 18Treaty of Westphalia (1648) 4, 20Trevi informal agreement 214, 219‘triple transition’, communism and 200Tudor, Vadim 71

Tunisia 111Turkey 2, 9, 13, 35, 49; accepted by West

during Cold War 81; associate memberof WEU 108; Association Agreement90–91; ‘Atlantic’ Alliance 79; Black Seaand 86–7; border with Greece 88;Central Treaty Organization 79; CFSPdiscussions, problem of 108; citizens inGermany 128, 153; conflict in Kurdishregions 244; Helsinki summit (1999)and 51; (im)migration 196, 199; NATOand 72, 92, 109; problems overenlargement 97, 109–11; question ofEU membership 91, 100–1, 103, 106,111; WEU and 108

Turkish Constitutional Court, SocialistParty (Kurdish-leaning) 145

Turkmenistan 80twenty-first century, sovereign territorial

state? 4

UK 66, 80, 87–8, 119, 152, 199; CommonTravel Area with Ireland (1921) 245;cooperation with CEECs 221; émigrésfrom communist era 176; EU defencepresence and 107; Europol Conventionand 246; frontiers and 232, 240–1; JHAand 249; Narcotic Information Service223; Northern Ireland secession 241;policing methods in EU 223, 231;reaction to enlargement 233;separatism 154; wage level 165; workpermits 58

Ukraine 20, 35, 49, 51, 69, 91; bordersand 196, 236; EU membershipapplication 9, 92, 100, 108, 207, 234;JHA and 247; migration 170, 174–5,199; minorities 123, 126; Poles living in67, 127; slow pace of development 72;wages 64; Westernizers 81

UN 47UN CIVPOL, police training 223unanimity rule, asylum and immigration

250‘unbounded’ principle of solidarity and

community 13‘unbundling territoriality’ 6–7, 43unemployment, borders and 232United Nations High Commission for

Refugees (UNHCR) 173United States 23, 29, 39, 96; émigrés from

communist era 176; enlargement ofEU and 97, 102, 106–7; FBI (Drug

Index 269

Enforcement Agency) 223; investmentin Mexico 73; migration to 163–4, 199,248; mistake of high-tech warfare217–18; narcotics training for CEECs231; OSCE and 107; police training inEurope 223; police training forHungary 203; post-1945 model 87;relations with Mexico and Colombia226; slowdown of economy 57

universalistic values 44Urals 4, 17, 88, 96USSR 87, 121, 163, 174–5

van der Stoel, Max 125VAT, transferred to EU 84Vatican state 79, 88Vauban, Sébastien le Prestre de 21Vedrine, Hubert (French Foreign Minister)

38Venice 88Verdun 33Verfassungspatriotismus 33Verheugen, Guenther (EU Commissioner

for Enlargement) 70Versailles Treaty (1919) 52Vienna 24Vietnam 174–5Visegrad (Central European) countries 99,

106Voltaire 71

Wales 155Wallace, William 6–8, 56Waltz, Kenneth 113Washington Summit (April 1999) 107‘wealth’ border 52weapons trading 191, 201, 203, 246Weber, Max 3, 20welfare state, post-World War II 29Western Europe, ageing of EU population

167; cooperation in justice and homeaffairs 85; death penalty in variousstates 80–81; enlargement idea and cost69, 219; ‘European’ projects 88;exploitive working conditions 168;informal economies 166–8; organizedcrime seen as threat 192; post-industrialrestructuring 165; reactions toenlargement of EU 233; structure ofunemployment 177

Western European borders, naturalthrough evolution 53

Western European Union see WEUWestern political alignment, inter-class

corporatist collaboration 29Western private investors, partnerships

against corruption 73Westphalian super-state 4, 7, 10, 13, 43WEU 34, 78, 99, 102, 107–8White, Stephen 53White Book 61‘white list’ 193Williams, Derek 17Witte, Bruno de 128Witte, Count 23‘worker-tourists’ 10World Bank 72, 162World Values Survey 56World War I 26, 28World War II 28, 89–90, 197; frontiers

after 241, 248; wage levels in West 205

Yeltsin, Boris 88Yugoslavia 52, 54, 57, 69, 90, 103, 109,

121; disintegration 247; minorities 123,126, 141, 144; successor states 142

zero-sum reasoning 12Zielonka, Jan 32, 85

270 Index