When we had been youngsters in Poland, it was the tip of the Nineties and by then we had already acquired the liberty to journey to Paris or London to go to language faculty and work. To afford this, we travelled by shabby, worn-out buses. It took dozens of hours, and the journey was at all times additional extended by a cease of a number of hours on the Polish-German border.
The border was actual and symbolic. It was the start of European house, however in our heads, we had been making a journey via time – a visit into the longer term, to a time when as members of the European Union we’d be realising the promise of a greater life.
We felt like we had been residing in another model of the Kafka story Earlier than the Legislation, through which a person waits all his life in entrance of a door with out ever being let in. The gates of Europe had been closed for half a century to our mother and father and grandparents. For us, nonetheless, the miracle of the autumn of the Berlin Wall meant we had been capable of go via that door freely.
Ten years after our first travels, one chilly December evening in 2007, folks gathered on the bridge over the River Oder, which connects Germany and Poland. The chilly didn’t discourage anybody from partying to loud music to rejoice the Schengen settlement, which was starting to take impact, dismantling inner borders throughout Europe and permitting passport-free motion. The nationwide anthems of each international locations and of the EU had been sung. Commemorative images had been taken in locations the place this was strictly forbidden for safety causes. Barbed wire was minimize and border limitations had been eliminated.
As we speak, the political focus is shifting from time to house.
After Germany’s extraordinary choice to reimpose border checks in any respect 9 of its land frontiers from 16 September – in a single day and with out consulting neighbouring governments or the EU – it feels to us as if that door is being shut as soon as once more.
Because the EU progressively ceases to ship the promise of a greater future, this choice by Olaf Scholz’s authorities is a bitter reminder of our previous, and our previous illusions.
Historical past explains why there’s a distinction within the response to those new controls relying on what facet of the previous iron curtain you might be from. The method of eradicating border controls between France and Germany, which dates again to the Nineteen Eighties, was not simply a part of the reconciliation of countries that had waged wars in opposition to one another, but additionally a broader integration of economies and tradition. No shock then that a lot of the response in France to Germany’s choice has targeted on the chance of longer ready occasions for individuals who commute to work on the German facet of the border.
In central and jap Europe, it’s completely different. For generations of individuals born earlier than 1989, the actual fact of whether or not Germany’s borders are open or not has an ethical which means.
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After the chilly conflict, we spoke within the Nineties of a “return to Europe”. The elimination of border controls was understood as a restoration of rights misplaced after the second world conflict, the restoration of geopolitical normality. For international locations equivalent to Poland and the Czech Republic, this was one of the vital necessary breakthroughs in leaving the Russian sphere of affect.
Despite the fact that we, as jap Europeans, had been pleased, it was not as a result of we actually thought the autumn of the Wall was the fabled “finish of historical past”. Everybody had their considerations. The Germans feared a rise in crime. Their neighbours, equivalent to Poland and the Czech Republic, feared the unlawful dumping of business waste. Outdated fears turned overshadowed by new ones over time, not least migration as populist politicians in Germany have performed on folks’s fears to construct their rhetoric round it.
Will the German authorities’s choice to strengthen borders neutralise the far proper? It definitely sends a sign to the entire of Europe that Germany has no confidence in different EU international locations to regulate their very own borders, nor in Frontex, the EU’s coastguard and border company.
It has been clear since Brexit that neither closing borders, nor even leaving the EU, solves the issue of unlawful immigration. Imposing unilateral random ID checks will accomplish even much less. For now, nonetheless, Berlin is extra involved with the notion of the coverage, moderately than its profitable implementation. It creates the impression of separation from unreliable neighbours. And Scholz needs to revive a way of sovereignty, management and company. What higher manner to answer the electoral successes of anti-immigration events Various für Deutschland (AfD) and Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), whose speeches are peppered with references to Germany’s “Kontrollverlust” (lack of management).
But this can be a political motion and populists will at all times demand extra. Within the imaginative and prescient of the unconventional German far proper, the restoration of sovereignty is to be maximised. It’s not an exaggeration to think about that, many years after the Berlin Wall got here down, a second wall might finally encompass the entire of Germany for the sake of border management effectivity.
It might be price reminding Scholz that Georg Simmel, a founding father of German sociological thought, as soon as wrote that whereas a bridge connects issues which are separated, a door separates issues which are already related. Maybe the reintroduction of Germany’s borders separates additional what was in actuality nonetheless separate: our international locations require a lot extra work on European integration. But this transfer now leaves us anxious due to our previous. Not simply anxious for our destiny in Poland, however for the European Union.
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Karolina Wigura is a historian of concepts and a sociologist. She is a board member of the Kultura Liberalna Basis and a member of the European Council on Overseas Relations
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Jarosław Kuisz is a authorized historian and author. He’s editor-in-chief of the weekly newspaper Kultura Liberalna and his latest ebook is The New Politics of Poland
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