Europe Unbound: Enlarging and Reshaping the Boundaries of the European Union (Routledge Advances in European Politics)

Europe Unbound

Europe Unbound provides an analysis of the enlargement of the European Union and 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. It discusses how dilemmas of inclusion and exclusion could be handled in the new Europe; how new borders will change the geopolitical map; and who should be in charge of border policing and administration. It also looks at patterns of migration between current and future EU members; examines ethnic minority problems in the applicant states; and analyses the threat of transnational crime across the new borders of the Union. Special attention is devoted to the eastern enlargement of the European Union. This book draws upon such diverse fields as History, Sociology, Political Science and International Relations and contains contributions from an international range of respected academics. Jan Zielonka is Professor of Political Science at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. His recent books include Explaining Euro-Paralysis and Democratic Consolidation in Eastern Europe, Volumes One and Two.

Routledge Advances in European Politics

1 Russian Messianism: Third Rome, revolution, communism and after Peter J.S. Duncan 2 European Integration and the Postmodern Condition Governance, democracy, identity Peter van Ham 3 Nationalism in Italian Politics The stories of the Northern League, 1980–2000 Damian Tambini 4 Uncertain Europe Building a new European security order Edited by Graham Timmins and Martin Smith 5 Widening the European Union: The politics of institutional change and reform Bernard Steunenberg 6 Institutional Challenges in the European Union Edited by Madeleine Hosli, Adrian van Deemen and Mika Widgrén 7 Europe Unbound Enlarging and reshaping the boundaries of the European Union Edited by Jan Zielonka

Europe Unbound Enlarging and reshaping the boundaries of the European Union

Edited by Jan Zielonka

London and New York

First published 2002 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003. © 2002 Selection and editorial matter, Jan Zielonka; the individual chapters, the contributors All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-203-21709-8 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-27308-7 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0–415–28253–5 (Print Edition)

Contents

List of tables List of contributors Preface List of abbreviations 1 Introduction: Boundary making by the European Union

vii viii ix xi

1

JA N Z I E LO N K A

2 Does Europe need a frontier?: from territorial to redistributive community

17

CHARLES S. MAIER

3 Fixed borders or moving borderlands?: a new type of border for a new type of entity

38

PIERRE HASSNER

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

51

ALINA MUNGIU-PIPPIDI

5 Where does Europe end?: dilemmas of inclusion and exclusion

78

W I L L I A M WA L L A C E

6 The geopolitical implications of enlargement

95

C H R I S TO P H E R H I L L

7 Ethnic minorities and long-term implications of EU enlargement ANDRÉ LIEBICH

117

vi

Contents

8 Politics versus law in the EU’s approach to ethnic minorities

137

B RU N O D E W I T T E

9 Transnational migration in the enlarged European Union

161

E WA M O R AW S K A

10 Illegal migration and cross-border crime: challenges at the eastern frontier of the European Union

191

E B E R H A R D B O RT

11 Border regimes, police cooperation and security in an enlarged European Union

213

DIDIER BIGO

12 The future border regime of the European Union: enlargement and implications of the Amsterdam Treaty

240

MALCOLM ANDERSON

Index

257

Tables

1.1 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6

Types of territorial boundaries Territorial nationalism in selected European countries EU applicant countries: selected indicators Regulation of work permits in EU countries East European would-be workers in the EU Numbers of Roma in selected EU countries Rule of law in Eastern Europe: selected indicators

5 53 57 58 59 60 63

Contributors

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’Études Politiques 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 de Recherches Internationales in Paris. Christopher Hill is Montague Burton Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science. André Liebich is Professor of International History and Politics, Graduate Institute of International Studies, Geneva. Charles S. Maier is Krupp Foundation Professor of European Studies and member of the History Department at Harvard University. Ewa Morawska is Professor of Sociology and History at the University of Pennsylvania. Alina Mungiu-Pippidi is Professor of Political Science at the Romanian National School of Government, Bucharest. William Wallace is Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Jan Zielonka is Professor of Political Science at the European University Institute, Florence.

Preface

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 that were found to be at the root of Euro-paralysis. However, I soon realized that this proposal is problematic on both practical and conceptual grounds. In fact, the Union decided to do the opposite: it began to harden its external borders, but remained ambiguous about their future reach. Once at a conference in Prague I shared my thoughts and doubts with Anna Michalski from the Forward Studies Unit of the European Commission and we decided to elaborate a research proposal 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 evolving nature of European borders and about the various implications of moving these borders further east. Yves Mény and Jérôme Vignon, at the time directors of the Robert Schuman Centre and the Forward Studies Unit, endorsed the proposal. Both institutions provided financial and organizational support for the creation of a special Reflection Group that was to meet six times over two years and produce a series of policy reports focusing on the borders of the enlarged European Union. For each meeting we commissioned two academic papers, and this book is largely comprised of the revised drafts of these papers. Interim and final policy reports from the project have already been published and are available via the Internet: . I owe a special debt of gratitude to members of the Reflection Group who debated early drafts of chapters from this book: Giuliano Amato (chairman), Judy Batt (rapporteur), Maarten Brands, Lord Dahrendorf, Jean-Marie Guéhenno, Elemér Hankiss, Christopher Hill, José María Maravall, Krzysztof Michalski, Jacques Rupnik, Aleksander Smolar, Rüdiger Stephan and Renate Weber. Never before have I had the pleasure of working with such a thoughtful, inspiring and collegial group of academics, and their contribution was crucial in completing this book. Several officials from the European Commission and professors from the European University Institute have also contributed to individual discussions and my thanks are extended to them as well. Although none of the sponsoring institutions is responsible for the individual arguments presented in this book, this project could hardly be realized without their generous help.

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Preface

Special thanks go to Ania Krok-Paszkowska, who helped me to edit the manuscript, and to Angelika Lanfranchi, who provided secretarial help. Heidi Bagtazo and Grace McInnes from Routledge assured the smooth and speedy production of the book. Above all I am indebted to the authors of the individual chapters for all the effort, talent, persistence and devotion invested in successive drafts of their contributions. Jan Zielonka January 2002

Abbreviations

AFSP BGS BKA CAP CEECs CFSP CIS CSCE CSU DST ECE ECJ EEC EEE EMU EU E–W FH GATT IGC ILEA ILO IOM JHA NAFTA NATO NGOs OECD OSCE PHARE RG SCTIP SIS

Association Française de Science Politique Bundesgrenzschutz Bundeskriminalamt Common Agricultural Policy Central and East European countries Common Foreign and Security Policy Commonwealth of Independent States Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe Christian Socialist Union Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire East Central Europe European Court of Justice European Economic Community East Eastern Europe European Monetary Union European Union East–West Freedom House General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade Inter-Governmental Conference International Law Enforcement Academy International Labour Organization International Organization for Migration Justice and Home Affairs North American Free Trade Agreement North Atlantic Treaty Organization non-governmental organizations Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe Pologne, Hongrie: Assistance à la Reconstruction Économique Renseignements Généraux Service de Cooperation Technique Internationale de Police Schengen Information System

xiv Abbreviations TOC UN UNHCR WEU

transnational organized crime United Nations United Nations High Commission for Refugees Western European Union

1

Introduction Boundary making by the European Union Jan Zielonka

Europe’s borders are again in flux, causing problems and anxiety. The Cold War border between the East and West was imposed arbitrarily in defiance of history and culture, but it was firm and stable. There was little trade and mobility across this border, and those who did venture to cross it were subjected to strict and often humiliating scrutiny by border guards with dogs and machine guns. However, in 1989 a euphoric crowd dismantled the Berlin Wall – the epitome of the East–West border. The Soviet empire subsequently collapsed, partly because the idea of making Europe ‘whole and free’ motivated resistance to it. Yet the legacy of the Cold War divide persists and Europe has found it difficult to resolve the complex issues of borders, frontiers and mobility.1 The European Union is the key actor trying to cope with these new border issues, 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 practical problems and conceptual dilemmas. Various gaps in terms of democracy, economics and culture still persist despite all efforts to make both parts of Europe more compatible. Accepting new and to a degree incompatible states into the Union cannot but affect the already existing system of European integration. Enlarging the Union to include only some, more compatible post-communist countries replaces old dividing lines by new ones, with potentially destabilizing implications for the entire continent. Moreover, the key aspects of European integration – the single market and the Schengen system – make it more rather than less difficult for outsiders to enter the integrated European space. While internal borders among EU member states are gradually being abolished, external EU borders are being tightened up. The Schengen Manual for the External Frontier, containing common rules that provide for strict controls, has added to a series of other judicial and security measures envisaged by the Schengen Convention. Those who aspire to join the Union are asked 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 in Eastern Europe it has come to be regarded as an imposed regime with discriminatory implications. For many in the post-communist part of Europe, Schengen has become a symbol of exclusion of the poor and allegedly less civilized

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European nations by wealthy and arrogantly superior ones.3 The problem is not only about a rising gap between symbolic politics and realpolitik, the former reflecting psycho-cultural anxieties, the latter relating to legal and administrative necessities. Since the fall of communism, the Schengen system has evolved in a direction not originally envisaged by the signatory states: the fears of mass migration from an impoverished and crisis ridden ‘East’ have prompted West European governments to reassure their voters that the abolition of internal EU frontier controls would be complemented by the preservation of tough external border controls. Thus the implementation of Schengen has been accompanied by a new emphasis on tightening up of immigration controls, curbing flows of asylum seekers, increasing visa restrictions, widening the scope of secret data collection on personae non grata and mixing crime and migration. The terrorist attacks on New York and Washington DC on 11 September 2001 reinforced further the arguments for tightening up borders, including those in Europe. This book attempts to analyse this complex set of problems from both a political and a theoretical perspective. It is about the evolving nature, characteristics and scope of EU borders. The scope of borders largely depends on the degree of diversity the Union is able to import and digest in the course of enlargement. It also depends on the reaction of external actors to an EU with an ever-greater geographical reach. The nature of borders largely depends on the degree to which these borders are open or closed and the extent to which they are part of the EU governance system rather than limited to national systems. The type and scope of borders may well be determined by different factors, but they are closely interlinked. For instance, the Union may well afford to have a ‘fuzzy’ type of border with Slovakia (assuming this country is not included in the first wave of enlargement), 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 theoretical perspective of governance and state building. This book devotes special attention to the problems resulting from the installation of a relatively harder EU border as envisaged by the Schengen regime and the single market. A hard border sharpens the distinction between members and non-members of the EU, producing an exclusion complex. It makes a great difference in both objective and subjective terms whether a country is on the right side of the border. Hence, the pressure for EU membership is growing and is becoming unmanageable. A hard border seems also at odds with the pressures on the EU from global economic competition. Globalization and interdependence may render prohibitive the costs of controlling the flow of goods, capital, services and people across borders. Moreover, the main argument used to justify the hard external border does not seem plausible. There is little evidence that attempts to control terrorism, international crime and migration at the EU’s rigid border are effective. In fact, a hard border creates extra demand for organized 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

Introduction

3

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 desirable) degree of exclusion and access should be carefully scrutinized. Likewise, there is no reason to treat EU borders in state-centric linear terms. The linear concept of a border emerged only some 150 years ago, and it is linked to an absolute and now largely outdated notion of sovereignty. More flexible types of border arrangements worked well in various historical contexts, starting with the Roman concept of limes or the French concept of marche, both treating the border more as a geographical zone than a clear line. In fact, for centuries East Central European countries had loose border areas and ‘marches’ rather than sealed types of borders. However, can one apply medieval concepts to modern or possibly ‘postmodern’ institutions such as the European Union?4 What would a soft, flexible and functionally overlapping border regime imply in practice? And can one restore loose ‘limes’ or ‘marches’ in a Europe characterized by a much different types and levels of cross-border mobility? This book assumes that it is virtually impossible to address these kinds of questions in a purely technical or administrative manner. This is because borders ‘are not simply lines on maps where one jurisdiction ends and another begins. … Borders are political institutions: no rule-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 history of human organizations could largely be read as a series of continuing efforts to bring territorial borders to correspond to and coincide with systemic functional boundaries, and to be in line with the consolidated socio-political hierarchies of corresponding populations.6 This book will look at the EU’s borders from this broad theoretical perspective. This introductory chapter cannot do justice to all the diverse, complex and at times conflicting arguments elaborated in this book by individual authors. But I will try to show and explain the sequence, rationale and implications of these arguments, and point to their broader theoretical context. I will first demonstrate the crucial role of borders in shaping the very nature of political systems. The extension of this argument is that the scope and type of borders of the Union will determine the profile of the EU itself. Second, I will try to assess the future scope of EU borders resulting from enlargement. The further the Union expands, the more diversity it will import. This will have serious implications for the Union’s cultural identity, economic path of development and model of government. The geopolitical implications of extending the EU further east and south will also be very serious. For all these reasons, the Union cannot expand endlessly, even though there is no rational or ‘natural’ way to draw boundaries of the European Union. I will therefore argue that the Union is likely to remain ambiguous about its future reach. Expansion is set to be open-ended, incremental and based on largely arbitrary and often vague criteria. This will shape the nature of Euro-polity and influence its neighbours’ reaction to it. Third, this introduction examines various possible border types. What will determine the

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degree of openness and closure of EU borders? Are these borders to be administered by the Union or by individual member states? I will show in particular that maintaining a hard border regime is increasingly difficult in practice, but also politically damaging, especially vis-à-vis law-abiding and economically prosperous East European countries. But I will also argue that the degree of permeability of borders cannot be totally divorced from the issue of European geo-strategy. The final section will try to assess the evolving nature of EU borders in the process of eastward expansion. The evidence points to the ongoing change in the scope of these borders, increased disharmony between different types of borders and the emergence of fuzzy border zones to replace the carefully guarded existing border lines. As a consequence, the Union may increasingly come to resemble a neo-medieval empire rather than a Westphalian super-state.7 The architects of enlargement should take account of these broader implications 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 employed for different historical purposes. The 1648 Peace of Westphalia symbolized the advent of territorial politics.8 It was at that time that the ideal of a sovereign state controlling a given territory became prevalent. This was later to be paired with the ideal of the sovereign people carried on the banners of the French and American revolutions. But as Charles Maier argues in his chapter, modern territoriality and the modern nation-state are not just a consequence of ideological developments or legal treaties. They also depend upon the material and administrative possibilities for controlling large regions on the ground. Such possibilities emerged in the second part of the nineteenth century with the development of modern forms of transportation (especially railroads), and the successful centralization of government. Only then, Maier argues, did a new awareness of ‘bounded space, a preoccupation with fixing border lines, with the demarcation of insiders and outsiders, public and private’, become truly the reality. Borders were seen no longer as zones, but as sharp lines separating largely homogenous and centrally governed nation-states. In other words, a strict overlap was provided between administrative borders, military frontiers, cultural traits and market transaction of individual states. Table 1.1 illustrates these different types of territorial boundaries of modern states indicating processes that led to their creation and consolidation. However, one should ask two basic questions. Is this ideal of a sovereign territorial state still valid in the twenty-first century? And can we apply this ideal of a territorial state to the European Union? Several chapters in this book provide negative answers to these questions, but usually with some important qualifications. Charles Maier in his chapter shows how globalization is undermining the capacity of nation-states to maintain discrete political, cultural and economic

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 limits surrounding the territories are defined as:

fringes (confinium)

margins (finis)

frontiers (limes)

borders (terminus)

These limits are created and consolidated by the processes of:

market building

nation building

state building

functional regime building

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

membership space characterized by the traits of the inhabitants (language, religion, ethnicity)

central repressive and extractive agencies

political-social rights, regulatory systems (education, welfare, labour market)

Focal point for operationalization of the territory:

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

space within their administrative boundaries. In his view, the decisive changes took place between the late 1960s and the end of the 1970s. National economic sovereignty in particular has been eroded by massive international labour and capital flows that constrain governments’ abilities to defend their countries’ economic interests. The economic basis of public life has also been reoriented with the demise of Fordism. Moreover, the basic class configuration that created the old territorial order has disappeared: ‘the new elite at the centre reaps the rewards of being adept at transnational control of information and symbols,’ Maier argues. Pierre Hassner in his chapter also points to the evolving trend towards ‘interpenetration between the interior and the exterior of states and organizations’ producing virtual ‘de-borderization’. Christopher Hill confirms that theorists of politics and international relations increasingly call into question polarities such as those between the domestic and external environments, between the state and world society, and between agents and structures. Several other chapters clearly show that it is no longer possible to control trans-border flows, suppress multiple cultural identities or defend particular lines of demarcation. Ewa Morawska, Eberhard Bort, Didier Bigo and Malcolm Anderson illustrate, in particular, that even carefully guarded and technically well-equipped borders can hardly stop terrorists, criminals and other unwanted migrants in an age of cascading interdependence and globalization. The tragic events of 11 September 2001 have led to further tightening of border controls, but they are unlikely to halt the ongoing process of globalization and interdependence. The notion of a sovereign, territorial state has thus been eroded and it is far from 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 no proper government, no fixed territory, no army or traditional diplomatic service

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– it even lacks a normal legal status.9 The Union increasingly acts in concentric circles or variable geometry due to various opt-outs negotiated by individual member states in the areas of foreign, monetary or social policy. At the same time its laws and regulations are increasingly being applied by East European states that are not as yet EU members. The Union also lacks a strong and coherent sense of cultural identity, let alone of a European patria. Nor is there a European political demos. In short, a particular form of territoriality – ‘disjointed, fixed, and mutually exclusive’, to use John Gerard Ruggie’s words – is no longer the 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 a process of acquiring all the characteristics of a territorial state and we simply lack a sufficient time-perspective to make a proper judgement concerning its progress. Besides, the demise of territoriality is not assured either. There are strong arguments for trying to prevent such a demise, and in fact various political forces are trying to raise rather than lower borders and to reinstate sovereign authority within them. Pierre Hassner in his chapter talks about ‘nostalgia for roots and for walls’ as a reaction to ‘new nomadism’ that tries to overcome borders and transcend territoriality. Malcolm Anderson talks about deeply rooted ‘dispositions in favour of inviolability and intangibility of borders’ and a widely held view that frontiers are ‘inseparable from the entities that they enclose’. He points out that for many Europeans the maintenance of territorial sovereignty is a necessary condition of true democracy. Borders are also seen as a precondition of security. William Wallace argues that boundaries enable social systems to relate to their environment in a regular and predictable way and it is therefore hard to imagine any system without clearly defined boundaries. In his view, ‘[t]he distinctions between internal and external security, between shared taxation and redistribution and “external” programmes of economic assistance, between citizens and aliens, between domestic law and international law, are all intrinsic to the modern state.’ This division between ‘territorialists’ and ‘globalists’, to use Charles Maier’s expression, is currently at the centre of political discourse and it is also present in this book. The former, as Pierre Hassner reminds us, echo Rousseau’s arguments about the virtues of internal cohesion of a political unit secured by sharp, linear borders designating the limits of property, cultural homogeneity and military balances. The latter, on the other hand, echo Kant’s concern about universal morals and about the fortunes of a broad community of people: the cosmopolitan polity, as he put it. They argue that most problems confronting states are transnational and sharp borders make it difficult to address them. The division between ‘territorialists’ and ‘globalists’ cuts across existing ideologies and party lines in the sense that opponents and supporters of territorial politics can equally be found on the left and right of the European political spectrum. In other words, parochial nationalists are not the only ones who defend the principle of territoriality. Not all liberal intergovernmentalists would be happy to remove clear, if not hard, borders, either at the nation-state level or

Introduction

7

at the level of the European Union. In fact, the concept of hard external EU borders as envisaged by Schengen directly challenges Ruggie’s above-mentioned assertion about the EU as a champion in ‘unbundling territoriality’. The opposite might in fact be the case, and this book tries to examine this issue. Is the Union trying to rescue the principle of territoriality or to ‘unbundle’ it? Is it trying to harden and fix its borders or is it trying to make them more open and fuzzy? And what is likely to happen regardless of all plans and intentions? Enlargement of the Union is basically about borders and territoriality and as such represents an ideal case study. Our findings may prove crucial in determining the very nature of the emerging Euro-polity. In other words, the scope and type of the future EU’s borders are likely to be most crucial in shaping the nature of the EU as a political system. ‘Tell me what your borders are and I will tell you who you are’ might be the motto of this volume. The established scope and nature of EU borders will tell us whether the enlarged Union is likely to became a Westphalian superstate or something entirely novel.

The scope of the EU’s borders Those who believe that the Union needs clearly defined borders should be able to say where to place these borders on a map. However, since the end of the Cold War this has proved to be a most difficult, if not impossible, task, and this book explains why this is so. On the one hand, there is no ‘natural’ border of Europe based on history, geography or culture that the Union could simply adopt as originally stipulated by the Treaty of Rome. (Its article 237 said, ‘any European state may apply to become a member of the Community.’) On the other 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 procedures. Several chapters in this book argue that defining borders in cultural, historical or geographical terms is virtually impossible. As William Wallace puts it in his chapter, Europe as a cultural and geographic region cannot be clearly defined: the diversity of images of Europe is too wide to provide a sense of identity common to citizens of Lisbon and Madrid, Helsinki and Stockholm, Prague and Warsaw, Thessaloniki and Palermo.11 Christopher Hill points to the fact that when the European Communities used cultural and geographic arguments to refute Morocco’s application for membership, they were accused of colonialism and racism. One does not need to be culturally agnostic to understand that it is difficult to prevent a country from joining the Union because it is predominantly Muslim rather than Christian or because it had the historic misfortune to be swallowed up by the Ottoman rather

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than the Habsburg Empire. Of course, as Alina Mungiu-Pippidi argues in her chapter, cultural stereotypes, or, as she puts it, after Václav Havel, ‘walls in our heads’, cannot but have some influence on European decision-makers. ‘[E]ven imagined borders can, at times, if we are dealing with widespread perceptions, turn into real borders,’ she argues. Nevertheless, the official policy of the Union is to select the new member states (and by the same token to draw the new external borders of the Union) along more tangible criteria than history, geography and culture. These criteria were initially spelt out at the 1993 European Council in Copenhagen, and later specified in a special blueprint for enlargement: Agenda 2000. The applicant countries must have stable institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of law, human rights and the protection of minorities. They must have a functioning market economy as well as the capacity to cope with competitive pressures and market forces within the Union. And they must have the ability to take on the obligations of membership, including the adherence to the aims of political, economic and monetary union. The Union insists, in particular, that the applicant countries must adopt the entire set of laws and rules existing 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 the procedure of ‘screening’ the applicant countries’ progress of meeting these criteria and of selecting new member states accordingly. The purpose was to assure 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 explain why laying down Europe’s borders has proved so complex and difficult. First of all, there is a problem with the admission criteria and their interpretation. Many of the admission criteria are prone to abuse and manipulation because they are confusing, contradictory or inconsequential. For instance, some criteria are very vague (like that concerning democracy) while others are extremely detailed (like those concerning competition regulation). Several criteria are in conflict (e.g. adopting the requested environmental standards will undermine rather than enhance the candidates’ capacity to cope with competitive pressures). And there are also some criteria for membership that even the current members are not expected to meet. As Bruno de Witte shows in his chapter, insistence on minority protection in the candidate states is ‘inconsistent’ or even ‘hypocritical’. There is a problem not only with the admission criteria themselves, but also with their implementation. It took current EU members many decades to arrive at common laws and similar administrative practices, but it is clear that the accession of candidates to the Union cannot be put off for so long. The selection process 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 as the chapters of Hassner, Wallace, Hill and Bigo clearly show, these security considerations are crucial in deciding the future scope of EU’s borders. In fact,

Introduction

9

in the aftermath of the war in Kosovo the Union began to engage more in the Balkans than in Central Europe, although the former are much less advanced in meeting the Copenhagen criteria than the latter. As Pierre Hassner points out in his chapter, Bulgaria and Romania, for instance, were allowed to open accession negotiations in December 1999 as a reward for their role in the Kosovo crisis and not for their progress in legal and economic reforms. But the Union cannot only worry about its acquis communautaire; it also must provide a secure international environment. Failure to stabilize its post-communist courtyard is bound to create pressure on the EU’s borders and on the Union itself. Third, keeping the prospect of enlargement open provides the Union with effective international leverage. Many countries on the continent are willing to modify their behaviour in line with EU wishes in the hope of obtaining EU membership. Fixing borders would deprive the Union of part of its attraction and would de-motivate if not frustrate countries that are left out. Moreover, by not establishing clear territorial boundaries, the EU may avoid antagonizing potential enemies and instead be able to coax them to join. If Ukraine, Turkey or even Russia have the prospect of joining the Union at some point, there is less reason 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 Union does not necessarily solve the future scope of EU borders. This is because borders of the candidate states from Eastern and South-Eastern Europe are often being questioned. Alina Mungiu-Pippidi quotes data in her chapter revealing that a majority of East Europeans (compared with less than a third of West Europeans) considers their borders ‘wrong’. André Liebich’s chapter provides historical and cultural explanation for this widespread contention of the existing borders in the region. Fifth, and probably most crucially in our context, the Union has little choice but to follow a policy of enlargement in stages with many functional transition periods at each stage. All the current candidate countries cannot join at the same time since their progress in meeting the admission criteria is very unequal. This is not only a matter of rewarding regional champions and providing extra motivation 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 affect the Union’s internal identity and efficiency. Moreover, formal admission to the Union will most likely be accompanied by transition periods in various functional fields, complicating the border issue even further. For instance, under pressure from the German government the European Commission suggested that free movement of labour would not be extended to new member states from the day of their accession. Similar transition periods will probably be applied in the field of the Schengen acquis. New members could sign up to Schengen from day one, but in practice implementation of free movement would depend on the subsequent assent of all Schengen members to opening borders, and this could take a considerable time. This means that we will have different scopes of borders in different functional fields for some considerable period. This will be

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coupled with ongoing uncertainty about who will join the Union and when. The current list of applicants is likely to grow, the progress of meeting the admission criteria is likely to be diversified and erratic, and various external pressures will also emerge, making it difficult for the Union to fix the scope of its borders once and for all. This is why Christopher Hill observes in his chapter: ‘Enlargement has neither a single decision-point nor a clear end-point. It is a virtually continuous and long-drawn-out process.’ Open-ended incrementalism may have its advantages, but it implies that the borders of the Union will remain ambiguous and fluid for many years to come. In other words, the important prerequisite of a Westphalian territorial type of state can hardly be met in view of the forthcoming open-ended enlargement in stages. The Union’s borders will be neither fixed nor linear. The question is, will they 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 be the norm nevertheless. This is the essence of the Schengen acquis, and candidate states are asked to adopt this acquis as a key precondition of EU membership. Tighter border controls and introduction of a Schengen visa are the clearest manifestations of the hard border regime. Several chapters in this book examine whether hardening the EU’s external borders is a desirable and achievable objective. The answers provided are negative, with only a few important qualifications. The authors argue, in particular, that a hard border regime does not necessarily help mitigate concerns about cross-border crime and migration. At the same time, hard borders hamper profitable trade, alienate the EU’s current and future neighbours and jeopardize the existing Western system of civic rights and freedoms. First of all, there is little statistical evidence to substantiate widespread fears of mass migration from Eastern Europe. As Ewa Morawska’s chapter shows, migration from this region is likely to remain relatively low, with positive rather than negative overall economic implications for the current member states.12 Most migrants from the candidate states are so-called ‘worker-tourists’ taking advantage of visa-free travel to the EU. They leave their families behind during their stay abroad and make no demands on medical insurance, unemployment benefits, social security or public education in the receiver-states. Admitting the ten current applicant countries from Eastern and Central Europe would move the incentive for labour migration further east. But also in this case the pattern of migration is similar to the previous one: so far it has usually consisted of ‘workertourists’ crossing the eastern borders of the candidate states. Moreover, their numbers are comparatively low. For instance, in Germany there are more residents from tiny Hungary than from the entire former USSR.13 Arguments for a hard border regime to stem ever-rising cross-border crime are linked to symbolic rather than ‘real’ politics. As Eberhard Bort shows in his

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chapter, on the German side of the Polish–German border the number of professional border guards has been increased dramatically in recent years and special ‘civic guards’ have been formed, even though the statistics show that criminality 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 adopted towards crime, but the policy of hardening the EU’s borders is not necessarily helping to combat it.14 In fact, most specialists argue that hardening the borders for goods and people creates a lucrative market for transnational criminals involved in illegal trafficking and smuggling. Specialists also argue that combating organized cross-border crime at a border is largely ineffective. (The same can be said about combating international terrorism.) Effective policing is done not at border checkpoints, but in a broader border zone or even within the entire territory of crime-exporting and crime-importing countries.15 Improving police and security cooperation between countries rather than investing in large numbers of border guards or in expensive surveillance equipment is seen as the most efficient way of combating cross-border crime. But as Didier Bigo shows in his chapter, EU member states seem more interested in promoting their own national style of policing in Eastern Europe and in selling them their own border surveillance technology than in sharing intelligence, let alone responsibility, in the process of combating cross-border crime. The demand for and the utility of hard borders are therefore overstated. At the 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 the Union to handle the problem of national minorities in post-Cold War Europe. As André Liebich’s chapter shows, millions of people in Eastern and SouthEastern Europe live on the ‘wrong’ side of a border. Restricting their free cross-border movement would have serious cultural and political implications. Hungarian minorities in Ukraine and Serbia (and possibly also in Romania) are likely to suffer most in this context. One can also envisage negative economic implications of hardening the borders between the new EU member states and their neighbours further south and east. For instance, the reintroduction of the visa requirement between Poland and Ukraine has drastically reduced cross-border trade and investment, causing severe economic problems, especially in the border regions.16 As Ewa Morawska points out in her chapter, prior to the introduction of tighter border controls, the value of goods purchased by Ukrainian tourist traders alone represented nearly 50 per cent of the value of Poland’s official exports to that country. Hardening the borders may also have damaging security implications. As Pierre Hassner, Alina Mungiu-Pippidi and Christopher Hill clearly show in their chapters, the policy of respecting existing borders, but keeping them relatively open for those living on the ‘wrong’ side of them. is seen as the only workable way of avoiding renewed inter-ethnic tension in the Balkans, which are only now emerging from a decade of bloody war. This also supports the progress made

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over the last decade by the countries of Central and Eastern Europe in overcoming historic animosities and implementing minority rights.17 Moreover, hard borders produce suspicion and a feeling of exclusion that may also cause security problems. For instance, as Christopher Hill rightly remarks: If the contrast becomes too marked between a large, inclusive and increasingly prosperous EU and a stagnant Russia, then the scenario of revived nationalism leading to disputes with the Baltic states and possibly other western neighbours will not seem so remote. In these circumstances it will not take much for the EU and Russia to start looking like security threats to each other, and the old realist game will have recommenced. Hardening the external borders of the EU will also hamper cross-border regional cooperation in Europe, which is seen as one of the most effective means of convergence and readjustment of the two parts of Europe. In the past several years the European Union has tried to stimulate various types of cross-border cooperation between both current and future EU members through programmes such as INTERREG.18 The purpose, which is seen as a prerequisite for any further European integration, is to enhance ‘constructive multilateralism’ and ‘interconnectedness’ with immediate neighbours. As Thomas Christiansen and Knud Erik Jørgensen have observed, in some cases this regional cooperation has resulted in a dense network of associations, conferences and joint ventures that ‘turned state borders from dividing lines between states into spaces of governance in their own right’.19 Hardening the EU’s external borders would make it difficult to continue this type of regional cooperation. Last but not least, a hardening of the external borders is in conflict with the set of political values the European Union is trying to identify with. As Didier Bigo puts it in his chapter: The right of European citizens and legal residents to move and reside freely within the territory of the EU is one of the most important assets of EU democracy. At the normative level, this right cannot be undermined by the creation of second-class citizens in Eastern Europe without seriously damaging 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 be about inclusion rather than exclusion. Hardening of the EU’s external borders is clearly in conflict with these principles. Of course, several chapters in this book warn against adopting a zero-sum reasoning. Softening and opening of the EU’s external borders does not mean abandoning them altogether, and vice versa. For instance, the Union may try softening its visa policy, while at the same time insisting on strict border controls.20 Moreover, as Christopher Hill puts in his chapter: ‘The question of a hard or soft outside border is closely related to that of where the enlargement of

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the EU will finally stop.’ Accepting Poland or the Czech Republic creates different problems than accepting Turkey, Croatia or Serbia. That said, it is hard not to draw the conclusion that the Schengen hard border regime is neither sustainable 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 old continent and some of the most rapid and at times fundamental changes have concerned borders. It is therefore very risky to make any predictions. In the last chapter Malcolm Anderson envisages three scenarios for future developments of cooperation in Justice and Home Affairs (JHA), although he openly acknowledges the speculative nature of his attempt. In his view, considerable uncertainty surrounds such fundamental issues as the implications of the new JHA provisions in the Treaty of Amsterdam and the Tampere programme. He also points to the uncertain effects of entry (or delayed entry) on national and cultural identities, and the ways in which ‘identity’ politics will be used by the various political forces in play. The evolution of global political and economic balances and their effects on the European Union and its border regime are also unknown. And there is always the possibility of unexpected political crises further south or east of the Union. Anderson adds that Europeans do not share any common perceptions of their borders. ‘Governments of the EU do not have an elaborate doctrine about frontiers because their frontiers are regarded, above all, as legacies of history,’ he argues. Despite all the uncertainty, however, this book makes it clear that the future borders of Europe are unlikely to be either hard or fixed. They will be, to use Pierre Hassner’s words, ‘less territorial, less physical, more complex and less visible’. This will have several important implications for the future shape of the Union. Instead of a ‘Schengen Europe’ we will probably have a ‘Maze Europe’ in which different legal, economic, security and cultural spaces evolve independently, cross-border multiple cooperation flourishes, and the inside/outside divide is blurred.21 Instead of a Westphalian super-state we will probably have a neo-medieval empire characterized by overlapping authorities, divided sovereignty, diversified institutional arrangements and multiple cultural identities.22 As Charles Maier puts it in his chapter, Europe would need to ‘reinvent itself beyond territoriality and outside of fixed frontiers’. This means that a new ‘unbounded’ principle of solidarity and community would have to be found and endorsed. As Jean-Marie Guéhenno has argued: ‘Having lost the comfort of our geographical boundaries, we must in effect rediscover what creates the bonds between the humans that constitute a community.’23 This also means that the notion of democracy would need to be readjusted because the current democratic rules are tailored for a clearly defined territory and a territorially defined demos. This means that the notion of security must also be redefined and ‘unbounded’. After all, terrorism and organized crime are more and more seen as the prime and most dangerous threat because they are not territorially bound.

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This book forces us to think in a new way about borders, not as dividing lines between 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 way about 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 the entire continent. And finally, this book forces us to think in a new way about the future shape of the entire Euro-polity, not as a traditional territorial actor, but as a new unbounded entity with fuzzy borders, and various kinds of multi-level regulatory arrangements.24 Such a new entity might represent a new opportunity for the old continent rather then merely a challenge or even a threat. But we need to understand the evolving nature of this polity and start thinking about proper ways of handling it. Comprehending the new nature of Europe’s borders will be most crucial, and this book throws new conceptual and empirical light on the dilemmas posed by borders.

Notes This introduction greatly benefited from thoughtful comments by Malcolm Anderson, Judy Batt, Christopher Hill and Ania Krok-Paszkowska. The usual disclaimer applies. 1

2

3 4

5 6 7

The use of the terms ‘frontier’, ‘border’ and ‘boundary’ varies. According to Malcolm 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 delimitation only. See Malcolm Anderson, Frontiers, Territory and State Formation in the Modern World (Cambridge: Polity, 1996), p. 9. Michael Smith distinguishes between four different concepts of boundaries in the context of the European Union: geopolitical, institutional/legal, transactional and cultural. See Michael Smith, ‘The European Union and a Changing Europe: Establishing the Boundaries of Order’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 34 (1996), p. 13. 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 in the process of enlargement. As Michael Emerson stated: ‘It is neither necessary nor desirable 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 seem interested 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. See Alina Mungiu-Pippidi’s chapter in this volume or Jakub Boratynski and Grzegorz Gromadzki, The Half-Open Door: The Eastern Border of the Enlarged European Union (Warsaw: Batory Foundation’s Policy Papers, 2001), pp. 7–9. For a responsible way of using the terms ‘modern’ and ‘post-modern’ in the context of the EU see John Gerard Ruggie, ‘Territoriality and Beyond: Problematizing Modernity 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. Anderson, Frontiers, p. 1. 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. For more on the neo-medieval metaphor see Ole Waever, ‘Imperial Metaphors: Emerging European Analogies to Pre-Nation-State Imperial Systems’, in Ola

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10

11 12

13

14

15

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Tunander, Pavel Baev and Victoria Ingrid Einagel, eds, Geopolitics in Post-Wall Europe (London: Sage, 1997), p. 61. See e.g. Friedrich Kratochwil, ‘Of Systems, Boundaries, and Territoriality: An Inquiry into the Formation of the State System’, World Politics, 39 (1986), pp. 25–52. For a comprehensive discussion concerning the legal framework of the European Union see Joseph Weiler, The Constitution of Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Weiler’s book does not cover the most recent efforts to create a European defence identity. But although the 1999 Helsinki European Council decided to create a European military corps (up to fifteen brigades or 50,000–60,000 persons) able to perform the so-called Petersberg (peace-keeping) tasks, it explicitly refrained from creating a European army. See Presidency Conclusions. Helsinki European Council.Press Release: Brussels (11–12–1999) – Nr: 00300/99. Ruggie, ‘Territoriality and Beyond’, pp. 168–70. For a similar argument about the end of territoriality but from a broader historical perspective see especially Charles S. Maier, ‘Consigning the Twentieth Century to History: Alternative Narratives for the Modern Era’, The American Historical Review, 105 (2000), pp. 807–31. And as Pierre Hassner points out in his chapter, defining Europe in terms of democracy and viable economic markets is not easy either because these are universal rather than continental qualities. Morawska’s chapter does not cover Romania, but Mungiu-Pippidi’s chapter quotes statistics showing a relatively high percentage of Romanians interested in finding a job in one of the EU’s countries. However, most other analysts believe that admitting new states from Central and Eastern Europe to the EU is not likely to provoke large migratory flows from the new member states to the current ones. See, e.g., Sándor Richter, EU Eastern Enlargement: Challenge and Opportunity, Research Report no. 249 (Vienna: Wiener Institut für Internationale Wirtschaftsvergleiche, 1998) or ‘The Free Movement of Persons for the Pursuit of Economic Activity in the Context of Enlargement’, European Commission’s Information Note, Brussels (April 2000), pp. 14–15. For a comprehensive data analysis of labour migration patterns and their genesis in one East European case see Jan Fidrmuc and Jarko Fidrmuc, ‘The Slovak Republic’, 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. Trends in International Migration. Annual Report (Paris: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 1999), p. 61. The cited data is for 1997. Likewise the data show that in Hungary there are many more foreign residents from Romania than from the former USSR. A special report of the House of Lords on frontier controls in the context of enlargement concluded ‘the extent to which enlargement to the east will exacerbate [cross-border crime and illegal migration] remains unclear and essentially speculative’. See Enlargement and EU External Frontier Control (London: House of Lords Select Committee on the European Union, 2000), p. 24. See also Mark Galeotti, Cross-Border Crime 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). 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’, in Malcolm Anderson and Eberhard Bort, eds, The Frontiers of Europe (London: Pinter, 1998), pp. 165–85. This has particularly devastating effects on regions such as Transcarpathia. See, e.g., Katarzyna Wolczuk, ‘Ukraina a kwestia rozszerzenia Unii Europejskiej: potencjalne konsekwencje na szczeblu regionalnym’, in Tomasz Paszewski, ed., Polska granicą wschodnią 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 (2 October 1999).

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17 The Baltic countries and the countries with a Magyar minority, for instance, may belong to the latter category. As far as the Balkan region is concerned, although most of the countries of the former Yugoslavia are not as yet official candidates to the EU the situation is likely to change very soon given the democratic breakthroughs in Croatia and Serbia. Croatia has in fact already embarked on a very active strategy of gaining membership in the European Union, and has even created a special Ministry for European Integration. In fact, some Western experts agree that the EU’s enlargement to South-Eastern Europe may represent the optimal solution to cope with the export 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). See also German Presidency, ‘A Stability Pact for South-Eastern Europe’, paragraph IV.1 (12 April 1999); . At the same time, one should keep in mind that instalment of a hard border in the region would inevitably reinforce calls for creating a greater Albania, Croatia or 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, ‘The European 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 Hungarians certain rights when on Hungarian territory. (See Act on Hungarians Living in Neighboring Countries, Budapest 2001, Hungarian Parliament’s Act no. LXII.) This does not include any mention of a special visa regime, and the law will lapse upon Hungary’s accession to the EU as it will then be incompatible with Hungary’s commitment to the Schengen acquis. However, strong pressures can be expected from Hungary for some such special regime to preserve free access for ethnic Hungarians to the Hungarian ‘motherland’. For instance, a system of giving a ‘national visa’ for ethnic Hungarians has been envisaged, enabling them to enter Hungary freely but not the rest of the EU (their status would be comparable to that of holders of overseas UK passports.) See Enlargement and EU External Frontier Controls (London: House of Lords 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 Will Reshape 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 argument about 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: What Administrative Reorganization Tells Us about Government’, American Political Science Review, 77 (1983), pp. 196–281; Beate Kohler-Koch, ‘Catching Up with Change: The Transformation of Governance in the European Union’, Journal of European Public Policy, 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.

2

Does Europe need a frontier? From territorial to redistributive community Charles S. Maier This boundary fixation, this obsession with territoriality carried the seeds of downfall. Derek Williams, The Reach of Rome, p. xx

Where does Europe end? An ancient question to which the conventional answer is the Urals and the Bosporus. Where might the European Union end? A contemporary issue for which the conventional answer won’t work. First because many countries within those borders are far from ready for membership; but even if they were, the EU admits nation states as units and the ancient limits of Europe 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 of what is within. The European Union is a variety of territory, an area of the earth’s surface enclosed by a frontier. But must it remain so? The premise of this chapter 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 transformation. If we wish to think about where the European Union should end, it will help to understand these changing concepts.

Frontier and territory The idea of the frontier as an end or limit is conventionally more of an American concept than the current European one. Until recently, when North Americans have written about their frontier, they have envisaged a place where settlement ended and ‘wilderness’ began, or more precisely where white settlement ended and wilderness, perhaps populated by indigenous settlement, began. The North American frontier had a sparse population, but none the less it was conceptualized as a definable line beyond which individual whites might penetrate as explorers but collective settlements ceased. This frontier divided civilization from nature or from peoples thought to be at a ‘lower’ or less advanced degree of social development. By 1890 the Bureau of the Interior announced that the frontier as such had ceased to exist; white settlers had filled up the continental space of the United States.

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The American frontier ends settlement. Normally frontier in Europe divides peoples: when ordinary Europeans write about a frontier they envisage a line where settlements of one people are replaced by a settlement of another people. Thus the American frontier is symbolized by the forest or the prairie; the European frontier by the border post. The Romans left us an idea of the frontier that shared both elements – the end of their world, but one that had to be fortified against outsiders at a clear border. It would have been as strategically rational to allow for transitional zones of penetration (so-called ‘marches’ or ‘marks’, apparently so named from the concept of markings), but the emperors dispersed their troops to minimize their political threat at home, and, thus planted in military colonies, they established defence at the border line, not further within. The result was a trade-off. The reach of Rome extended to the limes, but tribal trespassing meant institutional decay. Nonetheless, in comparison with other frontiers, for the three centuries they were maintained, Rome’s borders may have imposed less cost on outsiders. The imperial boundaries seem benign in comparison with the contact zones of recent centuries. Human and ecological disasters most commonly occur at cultural and economic divides, of which the decimation of the American Indian, the enslavement of the African, the destruction of Aztec and Inca, the near extinction of the North American bison and the Siberian fur animals are prominent examples. Rome was far from blameless, but instances of interfacial brutality were relatively fewer and their scale smaller. A world without barriers is a noble goal, but pending man’s fitness to achieve it, firm frontiers, disciplined and clear, have undeniable advantages.1 Those advantages did not continue: the frontiers crumbled and defence was needed at every point within the former imperial territory: a disorder testified to by church towers and dispersed castles. The concept of the frontier persisted: the Treaty of Verdun in 843 required two hundred agents to set out the rocks and show the rivers that divided Charlemagne’s legacy among his three heirs. ‘Frontier’ (the adjective from ‘front’ made into a noun) became the term for such a division: from the analogy with troops confronting other troops. By the late thirteenth century, the ‘frontier’ of the French kingdom, which separates it, say from the Empire, is differentiated from the ‘limits’ dividing feudal jurisdictions within the kingdom. At the frontier one state abuts against another, one people confronts another; and if one people’s frontier moves outward, the neighbouring frontier contracts. The concept is implicitly zero-sum.2 Of course, this distinction is too simple. Geographers do use the term ‘frontier’ to indicate a transitional region, which is a bit more like the American concept of frontier except that the geographers do not postulate a transition from settlement into wilderness, but a ‘zone’ of contacts, of local back-and-forth traffic – commercial, official, personal – between two or more contiguous peoples. 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

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Romans’ limes, which was construed as the end of an encompassing jurisdiction and an advanced civilization. Nevertheless, whatever terminology one might choose, the concept under discussion here is the contemporary lay European notion of a division between peoples, not an end to settlement. It remains a highly relevant question whether these peoples are perceived to be of the same cultural and economic level or not. In theory we have frontiers between peoples of equal development: Americans and Canadians, French and Belgians, etc. But the problematic frontiers (problematic even after consensus has been reached on where precisely they are to be located) are those where the authority on one side of the line feel that the population on the other side lack some evolutionary attainment. Have they abandoned inconvenient and intrusive religious practices? Have they moved beyond habits of feud and violence? Have their youth suitably compartmentalized their sexual foraging to enclosed sites established for this purpose? Do they wash often enough? Have their home societies advanced beyond poverty or beyond a more primitive distribution of economic activities? The economic gradient does not arouse the same prejudices and passions as the cultural differences. In fact, many of us in the more advanced societies benefit from the economic gradient. Our large firms can find large reservoirs of labour across the frontier to assemble manufactured goods. And if we maintain some control over our frontiers, we as individuals can admit other peoples to fill important jobs in our own metropoles: South Asians as physicians in New England; Central Americans and Mexicans as lawn tenders or fruit pickers in California; Portuguese and Azorians as cleaning women in Paris and Cambridge, Massachusetts. Still, the economic gradient does present the major policy problem relating to frontiers because economic disparity encourages the less advanced across the border to try to cross it in numbers greater than the host societies tend to wish. They can cross it as individuals, hence the problems of the Rio Grande or of Schengen; or they can, in effect, try to cross it collectively – hence the issues relating to NAFTA and to enlargement of the European Union. The idea of frontier accompanies the idea of territory. Frontiers enclose areas on the earth’s surface, and, once enclosed, such areas take on the aspect of territory. No boundaries, no territory. Being enclosed involves specific properties, historical and geographical. Territoriality is different from mere spatiality, and even 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 or economic sites, etc., are important, but territoriality adds the dimension of political jurisdiction. And not only jurisdiction, but overriding jurisdiction, perhaps exclusive, perhaps sovereign, in any case having some decisive elements. Not all territories have to have land frontiers; they can have natural frontiers entirely or in part – pre-eminently the sea, but also mountain ranges, or even significant rivers. Peoples can have territories with indefinite frontiers – the tribal units of the Arabian peninsula or the peoples of Central Asia – and they can, as nomads,

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have no fixed territory, but regions they successively occupy in one cyclical pattern or another. Historians have long been interested in frontiers, but have done less work on the idea of theme of territoriality as such. Instead they have focused on the nature of the units claiming territorial extension, that is, on states and nations. Consider, for example, Max Weber’s famous definition: ‘The State is that human community which in a specified area [Gebiet] – and area forms belongs to the criterion – successfully claims a monopoly of legitimate capacity for physical violence.’4 Theorists have examined the criteria of ‘monopoly’ of violence, or its ‘legitimacy’, 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 a timeless attribute of states. The prevailing chronology associates modern concepts of sovereignty, the emergence of the territorial state and a renewed stress on interstate frontiers with the Peace Treaties of Westphalia in 1648 and the Peace of the Pyrenees in 1659. The concept emerged with different meanings: theorists of domestic order, such as Hobbes and Bodin, referred to the need for a supreme authority within the state, while the international settlements stressed 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 states emerged as related ideas. The Habsburgs remained nominal overlords of the Roman Empire of the German Nation, but the three hundred-odd German states had the right to exchange ambassadors and go to war. The frontier thus acquires an urgency – all the more when for almost fifty years Louis XIV will be embroiling much of Europe in his frontier mania, triggering war after war by pressing up against the northeast or arranging the dynastic switch from Habsburg to Bourbon in Spain. Frontiers, in fact, occupy the map makers from the sixteenth century on. Encouraged by the great explorations to map the oceans and the New World, they turn to draw the boundaries of the old. We take the maps for granted and forget their metaphoric quality of reducing space and extent to readily apprehended planar models. To map is to control space, to dominate it conceptually. The map is cousin to the landscape and kin to the Renaissance mastery of perspective: a reduction of space to a small 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 world and, 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 in 1525; an atlas follows in 1594; the late seventeenth century sees a systematic mapping of the frontiers, an effort culminated by the Cassini family of Italian cartographers of France in the mid-eighteenth century. The Sieur de Beauplan will map Ukraine, the British in the nineteenth century will conduct geographic surveys of Ireland and India.6 Looking ahead to what he construes as the destructive ‘high modernism’ of nineteenth- and twentieth-century social engi-

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neering, James C. Scott writes, ‘All the state simplications that we have examined have the character of maps.’7 Besides requiring mapping, the frontier had to be made defensible. Vauban devoted 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 the phrase ‘invention of the Frontiers.’ Other powers had similar programs: as they pushed the Turks back out of Hungary and acquired Slavic territory, the Habsburgs settled Croatians on the so-called military frontier, who were probably more useful for excluding plague-bearers than soldiers. Historians have recorded the creation of these boundaries, but territoriality has its own history as well and while it is usually taken to be the logical counterpart of the development of the frontier, in fact it emerges at a different pace of historical development. To be sure, the territory of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century state must be administered as a fiscal resource, banditry must be suppressed, military cantons and supply centres established, nobles given administrative responsibility over local governance, roads built and canals cut. Colbert rationalizes the great farms of the French fisc and also removes many of the internal tolls and taxes. Mercantilism makes wealth a national resource. The great project of the Italian and Central European states in the mid-eighteenth century will be the cadastral survey.10 Habsburgs and Bourbons must map their realm, tax contributor by tax contributor. Maria Theresa’s cameralist administrators will leave their imprint in Milan and Trieste, Hungary and Bohemia as well as Austria. Even where a ‘feudal’ nobility has arrogated almost all offices and perquisites as ‘fiefs’, as in the Kingdom of Naples and Iberia, ambitious administrators such as Genovesi, Carracciolo and Pombal will work to make their territories rich (or less poor) and obedient. But the forces of privilege, the great inertial grip of a landed church and nobility, the sparseness of administrative personnel, all combine to limit the achievement. The resources for penetrating the territory and its local elites are still insufficient.11

Railroads, centralization, class realignment: creating modern territoriality, 1850–80 Historians and political scientists conventionally attribute the rise of modern nations to the epoch of the French Revolution and American and French ideas of the constituent people. But modern territoriality, and the modern nationstate, are not just a consequence of ideological development. (Indeed the inadequacy of ideas to assure the national state outcome becomes evident in the revolutions of 1848 in Italy and Central Europe.) They depend equally, I would submit, upon the material possibilities for controlling large regions of the earth. And while control requires establishing new frontiers, mid-nineteenth-century technology – coal, steel, electricity and steam – seems to permit a greater capacity for permeating and energizing the territory within frontiers. The telegraph, steamboats and the railroad mean that far more points within the state’s

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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 blueprints according to analogues from the physical world. Medieval writers described a social order functionally divided like the individual. Eighteenth-century reformers awaited a Newtonian politics subject to law and regularity. Nineteenth-century nation-builders celebrated the physical energy coursing through nature. It is logical that metaphors of energy and ‘fields’ achieve a new dominance, both for science and for human geography. ‘As sure as a fact yields only to fact,’ August Ludwig von Rochau argues, ‘so it is sure that neither a principle 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 will propose that national economic energies must flow freely throughout a territory.12 Searching for counterparts in scientific awareness to political development, historians have long cited the impact of Darwinism (On the Origin of Species appeared in 1859) on the pervasive sense of conflict between social groups and nations. Physics, however, was as rich a metaphorical source as biology. James Clerk Maxwell’s 1873 formulation of electrical and magnetic field theory meant that every point in a ‘field’ could be assigned a potential energy, and envisaged the whole space as filled with invisible ‘lines of force’. Territorial consciousness now meant that no point inside the frontiers could be left devoid of the 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 railroads would pervade and ‘fill’ the nation’s space. Filling that space, making certain no point evades the potential of governmental energy, is the mission of the sixties generation. The telegraph and railroad emerged as the strategic instrument for mastering territory. The former allowed centre and periphery to exchange information instantaneously; the railroad moved soldiers, settlers and goods in quantities that only waterways had earlier allowed and at a far more rapid rate. In Hungary the liberal nationalist Széchényi pleaded for railroad development; in Italy Cavour wrote 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 in triumphing over the retarding forces that keep them in a baneful state industrial and political infancy. Or as Cattaneo wrote in 1861, the railroad was the instrument ‘to rapidly correct the evils of history and geography’.13 The railroad emerged as the technical underpinning of the modern state. Mastery of its techniques allowed the movement of troops on which national power politics rested, as demonstrated by the Northern victories in the American Civil War or the Prussian humiliation of France in 1870. To thrust a railroad into southern Italy was a strategic necessity for subduing the guerrilla resistance, the Brigantaggio, that was felt to discredit the

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new state. Fifteen years after Cavour’s advocacy of railroad development, by the end of the 1860s, Americans had traversed the North American continent with a rail link; control of the new railroads in the American South helped unite the post-Civil War ruling elites in the American South. The Canadian Pacific was driven to the Pacific during the 1880s, in effect extending the Dominion westward along its dorsal spine. Similarly, as the Left secured control of the French Republic in the 1880s, it carried through two major projects: Ferry’s secularization of primary education and Freycinet’s national railway web, radiating outward from Paris to modernize the interior of the country so that the national domain might truly be integrated. Everywhere, the material results were impressive. Railroad lines tended to quadruple in the advanced states across the middle three decades of the nineteenth century. The United States went from 6.3 kilometres 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 in 1890 and to 134 in 1920; France from 17 to 62 to 70 in 1860, 1890 and 1920 respectively.14 Finally, by the end of the century, Count Witte had engaged Russian energies on the huge Trans-Siberian project. At one and the same time the railroad was the foundation of economic development, peopling hitherto remote areas, providing the transport infrastructure for commerce, creating a new demand for iron and steel manufacturers and machinists, beckoning with a representation of moral and political progress, supplying a tangible image of energy radiating through the national space, interlacing the national territory with specimens of the lines that were demarcating private and public, national and transnational spheres. The same era brings about the territorial reorganization not only of Central Europe, but also of much of the populated world. Fragmented states achieve unification; existing countries are recast to emerge more centralized, cohesive and militarized. To cite some of the specimens: Italy and Germany are unified from 1859 to 1870; the Habsburg realms are reorganized into two more cohesive halves (1861–7), the Kingdom of Hungary and the Cisleithanian lands represented in the Austrian Reichsrat. The Dominion of Canada is reorganized (1867). The Confederate States of America are defeated and the United States forged as a more homogeneous state from ocean to ocean (1861–5). Mexican liberals defeat the French imperial forces, push through a reform programme and create the basis for a more efficient secular state (1853–63). The Meiji Restoration (1867–8) displaces the old aristocratic families behind the Tokugawa Shogunate and embarks on a programme of technological and administrative modernization. The remnants of East India Company control are effectively taken over by the British Government of India after the Mutiny of 1857. The Qing dynasty endeavours to reconsolidate its rule in the wake of the massive Taiping rebellion. King Mongut of Thailand reforms his state in a successful effort to resist French or British absorption. Accompanying this reimagined territorial space was a widespread political reorganization. In a now forgotten study from the mid-1930s, the American historian Robert Binckley suggested that the worldwide turmoil of the 1850s and

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1860s amounted to a crisis of the federative principle. He brought together the unsuccessful efforts at confederal nation-building in Scandinavia, the Romanian principalities, the kingdom of Greece, Switzerland, Italy and the Germanies. In almost every society that underwent fundamental political reorganization, the more centralizing model prevailed over the more confederal.15 Binckley did not try to explain why this universal process took place after mid-century. Would not technological advances have allowed alternative political models? Perhaps so, but the rationalization of territorial space undermined the major alternative then practised. This was political rule officially based on nominal but weak central regimes with authority largely delegated to local ‘feudal’ magnates. National centralization also hastened another world-scale development – the continued weakening of imperial models of control. Empire had entailed theoretical claims of suzerainty coupled with de facto rule through powerful magnates who exercised most power and claimed most resources at the local level. Multiple ethnicity was permitted, sometimes (though not always) including religious toleration. Ottoman erosion took place in the early nineteenth century (facilitating Greek and renewed Egyptian state formation) and then again in the 1870s (with impacts on Romania, Serbia and Bulgaria). The weakening of Habsburg imperial concepts had even more familiar results. The relatively centralized national structures that emerged out of Habsburg disarray between the mid-1850s and 1870 were a logical reaction to the earlier Viennese effort at a confederal Habsburg ascendancy. Austrian rulers had resisted the consolidation of nationstates at the expense of their overarching but nominal suzerainty. They had offered instead a succession of schemes for overlapping jurisdictions extending from the local county level to that of the German Bund. As Vienna’s domination flagged after 1848 and national states emerged, in each case more confederal plans lost out to more centralized concepts. Cavour’s policy was unreceptive to Giobertian Papal federalism or even to a looser affiliation of the formerly Bourbon territories of Naples and Sicily. Within Germany, advocates of a ‘trialist’ position that would have reformed the German Bund by means of three blocs – the Prussian-dominated north, the German-Austrian and the former Rheinbund group (Baden, Württemberg, Bavaria, etc.) – were also rebuffed during the course of 1862–4, even though Vienna itself finally supported such a reform as a fall-back position. Once Vienna was finally defeated by the Prussians, the Magyar leadership lost no time in pressing their own claims for greater autonomy. The conflict between centralized and confederal political organization in fact occurred universally and not just where ancient imperial structures were disintegrating. The last major significant effort at confederal devolution in Europe took place in Spain with Pi y Margal’s advocacy of a decentralized (‘Federalist’) regime and the subsequent ‘cantonalist’ uprising of 1873, which provoked an oligarchical monarchical restoration. Outside Europe the Americas were racked by fundamental issues over the degree of national organization during the 1860s. The most spectacular was the secessionist effort by the Confederate States of America. The social structure that emerged in the defeated South after the end of an abortive dozen years of

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‘reconstruction’ was a compromise not unlike the 1867 Ausgleich in Central Europe: Magyar leaders and former Confederate elites traded their claims of theoretical sovereignty for internal domination in a vast agricultural region where lesser races performed a good deal of peasant labour. The United States Civil War was not the only significant struggle in the Western hemisphere. The Mexican civil war, following upon conflicts with the Church, a regressive land redistribution and Santa Anna’s unsuccessful foreign policies, led to state bankruptcy and to European intervention. French imperial ambitions in Mexico were defeated by 1867, and Benito Juárez began the task of reconsolidation that was completed by the oligarchical administration of Porfirio Díaz and los cientificos. Far to the south, the divergence in Argentine development between Buenos Aires and the pampas, with their respective political styles – represented by the cosmopolitan English-oriented elite of the port versus the strong man of the grazing plains – culminated in an attempted secession by the port and its failure in 1867. And half a world away to the north in the same year, the British North America Act brought the Dominion of Canada into being – hardly a centralized structure, but at least the basis for a unified state with a national parliamentary representation. In sum: most societies outside Britain and France saw major conflicts between defenders of local or regional liberties, on the one side, and partisans of a more uniform national authority, on the other. No revolutionary effort seeking localized power or outright territorial partition succeeded in the mid-nineteenth century. Whether as initiators of political rationalization, or as defenders of a long-term trend suddenly challenged by the ‘federalists’ (i.e. decentralizers), the champions of cohesive authority prevailed. In those cases where ethnically cohesive elites seemed to prevail within a larger, imperial framework, as in Hungary or the American South, they themselves confirmed political control over their regions, in effect creating quasi-independent nations. In those cases where the former authorities successfully reasserted their control, they rationalized and reorganized their rule, as in British India after the Mutiny of 1857. In those cases where new elites captured control of the central governments (Japan and gradually the Ottoman Empire), they reorganized the national territory to consolidate their regime. Authority over national territory was centralized, enhanced, reformed. Ironically even the revolutionaries who rejected the social and political order reflected its tendencies toward centralization. The First International was racked from 1864 to 1874 between ‘anarchists’, such as Bakunin, Fanelli or James Guillaume, and Marxists, who, despite their international commitment, still looked to the national states as the foyer of revolution and transformation. The anarchists failed to prevail within the First International, in part because they were tarred with the disastrous outcome of the Paris Commune as the International itself disintegrated among schism and recriminations. None the less, their suppression within the socialist camp hardly seemed inevitable during the late 1860s. The struggle within the International mirrored the great civil war

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and conflicts between adherents of national centralized and local control that characterized the worldwide politics of the age. In this great process of centralization, power was taken in hand by a new constellation of classes. The old aristocracies, based on land as a material resource and lineage as a source of prestige, were not thrown onto the rubbish heap of history. But they had to share power with the new administrative elites, industrial and commercial leaders, the leaders of science and education: if one can 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 push through programmes of national modernization. How did bourgeois liberals win a place alongside the ‘feudal’ elements and transform the nature of the state? Why in the 1850s and 1860s and hardly earlier (France, Britain and the United States being notable exceptions)? Possession of the land itself was a major reason. Landed power was the crucial economic resource of the old regime, and one of the major developments that established the bourgeoisie as a class challenger was its accession as a landed class. This was the upshot of that great despoliation of Church lands that the Catholic monarchs of Spain and France had initiated with their dissolution of Jesuit properties in the 1760s. The mass takeover continued with the sales of Church properties in the French Revolution, and thereafter with the secularizations in Napoleonic Naples, British-administered Sicily, Spain under the Liberals, 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 the French and Italian and Iberian towns who prevailed at the auction block. In effect, the new coalition of the 1860s comprised the beneficiaries of disentail. Throwing land into the crucible of the market was the precondition for the bourgeois–aristocratic coalition. But the coalition was forged from necessity as well as opportunity. Just as World War I would require class compromises with organized labour, so the clashes of the mid-nineteenth century necessitated enlarging the social bases of the state. This was not primarily to mobilize men for outright warfare. (By the mid-nineteenth century, conscription existed on the continent and it managed to stipulate universal obligation even while it allowed for class-differentiated service.) The more continuous rivalry was economic and focused on the different paths to development. The economic ebullience of the 1850s and 1860s spotlighted the importance of new industry.16 Hence a historical feed-back mechanism evolved: the support of bourgeois and liberal parties for national spokesmen (e.g. the National-Verein of the Prussian New Era in 1859, or the Piedmontese Liberals) intensified international competition. Heightened rivalry between states made it all the more necessary to enlist the economic strength of the middle classes. Each episode of territorial consolidation and rationalization constituted a phase of non-aristocratic recruitment into the governing elites. The opening of regimes was needed even where territorial controversies were no longer at stake, as in France and Britain.

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It would be misleading to construe the new participants too rigidly in terms of a bourgeoisie, even that redemptive Marxian notion of ‘national bourgeoisie’. To describe as middle class the impatient Samurai of the outer Daimyo, the Prussian bureaucrats or the Whig cousinage would be misleading. But these reformist groups were prepared to wager on technology and industry for the sake of national power and family enrichment. They insisted upon drawing on alternative principles to recruit a political elite – industrial leadership, professional expertise, literary and scientific capacity. The nation-state required this conscription of talent; the new elites needed the nation-state as their arena of ascent, as a lattice for meritocracy. At stake was hardly a doctrine of natural rights or democratic liberalism, but a demand for the representation of proven merit. Middle-class spokesmen who insisted on a broader, more universalist recruitment were in fact decisively defeated by the new national coalitions. Garibaldians in southern Italy, the Prussian Progressives unreconciled to Bismarck’s browbeating of parliament despite his nationalist success, remained outside the new coalitions. Precisely because this major restructuring of the governing classes proceeded through cooptation rather than revolution, it is often underestimated. The great upheavals that mobilized urban and peasant masses in 1789 and 1848 were more visible and historically captivating. But their achievements were often less durable. Whether in Britain, where Disraeli wagered on household suffrage in 1867, or at the national level in Germany, similar strategies were attempted. Literally throughout the world, a similar process of simultaneous reform and stabilization was underway. It mobilized the same elements and excluded similar mass democratic alternatives. Either electoral participation was restricted by property and/or educational qualifications (witness the Prussian three-class suffrage or the four Austrian curiae of 1873), or, when opened up, it was manipulated by rural elites with the connivance of their new urban colleagues. Whether one travelled to Andalusia or to Alabama, to Mecklenburg or Moldavia, the same machinery of clientelism, suffrage manipulation and peonage held sway.17 Racial appeals, gerrymandering, caciquismo and the turno politico (the Spanish arrangement by which liberals and conservatives took turns in accumulating parliamentary majorities) and open voting kept the will of the people predictable. Beneficiaries of the system were new coalitions of industrial elites, landlords and professional men, divided increasingly by 1900 over the issue of whether to try a further cooptation of the reformist working class while small independent 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 decisively reorganized in the generation after 1850 or 1860. National territories were seen as spatial domains that could be mastered physically by the railroad and transportation. Governance became more centralized and less confederal. Bourgeois and professional elements joined landed magnates in forming a new

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ruling elite. A new awareness of bounded space, a preoccupation with fixing border lines, with the demarcation of insiders and outsiders, public and private, transformed social consciousness. This combination of elements, I would maintain, did not decisively change during the first half of the twentieth century. Rather they culminated in the two world wars and the Cold War. The concept of territory as a bounded space, to be fought over, became more compelling. Imperialism meant that the European powers took their notion of conflicting territoriality and extended it to Africa and Asia. The world economic crisis finally also led (outside of Britain at least) to greater efforts at political control of failing national markets, to national bailouts of industry, and to major reforms of national banking systems. The Western world got through the Great Depression by strengthening the principles of territorial governance, not reversing them. Doctrines of geopolitics, extensive territorial aims in World War I (whether German plans for continental expansion or Allied plans for colonial partition), even more ambitious notions of Lebensraum in World War II, and the ‘Iron Curtain’ and the Berlin Wall that marked the decades of Cold War tightened the grip of territoriality. The general technological corollaries also remained intact. Industrial prowess seemed focused on high-energy mass-production industry. Mass-production from the assembly lines introduced in the auto industry on the eve of World War I through 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 continuous production process controlled from above and designed to turn out large masses of standardized output. Shipping lines increased their traffic; the airline became a critical innovation in overcoming space after World War I and even more after World War II. The class coalition of the territorial epoch had to be enlarged, but this was accomplished by cooptation again, not by revolution. The new ruling alliance of bourgeoisie and old elites was challenged by the trade unions and social democratic parties of the industrial working classes. That challenge led to the sharpest political conflicts and the growth of confrontational ideologies in the new century, including fascism and communism. But it was resolved in large part by a further enlargement of the governing coalitions in the West – one that admitted reformist 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 was precisely territory itself. The ruptures that were so politically spectacular – 1914, 1917, 1919, 1933, 1939, 1945, 1947–8 – represented caesuras within an underlying system of national states that did not challenge the premises of territoriality and modern industrial development. Defending rigid borders, moreover, became a preoccupation of social and political life more generally. Throughout the nineteenth century and until the last decades of the twentieth, Western society firmed up the frontiers of private and public life, including the lines between classes and the highly rigid gendered division of family and work. The norm of the male bread-winner family tended to be reinforced, not relaxed, by the

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

Globalists, territorialists and the contemporary transformation Somehow we have come to live in different times. Even if they culminated longer-term strains, the decisive changes took place rather abruptly between the late 1960s and the end of the 1970s. The United States, which had come to anchor the territorial system of the Cold War, came to the limits of the power it could or would deploy. It became mired down in a Third-World war in which its superior military technology gave it no real advantage. Within the Atlantic world it ceased to guarantee at least the international monetary structures that had come to play so important a role. The easy neo-colonial control of energy resources that it upheld for the West disappeared with the oil crises of the 1970s. The inter-class corporatist collaboration that underlay Western political alignments proved increasingly unwieldy and hard to coordinate, as the stagflation of the seventies also demonstrated. New social groups, such as students or selfaware women’s movements, could not easily be integrated into the traditional social bargaining. The industrial system of Fordist production that underlay the great economic achievements of World War II and the Cold War seemed increasingly obsolete: Western Europe and the United States had to shut down the coal and steel industries that had been the underpinning of the industrial system. Underlying the transition was the diffusion of Fordist production to Asia and Latin America as well as the spread of a new economy of electronics and services in North America and Europe. And while the innovation in other areas became a source of new vitality and wealth, such a shift undermined the social structures and political party alignments that underlay public life since early in the century. Similar tensions afflicted the communist world, and the Soviet Union 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 to territory and boundaries: Populations and elites have lost the reassurance of a territorial space that allowed control of public life. This chapter cannot explore all the transformations we know of as globalization: whether the internationalization of corporations and the siting of manufacture far from the headquarters of 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 we refer to post-modernism; or the partial disintegration of societal frontiers that earlier demarcated public and private space or gender roles and insignias.19

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Second, the economic base of public life – and the economic imagination of the contemporary era – has been reoriented. The transformative technologies no longer entail heavy metal or pumping iron, mass output and physical motion of goods. Fordism seems passé as firms organize team production and produce a wider range of customized products. The transforming sectors of the economy seem increasingly built upon the transmission of data. The metaphors or mentalités fostered by this technology no longer focus on ‘lines’ or borders, but on networks. To be sure, contemporary public discussion of this change far outruns the actual rate of transformation: heavy industry based on bending metal and physical transformation persists as do hierarchical factories – just as atelier production remained crucial throughout the era of industrial capitalism. Nevertheless, the culturally transformative impact of economic innovation remains as critical as its actual quantitative input and output, and this has reached avalanche tempo. Third, the basic social class configurations that created the old territorial order have also changed. The consolidation of national territorial space drew upon a post-1848 alliance of old magnates – oligarchic, agrarian, committed to decentralized local power – and new bourgeois elites drawn from science, learning, industry and commerce. This coalition soon faced a mass working class, concentrated in the factory or the mine, seen as a contender in a forthcoming apocalyptic struggle. But our class images have changed. Today we envisage elite and mass arranged in concentric circles, no longer in tapering pyramids. We use the language of centre and periphery: the new elite at the centre reaps the rewards of being adept at transnational control of information and symbols. The new proletariat performs menial services: cleaning hospital corridors or city streets, taking care of our homes and children. The former hierarchic geography of centre and periphery has altered such that what we used to describe 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 Latin America. We confront stratification on a world scale. Where Leninists and dependency theorists earlier described uneven development in terms of imperialism and geographically demarcated zones, the unevenness persists or advances but less between national territories than within them. The trend is more advanced in North America than in continental Europe, but progresses there as well. Relatedly, the movement of population has resumed the levels that it did in the decade before World War I, both from poor countries to richer and from country 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, Cairo and Lagos, Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta. When metropolitan conglomerations grow crowded in the first world, it is the greater conurbation – what can be described, in terms of urban radius, the 20-kilometre city – that registers the increase, and not the old ten-kilometre city, whose population has hardly changed at all, unless to decline slightly. San Francisco, Paris inside the Périphérique achieved their maximums before mid-century; while Los Angeles County, Houston, the Couronne de la Seine are the new sites of growth.

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Obviously this development has not happened without widespread public disorientation. The transformation underway has provoked what may be the major new impulse behind political division – one that cuts across old parties and encourages new ones. The traditional alignments and confrontations of Left and Right were pulverized between 1979 and 1989. Voters deserted social democrats to endorse Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and Chancellor Kohl. Where they remained loyal, the socialist parties themselves turned toward market 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 the major orientation of European Marxists. The failure of communism was part of the general loss of faith in political control of the economy that afflicted the Left in general during the late 1970s and 1980s. In Italy the Left’s collapse became an even more total decomposition by virtue of the socialists’ involvement in a pervasive system of urban pay-off, which intensified the general shattering of the loyalties on which the post-war Republic had been constructed from 1944 until the 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 traditional groupings and has generated what might be called two ‘virtual’ parties.20 On one side are those elements prepared to accept, or even profit by, the transnational flows 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 this party the ‘globalists’. They include centrist Democrats and moderate Republicans in the United States, Tony Blair Labourites or pro-European Tories in Britain, the battered Brahmins of the Congress in India, etc. They advocate ever more encompassing free-trade arrangements and identify with supranational institutions, including the European Union, envisaging a transnational civil society of NGOs that will assure international order. To a degree these are the elements with which most contemporary intellectuals identify. On the other hand, often their enthusiasm for market solutions threatens to become just a simple pro-market neo-liberalism, which believes that ultimately political control of the globalization process is hopelessly anachronistic. On the other side, increasingly, agitate the ‘territorialists’, who propose to reunite identity space and decision space. They argue that, whether inside the nation-state as we once knew it, or the new region as we must create it, peoples must reconstruct meaningful frontiers. Western intellectuals are ill advised not to pay attention to their themes and their campaigns. When European farmers were buffeted by modernization and the depression, their votes helped bring fascism to power. The victims of globalization have at least the capacity for disruptive politics and endemic violence. They represent what I think is best called territorial populism, and Jörg Haider is probably the most skilful of the group. To condemn them as neo-fascist misses the source of their appeal. None the less, if the globalists threaten to become mere neo-liberals on a world scale, the territorialists threaten to degenerate into chauvinistic politics. Outside

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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 of politics that listens to the laments of the territorialists without succumbing to their xenophobia and aligns with the globalists without merely surrendering to mere market orientation. Such an endeavour would involve reinforcing supranational institutions with political capacities and political representation – not merely a web of NGOs, for no matter how attractive that vision, it will remain elitist and feeble. It involves seeking a renewed concept of location, no longer territorial, but linked to the real consolations of place, such as familiarity, landscape 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 major surrogate for competitive loyalties and political activism as well as a lottery-like mechanism for offsetting inequality with dreams of riches (our gladiatorial politics). Commitment to place might suggest viable concepts of local development that could temper the harshest buffeting of the market without indulging in a sentimental or destructive effort to reconstruct old frontiers and without renouncing the post-modern internationalist sensibility that has been so liberating. Let those who wish to migrate to do so; help those who wish to stay on familiar ground. We might describe this as a task of inventing a sense of territoriality, now on a supranational scale, without frontiers. Is such a paradox possible? Another approach, perhaps more feasible, would be to renew bonds of loyalty and collective action without fixation on spatial location. Does the European Union offer one possibility, perhaps among several that might overlap in 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 the concept of a frontier. And if the notion of a frontier has changed for the nationstate, the implicit notion of the European frontier must also change. Does Europe in fact need a frontier? Admitting all the reasons for de-emphasizing frontiers, Jan Zielonka has argued that, nevertheless, a clear boundary will allow institutional progress.22 I plead the alternative case. If Europe wants a frontier to constrain the free movement of persons (Schengen), does it need the same sort of frontier to manage the European Union as an association of nation-states? (In fact Europe wants to exclude or control not people, but roles – terrorists, job seekers, drug dealers, welfare applicants, but not students and tourists; however, it has learned to differentiate only visas but not passports, which represent a more 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

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like them. Though they are a natural response to danger, we forget them when danger has passed. Nothing is less relevant to a people than the boundary of a former people across its land. Frontiers are history’s orphans.23 To think about the future of the frontier we need to ask about the nature of territory. They determine each other. What constitutes territory as seen from inside the frontiers? If we understand that, we can perhaps design the appropriate enclosure, or at least understand where the territory ends. Less and less are we comfortable construing territory as a regime of ethnic settlement. This is ironic in that, after World War II, Eastern Europe achieved relative homogeneity for the first time: a Poland as pure-blooded as any Endek or neo-Sarmatian might desire, no Germans in the Baltic or Silesia or the Sudetenland, few Jews anywhere and those few left to be further depleted by remaining antisemitism and the appeal of their own homeland. Ironic, too, since active ethnic cleansing and realignment turned out to become the de facto principle for national organization in the ex-Yugoslavia throughout the 1990s. In the era of ethnic purification, we dare not claim that territoriality should express an ethnic principle. We ask the Germans to dismantle the remnants of jus sanguinis even if the Serbs wallow in it. Yet without ethnicity, what is left to animate a sense of territory? Verfassungspatriotismus – that term coined by Jürgen Habermas during the Historikerstreit (the controversy among German intellectuals in the late 1980s over the uniqueness of the Nazi crimes) to describe the community of rational conversationalists – is the most attractive option: a civic culture. But if all our communities converge toward democracy and liberalism, why should Verfassungspatriotismus provide a loyalty only within national frontiers? Must it not spill out to embrace all of civilized society? Ubi bonum ibi patria: the republic of law if not of letters, the Rechtssuperstaat. ‘Seid umschlungen O Millionen.’ A homeland of values must implicitly soar outside the nation-state. Perhaps collective memory, our common blood-soaked histories (but abstracted from contemporary ethnicity), will serve to constitute territory if constitutionalism is unacceptable. We have become intoxicated by monuments and melancholy, and maybe they provide the basis for territorial loyalty. But what is remembered? Usually some sacrifice or tragedy, a common loss, a shared victimhood. Indeed, we generally link collective memory to a particular landscape or site: un lieu de mémoire. Almost every people has its own Field of Blackbirds, its Battle of the Boyne or Trail of Tears. Even those nations that are not ‘martyred’ – as the Poles, Irish, Jews and Serbians imagine themselves to have been – have sites of sacrifice: Gettysburg, Verdun or the Somme. But if we associate collective memory with particular places, can we reduce place to memory? 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 with place testifies to the fact that place or territory no longer serves as a site for

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forward-looking aspirations. The sentimentalist or ironic evocation of history by brilliant post-colonial authors living in the metropole, in Merchant–Ivory films, post-modern American architecture, etc., have become a substitute for an earlier vigorous confidence in territoriality – whether as locus for economic energies or political loyalties. Paradoxically, as Europeans and North Americans have lost confidence in territoriality, they have invested emotional energy into a sense of landscape and place – but now as an elegiac recourse, a refuge for historicized melancholy. Perhaps, therefore, the moment has come to replace the territorial premise, to associate our collective enterprises not with place or frontier, but with some other principle of community or association. What unites a people that is organized politically? Is it not these days a commitment to redistribution of resources, an acceptance of a community of risk? A political community, whether local, regional, national or European, is constituted by its self-imposed acceptance of material redistribution. The rich aid the poor, not out of Christian compassion, not individually as a gesture of charity, but collectively and by law. That implies a legislature as an institution as well as redistribution as an outcome. Citizenship is a community of redistribution: from parents to children, from youth to the elderly, from city to countryside, advanced regions to poorer regions. The EU has accepted this bond in two respects above all: its subsidization of farmers, the CAP 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 what emerges will be overlapping communities of redistribution, not all of which are geographically coterminous (but all of which should receive legislative scrutiny)? Let the geographical limits of the Erasmus programme extend further, for example, than those of the right to hold a job. The Europe of students can be more extensive than the Europe of banks or of common employment, just as the EU is more extensive than EMU or WEU. Call this, if you will, a frontier of variable geometry: I prefer to think of it as the transcending of the frontier and the dissolving of territoriality. In a way this means reverting from the notion of the frontier as limes to the frontier as ‘mark’ or zone, where peoples mingle. Such a transformed concept of frontier, furthermore, would allow the European Union to overcome the major theoretical difficulty with the idea of a redistributive community, namely that there must be some prior basis for inclusion in such a community. How can Europeans decide which individuals, families or other groups are to be included in a community of redistribution? Do not the claims of candidates for redistribution – farmers, residents of less developed regions, etc. – depend upon their prior inclusion in some pre-existing concept of community? And if to qualify for redistribution one must already be deemed a member of a common community, what is the basis for membership? How do we construct communities of redistribution without implicit frontiers that separate the ‘ins’ from the ‘outs’? Which farmers? Which underdeveloped regions? Is there any other answer than that of acknowledging a territorial base? Certainly

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the EU cannot propose to admit farmers wherever they may reside, or to scatter developmental funds far and wide for the sake of a European union. The most plausible response is that potentially any group roughly contiguous to the given boundary of the Union should be considered a collective candidate for inclusion. In this respect the idea of zone rather than a line would serve Brussels well. Let every community in the area outside the boundaries of the EU at any given date be potentially a candidate for inclusion. Such homely ideas as vicinity or area or even neighbourhood should suffice as the geographical common denominator. In so far as the Union has a frontier, let its frontier be construed as a ‘rolling’ border. There may be practical reasons why the EU is not extended at a particular time to Ukrainians or Turks or Russians; they may not be ready to accept the obligations of citizenship, that is, to open up their economies to international and even domestic market forces, or to police a segment of the common frontier. But they should not be excluded because of any reified concept of a fixed European frontier. We know that there are conundrums of belonging that are counterproductive. 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 institutional and spiritual parts. And parts of Turkey have been accepted as parts of Europe and the Atlantic Alliance. Does the notion put forward here amount to anything more than so-called ‘associated memberships’ for Russia or Ukraine or Turkey, etc.? I would argue that it will over time. For instead of conceiving of the EU as a nucleus or core with some affiliated members, or a core and periphery, it will be more constructive to envision a non-geographically referenced set of redistributional commitments. Provision for the aged or the ill, for children or the jobless, will be harmonized increasingly and made subject to European treatment. Over time any national unit can enter more and more of these community agreements. From the beginning, however, such partial members should enter a European parliament, which should become, as it has not so far, the major attribute of participation. No redistribution without representation – whether as donor or as recipient. This need not mean that Turkey or someday Ukraine would have to enjoy the same number of representatives as France, even if their populations are comparable. Rather let the size of a parliamentary delegation, or the number of civil servants, reflect the commitments that new members accept: if they participate in only a few sectors of redistribution, their numerically justified representation could be adjusted accordingly. The European Union has the advantage of constructing itself at a time when our familiar notions of territory are in epochal transformation. The age of traditional territoriality, as configured almost a century and a half, ago is past. The European Community was designed during the last years of that territorial regime, but it has been renewed even as a new territorial regime has swiftly replaced the earlier one. Europe may still claim to be a community, but need Europe be a territory? Is it not time for this most inventive of continents to reinvent itself beyond territory and outside of fixed frontiers?

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Notes 1 Derek Williams, The Reach of Rome: A History of the Roman Imperial Frontier, 1st–5th Centuries (London: Constable, 1966), p. xix. 2 On these issues of frontier and territory, Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and 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 Pierre Nora, ed., Les lieux de mémoire (part 2): (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), pp. 11–33; Lucien Fèbvre, ‘Frontière: The Word and the Concept’, in Peter Burke, ed.., A New Kind of History: From the Writings of [Lucien] Fèbvre, K. Folca, trans. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), pp. 208–18. Fèbvre outlines the history of the words: from fins to confins, 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 national and internal dividing lines is not frontier, but ‘border’ or ‘boundary’. The United States has a border with Mexico or Canada, and Massachusetts has a border with Connecticut or Rhode Island. When I tell family guests that we must cross the Massachusetts frontier to reach our weekend house in Rhode Island, they think such a 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 sounds equally odd. 3 But for the emphasis on the social relations of place rather than enclosure see Guy di Méo, Géographie sociale et territoires (Paris: Nathan, 1998). This American author notes with admiration that his basic texts on geography are produced in France, which maintains a tradition of historical (since Vidal de la Blache) and social geography that his own colleagues are only slowly reconstructing in the post-modernist problematizing 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 University Press, 1999), pp. 9–25, suggests that effective ‘domestic sovereignty’ need not correlate with ‘international sovereignty’ (recognition as a state among states) or even what he further differentiates as ‘Westphalian sovereignty’, the exclusion of any outside power from decisive domestic influence. But it was hardly accidental that these related notions all moved onto the European political agenda in the same era and as part of a long effort to establish political authority from claims to intervention or power made in the name of religion. See also John Gerard Ruggie, ‘Territoriality and Beyond: Problematizing Modernity in International Relations’, International Organization, 41:1 (Winter 1993): pp. 139–74. 6 For a Marxian treatment see Paul Alliès, L’invention du territoire (Grenoble: Presse Universitaire de Grenoble, 1972); and for French cartography in the context of absolutist statecraft, Jean Gottman, The Significance of Territory (Richmond, VA.: University Press of Virginia, 1973), pp. 58–9. For Ortelius see Jessica E. H. Maier, ‘The Parergon of Abraham Ortelius’, MA thesis, Columbia University (March 1999). 7 James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have 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: A History of Property Mapping (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

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11 Some suggestive recent works include Bertrand Badie, La fin des territoires: Essai sur le désordre 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 de l’EHESS, 1984); Gérard Labrot, Quand l’histoire murmure: Villages et campagnes du royaume de Naples, XVIe–XVIIIe siècle (Rome: École Française de Rome, 1995), esp. the contrast with 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 German Unification, 1858-1871: Struggles and Accomplishments (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), pp. 48, 51. 13 Cavour’s memo on railroads cited by Mack Walker, Plombières (New York: Oxford University 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 the German states in the early 1860s, in the North German Confderation in 1869, in Sweden in 1864, Denmark by 1857. See Thedore Hamerow, The Birth of a New Europe: State and Society in the Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), p. 275. 17 For a survey see Eugene N. Anderson and Pauline R. Anderson, Political Institutions and Social 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 and France, 1914–1945 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 19 For the implications of these issues as they apply to geographical and economic factors, 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” in der 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: A Philosophical 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.

3

Fixed borders or moving borderlands? A new type of border for a new type of entity Pierre Hassner

This chapter was written in France. In some ways, there is no better vantage point from which to speak about borders. France has no border disputes to speak of with its neighbours; it is satisfied with its national borders and they are not challenged by any other state. Yet few other states are as preoccupied with the problem of borders in Europe and in general. The reasons for this paradox can serve as a good introduction to the nature of our problem. More than any country, France is committed to the notion of clear and stable borders. It is the country that created the ideology of ‘natural borders’ (the Rhine, the sea, the Alps and the Pyrénées). Today, it is the most resolute defender of the fixed nature of borders, whether in Africa or in Europe, in the former Soviet Union or in former Yugoslavia, in order not to open a Pandora’s box of reordering Europe or the world along ethnic lines. While accepting the enlargement of NATO and of the European Union, France’s heart lies with deepening rather than with broadening and it insists on imposing clear limits upon both enlargements. It is in France, therefore, following the decision of the Helsinki summit, on 10 and 11 December 1999, to enter into negotiations with twelve states, including Romania, Bulgaria and even Turkey, that the most serious and vocal fears have been aired that over-extension may jeopardize the original project of the Founding Fathers: very explicitly from Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and Jacques Delors, more discreetly from the Foreign Minister, Hubert Védrine. They all believe that a Europe of more than twenty-five countries cannot become a real power, 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 differentiation between a tight hard core, which would pursue the goal of Europe as a great power or a ‘federation of nation-states’, and a broader and larger periphery. Its deepest traditions, whether embodied in historical formulations or in current language, insist upon a division between inside and outside, be it at the individual 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’ (‘the coalman is the master in his own house’, the equivalent of ‘an Englishman’s home is his castle’), ‘le roi de France est empereur dans son royaume’ (‘the king of France is Emperor in his own kingdom’), etc.

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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 that the organization Médecins sans frontières was created, and it is France that gave birth to a series of sister organizations, such as Pharmaciens sans frontières or Reporters sans frontières. This gave rise to what has become known as the ideology of sans frontièrisme (borderlessness), as well as to the notion of droit d’ingérence, justifying the violation of borders in the name of humanitarian intervention. Indeed, the current debate between ‘national republicans’ or ‘sovereignists’ and internationalists 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 exception of Britain, France is the country where the notions of the state and of sovereignty have retained the greatest prestige and the most committed defenders, even though these notions have been eroded, like everywhere else, by globalization and other general trends. But at the same time, France is also the country that, with the possible exception of the United States, has insisted the most strongly, since 1789, on carrying a universalistic message: that of the rights of man and citizen. The country of Raison d’État and of human rights and of self-determination is faced with a contradiction common to all states, but more acute in its case, which is reflected in its divisions on the importance and nature of borders. Other national traditions make it easier to manage these contradictions because they are more at ease either with change, or with ambiguity, or with both. The United States, which was built first on continental, then on commercial, expansion, is wedded to a dynamic conception of the ‘frontier’, to the notion of ‘manifest destiny’, and finally to that of the ‘open door’, even though it combines these concepts with an acute sense of its own sovereignty. This sense of sovereignty, however, emphasizes the universal freedom of action of the state and 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 no proper borders in the sense of fixed and clear boundaries. The Russian empire expanded through the recurring necessity of defending its ever-extending borders against external threats or peripheral disorder. From the Roman limes to the Austro-Hungarian confines or Grenze or Krajinas, all empires have known these peripheral zones where settler-soldiers served as ever-embattled ‘buffers’ for the imperial centre. With the collapse of empires and their division into nationstates, the inhabitants of these borderlands or buffer zones more often than not become nostalgic or independence-seeking minorities in a hostile environment.1 As a result, the new states are confronted with a tension between strictly defined state borders, more or less imposed or tolerated internal borders whose character (administrative or potentially international) is a matter of dispute, and the imaginary religious or ethnic borders that would encompass their whole nation as defined by history and myth. This, of course, is the story of the Balkans, where different conceptions of borders, based on different relations to time and space, co-exist uneasily. In the

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Balkans, great migrations, whether forced or voluntary, are part of the same tradition as an obstinate attachment to territory. However, the full coincidence of state 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 counterpoint to that of France, and one most relevant to our concern with the borders of the European Union. This case can be interpreted, as some (often the French) do, in an imperialist mode. They emphasize the Drang nach Osten, the search for Grossraum, pan-Germanism and the German school of geopolitics at the beginning of the twentieth century as evidence of the destabilizing effect of an absence of clearly defined borders.2 Or it can, on the contrary, be interpreted, as some (often Germans) do, in a federalist mode. They point out that Germany’s tradition (except for seventy unhappy years) is not that of a centralized nation-state but that of a continuum between different types of entities, of authorities and of overlapping borders between principalities and empire. They argue that it is precisely this lack of a sharp, dualistic division between above and below and between the interior and the exterior that makes it more adaptable to the new condition of world affairs and more applicable as a model for European integration.3 It is precisely the preservation of its pre-modern roots which enables it to enter the post-modern age more easily than France, which is always identified with the strict model of the modern state.4 Beyond this almost classic parallel between two Western states, one can go back to the basic opposition between nomadic and sedentary peoples, with their different conceptions of territory and hence of borders. Borders obviously play a defining and decisive role for agricultural peoples and a much more complex and relative one for nomadic ones. In a world dominated by communications, commerce and technological change, some have talked of a new nomadism and many of a devaluation of territory as well as of sovereignty and the state. This in turn has led to a new nostalgia for roots and for walls. Thus it is at three levels that the ambiguous and complex nature of borders appears relevant to our subject. The first concerns the concept itself, as it unfolds in history with, in particular, the dualities of line and zone, and of expansion and rigidity. The second level concerns the distinctive character of our time, with the growth of communications and of informal, trans-border networks as well as of increasing fragmentation and new types of borders. Last but not least, the third level concerns the specific nature of the European Union, which can neither dispense with borders altogether nor settle on one fixed type. Although it seems fated to live with ambiguous and moving borders, this may actually help it to invent a new type of relationship between centre and periphery.

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

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is the full integration of this region into a Europe where borders unite rather than divide. Our answer to calls for a greater Serbia and a greater Albania must be a greater Europe.’5 At least two general questions are raised by this statement. First, how can borders unite rather than divide? Isn’t dividing the essence of their function, and isn’t their disappearance the only way to stop them from doing so? On the other hand, if by borders one means borderlands, rather than fixed boundaries or lines, it becomes possible to see them as links between two countries through their economic exchanges or human contacts. The Czech regions bordering Germany are becoming an example of this.6 But the problem raised by these types of links is whether they create new divisions within the countries concerned, 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 and among Albanians? By rendering some borders meaningless, does this not create new ones, that is, between those who are inside this greater Europe and those who are outside it? This is, of course, hotly debated in connection with the Schengen agreements. It seems clear that, as Spinoza put it, ‘omnis determinatio negatio est’, any union that does not encompass the world implies a differentiation from 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 of borders, some borders may simply become more quickly and more totally irrelevant than others. All borders would tend to disappear but those inside integrated unions would disappear more than others. Again, to give meaning to the statement implies a certain transformation in the concept and reality of borders as such. And this, in turn, has important theoretical implications. There are three possible approaches to the problems of borders. The first is a positive and conservative approach, which sees borders as the central instrument of political order. The second, a negative and revolutionary approach, considers borders to be an unnatural obstacle to peace and the unity of humankind. The third, dialectical and evolutionary, approach maintains that, like tongues according to Aesop, they are both the best and the worst of things: the abolition of some borders inevitably creates new ones, but the latter do not necessarily have the same character as the former. The general trend, according to the third approach, is towards borders becoming less territorial, less physical, more complex and less visible. The first theory rests on the age-old alliance, emphasized by Rousseau in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, between property, authority and war, which was especially striking in agricultural societies. Borders are lines, walls, barriers or hedges that designate the limits of a given property or domain. They indicate the limits of the competence or of the sovereignty of a given state. Hence they encourage homogeneity, or at least a feeling of common belonging, within their limits, 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 indicate a military balance or stalemate, they are changed by conquest or expansion.

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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 theoretician Carl Schmitt. His great book Der Nomos der Erde8 is based on a pun between Ordnung and Ortung. Order means above all a territorial order: the division of the planet into legitimate units controlling different pieces of land. The limitation of war is based on a ‘Hegung des Krieges’, again conveying the suggestion of physical delimitation. Of course this delimitation, while being the source and the basis of international public law, is not equalitarian, as it is the result of relations of power. Hence intermediary notions like Great Power, Grossraum or spheres of influence give rise to other types of borders than the physical interstate ones. Still, they rest upon a continental conception based on the division of territory. Colonial expansion and wars make for other, looser types of boundaries, 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 his antipathy for the maritime, commercial and universalistic conceptions of the Anglo-Saxons. A second source of his hostility to the notion of an order based on humanity as 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 But even in the more positive and peaceful version, borders are linked to the results and prospects of war. Sometimes these divisions and these wars seem to be based on ethnic, religious or cultural differences, as in the notion of the ‘clash of civilizations’. Sometimes they appear as the result of power relations and of political invention. Even physical divisions, such as the Urals as the limit of Europe, as opposed to the much more imposing Himalayas, which are held to delineate only a subcontinent, 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 political domination and the results of war, that inspires the second theory, that of a borderless world. In this view borders are essentially prison walls that hamper both the free development of economic exchange and cooperation as well as understanding among peoples and their banding together for the common tasks of humankind. Peoples are kept inside borders, oppressed by rulers whose legitimacy rests on the threat from outside. If borders were suppressed, we could be brothers and sisters instead of being artificially divided into ‘quasi-species’. The moral argument based on our common humanity is reinforced by a practical one based on effectiveness: borders multiply costs; they divide the forces necessary to tackle global problems, from epidemics to the environment, from hunger to weapons of mass destruction.

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There is a convergence between: •

•

•

the philosophical inspiration reaching from Kant, for whom the goal of history is the creation of a ‘cosmopolitan situation’,11 to Hans Jonas, for whom the primary responsibility, transcending all national and political divisions, is to ensure the survival of the planet;12 an ideology that emphasizes global solidarity like that of Médecins sans frontières or that of the prevalence of generational over territorial ties (‘We are the world’, ‘Woodstock nation’, etc); and the analyses of political scientists, like Bertrand Badie,13 who refer to ‘the end of territoriality’ because of the revolution in communications, the prevalence of transnational flows, or, in a word, globalization.

Does this, then, invalidate the conclusion of Malcolm Anderson’s book on frontiers: ‘A world without frontiers in which solidarity with the whole human race dominates all intermediate solidarities remains an utopian dream’?14 Before jumping to that conclusion, one must ask two basic questions. First, assuming frontiers are dangerous and counterproductive, does this necessarily mean that they are on the way out? Second, are they in a process of withering away or are they in a process of transformation and differentiation? Could it be that some types of borders are disappearing but that they are being replaced by others, that we are witnessing ‘the unbundling of territoriality’, to use John Ruggie’s expression,15 rather than its end, or even that non-territorial borders are rising while territorial ones are declining? The answers implicit within these questions are at the root of the third approach, which I have called evolutionary and dialectical, and which seems to me to be more helpful in understanding the specific character of our time in general and of the European Union in particular. The key lies in the notion of differentiation. While the modern Westphalian order tended to promote a sharply delineated separation between nation-states, with borders understood as lines rather than zones, and an ideal model emphasizing homogeneity within state-centred territorial units and rivalry between them, the progress of communication and of interdependence tends to favour the opposite model, that of heterogeneity within society-centred units and of overlapping 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 issue areas like economics, security, etc., so that the basic distinction between inside and outside, between natives and aliens, tends to become much more complex and uncertain. This does not mean that it disappears. The common error of the first and the second approaches is to posit the alternative as being between exclusion (or downright hostility) and fusion or elimination of differences. In contrast to the proponents of a world without borders, adherents of the first approach see the distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’ as the essence of human

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society and politics. But, contrary to Carl Schmitt, this is not identical with the distinction between friend and foe. Of course, any inclusion implies an exclusion, and vice versa. But there is a world of difference between starting with the one or with the other. If the main purpose of states is defined by international rivalry, then they are based above all on exclusion and their respective citizens are defined by their non-exclusion. In a world where universalistic values and material interdependence converge in the direction of globalization, and where the primary purpose of states is seen as guaranteeing the individual well-being of their citizens, the prevalent politics are the politics of inclusion. But of course differences immediately emerge concerning degrees of inclusion, whether in terms of power or prestige or in terms of community and solidarity. The relevant spatial metaphor is, then, the distinction between centre and periphery: exclusion becomes the extreme form of marginalization. But this means the borderline between inclusion and exclusion becomes a relative one: there is no absolute or immutable difference in nature between internal and external boundaries, between internal and external periphery. More generally still, the trend is towards interpenetration between the interior and the exterior of states and organizations, which produces what the German sociologist Ulrich Beck calls Entgrenzung or ‘de-borderization’.16 This, in turn, changes the perception and the status of foreignness and foreigners as such. As another German sociologist, Sighard Neckel, puts it, the increase in mobility has meant that ‘what was the characteristic of the foreigner (the migrant who comes today and stays to-morrow) becomes in the age of individualization a general form 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, this creates 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, whether through withdrawal or through ethnic, religious, ideological or social cleansing. Here again, the dialectics of borders may produce paradoxical results. The desire to exclude immigrants may lead a country to isolation from the other members of the community. Jörg Haider’s Freedom Party in Austria, by trying to erect a wall to prevent the invasion of poor masses from the East, may have created a psychological and moral wall between itself and its neighbours to the West. This, again, raises the question of co-existence and contiguity: when territorial separation through partition or expulsion is impossible, can the aspiration to separate communities be satisfied within a common territory? The trend, concerning citizenship, has been towards attachment to a common territory as opposed to a common blood. Can there be different communities, obeying different laws and customs, yet living together within the same borders? Can a leaf be borrowed from the book of the Austro-Hungarian Empire or of Lebanon in the direction of personal federalism or autonomy rather than territorial federalism, as has been argued by Stéphane Pierre-Caps? 18 Does this not mean an inequality of rights, sooner or later leading either to clashes or to territorial separation? Forced co-existence of communities who fight for status and

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influence or for work and wealth may well be the fate of the big metropolises created by modern population movements. This is only one example of the permanent fluidity of borders, constantly erased and re-created on another level in our complex, moving world. As the French geographer Denis Retaillé put it: The simultaneity between globalization and the fragmentation of identities creates a new field for political action: between the World and the Place, all intermediary levels are but constructions and strategic steps according to the new territorial imperative that engages the responsibility of actors in both directions. … Before, the coalescence of societies used to be handled in a simple way by contiguity. … Now what one has to invent is the coalescence of different levels of society. Something that resembles horizontal federalism, i.e. the process of assembling incomplete or unfinished societies in places 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: the European 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 the advent of the modern era’.21 No wonder that the problem of its borders cumulates all the paradoxes and ambiguities we have seen – and adds some additional ones. The specific difficulties have to do with its open-ended enlargement. This has been made almost inevitable by the duality of its criteria, as laid down in the Treaty of Rome. On the one hand, the European Union is geographically embedded, since it is on the continent of Europe. On the other hand, the criteria for membership – democracy and an economy able to be integrated – are universalistic and point beyond a limitation to contiguous territory. In 1954, polemicizing against what he called ‘Little Europe’ at the time of resistance to the idea of a European Defence Community, the French economist François Perroux launched the slogan: ‘Europe without shores’ (‘L’Europe sans rivages’). But what is the real ‘Europe without shores’ if not the whole planet? Obviously European 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 be final. Nor does ‘Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals’ – a geographic notion that no longer corresponds to the political, economic and military realities of the twenty-first century – fit the bill. It does seem that the Europe of European integration is bound to remain ambiguous in its geographical dimension. It cannot be conceived without borders, but these borders are bound to remain fluid and contradictory.

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The first of these two features distinguishes the borders of the European Union and, to some extent, of NATO from those of the European states, whose rule, according to Michel Foucher is to combine geographical fixity with increasing permeability.22 But the second, the fact that the monetary, the commercial, the financial, the military, the cultural borders of Europe do not coincide, only makes it the most visible and powerful example of a trend that is affecting the nation-states themselves. If, as Ruggie suggests, ‘the distinctive feature of the modern system of rule is that it has differentiated its subject collectivity into territorially defined, fixed and mutually exclusive enclaves of legitimate dominion’23, then we must acknowledge that the fluid, mobile character of relations between the internal and the external, the intergovernmental and the supranational, the political and the functional that characterizes the European Union represents a break with the modern conception of political territoriality. But in the same breath we must also acknowledge that this break represents a significant move towards the new sociopolitical, national, international and transnational reality into which we are sliding – a reality that could be characterized by the interpenetration of units and issue areas, by the multiplicity of competences, and by their mobility or fluidity. The very multitude of paradoxical or intermediate formulations needed to describe the relations between the European Union, its member states, the candidates for membership and the associates indicates the predominance of nuances and shades as opposed to clear and distinct delimitations. At the level of the European Union, the relation between the centre and the periphery remains ambiguous and fluid. It is no easy matter to distinguish between the internal and the external periphery: the distinction between centre and periphery tends to be reproduced within the centre and the periphery themselves through a spectrum that goes from the centre of the centre to the periphery of the periphery. What we are witnessing is neither a stable and accepted hierarchy nor a trend towards the pure and simple erasing of distinctions. But this is precisely what our third theory was predicting. Not only are classical oppositions between interior and exterior, public and private, political and social, brought into question, but new and ambiguous forms of subnational and transnational community are beginning to appear, while classical ones like the nation, state and territory are far from ready to disappear. We are seeing more and more abstract identities such as Delors’s ‘unidentified object’, the European Union, but also such as Bosnia-Herzegovina (a sovereign state composed of two ‘entities’ that can have their own special links with differing 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 populations whose statuses are ambiguous or incomplete (refugees, gypsies, permanent residents, European citizens); and places whose status is equally obscure (concentration camps, ‘safety zones’, ‘grey zones’, enclaves, zones placed under international administration), not to mention a myriad of networks in every sense of the word.

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What emerges is a field of forces in which attraction and repulsion pull in different directions. There is a tendency for the centre to pull back from the turbulent and violent peripheries. In the case of the closure to immigration, this tendency works towards the creation of a separation between the Union and its external environment, as symbolized by the Schengen agreements. There is at the same time a retrenchment in the individual member states themselves. Even more importantly, both inside and outside the European Union, new spaces and new differentiations are being created in order to isolate or reject migrants; they go 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 or Atlantic centre and the South-East European periphery. Enlargement has always been an option for Central Europe. The Central European states are more plausible candidates than their neighbours to the east or south. They are closer to the centre economically, politically and culturally and are thus easier to integrate. But disorder, war and famine – the very reasons for which the prosperous and liberal West would prefer to keep a region like the Balkans at arm’s length – also force the West to get involved in spite of itself. Paradoxically, after the Dayton accords and the war in Kosovo, the European Union and NATO are much more engaged in the Balkans (where they hold certainly Bosnia and Kosovo, and to some extent Albania, Macedonia and perhaps tomorrow Serbia, under a combination of a military protectorate and a mandate for economic reconstruction and political reform) than in Central Europe, which, although more familiar and reassuring, does not find itself in a crisis situation. As for countries like Romania and Bulgaria, their place on the list of priorities for the EU may decline even further, as they risk falling between two stools. Or, as would seem to be indicated by decisions made in Helsinki in December 1999 to include them in negotiations for accession, they may benefit from their role during the Kosovo crisis, which seems, at least for the time being, to loom larger than their progress (or lack thereof) in economic reform. Another paradoxical illustration of the discrepancy between degrees of proximity or distance according to issue areas is the case of the Baltic states. Their dimensions and Nordic affinities would allow a rapid economic integration into the European Union, but, because of their geopolitical and historical relations with Russia, they have, for a long time, been denied any hope of joining NATO and any serious prospect of being protected by it. For international institutions, the question of universal or open-ended membership raises considerable problems concerning their ability to fulfil their specific functions. Indeed, by their very nature, NATO, the European Union or the Council of Europe, unlike the UN or the OSCE, cannot become universal or open to any and all applicants. Some limitations exist concerning the character of the candidate states, in terms of human rights, market economies or their commitment to the observance of certain rules. If ignored, they would make a mockery of these institutions, which exist precisely in order to differentiate between those who do conform to these rules and those who do not. This is

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what seems to have happened as a result of the failure of the Council of Europe to exclude or even to issue a warning to Russia in spite of its crimes in Chechnya. But, by the same token, history or geography cannot easily be invoked to keep out those who do adhere to these rules even if increased membership means decreased effectiveness. ‘Multiple speeds’ or ‘variable geometry’ is inevitable. It is likely, for instance, that a hard core around a common currency or a common defence policy will emerge within the European Union and that the enlargement of NATO will lead to a multiplication of limitations based on the French or Scandinavian model: members without foreign troops or without nuclear weapons on their territory, etc. This obviously reduces the political potential of European unity and the protective effect of NATO. The myth of equality and of solidarity, common to nation-states and to collective security organizations, may become less and less credible. Instead, both NATO and the European Union may begin to look more like traditional empires, with the distinction between centre and periphery (or centres and peripheries) becoming almost as important as the distinction between members and non-members. Their survival and their ability to fulfil their functions will then depend, above all, on the reliability (in terms of both coherence and flexibility) of their respective centres. The more differentiated the organizations are and the less they are constrained by external threats or rigid boundaries, the more they need a legitimate, wise and active leadership to keep them together. NATO certainly does not lack assertive leadership but the problem lies in its unpredictability and its reluctance to run risks and incur costs. In the European Union, the problem is whether its leading powers and its central institutions can be both united and open enough to steer the organization and its periphery on an ocean battered by the contrary winds of globalization and nationalism. Jacques Delors seems to fear a negative answer to this question, so much so that he advocates ‘a treaty within the treaty’ among the central powers once they are ready to enter a ‘federation of nation-states’. But their willingness to do so is doubtful 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 of a multi-tiered EU; as yet it is unclear how this would be structured or function, and whether it would be sufficiently cohesive. There are three broad outcomes that can be envisaged if enlargement goes ahead. First, an enlarged EU could essentially reach a point of stasis, with adequate functioning of well-established areas, but lacking any further policy development and failing in particular to develop in problematic or newer policy areas (notably the common foreign and security policy, and justice and home affairs). Secondly, the EU could move towards defining a narrower core acquis, while allowing flexibility in other areas: this outcome might be effective as long as the core acquis was sufficiently cohesive. Thirdly the EU might enlarge on the basis of the current acquis with a core group of countries moving ahead in a number of areas; without effective institutional change,

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however, there would then be problems in operating the acquis and pressures might also build for the core group to splinter off from the rest. In the absence of a genuine strategic overview of how to structure the future EU, one of these outcomes might emerge not through direct choice but by default, at the end of a sequence of step-by-step decisions on institutional reform and accession conditions; the resulting Union might be not so much multi-tier as a patchwork EU.24 This patchwork character may well extend to our subject proper, namely borders. With the accession of Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, and eventually of Slovakia, Romania and Bulgaria, not to speak of Turkey, the problem of what has been called the Schengen acquis would raise drastic, if not dramatic, problems. The principle of the abolition of borders and controls inside the Schengen space and their reinforcement outside would, if applied rigorously, bring havoc to the relations of Hungary with its national minorities in Romania or Serbia, or of Romania with Moldova, or to the economic relations between Poland or the Czech Republic and Ukraine or Belarus. It would have disastrous consequences for the latter countries. If, on the other hand, a series of exceptions were made, the principle of ‘bringing one’s friends along’ would not only transform the whole process of accession but would also intensify the blurring of the distinction between inside and outside even further, just as the accession of Turkey would accelerate the creation of an internal periphery subject to restrictions of movement not unlike those of the external one. In the end, very much will depend on the general environment. If it develops into a benign environment, with no immediate military threat, with immigrants being welcomed for economic reasons rather than feared for social and psychological 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 for other regions. But if a severe general or domestic economic crisis or external military threat sharpens its multiple contractions into ‘either–-or’ or ‘us against them’ alternatives, then hardening and closing may become the order of the day: The trend is certainly in that direction; the fear of immigrants for reasons of economic competition or of national cohesion manifest from Austria to Australia is multiplied by the fear of terrorism in the post-11 September world. While the external borders of Schengen law may become even more rigid, the abolition of internal borders may become less and less total. And in that case the cleavage may well be following national or core versus periphery lines even more than between the European Union and the rest of the world.

Notes 1 2 3

Michel Foucher, Fronts et frontières, 2nd edn (Paris: Fayard, 1991), p. 512. J. Ancel, Manuel géographique de politique européenne, vol. 1 (Paris: L’Europe centrale, 1936). Reinhart Kosellek, ‘Diesseits des Nationalstaats. Federale Strukturen der deutschen Geschichte’, Transit, 7 (Spring 1994), pp. 63–76.

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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 frontières’, 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: Duncker und Humblot, 1988). 11 Immanuel Kant, ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Intent’, in Perpetual 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, Pavel Baev and Victoria Ingrid Einagel, eds, Geopolitics in Post-Wall Europe: Security, Territory and 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, The Sharp Edges of Europe: Security Implications of Enlarging EU Border Policies Eastwards, Occasional Paper 13, the Institute for Security Studies, WEU (March 2000); and Monica den Boer, Look Who Is Talking: The Double Logic in the Imposition of Instruments of Control on Candidate Countries, paper for the Robert Schuman Centre’s Reflection Group on ‘Diversity and Unity in the Enlarged European Union: What Influences the Process of Transition and Adaptation in Central and East Europe?’ (21–2 June, Brussels).

4

Facing the ‘desert of Tartars’ The Eastern border of Europe Alina Mungiu-Pippidi

What are borders? Of the many possible definitions, the one nearest this chapter’s approach is that of borders as formal delimitations between collective subjective entities – identities in the fortunate cases – politically organized in states or equivalents. As such, their importance is twofold: political, as they stand as protectors of one given set of laws and regulations, and not another’s; and symbolic, as they also guard certain customs and norms, therefore cultural identity.1Both roles make borders indispensable, as collectives cannot do without identity, albeit conventional, cultural anomie is unhealthy. Yet in both endeavours borders are vulnerable and increasingly harder to sustain in times of unprecedented movement of ideas, people and capitals. The 1999 EU Helsinki summit made the historic decision to set an Eastern border 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 decision was taken in the aftermath of the Kosovo war, the border could not have looked different. Nevertheless, this historic decision seems to follow the blueprint of the most important European policies in the last decade of the twentieth century, the crafting of today’s policies on yesterday’s shabby forecasts, be they the prolongation of the Cold War or the survival of the Milošević dynasty into the twenty-first century. Given the benefit of hindsight, one cannot fail to notice some considerable inertia behind the signing of the European Maastricht Treaty or the EMU, but neither can one deny the exceptional significance of such decisions, regardless of their initial motivation. For some East European states, Helsinki was the best news in a century otherwise quite poor in historic opportunities. But much is still to be done to turn this conventional border drawn on a map in Brussels into a border of Europe, even assuming the target set is the right one. Challenges to the Eastern border of Europe are tremendous, and enlargement policies may well stop short of securing what Europe was seeking in the first place: peace, security and prosperity on the Eastern border. This chapter will review these challenges taking a political analysis approach rather than a technical policy-bound one. The latter would discuss the Justice and Home Affairs acquis, cross-border police cooperation, and so forth, breaking down each item into the two main challenges: the geographical terres-

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trial border to the East and the ‘wealth’ border, the difference in income between Western and Eastern Europe. I will take a broader approach, however: challenges are rooted as much in policies’ design as in their implementation, so from the Brussels policy planning cabinets to the Eastern outskirts of the vast European empire, border posts and consulates directly facing the ‘desert of Tartars’,2 one can try to cast a fresh look. Change is said to come only incrementally to huge organizations, but understanding can be occasionally unleashed. Still, understanding is culturally bound: of the scenarios for Europe released by the Forward Studies Unit in 1999 none actually foresaw Helsinki at close range, and only one displayed some trust in classic liberal democracy to endure in the twenty-first century on the basis of successful markets, all the others being more or less disguises of post-1968 postmaterialist ideologies. If the rate of forecast writers is one free-marketer to four post-materialists, or of one Euro-optimist to four Euro-pessimists, than the future seems grim indeed. Ideas are therefore as important as facts: this is the underlying assumption guiding this policy analysis. Consequentially, this chapter is structured around the discussion of five essential ideas relevant to enlargement policies and the Eastern border topic, and the challenge of the use of common wisdom towards those. This should not be read, however, as though this author is somehow be able to resort to some alternative source of wisdom, or as though such an alternative source might even exist; instead, it should be viewed as a programmatic attempt at some ‘mise en abime’ exercise, the open exhibit of our common assumptions with a hope that unconventional discussion will foster our more advanced understanding. As such, I shall discuss policy options in the light of these widespread assumptions and their challenge to reach, in the end, a few recommendations.

Is East European borders’ ‘goodness-of-fit’ comparable to the West European one? State borders may seem, at first sight, to be granted similar significance throughout 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 in Central and Eastern Europe since 1989 alone. The brutal, be it peaceful (Czechoslovakia) or non-peaceful (Yugoslavia) redrawing of frontiers within Eastern Europe frightened the Western world after 1989: but it was a mere revenge on a century of frustration over the inability to find the ‘right’ borders, the expression of what a political scientist labeled as ‘unfinished national revolutions’.3 All borders may be conventional (i.e. formal), but some are more conventional than others, and East European borders after the wars of liberation that started in the second half of the nineteenth century and ended with the Versailles Treaty in 1919 resemble, to some extent, more post-colonial African borders than those of Western Europe. The character of Eastern Europe as ‘colony’, unable to pursue a normal development path due to chronic foreign

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domination and intervention by the entities designed under the name of ‘the Great Powers’, is rarely acknowledged nowadays. For a region such as the Balkans even its negative consequences are disputed.4 None the less, the essential variable that prevented normal state formation in Eastern Europe and led to the impossible patchwork we face today is the confiscation of natural national developments by centuries of foreign domination and/or intervention. Nowhere and at no time were nation-states built without violence: the idealization of the West European state- and nation-building only leads to flawed categories of nationalism. Centuries of combined ethnic and religious cleansing, conversion and 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 the third time-zone, roughly the enlargement countries of today, this evolution was prevented by the zone being a playground not for God, as the title of a contemporary history of Poland proclaims,6 but for the Ottoman, Habsburg and Russian empires. The most influential set of classifications of nationalism are as Western civic, Eastern ethnic,7 which, in fact, may be reduced to ‘Western good, Eastern bad’ and fully based on the lack of acknowledgement of two essential phenomena: the national under-development of Eastern Europe due to foreign occupation, and civic liberal models, not German romanticism, as the initial dominant paradigm of nineteenth-century East European state-building.8 A much more refined, therefore more accurate, perspective does exist in nationalist literature,9 but, as it is often the case with more complex, less black-and-white approaches, their use by the media and policy-makers is severely limited. West European 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 high degree of ‘goodness-of-fit’. Where it did not, as in the case of borders between France and Germany, a revolutionary process of European unification was needed to solve the matter. But nowadays, indeed, less than a third of West Europeans consider their borders ‘wrong’, and the figure decreased even more after the unification of the two German states. In Eastern Europe, however, the situation could not be more different: on the average, a majority of Eastern Europeans are not settled with their borders, and three polls11 found high rates of agreement with the statement ‘There are parts of other countries which belong to us’ (see table 4.1).12 Unsurprisingly labelled by Miller, White and Heywood as ‘external nationalism’, this variable may measure simply the awareness of perceived ‘lack-of-fit’ of national borders to national cultures. Living with cultural Table 4.1 Territorial nationalism in selected European countries There are parts of other countries which belong to us

UK

FRG

GDR

Cz

Hun

Pol

Bul

Rus

Ukr

Lith

Rom

20

43

25

39

68

60

52

22

24

46

71

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

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minorities within your national borders is both acceptable and manageable. To accept, however, that one’s own ethnic group forms a minority or even a majority in a neighbouring state (Kosovo, Moldova) while the ethnic group of another neighbour forms a minority in your state means acknowledging that borders are wholly, not somewhat, conventional, which renders them meaningless altogether. Eastern Europeans’ perception that something is wrong with their borders is therefore partially grounded in reality; this does not imply, however, that a better set of borders could have been produced when centuries of unnatural evolution had to be brought overnight to an equitable and workable solution. This also does not imply that the perception, in itself, of borders as wrong does not generate territorial nationalism. It does. Hungary, for instance, leads, at the top of the countries polled for external nationalism, despite Hungarians from abroad being high on the list of the most disliked groups in Hungary.13 In a March 2000 Freedom House–SAR survey Romanians prove a close match to Hungarians’ dissatisfaction with borders, and also share the distaste for co-nationals living in surrounding countries, especially Moldovans.14 This shows that territorial nationalism is fed by memories of historical ‘greatness’, more than contemporary feelings of solidarity grounded in common identity. If that is the problem, what is the solution? Most East European borders resemble the France–Germany model rather than the ordinary West European border, so the plain solution that these borders must be rendered superfluous via a process of unification (although it was not specifically stated as such at Copenhagen 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 recuperate some of its pre-1918 territories. The most difficult borders are with and within the former Yugoslavia, and there exists only a poor foreseeable forecast for the stabilization of South-Eastern Europe without some degree of inclusion of former Yugoslav countries. There is no final solution, nor indeed a temporary convenient one, for former Yugoslav countries without their inclusion in the EU, even though this solution may seem remote and indeed far-fetched today. When crafting a border policy one has to keep in mind that Yugoslavia must be brought into 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 of some authors regarding former Yugoslavia is exaggerated.16 Wasn’t it equally difficult at a given time to conceive the German–Polish or the German–French reconciliation, not to speak of the Spanish–Spanish one? It is difficult indeed to be optimistic about Yugoslavia within the limited framework of imagination, as the embattled, not viable and not even ethnically homogenous statelets outside the EU.17 The same applies to Albania: smuggling Albanians into Italy will continue, despite Italy being a full Schengen member, if Albania is not given more hope that it can belong to Europe some day. (ii) Some of the borders with problems are between accession countries and their neighbours, who would be excluded once all applicant countries adopt the

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Schengen acquis. Hungary’s border with former Yugoslavia, where a strong Hungarian minority lives in Vojvodina; Poland’s border with Ukraine, with a Polish minority; and Romania’s border with Moldova fall in this category. To be sure, these are not conflict-leading borders per se; nobody would wage war to change them. But making those borders impermeable would sever minorities’ connections with countries where the bulk of their culture lies, prompting illegal entrances 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 event that even within the current pool of EU applicants some will join sooner and others later – considerably later (Romania and Bulgaria apply for certain, but things may get messy even for Poland). Foreseeing such a development, the Hungarian government of Viktor Orbán, for instance, crafted a bill (the socalled ‘Status Bill’) granting Hungarians living in neighbouring countries (Slovakia, Romania, Ukraine, former Yugoslavia) limited citizenship rights, that is, entitlement to limited work-permits and benefits, although not the right to cast a vote in Hungarian elections. As many of these countries are still on the black-list of visas, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán may have reasoned correctly on behalf of the four million Hungarians living in neighbouring countries, of which quite a few try to work in Budapest, at least seasonally.18 Such policy remains to prove itself as having the potential to solve more problems than it creates. Most Hungarians from outside Hungary were eligible for work permits even before the Hungarian Parliament passed the ‘Status Bill’; if they did not apply for such a permit it is because there is a black labour market for seasonal workers. It is affordable to hire Magyars from surrounding countries because they settle for lower wages and no taxes have to be paid to the state by the employer, and the law will not change this economic rationale. The main driving idea behind the law was nevertheless the need to do something to help ethnic Hungarians residing in neighbouring countries not to fall behind the border once it will become the border of an enlarged Europe. Once a border is set, albeit conventionally, it starts working as a border; in other 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 a vast programme of crafting a new identity and the common reality underlying it, as with a unified Europe. This implies an increase in the differences currently existing between accession countries joining Schengen earlier and those that will join 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 East from West? The difference between the development of Western and Eastern Europe is above any controversy. Even where we are dealing with the same history and the same culture, as is the case with East Germany versus West Germany, decades of

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further investment are needed to rectify the destruction communism wreaked on the economy and society. However, this development border was much less an object of public concern in the West than was the assumed ‘cultural’ one. More than one version of where this ‘cultural’ border actually stands has been around in the past three decades. Václav Havel had the honesty to acknowledge that between Western and Central Europe there still lies ‘a wall in our heads’, but he was alluding to the legacy of communism, not to some structural cultural difference. Many Central Europeans implicitly accept the ‘cultural border’ argument when striving to push this imagined cultural border further to the South and the East.21 Samuel Huntington endorsed this with his William Wallace-based argument: ‘The Velvet Curtain of Culture has replaced the Iron Curtain of ideology as the most significant dividing line in Europe.’22 This well-phrased assertion came under serious attack. However, one must acknowledge that, if we are dealing with widespread perceptions, even imagined borders can, at times, turn into real borders, so ‘the wall in our heads’ can well be of 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-listed by the EC and most member states as well, so in order to travel to the rest of Europe their inhabitants needed to get a visa at the consulate of some member state, a process often expensive, time-consuming and humiliating. Countries falling within the cultural borders, despite being rated similarly in terms of their overall performance by the EU, such as Slovakia, or not even featuring among invited countries, such as Croatia, enjoyed a lot more freedom of movement within Europe than did Bulgaria and Romania. However, when checking public opinion data no cultural differences seem to matter. Amazingly, on average, Eastern Europeans report having a ‘European identity’ more than do West Europeans (66 per cent as against 54 per cent), but this probably reflects only their strong desire to end the forced separation of Europe they have lived through fifty years of communism.23 Comparisons of Eastern and Western Europe,24 or within Eastern Europe,25 as well as cultural classifications based on the World Values Survey26 show that Eastern Europe falls within one cultural area, with the recent influence of communism overriding dramatically any remote influence of past regimes or cultural factors such as religion.27 In terms of development, however, things are quite different. And the imagined wall becomes a 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 were successful and others not. Historical legacies of development, however, can hardly be seen as ‘cultural’ legacies, and they should not be considered as such. Can the most severely constrained of these societies; the countries beyond Huntington’s fault line to the East, carry the burden of EU accession with little direct foreign investment and insignificant structural aid? The problem is more pressing for Romania and Bulgaria, which seem to fall behind the rest of the group, 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-

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Table 4.2 EU applicant countries: selected indicators GDP/capita adjusted by purchase power parity (PPP – 1999)

Cz

Est

Hun

Pol

Sloven

Bul

Lat

Lith

Rom

Slovak

62

38

53

42

73

24

29

31

28

49

Foreign direct investment (FDI)/capita – thousands 1.68 1.64 2.05 1.04 US dollars Trust in Parliament*

15

–

25

25

1.35 20

0.464 1.75 0.649 0.268 12

–

–

13

0.389 21

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

tation more than just a symbolic thank you to Balkan countries for support over Kosovo,29 chances are the Eastern border will be set between Central Europe and the Balkan countries, which would induce major political disadvantages and will prove the Balkan stability pact an empty catchphrase. This would clearly point to the fact that the border is economic rather than political. Both Bulgaria and Romania visibly showed they are committed Euro-Atlantic supporters throughout the Kosovo campaign and the 2000 elections in Romania, despite initial worries, produced a government with a foreign policy similar to the previous one. Both countries have come to fulfil the Copenhagen political criteria. 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 the Danube 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-fulfilling prophecies, development problems abound. Few dare to phrase it plainly in such politically incorrect terminology, but the major problem of the Europe of today and 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 poor regions of post-communist Europe, and its social acquis from a more liberal American-type approach.31 And it may well be that the latter requires the former. The ambiguous career of the Euro so far and the slowdown of the American economy create further need for Europe to protect its moderate growth and pursue cautiously its economic integration. This leaves little room for a daring policy to increase competitiveness, to radically reform EU spending and to 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 enlargement stays, in terms of expenditure, a third-rank policy, economic challenges to the Eastern 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 capita income of all applicant countries, might need twelve to twenty years to level its living standards with neighbouring Austria. As long as differences between Western and Eastern Europe remain so dramatically high, the worry will persist that the enlargement will be followed by a wave of immigration. So far, the German and the Austrian governments have been the most active among

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member states in this area as they considered themselves to come under the most serious threat. Germany has recently managed to obtain from the Commission a stall of five to seven years on the freedom of movement of workers once the first applicants are in (see table 4.3). For Poland and Hungary, this was a considerable blow as governments there have constantly quoted the free movement of labour as the main incentive of the European accession. With the structural aid and the CAP reformed to prevent newcomers from getting a share, and the free movement of labour blocked, the EU becomes quite unattractive to the most advanced applicants, who are also required to adopt and implement the full Schengen acquis even before becoming members of the Union.32 Certainly the accession process also has other important advantages, foremost among which is that it gives clear Table 4.3 Regulation of work permits in EU countries

Austria Belgium Denmark

Finland France

Germany Greece Ireland Italy Luxembourg Netherlands

Total number of Access for self-employed? permits 126,889 (1999) Only residence permit 83,500 (1999) With prior agreement of Ministry 73,092 (1999) Very rarely, only for important aspect of the activity – Only residence permit, and business plan Many professions – prohibited to foreigners 1,083,268 Yes, lengthy (2000) procedures 69,600 (1997) Yes, required financial resources 2,600 (1997) Yes, but ‘business permission’ required 30,000 (1999) Yes Yes, bunk guarantee 6,800 (1997) must be paid 20,816 (1999) Yes, residence permit needed

Are long-term residence permits issued? Yes, for 1 year Yes, after 5 years Yes, if a work permit is granted

Yes, usually for 1 year

Yes, between 1 and 10 years Yes, granted up to 5 years Yes, between 1 and 10 years, renewable each year Yes, for 1 year Yes, after 5 years Yes, for 1 year Yes, for 1 year. After 3 years no more work permit needed. After 5 years permanent residence permit is granted under certain conditions

Portugal

–

Yes

Yes, if has resided legally for at least 10 years.

Spain

85,526

Yes

Yes, after 6 years a permanent residence permit may be applied for

Sweden

220,000

Yes

Yes, after 2 years a permanent residence permit may be applied for

UK

72,599

Very tough conditions

After 4 years work permit holders can apply for permanent settlement

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direction to a process of institutional and economic transformation, prompting even reluctant governments (such as – at times – those of Romania or Slovakia) to undertake necessary reforms. But such incentives are quite meaningless for countries such as Estonia or Poland, which are already moving ahead at full speed. Unsurprisingly, public support for EU accession in these countries is declining as perceptions of sacrifices induced by years of liberal reforms prevail over shorttime hopes of boosting living standards via accession to the Union. The concern with the potential immigration of the cheap labour force from the East may be exaggerated, but it still remains a serious one, in bad need of a common policy. Some separation is needed, however, between fears of rising criminality in the enlarged Europe – addressed in detail by the Schengen acquis and the policy documents of Justice and Home Affairs, and needing only intelligent and effective implementation – and the problem of immigration – which badly needs a totally different set of policies.33 How justified is the fear of massive immigration? Most authors agree it is much exaggerated.34 Extrapolations from the past enlargement process or current figures have obvious limitations. Polls confirm, however, that Poland’s or Romania’s immigration potential remains quite high (see table 4.4). Other estimates point to a figure of 35 per cent of would-be employees out of a total of 335,000 residents who it is assumed will immigrate following the removal of barriers after the first enlargement wave.35 The figure is by no means alarming, although Germany’s fear of Polish immigration has already succeeded in halting the free movement of labour for five to seven years. The problem increases, however, with the next wave of countries, those with a higher migration potential, from Lithuania to Romania. The crux of the matter is the difficulty in solving the Roma problem within a foreseeable time-frame and to avoid feeding the already existing perception of Romanians and Bulgarians that the EU member states operate with double standards: on the one hand, asking these countries to solve their Roma problem; on the other hand, delaying their entrance from fear of floods of Roma invading Western Table 4.4 East European would-be workers in the EU Would you be personally interested in finding a job in one of the EU countries once your country enters the EU? (%) 1. Yes, I am interested and I will certainly try 2. Yes, I am interested and I will probably try Source: CEORG poll, 2001

Czech Republic

Hungary

Poland

Bulgaria

Romania

Sept. 2001

May 2001

Sept. 2000

May 2001

Sept. 2000

May 2001

May 2001

May 2001

4

4

6

7

10

13

9.6

17.3

7

8

7

7

8

10

10.6

13.5

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Europe.36 Without question, the walls of a fortress are needed to keep beggars out, but how thick can you make them, and would it not be cheaper to tackle the root cause of the problem? The model Europe should look at more closely is the Greek one: following the abandonment by the Simitis government in 1996 of the practice of forcefully expelling Albanian illegal migrants, an estimated 500,000 Albanians now work in Greece, representing a boost for both economies. It has already become obvious that the second issue related to the new economic border concerns the Roma. Large migrant communities of Roma have managed to cross the borders regardless of all the barriers in the past ten years and there is little to keep them in their home countries, where they are allegedly politically discriminated against, and certainly economically disadvantaged. Enforcing borders against the Roma was not a solution in the last decade and 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 in the underground Paris market.37 Roma claim that they are the targets of racially motivated discrimination and violence in candidate countries; candidate state government officials make the counter-claim that they are merely economic migrants.38 Both have found support for their claims within the EU: discrimination 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 moment imagine that they have the potential to solve the issue. Affirmative programmes for Roma, now in fashion, are not without use, but they do not address the hard issues. Nor is it likely that Roma coming from former Yugoslavia will be granted political asylum in Western countries as a result of aggressive demands by human rights groups. The largest group, the Romanian Roma, which is estimated at up to 1.5 million strong (see table 4.5), cannot even be called a community due to its loose, fragmented, pre-modern organization and important internal differences.40 The Romanian Roma are the heirs of slaves liberated between 1848 and 1854 from large domains, who have neither benefited from the kind of social assistance the American black community have, nor ever lived in a prosperous country. The legitimacy enjoyed in their own ethnic group by leaders who get to discuss with governments and international organizations is low to nil. Can one realistically assume that Romania is able to tackle the heritage of its Roma 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. A country that has not achieved an economic breakthrough since the fall of the Wall cannot solve a problem that has proved long and strenuous even in the most 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

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

Do good ends somehow generate their own effective means? The failure or success of an institutional transformation on the scale of the European integration of a post-communist country seems increasingly to rest upon clear delimitation between the ends of a transformation – let us call these final institutions, e.g. Eastern economies competitive with Western ones – and the means used to attain these, such as the acquis. The mixing of the two in policy discourse and debate has occurred more often than not in the past decade, and in the most difficult country cases (which had previously been subject to deeper communization processes) such approaches inflicted major damage to the management of the transformation. Examples accounting for dramatic failures can vary from competition policies to law enforcement.42 It is not a simple issue of empowerment, although empowerment is important, but an imperative need to assert the necessity of intermediate institutions,43 to identify them correctly (as the final institutions are obvious: the White Book and the Agenda 2000 state them clearly) and then implement them by empowering the right agents. From economic development to social inclusion and ability to integrate into Europe, much will depend on the strengthening of institutions and governance in East Central Europe. Gradual integration with the European Union will require significantly more mature institutional structures, able to satisfy the economic and political framework conditions of the EU and to implement the acquis communautaire. Unlike other strategies that come in one package with at least some intermediate institutions (like development strategies), European accession is an end often deprived of means, and quite a burdensome end for countries where institutions are weak, norms are shabby and resources are scarce. One cannot stress enough the need for institutional development necessary for East Central European countries to become reliable partners in the EU integration process.44 Good governance comes basically from a set of institutions that structure political

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and economic life, yet arriving at these often requires intermediate institutions able to motivate people and organizations to change from whatever institutions they 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 highly unlikely that one sector will have strong institutions and another one will have weak ones. Many countries in transition have weak institutions and the high degree of institutional transformation required by successive ideologies and contradictory targets throughout transition will have weakened them even further. The core services that the government is supposed to provide, such as legal and judicial protection for citizens, are the most affected by institutional weaknesses, 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. ECE countries need to build accountable governments and public agencies. The dramatic public discontent with politicians and political organizations comes from a generalized feeling that governments are not accountable. More often than not this perception is rooted in reality since institutions of horizontal accountability are extremely weak or non-existent. In developed democracies, vertical accountability is ensured by constituencies, and by competition for resources between various levels of government. Legislative bodies and the judiciary provide formal horizontal accountability, but NGOs, interest groups and strong, impartial media also bring an essential contribution to informal horizontal accountability. Surveys of the applicant countries show important differences but also point to a clear underdevelopment of institutions of accountability and law enforcement in general (see table 4.6). Both subjective and objective estimates of corruption and accountability show most countries of the ECE falling into the bottom half of the scale. Romania and Bulgaria, accession countries, score below Croatia on rule-of-law items. Poland is not doing much better than Eastern Balkan countries, however. Former Yugoslav countries were included in order to facilitate comparisons between the threespeeds of Eastern Europe. Three clusters indeed emerge, with Slovenia and Hungary at the top, highly similar in Home and Justice items, Macedonia and Kosovo at the bottom, and Romania, Bulgaria and Croatia somewhere in the middle of the scale, with Poland and the Czech Republic ahead of them. This shows that the three countries to become the next ‘buffer’ area of the EU in the East – Poland, Romania and Bulgaria – are not the best prepared for such a task. The ‘Area of freedom, security and justice’ has shown an extraordinary buildup of structures and activities as a reaction to perceived transnational threats to internal security; the outcome was the proposed common structures and measures at the European level, of which there have been quite a few over the past ten years. Monar45 quotes: (A) A proliferation of centralized European control mechanisms such as upgrading the Schengen external border controls, creating the Schengen

Predictable judiciary

Law and order index

Rule of law index

Law and order (0–6)

Accountability index (0–5)

Corruption

WDR 97

EBRD

KKZ*

ICRG

SAR–FH*

FH

4

2

-0.92

NA

4.66

5.25

3

1.51

Slovakia

3

2.64

4

-0.15

1.38

4.61

3.75

Bulgaria

3

5

0.15

1.43

NA

4.75

Croatia

3

1.74

NA

-0.26

NA

4.28

4.50

Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia**

3

4

-0.09

1.07

NA

4.25

Romania

4

NA

NA

NA

NA

5.00

Kosovo

1

6

0.71

2.34

3.65

1.75

Hungary

Notes: Higher numbers indicate poorer governance for FH and WDR97. Higher numbers indicate better governance for EBRD law and order index, TI, KKZ, SAR–FH and ICRG. SAR– FH index is the average score attributed to the response rate (0 – lowest, 5 – highest) of government agencies when asked to produce the most recent activity report. (Methodology described in Government Accountability in Eastern Europe [Bucharest: Romanian Academic Society], 2000 ⬍http://sar.euroweb.ro/issuegovern.htm⬎). * KKZ index was built by Daniel Kaufmann, Aart Kray and Pablo Zoido-Labaton, ‘Aggregating Governance Indicators’. World Bank Policy Research Working Paper No. 2195 (1996) and ‘Governance Matters’, World Bank Policy Research Working Paper No. 2196 (1999). Full description of these and other governance indicators can be found on the World Bank site
Source: Data from the World Development Report Survey of Enterprises 1997 (WDR97), the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD)/World Bank 1999 Business Enterprise Performance Survey, Transparency International (TI), KKZ, International Country Risk Guide (ICRG), Heritage Foundation, IMF Global Financial Statistics, the International Telecommunications Union, Freedom House (FH) and the Romanian Academic Society (SAR).

Rule of law

FH

Albania

Table 4.6 Rule of law in Eastern Europe: selected legal/judicial indicators

64

Alina Mungiu-Pippidi Information System (SIS), establishing Europol, setting up the Customs Information System, and reaching an agreement on the Eurodac Convention; (B) The adoption of a large number of binding and non-binding restrictive documents on the concept of asylum and immigration, which include the Dublin Convention, various resolutions to restrict immigration, the readmission agreements concluded by the Schengen members with third countries, etc.; and (C) Some first measures aimed directly at improving law enforcement, such as the imposition of standardized minimum sentences for fraud against the EC budget, the criminal law measures taken against cross-border corruption, the facilitation of extradition, and the first steps in permitting cross-border law enforcement operations.

At the 1999 Tampere Council substantial steps were taken towards: the creation of a common asylum system (especially on procedures and minimum guarantees); the use of external EU instruments to reduce the pressure exerted by immigration on the Union; improved cross-border litigation procedures; and an enhanced mutual recognition of judgements and more legislative action against money laundering. Two new institutions were created: Eurojust, to facilitate the coordination of national prosecuting authorities and support criminal investigations in organized crime cases; and a European Police College for the training of senior law enforcement officials. These highly complex and sophisticated instruments are to be adopted almost at the same time, and many of them either prior to accession or on day one of the accession by applicant countries. Given the current stage of institutional development of the East European applicants, in many instances such adoption can only be formal. More time and assistance is needed in order to adjust both national legislation and practice to such a demanding task, and in some cases those won’t even suffice. For border policies to be effective, however, more than formal adoption is needed. As Home Ministers from Poland and Romania have repeatedly pointed out, it is difficult to enforce borders without cooperation from neighbouring countries. There is considerable corruption among customs and borders officers even in applicant countries where they receive their wages regularly (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 Moldova there is a price tag for every felony, including the life sentence.46 Infrastructure upgrading and professional training on a massive scale are needed, but the most serious issue of all is the socioeconomic gap. How much above the national average can one pay law enforcement officers and judges to make sure they resist temptation? The downside of globalization is that bribes reach the level of developed countries even in underdeveloped ones, while even the highest wages

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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 of the Austrian wage level (at current exchange rates). In the Czech Republic and Hungary wage differentials are not much different. Eastern countries have made considerable efforts to comply with requirements to bring their judiciary and law enforcement agencies in line and some progress is indeed visible. But there is a direct correlation between the general level of institutional development and the implementation of Justice and Home Affairs. The future buffer zone countries have an uneven potential, but even the most advanced ones are hardly able to carry the burden of the EU Eastern border by themselves. The approach so far has been that of requiring them to adopt the acquis – therefore stressing the institutional end – and of offering some support in training and infrastructure building via PHARE programmes, reputed for their lack of flexibility and their inability to contribute to institution-building efforts. When describing the difficulties of reforming the law enforcement agencies in Russia via Western assistance programmes, Stephen Holmes makes a number of considerations 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 much harder. Improving the quality of public institutions requires a broader and deeper social consensus and capacity for cooperation than, say, currency stabilization or price liberalization. Law is a public good, and politically disorganized societies, by definition, have a hard time creating public goods. The magnitude of the challenge facing legal reformers can be expressed simply by recognizing that legal reform is a branch of state building.47 Evidence from East European states acknowledges this reality. The poor state of the judiciary is considered by analysts to be the most alarming problem within the Bulgarian and Romanian political systems. The budget for the judiciary in Bulgaria, for instance, is about one fiftieth of the average budget set aside by comparable EU countries, and the situation of other East European countries is not much better. Even more worrisome is the fact that the judiciary cannot be considered independent. For instance, a common feature is the involvement of the 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 liberal reforms through East European governments has only amplified problems in many sectors: the main EU assiatance programme, PHARE, often sponsors directly the domestic administrative corruption and lack of effectiveness, mainly under pressure from Brussels to spend the funds, rather than reach clear measurable targets. ‘Success’ in assistance programmes to some East European governments means, more often than not, that grantees managed to spend the allocated funds. A thorough diagnosis of what specific problem should have been targeted, by what means, by empowerment of what actors and with what finality

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is often missing. Therefore, it is no surprise that vast sums of money out of Western taxpayers’ pockets are spent in the East with minimal effect. Promoting large-scale institutional and societal change requires an understanding of the local situation based on thorough research, flexible and creative procedures of aid granting, and regulated measurements of its effects (much more than consultants’ assessments). The advent of a new legal culture in Eastern Europe cannot be prompted unless a more comprehensive strategy is forged aimed at building institutional social capital. This will require bringing in line various organizations capable of acting as horizontal accountability agents, either formal or informal, and empowering them to act as partners, ombudsmen and audit agents for governmental agencies within the framework of large coalitions granting transparency and accountability on the part of governments and the public sector in general. Corruption and accountability issues have been given little space on the agenda of European accession negotiations so far, the reason being that they are informal 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 administration systems is Brussels-driven, the EU needs to further strengthen its position regarding accountability and best administrative practices, and use its leverage to support domestic ‘mani pulita’ (‘clean hands’) coalitions, not governments alone. If the 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 investment in the former that can prompt some returns from investment in the latter. The same applies to countries that are not applicants – such as Russia – but are nevertheless massive recipients of European assistance programmes for the reform of law enforcement agencies.

Do good fences make good neighbours? Unlike previous enlargements, this is the first one to include the Justice and Home Affairs acquis, which now covers asylum, control over external borders, migration, organized crime, terrorism, drugs, as well as police, customs and judicial cooperation. Most importantly, the acquis also includes the Schengen agreement on the removal of border checks between member states. Article 8 of the Amsterdam Treaty Protocol, which includes the Schengen acquis, states that future EU members will be required fully to comply with the Justice and Home Affairs acquis. In spite of the diversity of national practices visible in the flexibility of arrangements within the Justice and Home Affairs regime (to accommodate Western countries that opt out: members such as UK and nonmembers such as Norway), this regime is well on its way to becoming generalized in Europe, at least in its control and enforcement rationale and its tendency to create Central European controlling instruments, such as Europol and the SIS.50 Most of the applicant countries have already started to adjust, changing their

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border control mechanisms and their visa regimes, and concluding re-admission agreements with their neighbouring countries. Romania and Bulgaria were required 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 other words, there is no room for negotiation here, with East European countries becoming passive consumers of asylum and border policies set by the EU. Applicant countries have more or less complied so far, the bottom line being more rather than less under all circumstances. Challenges vary greatly from country to country, however. The security of Poland’s eastern borders, for instance, has been a major concern for the EU. Not only has EU money (more than $50 million in 2000 alone) and technical assistance been provided to shore up Poland’s ability to control its borders, but in addition, the EU hopes to station German patrols along the Union’s new Eastern front. Poland in its turn is worried over the fate of ethnic Poles living in Ukraine. Indeed the various measures adopted between 1997 and 1999 led to a dramatic decrease in border traffic (50 per cent).51 Although Poland initially resisted the outright militarization of its borders with Ukraine and Belarus, Polish customs officers have begun to police the border in keeping with EU expectations. German-trained Polish border brigades have successfully tightened surveillance, but in doing so they have also curtailed the vibrant ‘bazaar economy’ that was flourishing in the border regions.52 There is clearly some political cost to these restrictions, combined with the strain of a long admission process. Poland was once the East European country most in favour of membership. But in 2000 only 59 per cent would 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 adjusted to come fully in line with that of the EU by the date of the Czech Republic’s accession. The Czechs’ main problem is their Roma population, which prompted repeated warning from the European Commission, but the Slovaks’ access to the Czech Republic’s labour market might also be reduced following full EU membership for the Czechs. The Czechs have also already introduced visas for Eastern neighbours who are black-listed by the EU. This meant putting an end to the only good legacy of communism: freedom to travel from one East European state to another. They had followed in the steps of Slovenia, which has taken the most restrictive approach to freedom of movement and therefore is the closest in spirit to the Schengen requirements. Slovenia introduced visas for Romanians and Bulgarians in 2000, following earlier similar requirements for citizens from the CIS, former Yugoslavia (except Croatia) and Albania. At the same time it started the very expensive process of building a Schengen border between 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, Hungary has struggled the most to keep its borders open to neighbouring states, due mainly to the existence of important Hungarian communities living outside national borders, notably in Transylvania (Romania), Ruthenia (Ukraine), Vojvodina (Yugoslavia) and Slovakia. In June 2001, as noted above, the

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Hungarian government adopted the ‘Status Bill’, the aim of which was allegedly to stop ethnic Hungarians’ emigration to Hungary and to ensure better conditions for them in their homelands. The Bill grants a ‘Hungarian card’ to every ethnic Hungarian living in a neighbouring country (Austria is excepted) who applies. The card is a token of second-rank citizenship: holders are able to travel visa-free and work in Hungary for three months every year with all benefits included. Needless to say, the Bill was quite unpopular with Hungary’s neighbours, mainly Romania, where a 1.6 million Hungarian community still resides. Romania filed complaints with the EC, tried to propose a motion of protest in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, and in the end managed to ensure that the card is granted to every applicant for a job who holds Romanian citizenship, and application could be made only on Hungarian, not Romanian, territory.54 Slovakia had moved ahead even of Hungary. Since 1997, during the Meciar government, it adopted the ‘Slovak card’, meant to expand some of the citizenship rights to ethnic Slovaks living in neighbouring countries, notably Ukraine. Following this, Slovakia introduced visas for CIS countries and is currently complying with the request of having the full Schengen acquis adopted on the first 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 adopted that introduced a far more secure type of passport. Conscripts were replaced by police officers at the borders, and visas for some of the countries black-listed by the EU were introduced. Following these timely measures, Bulgaria had the satisfaction of being removed from the visa black-list at the end of 2000. Neighbours such as Macedonia are extremely worried by the prospect of being cut off from Bulgaria by a restrictive visa policy. After the removal of Bulgaria from the visa black-list in 2000, Romania has the worst position among applicant countries, until being removed itself from 1 January 2002. Romania signed over thirty re-admission agreements (allowing the repatriation 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 severely limited institutional capacity. The consulates of EU member states granting visas in Romania have long been a picture of ineffectiveness, arbitrariness and corruption. Frequent purges of corrupt clerks by EU member states (those who cared to do it) proved unable to solve the matter. The freedom of movement of Romanian citizens is still extremely disputable as now Romanian authorities are preventing people from crossing the border if they cannot prove that they have enough money to travel. Faced with the lifting of visa requirements, some member states without warning introduced new conditions to determine whether Romanians could enter their space. In January 2002, nearly eighty Romanians 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

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to Central and South-Eastern Europe, but they will arise once their membership becomes a fact. The Russian-speaking minorities in the Baltic states will undoubtedly require some special travel status for relatives from Russia. Indeed, Russia itself is certain to feel its isolation more acutely once separated from the Baltic countries, whose seaside cities were once the pride of the Soviet Union and a common destination for domestic tourists. Some flexible arrangement allowing Russian citizens to get at least national visas at the border and be able to travel freely in the Baltic states, while being prevented from entering the rest of the 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 countries that had barely managed to surpass prior tensions. The situation of South-Eastern Europe is even more delicate since, although the EU-endorsed Stability Pact vowed to bring more stability and security to the region, favouring Croats over Serbs even after the normalization of the situation in Serbia, isolating high-migration potential Bosnia and Macedonia, and erecting a new wall between Slovenia and the rest of the Balkan countries can hardly be considered as stabilizing policies. Transitory or lasting forms of accommodation with neighbours are highly necessary. These would cover the Ukrainian–Polish and Romanian–Moldovan problems and the Balkan borders in general. While rushing to join the EU, applicant countries should not forget that vicinities are lasting realities, and by no means is the vicinity with Western Europe the only one that matters. Yugoslavia, Ukraine and Russia may not be doing well for the moment, but their citizens bear no guilt for their politically or socioeconomically inferior status, and if entrance to the club of the rich is still at a distance, at least these citizens should not lose their essential freedom to circulate within the former common East European space. This would only feed unnecessary frustration and resentment, which are far from being in short supply in the region.

5. Can consensus amongst the elite substitute for general 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 its share in the EU budget expenditures, the current enlargement looks second-rank and low in importance. Supporters in Western Europe, who know the difficulty of pushing for the enlargement idea, which is popular in the West only as long as it does not cost the taxpayer a penny, claim that this slow speed is the only possible one: at a faster pace either East Europeans could not bear the burden of adjustment, or the West European public would get scared off and put a hold to the whole process. Despite a low investment financially, the process is no less a major historic one and in time it will prove that a lot was accomplished even with limited resources. By and large, one gets the feeling that Easterners somehow

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steal the enlargement by the back door of the EU with the help of the Commission and the political and intellectual elites of a few member states. According to a recent Eurobarometer poll, a mere 27 per cent of Westerners think that enlargement is of primary importance for the EU, with Germans the wariest of EU citizens. That makes the Brussels bureaucracy the only consistent supporter of enlargement and adds to the democratic deficit between EU headquarters and member governments. Speaking no doubt for his constituents back home, the EU Commissioner for Enlargement, Guenther Verheugen, repeatedly emphasized that enlargement should be an informed political choice for EU citizens. But that will not happen until the enlargement project ceases to be a low-priority issue on the agenda of Western political leaders, who never had a consistent and sustained programme of ‘selling’ it to the public at home. Despite temporary setbacks, the view that by and large Eastern Europe after 1989 was a tremendous success55 seems to prevail over the pessimistic opinion that the region has changed at a slower pace than expected. Never before has democracy taken root anywhere at such an amazing speed: even countries that did not meet standards of economic success, such as Romania, managed to solve centuries-long inter-ethnic problems more impressively than anyone dared to predict in 1989. Successful markets paved the way for societal transformation almost everywhere, the different paces of change being better explained by the difference in initial constraints than by any other factor.56 Despite all this, the popularity of EU enlargement in Eastern Europe is still quite 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 a symbolic endorsement than anything else. Elites are, however, fully committed, and this commitment has gone beyond the communist/anti-communist divide within the political class, present at the beginning of transition. A major gain for the region is the fact that the pro-EU political discourse is the only legitimate one, with all alternate discourses being so far delegitimized. But will the pro-EU stance survive the difficulties of negotiations and integration? Will it survive Schengen and the double standards it incurs? Pro-Western elites 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 of them. Western political elites have quickly supported the enlargement idea in compensation, among other things, for deserting their Eastern counterparts in 1938, 1945 and 1956 – to mention only the more exceptional moments. On a less grand scale, the fall of democratic pro-EU governments in Romania (2000) and Bulgaria (2001) can also be partially blamed on the insufficient Western support they received. The popular support of these governments vanished after they endorsed the EU and NATO in the Kosovo war against an Orthodox neighbouring country and long-term ally. Promoting the austere fiscal policies needed to make these countries’ economies competitive with the EU did not help to boost their popularity either. These two governments can be considered casualties of the policy to engage in full pro-European policies with minor investment from the EU as back-up.

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

Conclusion All problems have solutions, more if looked at in detail, fewer if addressed globally. The East European border is no exception to the rule. On a broad historical scale it may look to be a hopeless game, in particular for Europe’s Balkan, former Ottoman-dominated territories, but also for Christian Orthodox and Muslim Eastern Europe in general. Voltaire said that Europe must distance itself from the Balkan Peninsula, then under Turkish occupation: its former Byzantine affiliation mattered less to him than the need to keep Europe away from legendary Thrace.57 Of course, the fact that it is the Orthodox countries that are lagging behind Europe, within or without the future enlarged EU border, may mean nothing in itself. The case of Greece shows that geographical determinism, not religion, is the origin of Europe’s post-modern borders. Passive endorsement by Western leaders of cumulated negative geographical determinisms, however, by paying less attention to and investing less in South-Eastern Europe can only reinforce the vicious circle and draw the European border north of the Balkan Peninsula. Voltaire’s warning would then be fulfilled. Looking at issues in more detail, though, there are a few obvious policy options to be endorsed if such negative developments are to be prevented. They are 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 its spending as much as possible, with some member states acting to lessen the impact experienced by European budgeting priorities as a result of the new country memberships. Exceptions and transitional thresholds of all kinds58 may be expected to prevent the new members from enjoying the same basic rights and privileges as the old ones and to protect the old rules of the game.59 The second assumption is that the enlargement process may well be delayed or even halted after the first group of countries join, more if Poland is part of this first group, less if it is not, due to difficulties presented in point one and to the serious economic gap between some of the applicant countries and the EU, despite progress registered with the formal adoption of the acquis. Since the EU’s policy towards Eastern Europe over the past decade was largely an incremental, selfinterest filtered response to strong pressures from Central European countries,60 we can assume that once these pressures fade the process will be stalled, although major points on the agenda of the new entrants (such as Poland’s need to keep a flexible 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

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enlargement may fail in the end and the reality will force important adjustments to be made as soon as joint pressure is applied by the disappointed first-wave joiners, on the one hand, and the delayed (for different reasons) second-wave applicants, 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 adjustments none the less.62 A third assumption concerns Russia and Ukraine, who will continue to develop at a slower pace, remaining extremely poor and disorderly societies. Illegal border-related activities as well as immigration pressures on the EU border will therefore only grow as it moves further East. Assumption number four is that it would take at least a decade to bring former Yugoslavia back into some form of self-sustaining regional political unit, even if a clear political project, 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 and received a high level of foreign direct investment. Its weaknesses are all the more visible in the other cases, at risk of generating casualties once real hard problems are on the table, such as Polish agriculture. Furthermore, the acquis can be a burden rather than an aid in places where there is serious institutional underdevelopment and informal institutions prevail over formal ones. This is merely to say that different cases (or countries) require different approaches; more problems require more support if there is the political will to bring the task to a successful end for each and every applicant country; the acquis must be understood as an end, not an instrument, and therefore policies should be devised that help to integrate it within domestic institutions rather than expect it to shape new ones. This requires giving up some of the rigid strategies pursued with such little success so far and their instruments (the famous PHARE programme in its current form) and associating with other actors and donors (such as the World Bank and domestic NGOs) in a more problem-centred approach. This is especially valid for the building of an accountable, transparent and effective judiciary and law enforcement segment in South-Eastern Europe. No revision of treaties or other inaccessible strategies are needed, only a better and more daring understanding of assistance strategies and the need to bring in the customers besides the 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 instability in the region. It was obvious all along that Eastern Balkan countries were not ready 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 they should become NATO members. This can be realistically done before their becoming EU members in 2002. The tremendous difference NATO membership 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

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should be extended in 2002 to at least all countries on the South-Eastern flank of enlarged Europe.63 It is only realistic to assume that some borders will remain more difficult than others, and that for a while borders may remain between regions at peace (Bulgaria) and regions at war (Macedonia). While struggling to develop civilian institutions, we must also admit that some challenges will not wait until these countries are ready. (3)Extended regional cooperation and development assistance to the East and South. More cooperation 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-applicants to keep some freedom to travel in Eastern Europe. The same solutions should be applied in former Yugoslav countries, exceeding the model of the recent EU–Macedonia agreement. Enhanced cooperation and investment in regional programmes rather than isolation from former Yugoslav countries can bring the region back together, a solution that has become less unimaginable after the fall of the Milošević regime in Belgrade and the relative appeasement of the tensions in Macedonia. In order to succeed in enlarging to the full panel of current applicants and to include in the future other former Yugoslav states, Europe needs to move beyond the mechanical strategy of adoption of the acquis. The acquis is not a development strategy, and wherever it is tried as such it will not bring about institutional development, in the field of Justice and Home Affairs or any other, but only formal multiplying of unenforceable rules and regulations. Some intermediate strategies should be devised to help more backward countries catch up, and these should be innovative, patterned, for instance, on the model of US policies of encouraging – and guaranteeing – private investment in neighbouring Mexico. Where public money is short, a strategy must be devised to make private money come in to support indirectly the development of institutions necessary to business. The business sector has a main interest in developing law and order institutions, and it should be made an ally. The treatment in the development phase for some of the applicants or potential applicants should be different to the treatment states receive after becoming members. This implies having an active policy to encourage Western private investors and to build partnerships with them and domestic allies against corruption, mafia and illegal border activities. This means giving up the current formal and strictly governmental assistance in the field in order to create far-reaching coalitions with innovative ways of funding programmes. Looking again at the Balkans, Greece is there as an example of funds wasted on formal, government-run structural aid programmes that did not succeed in changing informal institutions. Instead of such programmes, the Balkan stability pact should propose innovative approaches based on broad coalitions of governments, businesses and NGOs. In olden times, enlightened conquerors were accompanied in their campaigns by merchants and artists: Europe’s advance to the East requires such a collection of military, police, business and institution-building groups and none of those alone can succeed in taming both the Tartars and the West’s dread of them.

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Notes 1 See also Zielonka (chapter 1) and Anderson (chapter 12), this volume, for a more substantive definition of borders. 2 The expression is the title of a famous novel by Dino Buzzati. The hero guards a border 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: ABCClio, 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 PostCommunist Europe (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998); Alina Mungiu-Pippidi, Government Accountability in East Central Europe; Governance, Accountability and Institutional Social Capital in the Third Europe. A Survey of Romania, Bulgaria and Slovakia (Romanian Academic Society 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 reunification, European history might have been spared its most recent war (see also Heinz Kramer, ‘The European Community’s Response to the New Eastern Europe’, Journal of 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 former Yugoslavian states at the same time, therefore setting the most important incentive to peace 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-isready approach – good policies are built on good incentives embedded within. Borders, not economic development, are the prevailing common problem of former Yugoslav states, and border-solving business requires regional, not country-bycountry, approaches. 18 The Status Bill had been long pending before being passed on 19 June by the Hungarian Parliament. Its initial version included a few discriminations, which were subsequently dropped at the EC’s suggestion. 19 This worked in post-1918 Eastern Europe to a large extent, in unitary states more than in federal ones. As the region was so heterogeneous, however, it did not work fully on all counts. 20 See Marius Vahl, ‘Borderland Europe: Dividing along the Polish–Ukrainian frontier?’, CEPS Commentary (The Centre for European Policy Studies, 2000).

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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 (Summer 1993), 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 Political Change in 43 Societies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). 27 Huntington’s famous cultural divide between Catholic Habsburg Central Europe and Orthodox Ottoman Balkans does not exist. Multivariate models explaining democratic orientation fail to turn out religion as a predictor (see Rose et al., Democracy and Its Alternatives); when comparing within a closer development range, that is, Romania and Bulgaria against fellow second-wave applicant but Catholic and Central European 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 Enlarged Europe, RSC No. 2000/20, 2000) also emphasizes the widening gap between applicant countries and considers differentiation essential (see also Mungiu-Pippidi, Making Democratic Institutions Work for the People). 29 A quite ineffectual thanks to this effect. The unpopular policy of support for NATO bombing cost the Romanian liberal government a dramatic drop in popularity followed by loss of office. The Bulgarian government, despite holding elections over a year later, also paid dearly in popular sympathy. 30 The Gothenburg European Council acknowledged this and, for the first time in a resolution on enlargement, included the idea that applicants facing more problems need 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. Strict geographical–economic determinism seems to guide the EC’s policy on Schengen, imposing on newcomers harder rules than on Western non-Schengen member states and non-members. 33 See also J. Batt and G. Amato, Final Report of the Reflection Group on the Long-Term Implications of EU Enlargement: The Nature of the New Border (Florence: European University Institute, 2000). 34 See Ewa Morawska, chapter 9, this volume; Renate Langewiesche and Martina Lubyova, ‘Migration, Mobility and the Free Movement of Persons: An Issue for Current 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 2000 that ‘Roma in Hungary should try to learn and work more.’ József Krasznai, spokesman of the Zámoly group, said Orbán would be entitled to make such comments ‘only when all Romany children are able to go to standard schools and Roma are not discriminated against on the labour market’, RFE/RL Newsline, Vol. 4, No. 153 (10 August 2000).

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39 One of the more dramatic examples of member state attitudes towards Romany asylum seekers came when Belgium ignored a stay on deportation issued by the European Court of Human Rights and forcibly deported a large group of Romany asylum seekers to Slovakia in October 1999. See RFE/RL Newsline, 5:2, Part II (4 January 2001). See also Claude Cahn and Peter Vermeersch, ‘The Group Expulsion of Slovak Roma by the Belgian Government: A Case Study of the Treatment of Romany Refugees in Western Countries’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs (Spring/Summer 2000). 40 The Roma population is subdivided into almost forty groups, according to customs and 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 distinction to 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 Development Fund in Romania. Targeted at the poorest communities, the programme matches World Bank funds with community resources (most often labour). Field operators identify communities most in need, advertise the programme and help local organizations. It is hard to imagine that such an effective programme could be run by the EU one day as the application procedures are minimal, the operator assists applicants in doing them and the applicants do not even need to be legal entities, proof of a shared bank account being sufficient. 42 See Stephen Holmes’ ‘Demand for Law’ on the failure of assistance programmes to reform 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; institutions are the means of governance, not its ends, therefore instrumental and intermediate in their essence. 44 A broader argument on this is to be found in The Road to Stability and Prosperity in South Eastern Europe: A Regional Strategy Paper, Chapter 6, ‘The Need for Strong Institutions and Good Governance’ (World Bank Europe and Central Asia, March 2000). 45 Jörg Monar, ‘An Emerging Regime of European Governance for Freedom, Security and Justice’, Briefing Note 2/99 for ESRC Programme ‘One Europe or Several?’ (Centre for European Politics and Institutions, Department of Politics, University of Leicester, 1999). 46 The latest form of struggle against corruption in the law enforcement agencies has been the setting up, in Romania, of anonymous websites disclosing corrupt policemen, 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 or Several?’ (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.

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58 One example is the April 2001 Commission decision to phase the granting of full mobility rights for five to seven years in the case of new entrants, as requested by Germany. 59 See, for instance, Spain’s reluctance to accept a change in the distribution of structural 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 at different paces. This would also allow NATO to decide where more urgent involvement is needed, such as the more vulnerable borders.

5

Where does Europe end? Dilemmas of inclusion and exclusion William Wallace

The Cold War gave Western Europe a secure and stable eastern frontier, guarded by the Russians. Western Europe became ‘Europe’, and ‘Europe’ was firmly part of ‘the West’: two overlapping concepts, easily elided. Across the Iron Curtain lay Eastern Europe: unfree Europe, Eurasian Europe, excluded by Soviet domination from ‘Western’ institutions. These Western institutions – the European Community and NATO, the Council of Europe and the WEU – in turn formed part of the broader ‘Atlantic Community’, the ‘free world’. Ideology and institutional membership went together; concepts of community served as the rhetorical underpinning for both the North Atlantic Treaty and the European Communities. This has, however, created a central problem for post-Cold War Europe. The cultural claim to be ‘European’, to share European values, history, identity, has political, security and economic consequences. The evocative phrase that dissidents in East Central Europe used in the 1980s – to ‘rejoin the West’ – implied both to recover their links with Western culture and ‘civilization’ and to negotiate full membership of Western institutions, with all the privileges that membership offered. Must cultural Europe become identical with institutional Europe? Can Western institutions avoid provoking an anti-Western backlash in countries that do not gain the full membership that they seek? Is there an alternative to drawing new lines of inclusion and exclusion as institutionalized Europe extends reluctantly eastward? Is it possible to design forms of variable geometry that avoid the erection of a new divide between Europe and non-Europe, privilege and dependence, security and insecurity, free movement and entry controls? The ideal of a Europe without borders developed within a Western Europe with a strongly defended eastern frontier; the development of the Schengen system (of the abolition of internal border controls within the EU) since 1985 has been accompanied by a wide range of compensatory measures, including efforts to tighten external border controls. Modern states, after all, depend on a clear division between citizens and aliens, between insiders and outsiders; the more functions the confederal EU takes over from its component states, the more it needs in turn to have clearly defined external lines. The central paradox that this chapter addresses is that the European Union is unworkable without

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

Europe’s fuzzy borders What Europe you see depends on where you live. ‘Europe’ is a moveable set of myths and images, both positive and negative, embedded in national histories and vernacular literatures. There is no idea of Europe common to all European states, and therefore also no agreement on where Europe ends. West and East Europeans, Northern and Southern Europeans all have their own definition of what Europe means and where it ends – and all are equally convinced that they are offering a generally valid definition. Cold War Western Europe exhibited its own confusion about its core space and 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 Treaty Organization, which stretched eastwards across Iraq and Iran to Pakistan. Article 237 of the Treaty of Rome states simply that ‘any European state may apply to become a member of the Community.’1 The loose definition of what ‘Europe’ implied was evident in the EEC’s first Association Agreements, with Greece and Turkey, which envisaged membership at the end of a long transition process of over twenty years. The political debate within Israel in the early 1960s about whether to pursue a parallel agreement, with the same long-term objective, led to little more than Israel’s continuing membership of such peripheral European bodies as Eurovision, whose annual song contest was won by an Israeli singer in 1998; but the expectation that Israel might negotiate at least as favourable an association agreement as Greece illustrates how little thought had been given to the future shape and limits of European integration. The Council of Europe’s membership in the 1980s offered an extraordinary image, of a continent which stretched from Finland to Cyprus without including Poland or Hungary, justified in terms of the political values that the Council represented 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 Marshall Plan aid and promote cooperation among the market economies of non-socialist Europe, was reshaped in 1961 into the OECD, with NATO’s two North American states and in addition the Pacific‘Western’ states of Australia, New Zealand and Japan extending its previously-European membership. Spain was excluded from European institutions until after the death of General Franco in 1975, though the Franco regime – staunchly anti-communist – succeeded in building 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 two halves of Europe, each led by a semi-European power, was institutionalized in the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe: ‘Europe from Vancouver to Vladivostok’, with the Soviet Union bringing the former Russian empire to the conference table, and the USA including Alaska and Hawaii. It was therefore ‘natural’ for the successor states to the USSR to take up their seats within the expanding post-cold war OSCE. Their territories, after all, contained many of the strategic missiles over which East–West negotiators had bargained, and many of the military bases with which security analysts remained concerned. Georgia and Armenia, at least, could claim a small stake in Europe’s culture and heritage, through their links to the Byzantine Empire; Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and the other Central Asian states could claim only their links to Turkey and to Islamic civilization as alternative reference points to Russian conquest. Each of these institutions embedded different aspects of the loose and overlapping concepts of ‘Europe’ and ‘the West’, as these had come to be defined by West European elites and their transatlantic allies during the Cold War: resistance to communist expansion; commitment to open societies, civil liberties and parliamentary democracy; acceptance of market economics and (relatively) free trade. These institutionalized values were spelt out in (US) Presidential speeches, in the preambles to the Treaties of Paris and Rome, in the communiqués of heads of government meetings, but were not – except in the Council of Europe – tightly defined or applied. There was overall agreement on some kind of European (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. A definition of democracy that required that government should clearly represent the majority of the electorate would, for example, have excluded the United Kingdom almost throughout the modern era; no British government in the past thirty years has represented more than 44 per cent of the electorate, some less than 40 per cent. The Italian economy in the 1960s and 1970s was an extraordinary mixture of state control and private influence in which market rules played only a secondary role and competition was far from open. Secret services in several Western countries operated largely beyond democratic scrutiny, on occasion 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 governments overlooked variations in national practices that fell short of the ideals proclaimed but operated to preserve domestic peace and international stability. Ideas and expectations have evolved over the past fifty years, hardening into the precise conditions that the European Union now spells out to applicants for membership. Agenda 2000 thus provides for some purposes the most precise definition of European values outside the European Convention of Human Rights, extending more widely than that Convention into the details of market rules and public administration. States like Turkey that were accepted members of the ‘Western’ community throughout the Cold War feel aggrieved, with, from their perspective, considerable justification, that the goal-posts have now been moved: that their partners and allies now demand of them adherence to standards of behaviour that they themselves scarcely met a generation ago, as a condition of access to the economic and political privileges that Western institutions provide. Westernizers in Russia and Ukraine have a similar sense of unfairness: of unrealistic demands placed upon them, without recognizing the difficult circumstances under which they are living and the special social, political and economic conditions they face. The concept of a ‘return to Europe’ has thus proved deeply ambiguous. Historical claims, associated with national myths, overlap with assertions of political, social and economic transformation as criteria for qualification. ‘Europe’ is identified with the EU; denial of accession to the EU is thus seen as a denial of the claim to share a European identity. Refusal to recognize such claims is seen as exclusion: as an insult to national identity as well as a blow to hopes 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 their governments and political elites are confident that they would be welcomed as applicants should they change their minds, and anticipate that they would be able to negotiate mutually satisfactory terms of entry. Theirs is a voluntary exclusion, which carries no sense of inferiority or forced dependence; their economies are prosperous, their societies are stable, their boundaries are secure. The states to Western Europe’s east and south, in contrast, start from an awareness of their unavoidable dependence. They are demandeurs for access, asking for assistance – and for recognition, for the status that membership of European institutions is seen to confer. It is thus much easier in the post-Cold War world to leave a certain fuzziness around Europe’s western and northern borders than about those that have opened to the east and south-east. Public opinion in Norway and Iceland, political and intellectual elites, feel no less European because they are outside the EU; there are those within Norway (and more within Switzerland) who feel almost superior to those who have compromised their sovereignty and national identity by accepting the full obligations of formal European integration. These rich Western countries have, relatively successfully, managed to pick from the à la carte menu of European integration: with economic association, and for

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Norway and Iceland also full freedom of movement within the EU, without shouldering the other burdens of EU membership or feeling it necessary to represent their interests directly round the Council of Ministers’ table. It is much harder to persuade poorer and less secure countries on Europe’s other peripheries that ‘Europe’ does not need to become coterminous with European institutions. Most West European governments would be happy for the privileges and obligations of EU and NATO membership to diminish step by step across Europe’s eastern periphery, through patterns of association and variable geometry. They may, however, face an insurmountable challenge in persuading such countries that half-membership or association offers either sufficient economic and security advantages or sufficient status to form an acceptable alternative. Mikhail Gorbachev’s concept of a ‘common European home’, for example, was intended not only to strengthen the CSCE but also to encourage Western states to open their markets – and their technological exports – to trade with the USSR: to include the Soviet Union inside the European economic system, from which Soviet planners hoped to gain desperately needed technological assistance, and hard currency to pay for the imports they needed. The hope of gaining these benefits persuaded Soviet leaders to accept that their regimes should be judged in terms of human rights and civil liberties by Western, or West European, standards: an early example of the trade-off between political standards and potential economic benefits that has characterized Western Europe’s approach to former socialist states since 1989. The leverage Western governments exercised over socialist regimes through CSCE review conferences depended upon the expectation of those socialist regimes that access to Western markets, financial and technological transfers was open to them if they demonstrated some degree of willingness to comply: no expectation of access, no political leverage. Expectations among post-socialist governments have been higher: not only of access and transfers but also of recognition and acceptance, as full members within a Western/European community that is also an Atlantic/European Community. ‘But how can the West refuse us?’ a Romanian government spokesman protested to a visiting BBC team in early 1991. ‘You cannot create a common European home, and then expect the Romanians to live in the doghouse.’3 Yet Europe is an imaginary space, shaped and reshaped by politicians and intellectuals to serve their changing purposes. There is – as will be explored further below – no ‘natural’ basis for solidarity. The limits of international communities are defined by inherited assumptions and subjective choice; politics depends upon imagination and invention.4 ‘Europe’ as a set of values, or as a region of shared history, has no clear outer limits, and many competing claims to constitute its historical core. The problem political leaders face is that they are forced to operate both at the rhetorical level and at the operational. And an operational, institutionalized Europe cannot be reconstructed without drawing boundaries, without bringing some states in and leaving others out.

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The necessity to have clear borders in the modern polity No boundary, no state – and by extension, no boundaries, no effective European institutions. Boundaries enable social systems to relate to their environment in a regular and predictable way. Luhmann has remarked on the role of boundaries: [They] reduce the points of contact with the environment, thus allowing the complex internal conditioning of relations with the environment. … Only when boundaries do exist can relations between system and environment increase their complexity, their differentiation and their controlled mutability.5 The distinctions between internal and external security, between shared taxation and redistribution and ‘external’ programmes of economic assistance, between citizens and aliens, between domestic law and international law, are all intrinsic to the modern state. As West European institutions, above all the European Union, have developed state-like qualities through increasingly extensive frameworks of law, regulation, taxation and expenditure, so they too cannot avoid the drawing of boundaries to define the limits of jurisdiction, obligation and privilege. Not only for the EU but also for NATO the inside/outside distinction is of fundamental importance. It is not only a matter of shared obligations, difficult to fudge as half-obligations or semi-guarantees to associate members; the terms of NATO’s Article Five are clearly stated, and bind each full member to share in the common defence. For members of both NATO and the EU, full participation in decision-making is also a key factor: the right to sit at the table, to ensure that each national perspective is expressed, each national interest protected and promoted. The presence of Danish representatives, and since 1995 also Swedish and Finnish, throughout the extensive network of EU ministerial and official meetings has made it easier for Norwegian and Icelandic politicians to stay outside, relatively unconcerned that their particular interests will be forgotten in specific negotiations; on most issues and under most circumstances, they can be confident that others will speak on their behalf. Few states in Eastern or SouthEastern Europe can share that confidence, or accept that they may safely wait in the corridor while others shape European policies on their behalf. Their governments 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 organizations to understand that when hard bargains are struck, it is those who strike them who protect their own interests best, not those outside on whose behalf they may from time to time claim to be acting. Fiscal boundaries are as old as the modern state. States rely on frontiers for the definition of residents for tax purposes and in many cases also for the actual raising of the tax. The European Union relies for its revenue partly on its own resources, giving it a certain independence from national contributions and making it into a political unit that can act in its own right within the remit of its tasks. Although small in scale – limited to 1.27 per cent of Community GDP and

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with little macro-economic significance – the budget is vital to some smaller and poorer countries of the Union (above all Ireland, Greece and Portugal, but to a significant extent also Spain) that depend on extensive transfers from the structural funds. Part of the Community’s own resources – that is, the customs duties based on the Common External Tariff and the agricultural levies on trade with non-member countries – are raised at the frontiers. The percentage of each member state’s VAT revenue that is transferred to the EU is collected by customs officers operating inside the EU territory.6 Taxability requires clear boundaries. The erosion of national tax bases through the transfer of capital to ‘tax havens’ inside and outside the EU is already becoming one of the most sensitive issues on the EU’s agenda. The ‘prevention of harmful tax competition’ is seen to require clear rules, imposed across the EU – and as far as possible extended through negotiation and regulation beyond its boundaries. ‘Offshore’ financial centres with ambiguous relationships to the EU – Monaco, Liechtenstein, Gibraltar, the Channel Islands, the Isle of Man – have been tolerated so long as their operations are not seen as representing too great a threat to fiscal revenues within member states; but it appears increasingly likely that member state concerns about possible fiscal irregularities will force changes in their regimes in the coming years. Swiss banking regulations and the perceived role these play in tax evasion within the EU represent some of the most sensitive issues in Switzerland’s relations with the Community, which surrounds its territory. The distinction between insiders and outsiders arises vividly when it comes to questions of redistribution. The EU’s cohesion and structural funds have developed through a succession of internal bargains, justified in the Preamble to the Rome Treaty as ‘to strengthen the unity of their economies and to ensure their harmonious development by reducing the differences existing between the various regions and the backwardness of the less favoured regions’. The concept of ‘Community solidarity’ is evoked as a rationale for this transfer. This raises some underlying questions about the economic benefits that follow from membership, and the link between perceptions of shared community and willingness to contribute to redistribution. Economists have long argued over whether economic integration spreads its benefits evenly across the territories included, or leads to core regions profiting more than the periphery. If the latter is accepted, peripheral states and regions will require substantial and permanent transfers in compensation; if the former, then transitional transfers of the type agreed at Maastricht in the ‘Cohesion Fund’ to assist poorer member states to qualify for membership of the single currency should be sufficient. Financial transfers have formed part of Community bargaining since the Rome Treaties were negotiated, providing side-payments to reluctant (or awkward) member governments to buy agreement 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 shared community on which such ‘solidarity’ rests gets thinner with each expansion of the 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 the prospect of paying for eastern enlargement was edging onto the agenda, ‘will stretch only so far as the German taxpayer is willing to accept.’ ‘In that case,’ a German colleague replied, ‘it stops just west of Leipzig.’8 The growth of West European cooperation in justice and home affairs has also given greater prominence to the external borders of the Union. The key to the establishment of an area of ‘Freedom, Security and Justice’ is strengthened cooperation in internal security, and a clearer demarcation between the internally secure area and the uncontrolled area outside. The whole logic of internal security is to identify a clear population within a territory whose welfare is to be protected by keeping undesired aliens out, and by maintaining systematic controls on those who cross the external border. The rapidly developing structure of Schengen, of Europol, of cooperation among national intelligence services, customs and immigration services, testifies to the strength of this division between free movement inside and greater protection against outsiders. Some have identified an emerging discourse that identifies as ‘dangerous’ everything coming from the East, through the development of a security continuum criminalizing immigration and securitizing crime.9 There is an underlying ambivalence in the EU’s approach to eastern enlargement in the field of internal security and border controls. In 1999 both Bulgaria and Romania were subject to the EU’s common visa regime, though in principle accepted as future members of the EU. German officials have made it repeatedly clear to their Polish counterparts that progress in opening the German–Polish border depends partly upon the effectiveness of Polish controls on their country’s eastern border: thus choking off the flourishing cross-border trade that had developed between eastern Poland and western Ukraine in the mid-1990s, opening Poland to the west at the expense of shutting its borders to the east.10 Cross-border exchanges have nevertheless been expanding across the EU’s external borders. Even with tightened controls, there is plenty of evidence that total control of borders is impossible.11 Nevertheless, the queues of trucks and cars at the Community’s eastern external borders provide vivid evidence that borders do still matter, that globalization of economic activities is still limited by territorial jurisdictions, and that contemporary democratic polities need borders for their own internal economic and political systems to flourish. Europe may have no clear boundaries, but it is difficult to conceive of the European Union without them.

The frontiers of Europe in the past Jan Zielonka has suggested that the twin weaknesses in identity and democracy are at the root of ‘Euro-paralysis’.12 The re-emergence of ‘Central Europe’ in West European consciousness, during the course of the 1980s, called up echoes in collective memory and history sufficiently familiar for West European publics to 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 to reorient 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 intellectual entity in contradistinction to Asia’13 developed in ancient Greece. Even before the arrival of Christianity and Islam, Iver Neumann argues, ‘the proto-European Greeks defined themselves culturally in direct opposition to the Asian Other.’14 Beyond the Danubian and Rhenish limes lay the barbarian north. Traditions of eastern Orthodoxy have preserved this sense of civilization as centred in the eastern Mediterranean, and Western Europe as populated by ‘Franks’. The Archbishop of Athens, in a sermon in April 1999, is reported to have compared NATO’s bombing of Serbia with the Frankish sacking of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade. The overrunning of the Western Empire by a succession of northern invaders, and the re-establishment of a new Western Empire with its centre in the Rhineland and Burgundy, took ‘Europe’ further north and west than any classical scholar would have imagined. The common threads through history that refer to what have been termed the ‘three basic elements of Europe’, Athens, Rome and Jerusalem – monotheism, the birth of scientific inquiry, the rule of law, freedom and humanism – 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 lain more and more clearly in the west. Rome represented the southernmost territory of the Holy Roman Empire, rarely under the effective control of the Emperor – though the conversion of the Germanic tribes to Western Christianity had provided a key element in the rise of organized kingdoms in the west. Frankish expansion eastwards across what is now Brandenburg into present-day Poland gave the Empire a stronger northern foundation.16 The Western Emperor came to title himself first as ‘King of the Germans’, with a capital that moved across present-day Germany from the Rhineland through Swabia into Franconia and Bohemia, before becoming fixed under the Habsburgs in the ‘eastern kingdom’ (Osterreich) of the West – Austria. Western Christendom pushed east, both against pagan Prussians and Lithuanians and against Orthodox rulers in Russia. More disastrously in European history and in the creation of myths that linger on to the present day, Western Christendom’s Mediterranean expansion, embarked on as a crusade to recapture the holy places that Byzantium had lost to the infidels, deteriorated into incursions against the Byzantine Empire, which briefly planted Western kingdoms around the eastern Mediterranean and has left behind ‘Frankish’ castles in Greece and the Greek islands. The Orthodox countries of eastern Christendom took the heaviest brunt of the invasions that swept out of Asia between the fall of Rome and the high Middle Ages. Islamic successes in the western Mediterranean pushed the core of reviving Western Europe further north; but Islam had already conquered the Asian lands of the Byzantine Empire. The Mongol hordes that broke through the 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 Byzantium until the final collapse of 1453. The elision that Samuel Huntington makes in ‘The Clash of Civilizations’17 between the Islamic and Orthodox worlds had already been made by Western Catholics by the end of the fifteenth century, as Turkish armies with troops recruited from their Orthodox subjects advanced through Hungary towards Vienna, and Turkish galleys with Orthodox oarsmen attacked the power of Venice in the eastern Mediterranean. The Orthodox world was thus shut off from the great intellectual revolutions that shaped the modern West – the Renaissance, the Reformation and the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. 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 backwards and forwards across the Atlantic as French troops supported the American War of Independence; and were carried across Central Europe and into the Mediterranean by Napoleon’s armies. Huntington expressed the conventional view of Western historians, as set out in a semi-official history sponsored by the EC;18 academic and political proponents of the centrality of Central Europe have vigorously contested this Western consensus view since the division of Europe ended.19 Nineteenth-century Europe was the West. The most ‘modern’ states and economies, and the most ‘advanced’ cultures in the world, were to be found in Great Britain, France and Germany. The empires of Eastern Europe were its periphery: accepted as European in the culture of their capitals, but (accurately) seen from the West as less advanced and less stable. The Industrial Revolution spread eastwards, from England across Belgium into the Rhineland, Bohemia and northern Italy; the limited industrialization of Russia before 1914 depended heavily on British and German entrepreneurs, and French, British and German capital. Russia was accepted as one of the European ‘powers’, building its drive for imperial expansion on the dual foundations of its claim to have become the protector of the Orthodox world against Ottoman oppression and on its landward colonization of Central and Northern Asia. But liberal opinion in Paris and London never regarded Russia as fully part of the civilized world; while imperial Berlin and Vienna saw Russia as Eurasian, a half-barbarian state held together by a determined and Europeanized elite. Modernizing elites in Istanbul and Tokyo identified Europeanization with modernization, learning to dress and to dance according to European fashion in the same way that they acquired European skills in engineering and military training. Japan was accepted as a ‘Western’ power, alongside Russia, in the interventions in China in the late nineteenth century. Those in contemporary Turkey who argue that the Ottoman Empire had succeeded in establishing its European credentials, if only as ‘the sick man of Europe’, are saying little more than that all national reformers looked to Western Europe to provide the models for political, economic and social reform, in the same way that in the world post-1945 all national reformers looked to the USA or the USSR as the models that they should follow.

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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 that Europe’s boundaries may thus spread as ‘Westernizers’ in countries on Europe’s eastern and southern peripheries succeed in incorporating those values into law, politics and society. Pessimistic interpretation, in contrast, would follow Huntington’s view: that there is a deep divide between the political and social cultures of Western Christendom and those of the Orthodox/Ottoman world, unbridgeable within the foreseeable future. It is important to note that Western powers have assumed their superiority over eastern empires (and Ottoman dependencies) for the past two hundred years; and that Eastern elites have returned that disdain with a studied ambivalence about their relationship to the corrupt but luxurious West. Russian history has witnessed cycles of conflict between Westernizers, Old Believers, and self-proclaimed patriots attempting to balance 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 eastern frontiers is thus in many ways superfluous. Mental maps have counted for more than physical geography; the Carpathians, the Urals, the Dnieper or the Don have served to illustrate imaginary boundaries as much as to delineate territory. The Urals have acquired a degree of authenticity as a frontier from generations of Western schoolbooks, together with the Bosphorus; but neither has served as a formal frontier, whether between states or ‘civilizations’.20 Boundaries in the Balkans were repeatedly redrawn by war and by conference diplomacy between the 1870s and 1919; the border between Greece and Turkey was settled only after Greece’s disastrous failure to conquer western Anatolia in 1922. What is now Algeria was formally part of France until the early 1960s; migration and settlement have flowed north and south across the Mediterranean since classical times, and continue to do so. What we know of earlier ‘European’ projects is that most have started from Western Europe and have spread only some way eastwards. The Duc de Sully’s proposals for a European federation in the early sixteenth century included the Papacy, Hungary, Bohemia, the Empire, Poland and Venice, France, Spain, Britain, Denmark, Sweden, Savoy, Switzerland, the Netherlands and ‘Italy’, but excluded ‘Asiatic’ Muscovy. ‘The frontiers allowed for religious blocs – Lutheran, Catholic and Calvinist – to remain separate, and these frontiers were to be guaranteed by a general assembly of representatives from all the newly shaped units.’21 Immanuel Kant’s plans for perpetual peace were thought out in the eastern Baltic, but he looked west from Königsberg in the hope of finding European republics in the lands reshaped by the Enlightenment and the French revolutionary wars. Konrad Adenauer, with the Western perspective of a Rhinelander and a German 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 the Landstraße’ (the road out of Vienna towards the East),22 as German lands gave way to Slav and Hungarian. Definition of Europe through contrasting it with non-Europe, the uncivilized ‘other’ that threatens the civilized West, has deep roots in European history and literature, as Iver Neumann has argued. ‘In the fourteenth and early fifteenth century, … the presence of an Other which could be characterized as the embodiment of evil served to unify and strengthen the disparate Christendom.’23 When divisions within Western Christendom widened into the Reformation, John Calvin spoke of a shattering not of Christendom, but of Europe itself (Europae Concussio)24 – which indicates how closely associated the ideas of (Western) Christendom and of Europe had become. The role that Russia assumed with the fall of Constantinople as the protector of Orthodoxy defined Russianness, in turn, in opposition to the corrupted West.25 Russian nationalism thus contained strong anti-Western (or antiEuropean) elements for political leaders to use when it served their purposes. With the Russian Revolution, the religious element in anti-Western rhetoric was replaced by the ideological one, rejecting the corruption of Western capitalism for 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 the Second World War. Neumann argues that Europe defined itself to a large extent in 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 modern Europe was occupied mainly by Turkey and Russia. In the nineteenth century particularly, the Ottoman Empire was characterized as barbaric in comparison to civilized Europe, which was based on humanity, individual rights and adherence to international law and the rule of law domestically. Russia, for (West) Europeans, was also essentially an Asian country with a Europeanized elite. With Russian expansion beyond the Urals, a debate began as to the demarcation between 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 the one hand, there was a long association of Russia with the Mongols who had ruled the entire country in the thirteenth century. On the other hand, there was the fact that Russia itself, after emancipating itself from the ‘Tartar Yoke’, turned eastwards and colonised north-eastern Asia. Russia thus came to be a frontier separating Europe from Asia.27 From the West European perspective the countries between Germany and Russia – contemporary Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, populated by Slavs intermingled with Germans and Jews – represented a frontier region, the lands in-between the West and the Asiatic East. The concept of Mitteleuropa carried undertones of prejudice against both Slavs and Jews, the peoples of a region dependent on Western Europe and oriented towards Western Europe,

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though politically dependent on the three empires that had divided the region among themselves. The occupation of East Central Europe after 1945 thus fitted into pre-existing Western images – as did the dissident voices of the early 1980s, looking westward to help these dependent peoples escape from Eastern authoritarian domination. In secular Western Europe, more than fifty years after the end of the Second World War, with a substantial Muslim minority living in most West European cities, these echoes of the past should be fading. But enough remains for politicians (like Wolfgang Schäuble) still to refer to Europe as Western Christendom, to the exclusion of the Turks, for ‘Balkanization’ and ‘Salade Macedoine’ to carry implicit messages, for West European political leaders to feel ambivalent about eastern enlargement on more than economic grounds. In Eastern Europe, too, enough remains to sustain ambivalence about Western domination – and to generate popular support in several Orthodox countries for Orthodox Serbs under ‘Western’ attack.

Can we define any settled border – and should we? In principle, most Western institutions are now committed to a long process of rolling enlargement, holding open the prospect of future full membership of NATO and the EU to a lengthening list of hopeful countries once they can meet the criteria set out – and offering help in preparing to meet those criteria. In the spring and summer of 1999 Western leaders committed themselves far more explicitly than ever before to extensive enlargement, justified on political and strategic grounds, in response to the crisis in Kosovo. Half-promises to Macedonia and Albania that they will in time find a place within Western institutions indicate that Bosnia, Croatia and Yugoslavia will, under more favourable domestic circumstances, also find a place; and that the West is thus committed to some fifteen to twenty years of transition to full membership, with the stick of conditionality and the carrots of market access and financial assistance to guide applicant states along the right path. This is as long term a commitment as that which the infant EEC made to Greece and Turkey in their association agreements nearly forty years ago. It may well prove to have been as lightly considered, as little thought through, as the earlier commitments to Greece and Turkey, building up difficulties for the future when expectations within the applicants come up against second thoughts among the member states. Commitments to Cyprus and Malta raise other delicate questions of microstates and of state capacity to shoulder the responsibilities of membership. They also raise questions about the outer limits of European institutions to the south and south-east. Nicosia is 200 miles from Beirut, deriving some of its prosperity from its role as an entrepôt in Middle East trade. Valetta is half-way between Italy and Tunisia: a bridge to a more closely associated Mahgreb, perhaps, or an outpost of institutionalized Europe on Europe’s well-policed Mediterranean border? 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 Agreement had been an aggrieved Turkish elite, complicating an already delicate relationship with major West European governments. The agreement at the Helsinki European Council in December 1999 to accept Turkey as in principle a candidate for EU membership was another delicately crafted compromise, about which many member governments retain strong reservations. West European governments find it tempting to resolve immediate difficulties by offering halfpromises of future obligation, with the date of delivery safely beyond their term of office: of ‘partnerships’ and ‘membership action programmes’ that serve to postpone decisions on full membership, of association or ‘candidate status’ raising the prospect of full membership in fifteen to twenty years. The commitments to South-East European states that the German Presidency, the Washington NATO Communiqué, the British Prime Minister and others made in the summer of 1999, repeated in the South-Eastern Europe Stability Pact, have extended the potential boundaries of NATO and the EU far further than most of their citizens would yet accept – or are aware of. A change of government in Ukraine, a repetition under favourable conditions of Georgia’s declared intention to join NATO, and democratic politicians risk offering more than they may be able to deliver, thus building up future resentment at exclusion from states with a great deal of economic interest, security concerns and status at stake. ‘The greatest danger’ of enlargement, President Mitterrand once said, is that as the last grateful applicant takes its seat at the Council table the institution it has been seeking to join at last collapses under the complexities of managing so many members with so diverse a set of interests. An associated danger is that the EU and NATO reluctantly enlarge, without carrying through the internal reforms necessary to cope with the implications. There are enough signs of drift, with suggestions that perhaps two Inter-governmental Conferences will be needed before the EU is ready for the next enlargement, and that the negotiations now under way will take sufficient time to carry through to completion to allow member governments to postpone hard decisions for several years yet. What conclusions should we therefore draw as to the outlines of a strategy for extending and managing institutionalized Europe’s eastern and southern frontiers? First, we must accept that there are severe limits to a variable geometry solution, 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 of Western integration as they can; denial can only cause offence. Second, ambiguity in relations with significant third states is counterproductive: it builds in misunderstandings, with the potential for rising feelings of grievance later. If EU governments conclude that it is unlikely that they will be able to accept Turkey (for instance) into the EU by 2020, they would do better to say so, and justify their position – and to seek to construct an acceptable alternative. Similarly, conditions for full membership are best spelt out explicitly: the lack 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 into political – or, worse, military – crisis as different parties act upon different expectations. Third, it is imperative that there is an approach that attempts to create mutually acceptable patterns of association that can provide an alternative to full membership. Ukraine and Russia (and, perhaps in time, Belarus) are important partners for institutionalized Europe, but unlikely full members of the EU, at least. A ‘privileged partnership’ is needed, which will give their leaders some voice within EU councils without the complications that would follow from accepting 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. If NATO, which already includes non-EU Turkey, were to enlarge to offer full membership to Russia and Ukraine (and perhaps in time even to Georgia), the West would avoid drawing a single solid line between insiders and outsiders. NATO would thus to some extent displace the OSCE as a pan-European security organization. Fifth, what is offered to the states on Europe’s eastern periphery will also need to be offered to the states on its southern periphery: not ‘European’ on many definitions, but economically dependent on European markets and investment, with established patterns of migration and settlement for their citizens within institutionalized Europe. Close association for Mediterranean partner countries, through an enhanced Barcelona process, will not only be the price that the Spanish government and its Western Mediterranean partners may wish to extract 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 and open, with cross-border exchanges encouraged rather than blocked. But this will not always be possible: pressures for illegal immigration are such, organized crime is sufficiently skilful, to require systematic controls – and for domestic publics within EU member states loudly to demand that they be maintained. Indeed it is likely that border controls along the EU’s eastern and southern borders will be stepped up in the coming years, as much to provide visible reassurance to anxious EU citizens as to increase the effectiveness of policing itself. Seventh, the relationship between core Europe and peripheral Europe is inherently unequal. Peripheral states will unavoidably protest that they are affected by the extra-territorial reach of EU jurisdiction, and will complain that their 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 of association councils and agreements is likely to grow still untidier as core European states struggle to provide symbolic status and the illusion of serious consultation to states whose interests they normally consider only when they have struck bargains among those inside. Lastly, it is unhelpful and unconstructive for politicians both inside and outside Western institutions to pursue further the dangerous rhetoric of

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European inclusion and exclusion, couched in terms of history, religion, ethnic origin or culture. Historical claims exploited to support contemporary demands for privileged treatment for inclusion or exclusion are the stuff of conflict, as we have witnessed in the former Yugoslavia. There have been many different ‘Europes’, with many different core regions. The core region for West European integration was defined by the historical circumstances of the Cold War. The economic and political balance of the wider post-cold war Europe that is now emerging is likely to tilt eastwards. The language of ‘core Europe’, of an avantgarde or noyau dur, represents an attempt to sustain the privileged position that the Benelux states and France had established within the old order, at the expense of those states that were locked out of Western Europe for fifty years. The European priority now is to construct a stable and workable institutional order for a broad region without definable boundaries, within which it will nevertheless be necessary to draw demarcation lines. The EU and NATO are clearly emerging as the defining institutions for this emerging order; and there are good reasons, as argued above, for drawing the lines of membership for NATO wider than those that will be manageable for the EU. The most difficult task will be to construct a mutually satisfactory framework for relations with the dependent states on Europe’s periphery, to associate them with Europe’s prosperous and secure Western states: to find a formula that allows them access, through borders which are at once permeable and secure. The test of statesmanship within rich Western Europe will be to persuade reluctant voters to share some of their wealth, their markets and their security with their less fortunate neighbours to the east and south, when those voters would much rather cultivate their 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 introductory chapter by Jan Zielonka. 1

2 3 4 5 6

Article 6 of the 1949 North Atlantic Treaty lists Turkey and ‘the islands under the jurisdiction of any of the Parties in … the Mediterranean sea’ separately from ‘Europe and North America’, thus excluding Malta and Cyprus along with Turkey from its definition of ‘Europe’. See Soledad García, ed., European Identity and the Search for Legitimacy (London: Pinter, 1993). I was the BBC interviewer. Malcolm Anderson, ed., Frontier Regions in Western Europe (London: Cass, 1983) and John Benyon, Andrew Willis, Rachel Woodward and Adrian Beck, Police Co-operation in Europe: An Investigation (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1993). Niklas Luhmann, ‘Territorial Borders as System Boundaries’, in Raimondo Strassoldo and Giovanni Delli Zotti, eds, Cooperation and Conflict in Border Areas (Milan: Franco Angeli Editore, 1982). See Malcolm Anderson and Eberhard Bort, eds, Schengen and EU Enlargement. Security and Co-operation at the Eastern Frontier of the European Union, Proceedings from an International Conference at Vienna and Bratislava, 17–20 April 1997 (Edinburgh: The University of Edinburgh, International Social Sciences Institute, 1997), p. 30.

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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 EU External Frontier Controls’, HL 110, October 2000. 11 Albrecht Funk, ‘Policing Europe: Border Controls and European Integration’, in Stefan 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.

6

The geopolitical implications of enlargement Christopher Hill

Borders and foreign policy Foreign policy depends on the existence of borders.1 The word ‘foreign’ originally referred to that which is ‘outside’, and where there is an outside there must not only be an inside but also a line of demarcation between the two. This elementary point is worth making for two reasons: first, theorists of politics and international relations increasingly call into question polarities such as those between the domestic and external environments (because of globalization, for instance), between the state and world society (for normative reasons) and between agents and structures (for epistemological reasons);2 second, the European Union itself is a perpetual challenge to the historical fixity of borders – it is steadily breaking down those between its member states, and its rolling programme of enlargement, from six to fifteen and possibly twenty-plus members, and from 1969 to well into the second decade of the twenty-first century, makes unclear the nature of its current border, let alone that of a putative 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 current enlargement of the Union, a massive historical enterprise by any standards, requiring political stamina over many decades, will raise problems of foreign policy for the EU and its member states. For borders imply foreign policy just as much as foreign policy implies borders. Where decisions are taken to exclude states from membership (even if not permanently), their relations with the Union remain by definition at the level of foreign policy. Their very desire to enter is premised on the view that being inside involves a qualitatively different kind of relationship than is implied even by close friendship from the outside. Moreover, changing membership transforms relationships between those admitted and their neighbours left outside, previously shaped at least in part by the common status of exclusion. It is thus evident that enlargement should be seen not simply from the perspective of resources and institutional complications, but also from that of international 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

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major new foreign policy on the part of the EU, that of changing the map of Europe to the East and to the South. Such a commitment is seen by third states as having a structural impact on the international system, as in fact the Fifteen intended it to have. They want to stabilize East, Central and South-Eastern Europe through taking in states from those regions where it is practicable to do so. With the precedents of Portugal, Spain and Greece fresh in the mind, the aim is to extend the zone of economic prosperity and the ‘democratic peace’ as a prophylactic against war, nationalism and autocracy. That the strategy has been conducted on the basis of disjointed incrementalism rather than a fully worked out grand plan does not make it any less significant. The very flexibility of the process, or incoherence according to viewpoint, means that expectations outside the EU are unstable and its international politics the more turbulent. The foreign policy aspect of enlargement is extended by virtue of the fact that this is one area where the EU does possess capabilities. Whereas many actions under the heading of the Common Foreign and Security Policy are vitiated by the inability of the Union to back them with resources or unified political will, the enlargement process was undertaken on the basis of considerable consensus and an evident ability to deliver gains for those states that were ultimately to be admitted. Enlargement cuts across all three pillars of the system set up by the Treaty of Maastricht and by its nature imposes a degree of unity on an EU decision-making process bound to generate incoherence. It mobilizes both economic and political resources and cannot be ignored even by those states not themselves seeking membership. It has an impact on the international system, and it makes a difference. There are two central foreign policy questions thrown up by the move towards a new external border that the EU is currently, if incidentally, engaged in.3 These are, firstly, where are we going, and, secondly, what are the consequences of our actions? 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 currently leading us there find the issue too difficult to discuss openly.4 If ‘Europe’ is really to stretch from the Atlantic to the Urals, from Malta to Tampere, from Scapa Flow to Batum, then it will be a very different entity from that which for most of its existence has been little more than a caucus within ‘the West’, led by the United States. Such a body might become a superpower, or it might be unable to cope with its sheer size and complexity, but it will certainly figure prominently in the mental maps of decision-makers across the world. Whatever enlargement takes 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 Eastern Europe, the Balkans and the Mediterranean. The geopolitics of any new borders should not, therefore, be relegated to the margins of discussions on agricultural prices, 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 longdrawn-out process. This means that each stage will take some time – as we can see 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 consequences. In other words, the negotiations with candidate countries will be difficult and raise foreign policy issues in their own right, while the consequence of discriminating among the many would-be members by giving out queuejumping tickets is bound to have international fall-out and complicate other aspects of the Union’s external relations. One advantage of this gradualism is that the map of Europe will change only slowly, perhaps even imperceptibly; the corollary, however, is that each stage can itself seem like a major upheaval in the diplomatic landscape. Thus enlargement, borders and foreign policy are inextricably bound up with each other. Indeed, the border question is probably the most important of all the foreign policy implications of enlargement.5 Some, like Charles Maier in this volume (chapter 2), like to see the EU as so unusual, perhaps post-modern, in its character that it represents more a virtual than a territorial community, reaching out to peoples and processes well beyond its nominal borders.6 By contrast the present chapter argues that it is of vital importance where the external frontier of the EU falls, whether temporarily or permanently, for both the domestic and external environments of the Union. Outsiders are far from indifferent to its geopolitical character, in terms of size, range, resources, population proximity and potential. This is as true of the United States and Russia as it is of small states in the EU’s orbit such as Morocco or Iceland. Equally, each aggrandizement of the Union is inherently both territorial and communitarian. That is, it brings the external border into new zones of international relations (e.g. deeper into Balkan politics if Slovenia is admitted) and new problems of cross-border communities (e.g. the problem of ‘Hungarian’ Romanians). Turkey is the most obvious case in point: if admitted, it would greatly enlarge the area, scope and population of the EU and would alter the way others currently perceive it – as a broadly rich, Western, Judaeo-Christian entity. This may be a good thing; what is clear is that the international effects of Turkish entry would not be neutral. What follows elaborates this argument by looking in more detail at the nature of geopolitics in the context of contemporary Europe, and by examining the question 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 to have a clear idea of who is ‘not us’. The key issue of security is given particular attention, as are the geopolitical zones of greatest sensitivity so far as the EU is concerned, that is, Eastern Europe, North Africa and Turkey. Finally, the question 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 itself and to the wider international system. Furthermore, enlargement is the major

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influence on the character of that boundary. If these two propositions are accepted, then the EU has to be analysed in a geopolitical context. This is particularly the case because it has something approaching a common foreign and security policy and generates many significant outputs to that end. It now also aspires to a common defence policy. Moreover, its very existence signifies a geopolitical presence in the world, with its resources and element of supranationality making for a sharp distinction between members and non-members, between inside and outside. Even if the Union falls far short of being able to mobilize its resources and political will on a state-like basis, it still represents a distinct 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 because they were uneasy with that kind of discourse for normative reasons. To some extent the neglect was mirrored among international relations specialists. The long tradition of realist writing about strategy and the balance of power produced a deep scepticism about civilian diplomacy, the inability to supplant NATO and the lack of the capacity to engage in ‘rational actor’ behaviour. Others, reacting against realism, were attracted by the EU and the model it embodied, but were not, by definition, interested in its geopolitical aspect. This dichotomization, however, can no longer be sustained, given the EU’s own evolution and aspirations, and the changing nature of security relationships in the aftermath of the Cold War. Of course, fundamental change is still more a matter of promise than realization, but the admixture of multi-level foreign policies with an enlarging Union means that geopolitics can no longer be bracketed out of 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 of the world on international politics, it is contaminated by its association with notions first of Lebensraum and ‘heartland’ and then of containment and dominoes. From c. 1890 to c. 1985, with only a brief pause between 1919 and 1933, international relations were conceptually dominated by the language of military strategy, with its apparent qualities of objectivity and determinism. The aggrandizements of Nazism, fascism and Japanese imperialism were all based on the idea that security, indeed civilization, required territorial expansion. The Cold War, which followed, saw both sides place buffer zones and global reach at the centre of their concerns. As before 1939, international politics was dominated by the ‘great game’ of power politics, with at stake ‘key’ states like Poland or Korea, and nodal strategic points like Suez. Complex interdependence and multipolarity 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 dreams of world power, and it is paradoxically only since Mikhail Gorbachev sounded the tocsin for the Cold War that it has crept back into fashion as ‘the new geopolitics’. 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 topography on foreign policy; and, to a lesser extent, the international politics of the environment. There is under this cooler rubric no reason why the classical question of the emergence of new powers, their zones of influence and the ‘shatterbelts’ between the various geopolitical regions should not also be considered, now that the normative language of the old tradition has been stripped away. Moreover, unless we grant determining force to transnational economic regions like the Asia-Pacific Rim, or the ‘golden banana’ from Barcelona to Livorno, geoeconomics can be subsumed within the new geopolitics. States may need to band together to dispose of economic power, but that is precisely what they are tending to do, and the configurations of strength thus produced create new faultlines of competition in international affairs. In this respect the EU is, of course, the leading example, possessing a formidable concentration of wealth and, through enlargement, even greater potential. Even without the development of a single military policy this economic power cannot avoid being political in its use and implications. The frequent use of terms such as ‘fortress Europe’ in relation to trade, ‘hard shell’ in relation to migration or ‘EurAfrique’ in connection with development denotes that, even as it stands, the EU is perceived as a major geopolitical/geo-economic entity. Given that the Union is also increasingly prioritizing its own near abroad, with the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership and a Common Strategy on Russia, it is evident that it is beginning to behave like a traditional great power.7 Further evidence for this conclusion is provided by the reactions to Europe’s relative impotence in the Balkans. Britain and France in particular, but even the smaller and neutral member states, have concluded that the EU needs to acquire more capabilities so as to enable it to intervene in crises in its own region independent of the United States. To this end the Anglo-French declaration at St Malo in November 1998 started a process that led to all fifteen signing up to a prospective militarization of the EU and the winding up of the Western European Union.8 If this happens, the consequences will not be unmitigatedly positive. The emergence or growth of military power always alarms outsiders and very often leads to an increase in their own armament programmes and to a rise in tension in external relationships. In that event the EU will not be able to avoid the 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 be by 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 of new members.9 If closely managed, with those at the end of the queue compensated and constantly reassured as to their eventual reward, this could work well enough. In geopolitical terms it would also have the advantage that the external border would change only slowly and predictably. It is already more than a decade 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 very unlikely to enter before 2004. This hardly sets a breakneck pace risking sudden destabilization of the international environment. By the same token, however, long-term foreign policy projects, especially those on the grand scale, make it virtually impossible to ensure a close control over events and the greater likelihood is that those who miss the first bus will become ever more irate and insecure. The very fact of differentiation and delay will increase the possibility of the excluded looking for other protectors and/or suffering internal reactions. The great length and staccato nature of the process will also create an environment of perpetual uncertainty, to an extent counter-balanced by the discipline exerted on the candidate states through the fear of exclusion. The inevitability of changes inside the EU and differences amongst its principal member states are further factors making for an unpredictable and to some extent arbitrary process. Thus, given the complexity of the multiple issues involved, and the bargaining process over them, the problem of the external border is bound to be settled incidentally 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 first few of them by definition merely transitional. These stages are illustrated in the maps in figure 6.1, on the premise of a likely first round of expansion from fifteen to twenty (Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Slovenia); a second from twenty to twenty-five (Bulgaria, Romania, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia); and a third of Cyprus and Turkey.10 These are to be taken as exemplars more than firm predictions. An EU of the twenty states suggested by Agenda 2000 would bring new frontiers with Belarus and Ukraine, as well as lengthening that with Russia and pushing the Union’s reach further towards the Balkans and South-Eastern Europe.11 Slovakia would then be almost encircled by EU states, and political pressures would build up for its inclusion – a kind of domino theory in reverse (a theory, of course, so far refuted by Switzerland). The same would apply to Bulgaria and Romania, to the two remaining Baltic states, and possibly by then to the states of ex-Yugoslavia, now much more difficult to ignore after the Kosovo war. At the very least the EU’s sense of responsibility for these by now neighbouring states would be sharply heightened. Relations with Russia would become more sensitive and significant in direct proportion to this eastwards expansion. If a combination of pressure, planning and self-fulfilling prophecies then did produce an EU of twenty-five, the geopolitical pivot of the Union would certainly shift eastwards. Albania and the remaining successor states of exYugoslavia would be wholly surrounded by the EU, and the issue would arise of whether in their turn Moldova, Belarus and the Ukraine were not possible candidates for entry. If by this time the EU had indeed acquired a significant defence capability, with or without a supplanting of NATO, then we can be sure that Russia would be becoming concerned in the extreme, while Turkey, unless sure of its place in the next round, would be on the verge of alienation. Moscow and

The geopolitical implications of enlargement The EU of 15

The EU of 20

The EU of 25

The EU of 27

Figure 6.1

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Continental drift: the possible enlargement of the European Union

Ankara have in common the fact that they are the major losers of EU enlargement – 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 either accepting 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 enlargement, 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 and will have few incentives to lessen the tensions arising from its relations with Greece, its role in Cyprus and its abuses of human rights. Turkey’s frustrations with the EU also have the potential severely to exacerbate its existing internal political problems, and quite possibly to precipitate a crisis inside what is an important NATO member and a large neighbour of the Union. If the unlikely comes about and Turkey does itself join the EU, then geopolitics will hit home with a vengeance (see pp. 109–111 below). At present the fifteen EU member states have between them borders with twelve non-members. Enlarged to

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

A sharp or fuzzy border? The geopolitical implications of expansion will differ according to whether the external border of the Union is going to be sharp, in both practical and political senses, or fuzzy – by which is meant a condition of ambiguity resulting from some insiders having opted out from some common activities and some outsiders being ever more closely associated with what the EU does.12 At present, with only 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 of third countries engaged in political dialogues, it is arguable that the Union presents a less than distinct image as an international actor. In the future, with long transition periods and/or special arrangements on agriculture and labour mobility having to be found for some new members, the picture could be even more complex. On the other hand the very challenge of enlargement could precipitate internal crisis and a leap forward into unity. The apparent consensus on the need to make the ‘European Security and Defence Policy’ more than an aspiration could be the first manifestation of such a trend. The converse of this, however, is that if the EU system continues not to be clearly demarcated, with insiders not accepting identical obligations and some outsiders enjoying privileged access, it will be the more difficult to pull together the 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 enlargement will play in it: will the need to cope with expansion and the external challenges entangled with it push towards greater uniformity and a sharper inside/outside split, or will the combination of internal complexity and external pressures for involvement make both the physical and the political borders of the EU less clear? The United States, for example, may favour EU enlargement but it also has no wish to see an autonomous Europe emerge in contradistinction to itself. It wishes to continue a close association between the CFSP and US foreign policy, with NATO as the major producer of security. For their part the Europeans are only too aware that for the foreseeable future they still need American troops and guarantees. From the Russian perspective, things might look rather different. Although Moscow has so far been relatively relaxed about EU enlargement, there is no guarantee that this will remain the case. The subtleties of differentiated integration and institutional overlap might seem less important than the image of an EU expanding eastward relentlessly, apart from the certainty that it will halt at the Belarus border, excluding Belarus and Russia itself. The consequence, of a massive trading and political bloc with the potential to place a second superpower on Russia’s doorstep, is unlikely to be viewed with equanimity, particularly if 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 states between the Oder and the Don rivers are not likely to settle for anything less than full membership, and will keep pressing if they are stalled with ‘special relationships’. Whatever the risks, they will seemed outweighed by the potential gains in terms of the transfer of resources, and perceived protection. The question of a hard or soft outside border is closely related to that of where the enlargement of the EU will finally stop, as it must. Until there is a sense that the geographical and cultural limits of ‘Europe’ have been reached, there will always be an uncertainty as to whether those still outside are permanent or only temporary exclusions. The sense of an unrolling EU border could provoke just as much instability as it is able to reduce through ‘the power of attraction’. Furthermore, the problems of absorbing some new members are likely to go beyond temporary attacks of indigestion. While anomalies like Norway or Switzerland could easily be absorbed if they should choose to reverse current policies, Croatia, Bosnia, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria or Turkey would be a completely different matter. And yet all these states have some clear claims in cultural terms to be regarded as European (as indeed does Russia), even if they do not currently qualify under the Copenhagen conditions.13 There will come a time when, for both internal and geopolitical reasons, the EU will have to abandon its current policy of creative ambiguity in favour of a blunt statement that ‘enlargement stops here (or there)’, explaining precisely why some states cannot be included, whatever their political and economic progress. This will be necessary if only to resolve uncertainties and lower escalating expectations. If and when it does this – and many will argue on grounds of realpolitik for perpetual ambiguity – it will not be able to avoid geopolitical reasoning. Countries will be excluded either because they are too far away, or because they would make the EU too big, or because they would involve it in problems and quarrels that even the irenic optimists in Brussels cannot take on. There may also, ultimately, be some realization that continuing the eastwards movement of the Union could end in a more direct confrontation between Europe and the Middle East than has existed since the height of Ottoman power in 1683, and a sharper division between Europe and Russia than has arguably ever existed before. A fourteenth-century encyclopaedia said that: Europe begins at the river Tanay (Don) and stretches along the Northern Ocean to the end of Spain. The eastern and southern part rises from the socalled Pontus (Black Sea) and is all joined to the Great Sea (the Mediterranean) and ends at the islands of Cadiz .14 In these terms the historical mould of Europe is a loose, geo-cultural one. There is 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 the concept of Europe synonymous with the Union, but rather break Europe damagingly 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 conflict has revolved around the problems of scapegoating outsiders, polarizing relations with ‘enemies’ and defining the ‘us’ and the ‘other’. The European Union has been constitutionally ill-disposed towards polarization of this kind, let alone the armed-camp syndrome that tends to be associated with it, but it cannot avoid certain similar attributes through the very process of enlargement. The ghosts of the division between the Roman and Orthodox churches, as well as that between Christianity and Islam, have inevitably been awoken by the flux that has followed 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 differentiating its culture and protecting itself from what are perceived as inimical ways of life. Self-fulfilling prophecies could arise here to increase the sense of threat on both sides of the EU frontier, and the consequences of the ‘war against terrorism’ after 11 September may compound the problem. Rather more concrete are the fears that expansion can evoke in those excluded, to the south as well as the east, on economic and security grounds. In the case of the south, the issue is only indirectly connected to enlargement. That the EU is not planning to enlarge onto the southern littoral of the Mediterranean means at least that there is no ambiguity over membership and status. Morocco’s expression of interest in accession was briskly rebuffed in 1987 without internal disagreement. By the same token, the feelings of exclusion may be felt more keenly, together with resentment at the images of the new threats from Islam and Maghrebian emigration that are all too easily conjured up in the ‘new’ security environment. King Hassan of Morocco openly opined in 1994 that ‘[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 its southern border, and to console the countries excluded with cooperation agreements and the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership. Given the traditional influence of France, Spain and Italy in the region, the combination of firm exclusion with apparently open-ended enlargement towards the east and south-east runs dangerously close to being seen as neo-colonialism and certainly makes a mockery of the term ‘partnership’. Even if a commitment was made at Barcelona in 1995 to transfer to the Mediterranean non-members approximately 70 per cent of the sums being given to the Central and East European countries until the end of the century, actions speak louder than words, and the implementation of transfers has turned out to be slow and tortuous.17 The countries of the Maghreb are well aware that the priorities of the rich northern states lie in Eastern Europe, while the EU’s very concept of a clear southern border is premised on the notion of dangers that need to be kept at bay. Money has been promised on the intelligent if unsympathetic basis that young Arabs need to be given 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 civil war.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 the surface. It is true that so far Moscow has been remarkably laid-back about EU enlargement. NATO enlargement drew the Russians’ fire, and by comparison the EU’s role seemed almost benevolent. There is indeed something of a Russian interest in seeing the markets of East and Central Europe develop, so long as both its own development can keep pace, allowing Russia to take advantage, and the accession of the CEECs does not lead to a damaging diversion of trade and investment. But these are big assumptions, both dubious, and it would be a mistake to assume that Russian attitudes cannot change. If the contrast becomes too marked between a large, inclusive and increasingly prosperous EU and a stagnant Russia, then the scenario of revived nationalism leading to disputes with the Baltic states and possibly other Western neighbours will not seem so remote. In these circumstances it will not take much for the EU and Russia to start looking like security threats to each other, and the old realist game will have recommenced. Technical border problems will also arise when the EU frontier moves to that between Poland/Hungary and Belarus/Ukraine. The chances of this border being well policed seem very low. It is currently highly permeable because poor pay, training and equipment of the customs officials on both sides invite corruption. The highly organized mafias from Russia and other parts of Eastern Europe are not slow to take advantage, and the consequent flows of crime and migration will be immensely hard to stem. Criminals tend to be insouciant about state boundaries wherever they are set.

Security: wider definitions, bigger problems? This prospect leads us from the question of the general perception of opposing interests, even hostility, to that of concrete security problems. The EU cannot help but create various ‘others’, by virtue of its existence and continued enlargement. But the nature and degree of this process are hardly inevitable. One of the factors on which it is most contingent is the degree to which the EU creates a genuine security and defence identity for itself. The Union is already seen from the outside as a secure zone – after all, that is an important reason why many wish so fervently to join it. If, however, it begins to acquire the capacity to use force, and in particular to project force externally, as wider borders bring more agonizing dilemmas over humanitarian or political intervention, it would certainly sharpen the antagonisms with those still excluded, like Russia. The EU’s emergence as a superpower, with correspondingly alarmed reactions along balance-of-power lines from the other powers, remains something of a doomsday scenario. Nonetheless, there remains an important security dimension to enlargement. As the security agenda has widened, encouraged but not begun by the end of the Cold War, so the range of problems that enlargement can 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 and porous eastern frontier, with associated problems of crime and illegal immigration. The hard-won Schengen system will come under renewed pressure of both a technical and political nature once it has to be extended. It is revealing, for example, that citizens from both Bulgaria and Romania still need visas to enter the Union. The next round of accession will also bring into the Union the environmental problems still produced by old smokestack industries in Eastern Europe, 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 of the ‘dying’ Black Sea on the EU’s plate. Moreover, on the front of energy and the security of its supply, the eastern enlargement is likely to worsen the ratio of customers to producers within the EU. The Visegrads may have coal and lignite but they lack oil and gas. This does not matter in a period of stability and free trade, but things might look very different in the event of foreign policy crises with Russia or in the Middle East. Even a rise in the price of energy for economic or ecological reasons might cause significant problems for an enlarged and more variegated EU. If Turkey and/or the ex-Yugoslav republics were also to join the Union, these problems would be magnified further – although those citizens of the EU already playing host to substantial numbers of Albanian and Kurdish refugees might be forgiven for thinking that the external border of the EU makes little difference either way in some of these matters. Indeed, one of the strongest arguments for rapid and extensive enlargement is that the Union will have fewer problems when some of these countries are subject to the socializing effects of European integration than if they are left outside to fester. On the other hand, ‘domesticating’ a large number of potentially intractable problems is hardly likely to make for a settled external frontier and geopolitical stability. It merely increases the number of potential flashpoints, depending on where the line is drawn – at Macedonia, Turkey, Israel, the Transcaucasus. It might be added that whereas enlargement could have neutral effects so far as the technical vulnerability to terrorism is concerned – the advantages of cooperation off-setting the greater number of sources and/or potential targets – an enlarged Europe would certainly present a high-profile and much more accessible target for anti-Western groups than does the virtually island-continent of North America. The events of 11 September 2001 proved that no state is invulnerable, but Europe is particularly difficult to defend against determined terrorists. Notwithstanding these very real aspects of the new security agenda, the most important way in which enlargement raises security issues is in relation to the EU’s emerging defence dimension and to its impact upon NATO. And these questions in their turn are powerfully dependent on the reactions of the United States. Thus far the US has promoted EU enlargement with some enthusiasm. Indeed, arguably Washington has subtly and successfully incorporated the Union’s policy into its own range of foreign policy instruments, a factor that should 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 essential, perhaps it is because it reinforces Atlanticism more than European influence stricto sensu? The US may be more willing than the reluctant Europeans to see NATO expand beyond the three members admitted in 1999, but it acknowledges the problems and therefore wishes to see the Baltic and the Balkans stabilized 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 carefully endorsed in advance the EU’s move towards taking over the functions of the Western European Union, announced at the Cologne European Council the following June. Phrases like ‘the dual enlargement strategy’ and ‘combined joint task forces’ have not yet been exposed as misnomers, despite the sceptics. The United States has, however, shown some concern about the apparent British volte-face in backing the development of a real EU defence presence, through the ‘headline goal’ of a 60,000 strong Rapid Reaction Force in place by 2003. If this does mean that the European Union is on the verge of serious moves towards taking more responsibility for its own ‘defence’, in the broadest sense, then the continued rationale of NATO in Europe must come into question, and with it the role of the United States. In fact, if the future of NATO is the most crucial geopolitical question facing Europe, possibly the world, over the next few decades, then the enlargement of the EU will have a significant bearing on it and thus indirectly upon its own geopolitics. Things could go either way: enlargement could strengthen EU confidence and military resources, while also precipitating a great leap forward in integration – in this case NATO would be at risk, and the EU would become the major player in Eurasia; or enlargement could so burden the EU financially and in terms of decision-making that the CFSP becomes even more circumscribed, with the Union turning into a vast, flabby territorial entity unable to rouse itself and even more dependent than before on externally provided security. There are two more particular aspects of the twin current developments towards a larger and militarized EU that might prove problematical. The first is that 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 security can participate in a major forum for discussion on the continent’s international relations. But an EU that were to add ten states or so to its current size, most of them with no recent tradition of stable and independent foreign policy-making, might find itself in ever greater difficulties when confronting the need for joint actions, and resembling ever more closely the loose framework organization (or talking shop) that is the OSCE. The second current dilemma in the context of security and enlargement is the fate of the ‘WEU family’ now that WEU is being absorbed into the EU. By this is meant the eighteen states that are not full members of the WEU but that are currently closely attached to it. Of these the four ‘neutrals’ already inside the EU 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 the CFSP even more obviously than at present, and blur the distinction between insiders and outsiders. Likewise two of the three Associate Members of WEU, that is, Iceland and Norway, will continue their current cooperation with the EU and NATO almost whatever happens, unless enlargement transforms the former into something unrecognizable. The problems really arise with the third Associate Member, Turkey, and with all the Associate Partners. These states have become used to being closely involved in WEU discussions, and indeed by extension with CFSP. If the EU is really to start down the road to militarization, albeit in close association with NATO, then this will be manageable for the states on the verge of entering the Union, and accepting its acquis politique, namely the Czech 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 on CFSP discussions given Greek concerns. This has already caused a minor crisis in NATO and threatens to merge with a much bigger one over Cyprus. It will also be difficult to give the other Baltic and Balkan states privileged access given the historical preference for restricting the CFSP to members of the EU. Anything short of rapid and wholesale enlargement will therefore leave a significant group of states rather more cast loose from European security cooperation than they have been in the recent past.

Special sensitivities The analysis above has already referred frequently to the three main potential sources of hostile reaction to EU enlargement on geopolitical grounds, namely Russia, the Maghreb and Turkey. But it is worth attempting to be more specific about the extent to which problems are likely to arise on all three fronts, in both the short and the long terms. Russia For Russia the enlargement of NATO and of the EU puts an end for the foreseeable future to the role in East and Central Europe that it has enjoyed for the last 250 years. In consequence the Poles may feel safe at last from further partitions. In its relatively enfeebled condition, modern Russia has few means of obstructing EU enlargement, but that does not mean that the process will not cause problems for both sides. There can be little doubt that Moscow’s already important relations with Belarus and the Ukraine will become ever more critical as Russia seeks to attenuate a perceived isolation, leading either to heightened tension (the Polish–Ukrainian relationship has already developed at Moscow’s expense) or to an embattled sense of bloc unity. As for the Baltic states, it would not be surprising were Russia to grow more uneasy about their possible EU entry, and conflicts could easily widen over the questions of the Russian minorities, 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 major new difficulty to its external relations. This also particularly relates to the Balkans, where Russian policy has all too evidently diverged from that of the Western Europeans in recent years. It was something of a triumph for the new multilateralism that Russia was kept on board to the extent that it was during the end-game over Bosnia, but all the incipient tensions emerged over Kosovo in 1998–9.20 Although not now physically contiguous with the states of South-Eastern Europe, Russia can still wield considerable influence in the region, as some of its decision-makers were keen to demonstrate at Pristina airport at the end of the Kosovo war.21 Through the taking of new responsibilities in this, the bear-pit of contemporary Europe, the new Stability Pact for South-Eastern Europe, and hints of rapid accession for helpful states, the EU has created a moving border zone for itself in Balkans, and one that is both atomized and unstable. It is impossible to say whether the states of the Balkans will or should be able to enter the EU inside the next two decades, and, if so, in what order. What is certain is that the interplay between the seven of them, pivoting around the question of enlargement, will be of critical importance to both Russia and the EU, and it will present major obstacles to their mutual relations. In this process bilateral problems, like those between Hungary and Romania, Macedonia and Kosovo, Albania and Yugoslavia, will no doubt continue to figure prominently. The EU will not be a bystander; indeed its policies and instruments already have an important impact on outcomes. But given that there is going to be no wholesale 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 geopolitical consequences 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 border through the Balkans in a controlled and peaceful manner. Turkey Despite the importance of the Balkans, Turkey is potentially the most serious geopolitical issue raised by enlargement. It is the country that holds the most critical strategic position of all the candidates for accession, poised as it is between Europe and the world’s most turbulent region, the Middle East. As a long-time (and valued) member of NATO on Russia’s southern flank, its ‘loss’ to the West would cause the most serious policy repercussions even today. And yet Turkey has aspired longer than any other candidate (since 1964) to enter the EC/EU, and its chances are still remote. The states of Western Europe want good relations with Ankara, and they want to encourage the forces of democracy and modernization in the country. Yet they fear the prospect of Turkey’s accession for a whole range of reasons, which include foreign policy despite the fact that factors such as size, human rights and income levels are usually given far more prominence.

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With Turkey the EU is really damned if it does and damned if it doesn’t. If a benevolent view were to be taken of the economic and demographic problems Turkey presents, and the prospect of its membership were to become real, then the EU would run straight into a set of foreign policy issues of even greater magnitude. Does it wish to be directly implicated – as opposed to involving itself by choice, as is the present case – in the politics of the southern Caucasus, the Levant and Mesopotamia? Turkish entry would give the EU long, unmanageable frontiers 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 further north. If, on the other hand, it is made clear to Turkey that accession will not be possible in the foreseeable future, then bitter disappointment and alienation will probably follow. Indeed, Ankara has drawn its own conclusions in recent years and has already made various moves in directions other than the EU – in the first place towards Transcaucasia, and subsequently into a closer relationship with Israel. The Turks themselves take the question of EU membership very seriously and are perfectly capable of seeing through the various EU prevarications. If the most likely outcome in the medium term is that Turkey will remain outside an EU that continues to enlarge in Eastern Europe, while being subject to an intermittent charm offensive (as with the the revival at the Helsinki Council 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, strategically calculating government in Ankara. Unfortunately the issue of EU membership is intimately tied to that of the very identity of Turkey – secular modernity versus fundamentalist self-assertion – and by extension to internal political struggles of some ferocity. The EU is willy nilly a player in these struggles. 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, could inflict severe damage on the standing of the pro-Western domestic parties, and by extension on Turkey–EU relations. Petrol has been thrown on the fire in this respect by the way that the EU has played the Cyprus card, thereby apparently acceding to Greek wishes to put pressure on Turkey. In so far as the move has been clearly thought through by the European Council (which is to be doubted), the decision to open negotiations with Cyprus six months after the end of the IGC was a calculated risk in order to break the deadlock over the partition of the island. And to some extent there have been gratifying moves towards better Greek–Turkish relations. But it is a very high-risk gamble indeed. Turkey holds all the cards over northern Cyprus itself, and has little incentive to change the status quo, apart from – as the 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 Ankara calls 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 all parties 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 conceivably 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 out of the EU is a distinction without a difference. Difficulties only arise when there are disputed jurisdictions, whether in the Aegean, or over the rightful home of Northern Ireland. In this context, Cyprus represents a major historical stalemate, and the general process of enlargement has added a dangerously unpredictable element to the inflammable cocktail. Keith Kyle saw early that ‘by decision of the EU the alarm clock is ticking over the Cyprus Problem’, and the hands are now approaching midnight.22 The Maghreb Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia represent the same danger to the EU as Turkey does, namely the consequences of neglect, but not to the same degree or with the same strategic importance. That this is so at least at the level of perceptions is indicated by the relative indifference shown by both policy-makers and publics to the current slaughter in Algeria, where deaths since 1991 amount to almost half the total killed in all the Balkan conflicts over the same period.23 A war like that in Algeria – the second in forty years – is important for its spillover of terrorism into France, and for the extra impetus it gives to migration into the Southern European states and thereby the whole European Union. The same is true of structural problems like poverty, population growth and political instability. The EU states see that they have to do what they can to encourage the peoples of North Africa to be contented in their own countries if they are to discourage the pressure of illegal immigration and the export of indigenous conflicts with them. Otherwise, this important part of Braudel’s ‘Mediterranean world’, a single geopolitical space going back to the Greeks and the Phoenicians, is seen as containable. Spain, Italy and France are particularly anxious to promote ‘Mediterranean security’ through ideas such as the Conference on Security and Cooperation in the Mediterranean (abortive) and the Barcelona Process (still alive). This is conflict prevention rather than conflict management, and it is arguably having a modest success. The fears of the early 1990s about an ‘Islamic’ threat sweeping up from the South have quietly subsided, and there seems no imminent prospect of a rash of small Irans springing up along the North African coast. Islam’s presence through the headscarves of French schoolgirls is a more concrete political issue than the potential hostility of fundamentalist regimes in the Maghreb – whether because of the electoral intervention of the Algerian generals or despite it. Even the riddle wrapped in a mystery 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 that the EU’s evident preoccupation with Eastern Europe might not have some

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damaging effects on potentially friendly governments struggling to explain to their ever more youthful populations why the CAP and the Single Market only damage their livelihoods incidentally, and not by design. The problems that the EU faces in North Africa may seem at present largely historical and moral, but fundamentally they arise from one of the more world’s more clear-cut geopolitical fault-lines – between a homogeneous rich northern littoral and the poor but aspirant southern littoral, part of the world’s poorest continent and representing very different cultural and political traditions. Now, more than ever, in the postTwin Towers world, this must be a source of concern. What is more, given that enlargement is not available in this zone as a policy option, as a way of managing difference, the contrast must be faced directly. This means attempts at creating inclusive but ultimately limited processes like Barcelona, but also, inevitably, seeing North Africa as a question of foreign policy. Whatever the justice of the matter, the pressures from that region cannot but be regarded as of a different order from those deriving from states whose right to become part of the EU 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 the big picture: what kind of Europe will we end up with? What will it look like to outsiders, to geopoliticians in Beijing and Washington, to historians in the future, indeed to ourselves? Will it seem overbearing and expansionist, or unwieldy and overstretched? An octopus or a giraffe? Is it moving towards territorial cohesion and defensibility, or are these very notions unnecessary in a post-modern age, where the kind of border problems represented by Danzig, Suez and East Pakistan are now only distant memories? Even in this age of the new geopolitics, however, realism is far from dead, and the EU has to take it into account. Some observers, like John Mearsheimer, believe that Bosnia is unsustainable and should have been partitioned.24 Even those who stop short of such bluntness accept that the Dayton settlement is inherently fragile, just as it will prove extremely difficult to reconstitute the Cyprus of the 1960 agreement. The EU itself has so far managed to avoid the dilemmas posed by realism, in terms both of its own foreign policy and of the perceptions of others. Given that it is a multi-level foreign policy system that currently eschews military action, it wishes neither to constitute a ‘power’ in the world nor to be seen as such. The EU’s role in the world is, however, in constant evolution, and we may now be verging on a situation where the member states will make a commitment to a common defence capability and to more independence from NATO.25 If this is the case, then enlargement will have an even greater geopolitical resonance than has been suggested thus far. The nature of that impact will depend on two things in particular. The first is the pace of enlargement. It is by no means clear how quickly it might accelerate after the next round of accessions, which might be completed by 2005. On geopolitical grounds there are strong argu-

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ments for going slowly so as to give outsiders time to adjust to the new size and shape of the EU, both those sore at being excluded and those who can never hope to be members. On the other hand, the dragging of feet on promises once made creates bitterness and uncertainty, and what seems rapid to existing members can seem funereal to those waiting in the ante-room. The second key variable in the interplay between enlargement and geopolitics is size. How big will the EU eventually be? Will it ever be possible to say that its boundary is final? What are the desirable stages of enlargement, and how far should each be regarded as more a stepping-stone to an eventual imagined entity than a way of expressing Europe’s international presence in its own right? We have already considered, with the help of the maps in figure 6.1, the possibilities of the EU expanding further but becoming becalmed at a number of different points – twenty, twenty-five, twenty-seven, or almost anything in-between, depending on individual states’ situations. Moreover, size is likely to be related to effectiveness, in terms of both the degrees of supranationality engendered to cope with enlargement, and the international resources generated through economies of scale. The variables of pace, size and effectiveness combined make for many possible scenarios for the future of the EU in the world system. Of these, four may be picked out as the most interesting: •

•

•

•

A large and loose EU, relatively quickly achieved. The pace of this transformation would complicate the international system considerably, but without giving the EU much extra ability to resolve problems or to pursue its interests. Indeed, because the Thatcherite model of intergovernmentalism would essentially have prevailed, the external capabilities of the Union might well turn out to have been diminished (not, ironically, an end for which any British 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, and presumably without international war in the short term. Whether the very existence of another superpower to rival the United States (and possibly others by then) would add to the long-term stability of the international system, as realists like Kenneth Waltz, and believers in the EU’s inherently peaceful intent, might both argue, must be open to argument. It would constitute the largest impact it is possible to imagine the EU having on the wider international system. An EU of only limited enlargement and progressive supranationalism would also be an important actor in international politics. It would pose serious questions for at least the United States and Russia, not least because the EU would inevitably have to assume full responsibility for its own defence. The issues of identity and purpose would also be central to the debates that would presumably proceed pari passu on the nature of both the EU polity and its world role. An EU of both limited enlargement and stalled integration would either stay as it currently is, that is, with a CFSP interdependent with NATO and other

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The EU wishes, in foreign policy as in trade policy, to be both a strong negotiating presence and a community open to the world and to international cooperation. This combination, perhaps also a contradiction, has led it both to undertake responsibilities for its liberated European cousins and to hesitate over the implementation of enlargement. From the viewpoint of strategic action it may seem too late now to do more than slow down the process and to damp down unreasonably raised expectations, but in practice there are still many hard choices to be made over enlargement, in relation to the countries chosen, to the pace of their admission and to the ultimate borders of the EU. In this the geopolitical dimension, that is, the effects on outsiders and on the structure of the world system, has too often been neglected or obscured, with the result that we now find ourselves in a catch-22, whereby both large-scale enlargement and any decision to slow it down have the potential to destabilize the EU’s rimland. Ultimately the citizens of the European Union have to decide whether they need collectively to be a major actor in world politics like the United States, with all the advantages and disadvantages that implies, or whether they are willing to settle for an EU near the centre of a network of international processes but without the ability to have a decisive impact on matters affecting security and the pattern of international order. It is not mere chance that this potentially explosive 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, and to Jane Pugh of the London School of Economics’ Cartographic and Design Unit for help with the maps. 1

2

3

For a discussion of the differences between borders, boundaries and frontiers, see William 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 the exact boundary between states, and thus has a technical as well as a legal meaning. 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 Cosmopolitan Governance (Cambridge: Polity, 1995), and Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) – although Wendt to some extent comes full circle by showing how some boundaries, both conceptual and political, are both inevitable and desirable (e.g. pp. 193–245 and pp. 211–14). ‘Incidentally’, because the arrival at a new external border will be more a consequence than an intention of the enlargement process, which has arguably been driven on by a series of myopic piecemeal decisions, and been motivated more by general concerns about stability than by any clear geopolitical strategy.

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4 The refrain ‘where are we going?’ was common among French soldiers in the Phoney War, impatient at being thrown this way and that by the tide of war, and without leadership from their generals. It can and should be asked by all those who make great decisions without necessarily thinking through (or owning up to) their implications. See Christopher Hill, ‘ “Where Are We Going?”: International Relations and the 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 the resources available for external relations, and the changing image of the EU. But almost everything comes down in the end to the question of where the borders settle down, and who is included/excluded. 6 See also Robert Cooper, The Post-Modern State and the World Order (London: Demos Paper no. 19, 1996). Cooper sees the EU as a post-modern polity but is not so idealist about 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 internazionale (Rome: Arel Informazioni, 3/98). 7 The reassertion of interest in the Mediterranean, with a ‘societal security’ perspective, dates from the Barcelona Process agreed in November 1995. The Common Strategy on Russia was launched at the Cologne summit in June 1999. See presidency Conclusions (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 inextricably intertwined and it seems improbable that decisions on the entry of either can be insulated from matters of geopolitics. 11 Agenda 2000 was the document produced by the Commission in 1997 to set out the EU’s strategy, in particular towards enlargement, for the medium term. See Bulletin of the European Union, Supplement 5/97. 12 Thomas Christiansen, Fabio Petito and Ben Tonra, ‘Fuzzy Politics Around Fuzzy Borders: the European Union’s Near Abroad’, Cooperation and Conflict, 35: 4 (December 2000), pp. 389–416. 13 Pace Samuel Huntington, who argued in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), pp. 158–63, that the historical divide between the churches of Rome and Byzantium reverberates in the conflicts. In his view: The civilizational paradigm [thus] provides a clear-cut and compelling answer to the question confronting West Europeans: Where does Europe end? Europe ends where Western Christianity ends and Islam and Orthodoxy begin. This is the answer which West Europeans want to hear … . Helmut Kohl’s foreign policy adviser, Wolfgang Schäuble, made similar points in various 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 their country to have the possibility of joining the EU, and the division of Europe argument is one of the strongest at their disposal. See the article by the chairman of a key Russian think-tank, Sergei Karaganov: ‘Building Bridges with Brussels’, Financial Times (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.

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17 See Esther Barbé and Ferran Izquierdo, ‘Present and Future of Joint Actions for the Mediterranean Region’, in Martin Holland, ed., Common Foreign and Security Policy: The Record and Reforms (London: Pinter, 1997); also Nicola Minasi, I Rapporti tra L’Unione Europea ed il Maghreb dalla politica Mediterranea al Partenariato (Rome: LUISS Working Paper no. 39/1997). 18 In the tragic events in Algeria over the last decade the EU has managed to alienate both sides, first by failing to condemn the overturning of a democratic election result, and then by gradually distancing itself from the government’s determination to match the rebels’ capacity for terror and atrocity. For the difficulties of understanding the war in Algeria, let alone influencing it from the outside, see the articles by Claire Spencer (‘Who Killed the Monks?’) and Marc Marginedas (‘Passive Response Sends Wrong 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 from Recent Experience, Chaillot Papers 15/16, Western European Union Institute for Security Studies (Paris, June 1994). 20 The five (now six)-member Contact Group was invented in 1994 largely so as to be able to prevent Russia’s alienation over the Balkans, and it implicitly acknowledged that neither NATO nor the CFSP was a sufficient instrument for diplomacy in the region. David Owen, Balkan Odyssey (London: Indigo, 1996), pp. 392–3. 21 On the importance of Russia over Kosovo, see Paul Rogers, ‘Lessons to Learn’, The World 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 figure given that full-scale civil war has not broken out. In the Balkans, up to 230,000 people died in the 1990s, the majority in Bosnia. I am grateful to Malcolm Madden of the Royal 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, Chaillot Paper no. 42 (Paris: Western European Union Institute for Security Studies, 2000).

7

Ethnic minorities and long-term implications of EU enlargement André Liebich

A century ago about half the population of the area under consideration was identified with one ethnic minority or another; sixty years ago the proportion was still about one-quarter.1 Today, although quantitative approximations are extremely problematic, it might be estimated that no more than one-tenth of the population 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 exYugoslavia, minority problems here have not exploded into armed conflict and they are not likely to do so. However, they continue to weigh considerably on the internal 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 the underlying problem is the dominant conception of the state in East Central Europe. In this sense, one could say that it is not minorities but majorities that are the problem. Even more than elsewhere the state here is perceived as the exclusive state of the titular majority. From this perspective, minorities are viewed as peripheral and even illegitimate. Their presence constitutes a reminder that the state does not correspond to its image of itself and their development raises fears that the nature of the state will be put into question. Moreover, one might add that it is the weakness of the state rather than the strength of the minorities that lies at the root of the problem. The exclusivist conception of the state, with its consequences for the minority issue, is a common feature of all the countries under examination here, regardless of the very significant distinctions in the weight and situation of minorities among 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 countries (Slovakia, Bulgaria, Romania and Lithuania) minorities comprise up to 25 per cent of the population. Here, certain minority groups constitute compact and distinct societies and they are an important factor in national politics. Finally, in two countries (Latvia and Estonia), minorities – in fact, a single Russian-speaking or Slavic minority – exceed 30 per cent of the population. The similarity of attitudes towards minorities as well as the dynamics of minority life in East Central Europe may explain the similarity of minority

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grievances throughout the area. It is therefore tempting to assume that the situation of minority groups is similar in the various countries and that the condition of the various minorities within each country is also comparable. Such assumptions would not be justified. There is a considerable gap between the minority-friendly stance eagerly pioneered by Hungary; the reserved and unhurried approach of Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovenia; the occasionally tempered hostility of Romania and Lithuania; the underlying animosity of Bulgaria and Slovakia; and the generally confrontational positions of Latvia and Estonia. There is an even greater discrepancy between the situation of minorities connected to Western home countries, such as Germans and Jews, and minorities with only regional patrons, such as Hungarians, Poles, Turks and Russians, or no patrons at all, such as Ruthenes, Pomaks or Tartars and Lippovans. Above all, there is a profound gulf between the condition, both objective and subjective, of all other East Central European minority groups and the Roma, who happen to be by far the most numerous and the most problematic minority. These numerous divergences imply that it is not practical to seek a unified strategy of coping with the minority issue, just as it is unrealistic to expect the peaceful assimilation of minorities along imagined Western patterns. In the following pages we shall first examine the historical foundations of East Central Europe’s specificity with regard to minorities. We shall then look at the mainsprings of current minority demands in the context of prevailing legal and policy regimes. Finally, we shall consider the regional and international implications of minority issues in the foreseeable future.3

Historical background ‘Discontinuity’ and ‘empire’ are two terms that provide the key to the historical situation of East Central Europe’s minorities and, indeed, to the history of the region as a whole. It is these terms too that define the most significant contrast between East and West European development.4 West European political and linguistic boundary changes over the centuries have been moderate compared to those in East Central Europe. They have, nevertheless, been the source of considerable turmoil, and they continue to impinge upon daily life and politics in Western Europe.5 One can therefore understand the profound impact of repeated and acute boundary modifications in East Central Europe, continuing virtually up to the present day and far exceeding anything Western Europe has experienced in the last millennium. Comparing maps from one period to another one finds entire countries that are displaced. For example, tenth-century Bulgaria appears where Serbia is later to be found, and thirteenth-century Serbia is located in present-day Bosnia; Poland’s boundaries today resemble those it possessed at the beginning of its state existence but they are quite different from those it displayed in the intervening thousand years. Such discontinuities can be attributed in part to the absence of natural boundaries 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 are historically determined. Whereas both Western and East Central Europe were formed through the invasion or migration of peoples from the East, these movements continued to occur in East Central Europe long after they had ceased in the West. The Magyar presence is the most persistent confirmation of this reality.6 Whereas in the Middle Ages East Central Europe appeared to be embarking upon a process of state-building that resembled and even anticipated that 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 the post-Carolingian French state and they preceded British, Spanish and Swedish statehood. It must be added, however, that these East Central European states disappeared and only reappeared at a time when the process of state formation in the West had been almost completed. What was happening to East Central Europe at the time that Western Europe was developing the modern territorial state, between the sixteenth and the nineteenth century? Without a single exception the peoples of the area were falling under the sway of imperial rule of one sort or another. Once again, the natural configuration of the area favoured such an outcome. ‘The Lands Between’, as they have been gracefully designated, happen to lie between large and powerful imperial units.7 From the West, the Holy Roman Empire of the Germanic Nation, the Habsburg Empire, Prussia and Germany have all exercised cultural, military and political hegemony over large parts of East Central Europe at one time or another. From the East, Moscovy, the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union 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 recall that one of the countries considered here, Bulgaria, was still formally under Ottoman suzerainty until 1908. The implications of these historical processes are significant, for both majorities and minorities in East Central Europe. Majorities or the titular nations corresponding to the states of the area are painfully aware that their states are small, weak and fragile, and that, historically speaking, their very existence is an exception rather than a rule. East Central European intellectuals, such as Milan Kundera and István Bibó, have remarked on the existential distress of these small nations, where the question of survival – an absurd question for the old continuous states of Western Europe – is posed ever anew.8 Whereas the English sing ‘there will always be an England’, the Poles comfort themselves with the lyrics ‘Poland is not yet lost while we are alive’. Minorities in East Central Europe are living testimony to the meanders of the past, and perhaps also to the uncertainties of the future. Like archaeological layers, they recount a history: that of the Turks in Bulgaria; the Hungarians in Romania and in Slovakia; the Germans in Poland, the Czech Republic and elsewhere; 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 piously cultivated 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 that even recently parts of today’s Poland were not Polish as parts of Romania were not Romanian. Inasmuch as the legitimacy of state units in East Central Europe is founded, to an even greater extent than in Western Europe, upon myths of national continuity, nay, of perennity, minorities are an unwelcome presence.

Current situation Why have minority issues attained such prominence in the immediate aftermath of the fall of communism? Scholars fret over whether the minority issue is now one of old wine in new bottles or of new wine in old bottles.9 Meanwhile, explanations and interrogations concerning the ‘return of minorities’ continue to abound, usually connected to speculation about post-communist nationalism in general. The early ‘icebox’ theory, according to which the demise of communism ‘unfroze’ hoary national sentiments, turned out to be more successful as an image than as an argument. It was supplanted by the ‘vacuum’ or ‘default option’ theory, which stated that ethnic identity and nationalism stepped into the ideological void left by the disappearance of Marxism-Leninism and by the weakness of alternative value systems. Neither explanation has led to much in the way of a coherent Western policy, other than distaste for manifestations of nationalism 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 countries. The model usually, but not necessarily, points to ‘ethnic entrepreneurs’ as key agents in the process. This approach has the merit of highlighting an important but neglected fact: minority tensions, such as those we have been experiencing in the last years, come to the fore when a preceding equilibrium, however unsatisfactory, has been broken. As the economic, political and social spheres change radically, groups, like individuals, are obliged to reposition themselves. They carve out their place in the new order, seek out and defend the most satisfactory niches, and realign themselves with respect to rivals. This is an inherently conflictual process fought for high stakes. Minorities participate in it as do other groups.11 Let us note, in passing, that no new equilibrium has yet been established in respect to the minority issue anywhere in the postcommunist world. To understand this process fully, it should be noted that the minority question was not entirely absent during the communist period, as is sometimes alleged. To be sure, state and party control of the media meant that minorities were only granted as much attention as the authorities allowed, and minority conflicts, real or potential, were ignored. The range of communist options for dealing with minorities, however, was fundamentally the same as that of their post-communist successors. 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 they could recognize and formalize the status of minorities by granting them autonomy of one sort or another. Thus, Poland consistently refused to acknowledge any sort of German presence. Bulgaria sought to assimilate its Turks and Pomaks and, eventually, to expel those who could not be assimilated. Slovaks in Hungary, Poles in Lithuania and small minority groups in other communist states were allowed to set up carefully controlled cultural associations. As Romania emancipated itself from Soviet tutelage, it curbed the Hungarian autonomy that it had previously granted. On the other hand, Slovenia and Slovakia constituted distinct, ethnically defined units within a federal state, as did the 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 the existence of minority groups that insist on being heard. In Poland, not only the previously unacknowledged Germans and the barely recognized Ukrainians and Belarussians but also the formerly overlooked Kashubes have staked out their place on the ethnic landscape.12 The Czech Republic has finally conceded that it still contains minorities and it has taken the first steps towards giving institutional recognition to this fact.13 Hungary has defined a system of minority institutions which is both organizationally elaborate and politically marginal.14 In these countries minorities are more visible than they were previously. At least potentially they have powerful instruments at their disposition, such as free media, an unrestricted right of association and some sympathy abroad, though not matched 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 organized and they carry definite political weight. From their point of view, however, their actual achievements are disappointing. Thus, the Hungarians of Romania and Slovakia, like the Turks of Bulgaria, feel that they have little to show for their efforts of the last years, and that whatever specific gains they have made have not been accompanied by general societal acceptance. In some respects, the situation of minorities may even have encountered a setback. Because of the fate of the three federal communist states (Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, the USSR), federalism itself or even more mild versions of territorial autonomy have become taboo since they are considered stepping-stones towards separatism and disintegration. Because of the general reassertion of nationalist sentiment, antiminority political formations find a sympathetic hearing and an electoral following. The question of economic well-being, factual or perceived, dominates the agenda of post-communism. The experience of minorities in this respect is therefore a key component of their overall situation. Living standards fell radically for all social groups (as opposed to some individuals) with the introduction of the market economy and, for the most part, standards have been rising only slowly and hesitantly.15 Economic insecurity remains far higher than it was in the communist period. In the light of this situation, the question is not whether minorities 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 minorities have been particularly hard hit by the ‘transition’. This has been the case for those prominently represented in obsolescent sectors of the economy: Turkish agricultural workers in Bulgaria; Russians in heavy industry in the Baltic countries; Hungarians in the primary and secondary sectors in Slovakia. Minorities inhabiting advanced areas, such as the Germans in Polish Silesia or the Hungarians in parts of Transylvania, have struggled to keep their edge with respect to the national economy, with varied results. In the final analysis, however, the economic question as it affects the minority issue is one of perception. If minorities are seen as profiting from the transition more than the majority population (or, at least, suffering less), resentment against them ensues. This is particularly relevant for the case of the Roma. By all accounts they are the most miserable social and ethnic group in the area and their overall situation has deteriorated since the social safety-net of communism disappeared. Yet the Roma minority has become the focus of social frustration, for various reasons. Roma are conspicuously different in terms of consumption patterns and life style and they are easily identifiable. Long involved in the shadow economy, they are now also prominently represented in both petty and organized criminal activities. A well-defined ethnic group that is perceived to be preying upon the rest of society in order to avoid the rigours of transition is a veritable lightning rod for social resentment.16

Tendencies The premise underlying discussion of EU enlargement in East Central Europe is that, sooner or later, the outcome of the economic transition will be some sort of stable and, it is hoped, prosperous economic order. In these future circumstances it is likely that another dimension of the minority issue, namely that of identity politics, will come to the fore. Already today, as the East Central European countries come under the influence of current West European intellectual and cultural values, the politics of recognition and of identity are emerging as a new feature of the ideological landscape.17 Nationalism, as an expression of the majority’s identity, shows little sign of losing importance within the political culture of the East Central European states. Generally speaking, overtly nationalist parties have not fared best since the onset of democratization, but this has been because all other parties have become nationalist to a greater or lesser degree. The glorification of national history and the assiduous restoration of national symbols have been high on the agenda of post-communist governments. Obviously, this has heightened the sense of exclusion among ethnic minorities, but it has also made them receptive to ideologies and strategies of counter-affirmation. In response to the persistent dominance of majority groups, and inspired by Western preoccupation with minority rights and ethnic revival, East Central European minorities are increasingly receptive to the idea that cultures cannot be assessed on a scale of ‘higher’ or ‘lower’, that all ethnic groups should be

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recognized as equally worthy of respect, and, in particular, that numbers are not determinant of status, so that even small minorities deserve equal recognition. For the moment, these considerations are leading towards demands for equality of treatment rather than calls for affirmative action (positive discrimination).18 At the same time, they are preparing the ground for a minority agenda based upon ethnic pride, compensation for past victimhood and redress of present discrimination. The culture of subjectivity and the politics of identity will not only legitimate demands based on identity but will also dramatically expand the bases for identity. In addition to traditional religious, language and ethnic bases, identity in the future may well be founded on gender, sexual preference or life-style considerations. These new identity groups may, in the long run, upstage ethnic minorities, although, in the first instance, they will probably reinforce them and, in the second instance, they will supersede them. For example, we shall find not only Hungarian minority associations in Slovakia but also Hungarian homosexual minority associations as separate groups. There is really no limit to the proliferation of such identity formations. The multiplication of affinities along with the combination of ‘ressentiment’ and narcissism will provide an abundant and inflammable fuel for minority demands. The implications of these trends are that minorities will emerge strengthened, both subjectively and objectively. Existing organized minorities will be more affirmative in their demands, incipient minorities will develop self-consciousness, new minorities will arise. Forcible assimilation of minorities is already banned, at least by international convention, and voluntary assimilation will become less respectable. To be sure, the visible differences between minorities and majorities may become less noticeable in an increasingly uniform urban and modern setting. Diminution of objective differences does not mean, however, that minorities will abandon their distinct subjective identity or the agenda that flows from it. The process we are describing is a diffuse and inchoate one but it is already perceptible. Poland is witnessing the affirmation not only of its more substantial minorities, such as the Germans, the Ukrainians and the Belarussians, but also of such numerically insignificant communities as the Jews and of groups striving for recognition such as the Kashubes.19 Hungary’s national minority policy is designed to maintain minorities in existence, and these minorities are making claims on the national agenda and national budget. The revival of the Ruthene identity, in part through efforts from abroad, affects Slovakia and Poland as well as countries outside our purview, notably Ukraine and Yugoslavia.20 In the Czech Republic, Slovaks, indistinguishable in most respects from the Czechs, have organized as an ethnic minority. The relegalization of churches, such as the Uniates, and the vigour of Islam have also bolstered ethnic identity. Postcommunist national censuses confirm that earlier tendencies are being reversed and that more individuals now choose to proclaim a minority identity, previously dormant or recently acquired. It remains to be seen whether such developments will gravitate towards the realm of symbolic or of effective politics.

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Legal and policy regimes A telling aspect of the minority question in East Central Europe is the discrepancy between the spirit of these countries’ constitutional regimes and the international legal regimes to which they are ready to subscribe. In no other area is there as profound a gulf between the desire for national self-affirmation and the wish to integrate into a larger unit. The preambles of many post-communist constitutions confirm resoundingly the identification between the political order and the titular nation. The state is routinely presented as the emanation, the incarnation or the property of the majority nation. Some preambles also seize the occasion to articulate a view of history from which past or present minorities are absent.21 Constitutions mention national minorities in general terms, sometimes employing circumlocutions or alluding to them residually (e.g. ‘citizens whose native tongues are not Bulgarian’). They guarantee minority rights for individuals but not for collectivities, thus frustrating a key minority demand. The limitations of these provisions come to the fore when compared with those of the Hungarian constitution, which specifically states that ‘national and ethnic minorities share the power of the people – they are constituent factors in the state’, and which recognizes minorities 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. There might well be solid reasons for doing so: autonomous territorial units may simply replicate the exclusivist logic of the nation-state on a smaller scale; they invariably create new minorities among those not belonging to the titular people of the new unit; they may foster a ghetto mentality; they can act as an incitement to separatism. All these objections to territorial autonomy are weighty enough. It remains true, however, that territorial autonomy or federalism has functioned successfully as a mechanism for managing minority problems in various parts of the world. It is regrettable, though comprehensible in the light of recent experience, that federalism should arouse such panic in the ex-communist states. Constitutions are not necessarily the best guide to state practice because of their general nature and exhortative function. In dealing with minorities many constitutions simply refer matters to subsequent legislation, stipulating rights or guarantees ‘as provided by law’. Consequently, confrontation between the state and its minorities often focuses on particular laws concerning language (Slovakia), education (Romania), citizenship (Estonia, Latvia) or on a combination of these and other specific issues (e.g. toponyms, personal names, flags and other symbols). In most cases what counts is the spirit of the laws and of their application. Inasmuch as trust between the states and their minorities is minimal, however, much energy is dissipated in bickering over the wording and interpretation of these laws. It is often in response to such disputes that minority issues are internationalized. All the countries discussed here belong to the Council of Europe and to the OSCE, and it is these organizations that have taken an increasing interest in setting 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 Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities (1995), by virtue of its binding character, is heralded as a major breakthrough in minority protection. It has been ratified by all the states under discussion here (with the exception, as of December 2001, of Latvia, which has signed but not ratified). The Convention’s follow-up monitoring missions in adhering states also play a useful role in taking the pulse of minority problems.24 Since the end of the Cold War the OSCE has adopted a number of declarations relating to minority protection. Most significantly, it has established the Office of a High Commissioner for National Minorities (headed until July 2001 by the former Dutch Foreign Minister, Max van der Stoel, and subsequently by the Swedish diplomat, Rolf Ekeus), which has worked tirelessly to mediate and report on minority issues throughout the excommunist world. Of course, there are also UN bodies dealing with minority issues, notably the sub-committee on minorities within the Human Rights Commission. The EU has only stepped into this area warily and indirectly, by way of the ‘Plan Balladur’ (1995), formally sponsored by the OSCE, which called upon prospective entrants into the Union to settle among themselves frontier and related issues, such as minorities, before proceeding with the adherence process. The internationalization of the minority issue has created a dilemma for a number of East Central European states. On the one hand, they resent the outside interference and the assault on their sovereignty, much as they did in the inter-war period when the League of Nations monitored compliance with the minority treaties imposed upon the East Central Europeans by the victorious great powers. On the other hand, they are keen to argue their case inasmuch as rapprochement with Western countries is their top international priority. Indeed, Hungary has made internationalization of the minority issue a linchpin of its policy 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 that they are acting in good faith and in a reasonable manner, that minority complaints are exaggerated and stoked from abroad. The contrast between such attitudes, shared by public opinion, and the growing stridency of minority spokespersons suggests that the parties to conflict may be growing apart rather than coming together. It is indeed true that East Central European minority groups are following the lead of Western NGOs and international institutions, which, all too often, have little specific understanding of the area and automatically assume strident stances. Moreover, it must be grating for post-communist governments to hear ‘standard of civilization’ arguments from countries where minority conflicts are more violent than any in East Central Europe (Northern Ireland, Corsica, the Basque country) and where instances of deplorable treatment of minorities abound (as some critics put it, it is safer to be a Turk in Bulgaria than in Germany). At the same time, if the East Central Europeans are indeed seeking Western respect and equal recognition, they cannot avoid having the highest Western standards in regard to minorities invoked as a norm.

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Relations with neighbouring countries There is a fundamental difference between the present time and the inter-war period, when minorities were last a bone of contention within the area: today none of the countries under examination will go to war over the minority issue. In this respect, Hungary’s turnabout has been the most spectacular. Internal large-scale violence too is not envisaged against minorities. One cannot be as categorical in regard to border issues but it is only marginal political formations that call overtly for border changes and it is assumed that these changes would be carried out peacefully. At the same time, minority considerations enter into the relations of the East Central European countries with each other and with the outside world. The case of Hungary is most obvious. The fate of three to four million compatriots abroad (almost one-third of the population of Hungary itself) has been a dominant theme of Hungarian internal and foreign policy under virtually all regimes. Most recently, it has dictated Hungary’s policies in regard to its own internal minorities. Hungary’s generosity towards them was expected to serve as an example for neighbouring countries and as a basis for reciprocity. In this respect, the experience has been disappointing. The West has applauded Hungarian policies but Romania, Slovakia and Yugoslavia have reacted with suspicion and they, as well as Ukraine, have shown little inclination to follow the Hungarian example. Within Hungary itself, the vigour with which the question of the diaspora is pursued varies with the governments in power. As for minority policy within Hungary, it is difficult to assess to what extent support for it is ‘soft’ rather than ‘hard’. If this policy remains unreciprocated among all the countries in the area, 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 present its accounts with respect to its policies on behalf of the diaspora. It will have to acknowledge that the bilateral treaties signed with Slovakia and Romania, within the framework of the OSCE/EU’s ‘Plan Balladur’, have become a supplementary source of dispute as quarrels over interpretation abound.25 The conclusion that might have to be drawn is that the fate of Hungarian communities in the neighbouring countries depends overwhelmingly on the internal politics of these countries. Hungarians in Romania made temporary gains when the Democratic Convention government came to power in late 1996, but the future under the second Iliescu presidency is not at all assured. Improvement of the situation of the Hungarians of Slovakia followed the defeat of the Meciar government, but irritants persist under the shaky coalition government of Mikulas Dzurinda. What are the conclusions that Budapest (and the Hungarian minorities) will draw 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 countries, as an indication of a new approach to the problem of the Hungarian diaspora.26

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Other East Central European countries have not shown as much interest in the fate of their co-nationals abroad, which does not mean that they do not have diaspora communities or that they will show forbearance in the future. Poland is sympathetic to the plight of Poles in the ex-Soviet Union (one to two million people) and, after first having left the matter to the Church and other voluntary organizations, it has recently promulgated a repatriation law limited to Poles in Kazakhstan.27 It is relieved that the Polish minority in Ukraine (220,000–400,000) has not become an issue, both because of Ukraine’s policies and because of the generally good relations between the two countries. Poland is also satisfied that the Polish minority in Lithuania, after having opposed Lithuanian independence and then complained about political discrimination, now appears to be more docile. It is concerned, however, that the repressive political regime in Belarus may force attention upon the Polish minority there (400,000–500,000). Several countries are suspected of demonstrating concern for their conationals abroad only for opportunistic or retaliatory reasons. Slovakia complains about the fate of Slovaks in Hungary, although the latter are not only far less numerous than their Hungarian counterparts in Slovakia but they are also integrated almost to the point of assimilation (which provides additional grounds for complaint). Slovenia responds to Italian criticism of its failure to make amends for the expulsions of Italians and confiscations of property of 1945 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 the issue only makes a dent in Italian local politics whereas it is of national importance 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 drawn complaints). At present, the key issue is that of granting citizenship to the great number of Russians who settled during Soviet times. Inasmuch as statelessness is a violation of human rights and the citizenship requirements of these Baltic countries are designed to discriminate against a particular category of candidates, Moscow’s case for protecting Russians (and other former Soviet citizens) is a strong one. As the issue of citizenship moves towards resolution by way of inclusion, largely under international rather than Russian pressure, the nature of the problem changes.28 These new citizens will be able to run their own candidates for national office and they will weigh heavily on political outcomes. If they organize along ethnic lines, setting up Russian minority parties and electoral lists, they will end up by transforming these countries into binational and bilingual states. This is precisely what ethnic Latvians and Estonians are desperate to avoid but, instead of seeking an agreement with their Russian-speakers while the latter are still disenfranchised, they have been inclined to stall until forced to make 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,

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previously for the purpose of bringing them ‘back’ to Germany, more recently in order to foster German culture and to promote the welfare of Germans remaining abroad. Germany is treading very lightly in this domain, for historical reasons. 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 more reservedly) are only too eager to act benevolently with regard to their local Germans in the light of the economic importance that Germany has for East Central Europe. Another outside state that may be returning to parts of the area is Turkey, but, of the countries with which we are concerned, this interest is potentially relevant only for Bulgaria (other Balkan countries are another matter).

Perspectives and conclusions Let us assume, by way of a thought experiment, that ten years or so from now all the East Central European countries examined here are members of the European Union. What then will be the situation of ethnic minorities in this enlarged Europe? One may suppose that the minority factor will become far more important to EU politics than it is at present. This will occur because trends and realities from both parts of the Union will converge in a highly dynamic combination. On the one hand, the Union will contain a significant number of new members with important but marginalized minorities. On the other hand, it will be made up of old members where minorities are more integrated and less numerous but where a culture of minority promotion and of minority rights has been developing (often in terms of regionalization). West European minorities will find themselves reinforced, perhaps reinvigorated, and will intensify their strategies aiming at European-wide recognition. At the same time, in the new members of the Union, minorities will invoke West European precedents and norms to pursue their case in favour of an improved status, including greater cultural autonomy and, in some cases, territorial autonomy. In these circumstances it is difficult to imagine the indefinite continuation of what Bruno de Witte, in this volume (chapter 8), has aptly called the EU’s ‘agnosticism’ towards minorities residing within its member states. To be sure, tensions might be reduced by the new element of mobility. In the forefront of those who will avail themselves of the opportunity to cross borders freely will be minority members who will gravitate towards the countries of their language or ethnic kin to take up jobs and, in the long run, to settle down. This factor may, just as easily, operate in a reverse direction. Diaspora communities have always been important to the development of nationalism, and today’s ease of communications means that they can play an even greater role in the politics of the land they have left.29 Moreover, mobility will eventually force a reformulation of the very term ‘minority’. At present, though there is no universally accepted definition of the term, there is agreement that a minority must be made up of citizens of the country of residence.30 Thus, Turks in Germany are

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not a Turkish minority in Germany and the only Polish minority in Germany is that made up of German citizens, a qualification that limits the weight of this group both numerically and conceptually. Such restrictions will no longer be tenable in a Union where everyone shares European citizenship. This does not mean, however, that members of the Union will cease to intervene on behalf of their own nationals abroad, along the patterns of earlier interventions on behalf of minorities. In fact, the opposite will probably be the case. A possible development in this future enlarged Union will be pressure towards an increase in the number of Euro-regions and other trans-border arrangements. At present, Euro-regions and the like are regarded with suspicion by the states of East Central Europe, as alibis for outside interference and tampering with borders. This is why Poland has been unenthusiastic about creating any such 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 realization that trans-border cooperation, especially involving ethnic minorities, can be mutually beneficial could alter perceptions significantly. Certainly this is a less controversial project than that of introducing or reintroducing territorial autonomy or federalist structures, which will continue to arouse anxiety. As the East Central European countries enter the European Union, they will experience a series of changes affecting their sovereignty and their effective powers. Whatever their gains in other areas, they will be weakened qua states, and therefore power relations between majorities and minorities within these states, as well as within the EU as a whole, will change. How both parties react to these changes is a matter for speculation. By way of conclusion, let us recall that minorities imply majorities, and both assume the one-nation state as the norm of political organization. Franz Josef spoke of his ‘peoples’ rather than of ‘minorities’ within Austria-Hungary, and the Swiss today do not refer to the French-speaking or Italian-speaking population as ‘minorities’. In both cases, we are faced with pre-modern political conceptions that, in some curious and as yet undetermined 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 state framework inimical to them.

Appendix I: Statistical note Minority statistics constitute a great illusion. Under the appearance of scientific certainty and mathematical precision they conceal, advertently or inadvertently, a world of differing degrees and conceptions of identity, diverging definitions and unstable classifications. The uncertain or unreliable character of minority statistics holds true even if one discounts conscious falsification by state authorities, which has not been unknown in the past. Indeed, the obstacles to a reliable count come both from above and from below. Census categories are established by state authorities and reflect their vision of the state. Instead of documenting reality, some inter-war governments introduced

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the amalgamated categories of Czechoslovak and Serbo-Croatian to express a nation-building project. In the post-war period, states have sometimes been creative in inventing census categories, in order to avoid problems of attribution among established groups, to weaken these groups numerically or to promote new groupings. This is the origin of the categories of Muslims, in the ethnic sense, and of Macedonians in ex-Yugoslavia. In Romania the authorities have distinguished between Szeklers and Magyars or Germans and Saxons to diminish the weight of the larger groups. Authorities may ask a variety of questions to determine minority status. The most common criterion is language, but this is often problematic. For example, the main language of most Hungarian Roma is Hungarian, and therefore the number of Roma in Hungary is grossly underestimated. Nor is language a straightforward criterion. Some countries ask about mother tongue, which may be a distant and irrelevant fact, whereas others inquire about language of daily use (Umgangssprache), which favours the majority language wherever minorities work among majorities. Historically too, East Central Europe has had its share of minorities defined by non-linguistic, usually religious, criteria, and it can count individuals who identify with a group whose language they do not know. Assuming the most open census questionnaires, minority statistics will still contain significant variations over time. As in all other polls, respondents often provide the answer that they imagine, rightly or wrongly, the questioner expects. They may do so because they are intimidated, because they wish to discourage prying into their personal lives, or because they seek to project a particular image of themselves. Self-identification will therefore depend on circumstances, political and other. For example, it was imprudent to define oneself as German in Poland for much of the post-war era. This ceased to be the case for individuals who 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 to remain in Poland. Such variations of identity are all the more prevalent and understandable in areas where people effectively share more than one identity, whether because of personal factors, such as mixed marriages, or political considerations, such as border alterations and regime changes. The wisest respondents to questions about 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 statistics provide a range of figures. In some cases, we are giving the minimal and maximal plausible figures. In other cases, we are leaving open the minimum or the maximum (indicated with a question mark). In those cases where a single figure is provided it should be seen as an approximation.

Ethnic minorities and implications of EU enlargement Bulgaria population: 8,500,000 area: 110,000 km2 minorities: Armenians 20,000–40,000 Greeks approx. 7,000 Jews approx. 6,000 Macedonians ?–200,000 Pomaks* approx. 200,000 Roma 300,000–800,000 Tartars 6,000–? Turks 750,000–1,000,000 *Pomaks are Bulgarian-speaking Muslims. Czech Republic population: 10,300,000 area: 78,000 km2 minorities: Germans Hungarians Jews Poles Roma Slovaks

50,000–150,000 approx. 20,000 approx. 5,000 approx. 60,000 ?–200,000 300,000–500,000

Estonia population: 1,600,000 area: 45,100 km2 minorities: Belarussians Finns Jews Russians Ukrainians

approx. 30,000 approx. 18,000 ?–5,000 approx. 450,000 approx. 50,000

Hungary population: area: minorities: Armenians

10,400,000 93,000 km2 ?–3,000

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?–2,000 ?–60,000 65,000–200,000 ?–5,000 ?–80,000 ?–10,000 400,000–800,000 ?–5,000 30,000–100,000 ?–5,000

Latvia population: 2,700,000 area: 64,000 km2 minorities: Belarussians Jews Lithuanians Poles Russians Ukrainians

approx. 120,000 ?–25,000 approx. 35,000 approx. 60,000 approx. 900,000 approx. 90,000

Lithuania population: 3,700,000 area: 65,000 km2 minorities: Belarussians Jews Poles Russians Ukrainians

approx. 65,000 5,000–10,000 approx. 260,000 approx. 350,000 approx. 45,000

Poland population: 39,000,000 area: 312,000 km2 minorities: Belarussians Czechs Germans Jews Kashubes Lithuanians

200,000–400,000 approx. 2,000 300,000–800,000 3,000–10,000 ?–300,000 approx. 30,000

Ethnic minorities and implications of EU enlargement Roma Ruthenes (= Lemkos) Slovaks Ukrainians

15,000–40,000 ?–30,000 approx. 20,000 200,000–400,000

Romania population: 23,000,000 area: 237,000 km2 minorities: Armenians 2,000–? Bulgarians 30,000–100,000 Croats 7,000–? Germans approx. 100,000 Greeks 4,000–20,000 Hungarians 1,600,000–2,000,000 Jews approx. 10,000 Poles 4,000–10,000 Russians (& Lippovans)* 40,000–100,000 Roma 800,000–2,000,000 Serbs 35,000–? Slovaks 20,000–? Turks (& Tartars) 25,000–50,000 Ukrainians 70,000–250,000 * Lippovans are Russian Old Believers long settled in the Danube delta

Slovakia population: 5,300,000 area: 49,000 km2 minorities: Czechs Germans Hungarians Poles Roma Ruthenes Ukrainians Slovenia population: area: minorities:

1,900,000 20,000 km2

approx. 60,000 approx. 5,000 560,000–700,000 approx. 3,000 250,000–500,000 15,000–30,000 15,000–30,000

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André Liebich Albanians approx. 3,500 Croats approx. 55,000 Hungarians approx. 8,500 Istrians* 5,000–? Italians approx. 3,000 Macedonians approx. 4,000 Muslims* approx. 27,000 Roma 4,000–10,000 Serbs 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 with Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia. I am grateful to Giuliano Amato, Alexander Smolar, Jan Zielonka and other members of the EUI Reflection Group on the Nature of 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 which everyone was a minority in the Habsburg and Ottoman empires since even the titular or 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 et orientale (Geneva: Georg ed., 1997). 4 I have tried to explain some of the historical differences between Eastern and Western 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 last thousand years, with the exception of the region around Brussels, which has therefore become a focal point of linguistic tension. John A. Armstrong, Nations Before Nationalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), p. 25. 6 The Magyars occupied the Hungarian basin in 895 whereas the last Eastern invaders to settle in Western Europe, the Lombards, established themselves in the sixth century. See Norman Davies, Europe: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 234. For obvious geographical reasons, East Central Europe was subsequently 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 of Vienna (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, CO and Highland Lakes: Social Science Monographs and Atlantic Research and Publications, 1991), pp. 13–89. Milan Kundera, ‘The Tragedy of East Central Europe’, 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 Wiedererwachen der Nationalismen’, Transit, 1 (1990), pp. 132–41 and his ‘Le réveil des nationalismes’,

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11

12

13 14

15

16

17

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in Jacques Rupnik, ed., Le Déchirement des nations, (Paris: Seuil, 1995), pp. 9–40. The following title is eloquent: Bernard Paquereau, ‘Sous la glace l’histoire. Les rapports du 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, ‘Nationalism and the Crisis of the Post-Soviet State’, Survival, 35:1 (1993), pp. 5–26. On the wider implications of the contemporary East Central European ‘politicization of ethnicity and ethnicization of politics’ (Joseph Rothschild) or ‘revived versus contrived nationalism’ (Ivo Banac), see Katherine Verdery’s succinct statement: ‘The idiom of national difference becomes the means of assigning blame for present disaster as well as of establishing who has the purity – both moral and ethnic – needed to govern’ (comments on Eric Hobsbawm in ‘Ethnicity and Nationalism in Europe Today’, Anthropology Today, 8:1 [1992], p. 10. For more specific argumentation on the economic aspect, see her ‘Nationalism and National Sentiment in PostSocialist Romania’, Slavic Review, 52:2 (1993), pp. 179–203. For an original, moral variant see also Jiřina Šiklová, ‘The Solidarity of the Culpable’, Social Research, 58:1 (1991), pp. 765–73. See Sławomir Lodzinski, ‘The Protection of National Minorities in Poland: Law and Practice after 1989’, in Jerzy Kranz, ed., Law and Practice of Central European Countries in the Field of National Minorities Protection After 1989 (Warsaw: Centre for International Relations, 1998), pp. 131–85. ‘New Minorities’ Office in Czech Republic?’, RFE/RL Daily Report (31 January 2000), and ‘Government Calls for Ethnic Minorities’ Council’, RFE/RL Daily Report (2 November 2000). See Niamh Walsh, Minority Self Government in Hungary; Legislation and Practice (Lund: Raoul Wallenberg Institute [Master Thesis], 2000) available on European Centre for Minority Issues website () and Andrea Aján, La Protection des minorités ethniques et nationales en Hongrie: Aspects historiques, juridiques et politiques (Geneva Graduate Institute of International Studies [DES thesis], 2000). The economies of all the states examined here suffered calamitous drops (contractions of up to one third and, in the case of the former Soviet republics, one half of GDP in the early 1990s) compensated by subsequent growth in the single digits (with occasional relapses into negative figures). See Stanisław Gomułka, Macroeconomic Policies and Achievements in Transition Economies, 1989–1999 (Geneva: UNECE, 2000) and Economic Trends in Eastern Europe, 9:3 (2000). In Hungary and the Czech Republic, for example, Roma unemployment rates hover around 60 per cent to 70 per cent. In Hungary, Roma life expectancy is about fifteen years lower than the average. About 60 per cent of the prison population in Hungary is Roma and some 50 per cent of burglaries in the Czech Republic are committed by Roma. Two recent studies (which avoid some of the negative quantification given above) are Dena Ringold, Roma and the Transition in Central and Eastern Europe: Trends and Challenges (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2000) and Report on the Situation of Roma and Sinti in the OSCE Area, prepared by the High Commissioner on National Minorities, OSCE (2000). New approaches to minority issues in this perspective have been pioneered by two Canadian authors: Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994) and Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). The option of positive discrimination was already suggested for the area in a case before the Permanent Court of International Justice in 1935 concerning Greek minority schools in Albania. The Court ruled that although equality in law precluded discrimination, 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, see Antony E. Alcock, ‘A Reapparaisal of Existing Theory and Practice in the Protection

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21

22

23 24 25 26

27 28 29

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of Minorities’, in A.C. Hepburn, ed., Minorities in History (London: Edward Arnold, 1983), p. 234. For an interesting look at the recent stirrings of Kashub identity, see Brunon Synak, ‘The Kashubes During the Post-Communist Transformation in Poland’, Nationalities Papers, 25:1 (1997), pp. 715–28. Regarding efforts on behalf of the Ruthenes by a dedicated North American ethnic entrepreneur, see Chris Hann, ‘Intellectuals, Ethnic Groups and Nations: Two Late Twentieth-Century Cases’, in Sukumur Periwal, ed., Varieties of Nationalism (Budapest: Central European University Press, 1995), pp. 110–16. One may read the following in the preambles to the constitutions of two new countries, identified with those whom Marx and Engels described as ‘peoples without history’. ‘We, the Slovak Nation, mindful of the political and cultural heritage of our forefathers and of hundreds of years experience in the struggle for our national existence …’; ‘Proceeding from … the historical fact that the Slovenes have formed over many centuries of struggle for national liberation their own national identity and established their own statehood.’ It should be acknowledged that the Slovak preamble does mention ‘members of national minorities and ethnic groups living in the territory of the Slovak Republic’. For example, article 1 of Romania’s constitution of 1991 states: ‘Romania is a national state, sovereign and independent, unitary and indivisible’, whereas the preamble to the Bulgarian constitution of 1991 recalls ‘our irrevocable duty to safeguard the national and state unity of Bulgaria’ and soon excludes autonomous territorial units (article 2[1]). 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. See further Kinga Gal, ‘The Council of Europe Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities and its Impact on Central and Eastern Europe’, VI ICCEES World Congress, Tampere, Finland, July 2000. For a legal analysis, see Kinga Gal, ‘The Role of Bilateral Treaties in the Protection of National Minorities in Central and Eastern Europe’, E/CN.4/Sub.2/AC.5/1998 CRP.2. The ‘Law on Hungarians Living in Neighbouring Countries (2001)’ provides some social benefits and limited (three months annually) work permits to persons of ‘Hungarian nationality who are not Hungarian citizens’. Further on this law, see Alina Mungiu-Pippidi, chapter 4 in this volume. ‘Polish Repatriation to Focus Mainly on Compensation from Kazakhstan’, RFE/RL Daily Report (9 November 2000). ‘EU Praises Changes to Estonian Language Law’, RFE/RL Daily Report (15 June 2000). 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). International bodies have not succeeded in establishing a universally accepted definition of minorities, in spite of the efforts of two UN rapporteurs, Francesco Capotorti in the 1970s and Jules Deschenes in the 1980s. The definitional problem is therefore not confined to East Central Europe and a discussion of it would lead us too far astray from our main concern here. Those interested may consult, for example, John Packer, ‘On the Definition of Minorities’, in John Packer and Kristain Myntti, eds,The Protection of Ethnic and Linguistic Minorities in Europe (Åbo/Turku: Abo Akademi University, Institute for Human Rights, 1993).

8

Politics versus law in the EU’s approach to ethnic minorities Bruno de Witte

The notions of ethnic minority and European Union seem, at first sight, to belong to two different worlds. The contrast between these two worlds may be illustrated by several contemporaneous pairs of events that occurred during the first half of the 1990s: •

•

•

On 9 and 10 December 1991, the European Council met in Maastricht and managed, with some difficulty, to reach agreement on the Treaty of Maastricht establishing the European Union and providing, among other things, for the creation of a common European currency. I remember one American journalist, present at Maastricht, criticizing the Heads of Government of the (then) twelve member states for squabbling endlessly over what, for her, were technical trifles while at the other end of Europe, she argued, something much more important for the future of the continent was happening: through the conclusion of the Minsk Agreement of 8 December 1991, the Russian Federation, the Ukraine and Belarus had created the Commonwealth of Independent States and proclaimed the end of the Soviet Union ‘as a subject of international law’. Ethnic diversity had, of course, been one of the principal agents of the dissolution of the Soviet empire, whereas it had not played any role in the adoption of the Treaty of Maastricht. On 1 January 1993, the European Union witnessed an event that, at the time, was greeted by solemn statements and bonfires lit across Europe (although it seems almost forgotten today): the abolition of border controls on the trade in goods between the member states of the European Union and the official launch of the Single Market, crowning an intensive period of legislative activity that had started after the European Commission had issued, 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 Federal Republic was dissolved into two new states: the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Again, cultural differences were among the principal causes of the separation. On 1 February 1995, the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities was signed within the framework of the Council of

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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 on matters of minority protection; at the same time, it was clear to all that the Convention was primarily meant to deal with one particular part of Europe, namely the Central and Eastern part. The Convention was treading with care, as shown by its article 21, stating that nothing in the present framework convention shall be interpreted as implying any right to engage in any activity or perform any act contrary to the fundamental principles of international law and in particular of the sovereign equality, territorial integrity and political independence of States. No such precautions had been taken when drafting the Act of Accession by which Austria, Finland and Sweden had, just one month earlier, been admitted as new members of the European Union. It was clear to those countries’ governments and populations that joining the EU implied a serious limitation of national sovereignty, which they accepted – with more or less enthusiasm – in view of the expected economic benefits of membership.

The three contrasting pairs of events described above evoke two very different trajectories: on the one hand, one finds countries of Western Europe that carry forward, or join, a process of intense economic and political integration called the European Union, for which they accept divesting themselves of certain paraphernalia of the traditional nation-state, and in which they are not hindered by ethnic minority questions. On the other hand, one finds countries of Central and Eastern Europe that remain outside this supranational integration process and many of which are marked by a revival of traditional questions of nationalism and ethnic conflict. Today, however, the two trajectories have become tangential and even tend to overlap. This may again be illustrated by a pair of events that signal the emergence of the terms ‘ethnic’ and ‘minorities’ in the official vocabulary of the European Union. On 16 and 17 June 1997, the European Council reached political agreement on a document that was, some months later, formally signed as the Treaty of Amsterdam. This Treaty, among many other things, inserted into the EC Treaty a new article 13, which enables the Council of the European Union to ‘take appropriate action to combat discrimination based on sex, racial or ethnic origin, religion or belief, disability, age or sexual orientation’. Less than a month later, the European Commission, in its opinion on the request for accession to the EU by a number of CEECs, insisted on the importance of what it called ‘respect for minorities’ as one of the political criteria for membership of the European Union.1 These two recent uses of the terms “ethnic” and “minorities” were made in two different contexts:

Politics vs law in the EU’s approach to minorities •

•

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The first was made in the context of the internal evolution of the European Union, in which the question of ethnic minorities has long occupied a very marginal place and is now finally recognized as a matter of concern, albeit with regard, primarily, to immigrant populations. The second was made in the external context of the relations between the EU and its Central and East European partners and candidates for accession; in this context, the position of ethnic minorities has been a relevant factor for a number of years.

There is, thus, a chronological décalage between the internal and the external agenda of the European Union. I will, therefore, start by considering the role of the ethnic minorities question in the external relations of the EU with the Central and East European countries (or ‘CEECs’). I will then examine more closely the reasons for the apparent absence, so far, of any internal European Union policy on ethnic minorities. In the final section, I will try to weave the two threads together and speculate about the way the European Union will be confronted with the ethnic minority question in future years, particularly after its projected Eastern enlargement.

The external perspective: double standard or common standard? The double standard revealed: two meetings in Copenhagen and one in Amsterdam For the European Union, concern for minorities is primarily an export product and not one for domestic consumption. This fact may be highlighted by looking at three political documents, adopted within one decade, each of which helped to define the fundamental values underpinning the European integration process. •

At its meeting in Copenhagen on 29 June 1990, the Conference on the Human Dimension of the CSCE adopted a text that became known as the Copenhagen Document and is sometimes referred to as a ‘European Constitution on Human Rights’.2 The Document affirms the link between democracy, the rule of law and human rights and also devotes, within this context, an extensive chapter to the protection of national minorities. This chapter, although cautiously worded and lacking binding legal force, was the first attempt at agreeing an all-European standard on the status and rights of minorities. In the euphoric post-Berlin-Wall climate of 1990, the commitments contained in the Copenhagen Document were subscribed to by all countries of Europe, including therefore the member states of the European Union. These commitments continue to inspire, today, the activities of what is now called the OSCE, and, more particularly, of its High Commissioner on National Minorities.3

140 •

•

Bruno de Witte This common platform accepted by all European countries was transformed, at another Copenhagen summit some years later, namely the European Council meeting of June 1993, into political criteria to be complied with by a particular set of countries, namely those of Central and Eastern Europe aspiring to membership of the European Union. According to the European Council conclusions, ‘membership requires that the candidate 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 the Copenhagen Document of 1990 was translated into one synthetic formula with important political implications. A slightly different formula was adopted, for the EU’s internal usage, at the Amsterdam 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 the rule of law, principles which are common to the Member States.’ If these are the principles on which the EU is founded, it is logical that they should also serve as conditions of membership. Indeed, the text of article 49 of the EU Treaty, as modified in Amsterdam, confirms that ‘any European State which respects the principles set out in Article F(1) may apply to become a member of the Union.’ Yet, as we have seen, the formula that was actually used for the purpose of the present enlargement process is more demanding as it also includes protection of minorities as one of the indispensable premises for integration.

Thus, among the famous ‘political criteria’ set out by the European Union as conditions for the accession of the CEECs, or – more generally – for closer cooperation with the CEECs, the insistence on genuine minority protection is clearly the odd one out. Respect for democracy, the rule of law and human rights have been recognized as fundamental values in the European Union’s internal development and for the purpose of its enlargement, whereas minority protection is only mentioned in the latter context. Therefore, its imposition on other countries may seem rather inconsistent or even ‘somewhat hypocritical’,5 and the distinctive treatment meted out to them is strangely reminiscent of the infamous post-World War I minority protection regime, which collapsed, in part, because it was perceived as a set of unilateral obligations imposed on the newly created states of Central and Eastern Europe by the Western victors of that war.6

Stages in the EU’s external policy on minorities7 The commitments jointly undertaken by all CSCE states in the Copenhagen Document of 1990 formed the basis from which the European Union, and its member states, gradually developed a set of requirements for groups of countries in Central and Eastern Europe that, taken together after some ten years’

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experience, may be presented as an embryonic ‘common foreign minorities policy’ of the European Union (although the EU member states notoriously have continued to have divergent views on the political situation in individual CEECs). Minority protection as a criterion for the recognition of new states (1991–2) In response to the eruption of violent conflict in Yugoslavia, the EC member states, within the framework that was then called European Political Cooperation (the forerunner of the Common Foreign and Security Policy), convened a peace conference at the Hague, and an Arbitration Committee was set up, also known as the Badinter Committee, from the name of its chairman. Through the opinions that it gave upon the request of the EC, the Committee developed a small body of doctrine on self-determination and minority rights.8 The Twelve (as they then were) also contributed more directly to international state practice in this field 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 new states in this area of the world was made conditional, by the Twelve, on a number of commitments from the side of the applicants, including respect for human rights and ‘guarantees for the rights of the ethnic and national groups and minorities in accordance with the commitments subscribed to in the framework of the CSCE’.9 Putting conditions on recognition of new states was not unprecedented. What was striking was the specific mention made of minority protection as one of the conditions for recognition, particularly as it came from the side of a group of countries (the EC countries) that had never before taken, as a group, any internal or international action in the field of minority protection. In reality, the agreement on common conditions for recognition was a compromise designed to paper over the differences among European countries over the situation in Yugoslavia.10 Moreover, the minority protection criterion was applied inconsistently by the EC countries: Croatia was recognized on 15 April 1992, although the Badinter Committee had expressed reservations on its minority protection laws; whereas Macedonia complied with all the criteria, according to the Committee, 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’s Common Foreign and Security Policy, immediately after the entry into force of the Treaty of Maastricht, was the ambitious initiative, inspired by France, to convene an international conference at which the stability of Europe would be ensured by means of a range of bilateral treaties and declarations establishing good-neighbourly relations between countries of Central and Eastern Europe. There is no doubt that the active role and apparent commitment shown by the

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European Union in this matter was a decisive factor in convincing some of the CEECs to start negotiations with their neighbours in preparation for the Stability Pact.11 The Pact, as eventually adopted at a conference in Paris in 1995, included only one important new instrument for minority protection, namely the bilateral treaty between Hungary and Slovakia, which was signed on the eve of the Paris Conference.12 The negotiations on a similar treaty between Hungary and Romania were concluded only later, in 1996.13 The Stability Pact was deposited with the OSCE, and that organization was entrusted with monitoring the implementation of obligations contained in it. The European Union itself lost interest in the Pact, and now directs its efforts mainly at bringing about reforms in the domestic laws of the CEECs. Yet the spirit of the Stability Pact is still reflected in the financial support given by the EC Phare programme to crossborder cooperation actions.14 The opinions on accession and the accession partnerships (1997–8) As mentioned above, the opinions delivered by the European Commission in July 1997,15 as to whether the applicant CEECs fulfilled the conditions for being admitted to accession negotiations, devoted specific attention to the question of minority protection. Despite the unsophisticated and fragmentary nature of the Commission’s analysis of the minority issues, two implicit positions can be derived from these opinions. First, in commenting upon the situation in Estonia and Latvia, the Commission adopted its own definition of minorities: one that included all the communities residing in these countries, without distinguishing whether their members were nationals of the country or not. This is an approach that the Baltic governments had always taken care to reject in other contexts.16 Second, the Commission was apparently not content with the formal recognition of minority rights in national constitutions and bilateral treaties, but made 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 its bilateral ‘Stability Pact’ treaty with Hungary, but the European Commission nevertheless expressed dissatisfaction with the minority situation there. In the end, Slovakia was the only country that, in the Commission’s view, failed to meet the political criteria, although the minority question was not the most important reason for that negative decision. Today, the policy of ‘conditionality’ continues unabated with both the frontrunners and the second-wave applicants, and, indeed, in the relations of the EU with the successor states of Yugoslavia. The Accession Partnerships adopted in 1998 list a large number of ‘short-term’ and ‘medium-term’ priorities for the applicant states. These priorities include some items in the field of minority protection. The short-term priorities for Slovakia include a reform of its laws on the use of minority languages, whereas Estonia and Latvia must urgently facilitate the conditions for the naturalization of ‘non-citizens’ (i.e. the Russian-speaking community) and improve their integration by offering them

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courses in the national language. In the medium term, four other countries (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania) are expected to improve the integration of the Roma population.18 Latvia and Slovakia, in particular, although they were excluded from the first round of negotiations, continued to be the object of political pressure to improve their minority protection record. At a session of the EU/Slovakia Association Council in April 1998, the EU ministers reiterated their demand for the urgent adoption of a new law on the use of minority languages.19 A few days earlier, the European Union had expressed satisfaction over a new Action Plan of the Latvian government to accelerate the handling of requests for citizenship.20 In the general reports on ‘progress towards accession’, which the Commission adopted in November 1998,21 satisfaction was expressed about the legal reforms that Latvia had, in the mean time, enacted, whereas no significant improvement was found in the protection of minorities in Slovakia (but the change of government in that country was still too recent to be reflected in the Commission’s findings). In its general assessment of the record of all applicant countries, the Commission continued to exert pressure on applicant states by referring critically to the situation of the Roma in several candidate countries, and by concluding: ‘Overall, the problem of minorities continues to raise concerns in the perspective of enlargement.’22

Elements of a common European standard In international relations, there is no rule of formal reciprocity whereby states are prevented from formulating rules of behaviour for other states that they are not prepared to follow themselves. Yet, if the European Union institutions evaluate the treatment of minorities in third countries, can they legitimately ignore the way in which similar groups are treated inside the European Union? Some years ago, a member of the European Parliament bravely stated: [W]e will be equally assiduous at identifying and following up instances of abuse within the European Community; … as well as examining the situation of the Greek minority in Albania, we also will take an impartial view of the situation of the Turkish minority in Komotini.23 That may be the position of some members of the European Parliament, but it has never been endorsed by the Commission and the Council: what the member states do with ‘their’ minorities is none of the EU’s business. So, is there a blatant double standard in the respect for minorities? Or could the EU’s inactivity with respect to its own member states perhaps be justified by arguing that intervention is superfluous in view of the perfectly adequate performance of each member state with regard to minority protection? That is not so evident, to say the least. When looking at the internal situation in the present fifteen member states, one should certainly take into account the considerable diversity in the factual situations (ethnic minorities are not present everywhere),

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but there are also large differences in the willingness of the various states to recognize minorities, protect their rights and guarantee their political participation. There is, in fact, a sharp contrast between the common regime of protection of fundamental rights (where there is considerable similitude between West European countries) and the special case of minority rights (which are still very much an idiosyncratic feature of certain countries or parts of countries). The diversity is so great as to discourage any attempt at systematic comparison.24 The academic pilgrims from the West who, in the early 1990s, brought their ‘model constitutions’ to Central and Eastern Europe did not have a readymade minority protection model in their first-aid kits25 because such a generally applicable model simply did not exist. Yet one should look beyond the domestic practices of states and also take into account the international commitments undertaken in recent years by all European states. A common European standard of minority protection may exist after all. It has been developed mainly outside the framework of the EU itself, but with the participation of its member states, and may therefore legitimately be used by the EU in its external activities, at least to the extent that the EU states effectively comply with that standard. The elements of the European standard will be briefly considered now.26 Democracy and the rule of law In the Copenhagen Document of 1990, the participating states recognized, in the first of the paragraphs dealing with minorities, ‘that the questions relating to national minorities can only be satisfactorily resolved in a democratic political framework 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, many ethnic activists and academic experts failed to make a principled distinction between democratic and authoritarian states as far as the treatment of minorities was concerned. Often, even in Western Europe, countries like the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia had been described as showing a better approach to the protection of ethnic diversity than West European countries with their unilateral emphasis on individual human rights. Indeed, Yugoslavia had acted for a long time, 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 the absence of democratic elections, freedom of expression and an independent judiciary, 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 of protection for minority interests can be brought about simply by applying and creatively 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 give implicit protection to minorities by adhering to general human rights standards as defined by their Constitution and by the European Convention of Human Rights (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 the language of one’s choice in private activities, and thereby limited the possibility for the Quebec provincial government to impose the exclusive use of French for outdoor commercial signs and, hence, protected the linguistic rights 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 of Turkey into a federal state, which was found to be in contrast with longestablished constitutional values. The Socialist Party complained in Strasbourg that this was a breach of its human rights as guaranteed by the European Convention of Human Rights. The European Court held, in its judgment of 25 May 1998, that the fact that such a political programme is considered incompatible with the current principles and structures of the Turkish State does not make it incompatible with the rules of democracy. It is of the essence of democracy to allow diverse political programmes to be proposed and debated, even those that call into question the way a State is currently organised, provided that they do not harm democracy itself.29 And the Court (unanimously!) concluded that the dissolution of the Socialist Party constituted a violation of the freedom of association as guaranteed by the European Human Rights Convention.30

These examples could be multiplied. It will be interesting to observe the contribution of the European Court of Human Rights case-law in the years to come, as many more applications on minority matters are likely to be lodged at Strasbourg from the CEECs. Yet there are some inherent limits to the human rights approach. They may be exemplified by a decision of the (now defunct) European Commission on Human Rights. There was a complaint by the Südtiroler Volkspartei (the main party representing the German-speaking population in South Tyrol) that the new Italian electoral law, by imposing a minimum threshold for the attribution of seats in Parliament, constituted discrimination against minority political parties. The Commission stated that the new electoral law applied equally to all parties and that ‘the Convention does not compel states to provide for positive discrimination in favour of minorities.’31 This interpretation 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 this case, organizations) in accordance with objective differences among them, and

146 Bruno de Witte therefore also a duty to enact special rules enabling the use of minority languages and, more generally, the development of minority cultures.32 But it certainly makes things much easier if such positive duties towards minority groups are laid down explicitly. This leads me to the third layer of the ‘European standard’. Minority rights Despite the undeniable differences in the domestic arrangements of the various states in both East and West, a European standard in respect of minority rights has been emerging in recent years. The Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities, adopted within the Council of Europe in 1995, entered into force on 1 February 1998. It has, to date, been signed by fourteen member states of the European Union and ratified by nine of them. Only France has neither signed nor ratified.33 What is the content of this emerging minority rights standard? The Framework Convention contains, first of all, a number of general fundamental rights that can already be found in the European Convention on Human Rights but whose particular implications for the members of a national minority are emphasized. Yet the main contribution of the Framework Convention lies in the formulation of a number of specific minority rights that cannot easily be reduced to the canonical list of general human rights,34 namely a qualified right for individual members35 of a minority to use their language in dealing with courts, public authorities and in the public service media, and a right to receive instruction in that language in the public education system. Although the Framework Convention may seem overly cautious in its wording and too respectful of the states’ sovereignty,36 it does constitute an important stage in international standardsetting, 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 is true that citizenship defines, in a fundamental way, an individual’s membership of 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 the relevant international and European treaties, apply to all residents of a particular country, whether or not they are nationals of that country. Therefore, the possibility for members of an ethnic minority to acquire, or keep, the nationality of the state where they live ranks lower than the guarantee of human rights in the scale of minority protection instruments. At any rate, no clear Europe-wide (or universal) standard has emerged in this respect. The pressure exercised by the international community to relax the harsh conditions for naturalization that, in countries such as Estonia and Latvia, make it difficult for Russian-speaking persons to acquire the nationality of the country are primarily inspired by the will to prevent the escalation of inter-ethnic tensions and to appease the ire of

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the Russian government. Political pressure has not been backed by legal standard-setting in this field. There is no generally recognized right for all long-time residents in a particular state territory to be eligible for citizenship of that country. Indeed, such a standard would be hard to meet by many West European countries, whose legal regimes for the acquisition of citizenship are hardly less rigid than those of the Baltic states. The rules on the acquisition of nationality are relevant because the recognition of minority rights, in contrast to human rights, is often made dependent on having the nationality of the country concerned. That, at least, is the interpretation given by many states to the term ‘national minority’ as used in the Framework 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 state power. A second type of often-used instruments for minority protection or of ‘group accommodation’39 are those that involve the sharing of state power, either through the recognition of autonomous legislative powers to institutions representing ethnic minority interests (autonomy) or by organizing the participation of ethnic minority groups in the decision-making processes at the central state level itself (consociation). Those are, arguably, the most advanced forms of minority protection. Regional autonomy is widely, and increasingly, used in Western Europe as a means of defusing ethnic minority conflicts, including in such traditionally centralized countries as France and the United Kingdom.40 Yet CEECs tend to be rather wary of federal or quasi-federal solutions in general, and special ‘asymmetrical’ regimes of autonomy for parts of the country inhabited by minority populations are shunned by those states for fear that this may be a prelude to secession. Currently, there is no clear obligation for states, in general international law, to establish regimes of autonomy for minority groups. Nor has a common European standard emerged in this respect, at least for the time being. The Copenhagen Document of 1990 went some way in this direction by recognizing the ‘right of persons belonging to national minorities to effective participation in public affairs, including participation in the affairs relating to the protection and promotion of the identity of such minorities’. This principle is now echoed in article 15 of the Framework Convention. Yet efforts to go beyond this general statement, by imposing a specific duty on states to create regimes of local or regional autonomy in areas inhabited by ethnic minorities, have not been very successful. The only text that goes that far is Recommendation 1201 (1993) of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, which provides as follows in its article 11: In the regions where they are in a majority the persons belonging to a national minority shall have the right to have at their disposal appropriate local or autonomous authorities or to have a special status, matching the

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A ‘Recommendation’ is, as the term betrays, a non-binding text. Yet this particular Recommendation has quickly become famous because of the efforts made by the Hungarian government to incorporate it as a binding standard in the bilateral treaties that it negotiated with Slovakia and Romania. This issue was, indeed, the main stumbling-block during the negotiations, and although the reference to Recommendation 1201 was eventually inserted in both treaties, additional declarations specified that this reference did not imply any recognition of a right to a special status of territorial ‘autonomy’ based on ethnic criteria.41 All in all, it is quite obvious that European states are still very reluctant to recognize any limits to their sovereign power to decide their country’s governmental structures. An all-European consensus exists on the principle that the solution for ethnic conflicts involves the elaboration of rules and institutions that will allow for the preservation of both the integrity of the state and the identity of the minority. But what does this involve in practice? A major distinction should be made between instruments permitting a limitation of state power without affecting the institutional structure of the state (‘rights’) and instruments that rearrange the state structures so as to allow for territorial autonomy or other forms of minority interest representation. On the former level, a European standard exists, though it is often vague and needs to be developed further. On the latter level, no such European standard has emerged.

The internal perspective: are ethnic minorities a nonissue in the European Union? The EU is not unfamiliar with tension caused by ethnically inspired conflicts, but until today such questions have rarely been lifted up to the Union level. I shall attempt, in this section, to explain some of the reasons why this is so. The comparative politics and multi-level governance approaches to the study of European integration, which are both currently fashionable political science theories, invite us to examine the EU by analogy with national political systems, and particularly those of federal states. Now, ethnic minority issues arise in federal systems in two different guises: either some or all of the component units act as institutions articulating the interests of particular ethnic groups; or the central government intervenes in order to protect ethnic minorities within some of the component units of the system. Both hypotheses could conceivably arise in the European Union as well. Have the member states of the EU become ‘national minorities’? Let me start by considering the first hypothesis. In federal or regional states one of 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 many Canadians both inside and outside the province as the institutional representative for the French-speaking community in Canada. In Spain, the Constitution recognizes Catalonia, Euskadi and Galicia as Autonomous Communities with legislative powers, but also as ‘nationalities’ with distinct histories and cultural characteristics, and the governments of those Autonomous Communities defend with pugnacity the cultural characteristics of their territory against the perceived dominance of the Castillian-speaking majority of the country. In Belgium, to take a final example, the Communauté germanophone is an autonomous unit with distinct legislative powers but also acts (as its name clearly betrays) as the representative for the country’s tiny German-speaking minority. There is no similar ethnic dimension in the relations between the European Union and its member states. Although each of the member states’ populations is, obviously, a numerical minority in relation to the European population as a whole, and although individual countries are frequently outvoted in the European Parliament and the Council and feel their interests are being neglected in the European decision-making process, this does not mean that any of the member states has become a ‘minority’. One reason for this is of a formal nature: all member states have preserved their status as independent, and equally sovereign, states, a status that finds practical reflection in the requirement of unanimity for all major decisions affecting the future of European integration (including any revisions of the founding treaties and any accessions of new states), in the paramount role of the principle of 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 the various national languages as co-official languages of the European Union. Beyond the formal institutional equality of all member states, there is also the happy political circumstance that no single country or coalition of countries has ever been able to dominate the others so as to impose its views and interests in the decision-making process. Coalitions between states keep shifting according to the particular subject matter; there are some stable sub-systems and the FrancoGerman tandem, in particular, may well play, from time to time, the role of the locomotive of EU politics, but it would not make sense to describe the political relations between member states of the EU in terms of a stable ‘majority’ pitted against one or more structural ‘minorities’.42 The most fundamental reason why none of the member state populations can be described as an ‘ethnic minority’ is the absence of a clearly dominant culture among either the original Six or the present Fifteen, and the firm but long unexpressed agreement that no such dominant culture should be allowed to emerge. When the European Community was founded, economic cooperation was launched against the background of major political objectives, such as the preservation of peace or the encapsulation of Germany, but aims of cultural expansion or assimilation were entirely absent. The European unification process, unlike earlier attempts at political and economic unification within the nation-state

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framework, was not thought to require cultural homogenization. The guiding image of the future Europe was, and still is today, that of a federation of nationstates respecting the existing cultural patterns of its members rather than replicating the nineteenth-century nation-state model. In legal-institutional terms, this meant that education, culture and language were not listed among the policy areas falling within the competence of the European Community, and that the authority of the member states in these matters could be entirely preserved. To conclude, there is no evidence so far that, by being part of the European Union, the French, or Danish, or Luxemburgian peoples have become ‘national minorities’. A minority protection policy of the European Union? Let me now turn to the second hypothesis, namely that the European Union could be instrumental in protecting the position of ethnic minority groups inside its member countries, like the Canadian federal government protecting the position of Indians and Inuits living in the province of Quebec, or the Swiss federal government guaranteeing the rights of the Romansh-speakers, who are outnumbered by the German-speakers in their home canton of Graubünden. Again, this analogy does not hold. It was, and is, entirely unacceptable for the EU to interfere in the relations between the central governments of the member states and the ethnic minorities living within their borders. This can be seen both in the institutional structure of the EU and in the actual policies pursued by the Union. On the first level, the dominant principle is that of institutional autonomy: the way in which each member state of the European Union defines its own input in EU decision-making is an internal matter that depends only on the constitutional rules and political practices of that country. Whether ethnic minorities (or, rather, the local and regional institutions representing their interests) should have a role either in defining the position taken by the member state in the EU policy process, or in implementing EU policies on the ground, is therefore a matter to be settled by each country separately. The legal system of the European Union only knows the ‘member states’, an abstract denomination that covers bodies and civil servants acting at many different levels. The right to take part in EU decision-making bodies and the responsibility to comply with EU obligations is entrusted to whoever is, according to internal rules, entitled to act in the name of the state. The exclusion of any direct participation of regional and local authorities in the EU decision-making process became increasingly hard to maintain as more and more member states developed advanced systems of regional or federal autonomy, and as the scope of the EU’s activities spread ever wider, so as to interfere with the policies of those regions. After an energetic campaign conducted by the German Länder and the Belgian Communities and Regions, the Maastricht Treaty 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 body consisting of representatives of regional and local bodies, and by allowing states to 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 by Belgium. Yet what should be emphasized in the context of this chapter is that the regions, whenever they are mentioned in acts of Community law, are referred to as a global institutional category. There is no special status for regions that happen to be genuine member states of a federation (as in Germany), or regions that represent a constitutionally recognized ‘nationality’ (like Catalonia, Euskadi or Galicia). Regions may therefore correspond to an ethnically or linguistically defined territory or not, and minority areas may have regional autonomy or not, and this choice is still entirely left to the member states’ internal constitutional rules. In other words, the Maastricht Treaty did not introduce a European Union regime for territorial minorities, and the more recent Treaties of Amsterdam and Nice have not brought any significant changes either. The same agnostic attitude pervades the second level, that of the European Union’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 their founding Treaties. Whereas those fields encompass all types of economic policies and much more than that, culture, education, media and language policies were not transferred to the European level and remain basically controlled by the member states, even though there may be occasional interference between the requirements of economic integration and national (or regional) policies of minority protection.

Ethnic minorities are not entirely ignored by the EU To the basic picture drawn in the previous section, of ethnic minority questions being a non-issue for the European Union, I will now add a touch of nuance. I will, first, mention three specific cases (one might find a few more) in which the European Union has been directly, though modestly, involved with ethnic minorities, and then, second, three structural ways in which the European Union is having an indirect impact on ethnic minorities and their position within their respective states. First the three specific cases: •

The European Community budget has been offering some financial support to an action programme for ‘the promotion and preservation of regional and minority languages and cultures’. The importance of this initiative should not be overrated. There was no firm legislative basis for it. The programme was started at the insistence of the European Parliament, but never had the formal approval of the Council of Ministers. The actual amount of the subsidy was modest,43 and was decided year by year, as part of the precarious battle between the European Parliament and the Council on the EU budget. The action programme is being phased out, and the announced follow-up programme has not yet been put into place.

152 •

•

Bruno de Witte The EU has played a direct role in one of the main minority conflicts in Western Europe. The European Initiative for Peace and Reconciliation has provided some £234 million between 1995 and 1997 on projects in Northern Ireland.44 This ad-hoc project was launched, it should be emphasized, on the express invitation of the United Kingdom and Ireland, and should therefore not be seen as an attempt by the EU to interfere in the minorities policies of its member states. The European Union was absent from the ‘multi-party talks’ that led to the conclusion of the Good Friday Agreement of 10 April 1998, and the European Union is hardly mentioned in 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 having contributed 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 existence of ethnic minorities. Special Protocols to the Act of Accession of Austria, Sweden and Finland were adopted to preserve, against the impact of EU law, the special status of the Aaland Islands (within Finland) and the special rights of the Sami people (in Sweden and Finland).47

In addition to these three specific references to minorities, which have limited importance, one can identify three indirect channels of EU influence on ethnic minority issues: •

European Community policies that do not have as their objective to affect the position of ethnic minorities may nevertheless display such effects in practice.48 This is most obviously so for the cultural and educational action programmes that the EC has launched in the last decade, particularly since an official green light for those programmes was given by the Maastricht Treaty. That Treaty provides that the cultural action of the EC shall ‘contribute to the flowering of the cultures of the Member States, while respecting their national and regional diversity’ (article 151 EC Treaty, as renumbered by the Treaty of Amsterdam). Regional diversity is thus recognized as a common European value worth preserving; this obviously includes territorially based cultural and linguistic differences, and one could therefore read in this phrase of the EC Treaty a veiled recognition of the role and place of ethnic minorities in the European integration project. In practice, the modest cultural programmes based on this article 151 are not particularly aimed at minority cultures, although one may note that Ariane, the support programme in the field of books and reading,49 listed, among its funding priorities, translations to and from lesser used languages – minority languages 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 in many 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, and naturally acquires an ethnic minority dimension in some places along the intra-Union borders, such as between the Spanish and French Basque countries, or between South and North Tyrol. More important, perhaps, is the role played by the European Union with regard to immigrant minorities.51 Two categories of such immigrant groups need to be sharply distinguished here: European Union citizens (for instance, the Portuguese community living in Luxembourg) and ‘thirdcountry nationals’ (for instance, the Turkish community living in Germany). Indeed, the very distinction between privileged and ordinary foreigners is a result of European integration. There are wide-ranging EC rules on the free movement of persons and non-discrimination on grounds of nationality, which has resulted in the fact that EU citizens from other countries (and also their closest relatives irrespective of their nationality) have the right to be treated, with some minor exceptions, exactly like the host state’s own nationals. They are the privileged category of foreigners. On a second level, some international agreements concluded between the EC and third countries such as Turkey or Morocco grant limited rights to the citizens of those countries in the employment sphere, but nothing is said about the cultural rights of immigrants from those countries. Other third-country nationals (for example, those from sub-Saharan Africa) do not possess rights under Community law, whether or not they have a permanent residence permit in their host state. Of course, nothing prevents the member states from deciding, on their own behalf, to extend rights possessed by European Union citizens to non-EU nationals, but this only happens occasionally, and for limited purposes. Therefore, the distinction between the two types of immigrant groups, although not directly imposed by Community law, is closely related to the central objectives of European integration and, to that extent, non-EU nationals may be called ‘Community minorities’: their minority status is revealed by the existence of a class of ‘privileged’ aliens who have extensive rights under Community law.52 In this respect, the Italian term extracomunitari, which is commonly used to describe migrants from third countries, is revealing: these persons come from outside the European Community (which is the literal origin of the term) but, for that reason, they also remain outside the national community. This state of affairs implies that the European Union can no longer ignore the questions of immigration and integration of third-country nationals. More particularly, the creation of an internal market conceived as an area without frontiers would seem to imply the power, for the EU, to harmonize, and improve, the legal status of non-EU minority groups. Yet the misgivings of some member states about an active role of the European Union in this field have until now blocked any major initiatives.

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Bruno de Witte The Amsterdam Treaty may well give a new impetus to the development of a European Union migration policy. On the one hand, the Treaty recognizes more firmly than before the EU’s responsibility in matters of immigration, including questions relating to the status and rights of immigrants once they are on the EU territory. On the other hand, the new article 13 introduced by the EC Treaty grants to the European Union the power ‘to take appropriate action to combat discrimination based on sex, racial or ethnic origin, religion or belief, disability, age or sexual orientation’. The reference to ‘ethnic origin’ must be seen as complementary to ‘racial origin’: what is meant are persons targeted for discrimination on account of their cultural characteristics, whether or not they belong to a different race; indeed, ethnic discrimination is the proper word for what is popularly but incorrectly called racial discrimination. On 29 June 2000, the Council of the European Union adopted an implementing measure of article 13 in the form of a directive on ‘equal treatment between persons irrespective of racial or ethnic origin’.53 The effects of this potentially important piece of legislation will only become visible in some years’ time, but it is clearly intended to benefit non-EU immigrants, although there is no reason why the 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 the very existence of the European Union as a plurinational and multicultural community of semi-sovereign states. Partly because of events in Central and Eastern Europe, separatism and secession are on the European agenda again, and have been advocated with some vigour by political forces in parts of Spain, Italy, Belgium and the United Kingdom. The European Union has, formally speaking, no part in these discussions, and its institutions have been careful not to appear to encourage separatist moves in any way. But the existence of the EU is an important variable in the separatism debates in West European countries. From one side, it is argued that establishing nominal sovereignty by means of the creation of a new state is even less meaningful in the European Union than elsewhere in the world, because the scope for effective national autonomy is reduced anyway. From the other side, the reply is that the close insertion of the state within Europe also means that the nation-state can no longer deliver many of the benefits it traditionally delivered, that national borders have become largely irrelevant, and that the political impulse towards secession need no longer be inhibited by the fear of economic or welfare costs involved in separation from an existing nation-state. Scottish nationalists may argue that, if Ireland and Luxembourg can be member states of the European Union, why should Scotland be excluded? And if, in a few years’ time, Estonia may become a member 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-making itself 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 might consider that the capacity to generate sophisticated compromises on complex matters, which West European politicians and officials have learned through their participation in the EU decision-making process, is fundamentally at odds with the radical and uncompromising attitudes traditionally displayed in ethnic conflicts within nation-states. The material and symbolic rewards offered by European bargaining processes, and the disciplining effect of those processes, may have contributed (although it would be difficult to prove this point) to pacifying ethnic minority conflicts in places like Catalonia, Wales, South Tyrol and Northern Ireland.

Conclusion: ethnic minorities in an enlarged European Union 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 a future and enlarged European Union. For the sake of the argument, I will briefly indicate two contrasting scenarios for the future. Scenario 1: Phasing out and status quo In their recent documents addressed to CEECs, references made by the European Union institutions to minority protection standards remain very generic. The action expected from these countries is specified, but the instruments 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 states themselves. Minority protection is, then, an ill-defined political requirement with which the CEECs are expected to comply because of the considerable carrot of accession offered to them. In the Accession Partnerships, there are even signs that the EU’s concern with minorities is sliding into the background compared to the central issue of adjustment to the acquis communautaire. The pragmatic prospect could well be that the remaining sensitive issues (Hungarians in Slovakia, the Russian populations in the Baltic and the treatment of the Roma in several countries) will gradually ‘solve themselves’ so that attention can be concentrated on the economic nuts and bolts of the negotiation process. Once a country is accepted for membership, this will ipso facto mean that the minority question is settled as far as the EU is concerned. And if CEECs join the EU with a clean slate in respect of their minorities, then there will be no need for the European Union itself to modify its ‘agnosticism’ in respect of minority protection inside the Union. If one adds to that the strong mood of subsidiarity that pervades the EU at present, with member states being very reluctant to transfer new 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 basically confined within the domestic jurisdiction and constitutional discretion of the states. A marginal supervision of the performance of all states will then be

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exercised, not by the European Union, but by the Council of Europe through the mechanisms provided under the European Convention of Human Rights and 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 different European Union in which ethnic minority questions will be more prominently present in the institutional system and in the policies of the EU. Once the European Union has let the devil escape from the bottle, through its activist minority policy towards the CEECs, it may be difficult to put it back in after accession. Furthermore, the EU itself may well, in the years preceding the next enlargement, see a greater salience of ethnic minority questions, in respect of both immigrant and territorial minorities. Indeed, there is a certain convergence of ‘traditional’ ethnic minority issues and issues of multiculturalism arising out of immigration. There is a strong current in political philosophy pointing out that what is at stake, in both cases, and despite the many differences, is the recognition of cultural differences in society.54 The reference to ‘ethnic discrimination’ now inscribed in article 13 of the EC Treaty after the Amsterdam reform is a perfect expression 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 to come. By the next enlargement, the time may be ripe for a major reform that could make of the protection of various forms of cultural pluralism a central concern of the European Union.

Notes 1 2

3

4 5 6

Agenda 2000 – Volume I: ‘For a Stronger and Wider Union’ (15 July 1997), p. 52. 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 also contains the text of the Copenhagen Document, which can be found, as well, in International Legal Materials, 29 (1990), p. 1306. For an analysis of the functions and role of the High Commissioner, see Victor-Yves Ghebali, L’OSCE dans l’Europe post-communiste, 1990–1996 (Brussels: Bruylant, 1996), pp. 522–47; and María Amor Martín Estébanez, ‘The High Commissioner on National Minorities: Development of the Mandate’, in Michael Bothe, Natalino Ronzitti and Allan Rosas, eds, The OSCE in the Maintenance of Peace and Security (The Hague: Kluwer, 1997), p. 123. Conclusions of the Copenhagen European Council, Bulletin of the European Communities 6–1993, point I.13. Amaryllis Verhoeven, ‘How Democratic Need European Union Members Be? Some Thoughts after Amsterdam’, European Law Review, 23 (1998), pp. 217ff. (p. 233). The one-sided nature of the minority protection commitments is not due to the activity of the European Union alone. The work of the High Commissioner for National Minorities, mentioned above, has also been exclusively concerned with Central, East European and former Soviet countries. This is due not to any geographical limitation of the scope of his activities, but to the fact that his office was set 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 conflicts threatening international stability. See also, for an excellent survey, Gaetano Pentassuglia, ‘The EU and the Protection of Minorities: The Case of Eastern Europe’, European Journal of International Law, 12 (2001), pp. 3ff. See the text of the opinions in International Legal Materials, 31 (1992), pp. 1494ff., and the comments by Alain Pellet, ‘The Opinions of the Badinter Arbitration Committee: A Second Breath for the Self-Determination of Peoples’, European Journal of International Law, 3 (1992), pp. 178ff. See also the detailed study by Matthew Craven, ‘The European Community Arbitration Commission on Yugoslavia’, British Year Book of International Law, 66 (1995), pp. 333ff. See the analysis by Jean Charpentier, ‘Les déclarations des Douze sur la reconnaissance 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). See Rahim Kherad, ‘La reconnaissance des États issus de la dissolution de la République Socialiste Fédérative de Yougoslavie par les membres de l´Union Européenne’, Revue générale de droit international public, 101 (1997), pp. 663ff. 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). 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 Europe Publishing, 1996), p. 81. Treaty on Understanding, Cooperation and Good Neighbourliness between Hungary and Romania of 16 September 1996, International Legal Materials, 36 (1997), p. 34. Within this cross-border cooperation framework, the actions eligible for EU financing include ‘cultural exchanges’ and ‘the development or establishment of facilities and resources to improve the flow of information and communications between border regions, including support for cross-border radio, television, newspapers and other media’ (Commission Regulation No. 2760/98 of 18 December 1998, Official Journal of the European Communities [1998], L 345/49 [replacing an earlier Regulation of 1994]). The opinions were published as Supplements to the Bulletin of the European Union (1997). For instance, when ratifying the Framework Convention on National Minorities, Estonia submitted a declaration stating that it understood the term ‘national minorities’ as referring only to citizens of Estonia. It should be noted, however, that the High Commissioner on National Minorities has repeatedly dealt with the position of the Russian-speaking communities of the Baltic countries, without first wondering whether they really were ‘national minorities’ in the sense of his mandate, and the Baltic governments did not object to his visits. Indeed, a member of the Slovak Constitutional Court concluded his comparison of Slovak minority legislation with that of other European countries by stating: Comparative analysis of the internal legislation of members of the Council of Europe regarding … the rights of national minorities demonstrates that the legislation of the Slovak Republic relative to the question studied is entirely compatible with the laws of other states. (original emphasis) See J. Klucka, ‘Étude comparative des ordres juridiques internes des pays membres du Conseil de l’Europe en matière de protection des minorités nationales (avec un accent particulier mis sur la législation de la République slovaque)’, in Emmanuel

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24

25 26

27 28 29 30

31 32

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Decaux and Alain Pellet, eds, Nationalité, minorités et succession d’États en Europe de l’Est (Paris: Montchrestien, 1996), pp. 189ff. (p. 205). All these points can be found in the Partnership Decisions adopted by the Council on 30 March 1998, Official Journal (1998), L 121. Agence Europe (29 April 1998), p. 7. Declaration by the Presidency on behalf of the European Union on Latvia, 17 April 1998, 7676/98 (Presse 101). The text of the reports can be consulted on the website of the European Commission’s DG IA: . ‘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 of the Political Affairs Committee of the European Parliament, Human Rights Law Journal, 12 (1991) pp. 380ff. (p. 401). But see the typology proposed by Norbert Rouland, Stéphane Pierré-Caps and Jacques 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. The expression is borrowed from Yves Mény, ‘Introduction: La greffe et le rejet’, in Yves Mény, ed., Les politiques du mimétisme institutionnel (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1993), pp. 7ff. (p. 33). For a more elaborate analysis, see Stéphane Pierré-Caps, ‘Peut-on parler actuellement d’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 of European Law, Volume VI, Book 2 (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1997), pp. 307ff. Copenhagen Document (see n. 2), paragraph 30. Ford v. Quebec [1988] 2 Supreme Court Reports 712. For an exploration of the protection of language use through freedom of expression, see Fernand de Varennes, Language, Minorities and Human Rights (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1996), pp. 33–53. European Court of Human Rights, Case of the Socialist Party and Others v. Turkey, judgment of 25 May 1998 (paragraph 47), European Human Rights Reports, 27, pp. 51ff. (p. 85). A similar, somewhat earlier, case involved a member state of the EU. In Greece, a politician had been convicted for referring to the minority in Western Thrace as ‘Turkish’ rather than ‘Muslim’, which is its official denomination according to Greek law. In that case, however, for purely procedural reasons, the European Court of Human Rights did not reach the question of whether a violation of freedom of expression had occurred (Case of Ahmet Sadik v. Greece, judgment of 15 November 1996, in European Human Rights Reports, 24, p. 323 – but see the dissenting opinion of the judges Martens and Foighel, who do discuss the merits of the case). Application No. 25035/94, Silvius Magnago and Südtiroler Volkspartei v. Italy, decision of 15 April 1996, Decisions and Reports of the European Commission of Human Rights 85-A, p. 112. For further elaboration of this point, see Bruno de Witte, ‘Le principe d’égalité et la pluralité linguistique’, in Henri Giordan, ed., Les minorités en Europe: Droits linguistiques et droits de l’homme (Paris: Kimé, 1992), pp. 55ff.; Varennes, Language, Minorities and Human Rights, pp. 77–89; Joseph Marko, Autonomie und Integration: Rechtsinstitute des Nationalitätenrechts im funktionalen Vergeleich (Vienna: Böhlau, 1995), pp. 172–94 and 276–96. 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): . The other, non-EU, parties to the Convention are: Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, 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 on Human 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 la protection 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 European human rights tradition. 36 The Convention was harshly criticized by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, which, in its recommendation 1255 (1995), included the following paragraph: The Convention is weakly worded. It formulates a number of vaguely defined objectives and principles, the observation of which will be an obligation of the Contracting States but not a right which individuals may invoke. Its implementation machinery is feeble and there is a danger that, in fact, the monitoring procedure will be left entirely to governments.

37 38

39 40

Similar criticism was expressed by Geoff Gilbert, ‘The Council of Europe and Minority Rights’, Human Rights Quarterly, 18 (1996), pp. 160ff. – see particularly his conclusion on p. 189. 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. See the separate declarations submitted, upon ratification of the Convention, by Austria, Estonia, Germany and Switzerland (to be consulted on: < http://www. coe.fr/tablconv/reservdecl/dr157e.htm>). This is a very controversial point, because the 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 the emergence 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 as including immigrant communities (and Roma and Sinti as well), see John Murray, ‘Should Immigrants or Roma and Sinti be Regarded as Minorities?’ in Franz Matscher, ed., Vienna International Encounter on Some Current Issues Regarding the Situation of National Minorities (Kehl: N.P. Engel Verlag, 1997), p. 219. This is the comprehensive concept proposed by Asbjørn Eide, ‘Group Accommodation: National Policies and International Requirements’, in Matscher, ed., Vienna International Encounter, pp. 103ff. For some general considerations, see Vernon Bogdanor, ‘Forms of Autonomy and the Protection of Minorities’, Daedalus (Spring 1997), pp. 65ff.; for more detailed examination of single cases of autonomy regimes established in the course of the twentieth century, see Ruth Lapidoth, Autonomy: Flexible Solutions to Ethnic Conflicts (Washington: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1997). A collection of papers offering a complete tour d’horizon is Markku Suksi, ed., Autonomy: Applications and Implications (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1998). A number of reports on single countries of Western, Central and Eastern Europe were published in Local Self-Government, Territorial Integrity and Protection of Minorities, Conference Proceedings, Lausanne, 25–7 April 1996 (Strasbourg: Council of Europe Publishing, 1996).

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41 See, for more details, Patrick Thornberry, ‘Images of Autonomy and Individual and Collective 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 de Schoutheete, ‘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 (budget line B3–1006). Compare, for instance, with the 987,000,000 Ecu allocated in the same budget to subsidies for tobacco production. 44 See Cathal McCall, ‘Postmodern Europe and the Resources of Communal Identities in 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 Union Integration (Aldershot: Avebury, 1996) 45 Agreement between the Government of the United Kingdom and the Government of 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 by Geoff Gilbert, ‘The Northern Ireland Peace Agreement, Minority Rights and SelfDetermination’, International and Comparative Law Quarterly, 47 (1998), pp. 942ff. 46 See. the speech by Mo Mowlam, British Northern Ireland Secretary, in the European Parliament 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 of National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities’, in Nanette A. Neuwahl and Allan Rosas, eds, The European Union and Human Rights (The Hague: Kluwer Law International, 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 and administrative language of some countries (e.g. the United Kingdom and the Netherlands) but not of others (France and Germany). In the social science literature, though, the use of the term ‘ethnic minorities’ for migrant communities is generally accepted; 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 European Union: The Pervasive Market Ideology of Community Law’, in Jo Shaw and Gillian More, 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 Minority Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995); Perry Keller, ‘Re-thinking Ethnic and Cultural Rights in Europe’, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, 18 (1998), pp. 29ff.

9

Transnational migration in the enlarged European Union Ewa Morawska

An immense increase in transnational population flows worldwide in recent decades as a consequence of and a contributor to accelerating globalization has made international migrations a priority issue in the economies and politics of sender and receiver societies and a hotly debated subject in international relations.1 Millions of people have moved across statal borders on the European Continent. Reflecting the global pattern, most of these migrations move ‘compass-like’ from South to North and from East to West (E–W). E–W flows and their potential growth have been a sensitive issue in the negotiations between the European Union and the East Central European candidate members to enlarge EU borders eastward.2 The issue of concern for the EU negotiators and West European public opinion addressed in this chapter are the potential migratory consequences of including three East Central European (ECE) countries – Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic – in the European Union. Considering the complexity of conditions shaping transnational migrations3 and the ‘fluxibility’ of processes transforming Eastern Europe, only tentative, ‘open-ended’ prognoses contingent on the specified configurations of circumstances can be formulated; they should be treated as such by the reader. Regarding the temporal framework of the EU eastward enlargement and the proposed appraisal of future transnational migrations, I have assumed the informal opinion among EU member governments that the formal accession to the European Union of Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic will be delayed beyond the ‘official’ date of 2004; the resulting freedom of movement, work and settlement of people within the new Union borders will be suspended for a transitional period of no less than ten years from this accession.4 Potential transnational migrations from and into the newly acquired eastern parts of the European Union are discussed within a 2000–15 temporal framework. Because of the specific characteristics of post-1989/90 transnational migrations, whose current volume, mechanisms and destinations have served as the basis for evaluating future trends in that region, the concept of migration as used in this analysis denotes one-way and repeated movements across nation-state boundaries for purposes other than (1) exclusively tourism and (2) cross-border shopping trips for individual/household needs, regardless of migrants’ political (legal or undocumented)

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status and the duration of sojourns abroad. The primary focus of this discussion is on the main types of transnational movements and on the common features of the macro- and micro-level contexts and mechanisms that generate transnational migrations from and into East Central Europe. Within the limited scope of this chapter, however, and to the extent the unsystematic data permit, the relevant differences between particular sender and receiver countries are noted. The sources used for this chapter have included: statistical reports published regularly by EU and sender and receiver country government agencies on international migrations into and out of East Central Europe from the early 1990s to the present; twenty-odd survey and ethnographic studies conducted during the 1990s in East Central and Eastern European sender and Western destination countries of (e)migrants; existing prognoses of future E–W migrations commissioned from scholar specialists by the European Union and international organizations (Council of Europe, World Bank, IOM, ILO) and state national institutions;5 press reportages and secondary analyses thereof on the potential ECE migrants’ projects and preparations for transnational travels; prognostic analyses of the economic transformation processes in East Central and Eastern European regions and countries, and, in particular, the effects of privatization and foreign investment on domestic labour markets and wages; and personal correspondence and informal interviews with fourteen scholar and policy specialists on the EU enlargement, migration and development, the new ECE economies and the economic and migration pressures in the CIS. The main conclusions I have derived from these sources can be summarized as follows. As part of the global population movements that result from and contribute to growing interconnectedness among different world regions, transnational migrations from and to East Central Europe constitute an integral element of that region’s progressive incorporation into the world-system and, in the case considered here, the European Union. As such they will persist, making the interstatal boundaries within the enlarged European Union after its eastward expansion (when it eventually takes place) naturally and unavoidably transnational by linking, rather than separating, the territories and residents on two sides of the borders through work, shopping and entertainment mini- and mezzoregions. At the same time, although some kinds of westbound movement of East Central Europeans and some migrations from the East and South into East Central Europe are likely to maintain their current volume or even increase during the transitional period, even combined they will not approximate the avalanche of ‘five to seven’ million or ‘twenty to forty’ million predicted by some alarmed West European commentators. Those that do occur will be composed predominantly of temporary, short-term income-seeking migrants who will draw from their home countries any public welfare provisions they receive, such as medical insurance, unemployment benefits and social security. They will leave their families behind during their sojourns abroad and will not require social welfare provisions, parental care and public education services from the host country, as some analysts of the ‘burdensome consequences’ of these migrations for 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 westbound migrations of East Central Europeans, the short-term, income-seeking Arbeitstourismus of transnational migrants, who remain and engage in work abroad without appropriate immigration documents, and a much smaller temporary migration of formally contracted ECE workers, are likely to retain in general their current volume, destinations and characteristics. The other most common category of cross-border travellers, Handelstourismus, who circumvent customs regulations by hiding the quantity of merchandise they carry or smuggle, will decrease in volume – in fact, the decline is already underway – to the extent that the functions performed by the individual transnational entrepreneurs (a large proportion of whom operate in the border regions) are being replaced by economic micro- to mezzo-regions with well-developed commercial infrastructures merging both sides of the border. At the same time, professional westbound travels of highly skilled East Central Europeans are on the increase. While continuing to send income-seeking migrants to the West, since the 1990s East Central Europe has emerged as a new (im)migration pole attracting migrants from the East and West. Legal and undocumented income-, transitand 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 controls tightened by ECE states seeking to comply with the EU acquis, but will probably gradually rebound, ‘pushed’ and ‘pulled’ by economic incentives in sender and receiver regions and facilitated by organized and informal social networks of assistance, or forced by ethno-religious conflicts and political turmoil in refugees’ home countries. At the same time, legal and undocumented employment-seeking migration to ECE from the West (primarily the European Union) will likely intensify. Intra-regional employment-seeking migration between ECE countries should also increase. In the remainder of this chapter I discuss, first, westbound migrations of ECE tourist-workers (because of their declining volume, cross-border travels of tourist-traders are not considered), then the main types of migration from East Eastern Europe (EEE) and Third World countries to and across East Central Europe, and, finally, eastbound (to East Central Europe) transnational travels of Westerners (West Europeans and North Americans).

Westbound transnational migrations of East Central Europeans Clandestine income-seeking travels of ECE tourist-workers have been directed primarily to Western Europe (85 per cent), especially to nearby Germany and Austria, and then to Scandinavia, France, the Benelux and, increasingly, Italy and Greece; also to North America (15 per cent). Current estimates of the number of these Arbeitstouristen are about 600,000–700,000 annually from the entire 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 (in North America average sojourns last longer: between six and twelve months). In comparison, ECE contract workers legally employed in Western Europe at any given time during the year have numbered about 300,000 in total. It may be noted that the total number of work-seeking migrant citizens of ECE countries in the West in the late 1990s was only slightly higher than the combined number of registered (450,000–500,000 annual inflow) and undocumented worker (estimated at 250,000–300,000) Western (fifteen EU countries plus Switzerland and Norway and the United States) migrants in the European Union.7 Of the three countries considered here and in proportion to the total volume of international migration from each of them, Poles have engaged in such indocumentado work during their sojourns abroad considerably more than either Czechs or Hungarians. Asked about the purposes of their international travels, nearly all respondents in studies of westbound Arbeitstouristen conducted in recent years, returned and potential migrants alike, have pointed either to the necessity to make additional money to ‘make ends meet’ (about 60 per cent) or to the desire of dorobic sie (Polish), significantly to elevate their socioeconomic status through the accumulation of material goods (about 40 per cent).8 Analyses of the mechanisms of post-1989/90 transnational income-seeking migrations of ECEs have pointed to the following factors. In the political sphere the major contributors have been the ‘domestication’ of passports after the collapse of communist regimes (previously, passports were granted for specific reasons upon application and were surrendered to state authorities upon return) and the elimination by most West European countries of entry visas for shortterm ECE visitors (up to three months). In addition, a relatively lesser politicization of international tourism vis-à-vis other types of migration by the receiver states has allowed ECE –W income-seekers to use tourism as a convenient ‘screen’ for the main purpose of their transnational travels. Finally, ‘gaps’ in the receiver states’ immigration policies resulting from the multiple, often contradictory, interests involved in deciding these policies9 have further facilitated undocumented income-seeking sojourns of ECE Arbeitstouristen. The geographic proximity between their home and (most popular) destination countries, made closer by rapid advances in communication and transportation technologies, has made it easy for these migrants to avoid the existing controls by moving back and forth across borders. Concurrent with these facilitating circumstances, the economic conditions in both the sender and the receiver societies have been of crucial importance in generating income-seeking westbound transnational travels of East Central Europeans. On the side of the sender societies, the primary ‘push’ factors have been the enduring E–W disequilibrium in economic performance (measured by the per capita GNP, the ratio was 1:3 in 1996, a minimal improvement since 1910, when it was 1:3.7) combined with structural relocations and material hardships affecting large segments of the region’s populations that have accompanied the post-communist transformation.10 The supply of income-seeking migrants

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on the ECE side has been met with increased demand in receiver, Western societies for undocumented, cheap and dispensable labour for construction work, personal services and small shops and for buyers and sellers of contraband merchandise. The core Western economies have already nearly completed what the post-communist ones have only begun, that is, post-industrial restructuring, or a shift to short-term production of services based on small and versatile companies and the accompanying rapid growth of an informal sector offering variable, usually substandard, wages and no employment security, which is unattached to the legal-institutional structures of the fiscal and welfare systems.11 Other, micro-level factors have been instrumental in stimulating, channelling and sustaining transnational income-seeking travels of ECEs since the 1990s. As studies demonstrate, the critical role in shaping people’s decisions to move and determining destinations and volume of movement has been played by local migration traditions and social support networks on both sender and receiver sides of the migration circuit.12 Depending on the vitality of migratory traditions in the region that often stretch back to the beginning of the twentieth century, between 33 per cent and 66 per cent of post-1989/90 ECE touristworkers have relied on information and assistance in planning and executing their transnational travels provided by family members or friends in the home country 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 by kin or acquaintances sojourning abroad as temporary indocumentado workers or residing there permanently.13 The major macro- and micro-level mechanisms identified above that have sustained income-seeking transnational migrations of East Central Europeans since the 1990s, such as the push-and-pull economic processes on the sender and receiver sides of the migration circuit, and well-established networks of assistance 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 the decade after the formal accession of the three ECE countries to the European Union. Should ECE economies grow at steady 6 per cent rate annually, the GNPs of ECE states would need twelve to thirteen years to reach the present levels of national output in Portugal or Greece, the poorest EU member countries that still regularly send their migrant workers abroad. Nineteen to twenty years would be required to reach those of Austria or Great Britain. If, however, these countries develop at their median rate of 1996–8, it will take the three new ECE member states of the European Union thirty years to catch up if they maintain a 5–6 per cent annual growth rate. Economists opine that even with increased financial assistance from the European Union for the new members, maintaining such a high growth rate is rather unlikely in view of the rapidly growing deficit of foreign trade, too low shares of investment in the GNPs and too slow increments in productivity in all three ECE countries.14 Although with the growth of ECE 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 factor throughout the transitional period. (Even if by 2010 it reaches the current ratio between Portuguese or Greek and German wages, the disparity will still be a wide 1:3–4, a sufficient motivation to travel for many an experienced migrant with established contacts in occupational niches abroad.) The steadily growing foreign investment in East Central Europe brings into the region sought-after services and consumer goods and very much needed modern technologies and management know-how. But thus far it has not resulted in the creation of a large pool of new jobs and is not expected to contribute significantly to it during the coming decade. In 1998 foreign-investment companies in East Central Europe employed no more than 3.5–4.5 per cent of the national workforce in each of the three countries considered here. As indicated in studies, most foreign investors are interested in funding small- to middle-size enterprises employing between five and fifty people in localities with low unemployment, preferably large urban centres.15 Locally owned private firms in East Central Europe multiply very quickly, but most of them are small (up to ten employees), and the turnover is rapid. In the assessment of students of ECE economic transformation, the quickest growth of employment opportunities in these firms has occurred in the rapidly expanding informal sector. Although jobs in the expanding informal sectors of privatized ECE economies can be expected to become increasingly available with time, they are usually seasonal or temporal and, thus, do not constitute a stable source of income. Experienced migrants holding such jobs will, therefore, be likely to treat them not as a replacement for but as a supplement to their accustomed short-term income-seeking sojourns abroad. Conversely, the great majority of Poles, Czechs and Hungarians who in recent surveys of ECE migratory intentions admitted they contemplated possibilities of future short-term migration to the 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 Western economies confronted with intensified global competition in deregulated markets and the resulting contraction of the influence of the states on national economies, as well as the rapid ageing of the working-age population in the EU, should sustain rather than temper SE–NW income-seeking migrations from abroad. The EU Freedom of Services (Employee Posting) Act, passed in 1971 as a step toward the greater economic integration of the European Union, has been implemented in individual member-country labour markets only since the mid-1980s. As a result, highly developed member countries such as Germany and Austria opened to employers from the much cheaper labour markets of Greece, Portugal and Spain. Subcontracted by German and Austrian firms on their home-country standards, workers from these countries are paid much lower wages and, because they receive social benefits at home, require no such contributions from host employers. In response to the protests against this transnational labour by native formalsector 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 minimum wage and applies also to employees posted from abroad. It has, however, been notoriously violated by employers, and effective enforcement by state agencies has been almost impossible, if only because of the number of potential culprits to investigate and prove guilty. In Berlin, for example, there were in 1998 about 100,000 construction sites (with a 50 per cent annual turnover rate) and even more household repair and food service establishments, small suppliers and retailers of articles of everyday use and transport companies – all renowned for informally employing low-wage foreign workers. In this situation ECE Arbeitstouristen, who accept even lower remuneration than do workers from the poorest EU member states (and who will continue to do so until their home countries’ development reaches the level of these poorest states) and very bad working 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 production costs and increasing the competitiveness of their firms, and ineffective, poorly enforced state controls of the growing informal economy, the demand for personal services in West European countries has been sustained by the rapid ageing of the EU population combined with greatly increased full-time participation in the labour market of women who have traditionally performed ‘nurturing labour’ for their families, health care and office maintenance and custodial staff that is not met by native workers. Both the ageing process (in the year 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 West European 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 and considerably reduce native middle-class expenses for home maintenance, care of children and the elderly, and the like.18 Forty per cent of East Central Europeans (Poles ranking the highest and Hungarians the lowest) who contemplate future westbound income-seeking migrations expect help from relatives and friends at home or in the destination country to realize these plans.19 When the informal economic sector in the receiver societies remains the main opportunity for ECE migrant workers to earn sought-after income in the West – owing to high structural unemployment in Western Europe, the current, limited quotas of contract workers from East Central Europe are unlikely to be increased in the near future (see below) – reliance on the existing personal networks of assistance or the well-tested dojścia (informal connections) and kombinacje (shady arrangements, as in wheeling and dealing) informed by the beat-the-system/bend-the-law entrepreneurial spirit of Soviet-era provenance should continue as the important resource in arranging for jobs and lodging abroad. The previously noted informalization of ECE economies as they adopt the Western model of postindustrial capitalism will provide the supporting environment for this

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embedded popular orientation-cum-practice of ‘working the system’ by relying on personal connections and using roundabout or outright illegitimate means to achieve one’s purposes. Thus far I have focused on the circumstances likely to uphold the present volume, destinations, and major characteristics of ECE–West work-seeking migrations during the transitional period after the formal accession to the European Union of Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic. It is, then, legitimate to ask what will prevent these migrations from swelling above their current volume if so many forces combine to sustain them? What factors are likely to impede such growth? A few studies of future migration plans of East Central Europeans have also investigated the reasons of those (the majority) who did not consider such travels. The three most common reasons (with no country differences) have been: family obligations, unwillingness to take risks and face difficulties connected with such undertakings, and already having a secure job or one promising better rewards in the future. Interestingly, a high, 50–60 per cent of respondents mentioned ‘lack of respect’ for foreigners in West European countries as the reason for remaining at home.20 Other factors are likely to restrain further growth of ECE–West incomeseeking migrations in the time framework considered here. The competition in the informal sector of host economies accessible to these tourist-workers, especially with (im)migrants from Third World countries where living standards are considerably lower than those in East Central Europe, will keep wages down. As the transformation progresses, wages in ECE migrants’ own countries will increase, reducing the discrepancy between home and host societies and, thus, the motivation of people without migration experience to invest considerable energy in organizing the trips. Exploitative working conditions in West European informal economies related by those who experienced them should be an additional disincentive to many who are unwilling to subject themselves to the stresses of undocumented sojourns and 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 of the destination country will require, as it does now, reliance on personal assistance networks. Because they are by nature locally confined and already serve a very large number of migrants, they are likely to reach saturation sooner rather than later. Considering that occupational niches carved out by ECE touristworkers in the informal economies of West European receiver countries have been 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 assistance networks effectively to process, as it were, new clients should put a ceiling on further growth of these migrations.22 Finally, a universal impediment to (voluntary) migrations everywhere and at any 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’s station 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 decide to move. Most people are risk-averse and, thus, reluctant to move to another location even if they expect their quality of life would improve there, as they are aware of the (real or imagined) risk involved. They also have important vested interests, emotional and instrumental, in their own habitats: the experience-near familiarity with the language, cultural rules and regulations patterning social life and the practical know-how of their applications; material and occupational advantages derived from the insider position; social acceptance and respect; the loyalty of long-time friends; a sense of security.23 East Central Europeans are, of course, 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 and will 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 standard of living. One more category of transnational travellers, ‘documented’ or legal migrants, requires comment. It is composed of two groups: temporary industrial and seasonal 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 unemployment in the country, Germany, the host to the great majority of ECE contract workers, decided in the mid-1990s to reduce the number of this contracted workforce. As the result of bilateral negotiations with each of the affected countries, however, for political (rather than economic) reasons these quotas were again increased to their current number of about 260,000 from the entire ECE region. Considering Germany’s long-term economic problems, it is unlikely this allocation will increase any further in the near future; rather, the German government prefers financially to subsidize job-generating projects in the ECE countries themselves.24 For similar reasons of high domestic unemployment, further increases in ECE contract-worker quotas in other West European countries seem also unlikely (they currently total about 40,000). Continued increase in this type of workrelated migration can be expected, however, between the three ECE countries themselves. 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 has more than tripled since the early 1990s and further growth is expected.25 Highly skilled international travellers, the second group considered here, by the late 1990s constituted about 12–14 per cent of the total number of post 1989/90 westbound migrants from each of the three ECE countries. These are predominantly young (most are under 35) professional managers of successful private businesses, service and production centres, including those owned by East–West joint-venture and multinational companies that employ increasing numbers of highly skilled native East Central Europeans competent in foreign languages; also scientists and researchers, including graduate and postgraduate students on Western fellowships. The progressive incorporation of ECE economies into the global capitalist system and several EU and individual-country policies in Western Europe and

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North America to facilitate the flows of highly skilled migrants and various exchange programmes for researchers and students will, expectedly, contribute to further growth of this movement. Although it has significantly diminished since 1989/90, some ‘brain drain’ from East Central Europe still exists and is likely to continue in the near future, depleting especially members of the youngest cohorts among highly skilled international migrants, namely graduate and postgraduate students, who leave on Western fellowships and upon graduation there search for – and often find – jobs in the West that offer greater professional opportunities and much higher salaries than those available at home.26

Transnational movement into and through East Central Eurorope of East Eastern European and Third World (im)migrants (Im)migration into East Central Europe from increasingly remote parts of the world has been a growing new phenomenon since the early 1990s and information about this movement has been more limited and less systematic than for westward migrations of East Central Europeans. In comparison with the latter, the recent migrations into East Central Europe have been more differentiated in kinds and more complex in characteristics.27 Temporary cross-border migrations include short-term undocumented income-seeking Handels- and Arbeitstouristen, mainly from Ukraine, Lithuania, Russia and Romania; and individual and organized (trafficked) illegal transit migrants heading to Western countries, primarily from territories of the former Soviet Union, Southern Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East. A considerable proportion of the detained transit migrants request political asylum only to disappear soon after they apply. Long-term and permanent (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 remote parts of the world; and permanent and long-term settlers, legal and undocumented, 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 with ECE–West migrations of these two kinds, multiple cross-border travels have been common, on the average four to five times a year.28 Like ECE quasi-tourists in the West, these EEE migrants have found employment in the informal economies of ECE societies. In growing demand by new capitalist enterprises in the receiver countries, EEE tourist-workers find jobs mainly in agriculture, and also in handicrafts, 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 wages received by natives for comparable work and are unprotected by union agreements or any other social coverage.

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In the later 1990s, ECE states tightened controls of their eastern and southern 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 shortterm tourist visits have been instituted along with the requirement for foreign visitors 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 had drawn considerable profits from it). The number of worker-tourists has probably also diminished (although I have not found any reliable information to this effect).29 The latter is likely, however, gradually to rebound. Several factors combine to weaken the long-term effectiveness of these increased controls. The corruption of EEE state officials on one side of the borders is ubiquitous, and it is quite entrenched (although comparatively less pervasive) on the ECE side as well.30 Second, the genuine desire of ECE countries to join the European Union and to comply with its acquis notwithstanding, their important political and economic interests dictate that they maintain good relations with their eastern or southern neighbours that are supportive of the processes of demoratization there and the increasing economic exchange with these countries. Regulations prohibiting the free movement of people across borders, particularly international tourism, thus far the least politicized kind of transnational migration, do not serve either of these two purposes and are likely to be contested in the negotiations with the EU, especially by Poland, which borders three EEE nation-states and draws significant, transformationenhancing profits from hosting EEE informal-sector worker- and trader-migrants. Set against each other, all these factors generate multiple tensions that, in turn, will create gaps and loopholes in the ECE countries’ immigration policies (just as they do in the policies of the current member states of the European Union). The deepening economic crisis in the countries from which most of these income-seeking worker-tourists originate has been reflected in declining production figures, diminishing taxes paid to state treasuries, rapidly declining exports, high instability in financial markets and, not least, the pervasive criminalization of the economy. In view of these trends, observers of the transformation processes in the former Soviet bloc agree that, during the next decade or even longer, the developmental disparity between East Central and East Eastern parts of the region will most likely increase.31 The continued malfunctioning of EEE state apparatuses, and, of specific concern here, irregularly paid wages in state-owned companies (still the largest employer), will keep the population busy earning income from shabashka or ‘kickoff ’ jobs in their home-country informal economies.32 If the economic decline continues or even gradually reverses, profits from the earnings accrued by EEE migrants from illicit work in ECE countries, presently four to twelve times higher than 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 advertisements and entertainment programmes watched avidly by residents of East Eastern Europe since the fall of communism and the subsequent spread of cable networks, will most likely attract more migrants. Like their ECE neighbours, in preparation for and during their cross-border income-seeking sojourns present-day EEE–ECE trader- and worker-tourists have used the well-tested resources of blat or an exchange of personal ‘favours of access’, relying on their fellow ethnics in receiver societies, friends and neighbours who have travelled before or are currently abroad, or direct contacts with ECE employers eager to increase their profits by hiring undocumented, cheap foreign labour.33 Unlike the support networks of westbound ECE migrants, however, much more recent ‘connections’ of EEE–ECE travellers are far from saturation and are capable of expanding on both sides of the border so as to channel 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 – especially among the most highly educated migrants with a knowledge of foreign languages – for whom, according to their own statements, work in East Central Europe was merely a training ground, as it were, in preparation for a move to the informal economic sectors in the West.34 Undoubtedly, many of them will not realize their plans, getting caught at some point in their journeys and being sent back (and back again) to their home countries, but more than a few of them will succeed. Illegal ‘transit travellers’ from south-eastern parts of the world heading to Western Europe (and further on to North America) have constituted the second major category of present-day temporary migrants into East Central Europe since the 1990s. It is estimated that 25,000–30,000 of these transit migrants detained annually at the borders or inside each of the three ECE countries represent no more than 25–30 per cent of the total number in the region. About 15–30 per cent of these westbound migrants, according to current estimates of ECE border guards, arrive in East Central Europe in organized groups. When detained at the entry borders, transit migrants usually request asylum (and destroy personal documents, if they have any, to avoid deportation to their home countries), after which they disappear within the receiver ECE country, where they await passage to the West.35 None of the three ECE countries has thus far been found in satisfactory compliance with the acquis communautaire in matters of ‘security’ and ‘transnational movement of persons’ focused specifically on frontier controls and the fight against transnational crime, but sincere efforts are being made to make frontier controls more effective. While they are likely to result in decreased individual transit migration (there are actually indicators that a decline has already begun), these efforts will probably prove less effective in the reduction of organized transit.36 First, the pool of motivated potential SE–NW migrants worldwide is very large 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 to follow, regardless of the failure of others. Second, criminal courier networks that operate this transnational transit are very well organized and have the professional know-how to evade, get ahead of or, when caught, deal with the controls of the countries they move through. In addition, the rewards for these operations are 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, considering that transit migrants are convoyed in groups of between fifteen and twenty-five to forty people, means enormous profits to be shared among the traffickers.37 The third factor that will undermine the effectiveness of strengthened controls is the already mentioned corruption of East Eastern Europe, and, if to a lesser extent, of ECE officials responsible for controlling cross-border movement. It is unlikely to be eliminated in the near future and is especially susceptible to high monetary rewards (and not-to-be-dismissed threats) from the organized crime world. The (im)migration of political refugees and asylum seekers into East Central Europe since the 1990s can be considered intermediate between temporary and permanent types of migration because of its ‘unfinished’ character (should the situation in their countries improve, those involuntary or semi-voluntary migrants might decide to return home). Since the cessation of war hostilities in the former Yugoslavia, the flow of refugees from that region has significantly diminished, while the numbers of Afghan, Chechen, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan and, more recently, African (im)migrants have increased. As indicated by the considerable proportion of asylum applicants who have vanished, this category has overlapped with the illegal transit movement. As they have tightened controls of their borders in an effort to comply with the frontier security acquis of the European Union, especially in view of the expanding illegal transit migration through East Central Europe to the West, in the last few years all three ECE states have significantly reduced, by one- to two-thirds in comparison with the early 1990s or to 5–6 per cent of the total volume of applicants, the number of asylums granted.38 The refugee and asylum policies in East Central Europe at present seem to be the most problematic among the (im)migration-related laws and regulations implemented in the preparation for EU accession. The basic problem inheres in the acquis itself and, specifically, in its apparently contradictory requirements for the implementation of policies promoting humanitarian standards such as hospitality to people in need of international protection, on the one hand, and, on the other, compliance with mainly restrictive measures for fighting undocumented and unwanted immigration by imposing strict visa requirements (impossible for refugees on the run to fulfil), the ‘safe third-country’ rule and readmission agreements (allowing the immediate return of asylum seekers at the border). The NGOs (especially the UNHCR and the Helsinki Committee) in ECE countries have already been protesting the unlawful (according to international human rights agreements) handling of asylum procedures, while local liberal opinion has 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 democratization of sociopolitical institutions and cultures in the region.39 Neither the contradictions within the acquis nor the disagreements among the organized interests and public opinion shaping ECE country immigration policies and generating ‘gaps’ in their execution can be expected to disappear or even significantly diminish in the near future; they have certainly persisted in the European Union despite systematic efforts to construct one common and effective policy for the region. At the same time, in East Eastern Europe and Southern Europe actual and potential ethno-religious and national conflicts and political instabilities are likely to continue to send out refugees. There is also, of course, the rest of the world with many volatile places and many potential fugitives for whom Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, already recognized as feasible destination or transit countries, will become migration targets should these potential (e)migrants decide or be forced to move. With increased controls still offering loopholes, the influx into East Central Europe of refugees and asylum seekers from increasingly remote regions of the world is not likely to diminish and will probably continue to grow. The major trends in the (im)migration of permanent and long-term settlers since the 1990s have been, first, a rapid increase after the collapse of communist regimes in the region and, since the mid-1990s, a decline in ethnic resettlements into East Central Europe from neighbouring eastern and southern countries, primarily into Hungary (from Romania, former Yugoslavia and the former USSR) and Poland (from the former USSR), and second, the accelerating increase in permanent and long-term settlement in Poland and the Czech Republic of residents of the former Soviet Union (primarily Ukraine, Russia, Belarus and Armenia), whose total numbers tripled between 1993 and 1997, and in all three ECE countries from Asia (primarily Vietnam and mainland China), whose numbers more than doubled in the same period. The Czech Republic has received the largest influx of all these settlers: by 1998 more than 80,000 officially recorded EEE and Third World (im)migrants (and 125,000 with Slovaks treated as foreigners since 1993) resided there, more than 50 per cent of whom were Ukrainians and about 20 per cent Vietnamese. Nearly one-half of those settlers have concentrated in Prague, about 10 per cent of whose residents (including Western sojourners) are now foreign-born. In Poland in 1998, legal EEE and Third World long-term and permanent residents, mainly Ukrainians, Russians, Vietnamese and Armenians, numbered more than 40,000, and in Hungary (excluding ethnic Hungarian immigrants) 25,000–30,000, consisting primarily of long-term residents from the former Yugoslavia, China, Ukraine and Russia.40 Short-term contract workers have constituted another category of legal EEE and Third World residents in East Central Europe. Following the intermission after the demise of communist regimes in East Central Europe and the subsequent invalidation of pre-existing labour contracts with Soviet bloc and other socialist countries, since the mid-1990s, their numbers have been on the increase again. 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, from Romania and Yugoslavia (mainly ethnic Hungarians). In 1998 there was a total of more than 50,000 of those contract workers in the Czech Republic, Hungary and 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 in a category of temporary migrants because of their considerable interpenetration with long-term and permanent settlers.41 Present trends in permanent and long-term (im)migration to East Central Europe from Eastern and Southern Europe and Asia – that is, a decline in ethnic resettlements and, after a period of stabilization owing to stricter immigration policies of ECE states, a redeveloping immigration of foreign settlers – can be expected to continue. Both processes are, of course, contingent on the political stability in sender societies/regions; intensification there of ethnic conflicts and political turmoil would likely reverse the decline in ethnic resettlements and accelerate immigration of foreign settlers. The attraction of ECE growing economies (and the informal sectors therein) and the much higher earnings than those available at home will exert a stronger ‘resettlement pressure’ or bring more foreign than ethnic immigrants because the more entrepreneurial, mobile members of the latter group have either already emigrated or (like ethnic Hungarians from Romania and the former Yugoslavia) have the opportunity to make short-term income-earning sojourns in ECE countries without leaving their homes for good. The already established but not yet saturated information and assistance networks should attract more migrants and facilitate their movement through and around the gaps and loopholes in ECE countries’ immigration policies. Excluding major natural or military disasters in the former Soviet Union that would force hundreds of thousands of people to flee, none of the types of transnational movement whose future increase I have evaluated as probable is likely, however, to generate a multimillion-strong influx of (im)migrants into East Central Europe and, further west, into the European Union. Although they will remain, as I have argued, sufficiently porous to allow for the continuation and even some expansion of present undocumented migrations, technologically modernized and tightened controls of the future eastern borders of the enlarged European Union implemented with the cooperation of Western European and ECE governments should be effective enough to stop an avalanche of undocumented migrants in any of the main categories considered. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, large numbers of its former citizens, especially Russians and Ukrainians, have been migrating in search of (formal- and informal-sector) work across the borders of new independent nation-states that have replaced the USSR. In fact, the total volume of internal migrations within the former Soviet Union has been considerably larger than that of westbound flows into East Central Europe, and it is expected to increase further, especially to Western Siberia and the Central Chernozem region,42 siphoning off part of the potential westward movement of income-seeking East Eastern Europeans. Although still unsaturated, 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 to assist millions. The recent increase of anti-foreign sentiments among ECE nationals (apparently more intense in Hungary than in either Poland or the Czech Republic) accompanying the growing presence of East and South European and Third World (im)migrants in their countries and, in particular, tightened border controls by ECE states may dissuade some potential travellers.43 Finally, the same reasons that, as I argued earlier, prevent most East Central Europeans from moving and thus limit the scope of international migrations – attachments to family, friends and familiar surroundings, unwillingness to take risks, fear of the unknown – have similar effects on their eastern neighbours. Risk aversion and fear of the unknown may actually be a more potent constraining factor among East Eastern Europeans than among East Central Europeans, thus preventing transnational migrations in search of better fortunes from turning into an overwhelming flood. They have been sustained by long traditions of quietism and what Vladimir Shlapentokh44 calls the ‘extraordinary patience’ of the majority of Russian and eastern (Orthodox and more Russified) Ukrainian populations in putting up with adversities rather than reaching for new, radical means of countering them.

Transnational West–East migration Since the 1990s East Central Europe has experienced an influx of temporary and permanent (re-)expatriates from the West. Most of them come from Germany, Austria, the United States, Great Britain and France. They are composed about equally of ECE émigrés from the communist era45 – some returning for good, but, more commonly, shuttling back and forth between their home and adopted countries – and non-ECE Western expatriates. Unlike westbound East European migrants, most of whom have elementary or high school educations, the great majority of Western–ECE (im)migrants are collegeeducated people with professional skills. Interestingly, growing numbers of them have been employed in recent years in ECE informal economies as undocumented workers. In 1996 Western residents in East Central Europe officially registered after 1989/90 numbered about 120,000, or nearly three times more than three years earlier. About half of them had lived in the Czech Republic and the remainder in about equal proportions in Hungary and in Poland. As the economic transformation of ECE societies and their legal/political cooperation with the European Union progress over time, more Western specialists in various fields can be expected to migrate to the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland for shorter and longer sojourns. The undocumented Western ‘workforce’ in East Central Europe has only recently begun to attract attention from receiver-country law enforcement agencies and the media. Current estimates by Poland’s National Bureau of Labour of illegally 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 not been able to obtain the information for Hungary.) Among the illegally employed foreigners 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-workers has been instigated by both the sending and the receiving sides of this transnational movement. The structure of unemployment in Western Europe, already well advanced in post-industrial capitalism, has been different from that in the eastern parts of the Continent, where deindustrialization has begun only recently in that highly skilled employees have been more affected than low-skill manual workers. Formal and, of concern here, informal-sector work-seeking migrations of highly skilled West Europeans have been a common phenomenon within the European Union, and their recent appearance in East Central Europe can be viewed as a reflection of that region’s progressive incorporation into the European and larger, global system of internationalized, two-pronged economies. In transforming ECE receiver societies, highly skilled Western experts are very much in demand. Undocumented Western specialists have been especially welcome as consultants, managers, advertisement and PR specialists, ‘contacts’ for Western markets, and so on, in small-scale foreign and joint-venture companies and also in newly founded ECE-owned enterprises, and as private foreign language tutors to native businessmen and managers. In addition to needed skills, they bring to their employers, who are unable to compete with large (especially multinational) companies, significant savings on salaries (lower than those paid to their officially employed compatriots with comparable skills) and social benefits (received in their home countries). As long as the above inducements are present and the immigration controls remain ‘gappy’ – and these conditions can be reasonably expected to last on both sides of the West–East migration circuit – informal employment of Western migrant specialists in ECE is also likely to increase.

Conclusion I have evaluated future trends in transnational migrations from and into Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic during the transitional ten-year period after the presumed formal admission of these countries into the European Union in 2005, during which the right of free cross-border settlement and employment of citizens of the newly admitted and old member states would be suspended. The question that begs consideration is what next, after the termination of this transitional period? Two possible scenarios for this post-2015 future from the viewpoint of present-day realpolitik represent, respectively, the ‘best feasible’ and ‘the more probable’ development. (Superstitiously I leave out worst-case developments such as a deep economic decline and/or destabilization of democracy in East Central Europe 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, a severe economic recession in Western Europe or a profound political crisis within the European Union that would undermine or interrupt the enlargement process.) The first scenario is the best-feasible (for ECE candidate-countries) version of a ‘multi-speed Europe’, as Bart Kerremans has called the situation postulated by different 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 authorities and ECE countries satisfactory to both sides (perhaps with the input of humanrights NGOs and Western public opinion opposed to a ‘fortress Europe’) regarding candidates’ compliance with the acquis communautaire, lead in 2015 or shortly thereafter to the acquisition by Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic of the ‘horizontal-integration’ rights and obligations accorded full members of the European Union, including the freedom of EU member-country citizens to move, work or settle anywhere within EU boundaries. As a result, the new eastern EU frontiers gain and the old western ECE borders lose importance as the political and economic dividers. At the same time, the ‘vertical-integration’ rights of decision-making in EU institutional bodies and EU monetary and foreign policy remain temporarily (but without a delimited schedule) confined, or partially confined, to all or a nucleus group of the most powerful old-member states. In this scenario, an enlarged Europe experiences so-called hunchback migration,48 that is, an immediate increase in international ECE–West flows triggered by the lifting of free movement restrictions followed by a reduction in migration volume. Transnational movement continues, however, prompted by densified ECE–West European integration, or interconnectedness, to which it itself contributes. Business/employment-related East–West and West–East transnational travels of highly skilled migrants actually increase, and because ECE workers in this category remain less costly to employ than their West European counterparts, the competition and, possibly, national/regional conflicts intensify in the EU’s highly skilled labour market. Restructured ECE economies generate postindustrial jobs in formal and informal sectors, and housing shortages (notorious under the communist regime and still persistent through the first decades after its collapse) are finally overcome, and internal and intraregional employmentrelated mobility within East Central Europe considerably increases. The growth of economic mezzo-regions that integrate expanded borderlands, up to 400 kilometres on each side of the neighbouring ECE and West European countries, creates employment opportunities for local populations that increase crossborder job commuters. Diminished in numbers in comparison with the earlier period because of expanded internal and intraregional employment opportunities, subcontracted ECE migrant-workers employed in West European informal economies replace

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Arbeitstouristen not only in name but also in socioeconomic composition as they are now drawn primarily from among the new impoverished social groups and underdeveloped regions of ECE post-industrial societies.49 They now travel not only to neighbouring Germany and Austria (where service workers are needed because of the rapidly ageing populations but where they must compete with still cheaper 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 German and Austrian workers about informally subcontracted Greek and Portuguese migrants. In the situation of free movement within the enlarged European Union, the eastern and southern borders of new EU member states, already tightened in the transitional period, are guarded with redoubled efforts particularly against organized traffic of undocumented EEE and Third World migrants heading toward the western parts of the Continent. This results in increased detentions of such travellers but does not eliminate the transit. Short-term contract and undocumented EEE/ECE migrant workers and refugees settling in East Central Europe are viewed with concern by first-rank member-countries of a multispeed Europe as ever-potential encroachers but are left alone as long as they remain in its eastern parts. In ECE countries EEE/Third World (im)migrants constitute a considerable presence. First-generation settlers bring in their relatives in accordance with EU family reunion policies, from different parts of the world come (and keep coming) asylum seekers whose requests must be processed according to international laws and EU regulations, and undocumented migrants sneak in through still leaky eastern/southern borders. The (im)migration issue divides interests and opinions in ECE societies along lines similar to those that have divided West Europeans. 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 and deportations of illegal foreign residents. More probable is a post-2015 scenario in which the extension to ECE countries of the ‘horizontal’ rights and obligations such as the free transnational movement of persons and trade is delayed beyond the repeatedly postponed timetables. (Flowing primarily West to East, capital would most likely be excluded from these restrictions.) Three (likely intertwined) problems would cause this situation. First, one or more ECE countries may fail to comply to the satisfaction of the responsible EU institutions with either part of the ‘parallel principle’ introduced at the 1999 EU summit in Helsinki as the basis for evaluation of candidates’ readiness for membership: implementation of the specific parts of the acquis and – a new requirement more difficult to meet outside of the EU structures – demonstration of minimum acceptable levels of environmental protection, transportation infrastructure, food production regulatory codes, and so 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 country would most likely hinder acceptance of the remaining two.) Second, repeated delays may result from a prolonged impasse in intra-Union negotiations of the pending reform of the EU budget, specifically the redistribution of structuralreform funds assigned to lesser developed EU members (to include, besides long-term South European, also new East Central European recipients) and of the contributions toward this purpose by richer countries. Third, there may be a persistence of the opposition by particular EU member states or ECE countries to specific items/aspects of the free movement acquis (e.g. free trade in some agricultural products) perceived as detrimental to the interests of their national economies or occupational strata. The prolonged-delay scenario would not change the basic mechanisms and directions of international migrations from and to East Central Europe, and E–W borders would remain transnational against the restrictions. But the overall costs of persistent constraints would surpass the advantages. To the disadvantage of both sender and receiver countries it would, of course, limit the exchange of highly skilled migrants and make the control of E–W international ‘migrant crime’ less effective or Europe’s eastern borders more porous to organized trafficking in human beings, drugs and stolen merchandise. As in the first scenario, however, assuming continued economic growth in the region, internal and intraand mezzo-regional migrations of ECEs would increase significantly, while ECE Arbeitstouristen, probably in reduced numbers, would continue their incomeseeking migrations in search of income in the informal sectors of Western economies. As in the first scenario, too, the presence of EEE and Third World settlers and refugees in Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic would grow larger and become a divisive issue in immigration policy-making and public opinion in each of these ECE countries. In both cases, whether integrated as lower-rank members into a multi-speed European 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 latter situation, however, would be not only more ‘wasteful’ economically but also more harmful politically for both eastern and western parts of Europe. Even with vertical-integration constraints, the free movement of persons within the enlarged European Union would stimulate professional and social contacts among students, civil servants, local- and regional-level organizational leaders and professionals from eastern and western parts of the Continent. Such sustained exchanges would create dense institutional and informal networks of support for the consolidation of democratic societies and cultures in East Central Europe. These networks could also be used to lobby for gradual elimination of vertical inequality within EU structures. With increased contacts between ECE countries and their eastern and southern neighbours, these contacts would also extend farther east and south, strengthening there the democratic ideas and the know-how of their implementation. In the prolonged suspension of the rights of free movement scenario, all these contacts would be considerably sparser and less systematic and their effects much more limited.

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More importantly, an indeterminate delay of the integration would be strongly demoralizing and alienating to ECE political parties and public opinion supportive of the accession. (Although they would occupy a lower-rank position in a multi-speed Europe, ECE countries would share their ‘vertical exclusion’ with less powerful and poorer EU member states.) The credibility of pro-Europe political parties in East Central Europe, sustained during the catch-up decade of economic growth assisted by EU funds in the expectation of full-rights integration at the conclusion of the transitional period, would be seriously undermined, leaving public space and disenchanted public opinion to anti-Western nationalistic groups and sentiments. Considering that in the enduring nationalist traditions in eastern parts of the Continent (Czechs possibly excepted) antiWestern has been synonymous with anti-liberal-democratic, such political reorientation brought about by the prolonged delay in the integration into the EU of the first countries from the eastern part of the Continent would undermine, in turn, the consolidation of democracy in that region and, thus, chances for a peaceful coexistence of all Europeans.

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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, Controlling Immigration: A Global Perspective (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994); Stephen Castles and Mark Miller, The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World (London: Macmillan, 1993); Mary Kritz, Lin Lean Kim and Hania Zlotnik, eds, International Migration Systems: A Global Approach (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). On contemporary E–W migrations, see Tomas Frejka, ed., International Migration in Central and Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States (New York and Geneva: UN Economic Commission for Europe, 1996); Mirjana Morokvasic, ‘Entre l’Est et l’Ouest, des migrations pendulaires’, in Mirjana Morokvasic and Hedwig Rudolph, 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.,Global History and Migrations (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), pp. 23–61; Trends in International Migration. Continuous Reporting System on Migration (Paris: OECD, 1998). On westbound population movement as a sensitive issue in the enlargement negotiations, see Bart Kerremans, ‘Eastward Enlargement and the Dilution of the European Union’, Problems of Post-Communism (September/October 1997), pp. 44–54; Sandra Lavenex, ‘Asylum, Immigration, and Central-Eastern Europe: Challenges to EU Enlargement’, European Foreign Affairs Review, 3:2 (1998), pp. 275–94; Rey Koslowski, ‘European Migration Regimes: Emerging, Enlarging, and Deteriorating’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 24:4 (1998), pp. 735–49. For reviews of these contributing elements and major (im)migration theories, see Douglas Massey, Worlds in Motion: Understanding International Migration at the End of the Millennium (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Hammar et al., eds, International Migration. The officially endorsed Agenda 2000 Blueprint for Enlargement (1997) sets this date for 2003. Recently, however, EU officials have repeatedly mentioned in public the probability 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 countries into the European Union, see Christopher Preston, Enlargement and Integration in the European Union (London: Routledge, 1997); Kerremans, ‘Eastward Enlargement’; Migration and Asylum in Central and Eastern Europe, Working Paper (Strasbourg: European Parliament, Directorate General for Research, 1998); Wernee Weidenfeld, ed., A New Ostopolitik: Strategies for a United Europe (Gutersloh: Bertelsmann Foundation Publishers, 1997). Unfortunately, most of these prognoses have shortcomings that make their utility rather limited, either due to the exclusive focus on legal migrants (a large majority of ECE cross-border travellers are undocumented); the lack of distinction between permanent and temporal migrations (most of contemporary ECE migrations have been short-term, back-and-forth travels); the reliance on respondents’ declared general ‘wish to travel abroad’ as the basis for the assessment of the actual migratory potential. I have selectively used the parts of these reports that, in my judgement, were not or only minimally affected by those shortcomings. For critical assessments of the ‘flood from the East’ prognoses, see Richard Baldwin and Pertti Haaparanta, eds, Expanding Membership in the European Union (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Trends in International Migration. Continuous Reporting System on Migration (Paris: OECD, 1998); Thomas Bauer and Klaus Zimmermann, ‘Integrating the East: The Labor Market Effects of Immigration’, SELAPO Seminar for Labor and Population Economics (Working Paper No.8, 1997); Dietrich Thranhardt, ‘European Migration from East to West: Present Patterns and Future Direction’, New Community, 22:2 (1996), pp. 227–42. Information on registered West–West migration was compiled from Trends in International Migration (1998); Eurostat Yearbook (Luxemburg, 1997); Council of Europe Report on Europeans Living Abroad (1996). Figures on undocumented worker migrants from member countries in the European Union are my (conservative) estimate and are confirmed by my European colleagues, who are migration specialists, as ‘possible’ or ‘likely’ but unfortunately, no more reliable data exists at this moment. Social surveys, ethnographic studies and field reports that served as sources for this and the following information about ECE (and later EEE) migrants’ purposes, support networks and orientations informing their actions include (in alphabetical order): 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 polnischer Zuwanderinnen in Berlin’, Bericht der Berliner Fachkomission ‘Frauenhandel’ (Berlin, 1997) and ‘In Deutschland arbeiten und in Polen leben: Was die neuen WanderarbeiterInnen aus Polen bewegt’, in Zwischen Flucht und Arbeit: Neue Migration und Legalisierungs debatte, ed. by Büro Arbeitschwerpunkt Rassismus- und Fluchtlingspolitik (Hamburg: Verlag Libertore Assoziation, 1995); Ewa Domaradzka, ‘Polacy Zatrudnieni Zagranicą i Cudzoziemcy Pracujący w Polsce’, Polityka Społeczna, 274/275 (November–December 1996), pp. 16–18; Dusan Drbohlav, ‘Ukrainian Workers Operating in the Czech Republic’, paper presented at the ‘Conference on Central and Eastern Europe: New Migration Space’ ( Pułtusk, Poland, 11–13 December 1997); Krystyna Iglicka, ‘The Economics of Petty Trade on the Eastern Polish Border’, in Krystyna Iglicka and Keith Sword, eds,The Challenge of East–West Migration for Poland (London: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 120–44; Malgorzata Irek, Der Schmugglerzug (Berlin: Das Arabische Buch, 1998); Ewa Jazwinska and Marek Okólski, Causes and Consequences of Migration in Central and Eastern Europe (Warsaw: Institute for Social Studies/University of Warsaw, 1996); idem, eds Ludzie Huśtawce, (Warsaw Scolar, 2001); Bożena Karpiuk, Emigracje Zarobkowe Mieszkańców Siemiatycz do Brukseli, Ph.D. dissertation (Filia Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego w Bialymstoku, 1997); Wojciech

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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?’, paper presented at the ‘Conference on Central and Eastern Europe: New Migration Space’ ( Pułtusk, Poland,: 11–13 December 1997); Władysław Misiak,. ‘Losy i Aktywność Polaków w Berlinie (Analiza Wyników Badań 1994r)’, Słowo, special issue on Poles in Berlin (Berlin: Polskie Duszpasterstwo Katolickie, 1995), pp. 23–65; Rajmund Mydel and Heinz Fassmann, Nieleglani Robotnicy Cudzoziemscy i Czarny Rynek Pracy (Cracow: Institite of Geography of the Jagiellonian University, 1997); Ewa Ornacka and Jacek Szczesny, ‘Gastpracownicy’, Polityka (20 December 1998), pp. 26–8; Tadeusz Poplawski, ‘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 do Grecji w Perspektywie Procesu Integracji Europy’, Migracje i Społeczenstwo, 2 (1997), pp. 153–64; Wiltrud Schenk, ‘Grenzgegerinnen’, Beitrage zur Feministische Theorie und Praxis, 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 and Consequences (Report to the UN Economic Commission for Europe, 1995); Keith Sword, ‘Cross-Border “Suitcase Trade” and the Role of Foreigners in Polish Informal Markets’, 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; Grzegorz Zietkiewicz, Polen in Berlin-Polacy w Berlinie (Berlin: Die Ausländerbeauftragte des Senats, 1996). 9 Cornelius et al., eds, Controlling Immigration; Virginie Guiraudon, International Human Rights Norms and Their Incorporation: The Protection of Aliens in Europe (European University Institute Working Paper, EUF 98/4, 1998). 10 GNP rates estimations from Ivan Berend, Central and Eastern Europe, 1944–1993: Detour from the Periphery to the Periphery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Gudrun Biffl, ed., Migration, Free Trade and Regional Integration in Central and Eastern Europe (Vienna: Verlag Osterreich, 1997); Stanley Black, ed., Europe’s Economy Looks East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Steven Turnock, The East European Economy in Context (London: Routledge, 1997); Czarina Wilpert, ‘The New Migration and the Informal Labour Market in Germany’ (unpublished manuscript, 1998); Morawska and Spohn, ‘Moving Europeans’. It should be noted, however, that there are differences between countries in the level of economic development within East 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 economic difficulties in this country) and in Poland 33 per cent (it has since increased by two points) of the average figure for Western Europe and the United States combined. In 1996 the unemployment in East Central Europe ranged, depending on subregions, between 10 per cent and 35 per cent, while 20–5 per cent of the employed population in each of the ECE countries had lived below the poverty level, and close to one-third experienced difficulties in making ends meet. Information compiled from Turnock, East European Economy in Context; Mieczysław Bąk, Przemysław Kuławczuk and Ireneusz Hampel, eds, Deregulacja Rynku Pracy (Warsaw: Institute for Private Enterprise and Democracy, 1997); Janos Hoos, ‘Country Report: Hungary’, Journal of Transforming Economies and Societies (Spring 1997), pp. 54–67; Endre Sik, ‘The Social, Economic and Legal Aspects of Migration in Contemporary Hungary in Relation with the Accession to the European Union’ (unpublished manuscript, 1998); and occasional press reports. 11 On the informal economy in post-industrial capitalism, see Alejandro Portes, Manuel Castells and Lauren Benton, eds, The Informal Economy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989); Saskia Sassen, ‘Immigration and Local Labor Markets’, in

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Alejandro Portes, ed., The Economic Sociology of Immigration (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1995), pp. 87–127. This informalization, it should be noted, has affected specific regions and cities of the European Union unevenly – more so the Mediterranean than the Nordic regions and global cities (such as Berlin or London) than cities less ‘densely’ connected to the world economy. On the importance of local migration traditions and social support networks in shaping past and present transnational migrations (not unique to East Central Europe), see Massey, Worlds in Motion; Hammar et al., eds, International Migration; Ewa Morawska, ‘The Sociology and Historiography of Immigration’, in Virginia YansMcLaughlin, ed., Immigration Reconsidered: Sociology, History, and Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 187–241. As studies show, there are local areas in East Central Europe traditionally sending income-seeking migrants to particular destinations in the West: in Poland, for example, the Podhalans have travelled to Lower Austria and to Chicago, the Polesians to Belgium and France, those from the Poznań province to Berlin in Germany. In contrast, the poor Swietokrzyskie voivodship or the Ciechanow and Ostroleka 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, Nieleglani Robotnicy Cudzoziemscy; this author’s ongoing study of the Polish colony in Berlin. For a similar differentiation in Hungary, see Agnes Hars, ‘Hungary and the Enlargement of the European Union’ (unpublished report for the World Bank, 1998); in the Czech Republic, see Regional Development: Central and Eastern Europe, The Impact of the Development of the Countries of Central and Eastern Europe on the Community Territory (European Commission Regional Policy and Cohesion Studies, 1996). Heinz Fassmann and Christiane Hintermann, Migrationspotential Ostmitteleuropa (Vienna: ISRForschungsberichte, Working Paper No. 15, 1997) discuss subregional differences in migratory flows in all three countries. The GNP growth rates are compiled from Weidenfeld, ed., A New Ostpolitik; Export Marketing, ‘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; European Economy 1996; Randall Filer, ‘The Role of Labor Market Institutions in Creating a Dynamic Labor Market’, and Marek Góra, ‘Rynek Pracy w Świecie Ciagłej Restrukturyzacji’, both papers presented at the Conference on The Creation of New Jobs and Economic Restructuring in Poland (Warsaw: The Case Foundation, 23–24 October 1998). Information compiled from Turnock, East European Economy in Context; Stanley Paliwoda, ‘Capitalizing on Emergent Markets in Central and Eastern Europe’, in William Nicoll and Richard Schoenberg, eds,Europe Beyond 2000: The Enlargement of the European Union Toward the East (London: Whurr Publishers, 1998), pp. 223–37; Mieczysław Bąk and Przemysław Kulawczuk, eds, Wpływ Inwestycji Zagranicznych na Gospodarkę Polski (Warsaw: PAIZ, 1996); Maria Jarosz, ed., Foreign Owners and Polish Employers of Privatized Enterprises (Warsaw: Institute of Political Studies Polish Academy of Sciences, 1997); Regional Development: Central and Eastern Europe; Gabor Hunya, ‘Foreign Direct Investment and Its Effects in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland’, in Gudrun Biffl, ed.,Migration, Free Trade and Regional Integration in Central and Eastern Europe (Vienna: Verlag Österreich, 1997), pp. 137–74; Daniela Bobeva,. ‘Policy Implications of Foreign Direct Investment in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland’, in Biffl, ed.,Migration, Free Trade and Regional Integration, pp.175–8; Jean-Pierre

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Garson, Dominique Redor and Georges Lemaitre, ‘Regional Integration and the Outlook for Temporary and Permanent Migration in Central and Eastern Europe’, in Biffl, ed.,Migration, Free Trade and Regional Integration, pp. 299–334; David Dyker and Stanisław Kubielas, ‘Technology Patterns in the Globalization of the Polish Economy’, Warsaw University Faculty of Economic Sciences, Economic Discussion Paper No. 42. (1998). Also my personal correspondence and interviews with Polish and Hungarian economists – authors of the studies cited here. 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 New Kind of Duality? Second Thoughts About the “Second Economy”’, in Janos Matyas Kovacs, 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 of Urban and Regional Research 18:1 (1994), pp. 46–68; Endre Sik, ‘Network Capital in Capitalist, Communist and Post-Communist Societies’, International Contributions to Labor Studies, 4 (1994), pp. 73–93; Endre Sik, ‘The Size of the Unregistered Economy in Post-Communist Transformation’ (unpublished manuscript, 1994); Szara Gospodarka w Polsce: Rozmiary, Przyczyny, Konsekwencje (Warsaw: Studia i Prace Zaklady Badan Statyst.-Ekonom. GUS i PAN, zeszyt, 1996), p. 233; Bąk et al., eds, Deregulacja Rynku Pracy; 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). On temporary income-seeking purposes of ECE westbound migrants, see Migration Potential in Central and Eastern Europe (Geneva: IOM, 1998); Fassmann and Hintermann, Migrationspotential Ostmitteleuropa; Hars, ‘Hungary and the Enlargement of the European Union’; Sik, ‘The Social, Economic and Legal Aspects of Migration in Contemporary Hungary’. Information on the Freedom of Services Act and its implementation in the individual member countries from Uwe Hunger, ‘Social Citizenship and Transnational Migration: The Political Economy of Temporary Labor Migration within the European Union’, paper presented at the conference on Migration and the Welfare in Contemporary Europe (Florence: European University Institute, May 1998); on the FSA consequences for German construction industry, and on the informal-sector economy in Berlin, see Wilpert, ‘The New Migration and the Informal Labour Market in Germany’; see Norbert Cyrus, ‘In Deutschland arbeiten und in Polen leben’; Bauer and Zimmermann, ‘Integrating the East’. See David Coleman, ‘Contrasting Age Structures of Western Europe and Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union: Demographic Curiosity or Labor Resource?’ Population and Development Review, 19:3 (1993), pp. 523–51; Trends in International Migration (1998); Black, ed., Europe’s Economy Looks East; also Elmar Honekopp, ‘Labour Migration to Germany from Central and Eastern Europe: Old and New Trends’ (Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung Nurnmerg, Working Paper No. 23, 1997); Michael Bommes and Jost Halfmann, eds, Migration in nationalen Wohlfahrtsstaaten. Theoretische und Vergleichende Untersuchungen (Osnabrück: University of Osnabrück Press, 1998); Keith Banting, ‘Social Rights and the Multicultural Welfare State’ (Florence: European University Institute, Forum on International Migrations, Working Paper MIG/43, 1998). Migration Potential in Central and Eastern Europe; see Fassmann and Hintermann, Migrationspotential Ostmitteleuropa. Migration Potential in Central and Eastern Europe; Fassmann and Hintermann, Migrationspotential Ostmitteleuropa. 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; also Marek Okólski and Dariusz Stola, ‘Migracje Miedzy Polska a Krajami Unii Europejskiej w Perspektywie Przystapienia Polski do UE’ (unpublished report for KPZK 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 Their Implementation’, paper presented at the conference on Dilemmas of Immigration Control in a Globalizing World. (Florence: European University Institute, 11–12 June 1998); Honekopp, ‘Labour Migration to Germany from Central and Eastern Europe’. 25 The data and prognosis from Trends in International Migration (1998); Turnock, East European Economy in Context; Marek Okólski, ‘Recent Migration in Poland: Trends and Causes’, in Iglicka and Sword, eds, The Challenge of East–West Migration. 26 Estimates compiled from Zsuzsa Berencsi and Endre Sik, ‘Intentions to Emigrate and to Work Abroad in Hungary in 1993–1994’, in Maryellen Fullerton, Endre Sik and Judit Toth, eds, Refugees and Migrants: Hungary at a Crossroads (Budapest: Institute for Political Science of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 1995), pp. 129–42; Judit Juhasz, ‘Hungary’, in Frejka, ed., International Migration in Central and Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States, pp. 69–80; Vladimir Cermak, ‘Talents in Migration Process’, and Eva Uhlirova, ‘Potential Emigration from Prague after the “Velvet Revolution”, both papers presented at the International Conference ‘Central and Eastern Europe New Migration Space’ ( Pułtusk, Poland: 11–13 December 1997). On highly skilled ‘brain drain’ (e)migration from East Central Europe during the 1990s, see Dominique Redor, ‘Les migrations de specialistes hautement qualifiés entre l’Europe centrale et l’Union Européenne: analyse et perspectives’, Revue d’études comparatives Est–Ouest, 3 (Septembre 1994), pp. 161–78; Mary Redei, ‘Hungary’, in Solon 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: Zur Mobilität westlicher Fach- und Führungskrafte nach Polen (Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin Fur Socialforschung, Working Paper FS I, 1996), pp. 96–103. See Janusz Hryniewicz, Bogdan Jatowiecki and Andrzej Mync, Ucieczka Mozgow z Nauki i Szkolnictwa Wyzszego w Polsce w latach 1992–1993 (Warsaw: Studia Regionalne i Lokalne UW, 1994); Barbara Rhode, ‘Brain Drain, Brain Gain, Brain Waste, Reflections on the Emigration of Highly Educated and Scientific Personnel from Eastern Europe’, in Russell King, ed., The New Geography of European Migrations (London: Belhaven Press, 1993), pp. 228–45; Trends in International Migration (1998); Activities of the Council of Europe in the Migration Field (Strasbourg: Council of Europe, 1998). 27 Jewish emigrants from the former Soviet Union, the majority of whom leave for the United States, Israel and, increasingly in the last decade, Germany, have been excluded 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 of Emigration; Dariusz Stola, ‘Income-Seeking Foreigners in Poland in the 1990s: QuasiMigrants from the Former USSR’, paper presented at the ‘Conference on Central and Eastern 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 Regional Integration 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 Vishnevsky und Zhanna Zayonchkovskaya, ‘Auswanderung aus der fruheren Sowjetunion und den

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GUS-Staaten’, in Heinz Fassmann and Rainer Münz, eds, European Migration in the Late Twentieth Century (Aldershot: Edward Elgar: 1994), pp. 365–90. Specifically on Romanian trader- and worker-tourists in Hungary, treated here jointly with EEEs, see Rachid 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). 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) in Hungary, Endre Sik (‘The Social, Economic and Legal Aspects of Migration in Contemporary Hungary’) has concluded that the number of undocumented Handelsand Arbeitstouristen decreased between 1995 and 1998. Because the survey consisted of self-administered questionnaires (with a response rate of 28–32 per cent) filled out by local 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 informal sector were not included in the sample, I am not convinced that these findings are indeed representative. See Hars, ‘Hungary and the Enlargement of the European Union’; Maria Los, ‘ “Virtual” Property and Post-Communist Globalization’, Demokratizatsiya. The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization, 6:1 (1998), pp. 77–86. Specifically on corruption of border officers, see Marek Jerczynski,. ‘Patterns of Spatial Mobility of Citizens of the Former Soviet Union’, in Iglicka and Sword, eds,The Challenge of East–West Migration, pp. 105–19. For the assessment of the economic and political situation and prognoses for EEE countries, see Peter Reddaway, ‘Possible Scenarios for Russia’s Future’, Problems of Post-Communism (September/October 1997), pp. 38–43; Black, ed., Europe’s Economy Looks East. 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 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Information about widespread use of personal networks by EEE income-seekers in East 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 Rynek Pracy w Polsce (Gdańsk/Warsaw: Instytut Badań nad Gospodarką Rynkową, 1994); Biuro Kontroli Legalności Zatrudnienia (Warsaw: Departament Pracy. Sprawozdanie Roczne, 1997); Pyrozhkov, Causes and Consequences of Emigration; Sipaviciene, International Migration in Lithuania; Buslayeva, Social Assessment of Coal Industry Restructuring. Iglicka, ‘The Economics of Petty Trade’. Information on transit travellers compiled from Marek Okólski, ‘Combatting Migrant Trafficking in Poland’, paper presented at the ‘Regional Seminar on Migrant Trafficking 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 dynamiques migratoires roumaines’, Migrations Études, 81 (July–August), pp. 1–12; Dorel, ‘Romania’; European Committee on Migration, Recent Developments in Policies Relating to Migration and Migrants (Strasbourg: Council of Europe, 1998); John Salt, Current Trends in International Migration in Europe (Strasbourg: Council of Europe, 1997); Dana Diminescu, ‘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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39

40

41

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Border Crime: Challenges at the Eastern Frontier of the European Union’ (unpublished manuscript, 1998). On worldwide human trafficking, see Claire Sterling, Thieves’ World: The Threat of the New Global Network of Organized Crime (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994); David Kyle, ‘Transparent Economies and Invisible Workers: Human Smuggling under Global Economic Liberalism’, paper presented at the ‘Conference on Dilemmas of Immigration Control in a Globalizing World’ (European University Institute, Florence, 11–12 June 1998); James Walsh, ‘Alien Smuggling: East to West’, Migration World, XV:1 (1998), pp. 13–17; John Salt and Susanne Schmid, ‘Trafficking in Migrants: A Preliminary Literature Review’, paper presented at IOM Workshop on Trafficking (Warsaw: 8–9 June1998);Organized Crime Moves Into Migrant Trafficking (IOM Quarterly Bulletin, No. 11, 1996); Fabrizio Calvi, L’Europe des parrains: La Mafia à l’assaut de l’Europe (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1993). On asylum requests and discontinuations in Poland, see Zbigniew Pruchniak, Anna Zawalak and Małgorzata Andrulonis, Poland: Statistical Data on Asylum Seekers and Refugees, 1993–1997 (Warsaw: Department for Migration and Refugees, 1999). Migration and Asylum in Central and Eastern Europe; Trends in International Migration (1998); Marek Okólski, ‘Emergence of the Countries of Central and Eastern Europe as Countries of Immigrants and Transit’, paper presented at the ‘Colloquy on Migration in Central and Eastern Europe: New Challenges’ (Committee on Migration, Refugees and Demography Parliamentary Assembly, Council of Europe, Warsaw, 17–19 December 1998); Pruchniak et al., Poland; Zdenek Pavlik and Jarmila Maresova, ‘Former Czechoslovakia’, in Solon Ardittis, ed., The Politics of East–West Migration (London: St Martin’s Press, 1994), pp. 111–25; Tomasz Kuba Kozlowski, ‘Migration Flows in the 1990: Challenges for Entry, Asylum and Integration Policy in Poland’, 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. See Lavenex, ‘Asylum, Immigration and Central-Eastern Europe’; also Boldizsar Nagy, ‘Can the Hungarian Migration Policy be Moral?’ in Maryellen Fullerton, Endre Sik and Judit Toth, eds,From Improvisation toward Awareness? Contemporary Migration Politics in Hungary (Budapest: Institute for Political Science of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 1997), pp. 157–64; Paul Latawski,. ‘Straz Graniczna: The Mission, Structure, and Operations of Poland’s Border Guard’, in Iglicka and Sword, eds, The Challenge of East–West Migration, pp. 90–104. Hungary’s new (1996) immigration law sets the annual quota of 2,000 permanent residence permits for immigrants (ethnic Hungarians are not subject to this restriction), but imposes no limitation on long-term permits. In practice, however, nearly all applications for permanent residence submitted since 1996 have been approved (after Trends in International Migration [1998], pp.117–18). On the influx into ECE countries of (im)migrants from EEE and Asia see note 38 above. The figures on contract workers are compiled from Trends in International Migration (1998); European Committee on Migration, Recent Developments; on undocumented settlers and the interchange between this and officially registered groups from Drbohlav, ‘Ukrainian Workers Operating in the Czech Republic’; Pal Nyiri, ‘New Chinese Migrants in Europe: The Case of Chinese Community in Hungary’ (unpublished manuscript, 1998); Okólski, ‘Combatting Migrant Trafficking in Poland’. See Elena Kirillova, ‘Temporary Labor Migration from Ukraine to Russia’, paper presented at the ‘Conference on Central and Eastern Europe: New Migration Space’ ( Pułtusk, 11–13 December 1997); Buslayeva, Social Assessment of Coal Industry Restructuring; see also Valentina Bodrova and Tatjana Regent, ‘Russia and the CIS’ in Ardittis, ed., Politics of East–West Migration, pp. 98–110; Zhanna Zayonchkovskaya, ‘Recent Migration Trends in Russia’, in George Demko, Grigory Joffe and Zhanna

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44 45

46

47

48 49

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Zayonchkovskaya, eds,Population Under Duress: The Geodemography of Post-Soviet Russia (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999), pp. 107–36. See Sik, ‘The Social, Economic and Legal Aspects of Migration in Contemporary Hungary’; Krytyna Slany, ‘The Attitudes and Patterns of Behaviour of Poles towards Foreigners in the Light of Recent Studies’, in Iglicka and Sword, eds, The Challenge of East–West Migration, pp. 206–23. Vladimir Shlapentokh, ‘Russian Patience: A Reasonable Behavior and a Social Strategy’, Archives Européennes de Sociologie, XXXVI (1995), pp. 247–80. A total of more than three million citizens of Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia combined (Poles making up more than a half of that number) either stayed on in the West as so-called displaced persons (DPs) after the conclusion of World War II and the imposition of communist rule in East Central Europe or left during the fifty years it endured. Since 1989/90, encouraged by post-communist governments in their native countries eager to establish links with potential political allies to help negotiate reintegration with the Western world and hoped-for investors in the transforming ECE economies, considerable numbers of those highly skilled émigrés have either repatriated or come to their native countries on professional longer sojourns. Figures for registered Western residents in East Central Europe calculated from Trends in International Migration (1998); Trends in International Migration. Continuous Reporting System on Migration (Paris: OECD, 1994); Eurostat Yearbook (1997); Report on Europeans Living Abroad (Brussels: Council of Europe, 1996); Hillmann and Rudolph, Jenseits des Brain Drain; Dusan Drbohlav, ‘International Migration in the Czech Republic and Slovakia and the Outlook for East Central Europe’, Czech Sociological Review, 3:4 (1994), pp.134–54; Drbohlav and Sykora, ‘Gateway Cities in the Process of Regional Integration’; Jarmila Maresova, ‘Czech Republic’, in Frejka, ed., International Migration in Central and Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States, pp. 49–56. They have been employed in a variety of positions in multinational companies and other foreign production and service firms, international organizations (most commonly OECD, GATT, IMF, World Bank, UN Development Programme, American Agency for International Development and NGOs), EU representative, funding and consulting agencies, and as specialists, consultants and teachers of the market economy and effective management to ECE businessmen, international lawyers, political scientists and organizational sociologists (see Geoffrey Pridham and Tatu Vanhanen, eds, Democratization in Eastern Europe: Domestic and International Perspectives [London and New York: Routledge, 1994] ; Michael Kennedy and Pauline Gianoplus, ‘Entrepreneurs and Expertise: A Cultural Encounter in the Making of Post-Communist Capitalism in Poland’, East European Politics and Societies, 8:1 (1994), pp. 58–93; Cermak, ‘Talents in Migration Process’). Estimates of undocumented Western migrants in East Central Europe from Ornacka and Szczęsny, ‘Gastpracownicy’; Drbohlav Dusan and Endre Sik (personal communications to the author). The idea of a multi-speed Europe has its origins in the so-called ‘Schäuble–Lamers paper’, an unofficial 1994 report on the EU by two German CDU leaders, Wolfgang Schäuble and Jan Lamers, in which they propose the formation of a European ‘nucleus’ (consisting of Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg) in order to avoid the dilution of the EU structures. A similar idea of Europe of ‘concentric circles’ was also proposed in the same year by the then French Prime Minister, Eduard Balladur – after Kerremans, ‘Eastward Enlargement’, p. 51; citation from ibid., p. 44. Kenneth Hermele, ‘The Discourse on Migration and Development’, in Hammar et al., eds, International Migration, pp. 133–58. 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

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(Warsaw: Instytut Pracy i Spraw Socjalnych, 1996), pp. 67–82; Ivo Bastyr and Magdalena Kotynkova, ‘Social Reform in the Czech Republic: Subsistence Minimum Functions’, and Endre Sik, ‘The Social Consequences of Unemployment’, both in Golinowska, 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, Istvan Toth and Gyorgi Vukovich, eds, Social Report 1998 (Budapest: Tarki, 1999), pp. 123–50; Michael Forster, Peter Szivos and Istvan G. Toth, ‘Welfare Support and Poverty: The Experiences of Hungary and the Other Visegrad Countries’, in Tamas Kolosi, 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).

10 Illegal migration and cross-border crime Challenges at the eastern frontier of the European Union Eberhard Bort

To put migration and crime into the same heading should sound an alarm in most readers’ heads. Part of this chapter indeed argues that linking the issues of movement of persons and cross-border crime should be strictly limited to the one connection that exists between the two: the (in)human trafficking of refugees by organized criminal gangs. Otherwise, one can assess both, migration and crime, as challenges that influence, and will continue to influence, border policies, particularly at the present and future eastern frontiers of the European Union. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, frontiers have increasingly returned to the political and academic discourse in Europe.1 It is easy to understand why. New international 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 function fundamentally, particularly in the case of the former Iron Curtain. At the same time, the rhetoric about a borderless Europe within the European Union has been, at least partially, translated into reality. Since March 1995, the 1985 Schengen agreement and the 1990 Schengen convention have been progressively implemented, blurring the distinction between international and sub-state boundaries 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 positive development: anxieties and even fears have accompanied it: In many countries, citizens have become fearful that they are now being invaded not by armies and tanks but by migrants who speak other languages, worship other gods, belong to other cultures and, they fear, will take their jobs, occupy their land, live off their welfare system and threaten their way of life, their environment, and even their polity.2 Would open borders be an invitation for criminals to cross freely (drug trafficking, 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?

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The Schengen process requires that the abolition of border controls at the internal frontiers be matched by a standardized strengthening of controls at the external frontiers of ‘Schengenland’. Thus, the eastern frontier of the European Union, opened in 1989/90 from the East, has subsequently undergone a degree of closure from the West. How does that match attempts at developing institutionalized cross-border cooperation along that frontier? As most of the eastern neighbours of the European Union have applied for membership, and negotiations for accession commenced in 1998 with five of these applicant states (Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovenia and Estonia), and in March 2000 with another four (Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Romania), as well as with Malta and Cyprus, the erstwhile Iron Curtain (with the obvious exception of the frontier dividing Germany during the Cold War, which in 1990 ceased to be an international frontier) is destined to become an internal EU boundary before the end of the first decade of the new millennium.4 Part of the accession process is the demand by EU member states and by the EU itself that the applicant states police their eastern frontiers efficiently. Schengen standards, in other words, are being exported eastward in order to secure the future eastern frontier of the European Union. The main issues at stake are immigration and crime, reflecting the marked gradient in economic performance and living standards at this frontier.5 Against this backdrop of an economic divide (even greater at the Mediterranean frontier of the European Union than along its eastern borders, and replicated at the future eastern frontier of the EU further to the east), organized crime, involving the smuggling of both illegal goods and illegal persons, is perceived as a threat to Western societies and their standard of life. Moreover, economic divides are making cooperation difficult between law enforcement authorities across the frontier, particularly where corruption blurs the boundaries between the socalled ‘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 and judicial authorities in 1990. According to this informal text, the main features of organized 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 cooperation by more than two persons working as a team over a long or indefinite period, where such cooperation involves: (a) the use of commercial or quasicommercial structures, (b) the use of violence or other methods of intimidation, or (c) the exercise of influence on the political process, the media, judicial authorities or the functioning of the economy.7 Minority problems (600,000 Hungarians live in Slovakia, 2.7 million in Romania8) could become exacerbated by new dividing Schengen frontiers if, say, Hungary was in, but its neighbours were denied membership. This in turn

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could, as the wars in the Balkans – from Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina to Kosovo and Albania – have demonstrated, produce further migratory pressure. The emerging intricate, and sometimes unclear or even contradictory, picture of conflicting functions of frontiers, especially at the external frontiers (and the expected future frontiers) of the EU – trying to reconcile the desire for enhanced cooperation and integration (requiring open frontiers) and the perceived need for security (requiring limits to this openness) – results in a political discourse highlighting the issue of migration and the need for harmonized and strict identity controls, at the borders and beyond, in what has been called a return to spatial approaches to security and control, including border zones and police cooperation far beyond national frontiers.

The Schengen process When the 1985 and 1990 Schengen agreements came into force in 1995, they were intended to cope with the effects of dismantling identity checks on frontiers between member states by consequent strengthening and harmonization of checks at the external frontier.9 Since free movement of persons also implied the free movement of criminals, persons wanted for serious criminal offences, persons in need of protection or personae non grata were reported through the Schengen Information System (SIS), available on-line in all the member states and at the major ports of entry to the EU. There were, in 1999, about 45,000 on-line access points and about fourteen million records.10 A rapid response system (the Sirène offices) was put in place in member states to act in case of any transfrontier criminal threat, or in case additional information was required about persons or about the legality of a request. This system inevitably had an effect on the neighbouring states of the European Union and even on distant states that had privileged relationships with members of the EU – such as those between the Latin American and the Iberian states. Millions of people who could previously enter states without a visa found this was now a requirement because the Schengen agreements included a visa policy common to all Schengen states. Criminal law enforcement cooperation (if one excludes the often rudimentary exchange of information through Interpol) remained on a bilateral basis between member and non-member states of the EU, but the latter became aware of a new system of closer cooperation between the member states in this domain, reinforced by a new non-operational European police office, Europol, in the Hague. At a meeting of Ministers of the Interior of all twelve Schengen states in Berlin in December 1998, visa harmonization was declared a top priority. A reduction of the ‘grey list’ was agreed (the original intention had been to abolish it 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 for one and all of the Schengen states, and a ‘white list’ of states where none are required, ending the problem that people from ‘grey list’ countries might have visa-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 the internal Schengen frontiers. At the same meeting, the ministers decided that control of persons would remain in place at Greece’s frontiers, which had not passed the efficiency test of the Schengen inspection group.12

The eastern frontier When Austria and Italy implemented Schengen (between 1 October 1997 and 1 April 1998), another part of the former Iron Curtain, opened initially by Hungary at its frontier with Austria in 1989, became the external Schengen frontier of the EU. This was feared as a threat to cross-border relations in the neighbouring states to the east. And when there was a trial run of Schengen external frontier controls at the Italian–Slovene border in October 1997, this caused considerable disruption.13 Yet by April 1998, the expected barrier did not materialize – at least not to the extent expected.14 The Slovenian border authorities had taken the Schengen threat seriously, had persuaded their own government to adopt the Schengen criteria (of identity and customs checks) at their Croatian frontier, and had convinced the Italian, Austrian and EU authorities that Slovenia has – in practice – implemented Schengen (without being part of it) at its external non-EU frontiers. This, obviously, made it possible for controls at its Italian and Austrian frontiers to remain relatively flexible, even after Schengen had become fully operational. Yet this does not obscure the unease felt on the other side of the EU external frontier about the Schengen process. From Poland to Slovenia, there has been concern at being obliged to implement Schengen norms – in the negotiations of which these countries had no right to participate.15 Slovenia may have been successful in saving its partially open frontiers with Italy and Austria, yet at a price. Slovakia, as could be experienced when crossing from Bratislava to Vienna, was much less successful – or did not try, under the Meciar administration, as hard to implement Schengen-type frontier controls at its eastern frontier. Compared to cooperation between the border authorities in Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic, which seem further developed – regular meetings, comparing notes, frequent communications, common training and exchanges – the south-eastern external frontiers seem to lag behind. This can be seen, for example, at the Austrian–Slovak crossing of Berg/Bratislava, where communication between both sides is, even after the Meciar regime was ousted, less common and has often to be conducted indirectly via Vienna and Bratislava. From the Austro-Hungarian border (historically, certainly one of the most symbolic frontiers of Europe) long queues are being reported since Schengen was fully implemented by Austria, caused by Austrian border police, a new special police force with a ‘martial outlook’.16 All the accession states with whom negotiations started in 1998 and 2000 respectively are under increasing pressure to police their eastern frontiers efficiently. 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

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of the Hungarian–Romanian frontier, for example, has implications for the large Hungarian minority in Romania. The Schengen agreements thus cast their shadow beyond the present European Union. EU Commissioner Hans van den Broek, for example, told the Polish government that Poland’s chances of joining the EU depended to a large degree on how well it could police its borders.17 The strengthening of Poland’s eastern frontier is seen – particularly in Germany – as the necessary attempt to erect a first serious obstacle to illegal migration and illegal trade from east to west. The Saxon Minister for the Interior supported the wish of applicant states in East and Central European countries to participate in the Schengen Information System and maintained that a full link to the Strasbourg-based computer system could be installed by mid-1999.18 By 2001, it had not happened. It is well known that the SIS computer had difficulties in coping with the Scandinavian enlargement of Schengen, let alone its extension to the east. By the end of 2001, the Schengen Information System operated in thirteen EU member states and in Norway and Iceland. Two initiatives were launched by Belgium and Sweden in June 2001 for the development of a second-generation SIS II capable of operating in an enlarged EU. Tightening the external frontiers is an expensive business for the accession states. There is the economic price for these measures. Poland introduced a new aliens law at the beginning of 1998, which led to protests from Russia; several border crossings were blocked by Russians. Belarus temporarily withdrew its ambassador from Warsaw. But there was also protest from Polish traders who depend on cross-border traffic. Ukrainians and Lithuanians have since had to prove that they have sufficient means to sustain themselves in Poland. Russians and Belarusians must have Polish invitations or pre-paid hotel-vouchers if they want to cross into Poland.19 Poland did not follow the demand by EU spokespersons to introduce visa requirements analogous to the EU, because the limited restrictions it implemented already affected sales to visitors from Russia and Belarus (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 traders protested 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 at Warsaw’s economically important ‘Russian bazaar’. Here, trading fell by about 30 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 Market Economy Research Institute, in the region of £350 million. There are also the costs of investing in new and modernized border checkpoints. Marek Bienkowski, in charge of the Polish border guards, announced the building of fifteen new border crossings on the eastern frontier by 2001, along with an increase of the number of border guards and the installation, aided by EU PHARE money, of electronic passport-reading equipment at border checkpoints. Immediately after the opening of the border in 1989, the Czech Republic started a programme of renovating and enlarging border crossings along the

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frontier with Germany, which has led to Rozvadov/Waidhaus now functioning as a motorway crossing. Using European PHARE money, Hungary has undertaken to open three new border crossings on its Romanian border, two on its Ukrainian border, one on the Slovene border, as well as upgrading Rajika on the Slovak border as a motorway crossing Furthermore, there are problems of policing, because Poland’s eastern neighbours cannot, or will not, cooperate. ‘Chaos and corruption’21 was the verdict of the respectable Süddeutsche Zeitung, summing up the situation at the frontiers between Poland and Kaliningrad in the north, as well as Lithuania, Belarus and the Ukraine, not necessarily at all control points, but concerning the large ‘green border’ – 407 kilometres with Belarus, 526 kilometres with the Ukraine. In Belarus, as during the Soviet era, the army still exercises a measure of control from the east, but the Ukrainian side is totally deficient in their policing of the border. When Ukrainian frontier guards ceased to receive their salaries in 1997, they were wont to recoup the money by assisting illegal migrants to cross the frontier. But corruption is supposed to be widespread on both sides of the Polish–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 controlling the borders (during the 1990s, more than 80,000 ‘illegals’ were arrested at the Polish–Ukrainian border alone),23 but avoiding total closure towards the east: ‘Poland, too, does not want barriers at its eastern frontiers,’ Poland’s Foreign Secretary, Bronislaw Geremek, stressed on a visit to Bonn in November 1997.24 And the Minister for Europe, Ryszard Czarnecki, used the image of a tightly controlled border that could, at the same time, function as a bridge to the large markets of Russia, Belarus and the Ukraine. Stabilizing the states that have emerged from the rubble of the Soviet Union, he stated, must be in both Poland’s and the West’s interest.25 As the less than satisfactory situation at the Polish–Ukranian border continues, and as the Ukraine seems far from becoming a candidate for EU accession, Poland seems increasingly inclined unilaterally to harden the frontier.26 The figures of illegals arrested at the 810-kilometre-long Czech–German border 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 credit the new international frontier between the Czech Republic and Slovakia (since the beginning of 1993) for effecting that fall in numbers, the new border acting as a filter for the Czech–German frontier.27 But there seems to be reluctance on both sides of that new frontier to introduce rigorous measures (hardly anybody in the area can envisage the Czech–Slovak border as a future external frontier of the EU),28 and since 1996 the numbers have risen again so that the Department of Migration in Prague now considers the effects of the drastic tightening of the German asylum laws in 1993 as the main reason for the temporary decline of arrests. In 1997, there were 29,339 arrests, in 1998 the figure reached nearly 40,000. Among them are illegal migrants from further east and from Turkey, but the main group, since the beginning of the Kosovo crisis, have been ethnic

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Albanians from Kosovo using, according to Czech police, a ‘human-smuggling pipeline running through the former Czechoslovakia’.29 Kosovo Albanians and other refugees from former Yugoslavia are, in most cases, bound for Germany, where ‘colonies’ of their compatriots already exist: 72.2 per cent of the illegal migrants have Germany as their destination – 60 per cent of them cross into Saxony. 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 this border.30 To get a better perspective on these figures, they ought to be seen against a backdrop of no less than 210 million legal crossings of the Czech frontiers in 1997. As has already been mentioned, if Hungary joins the European Union (and Schengen, which has been integrated into the acquis communautaire in the 1997 Amsterdam Treaty on European Union), this could ‘cut off ’ the sizeable Hungarian minorities in Slovakia and Romania. And while Slovakia, with its new government after Meciar, might rejoin the ‘fast-track route’ to EU membership,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 also in a difficult position. Like the other candidates for EU membership, it is under particular pressure to strengthen its border controls and bring them in line with Schengen procedures as part of the negotiation for membership process, but this could cause difficulties if it is not synchronized with Latvia and Lithuania. Moreover, Estonia is on extremely bad terms with Russia, mainly, the Russians argue, because of the precarious status of the Russian third of the Estonian population being discriminated against in terms of language, minority and citizenship rights, a point supported by the concern shown by the EU and the Council of Europe. Estonians counter that Russia has unilaterally fortified the border (against international usage, where border demarcations are set in consultation with neighbours), a border formerly purely administrative, between two Soviet republics, and resulting from an imperial transfer of territory after World War II, when Stalin forced a large strip of Eastern Estonia to be ceded to Russia. 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 EU conditions for accession, i.e. no claims to foreign territory, but still Russia refuses to sign the negotiated settlement – which, in turn, is seen by Estonians as a Russian threat of keeping all options open.) It is a highly ‘unnatural’ and martial border (leading in one case straight through the middle of an Estonian house), characterized by watchtowers, barbed wire and a no-man’s-land – for some commentators most reminiscent of the Iron Curtain. The situation is further exacerbated by the fact that, since 1996, the Russian border region of Pskov has been represented by Governor Yevgenii Mikhailov (re-elected in November 2000), an ultra-nationalist of Zhirinovsky’s Liberal Democratic Party, which calls for the restoration of the Soviet-era borders. Russia is still determined to block the Baltic states’ desire to become 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 border treaty with Russia. Still, manoeuvres by the Russian army close to the Belarus–Lithuanian border in the autumn of 2000 were viewed, particularly against the debates about the status of Kaliningrad, with mixed feelings in all Baltic states.32 All the Baltic states are regarded as highly permeable transit countries for illegal migrants. But in view of EU enlargement, potential legal labour migration within an enlarged EU has also caused concern, particularly among Conservative politicians in Germany, who see huge problems if EU enlargement towards the East does not go hand in hand with very long transition periods before the introduction of free movement of people. They argue that an additional 340,000 to 680,000 work migrants annually would put problematic pressure on the ailing labour markets of Western Europe. The Christian Democrats have therefore demanded that freedom of movement can only become operational by 2015 at the earliest.33 The Bavarian government orchestrated these fears by issuing a statement that they expected another two million ethnic Germans from the former Soviet Union to exercise their right to come to Germany.34 The debate about the changes of citizenship laws proposed by the German ‘red–green’ government and particularly the proposal of dual citizenship provoked highly speculative figures of a potentially massive influx of relatives of foreigners with dual citizenship in Germany, especially from Turkey.35 Politicians of the Bavarian CSU conjured up a figure of up to 600,000 additional immigrants. Yet, as Klaus Barwig showed, this was a ‘horror scenario’ without any foundation. He calculated a realistic number as being closer to 4,000!36 But this is not just a phenomenon of the xenophobic German right. People in the Austrian borderlands, for instance, seem even more reluctant to welcome Hungary as a new EU neighbour: Many Austrians actively oppose it, especially those living in border regions such as Burgenland, in the belief that free labour migration will endanger their jobs and an increased flow of refugees put pressure on already stretched Austrian capacity to receive the 500,000 or so people they have absorbed in recent years.37 Yet all these figures, and the fears based on them, seem to ignore the fact that, in Germany for instance, the data for 1997 indicate that more foreigners left the country than entered it: 615,000 new arrivals were outnumbered by 637,000 who left.38 They also seem to ignore that the ‘wave’ of labour migration predicted when Spain and Portugal joined did not materialize.39 Migration, not always distinguishing between legal and illegal, has thus become a dominant theme in public debate across Europe. The past few years have seen a barrage of alarmist news about millions of people waiting to cross the frontiers of Europe, some legally, most of them illegally. In August 1998, it was 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 Union from the East and from the South.40 Figures were given: 2.5 to 3 million potential migrants in Russia, Belarus and the Ukraine, intending to emigrate via the Baltic states to Scandinavia; in Kiev alone, 200,000 migrants were reported to be waiting for human traffickers to smuggle them to Western Europe; 500,000 ready to go in Poland; in Turkey, according to the same sources, there are presently up to one million illegal residents whose ultimate aim is reaching the West. A recent survey, published in January 1999 and conducted in all the major sender countries by the European Observatory for Migrations, contradicts these prognostications, suggesting that the propensity to emigrate is high, but that the potential immigrants want to go to the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand rather than to Germany, France, let alone the UK. The International Organization for Migration (IOM) comes to a similar conclusion in an extensive study presented at their headquarters in Geneva: it is improbable, the study argues, that Western Europe will be flooded by mass immigration. What has to be reckoned with is that many from Eastern Europe will seek temporary employment 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 no longer as effective as they once were. This may be changing as populations become more accustomed to the absence of frontier controls at the internal frontiers. This absence is widely welcomed in frontier regions. In general, the French – normally very sensitive to these matters – seem to have adopted a reasonably relaxed attitude about open frontiers, and those living in the frontier regions seem very pleased with the new situation. Law enforcement agencies seem to have adapted to the new situation without undue difficulty. The nature of frontiers is perceived as changing. New information technology for surveillance and identity control is widely seen as a key factor in securing efficient frontier controls. A final paradox is that policing internal as well as external frontiers has also entailed the creation of border zones – sometimes referred to as a return of the limes42 – where random checks are allowed.43 In April 1997, the Austrian Secretary of State in the Ministry of the Interior revealed that, with the implementation of Schengen in October 1997, a 30-kilometre-wide ‘security veil’ would be installed along the German border, with a significantly increased police presence, and that German police could pursue criminals unlimited by space and time in Austria.44 Dr Horst Eisel, Assistant Director for Frontiers at the German Ministry of Internal Affairs, has put it thus: The spatial approach clearly ought to take precedence over the purely linear approach to geographic boundaries. The latter is no longer a match for today’s challenges, because individual and collective security begins beyond our 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 former Soviet bloc having a stranglehold in the West on prostitution, racketeering and the trade in stolen cars. Drugs are also pouring in from the east, with Poland now the third largest producer of amphetamines.46 Indeed, the real existing dangers of cross-border crime must not be underestimated. Leslie Holmes has argued that, ‘at their most extreme, substantial rises in the proportion of illegality in international economic activity can destabilise national economies.’47 The rise in internal and cross-border crime in Eastern Europe, and particularly in the countries of the former Soviet Union, can be pinned down to the difficult transitional situation in these countries: postcommunist states attempting, in Claus Offe’s term, a ‘triple transition’: the rapid and simultaneous transformation of their political systems, their economic systems and their boundaries and identities.48 This ‘triple transition’ is grafted upon a pre-1989 experience under communism, where corruption and dodging the state were part of the political culture, ‘creating an environment of institutionalised illegality’.49 Economic decline had long laid the foundations of a flourishing shadow economy, before the fraught transformation into market economies provided new opportunities for criminals to exploit deficiencies in inadequately regulated markets that could not match demand and supply. Yet this is not just an internal problem of the postcommunist countries. There seems to be widespread interaction between organized criminals in post-communist states and established criminal structures in the West, as ‘all sorts of crime can cross borders.’50 •

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Street prostitution has been visibly increasing on the German–Polish and German–Czech borders, as well as on the Austro-Czech and Austro-Slovak borders.51 Prague is reported to have become a centre for money laundering for the Chechnya mafia, operating from there in conjunction with dubious Liechtenstein firms.52 Large-scale money laundering, one of the chief operations 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 the Federal Police Office in Berne, affected by organized money laundering. More than 150 persons and 90 firms resident in Switzerland are suspected to have dealings with the Russian mafia.53 A report of Confcommercio, an umbrella organization of Italian tourism, catering and trade organizations, claimed that up to one-fifth of the banks, restaurants and bars, estate agencies, gold and antiques businesses, travel agencies and shops in Italy were in the hand of organized criminals: 15 per cent of all hotels, 24 per cent of all

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building sites, 25 per cent of financial services and 70 per cent of the cement 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 ‘drug tourism’ 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 and drug-related crime, based foremost on the heavy price difference between the two cities. The situation is worsened by ‘insider views’ that the police on the Slovak side are corrupt, so that little can be done against the ‘avalanche of drugs’ coming through Bratislava.55 The classic ‘Balkan route’ from Turkey through Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Austria has, partly as a reaction to the Yugoslav wars, split into two: a southern route via Greece and Italy; and a new northern route via Ukraine and Poland.56 One of the most frequent features is passport forgery. In 1997 alone, German border police confiscated 1,700 false passports at the Polish border, mostly involving Polish citizens. But the real problems are passports that are stolen, issued under false names by the authorities or sold to potential illegal migrants. These are hard to detect at the routine controls, even when fed through 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 the German frontiers can hardly contain their amazement at what is being smuggled – quantities of up to 1,000 rounds of ammunition, anti-tank weapons and hand grenades, often in small cars, adding to the danger of explosions in case of an accident.58 The organized human trafficking syndicates, often operating from places like Moscow or Minsk, but also from Georgia, Armenia and Asian countries, use the infrastructure of Red Army barracks and former Intourist agencies and the latest in navigation technology.59 It is estimated that human trafficking earns these organized, criminal cartels up to $5 billion a year.60 The most ‘popular’ routes for human trafficking, according to the Bundesgrenzschutz, are the ‘eastern channel’ (Almaty, Moscow, St Petersburg, Minsk, Vilnius) and the ‘Balkan channel’ (Romania, Hungary, Moldova, Russia, Ukraine, Poland).61 The Süddeutsche Zeitung noted the connection between the drastic tightening of the German asylum laws in 1993 and the increase of illegal migration. As the door was closed in the face of asylum, refugees have been driven into the arms of unscrupulous human smuggling organizations, paying up to £5,000 per head for their services.62 In January 1999, a major trial began in Amberg, Bavaria, involving seven Vietnamese and one German 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 German Project 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 a connection between illegal migration and organized crime, it is human trafficking. And human trafficking is a consequence not of open borders, but of closed borders. By tightening border control, would-be refugees are driven into the arms of organized human smugglers. Undoubtedly, the discourse of migration control has become intricately linked with the discourses on crime and security in what Jef Huysmans and Didier Bigo have both called a process of ‘securitization’.65 Security has become a much broader concept, compared with the focus on military concerns that dominated the discourse until the changes of 1989/90, encompassing new risks and threats to society, the economy and the polity itself.66 This constitution of a security continuum, including the control of frontiers and immigration among police activities in the fight against crime, is, Bigo argues, ‘not a natural response to the changes in criminality’, but rather a proactive mixing of crime and immigration issues.67 Barry Buzan has coined the term ‘societal security’, describing the shift of security concerns from protection of the state to protection against threats, or perceived threats, against society and identity, or the identity and security of groups within a society.68 In the notorious strategy paper concerning the Geneva Convention, which the Austrian government formulated during Austria’s presidency of the EU (and which was withdrawn after paramount criticism), the whole refugee problematic was categorized under ‘illegal migration’, and migration policies were explicitly with linked policies against organized crime.69 Yet the Dublin Convention and the Schengen agreements had already equated the threat of migration with the fight against drugs, acts of terrorism and international, cross-border and organized crime. Refining border controls as a means of exclusion can be seen as a response to the threat to societal security. Yet reinforced borders, a fortress mentality, although being often invoked when Schengen is criticized, are no longer really conceivable as practical solutions for internal security needs. It is undeniable that the security of individuals has become deterritorialized.70 Internal security now implies 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, on the 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 and cross-border crime, particularly in the borderlands press, connecting crime and migration, ‘civic guards’ were formed on the German side of the German–Polish border in 1998, subverting the authority of the state and its law enforcement agencies. This, despite the fact that the statistics show no higher rate of criminality in the border region than in the rest of the country.72 A particularly sad chapter are the casualties at the border, particularly refugees drowning in the Oder and Neisse rivers, led by their smugglers to remote river banks and dangerous currents because these are the least policed spots 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 had covered thousands of miles.73 There have been two predominant modes of reaction to the challenges of cross-border crime: increased security protection at borders (yet not necessarily restricted to the actual borderline) and increased international cross-border cooperation. The former, ‘law and order’, German Minister of the Interior, Manfred Kanther, called the borderlands to the east of Germany a ‘crime zone’.74 He pointed out the increase in cross-border crime in general (Russian mafia, cigarettes and car smuggling, drug trafficking, illegal weapons trade, fraud and money laundering, and smuggling of human beings), but with an emphasis on securing the borders against criminals, human trafficking and illegal immigration.75 In an attempt to combat the rise in cross-border criminality, police forces are increasing their cooperation across frontiers. Cooperation between border police at the German–Polish and the German–Czech borders is already highly developed, with permanent exchange of notes, common training and daily communication.76 At the Austro-Slovak and Austro-Hungarian frontiers, this is much less the case. In 1996, the European Commission started to sponsor seminars and a placement scheme for EU border police, with the intention to create an institutionalised network of exchange and cooperation.77 Seminars on detection of fraudulent documents are being held, and the collaboration between, for instance, car rental firms and police organizations in the East and Central European states are being intensified, which has already led to arrests and disruption of routes.78 This is not only happening in an internal European context. The US State Department has invested more than $8 million in police training in Hungary. In 1995, the International Law Enforcement Academy (ILEA) was founded in Budapest, offering eight-week courses for law enforcement agents from Hungary and other East Central European states, concentrating on combating terrorism, drug-related crime and economic criminality. This seems to go hand in hand with a much-needed improvement the Hungarian government provides for its underpaid – and allegedly corrupt – police force, and efforts to establish closer cooperation between the secret services in the East and in the West.79 There are signs of success. Police cooperation along the so-called ‘Balkan route’ resulted in the biggest-ever seizure of heroin in 1998, 8,112 kilograms, up 17.3 per cent compared with 1997.80 Liaison officers from Germany have been sent 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 a figure of 1,482 in 1997.81 Seizure of hard drugs was up 3 per cent from 1997 to 1998, with seizures of Ecstasy pills up 35 per cent, while the volume of intercepted hashish and marijuana doubled.82 How big the threat of organized cross-border crime really is is ‘a matter of judgement rather than fact’.83 It is noteworthy, though, that a survey of crime statistics 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 have remained considerably below those of many leading Western states.’84 Sometimes one cannot but feel that the campaign against organized crime has had to serve as a surrogate for the Cold War enemy which had vanished after the fall of the Wall: ‘The defeat of communism has created a “threat vacuum” that has given rise to a search for new enemies.’85 The police, Peter Cullen has argued, ‘have an obvious institutional interest in painting the picture blacker than the reality’.86 The discourse on organized and cross-border crime has undoubtedly been instrumentalized by law enforcement authorities ‘to endorse the “modernization” and “professionalization” of the German police force and to legitimize the extension of its arsenal of legal investigative tools to include, 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 border police than at any other border of Europe. Following German unification, the manpower of the Bundesgrenzschutz (BGS) was nearly doubled between 1989 and 1997, from 24,982 to 40,100 border guards; the budget of the BGS rose in the same period from £0.43 billion to £0.96 billion. Surveillance technique is state of the art, and highly expensive. One thermo-nightsight spyglass costs c.£70,000.88 All this in order to make the net tighter. Yet even hardliners like Kanther had to admit that there are limits to control. A democratic country, eschewing walls and barbed wire, would, he conceded, not be able to have a hermetically closed frontier.89 In the long run, intensified police and security cooperation seems far more promising than concentrating on border security, with its drawbacks in cross-border communication and cooperation.

Cross-border cooperation Cross-border regionalism has flourished over the past two decades, beginning in the heartlands along the western border of Germany, and taking a new step in the 1990s, when – in response to the opening of the Iron Curtain – Euroregions were set up from the Finno-Russian border down to Austria, Slovakia, Hungary and Slovenia.90 Peripheral borderlands are one of the legacies of the nation-state, and particularly along the East–West divide (see the German ‘Zonenrandgebiet’). It is because of the memory of that fact that the new rhetoric of the lasting importance of the nation-state is viewed with scepticism in the borderlands of Europe. Regionalism, and in particular cross-border regionalism, has been seen as a challenge to traditional notions of state sovereignty,91 but also as a tool to develop formerly peripheral regions. Wherever possible, Euroregions are based on common cultural and historical experience, but primarily they are a pragmatic economic 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 translation of practical concerns from West to East is well underway. The frequently expressed need for cross-border cooperation (environment, infrastructure, tourism, security) matches certain regional reform concepts, devolving planning authority and decision-making processes to the regions. The regional context may also be more conducive to solving problems of national minorities and even provide regional solutions for international problems. Regionalization and ‘integrated borderlands’,93 rather than a nineteenth-century model of the nation-state, could offer a more tranquil future for non-homogeneous states with large ethnic minorities within their borders. Cross-border regionalism seemed to develop, for instance, in the German–Czech borderlands despite the fraught negotiations between Germany and the Czech Republic about coming to a final agreement about the property of, and compensation for, the Sudeten Germans. The accord of January 1997 took nearly a year (and changes in government on both sides) to be fully implemented, but it is generally seen as opening up new opportunities for intensified cross-border cooperation.94 There are, however, reasons for being cautious about a simple transfer of Western models to the Eastern borderlands. Different centre–periphery relations ought to be considered. Jutta Seidel of the State Chancellery of the Free State of Saxony, speaking about her experience in organizing transfrontier cooperation between Saxony and Poland, and Saxony and the Czech Republic, emphasized the initial difficulties that had to be overcome and that resulted from administrative centralization in the Czech and Polish Republics. According to Seidel, it took years to create trust and willingness in Warsaw and Prague to allow their western border regions a degree of planning autonomy that would allow them to negotiate directly with their German counterparts.95 The potential of conflict between centre and periphery may be exacerbated by the major differences between the situations in the West and the East. While in the West, especially along the German frontier, states with roughly similar wage levels and costs of living started collaborating across their borders after World War II, the eastern frontier of the European Union became, under the conditions of the Cold War, a profound economic frontier.96 If problems of extreme economic inequality have caused anxieties among the countries bordering the EU to the east about economic and political subordination,97 are other regions within Poland, the Czech Republic and other Central and Eastern European countries not confronted by a similar question: why should the regions bordering on the EU be privileged by cross-border incentives? In other words, is the newly emerging, perhaps common, identity of the transfrontier regions a forerunner for integrating into the EU the whole of the states concerned, or does it reinforce the considerable disparities between East and West, town and country, within the applicant states? Does it cause resentment against these

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apparently privileged regions and, by challenging state centralism, cause a threat to the integrity of the state itself ?98 On aggregate, cross-border cooperation is undoubtedly deemed to be a positive force,99 enhancing communication and collaboration, and thus adding to stability and, by implication, to control. Here, in the borderlands, any functional change of frontiers is felt immediately, whether it has been the implementation of Schengen or whether it will be the opening of borders as a consequence of EU accession. Institutionalized cross-border cooperation is a laboratory for European concepts to deal with these questions.100 The implementation of Schengen and the accession process of Central European states to the European Union, highlighted by the establishment of these Euroregions, which, in order to function effectively, require a high permeability of borders – the border as bridge, as communicative channel rather than barrier – 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 security discourse about EU enlargement and the future of the EU’s external frontier regime. Some tentative conclusions can be drawn for future policies concerning ‘the new frontier’ in the East: •

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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, in the long run, counter-productive to stability and prosperity in the macroregion, 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 institutionbuilding processes of civil society in the post-communist countries should therefore have priority as their present deficiencies, in combination with the gap in prosperity between East and West, are the main sources of organized crime structures. A balance needs to be struck between addressing the need for security and the role border controls play, on the one hand, and the need for open frontiers to allow for the economic development across those borders, on the other. Security at and beyond borders can best be guaranteed through cooperation. Closed borders are not an option. Security cooperation can best be achieved 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 the internal frontiers of the EU, where initial fears have receded. There will have to be transition periods before the present external frontier can become a fully integrated internal EU frontier.

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Organized crime and issues of migration should be clearly separated, with the exception of illegal trafficking (where the smuggler, not the smuggled, is the criminal). Human trafficking is a consequence of frontier restrictions, rather than of open borders. The higher the obstacles for border crossings, the greater the need 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 different economic zones at the Estonian–Russian border.103 Not only do people on both sides of this border live in different actual time zones, they – and they share this experience 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 1999 marked a step in the direction of dealing with migration and border controls less in terms of threats than in terms of regulated immigration, emphasizing individual rights and cross-border cooperation. Freedoms can be abused. This abuse needs to be kept as minimal as possible. But combating it must not itself become a threat to those freedoms. A free society, Didier Bigo reminds us, is one with open frontiers and plural identities. This implies both that behaviour is adaptable and that there must be acceptance of illegality at the margins. Whether European politicians accept it or not, a free society now implies tolerance of international phenomena decoupled from territory, characterised by transnational networks and the penetration of national territories.104 Looking at the present and future eastern frontiers of the EU, one might conclude with Michel Foucher’s notion of borders being ‘time inscribed into space or, more appropriately, time written in territories’.105 Borders, in other words, are temporary, functional arrangements, and they might function in pragmatic, if contradictory, attempts at reconciling the demands of security and of economic and civic development. In a Central Europe that embarked on fundamental changes in 1989/90, ‘a ‘fuzzy logic’, less rational, less rigid, but allowing historical transition to take place’,106 may be a necessary condition we have to live 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 EU membership, but what about Belarus and the Ukraine, or Moldova?107 The final contours of the EU are not agreed. Their definition remains ‘a matter of politics and 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, Grenzüberschreitende und 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, Alan Sweedler, James Scott and Wolf-Dieter Eberwein, eds, Borders and Border Regions in Europe and North America (San Diego: San Diego State University Press, 1997); Raimund Krämer, Grenzen der Europäischen Union (Potsdam: Brandenburgische Landeszentrale für Politische Bildung, 1997); Gerhard Brunn and Peter SchmittEgner, 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 Zentrum für Föderalismus-Forschung, 1998); Malcolm Anderson and Eberhard Bort, eds, The Frontiers of Europe (London, Pinter, 1998); Philomena Murray and Leslie Holmes, eds, Europe: Rethinking the Boundaries (Aldershot: Ashgate,1998); Mike Mannin, ed., Pushing Back 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 Anderson with Eberhard Bort, The Frontiers of the European Union (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001). Myron Weiner, The Global Migration Crisis: Challenges to States and to Human Rights (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), p. 2. Patrick Fitzgerald, ‘Repelling Borders’, New Statesman & Society (17 February 1995). Simultaneously, and more quickly, NATO enlargement took place. On 1 April 1999, Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary joined the alliance. Yet further eastern enlargement 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). See Krämer, Grenzen der Europäischen Union, pp. 68–88. See also Didier Bigo (chapter 11) in this volume. As in the case of the Ukraine, which in the late 1990s failed to pay their frontier guards’ wages. See Jakub Boratynski and Grzegorz Gromadzki, The Half-Open Door: The Eastern Border of the Enlarged European Union (Warsaw: Batory Foundation, 2001). Hans-Ludwig Zachert, ‘Die Entwicklung der Organisierten Kriminalität in Deutschland’, Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, 23 (1995), p. 13. Paul Gillespie uses that figure for Romania (‘Hungary Presses Reluctant EU for Accession Date’, The Irish Times, 16 January 1999); Romanian sources, citing the census of 1992, speak of 1.62 million Hungarians living in Romania. See Jürgen Nowak, Europas Krisenherde (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1994), p. 133, who also gives 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 ‘numbering some 2m’: Migrants, Minorities and Security in Europe: Conflict Studies (London: Research Institute for the Study of Conflict and Terrorism, 1992), p. 8; see also George Schoepflin, ‘Hungary and its Neighbours’, Chaillot Paper, No.7, Paris, Institute for Security Studies of WEU (May 1993), p. 37; and Pál Dunay, ‘Hungarian–Romanian Relations: A Changed Paradigm?’, Chaillot Papers, No. 26 (Paris: Institute for Security Studies of WEU, June 1997), p. 6 – both tending towards the unofficial two million figure. See also Judy Batt, ‘The Politics of Minority Rights in Post-Communist Europe: 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. Legal and institutional aspects of the European border regime are discussed in more detail in Malcolm Anderson’s contribution (chapter 12). See also Jörg Monar,

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14

15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

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Enlargement-Related Diversity in EU Justice and Home Affairs: Challenges, Dimensions and Management Instruments (The Hague: Scientific Council for Government Policy, 2000). Evidence to the House of Lords, Select Committee on European Communities SubCommittee F (9 January 1999). See Anne Schmidl-Wrulich, ‘Die von der Österreichischen Präsidentschaft erzielten Ergebnisse’, in Monica den Boer, ed., Schengen’s Final Days (Maastricht: European Institute for Public Administration, 1998), pp. 67–75. Greece started to participate in the Schengen procedures on 1 December 1997. See ‘Personenkontrollen bei Griechenland-Reisen bleiben’, Süddeutsche Zeitung (17 December 1998). Melita Richter-Malabotta, ‘Some Aspects of Regional and Transfrontier Cooperation in a Changing Europe’, in Malcolm Anderson and Eberhard Bort, eds, Schengen and the Southern Frontier of the European Union (Edinburgh: ISSI, 1998), pp. 41–72; especially pp. 65–7. See Marko Gasperlin, ‘Schengen Needs Modification: A Slovenian Perspective’, in Malcolm Anderson and Eberhard Bort, eds, Schengen and EU Enlargement: Security and Cooperation at the Eastern Frontier of the European Union (Edinburgh: ISSI, 1997), pp. 102–3. A point emphasized by Jacek Sarjusz-Wolski in a lecture for the Europa Institute in Edinburgh (30 April 1998). Michael Frank, ‘Da gerät Europa an seine Grenzen’, Süddeutsche Zeitung (5 January 1999). Die Welt, 17 February 1998. See Statewatch (November/December 1997), p. 9. Ian Traynor, ‘Fortress Europe Shuts Window to the East’, The Guardian (9 February 1998). Ibid. ‘Deutsch–polnische Hausaufgaben’, Süddeutsche Zeitung (20 August 1998). See Thomas Urban, ‘Nach Westen isoliert’, Süddeutsche Zeitung (18 September 1998). 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 border incidents are counted (i.e. invalid passports, incomplete personal identity papers, etc.), which reduces the figure of migrants arrested for illegally attempting to cross the border to 30,000–40,000. Quoted in ‘Kohl sagt Polen Unterstützung zu’, Süddeutsche Zeitung (20 November 1997). ‘Deutsche profitieren von Polens Beitritt’, Süddeutsche Zeitung (9 April 1998). See Klaus Bachmann, ‘Rauer Wind aus Westen: In Polen wächst die Ernüchterung über die Ukraine’, Frankfurter Rundschau (15 September 2000). 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. See Peter Brod, ‘Ideal für illegalen Transit’, Süddeutsche Zeitung (31 October 1998). Kate Connolly, ‘Hundreds Held in Border Logjam’, The Guardian (9 October 1998). Figures supplied by Dr Milos Mrkvica, interviewed by Eberhard Bort, Prague (24 September 1998). See also Martina Fietz, ‘Warum Tschechien in seine Grenzen investieren muß?’, Die Welt (20 October 1998). Paul Gillespie, ‘Not Much Success as Czechs Find Fruits of Democracy Sour’, The Irish Times (9 January 1999). Thomas Urban, ‘Durchmarsch nach Königsberg’, Süddeutsche Zeitung (12 September 2000). Martin S. Lambeck, ‘Union sieht Gefahren bei Ost-Erweiterung’, Die Welt (8 July 1998).

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34 Peter Schmitt, ‘Noch zwei Millionen “Russlanddeutsche” ’, Süddeutsche Zeitung (9 January 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 citizenship to every child born in Germany of foreign parents. Yet, by their twenty-third birthday, these holders of dual citizenship will have to give up their parental citizenship, 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 Eastern Europe: International and Transnational Factors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 193. 48 Claus Offe, ‘Capitalism by Design? Democratic Theory Facing the Triple Transition in Eastern Europe’, Social Research, 58:2 (1996), pp. 3–13. 49 Mark Galeotti, Cross-Border Crime and the Former Soviet Union (Boundary & Territory Briefing), 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, ‘Spezialisten für 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 European Integration: The Dynamics of Inclusion and Exclusion (London: Pinter, 1995). See also Jef Huysmans, ‘The European Union and the Securitization of Migration’, Journal of Common 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 PostCold 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 and Practice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995); see also Jim Sheptycki, ‘Transnational Policing and the Makings of a Postmodern State’, British Journal of Criminology, 35:4 (1995), pp. 613–35, and ‘Law Enforcement, Justice and Democracy in the Transnational Arena: Reflections on the War on Drugs’, International Journal of the Sociology 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 (12 June 1997); and Markus Lesch, ‘Die Eltern ließen ihr totes Kind zurück’, Die Welt (14 January 1998). 74 Peter Scherer, ‘Kanther verstärkt Sicherung der Ostgrenzen’, Die Welt (8 May 1996). The conservative Welt coined the phrase ‘kriminalgeographisch hochsensibel’ for the external frontier of Saxony (‘Kanther kündigt schärfere Kontrollen an’, Die Welt, 19 September 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,

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Eberhard Bort ‘Organisierte Kriminalität: Vom Nutzen eines unklaren Begriffs’, Demokratie und Recht, 20 (1992), pp. 374–95. Mai, ‘Die Hilfssheriffs’. Scherer, ‘Kanther verstärkt Sicherung der Ostgrenzen’. See Eberhard Bort, ‘Mitteleuropa: The Difficult Frontier’, in Anderson and Bort, eds, The Frontiers of Europe, pp. 91–108. Eberhard Bort, ‘Crossing the EU Frontier: Eastern Enlargement of the EU, CrossBorder Regionalism and State Sovereignty’, Interregiones 6 (1997), pp. 20–31. Wolfgang Jung, ‘Grenzverkehr’, Süddeutsche Zeitung (11 November 1998); see also Neuss et al., eds, Grenzübergreifende Kooperation im Östlichen Mitteleuropa. 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. Peter Schmitt, ‘Neue Chancen für “Euregio Egrensis” ’, Süddeutsche Zeitung (27 January 1997). Jutta Seidel, in conversation with Malcolm Anderson and Eberhard Bort, Edinburgh (13 May 1996). See Josef Langer, ‘The Meanings of the Border in Central Europe’, in Éger and Langer, eds, Border, Region and Ethnicity in Central Europe, pp. 49–67; see also Krämer, Grenzen der Europäischen Union, particularly pp. 68–88. Anderson, Frontiers, p. 180. See Michael Dauderstaedt, ‘Ostmitteleuropas Demokratien im Spannungsfeld von Transformation und Integration’, Integration, 4 (October 1996), pp. 208–23. Particularly in an external and comparative perspective, as in Anthony Asiwaju, ‘Public Policy for Overcoming Marginalization: Borderlands in Africa, North America 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. See Jung, ‘Grenzverkehr’; see also Eberhard Bort, ‘Boundaries and Identities: CrossBorder Cooperation and the Eastern Frontier of the European Union’, in Nada Svob-Dokic, ed., The Cultural Identity of Central Europe (Zagreb: Culturelink/Institute for International Relations, 1997), pp. 133–44. Malcolm Anderson, ‘Transfrontier Cooperation: History and Theory’, in Brunn and Schmitt-Egner, eds, Grenzüberschreitende Zusammenarbeit in Europa, pp. 78–97. Didier Bigo, ‘Frontiers and Security in the European Union: The Illusion of Migration Control’, in Anderson and Bort, eds, The Frontiers of Europe, pp. 148–64. ‘Good fences’, The Economist (19 December 1998). Bigo, ‘Frontiers and Security in the European Union’, p. 161. Foucher, ‘The Geopolitics of European Frontiers’, p. 249. Michel Foucher, ‘Europe and its Long-Lasting Variable Geography’, in Bort and Keat, eds, The Boundaries of Understanding, pp. 163–9 (at p. 169). See Hans-Hagen Bremer, ‘Paris und Berlin begrenzen EU: Gemeinsame Studie lässt Russland und Ukraine aussen vor’, Frankfurter Rundschau (4 July 2000). William Wallace, The Transformation of Western Europe (London: Pinter, 1991), p. 8.

11 Border regimes, police cooperation and security in an enlarged European Union Didier Bigo

Policing by network, policing by remote control: these are the new forms of control and surveillance in European societies. They presuppose numerous changes: in targets, technology, control points and conceptions of security. These changes are exported towards the Central and East European Countries (CEECs), but often without a clear understanding of the norms and interests that are at stake. The official discussions give rise to myths concerning the security deficit, a global mafia threat, and efficiency of the external border controls through the Schengen Information System. They bring with them the belief in an homogeneous internal area without border checks and a strong external border, even though the actual practices of policing show the contrary. External border controls are weak but a lot of internal controls continue to exist, even if they are privatized or de-localized. Controls have also already been launched in the countries on the periphery of the European Union by the strategy of policing by network and surveillance at a distance. Before we can understand the effects on the CEECs of these new forms of policing it is necessary to describe them and their effects on the EU countries. In a nutshell, the activities of police forces, whether they are initiated by home affairs or justice departments, have been extended along two lines. First, the extension of police activities reaches beyond national borders, namely by the establishment of interconnections between the different countries. Second, new forms of control have considerably extended the sphere of police activity beyond crime control. The term ‘internal security’ or ‘internal affairs’ in use throughout Europe is an indicator of this double extension, which is both geographical (through increased European cooperation) and structural (in the light of the new tasks assigned to the different security agencies). The geographical extension and the consequent redefinition of spheres of competence have been much discussed, especially the causal link between economic globalization, the increase in crime and the need to create a European police authority. Europe is presented alternatively as a ‘sieve’ or as a ‘fortress’ by those wishing to stress either the need to strengthen controls or the dangers to individual liberties brought about by strengthening of controls. However, the debate concerning fortress Europe has little point given that there can be no control of land borders in Europe without changing the whole economic and political

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system.1 Thus, the practical implications of the theoretical transfer of internal border controls to the external borders of Europe have not been correctly assessed. Preoccupation with geographical extension has meant that there has been little discussion about the essential problem, which is the development of police activities in relation to the control of transnational flows of people and the security aspects of immigration and even human rights. The label ‘internal security’ at the EU level has, however, created a new definition of police activities in all the different countries. It has carved out, through the numerous police activities of each European country with their strong individual differences, a common basis for action in the fields of terrorism, drug trafficking and organized crime, which excludes some of the specificities of each country, but adds the common task of border surveillance and immigration controls. Within the European Community, legislation and the political debates concerning internal security have resulted in the Trevi informal agreement, the Schengen convention and Maastricht. They have created a continuum of internal affairs that include: the fight against terrorism and drug trafficking, domestic and international organized crime, and illegal immigration, as well as the surveillance of cross-border movements (migrants, asylum seekers, travellers). The latter even stretches 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- and third-pillar activities, have the effect of removing the link between asylum, migration and cross-border activities, on the one hand, and crime control, on the other, it seems that the Commission still has difficulty in creating an alternative debate to that of the ‘necessity’ of compensatory measures with regard to freedom of movement. This debate on compensatory measures and the security deficit created by the opening of the internal borders is one of the strongest myths of EU selfpresentation. It is argued that the very nature of criminal activities – or what are claimed to be such – has rapidly evolved in the last thirty years, providing the explanation for the changes within police forces. Drug trafficking, cross-border crimes, the globalization of terrorism and mafia activities are always quoted to explain the transnationalization of the police and the development of police networks at the European level. However, even if there is some truth in the idea that police forces seek to adapt constantly to what they perceive, or what is presented to them, as an objective threat (terrorism, mafia, organized crime), there are doubtless other reasons for this Europeanization of police activity. The most important of these reasons are: •

the struggle between and within various bureaucracies and services (police, customs, secret services, armed forces), and their competition for budgets and legitimacy – this obliges them to find more and more ‘European partners sharing the same vision’ concerning the nature of the threat in order to impose 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 for Europeanization, we need to understand how the process of convergence and conflicts between the different official or private agencies of any one country and those between all or any of these agencies of another country leads to networks of policing focusing on the practices of surveillance: how to check, codify, classify, 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 these populations cannot be massively expelled, to stabilize and normalize them. This is the type of knowledge that they share and exchange. It is often very technical and far removed from the rhetoric concerning rule of law in policing or democratic and community-based policing. Each agency (the different national police forces, customs officers, immigration services, the diplomatic service and even the armed forces) presents its own solutions and considers itself as the more competent. However, this extension of activity, which favours a new conception of surveillance, especially benefits the interior ministries and ministries that are responsible for police with military status or border guards, in so far as they have established, in parallel with this extension, a network of relationships between officials responsible for European police cooperation. This gives them an excellent awareness of the situation existing beyond their own borders. The result is to confer considerable expertise in foreign affairs on such ministries – one might even speak of an ‘internationalization’ of home affairs departments. This process occurs to the detriment of social ministries (health and employment) or specialized ministries such as European Affairs. As a result, the spheres of activity of internal security ministries overlap those of ministries such as Foreign or European Affairs that have international responsibilities. Thus, the former do not hesitate to take initiatives in the fields of immigration or foreign policy when the policies in question can have repercussions on internal security. They become essential counterparts of the leaders of countries generating strong emigrant flows or intervene directly when these countries are undergoing a political crisis. Conventional distinctions between domestic and foreign affairs thus lose their significance. Traditional points of reference and conventional delimitations between spheres of bureaucratic activity have been modified. With respect to the CEECs, it is important to understand the pre-eminence of interior and even defence ministers over foreign affairs ministers on these subjects. The events of 11 September in the US will accentuate this tendency to give more and more responsibility to security professionals with respect to other ministries. The question of freedom of movement is now directly addressed as a danger, a security risk. Within the security profession, the relationships between those responsible in the ministries of defence and the intelligence services and those 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 thirdpillar groups and the Commission (DG Justice of Home Affairs) to try to modify the way Europol deals with terrorism. They want criminal police to accept information from the intelligence community without questioning the origin of the sources. The framework for cooperation within police networks – which was based on mutual trust and which prevented the participation of intelligence services – is now under discussion. The pressure on NATO to take over responsibility for the struggle against terrorism reinforces the positions of the second-pillar groups. Of course, if Europol were to follow this line, its relationship with, first, Eurojust and, second, the European Court of Human Rights would also change. The judiciary would not agree to ‘intelligence sharing’ that could put people under surveillance without any evidence at the prosecution level. The fragile legitimacy of police cooperation and European police institutions could disappear if too many mistakes are made by following the ‘intelligence’ dream of a global surveillance of large groups of Muslim communities, or even of other ‘foreign’ groups coming from the Far East or Basque country. The second element comes on the other hand from the third-pillar groups in the wake of the events of 11 September. It is the desire to enlarge the definition of terrorist offences in such a way as to equate the struggle against terrorism with the upsurge of violence in transnational protest and thus to link New York with Genoa. Here, also in the name of greater efficiency, security professionals are demanding more freedom in their investigations and less judicial control. They are trying to take advantage of the situation to solve other problems, but this is likely to prove counter-productive because they will only succeed in blurring the lines between terrorism and protest. In the longer term this will have a negative effect on people’s willingness to cooperate because the unanimity on finding those responsible for the New York and Washington bombings will not be the same for searching out those blamed for nationalist struggles or open and minor forms of anti-globalization violence. This is not a temporary phenomenon. On the contrary, it is possible to determine the long-term tendencies of this extension of the functions of the police beyond national frontiers and into new forms of surveillance within our societies. These tendencies are not all linked to European construction, but result also from the evolution of the means of controlling international flows of goods, capital, information and persons as well as infighting within the security agencies. There is a progressive movement away from methods of surveillance established by nation-states, such as national identity cards and border controls of foreign citizens. In the 1970s, the security agencies began to establish interconnecting 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 collaboration. 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 illegal immigration widen the spectrum of public security to encompass different activities. Information and military activities to counter clandestine organizations from

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abroad, which use political violence against national citizens or which use the national territory as a transit zone or for the sale of drugs, usually fall into the domain of customs officers (border controls, the fight against trafficking, economic intelligence, etc.). They find themselves drawn into internal security and surveillance activities, which are increasingly delegated to private operators on a local scale. The connection is stronger when the different agencies employ the same technologies and know-how (fingerprinting, unforgeable IDs, computerized tracking of entrance, residence, accommodation and exit, setting up expert IT systems, satellite surveillance, widespread data-stocking, etc.). The price of this new method of policing, which is less concerned with territorial surveillance, has been looser and less systematic attention to individual surveillance. The result for the great majority of people has been greater freedom of circulation within Europe. However, the prior designation of groups requiring closer surveillance, such as immigrants or ethnic minorities, has introduced an element of discrimination, especially since these groups are not the only potentially criminal ones. The overlap between crime control and immigration control has modified the whole rationale and effectiveness of surveillance as well as causing a violent reaction from groups targeted for special surveillance. It involves more and more military technology and proactive surveillance from the secret services and diminishes the role of criminal or judicial police. At any time, however, the thrust of these new conceptions of surveillance can be altered in the interests of the different politicians in each country. Nothing is stabilized but there is a strong tendency to use technology as well as networking as a technique of policing. In brief, policing is now carried out using networks. There are networks of bureaucratic organisations in which customs officers, immigration offices, consulates and even private transport companies and private security companies join forces with national and local police forces. There are networks of information technology based on the creation of national or European data files on wanted 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 represent their governments. They enable information exchange as well as networks of semantics in which new doctrines and new concepts on conflict and political violence are developed. Remote policing is ever more pervasive with work done outside the national territory and with the help of technology. Security checks are no longer necessarily done at the border on a systematic and egalitarian basis, but can be carried out further downstream, within the territory, within the border zone, or even upstream, with police collaboration in the immigrants’ home country, through visa-granting systems and through readmission agreements. The analysis has been distorted for a number of reasons: the belief that ‘technology’ is by definition the solution for better control and surveillance; the belief that the ‘new threats’ are also highly technological (nuclear, bacteriological or chemical bombing as well as computer crime); and the need to compete for money on these topics. The US, the EU, NATO and Interpol have all made the same mistakes because they belong to the same field of ‘professionals of unease

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management’. They are prisoners of their vision of the revolution in military affairs and high-tech warfare and they forget to look at the real actions of clandestine organizations, which are largely more simple, but nevertheless highly destructive. It is not certain that they have learned from the attacks in the US because they propose as a solution more of the same – more technology, computer data banks and satellite surveillance. However, such solutions are at the origin of their errors. They refuse to return to what they call ‘old-style’ surveillance through human infiltration because it is human cost-consuming, and because those recruited by the intelligence services prefer to sit in front of a computer in Washington rather than spend years inside Afghanistan. They thus promote abroad their conception of ‘high-tech’ security where they can be sure that the provider of technology is always in a better position than the user of this technology. The result is asymmetrical cooperation with CEECs. From this perspective, the purpose of this chapter is to formulate a series of preliminary questions on the underlying principles governing control in a Europe that includes CEECs, and to do so by focusing the research on police cooperation. It will consider both practical methods and the probable consequences of control. This chapter is based on the sparse documentation available in this particular field and is supplemented by three months’ worth of conversations and e-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, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Estonia – I have no information from Slovenia, Cyprus or Malta). Thus it is not so much a description of current relations between the EU and the CEECs as a preliminary study of the implications for the implementation of the third pillar in a twenty-member European Union.2 My intention is to identify the perceptions of those involved in cooperation on a daily basis in order to highlight a series of problems that are often overlooked, even though they affect cooperation practices. Such problems include mutual trust (or lack of it), corruption, markets and state interests, as well as the ambiguity of objectives concerning the link made between transborder crime and population flows. The legal complexity of the issues raised by the postAmsterdam third pillar (shared Commission and Council competencies, the status of Europol, the Schengen acquis, etc.) has tended to overshadow other concerns. Indeed, the actual purpose and legitimacy of setting up police and legal collaboration is often simply forgotten in the eager discussion of the means of doing so. Consequently, enlargement is only judged according to its implications for relations between the Commission and the Council, for community and intergovernmental considerations, for the balance between the pillars and quarrels over areas of competence. However, it may also be useful to look at the substance of the cooperation, at the sociological profile of the actors involved, at the legitimacy of such an evolution. Even a rather fragmentary analysis of the relevant 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 so directly 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 cooperation with CEECs and their purpose. I will try to show the importance of direct contacts between police officers from EU countries and acceding countries and emphasize the informal nature of this cooperation. I will consider the interests of the different security industries and how the zones of influence that Western governments want to create are related to the implementation of the third pillar and are not confined to matters relating to the second pillar. I will show how institutional cooperation raises a contradiction between the objectives of crime prevention and the objectives of the prevention of immigration and mass population flows. At the heart of this contradiction lies the right to freedom of movement, on the one hand, and the devices of control related to the shifting Schengen borders, on the other. Enlargement upsets the already precarious balance between freedom of movement and security. It uncovers the extent to which we are dependent on the myths we propagate and the fears we have.3 What are we really trying to export to CEECs? Our democratic practices, our control technologies, or our fears of the Other? Is organized crime a problem in itself or is it being used also as a pretext for tighter border controls to block population flows? What kind of analysis are we carrying out in respect of organized crime, and what are the consequences of this analysis on the image of the political structures of the countries in which that crime is able to develop? To what extent can one have confidence in CEEC police forces, and to what extent is this mutual? Is there not an attempt to deflect the basic contradictions in respect 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 reconsider our own failures and limitations before exporting them as solutions.

Police cooperation with the CEECs: between trust and obligations Current methods of police cooperation There are three different types of police cooperation: operational, technical, and institutional, each of which poses its own particular problems. These three types of cooperation already exist among EU member countries. The first type dates back to the creation of national police forces. It is often bilateral and, with the creation of the Trevi group, the Palma agreement and the negotiations for the Schengen convention, it has found a new lease of life in the prevention of terrorism and drugs trafficking as well as in border control. This modern form of operational cooperation dates back to 1984–6. Since then, Europeanization has emerged as the forum for cooperation, overshadowing both transatlantic and worldwide cooperation, and weakening governments’ sovereign standpoints on national police forces. Cooperation at European level is now accepted, although some are sceptical about its actual impact.4

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Policing methods within these specialized fields have been transformed by informal contacts between European police officers, by the creation of liaison officers and later of police attachés to reinforce cooperation, and by the installation of computer systems that can be connected up only via trusted human intermediaries. There is new know-how based on exchanges of experiences, and it 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 has been more important for relations between EU police forces and their excolonies or certain Third World countries (in the 1960s for France and the United Kingdom, much more recently for Germany) than between EU states. The aim of this technical assistance and training cooperation is to extend one’s zone of influence in equipment, technology or specific know-how (French-style peacekeeping, English-style community policing, German information technology, Italian anti-Mafia methods). There is no convergence towards a unique European police model. Each country clings to its own particularity and tries to promote this abroad as being the best model. Indeed, the acceptance by a CEEC of a particular model is used as an argument for its wider implementation inside the 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 a number of principles or norms that are both non-negotiable and a condition of entry. This form of cooperation has implications for the Union itself. It presupposes uniform application within the Union that future member states would also have to accept. But internal differences undermine the credibility of the notion that there is uniform application, despite the fact that all discourse on institutional cooperation appears to suggest the contrary. Operational cooperation: the importance of mutual confidence Operational cooperation with CEECs is not a new phenomenon. Even during the Cold War, criminal investigations officers were occasionally known to cooperate, and since 1992 there have been bilateral exchanges of know-how and technology. In France this cooperation has been channelled through the SCTIP (Service de Cooperation Technique Internationale de Police – police department for international technical cooperation), which at the time created a division for cooperation with Eastern European countries. In Germany this cooperation is carried 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 relations with CEECs. In France, numerous visits and contacts led in 1994 to collaboration with the new CEEC chiefs of police (particularly with the police forces of Poland and the Czech Republic, held to be more respectable than their Romanian or Ukrainian counterparts). France has sent specialists from narcotics and organized crime divisions, making sure not to recruit from the DST (Direction

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de la Surveillance du Territoire – counter-spy intelligence service) or the RG (Renseignements Généraux – intelligence service). The French have emphasized their operational techniques in the fight against serious crime and drugs. Liaison officers 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 the languages of these countries, this cooperation is on the increase and the SCTIP has recently taken over the management of the various embassy attachés.6 The aim is to increase information exchange, to cooperate on controlled deliveries and undercover surveillance, and to demonstrate the efficiency of French crimefighting techniques. Germany is undoubtedly the European country that has invested the most money and men in operational cooperation with the CEECs, followed by France and the United Kingdom. Austria invests substantial efforts bearing in mind its size and capacity. The CEECs try to maintain links with all the different European police forces so as not to depend on one single partner. Nevertheless, there are marked zones of influence: Poland and the Czech Republic mainly work with Germany and the United Kingdom; France is more involved in Romania and is trying to get a foothold in Hungary; Austria already has strong links with Hungary, and the United States, with its FBI Academy, also plays the Hungarian ‘card’ for influence in the CEECs. This level of analysis of the member states’ strategies is not sufficient. We need to analyse the strategies of different bureaucracies. Very often, in contrast to those responsible for foreign affairs, police and security agencies continue to prefer bilateral operational and informal cooperation as this allows them to build up a relationship with their partners. As was the case in the past when there were twelve member countries, police officers in the field are increasing the number of informal contacts and have little faith in the EU’s legal norms and the political texts signed by their states. Some officers, at ground level, even fear that Europol will use these texts to claim the right to define EU interests in police cooperation, thus trying to replace bilateral cooperation by an homogeneous network under its own control. According to various interviews with police officers from both the EU and CEECs, Europol is seen as the by-product of German ambitions on the 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 police officers who do have access to these computers and because they themselves are particularly good at providing information on drugs routes, they can ask for counterpart information. Nevertheless, CEEC police forces complain of the lack of Western reciprocity and express regret at not having enough liaison officers in Western countries. Apparently Poland is the only country with liaison officers in Germany at the level of the border Länder. Elsewhere, bilateral cooperation has yet to deliver, and CEEC governments complain of the imbalance between the number of EU police officers on their territory and the number of their own representatives (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 ‘Balkan road for drug trafficking’ is due to the exchange of information with CEEC police forces. Nevertheless Europol is limited by its mandate, and the sensitivity of its data makes it loath to share information. Some governments or police chiefs do not want to commit themselves too far in their cooperation with the CEECs. Interpol, in contrast, has been quick to open its doors to CEEC police officers to exploit its comparative advantage vis-à-vis Europol. This organization uses its worldwide structure to build strong links with Russian and CEEC police forces in the hope of becoming the hub of information exchange, over and above Europol. Operational cooperation among police officers does well when they trust each other 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, as well as with respect to problems of minorities relations, the subjects tend to be more political. They often rise above the police level to involve diplomatic channels and government exchanges. Technical assistance and training: the importance of models of influence and competition between states Technical assistance is based on training sessions, contact between police (or customs or military police) academies, and radio contact in transborder operations. Politicians are involved to an extent but implementation is basically a police matter. There are two types of training sessions: those whose aim is to provide an institutional framework and promote a certain concept of the rule of law, and those whose aim is to train CEEC police forces in sophisticated techniques. The first type are often held by lawyers with an emphasis on data protection and civil liberties. The second type are carried out by police officers and provide training on the latest methods for detecting weapons, explosives and drugs or techniques to prevent money laundering. With respect to transborder operations, Germany and Austria plan to train their neighbours’ police forces and probably to set up joint police stations (or police and customs cooperation centres) on the border, as they did on their western borders. Clearly there are government strategies involved in both cases. Different Western police models (and concepts of the rule of law) compete with one another. There are economic interests at stake. There are also longer-term strategies at work.7 There is competition between German, British and French police models and they try to use these training sessions as a vector of influence. The intensification of exchanges between national or local police academies is a good indicator of how much is at stake. The desire to establish democratic norms is not necessarily at issue, but a lucrative trade in security technology and a belief in 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 The official idea is to transfer norms, practical know-how and technology in order to make the police forces of future member countries more efficient. Training sessions are organized bilaterally, at European level, or under the auspices of UN CIVPOL operations: aid for transition to democracy and various development programmes for the prevention of organized crime.9 The money to be made from internal security technology (IT equipment, remotetracking technology, airport equipment, computerized identity cards) plays no small part in cooperation strategy. Western countries and their private or quasipublic companies compete for this market, and sometimes lessons held by police officers for CEEC officers concerning rule of law are transformed into sales promotions for their own equipment. Aid is directly linked to sales of equipment produced by their companies. Moreover, immigration control and police cooperation with liaison officer access to sensitive data is linked to acceptance of their police models. The fight against organized crime is often a front for concern over migration flows, and the solution proposed for organized crime, namely tighter security on external borders, pulls the wool over the public’s eyes. Increased border security reassures the public but it is ineffective in both the prevention of crime and the prevention of transnational population flows. The political rhetoric does not reflect the strategies of the different services. Despite declarations that uniform policy is being implemented throughout the EU, police models and methods differ substantially between countries. Germany proposes a model of proactive, highly computerized policing that relies heavily on strategic analysis. This model is governed by the law and the clear-cut division of competencies between its different organizations. Unlike the American model, it makes little use of undercover techniques. France promotes a pragmatic model that focuses more on operations and men than on strategy and intensive use of IT. Its mixed model of national and local police is presented as an advantage and they emphasize its possible transferability from external security missions to internal ones. Like Germany and France, Britain is also trying to get into this market and uses the reputation of both Scotland Yard and British prevention of terrorism (IRA) to promote specific technology and organizational structures. Britain often acts in unison with the United States. There is an intense battle over the development of the organizational norms that will dictate CEEC preferences. This threatens to shatter the image of a single democratic police model in the EU and also gives the CEECs an opportunity to play one EU country off against another. To a lesser degree, other Western services also try to compete for markets and highlight their specificity and their originality: the overthrow of dictatorships and their experience of democratic transitions in the case of Spain and Greece; the fight against the Mafia in the case of Italy. However, competition is dominated by the main police forces of the United States (FBI, Drug Enforcement Agency), Germany (BKA, BGS), France (SCTIP) and the United Kingdom (Narcotic Information Service), 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 advantage, in terms of resources, within a specific ‘security field in Europe’.10 Clearly there is no consensus among EU governments on the content of police training sessions or on the methods of organization against crime and investigation techniques. It would be interesting to put together a comparative study of the CEECs’ police or military training programmes carried out by the various EU countries and the US in order to make a more rigorous analysis of the ‘norms’ passed on by these training sessions and to identify governments’ more indirect strategies. Despite ambitious projects established in 1995–6, the role of the European Union is not central at this level. The EU has not been able to agree on setting up a police academy worthy of the name and up to the standards of the American one. Seminars, however, do take place in Poland and Hungary. The Commission has also helped to set up seminars on border control in Strasbourg in order to share its experiences, but these seminars are not terribly influential, particularly in 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 made all the stiffer by the strong American presence in the sector (FBI Academy in Hungary). As Eberhard Bort points out (chapter 10), the US has invested more than $8 million in the ILEA (International Law Enforcement Academy) in Budapest. This is seen not only as a means to combat crime but also as a way of training CEEC police forces in American methods rather than leaving it to the Europeans. The Americans are keen to outdo the others and have made this training a strategic objective. Hungarian leaders receive this interest with mixed feelings. They are clearly sceptical about any help in moving towards democracy. They interpret all action by American or European governments as a form of neo-colonialism and as a recycling of systems that have already been tried out in the Third World and are now being forced onto them. As is the case with respect to operational cooperation, training cooperation can easily take place without any institutional agreement and many police officers in the field are wary of institutionalization (EU authorities). They are in favour of flexible bilateral relations according to the so-called ‘national interests’ of the different countries and against the formalism sought by lawyers and foreign affairs officials. They are sceptical about agreements signed at EU level. Some British and French police officers support what, in legal language, is described as an ‘intergovernmental’ position, although in fact this is basically an expression of their general distrust concerning judicial and formal agreements (and not simply a distrust of the Court of Justice or the Commission). They are not convinced that crime that ignores borders can only be dealt with by a European police force. That would only make sense if there were a European state with one government and one parliament with real control over police organizations. In its absence, there is a risk of those organizations becoming autonomous. 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 appeal are currently so dispersed. The danger is that Europol will determine the norms of international police cooperation at European level according to its own interests and infighting. Nevertheless, in the opinion of many police officers, institutional cooperation should concentrate more on judicial matters than on police cooperation, because this forms the basis for any criminal police cooperation. Institutional cooperation: the normative path to Europeanization Institutional cooperation with CEECs in police matters is only just beginning. The pre-accession pact on organized crime was one of the first documents to bring them to the negotiating table.11 But the conditions of this ‘pact’ are difficult to realize and it is not certain whether convergence will go beyond judicial agreement to the homogenization of practices or whether it will remain a simple formality. This issue is often overlooked and the only concern seems to be the timely signing of an agreement. The Commission (and the Council) seem to be mostly interested in the normative aspect. The signing of conventions and texts is regarded as a political guarantee, a sign of goodwill on behalf of future members. There is little concern, at least officially, over whether the transformations are effectively carried out. The debate is essentially a legal one. But can it remain so? The conditions of pre-admission impose at least six criteria that CEECs need to fulfil on organized crime: (1) an efficiently structured police organization with all necessary powers; (2) qualified personnel and technical equipment needed to combat crime; (3) an appropriate legal system and sufficient legal grounding; (4) practical capacity of the relevant services to fight crime and prevent drug addiction; (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 them models of behaviour even in comparison to established democracies. In so doing, EU members assume that the problems of transition and of adapting the police forces and various security agencies have already been solved. But is this reasonable? It is not the purpose of this chapter to analyse the processes at work in the transformation of the social practices of bureaucracies any more than it is to study the relations of these police forces with the different sectors of their societies.12 More research should be done on this subject in relation to the ‘models’ proposed by Western governments. The behaviour of police forces in democracies is not as transparent as we would like to believe. What are the real practices of security agencies in democracies and how can efficient crime prevention and necessary freedoms be reconciled? What importance do security agents give to the notion of liberty when it clashes with the quest for efficiency? What can be said of the proposed norms when examining the social practices of Western countries? To what 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 law against illegal efficiency? Do they lead to different practices or are they the basis of a more elaborate system of justification? The cooperation provided for by the pre-accession pact on the prevention of organized crime brings together the various recommendations of G7/G8 (especially the groupe de Lyon) and requires the CEECs to adhere to them. But EU countries themselves find it difficult to transform these recommendations into actual practices. How far should the CEECs be held responsible for the application of these recommendations? The paradox is that by demanding too much of them, the EU may end up demanding nothing at all as it will be satisfied simply with formal assent; the actual application will scarcely be looked into. Isn’t that what already happens within the EU before enlargement? In demanding more information exchange, more reliable organizations and better technical competence, EU countries show that their idea of cooperation is that CEECs need to pull themselves up to EU standards. This imbalance casts a shadow on the idea of the reciprocity of information exchange. The ambiguity of relations between CEEC and Western police forces lies in the fact that the latter want to give CEEC officers advice and advocate cooperation but at the same time they are reluctant to put their trust in them and are not prepared to work on a reciprocal basis. The advice given becomes a form of pressure that is not always well accepted by the CEEC agencies. There is little scope for innovations or initiatives of their own, even ones that might reflect their specificity, and their democratic capacity is measured by how well they adapt to the model imposed upon them. Cooperation is transformed into an unequal relationship in which they are expected to obey. This is not well received. Even if CEECs recognize their own weaknesses, they are not impressed by the strengths of West European countries and are not prepared to follow their lead. 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 not the case for EU police forces with regard to CEECs. Heads of security agencies in EU countries complain of the possible discrepancy between police practices (in terms of both efficiency and the protection of basic rights) and the texts signed by the political leaders of the countries in question. In their view, European diplomats and lawyers do not have sufficient understanding of the subject and are too formalistic; failing to ensure that the CEECs have the means to implement the texts. They often cite the example of the complex relationship between the United States and Central America to highlight the problem of the attainable 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 police access to sensitive data (particularly in relation to the development of Europol), their role in Schengen and the dangers of infiltration by criminal networks. For their 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 doubletalk 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 legal matters. Penal cooperation is an essential element of police cooperation and mainly achieved through the institutions. It would be difficult to work together without some common penal incrimination of organized crime or other offences. But despite their efforts, EU members have not been able, or have not wanted, to agree on a common definition and so make up for this lacuna by quoting all the appended texts that condemn acts under the general heading of criminality. Terms such as organized or serious form of criminality (a formula that includes both organized and non-organized crime) are symptomatic of their indecision. This state of affairs is unsatisfactory and there have been many calls for a uniform definition of crime. The problem with this, however, is that legal harmonization would ignore the heterogeneity of the social practices of crime in the various countries. The desire to reach a common definition at all costs could lead to a distorted view of the phenomenon itself if the overriding ambition is to unify what is, in fact, heterogeneous. After the question of mutual trust in operational cooperation, this is perhaps one of the most important issues at stake in the process and needs to be examined. Enlargement leads to texts that, in an attempt at synthesis and consensus, become more and more general and less and less in touch with social practices. The building of unity by means of the fairly artificial creation of a convergence of threats or of a new enemy is a process that needs to be carefully studied.13 By including the issue of Schengen and its acquis, Amsterdam institutional cooperation has renewed some of the ambiguity of Maastricht and has re-established a link between police cooperation, migration flows and border issues. The inclusion of Schengen has made matters even more complicated than they were under Maastricht (if that is possible), despite the fact that its very objective was to clarify and simplify the relationship between the pillars. Disagreements over the legally constraining nature of the decisions and over the distribution of the various acquis means that, after Amsterdam, for important points of regulation of practices, the Schengen acquis remain within the third pillar. Thus the pessimistic hypothesis about the Treaty of Amsterdam is likely to be confirmed.14 Police and judicial cooperation will continue to depend upon a vision that constructs a dubious generalization between crime and migration. It will be based more on dealing with the fears and worries of Western countries than on the identification of crime problems. The move towards more solidarity and integration among member countries inherent 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 first pillar through the domains of migration and transborder flows. Institutional cooperation with CEECs will only be judged relevant if it corresponds to the unspoken elements of Western policy on migration, and under the cover of arguments for the prevention of organized crime.

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But what exactly are we trying to solve, and by what means? These are two essential issues at stake in enlargement that force current EU members to examine their own practices. In this second part of the chapter I will pose several questions on the complex interplay of the norms we suggest, the norms we follow, the practices we adopt, the myths we propagate and what effects of reception, reproduction and resistance these might entail. As before, I will avoid entering into a theoretical discussion of the relationship between values, ideas, norms and interests, ideologies and practices, power and resistance, importation or hybridization, etc. I will simply identify different levels of problems and different ways of posing the problem.

Organized crime: the main focus of cooperation with CEECs? Is the ‘question’ of organized crime and the ‘response’ to it at the heart of the relationship between Western and CEEC police forces? Practically every agent in 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 development of state-coordinated public policy. I have already questioned the way this problem is formulated and the assumptions that it makes.15 Security agencies do not simply respond to threats; they take part in creating them by objectifying them in their routine work, in the way they put their statistics together, in the hierarchy given to different dangers, in the priorities they set, in the technical solutions available, in the know-how they think they possess. I do not share the view of some experts who believe that organized crime can be intrinsically defined as a social reality ‘independent’ of the security field, whose sole origin lies in the practices of ‘underworld’ actors. But, even if this were true, it is too simplistic to think that tighter border control, with the use of technology and the military, will stop it. It is more appropriate to coordinate intelligence and to infiltrate. So why do so many agents support the first solution? To what extent is concern over organized crime useful to certain services (in terms of missions and budgets) or politicians (dealing with fears over difference, immigrants, foreigners)? It can, for instance, be seen as one way of furthering technology, to the advantage of a few private and quasi-public companies. Aren’t the fears of citizens and their representatives strengthened by exaggerating the dangers? The answer depends on one’s view of whether or not organized crime is highly transnational. Does it operate on a transborder scale within a limited area, or does it operate on a continent-wide scale? American intelligence service discourse tends to speak of global terrorism, global mafia and transnational organized crime (TOC), but there is little concrete evidence of this and European police forces doubt that there is such a degree of organization. Of course, 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 the most dangerous and sophisticated mafia organizations use the police’s own undercover methods against them and manage to infiltrate the police and local or national politics. But are they that powerful? Isn’t it more a case of the police seeing in their adversaries the very characteristics that they would like to possess themselves?

Beliefs on the origins of organized crime The image of a mafia that has invaded Russian political circles and then spread to CEECs remains one of the most potent images portrayed by politicians, journalists and a minority of security agents (usually those furthest from the field or working in different specialized sectors). This image nevertheless forms the basis for the main argument in security debates and it combines with or replaces fears over migration flows from Russia. Yet associating the Russian polity with organized crime in this way is a complex matter.16 There are criminal activities in Russia, and their extent is all the more surprising since communist propaganda deliberately played down criminality to make us believe in the virtues of socialism. However, these activities are concentrated within Russian territory and their exportation is far from proven. Even if true, it would be in no way peculiar to Russia. Thus although there are suspicions of money laundering, ties with tax havens, with the US and with Germany, the activities of the Russian mafia outside its territory are probably fairly limited.17 In France, inquiries carried out by criminal investigations police have shown 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 journalistic imagination in search of an exciting subject.18 In Germany and Belgium there are more concrete signs of infiltration, but they also remain fairly limited. It would also be an exaggeration to say that the Polish or Hungarian mafia are a conduit for the Russian mafia. Once again, a particular phenomenon (in this case, the trafficking of stolen cars between 1992 and 1995) has been extrapolated to establish a theory of a global mafia linking criminal milieus. Since 1996, following the setting up of car-assembly plants in Russia that cater to the needs of rich Russians, there has been a fall in the traffic of stolen cars. But once ideas on global mafia have been formed, they are selfperpetuating through the ‘simple rationalization’ of events often based upon conspiracy theories creating an invisible and all-powerful adversary (AFSP round table on the enemy within). Like EU countries, CEECs have problems with criminality and significant problems linked to structural transformations in the economy and the labour market, but they are not a conduit for Russian criminality and should not be seen as threatening an invasion of Western countries through crime and/or immigration. Yet this is how they are viewed by a significant fringe of those in the field of security who have no qualms in calling for a ‘buffer zone’ that would keep 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 of sovereignty or the safeguarding of national identity. The image of a fortress or an electronic wall is valued as a protection against an ‘invasion’ seen as either ‘massive’ (people fleeing war or repression) or ‘creeping’ (illegal or even legal migration, which is seen as a threat if migrants refuse give up certain values from the old country).19 Such security ideas and debates have been increasingly criticized but their symbolic effect has not been reduced.20 This forms the basis for a whole 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 classify our own fears by analysing who voices them, what they are based upon, to what extent they influence discussions between EU members and CEECs, and to what extent they may affect CEEC rights. Fear of corruption in the future member-state police forces and organized crime As was said earlier, when EU police officers are asked about their fears over CEECs, they all mention corruption and the infiltration of CEEC police forces by the mafia. What Western security agencies fear is that when they work with CEEC police forces and give them information, that information may well end up in the hands of mafia organizations. Their suspicions are confirmed by the fact that when Central and East European states or organizations are accused of such practices, their reaction is to defend their own case whilst giving credit to the general theory of overall corruption by accusing the other services or CEECs.21 There are many reasons given to explain the corruption: lack of finance; late payment of salaries in certain countries; new habits of capitalism where everything can be bought; the weak notion of public service wrongly associated with socialism. The ‘weakness of the state’ and public regulations and even mafia control of central political power (in other countries) are also used to explain infiltration. This lack of trust and solidarity among CEECs affects their international credibility and increases Western distrust. That is why one of the Commission’s priorities must be to create the conditions of mutual trust that are currently lacking. This would entail an energetic fight against presenting security issues in a way that spreads unreasoned fear. Of course, the situation differs from one country to another. There is a correlation between those countries that are the first in line to be admitted (with the exception 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 also made an effort in wanting to show that it is already prepared for Schengen. Various countries have emphasized their techniques and repackaged the image of their police force, calling upon specialists in image creation from the private sector. 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 in the former regimes. Services specialized in narcotics claim to be a new generation of police officers, trained in modern investigation methods, very often after a course in the United States. The language of policing has changed and adapted to Western models: community policing, proactive methods, sophisticated surveillance technology in ports and airports. Acceptance of Western technology 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 countries and take restrictive measures against illegal immigration from outside the community. They will need to be equipped with the IT needed for the SIS and have legislation in place on data protection. However, despite what agents from the security field may claim, such measures will not necessarily have an impact upon their behaviour towards minorities and migrants. Technology and democracy do not always go hand in hand. If CEEC intelligence services have access to the SIS, which already has over eight million entries and will soon reach fourteen million, will it be used for other ends than those intended? Certain NGOs have already signalled their unease.22 How will anyone determine how strict or lax controls of migrants from outside the community are, or how effective the detection of false documents is? CEEC police forces will be judged by Western security agencies, by governments of the EU members and by NGOs. Their opinions will differ. They will be open to accusations of being both lax and arbitrary. One side is worried about the possible ill treatment of minorities and of asylum seekers from outside the community. The other side wonders just how far they can trust badly paid police officers who may be bought off by smugglers. At the same time, lawyers and diplomats argue that the new governments must be trusted to manage their police forces. A lack of trust would lead to a politically untenable situation of cooperation substitution whereby, de facto, the role of liaison officers from Western countries would be to observe, control or even direct as much as to advise. Furthermore, the fixing of efficiency standards assumes that all countries, both CEECs and current members, will adhere to them. But are they prepared to do so? Would we accept having our own police forces inspected by foreign governments and forces? Countries like the United Kingdom (or France) that adopt an intergovernmental approach will surely refuse, and once the CEECs have joined the EU it seems likely that they will reinforce an intergovernmental stance on police matters. They do not appear to favour a Europol that is either too powerful, too German or too interfering. Fear of the migration invasion, Schengen and the moving of the Union’s ‘external’ border As Malcolm Anderson points out, borders are complex institutions and any alteration necessarily carries certain consequences. Borders are identity markers,

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a means of protection, junction points, solidarity boundaries and demarcations of competence and the power to sanction.23 As long as borders demarcate the nation-state, these different functions more or less coincide. However, given the current distinction between the EU’s internal and external borders and the decoupling of territorial and identity controls, our frame of reference needs to be 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 war in Europe declined, the role of internal security was revived by playing on fears of loss of national identities through large-scale immigration and population movements. There was talk of insufficient security and people’s fears hinged upon links between immigration, crime, political violence, unemployment and deficits in social welfare. I have explained in detail how this continuum of threats to security is put together and how it shapes a vision of a world that is threatened from without and within by highlighting transnational phenomena, e.g. violence from the Middle East, drugs rings, modern slave-trade, illegal immigration, refugees fleeing political persecution or war. This (in)security continuum has gradually forged a link between security and migration (even asylum) that works on three levels. On an ideological level there has been a marked decline in the idea that there is a contradiction between security and liberty. This notion has been replaced by a conviction that security guarantees liberty. On a normative level the creation of statistical instruments and laws and regulations link the two phenomena. On an instrumental level each country puts policies in place in the name of European constraints.24 The original idea of a state delimited by EU borders with a uniform regime of external (increased control) and internal relations (freedom of movement) soon gave way to a series of complex relations between the different member countries.25 Some, such as the UK or Ireland, oppose any change. Others will only accept change if there is some form of compensation. None interpret the safety clauses in the same way (Schengen countries, French attitude). Over the years Schengen has done more to shape the debate on the justification of controls than it has to establish freedom of movement. It has been much less a laboratory for the idea of a community of European citizens than a source of opposition to it. It has short-circuited the Commission by quickly developing a rationale of surveillance and control that limits freedom of movement in practice. The idea behind Schengen is to make border control coincide with the deployment of migration-flow police, made up, in the absence of federalization, of cooperating national police forces from all member states. Yet there is still a myth of Schengen as the laboratory of the EU and as the bearer of the values of freedom of movement that makes it difficult to uncover these strategies of control. Enlargement now alters the balance of relations between the geography of the external border and its function, strongly advocated by some governments, as a barrier to migration flows. This poses a serious problem for those behind the creation of Schengen.

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The first consequence of EU enlargement for internal security matters lies in the change in the geographical area and in the people to be monitored and controlled. Theoretically, as members of the community, CEEC citizens will no longer be the object of any particular surveillance and will not only be free in their movements, but will also, under certain conditions, be able to settle in countries that currently protect themselves from migration flows from these very countries.This should make controls much easier as the new borders further to the East are currently far less active. Intra-community flows will greatly outweigh flows 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 of movement and the creation of solidarity among European countries, then the situation calls for some rejoicing. If, on the other hand, the idea (hidden behind Schengen) is to protect prosperous countries from flows from poorer countries and to create common policy in immigration countries towards emigration countries, enlargement will profoundly alter the balance of relations. For the first time, the Schengen area will include both immigration and emigration countries. The external border will no longer correspond to migration concerns. It will continue 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 in relation to the economies of Western Europe. Western countries can react in two ways. They can accept this state of affairs and clearly favour migration within the EU. Or they can reinstate controls on internal borders, or at least on borders with emigration countries, which is what the CEECs are likely to remain for some years to come despite the changes currently taking place. This would have to be done under the pretext of a special exemption to avoid awkward questions being raised about the historical (and colonial) ties with countries south of the Mediterranean. Although Germany would be little affected by this evolution, the same cannot be said for France and the United Kingdom. Unlike Germany’s intracommunity ties, their strongest ties will continue to be with countries outside the community. Relations with the East and South will change, as will relations between Germany and its partners. Immigration and emigration countries within one area? Although one might hope that a strong spirit of integration within the EU would help CEECs by giving their citizens rights and guarantees on movement and settlement that they otherwise would not have had, it seems that a lot of political parties, including some in power, as well as security agencies have a tendency to link migration from CEECs to organized crime. Such criminal activities include trafficking in works of art, stolen cars, prostitution, the heroin trade in the Balkans, as well as money laundering and mafia activity linked to Russian capitalism. Those who make that link call for greater internal control within the EU directed towards CEEC citizens.

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Although it is seldom brought to the fore, such an (unofficial) view is common among security agencies and has become one of their points of reference. It explains security agents’ misgivings about the rationale behind ‘Europe’ and more particularly about the power of the Court of Justice actually to assess their actions. What is at stake is not so much an issue of sovereignty as an unwillingness to exercise transparency or explain motives hidden behind the reason of state. The contradiction between the logic behind the first pillar (economy, integration, citizenship) and the third (security and migration) is not dispelled by enlargement and the Treaty of Amsterdam. Quite the contrary. Police officers in the field support the idea of a return to tighter national controls – which in practice would be at odds with freedom of movement – not because of organized crime but because of immigration. Others see the solution in a reinforced informal Schengen where immigration countries would cooperate against emigration countries within the official Schengen. This would create the famous buffer zone and a system in which the entry of CEECs would be no guarantee of freedom of movement for their citizens. There is no shortage of reasons, both good and bad, for setting up a system that will alter the regime of controls, thus ‘abandoning the Schengen discourse which justifies the tightening of controls at external borders by abolishing controls on internal borders’. Such a system would be comprised of a series of sluice-gates with various levels of border control according to a country’s prosperity. External borders would be maintained and even tightened, with the help of Western technology and using personnel with the military know-how that CEEC security agents exercised in former times. At no stage, however, would there 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 yet been traced and the first wave of new entrants will shape future relations with the ones that follow. The reasoning that Romania or Ukraine will enter under the same conditions as Poland creates new fears. There is talk of the risk of internal conflict in these countries due to their problems with minorities once they join the EU.26 Freedom of movement will have had its day. It will apply to some sections of the Union’s membership but not to others. How should we react to this argument that destroys the European idea? Can we accept a division of an enlarged 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 of those playing the security card. They argue that distrust at official level based on security fears undermines freedom of movement. They try to ignore or belittle the problem, despite the fact that some, albeit marginal, politicians have adopted this discourse as their own. According to diplomats, the very nature of migration flows from CEECs is changing, so the situation is only transitory. Provided that CEECs manage, through economic development, to keep their populations at home, 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. In future the problem will be more one of transit across their territory rather than one of migration within the EU. Recent trends highlighted in official reports are encouraging. We are far from the apocalyptic predictions of the Berlin Conference of 1994, and although it continues to be a point of reference for G8 and the European Council, sociological descriptions have shown that migration tends to fluctuate. Transborder crossings are principally a form of commercial tourism to supply the local transborder economy.27 Nevertheless, it is quite reasonable to assume that the current flow from 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 differences in economic development and a preference for ‘internal’ migration over migration from outside. Its rationale would resemble NAFTA, and this would again raise questions on the issue of freedom of movement for individuals within this area. Militarization of external borders through technology: not a solution The issues at stake in the militarization of borders, with the increasing intervention of armed forces in the control of transnational population flows, have been studied in some depth. The research focuses on a comparative analysis of the situations in America at the Mexican border, in Germany at the Polish border, in Austria at the Hungarian border, and in Italy at the Straits of Otranto. It also covers armed forces’ participation in domestic operations, such as the Vigipirate operation in France, which has been in place since 1995, various anti-Mafia operations in Italy (the most famous being Vespri Siciliani) and the Northern Ireland situation in the United Kingdom. The stakes involved concern the use of the most sophisticated technology (helicopters, radar, night vision, video surveillance, heat detectors, telecommunications tapping, high-speed intervention vehicles), personnel training and the relationship between the army, ‘mixed’ forces and the police. They also concern issues of freedom and democracy as they undermine the principle of non-intervention of the military in domestic civilian life. These points are outside the scope 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 available military equipment to secure the eastern border as it is impossible to do so by more traditional means. Furthermore, Poland has called for American and German help in setting up an electronic border (heat detectors, night surveillance, etc.). Hungary is also interested, provided the United States can give it technical assistance, and Slovenia has approached commercial companies to supply the necessary equipment. Even Estonia is considering such action, although such a move certainly would not ease their relations with Russia. As for

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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 technology redeployed in the surveillance of transborder flows is seen by many professionals as the solution to the problem. In fact militarization creates more problems than it solves. It is very expensive for public coffers even if it does bring returns for private companies. It creates arbitrary situations in certain enclosed areas such as airports, ports and certain border crossing-points. However, it cannot manage and control all unauthorized crossing-points and therefore does not provide effective protection. Determined individuals will continue to cross borders if they want to. Land borders cannot be closed off in their ‘green zone’ without an unacceptable increase in personnel costs. Militarization also leads to further confusion in distinguishing between migrant and enemy and can encourage fragile democracies to slip back into authoritarian habits. After the rapid demilitarization of borders, we could be insidiously sliding towards remilitarization involving the same people but with different uniforms. That could have serious consequences in terms of infringements of human rights for those from outside the community. Under what conditions will people be turned back at the eastern borders in Poland or Slovenia, and what rights will asylum seekers have? It is not necessarily a good idea to direct the armed forces of these countries towards internal issues and border protection. It would be better to train police forces to have greater respect for human rights. Militarization also encourages countries with powerful NGOs to transfer external border management onto their neighbours, thus avoiding any internal protest. We have called this remote policing or remote security control.29 CEEC police officers in the field get the impression that they are being forced into police practices that are out of step with the discourse on democracy, particularly when it comes to immigration and asylum. They feel that they are being made to do the ‘dirty work’ of blocking population flows at their borders. The recent Western reaction to the Kosovo situation, with a general refusal to accept refugees 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 their work while imposing responsibilities upon them when serious problems arise. Tighter controls have already upset the bazaar economy that had sprung up on Poland’s eastern border and created tension with its neighbours. The Germans give the Poles little credit for exercising tighter control, despite the fact that they recently experienced similar problems themselves and were considerably more conciliatory towards the Poles than they expect the Poles to be towards their eastern neighbours, particularly Ukraine. There are signs of disillusionment in the interviews with CEEC police officers. They have realized that this is the price they have to pay if they want to join the EU. Membership is desired for economic reasons but enthusiasm for EU values has waned. Those currently engaged in the process of joining the EU are already thinking about future enlargement and are adopting the same strategies with the future members, their territorial neighbours to the east and south-east.

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CEECs and the right to freedom of movement The right of European citizens and legal residents to move and reside freely within the territory of the EU is one of the most important assets of EU democracy. At the normative level, this right cannot be undermined by the creation of second-class citizens in Eastern Europe without seriously damaging the principles of the EU and creating significant resentment. But is it possible to implement this right in the short term? The debate centres on the core values we want and their practical possibilities. For people who believe in human rights, EU enlargement can only proceed if all citizens of the future Union are treated equally. This means that article 62 will apply to all citizens and that there will be no control of individuals crossing internal borders. European solidarity is weakened by the increase in alarmist discourse, be it official or unofficial, on the risks that current members run in letting CEECs join in the near future. Controls within the Schengen area between immigration and emigration countries are justified on the grounds of a ‘migration risk’ or the risk of ‘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, it would be difficult to require more of CEEC partners in terms of control, security and democratic transparency than is current practice within the EU. They cannot be expected to apply the norms laid down by the European institutions to the letter, especially if current member states like the UK often do little to apply them themselves. (See various practices in border and other forms of control that currently undermine the everyday reality of freedom of movement within the Schengen area.) The principle of the right to freedom of movement for all future EU citizens must take precedence over the fears that feed the security debate. These fears are often the product of over-generalizations based upon concrete examples that, although exact, are statistically insignificant. Media interest generates belief in their importance and creates greatly disproportionate distrust of foreigners or of those perceived as foreign. It is humiliating for those who are permanently suspected of being potential criminals simply because of their nationality or the colour of their skin.30 The image of the EU depends on the myths that it can project outside its territory 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 strengthen unity in the face of an imaginary enemy. It is typical of the profound naïvety of certain leaders’ short-sighted cynicism to believe that the security myth will not affect the image of democracy both outside and within the EU.31 Given the changing notions of state, sovereignty, identity, border and security linked to transnationalization and the age of risk, it is illusory to continue to function according to an internal–external diptych. They are not two separate worlds, and an action in one will have repercussions in the other. Security issues are affected by the blurring of the differentiation between internal and external.

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Conclusion In conclusion, to give the European project a renewed positive image, we must put as much energy as possible into fighting the negative images and disproportionate fears that drive cooperation policies. The new members must be given equal rights. More specifically we must make sure that the right to freedom of movement is effectively implemented. A useful initiative would be to create a European committee based on a network of NGOs, national MPs and members of the security field, which could check on this implementation. A monitoring body should be set up to identify the problems encountered and the obstacles placed 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 this panel, but at the same time, it is rare in the police research field to find so many people who are willing to give their own views and openly to discuss visions that are at odds with those of policy-makers and bureaucrats. I do not endorse everything they say in the interviews, but I think it is important to know that the golden legend of ever-improving cooperation between more and more countries is, for good reasons, not shared by the people in charge of implementing the general agreements created by 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 ‘Conference on 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 the Police. International Perspectives (New York: Garland Publishers, 1996). 8 Ethan A. Nadelmann; Cops across Borders: the Internationalization of US Criminal Law Enforcement (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 pour l’Europe? Le multiculturalisme à l’épreuve (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 1998). Dal Lago Alesandro, 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).

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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’, Problèmes Politiques et Sociaux (1997), p. 789. 17 See Leslie Holmes, ‘Crime, Corruption, and Politics: Transnational Factors’, in Jan Zielonka, ed., Democratic Consolidation in Eastern Europe: International and Transnational Factors (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 this volume. 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 Newly Developing 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 de sécurité intérieure, approche comparée’, La participation des militaires aux questions de 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 of the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001. See, e.g., Nicole Gnesotto, ‘Terrorism and European Integration’, Institute for Security Studies Newsletter, 35 (October 2001), p. 1.

12 The future border regime of the European Union Enlargement and implications of the Amsterdam Treaty Malcolm Anderson This chapter is speculative because it addresses some of the Justice and Home Affairs arguments that may be made over the next decade. Some developments will have specific implications for those countries of East Central Europe negotiating as the next entrants to the EU. The exact nature of the future developments obviously cannot be known, although certain key elements, in the absence 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 policies involving frontier issues will continue to be divided between the three Pillars; reinforcement of police and judicial cooperation within the EU; and continuing pressure to formulate common external and security policies to address problems in the neighbourhood of the EU. However, there are areas of very considerable uncertainty: the implications of the new Justice and Home Affairs (JHA) provisions in the Treaty of Amsterdam and the Tampere programme; entry dates of the applicant states, the transitional arrangements and the conditions for entry (in the sense of acquis communautaire); effects of entry on national and cultural identities, and the ways in which ‘identity’ politics will be used by the various political forces in play; the evolution of global political and economic balances with decisive effects on the European Union, and local situations including border regimes; and crises in Eastern Europe and in Russia, creating turbulence threatening the interests of the EU and the candidate members.

Shared perceptions of frontiers? Governments of the EU do not have an elaborate doctrine about frontiers because their frontiers are regarded, above all, as legacies of history. Explanations of the reasons for official positions adopted on frontier policy are usually brief and have the nature of assertions rather than explanations. In the British case, examples are Prime Minister Thatcher’s assertion in her Bruges speech that the maintenance of frontier controls are ‘plain common sense’, to the Labour Party’s terse commitment in its 1997 election manifesto that ‘we intend to retain controls on persons at our frontiers.’ The reasons given are that

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Britain is an island and therefore its frontiers are easy to control; it is the traditional 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. Since World War II, there have been deeply-rooted dispositions in favour of inviolability of frontiers, whilst accepting the principle of the self-determination of peoples when this becomes necessary (recognition of the ‘velvet divorce’ in Czechoslovakia, acceptance by the UK of the right of secession of Northern Ireland). There is also a widely held view that frontiers are inseparable from the entities that they enclose. This conviction was expressed in 1997 by Danes who attempted to form a human chain along the frontier with Germany under the slogan ‘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 territorial sovereignty is the necessary condition of true democracy. This conviction, which is difficult to defend when the problems facing Denmark cannot be managed within the national framework, is none the less shared by large populations within the EU. A widely diffused attitude among the populations of Europe links frontiers to the notion of security – in a broad definition of the term – against unwanted foreign intrusion: defence of physical and psychological security, of economic interests, of languages and cultures. This attitude persists even after the frontier can no longer be used for these purposes: on the Franco-Italian and FrancoSpanish frontiers frequently voices are raised that the French state ought to protect specific interests affected by the economic activities of Italians and Spaniards, despite the existence of the Single Market. A consensus exists among governments, supported by large majorities in public opinion, that the external frontier of the EU should be an effective barrier against illegal immigration. Although the dominant rhetoric about immigration varies according to time and according to country, restrictive attitudes predominate. This is amply illustrated by the ways in which asylum seekers are viewed and treated.2 In general terms, member states share certain basic principles (rule of law, parliamentary democracy, respect for human rights, private property as the basis of market economies …) so that the significance of the external frontier varies according to the degree to which the neighbouring state adheres to these principles. For example, the external frontier with Switzerland and Norway is viewed differently from that with Morocco and Russia.

Problems of control of the external frontier seen from the point of view of the EU member states Five problems of controlling the external frontier will persist: the impossibility of controlling migratory flows purely by police methods; uneven distribution of the costs of policing the external frontier; the low level of mutual understanding of the problems between member states; the coordination of police control of the

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frontier and other systems of police cooperation; and the difficulty of repression of transfrontier fraud. The Italian example illustrates the impossibility of controlling the external frontier by police methods without using unacceptable levels of force. The Straits of Otranto mark the deepest gulf between the standards of living of two European countries. The inevitable result is a strong desire by Albanians to cross to Italy. Professional smugglers have acquired fast boats to deposit migrants on the Italian coast. This has attracted immigrants from other parts of the world who wish to enter the EU. Despite the use of high-technology surveillance and tracking devices, the mobilization of the Italian customs and navy, and surveillance operations in Albanian ports, a high proportion of these illegal immigrants reach the Italian coast. Italy has a similar problem with immigrants arriving from Africa on the islands of Lampedusa and Sicily. In addition, large and unseaworthy vessels packed with illegal immigrants arrive in Italian coastal waters from the Middle East. Italy cannot stop forcibly this flow of immigrants except by using methods that conflict with basic human rights. Whether over the land frontier or the sea frontier, illegal immigrants enter Italy and turn up in other EU member states. The arrival of clandestine immigrants either hidden in lorries at the land frontiers or on the coasts attracts hostile media attention. Italy, like any transit country for illegal immigrants, 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 stop by conventional frontier controls are interpreted differently by different member states, usually as a function of whether the flow is likely to affect them. EU immigration control is still defective in several respects. There are not yet reliable and comparable statistics on the ways in which illegal immigrants gain entry (or, indeed, about border checks). Such statistics are essential for an accurate evaluation of the costs of controlling illegal immigration and efforts are being made to establish them. Like Italy, the majority of EU countries risk becoming either the destination of unexpected flows of illegal immigrants or transit countries to other destinations. A rapid and coordinated EU political, economic and diplomatic reaction to immigration problems has not yet been achieved, although, in the wake of fifty-eight deaths of Chinese illegal immigrants in Dover in June 2000, progress has been made. The High-Level Working Group on Asylum and Immigration has set in motion a ‘cross-Pillar’ comprehensive approach to the problem. The systems for exchange of information – Interpol, Europol and Schengen – about criminal activity related to the external frontier (drug trafficking, money laundering, trafficking in human beings, organized and large-scale theft, financial fraud) are not at the moment coordinated. Europol and Schengen are in their infancy and there are legal, political and technical problems in the way of systematic coordination between them, and between them and Interpol.

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The problems of customs fraud (fraudulent certificates of origin on agricultural products to obtain EU subsidies, and many other traffics such as the import and clandestine re-export of cigarettes) are regarded with varying degrees of seriousness across the EU. Problems of fraud change over time according to the criminal opportunities provided by national and European legislation. Customs powers vary – French customs have powers across the whole national territory whereas German customs only have powers over goods attracting the common tariff at the external frontier. Harmonized customs powers have been discussed for some time but not yet achieved. Generally speaking, problems associated with movement of goods, other than illegal drugs, excite less public concern than do immigration issues.

The Treaty of Amsterdam Two aspects of the Treaty received much comment. It made very little progress on the kind of institutional reform necessary for enlargement (partially achieved by the 2000 negotiation of the Treaty of Nice), and the Pillar structure of the Union was confirmed. However, the Justice and Home Affairs provisions (further developed in the Tampere programme3) are potentially of considerable importance because of the Treaty basis for Europol, the integration of the Schengen acquis 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 frontiers and frontier security. Frontier policy, broadly conceived, is distributed across Pillar I (immigration, asylum, visa policy, free movement, trade), Pillar II (common foreign and security policy) and Pillar III (police and judicial cooperation). In Pillar I there is a federalist dynamic since policy is adopted according to the community method of initiative by the commission, approval by the Council and Parliament, and subject to the adjudication of the European Court of Justice. In the area of free movement, Pillar I will assume greater importance and the potential for a considerable advance in the federal element of the EU is present. This is the domain that the candidate countries have to take particularly seriously (see the next section). Pillar II policy-making could be the main locus of general policy concerning border regimes on the eastern frontier, including elements of judicial and police cooperation. Political will is essential to infuse some substance to the aspiration to a common foreign and security policy for the eastern borderlands. This will is weak but may emerge as a result of external challenges, which collectively affect the interests of the major member states. Since the disintegration of the communist bloc, there is now a lack of a clearly defined and menacing military security threat. It has therefore been difficult to establish a new security doctrine and even a sufficiently precise definition of 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 as drug trafficking and traffic in illegal immigrants, the impact of social tensions

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and problems of crime and disorder from fractured societies ‘spilling over’ into the EU. In particular cases, it refers to the effects of armed conflict in the wider neighbourhood of the EU – in Algeria, Bosnia, Kosovo and the Kurdish regions of Turkey and Iraq. Criminal problems and political violence can be regarded as Pillar III matters but they overlap with Pillar II. Current uncertainty about the very concept of security has been a contributing factor to the hesitant development of the common external and security policy. Moreover, the pressure to develop such a policy that would have otherwise been felt by the EU has been lessened by the existence of NATO, which has built a bridge with Russia and could accept members from East Central Europe with relative ease. The Blair initiative in 1998 (the Anglo-French St Malo Declaration) suggesting a re-launch of a common security policy, by proposing that EU military forces could be committed outside the NATO framework, encountered political and technical difficulties in 2000–1 after the announcement of a European Rapid Reaction Force. The possibility of rapid intervention in situations of crisis and disorder in the so-called ‘shatter zone’ between the Baltic and the Balkans could give an impetus to the development of the EU as a genuine independent force in international politics, but this has yet to be put to the test. A Common Foreign and Security Policy is an aspiration but not yet a reality, which may result in undue weight being given to JHA cooperation to protect the security of the EU. Well-known attempts, by Barry Buzan and others, have been made to extend the scope of the understanding of security into what has been described as ‘societal security’ – threats to the environment, to human rights and to cultures.4 This has particular relevance to the eastern frontier of the EU. Since the Chernobyl disaster of 1986, there have been insistent voices raised to press for the inclusion of environmental threats in the area of security policy. The Finnish President, Marrti Ahtisaari, said in November 1997 that the threat from Russian pollution was his greatest security problem, and added: ‘I would be much happier if I could clean up the Baltic and swim in the sea than join NATO.’5 However, in terms of EU policy-making, environmental policy belongs squarely within Pillar I, the coordination 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 movement issues and Pillar III for police and judicial cooperation, is sometimes perceived by the candidate members as an imposed regime. It is the key element in the border regimes that are being established on both internal and external frontiers. Europol, because its objective is to fight transfrontier crime, is less sensitive in terms both of potential tension with the EU candidate states and of the practice of border controls. However, Europol indicate an important general point: that transfrontier criminal activities must increasingly be policed by forms of coordination other than border checks.

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The Schengen Agreement and Convention developed from the merger of a number of Common Travel Areas among European states. The original Schengen Agreement, in 1985, brought together the Benelux Common Travel Area with the proposed ‘open frontier’ agreement between France and Germany. The long-standing Nordic Common Travel Area provides for open frontiers between Denmark, Sweden, Finland (now all members of the European Union), Norway and Iceland; its merger with the Schengen Common Travel Area has necessitated special arrangements with the two non-European Union states. The United Kingdom has maintained a Common Travel Area with Ireland since 1921, although neither country is yet prepared to dismantle border controls with its partner. The debate on Schengen has focused within the EU on the strict control of immigration, the number of asylum seekers, the alleged creation of a ‘fortress Europe’, and the controversial links implied between security, criminality and immigration. In the candidate countries, the main issue has been that the Schengen external frontier is a ‘hard’ frontier, a serious and potentially disruptive barrier between them and neighbouring states. This affected the relations between the candidate countries and the EU member states as the Schengen controls were put in place, and, as these countries become integrated into the EU, it affects the relations between them and their eastern neighbours. In brief, the 1985 Schengen Agreement and 1990 Convention have as their aim the creation of an area without internal border controls, with compensatory measures to increase security at the external frontier and supporting measures to fight illegal immigration, exchange information through a computerized database (the Schengen Information System), increase cooperation between police forces and facilitate judicial cooperation. The Schengen agreements are intended to be ‘compensatory measures’ for the ‘security deficit’ resulting from the abolition of frontier controls at the internal frontiers. The objective of the Schengen arrangements is to create an area of free movement by removing controls at the common borders of the participating states; to compensate for the lifting of these controls, external frontiers controls are strengthened and standardized, and are accompanied by an array of ‘flanking’ measures designed to enhance security and improve cooperation within the Schengen area. The Schengen countries also explicitly recognize that they should move towards a common visa, asylum and immigration policy. A coordinating committee and technical inspections ensure that member countries meet the standards required for controlling the common external frontier. A Task Force of senior law enforcement officers has been set up to exchange information about clandestine immigration with a view to dismantling organized rings that smuggle people into the EU. (This Task Force has achieved only modest results, probably because smuggling is less organized than had been supposed.) From the policing point of view, the great advantage of Schengen is on-line access to national Schengen databases that communicate and receive information and enquiries from the central database in Strasbourg (which has about

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eight million entries). All significant ports of entry have to have this on-line facility, and in some countries it is widely spread: in France, for example, there are 14,000 access points. An upgraded database (Schengen II) is currently under negotiation and may solve some outstanding problems such as relations with the Europol database and the location within the Pillar structure of the SIS. Europol is, for the time being, a less constraining and problematic form of cooperation for the candidate states. It is still at a relatively early stage of development and, at the moment, goes little further than being a European equivalent of Interpol, although more ambitious claims are made in its annual reports. It was formally initiated by the setting up in 1992 of a Europol preparatory group in Strasbourg by an EC ministerial agreement. This group drew up a brief for the terms of reference of a European law enforcement body and its methods of operating. Although it was hailed by Paul Quilès, the French Minister of the Interior at the time, as the ‘embryo of a European Police’, subsequent progress was slow. Eventually, after difficult negotiations concerning accountability, judicial control, management, staffing levels, financial arrangements, communications infrastructure, information technology requirements, as well as data protection, the Europol Convention was agreed in 1995.6 The UK was the first to ratify the Convention (with an important, and potentially troublesome, opt-out concerning the role of the European Court of Justice in interpreting the Convention) and all other member states subsequently did so – making it the only Pillar III convention 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 launch inquiries – but there is important (German) pressure to emphasize an operational role, a concept open to more than one interpretation. Although there is potential for further development, Europol will not be for some time a centrally important instrument in assisting inquiries into complex criminal conspiracies. The reasons for this are as follows. First, it is only involved if more than two member states are concerned by a criminal act. Second, it has modest resources in terms of professional personnel, which are not on the scale of criminal investigation departments of medium-sized European cities. Third, the list of crimes in which Europol may be involved, ranging from financial 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 nuclear materials to trafficking in body parts, is extremely ambitious and it is difficult to envisage how Europol can play more than a minor supportive role in the efforts to repress them. Fourth, the holding of data on individuals and of historical data is severely circumscribed by data protection rules. Fifth, there is only a small chance that Europol, in the foreseeable future, will lead or participate in a major way in criminal investigations because its officials lack police powers and have to be invited by national authorities to participate in investigations as advisers. Sixth, although analysis of criminal intelligence is envisaged as a major role, there are serious practical difficulties in transnational sharing of sensitive intelligence. The difficulties for the candidate countries posed by EU law enforcement

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cooperation are of various kinds. The first difficulty is the existence of various systems of law enforcement cooperation: Interpol, Europol, other multilateral systems, and bilateral arrangements. New EU members have even greater difficulty than established members of coming to grips with this complexity. The second difficulty for the candidate states is that the Schengen acquis will continue to develop in the years before accession. The opportunities for the candidate countries to influence the content of the Schengen acquis will be strictly limited. It may be perceived as a system that has been set up to defend the interests of existing members and does not sufficiently take into account the specific requirements of candidate members. The third difficulty is that all institutionalized forms of police cooperation inevitably encourage a penumbra of informal arrangements. Without some informal channels of communication, it is difficult for institutionalized forms of cooperation to function efficiently. But informal systems of cooperation necessarily involve privileged and exclusive relationships. These develop in three main ways. An elite network will influence the general policy of cooperation – this is likely to be composed of the same European elements that have had most influence within Interpol.7 Networks dealing with particular criminal problems – fraud, money laundering, drug trafficking, etc. – are a feature of the current system. Networks based on geographical proximity to confront a series of local/regional problems are already common. Criminal investigators are highly pragmatic and form alliances where they must, but informal networks are likely to be led by people from countries with strong police traditions and long practice in international contact-making. These are not likely to include people from the EU candidate countries.

Problems of the EU eastern frontier and the EU candidate countries An abundant literature already exists on the transition from communism, nationalism, minorities, migratory movements, economic reform and restructuring, the disintegration 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 the problems of the relations within the candidate countries and between them and their neighbours to the east. Most of the issues are related to the economic glacis represented by the existing eastern frontier of the EU and could be much attenuated if the economic differentials were reduced. Economic differences do not, of course, explain all the political and social forms that problems may take; these are influenced by cultural and historical factors, as well as by unforeseen events. The complementary role, to other forms of rapprochement, that JHA cooperation plays is recognized in the ways in which the enlargement process is handled and the way in which common strategies concerning third countries – in particular, Russia and the Ukraine – have been agreed. None the less, certain sensitive issues will probably dominate the political agenda.

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Migration of people is likely to be the first of these. It has been, and will continue to be, perceived in EU countries as, above all, a problem for receiving countries. It has progressively been conceived as a security problem9 because of dubious links made between immigrants and illegal trafficking, crime, violence and urban decay. There have been cyclical anxieties in the EU member states about a ‘flood’ of immigrants from the east, fuelled by the actual arrival of immigrants, by hypothetical analyses of possible arrivals and by debates over how to tackle the problem of illegal immigration. The term ‘flood’ is usually a gross exaggeration of the scale of the problem, although there are exceptions. For example, dismantling the Berlin Wall and the heavily guarded frontier dividing the two Germanies enormously increased the flow of asylum seekers and illegal immigrants into Germany. Leakage of clandestine immigrants through the present and the future EU eastern external frontier is inevitable. Some of the movement of people westwards, whether from the candidate members or from countries further to the east, is bound to be associated with criminality. Wealth differentials are a major factor in certain forms of crime: crimes against property, prostitution (which is not always classified as illegal, although deriving profit from it usually is), illegal traffics, especially in drugs. However, there is a high risk that the dominant discourse about crime problems will emphasize the importance of repression. A ‘security first’ discourse is dangerous because it identifies criminality with Poles and other eastern neighbours, not with structural economic problems. The solution, as the relations of the United States with its southern neighbours have amply demonstrated, does not reside in political pressure on countries to take more repressive action, or heavy-handed policing including direct intervention in neighbouring states, flanked by increased foreign aid to domestic police agencies. This policy may paradoxically help to embed criminal organizations in societies in which many people feel alienated both by foreign interference and by police repression. In addition to crime problems, there is the difficult legacy (or legacies) of history 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 has been officially accepted by all EU member and candidate states but discordant memories remain in popular sentiment. The justice of what happened is viewed differently on different sides of frontiers; painful and strong sentiments arise on specific matters (such as the fate of German cemeteries where there are no longer any Germans). These sentiments enter into controversies over what to do about practical matters such as property rights. The restoration of individual German property rights for those dispossessed in the immediate postwar period poses greater problems than benefits but hopes (and fears) are still alive that some restitution will be made. Historical memories create fertile ground for political mobilization around old, re-created and possibly new identities, with complex effects on territorial politics and border regimes. Moreover, there are always losers as well as gainers in transformation processes. Regional imbalances in the costs and benefits of EU

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membership will inevitably provoke conflict and could reignite old animosities. The exacerbation of minority questions10 may create public order problems that, at the very least, complicate cooperation in Justice and Home Affairs.

Scenarios for future development of cooperation in Justice and Home Affairs At present, there are political limits to possible JHA cooperation in the EU. No member state, despite the ambition of the Amsterdam Treaty to create an area of freedom, security and justice, will consent to hand over to the EU the responsibility for public order on its territory without a firm guarantee of the unqualified solidarity of the other member states. The member states do not currently consider this is likely to be forthcoming, for a variety of reasons (not explored in this chapter). Moreover a sense of solidarity is unlikely to increase, and may diminish, as a result of enlargement. There are three possible scenarios for JHA cooperation for the first decade or so of the century. One scenario, beloved by Eurosceptics – regression to a system of competing states in which the EU is either marginalized or disintegrates – is excluded as unrealistic. In considering these scenarios, there are three elements that will be present whichever scenario approximates more closely to events as they unfold. The first is the theme of reinforced cooperation between certain member states – an important aspect of the Amsterdam Treaty, although restricted by the requirement that at least eight states must participate. This allows a group of states to go further and faster than the others in JHA cooperation. The acceptance of UK, Irish and Danish opt-outs was an example of the kind of flexibility that the contracting parties envisaged. This flexibility will affect the new member states, even though they have to accept all the acquis, because faster development of cooperation between core member states may exclude them or they may exclude themselves. In the former case it may be either because the older members consider the systems of the new members to be not sufficiently trustworthy or because they lack certain technical capacities; in the latter case, it may be either because the new members are unwilling to give up too much of their recently reacquired sovereignty and independence of action or because specific immigration and internal security issues require local solutions. The second element stems from the principles of rule of law and respect for human rights that are written into the Treaty of Amsterdam and that are contained in the (non-justiciable) Charter of Human Rights approved by the 2000 Nice conference. This opens up the possibility of European Court of Justice action in areas concerning rights of individuals, independence of the judiciary and behaviour of executive officials in the field of public order. The implications of the integration of fundamental rights into the EU framework are potentially very great because it may allow the ECJ to decide on the legality of actions in criminal matters by courts and police in the member states. For candidate members this introduced another area of uncertainty about what they are committing themselves to in joining the EU.

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The third element is that the new member states will have responsibility for the eastern frontier of the EU (along with Finland, which, unlike them, has long experience of administering, and paying for, a tightly controlled frontier). This poses problems of the maintenance of common standards, trust between member states and financing of an onerous responsibility. The first scenario envisages the continuation of the status quo (in which much has been achieved in the fields of police and judicial cooperation). The arrangements already in place are given time to mature but there are no new transfers of sovereignty to the EU. The basis of cooperation remains intergovernmental, and where areas are already subject to community procedures, majority voting is delayed. The Schengen acquis remain in Pillar III and each state remains responsible for the EU external frontier situated on its territory. The safeguard clause (article 2.2 of the Schengen Convention) that permits states to reimpose systematic controls at the internal frontier stays in force. Informal cooperation on control of frontiers is allowed to develop and exchanges take place between immigration and police officers, along the lines already developed for customs in the Mathaeus programme. On asylum and immigration the unanimity rule continues to apply for EU measures after the expiry of the five-year delay for the introduction of majority voting envisaged by the Treaty of Amsterdam. In other words, the implementation of the action plan on asylum and immigration proposed by the European Commission conforms to this scenario: an agreed list of countries from which individuals cannot seek asylum; constitution of a database of asylum seekers; common regulations for entry and residence; a uniform visa; a uniform policy for readmissions and for the return of illegal immigrants; and strengthening of solidarity to combat clandestine immigration. On police cooperation the facilities for cross-border surveillance and hot pursuit are implemented Europol functions according to the Treaty of Amsterdam, with criminal investigations entirely under the control of national authorities and the establishment of observatories (like the Lisbon observatory on drugs) based on new conventions. Judicial cooperation is advanced by the ratification and/or entering into force of Pillar III conventions already negotiated: mutual legal assistance, two conventions on extradition. The action programme of the Council and the Commission also includes: the establishment of Eurojust to coordinate transfrontier prosecutions; a European judicial network for criminal and civil matters; strengthening of the measures for the repression of money laundering; mutual recognition of judgements and sentences of courts; facilitating cooperation between ministries of justice and judicial authorities, or equivalent competent authorities in member states. This scenario does not require reform of national and European institutions. The continuation of the present system can overcome the rigidity of the unanimity rule through cooperation between a restricted number of states. This continuation would strengthen the Council and, to a lesser extent, the Commission with utilization of its power of initiative and as the repository of

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information through ‘observatories’ and the collection of statistics, but there would be a persistence of a lack of transparency in the arrangements for cooperation. National parliaments play a key role in the accountability of the agents of cooperation, and this is a role that they have not yet exercised effectively. The European Parliament would not have any power of decision except through its budgetary powers. The second scenario is the development of new forms of cooperation between national police and judicial agencies, and supranational intelligence agencies; in addition, EU norms in criminal matters and the approximation of national laws would be developed. This scenario corresponds to a ‘maximalist’ interpretation of the Treaty of Amsterdam. In this scenario, some supranational arrangements for external frontier control can be envisaged through qualitative norms for national agencies responsible for the external frontier and sanctions (imposed by a qualified majority) when they are not met. On asylum and immigration, qualified majority voting would be adopted after the transitional period of five years. Common rules, with sanctions imposed for non-compliance, would be established for entry of foreigners, long-term residence, family reunification, movement of third-country nationals resident in the EU, and procedures for the reception of asylum seekers and the granting of refugee status. On police cooperation Europol would be given powers for initiating criminal investigations by national authorities; agents of Europol would use the possibility opened up in article 30 of the Treaty of European Union to participate in national inquiries; joint police operations between different states would be provided with a legal basis to investigate certain forms of criminality; cooperation in frontier regions would develop beyond the existing joint police stations. European norms of professional police conduct and police efficiency would be developed 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 if the Schengen norms were not respected. In judicial cooperation, there would be a movement towards qualified majority voting after the transitional period of five years. Extradition in its present form would be abolished in favour of a common procedure of charging suspects and the automatic transfer of suspects to the court with jurisdiction in the case. Rogatory commissions would disappear and investigating magistrates would address requests directly to the law enforcement authorities of another state. They could also address an EU agency composed of magistrates drawn from all the member states, which would assist with the interpretation of legal texts and the translation of requests. This agency would also be charged with supervising the follow-up of requests for assistance. There would be a common definition of national interest when it is used to refuse requests for assistance. Harmonization of law would be achieved in the fields of organized crime, drug trafficking and terrorism. The impact of this scenario on national and European institutions would be considerable. Putting in place sanctions against both national agencies and states would require a revision of the treaties and a new culture of European public

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order. The development of a common system of charging suspects and common procedures in the field of immigration and asylum would have a radical impact on national legal codes. The third scenario marks a sharp break with the first two because it would be a decisive move towards federal structures, with the establishment of operational instruments at the EU level. The management of the external frontier would be handed over to a supranational agency. The principal responsibility of this agency would be the repression of clandestine immigration, although national agencies could retain the responsibility for expelling the immigrants found. In the domain of policing, a European police would be established that would enforce a European criminal law. This police, directed by a European police chief, would have sole responsibility in its domain of competence but would delegate most of the operational tasks to national police agencies. For certain procedures, such as search and entry, the EU police would need the agreement of the national jurisdictions. The European Court of First Instance would adjudicate conflicts of competence. Judicial cooperation would be defined in areas where criminal activity clearly crossed national boundaries or where offences were committed against the EU itself: drug trafficking, corruption, money laundering, forging euros, fraud against the EU budget. These matters would be dealt with by Pillar I. The ECJ would be competent for interpreting the European criminal law. All the rights presently available to individuals under the European Convention on Human Rights would be incorporated into EU law. A public prosecutor’s office would be set 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 adjudicate conflicts between national prosecution services and the European prosecution service. When an inquiry was complete, the accused could be sent for trial before national courts. This scenario would require very considerable powers of imagination and invention at the level of the European institutions. Procedures for appointing and for the accountability of the European police chief and the European prosecutor’s office would have to be established. A European Court of Appeal would almost certainly be necessary. The organization of the ECJ and, particularly, the Court of First Instance would have to be modified. National jurisdictions would have to adapt to procedures and structures for which there was no precedent in national arrangements. The possibility of this scenario in the foreseeable future is remote, particularly as developments to date have been incremental small steps. However, the quest for effectiveness could lead the EU to approach this scenario through the increased competence of Europol and the harmonization of laws. The emergence of a common immigration policy could lead to a certain federalization of immigration police. In other words, the adoption of part, rather than the whole, of this scenario is possible. In the absence of a strategic vision shared by all the dominant political forces in Europe, the stability of a system based on the whole scenario would be in doubt. It would require a strong

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democratic element and a highly developed sense of European identity to give it legitimacy, and, at the moment, this is scarcely conceivable. For new member states the acquis that they would have to accept is of very low effectiveness and would probably not have much public support.

Conclusion: the problem of the timetable Between 1997 and 2000, the European Commission reported increasingly satisfactory progress in JHA in the candidate countries of East Central Europe selected for the first round of EU admission, whilst noting the persistence of certain criminal problems and flaws in the police and judicial systems. The confidential assessments of the Council of Ministers are thought to be much more severe. During the ‘pre-adhesion’ phase, which opened in November 1998, the countries 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 existing members. The room for manoeuvre to defend national interests – transitional arrangements – is not available in JHA. Over this whole area, they have to conform to all the rules at the date of entry. In dismantling border controls, there will be no fixed transitional period, but a decision will be taken by the Council of Ministers at an unspecified date that new members have satisfied the necessary technical conditions. Even after the Nice conference the date of entry for the candidate members remains uncertain, although it is now thought that the first countries will enter between 2003 and 2005. The timetable is not dependent on JHA cooperation but it is dependent on the reform of the Common Agricultural Policy, the system of financing the EU and the reform of its institutional arrangements. All three dossiers are very difficult and involve crucial national interests of the existing member states. They are also of great importance to the candidate members, who stand to gain from the CAP (even though they cannot enjoy the existing compensation payments) and structural funds but will almost certainly see valuable prizes snatched from them by EU reform before they enter. On the institutional arrangements, decisive progress was made in the Nice Treaty but difficult details remain. The problem for the candidate members is that their de facto integration into the economy of the EU proceeds apace but preserving majority support by their citizens for EU entry may become more difficult as time passes. This will be particularly the case if the material benefits to be gained from entry become less obvious by comparison with the already existing benefits of proximity to EU markets, direct investment flows from EU member countries and liberalization of trade. Parts of the acquis communautaire that seemed imposed, rather than obviously beneficial and freely accepted – and Schengen has been singled out in this chapter as an example – could produce a lowering of support over time for EU entry in the candidate countries. The problems of phased entry may also cause hostile feelings to emerge. Transitional periods are likely in the areas of agriculture and structural policy, which will seem to deprive the candidate members of

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the fruits of membership. Delayed introduction of free movement of persons may appear discriminatory even though the governments of the new members may 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 no longer the case. It is an increasingly important domain of debate and policy in the 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. The Pillar I areas of immigration and free movement are equally sensitive and the concerns of the candidate members in these areas must be heard. Care will have to be taken that the development of systems of cooperation do not appear discriminatory and oppressive to the candidate states. Entry into the EU represents a considerable loss of sovereign independence for these countries, which have only recently re-acquired it – this means that political turbulence is an everpresent possibility.

Appendix Treaty of Maastricht (main articles on JHA) Article K.1 Without prejudice to the powers of the European Community, the Union’s objective shall be to provide citizens with a high level of safety within an area of freedom, security and justice by developing common action among the Member States in the fields of police and judicial cooperation in criminal matters and by preventing and combating racism and xenophobia. That objective shall be achieved by preventing and combating crime, organized or otherwise, in particular terrorism, trafficking in persons and offences against children, illicit drug trafficking and illicit arms trafficking, corruption and fraud, through: closer cooperation between police forces, customs authorities and other competent authorities in the Member States, both directly and through the European Police Office (Europol), in accordance with the provisions of Articles K.2 and K.4; closer cooperation between judicial and other competent authorities of the 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 the Member 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

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the police, customs and other specialized law enforcement services of the Member States in relation to the prevention, detection and investigation of criminal offences; (b) the collection, storage, processing, analysis and exchange of relevant information, including information held by law enforcement services on reports 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 liaison officers, secondments, the use of equipment, and forensic research; (d) the common evaluation of particular investigative techniques in relation to the detection of serious forms of organized crime. 2. The Council shall promote cooperation through Europol and shall in particular, within a period of five years after the date of entry into force of the Treaty of Amsterdam: (a) enable Europol to facilitate and support the preparation, and to encourage the coordination and carrying out, of specific investigative actions by the competent authorities of the Member States, including operational actions of joint teams comprising representatives of Europol in a support capacity; (b) adopt measures allowing Europol to ask the competent authorities of the Member States to conduct and coordinate their investigations in specific cases and to develop specific expertise which may be put at the disposal of Member States to assist them in investigating cases of organized crime; (c) promote liaison arrangements between prosecuting/investigating officials specializing in the fight against organized crime in close cooperation with Europol; (d) establish a research, documentation and statistical network on crossborder crime. Article K.3 Common action on judicial cooperation in criminal matters shall include: (a) facilitating and accelerating cooperation between competent ministries and judicial or equivalent authorities of the Member States in relation 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 of organized crime, terrorism and illicit drug trafficking.

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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’) is particularly informative on this topic. 3 Presidency Conclusions, Tampere European Council (SI (1999) 800), Brussels (16 October 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 of societal security. See also Jef Huysmans, ‘Dire et écrire la sécurité: le dilemme normatif 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 Police Cooperation (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 et immigration’, 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).

Index

Accession Partnerships 142–3, 155; Act of Accession 138; European accession negotiation, corruption and accountability 66 accountability 62, 66, 72, 251–2 acquis communautaire 8–9, 61, 72–3, 155, 163, 171; core acquis 49; ECE countries and 172–4, 178, 240, 253 Adenauer, Konrad 88–9 Africa 28, 30, 163, 170, 233, 242 Agenda 2000 8, 61, 81, 100, 115n.11, 179, 190n.50 Ahtisaari, Marrti 244 Albania 41, 47, 54, 90, 100, 109; Albanian and Kurdish refugees, EU and 106; rule of law 63; smuggling migrants to Italy 242; workers from in Greece 60, 143 Algeria 88, 105, 111, 244 American Civil War 22, 25; American revolution 4, 21 Anderson, Malcolm 5–6, 13, 43, 231 Anglo-French declaration at St Malo (November 1998) 99, 244 applicant countries: Accession Partnerships 142–3, 155; border controls and visa regimes 66–7; disparities between 205–6; eastern frontier of EU (with Finland) 250; flexibility and 249; history in Eastern borderlands 248; problems of 247–9; right path to EU membership 90–91; rules of acquis communautaire and 253; Schengen acquis 54–5, 58, 69, 195; selected indicators 57; vicinities are lasting realities 69 Arbeitstouristen 163–4, 167, 170, 179–80 Argentina 25 Armenia 110, 174 Asia 28–30, 163, 170, 174, 233; AsiaPacific Rim 99

Association Agreements 79, 90–91 asylum, immigration and 64, 252; transit migrants 172; unanimity rule, asylum and immigration 250 asylum seekers: fraudulent 191; immigration controls 2; policing and 214; political refugees and 173, 232; Schengen and 245; treatment of 241 ‘Atlantic Community’ 35, 78–9 Australia 49, 80, 199 Austria 23, 49, 138, 152; émigrés from communist era 176; Freedom Party 44; immigration and 57–8, 163; Schengen 194; service workers needed for ageing population 179; wage level 65, 165; work permits 58 Austro-Hungarian confines 39, 44, 203 Azerbaijan 80, 110 Badie, Bertrand 43 Badinter Committee 141 Bakunin, Mikhail 25 Balkans 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 NATO and 47; Europe’s relative impotence 99; former Ottoman-dominated territories 71; Russian policy in 109 Baltic states 47, 51, 57, 68–9, 105, 108, 127, 142; frontier 191; NATO membership and 197; Russians in 155; transit for illegal migrants 198–9 Barcelona process (1995) 92, 104, 111–12 Bartolini, Stefano 5 Barwig, Klaus 198 Basque country 125 Bavaria 198

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bazaar economy 195, 236 Beck, Ulrich 44 Belarus 49, 67, 100, 102, 108, 174–5; borders and 195–6; EU membership application 207; migration from 199; Polish minority in 127 Belgium 19, 58, 149–51, 154, 195 Benelux states 93, 163; Benelux Common Travel Area 245 Berlin: Berlin Conference (1994) 235; Berlin construction sites 167; Berlin Wall 1, 32, 139–40, 191, 248; meeting of Schengen states (December 1998) 193 Bibó, István 119 Bienkowski, Mare 195 Bigo, Didier 5, 8, 11–12, 202, 207 Binckey, Robert 23–4 Bismarck, Otto von 27 Blair, Anthony (PM UK) 31, 244 Bodin, Jean 20 Bohemia 88, 119 borderless world 42, 191 borders: agricultural people 40; approaches to problem 41–2; as bridges 206; controls as means of exclusion 202; definitions 3, 51; difficult to enforce 64; East European borders 54; elusive for unidentified object 45–9; empires, borders and 39, 43; Estonian–Russian border, different time and economic zones 207; foreign policy and 95; France–German border 54; German–Czech border 203, 205; goodness-of-fit comparable to West European 52–5; hard border, members and non-members of EU 2, 245; identity markers 231–2; imagined borders, real borders and 56; internal and external characteristics 2; lines rather than zones 43; militarization of external through technology 235–6; Polish–German border, border guards 11, 85; Polish–Ukranian border 196; political violence, borders and 232; sharp or fuzzy European? 102–3; systems and 4–7; technical problems when EU frontier moves 105, 232; ‘time inscribed into space’ 207; transportation and 4; unemployment, borders and 232; ‘wealth’ border 52; Western European borders, natural through evolution 53 Bort, Eberhard 5, 10

Bosnia 47, 90, 103, 109, 112, 118, 244; Bosnia-Herzegovina 46, 193 boundaries 4–5, 40–45, 84 Britain see UK Broek, Hans van den 195 Brussels: domestic administrative corruption and 65–6; enlargement and democratic 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 membership application 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 and 119; rule of law 63; secure passport 68; state of judiciary 65; Turks and Pomaks in 121; visa regime 67; Workers for EU and 59 Bundesgrenzschutz (BGS- border police) 220, 223; German unification and 204 Bundeskriminalamt (BKA – federal police) 220, 223 Buzan, Barry 202, 244 Byzantine empire 80, 86 Calvin, John 89 Canada 19, 23, 25, 199; Canadian Supreme Court, Quebec provincial government 145 Cannes decision 95 CAP 34, 58, 112, 253 Caps, Stéphane Pierre 44 Catalonia 149, 151, 155 Cavour, Count 22–4, 26 CEECs 155–6, 205; accession to EU and 105, 138; Copenhagen Document (1990) and 140–1, 145; EU police and fears over 230; institutional cooperation and 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 with Western police 226; right to freedom of movement 237; sensitive data and 226; Stability Pact and 142; transformation of and hypothesis of sluice-gates 234–5; visa requirements 231 Central and East European countries see CEECs Central Europe 9–11, 21, 23; 1980s

Index 259 emergence 85; cultural border argument and 56; enlargement always an option 47; expectations of EU membership 99–100; first wave of new entrants to EU 96–7; problems of borders 69 Central Treaty Organization 79 centre, periphery and 44, 46, 205 CFSP 9, 102, 107–8, 113, 141; an aspiration not reality 244 Charter of Human Rights 249 China 87, 174–5; Chinese illegal immigrants (Dover June 2000) 242 Christiansen, Thomas 12 CIS countries 67–8, 137 citizenship 34, 44 Clinton, President 40–1 Cold War 7, 28–9, 51, 105, 205; buffer zones 98; cooperation with CEECs 220; effect of end of 85–6; Europe and 1, 45, 78, 80; organized crime as surrogate for 204; OSCE since end of 125; pattern of crime 200; security relationships in aftermath 98; Western Europe and 79, 81 Cologne European Council (June 2000) 107 Committee of the Regions 151 Common Agricultural Policy see CAP common European currency 137 common European standard 143–4; autonomy and consociation 147–8; democracy and rule of law 144; minority rights 146; protection of human rights 144–6; right of citizenship 146–7 Common External Tariff, customs duties 84 Common Foreign and Security Policy see CFSP (Common Travel Area), Schengen and 245 Commonwealth of Independent States see CIS communism 28, 56, 67, 247; aftermath 120–1, 174; propaganda and crime 229; ‘threat vacuum’ after defeat 204, 243; ‘triple transition’ 200 Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe see CSCE Copenhagen, Conference on the Human Dimension of CSCE (1998) see Copenhagen Document Copenhagen Document 139–40, 144, 147

corruption 192, 200, 218, 230; accountability and 62, 66 Corsica 125 Council of Europe 47–8, 78–80, 124–5, 162 Crete 111 crime 2, 55, 59, 85, 105, 204, 242; crossborder 11, 191–3, 199, 200–6, 214, 218, 232; formal barriers, criminals and 55; immigrants and 248; need for definition 227, Roma and 122; see also organized crime; transnational organized crime (TOC) 228; transnational transit, criminal courier networks criminal courier networks, transnational transit 173 criminal police, information from intelligence community 216 Croatia 13, 56, 62–3, 67, 90, 103, 193 cross-border regionalism 204–5 CSCE 80, 82 Cullen, Peter 204 culture, division of East from West 55–61 Cyprus 79, 90–91, 100–1, 108, 110–11, 112; EU membership and 192, 230; increase in forces 236 Czarnecki, Ryszard 196 Czech Republic 13, 41, 89, 137; border controls 194–6, 205; contract workers 175; EU environmental protection for 106; 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; NATO membership and 72, 108; PHARE and 205; police cooperation with 220–1; security forces 230; undocumented Western ‘workforce’ 177; visa policy 67; workers for EU and 59 Czech–German border 196 Czechoslovakia 52, 121, 197; velvet divorce 191, 241 Dayton accords 47, 112 de Witte, Bruno 8 Delors, Jacques 38, 45–6, 48 democracy 8, 70, 122, 237; CEEC police and immigration 236 democratic deficit, EU and member governments 70 Denmark 58, 83, 88, 150, 241, 249

260

Index

Díaz, Porfirio 25 differentiation 43, 100, 102, 145, 237 Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST – counter-spy intelligence service) 220–1 Disraeli, Benjamin 27 drug trafficking 191, 201–3, 214, 216–17, 233, 242–3, 246–7; harmonization of law 251 Dublin Convention 64, 202 East Central Europe see ECE East Eastern Europe see EEE East Germany, West Germany 55 Eastern Europe 10–12, 67, 96, 205; after (1989) 70; building institutional social capital 66; Christian Orthodox and Muslim 71; colony 52–3; crises 240; critics of enlargement 69; empires on periphery of West 87; European identity 56; EU’s preoccupation with 111; 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 public agencies 62; anti-foreign sentiments 176; cheap foreign labour and 172; controls of eastern and southern borders 171; corruption and accountability 62; crime rates 204; democratization of sociopolitical institutions 174; different time and economic zones 207; (im)migration into, new phenomenon since (1990s) 170–2, 175–6; informal economies of 170, 175; internationalization of minority issue and 124–5; law enforcement 203; ‘marches’ 3; migration and 161; NATO and 244; negotiations to enter EU 240; NGOs and 125, 178; post-industrialism 178–9; refugee and asylum policies 173; ‘rejoin the West’ 78; shadow economy, economic decline and 200; short-term contract workers 174; undocumented Western specialists 177; westbound transnational migrations 163–70; Western images after (1945) 90 EEC’s Association Agreements, Greece and Turkey 79 EEE: corruption of officials 171; incomeseeking migrants to ECE 175–6, 180;

refugees from 174; settlers and refugees 180 Egypt 24 Eisel, Dr Horst 199 Ekeus, Rolf 125 enlargement 3, 7, 48, 96, 227–8, 234; balance between freedom of movement and security 219, 232–3; criminality and 59; crisis within EU and 178; Eastern border and 51; environmental problems from Eastern Europe 106; equal treatment for all citizens 237–8; ethnic minorities and 117–18, 128; Eurobarometer poll on 70; foreign policy 95–6; how it is judged 218; immigration and 57; international leverage for EU 9; one-size-fits-all 72; open-ended 45; ‘others’ created by 105; problems of 105, 249; risk of autonomous organization in policing 224–5; rolling 90; terrorism and 106 environmental standards 8, 244 Erasmus programme 34 Estonia 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; ethnic cleansing 53; ethnic discrimination 156; ‘ethnic entrepreneurs’ 120; ethnic minorities in ECE 117–18; ‘ethnic’ and ‘minorities, EU and 138; ethnicity, territory and 33, 57; historical background 118–20; legal and policy regimes 124–5; perspectives and conclusions 128–9; racial discrimination154; relations with neighbouring countries 126–8; tendencies 122–3 EU 48, 82, 93; admission criteria and implementation 8; aggrandizement territorial and communitarian 97; Algerian civil war and 105; ambivalence about eastern enlargement 85; ‘an unidentified political object’ 45; concern about East European borders 67, 248; cooperation with Russia and Ukraine 73; dilemmas of realism and 112; Eastern neighbours and membership 192; immigration control 241–2; importance of external

Index 261 boundary 97–8; independence from United States 99; ‘internal security’ 214; law enforcement cooperation, difficulties 246–7; major player in Eurasia 107; membership, costs and benefits 248–9; migratory pressure from East and South 199; minorities 139, 151–3, 249; mistake of high-tech warfare 217–18; national languages and 149; new border issues 1–2; new spaces and new differentiations 47; numbers of Roma in selected EU countries 60; partial members and European Parliament 35; ‘privileged partnership’ 92; redistributive community 34; regulation of work permits 58; relation between centre and periphery 46; revenue of 83–4; ‘rolling’ border 35; South-Eastern Stability Pact and 91; state-like qualities 83; status of 5–6, unworkable without clear boundaries 78–9; see also enlargement; Structural Funds EU borders, enlargement and 3; future shape of 13–14, 232; nature of 10–13; scope of 7–10 EU and ethnic minorities 137–9; double or common standard 139–40; minority protection as criterion for recognition 141; opinions on accession and accession partnerships 142–3; Pact on Stability in Europe (1993–5) 141–2; stages in external policy 140–1 EU Freedom of Services (Employee Posting) Act (1971) 166 EU-endorsed Stability Pact 69 EU–Macedonia agreement 73 ‘EurAfrique’ 99 Euro, the 57 Euro-Mediterranean Partnership 99, 104 ‘Euro-paralysis’, identity and democracy 85 Euro-polity, unbounded entity with fuzzy borders 14 Eurodac Convention 64 Eurojust 64, 216, 250 Europe, beyond European frontier 32–5; definition 88; frontier divides peoples 18; frontiers in the past 85–90; fuzzy borders of 79–82; ‘hard’ external boundary at various stages 100; identified with EU 81; imaginary space 82; nineteenth-century was the West 87; Russia, division between 103;

security agents and 234; security and frontiers 241; shape of future? 112–14; Western Christendom 90; where does it end? 17 ‘Europe without shores’ (‘L’Europe sans rivages’ ) 45, 78 European accession negotiation, corruption and accountability 66 European Charter of Regional and Minority Languages (1992) 125 European Community 78 European Convention of Human Rights 81, 145, 156 European Council (Copenhagen 1993) 8, 54, 57, 95, 103, 140 European Court of Appeal 252 European Court of First Instance 252 European Court of Human Rights 216 European Court of Justice 246, 249, 252 European Free Trade Area 80 European Human Rights Convention 145 European Initiative for Peace and Reconciliation 152 European integration 1, 45; delay demoralizing to ECE 181; institutional transformation and 61; separatist feelings and 154–5 European Monetary Union (EMU) 34, 51 European Observatory for Migrations 199 European police authority 213 European Police College 64 European Political Cooperation 141 European Rapid Reaction Force by (2003) 107, 244 ‘European Security and Defence Policy’ 102 European, The 200 European Union citizens 153 Europeanization 61, 87, 214–15, 219 Europol 64, 66, 85, 193, 200, 217–18, 252; CEECs fears of 221–2, 231; criminal activity and frontiers 242, 251; European Interpol 246–7; level of international police cooperation 225, 244; Schengen and 244–7; terrorism and 216; treaty basis for 243 Euroregions 204, 206 Eurosceptics 249 Euskadi 149, 151 ex-Yugoslavia see former Yugoslavia exclusion 1–2, 44, 78, 92, 202 ‘external nationalism’, ‘lack-of-fit’ and 53

262

Index

fascism 28, 31, 98 Field of Blackbirds 33 Finland 58, 79, 83, 138; Aaland Islands and Sami people 152 First International 25 fiscal boundaries, modern state and 83 Fordism 5, 28–30 foreign, definition 95 foreign direct investment 56–7, 72, 253 formal barriers, criminals and 55 former Soviet Union 38, 170, 174–5 former Yugoslavia 38, 62, 72–3, 100; conflict in 92–3; difficult borders 54; EU membership and 106; (im)migration 163, 174–5; minority problems 117; refugees and 173 ‘fortress Europe’ 2, 99, 178, 213, 245 Forward Studies Unit (1999) 52 Foucault, Michel 29 Foucher, Michel 46, 207 Framework 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 communist era 176; first national map (1525) 20; immigration 163, 199; les frontières, s’en fout! (to hell with borders!) 39; Mediterranean security and 111; minority protection 145–6; Mitterrand and 31; policing and 223, 231; reactions to enlargement 233; SCTIP for cooperation with CEECs 220; work permits 58 France–German border, East European borders 54 Franco, General 80 Franco-Italian frontier 241 Franco-Spanish frontier 241 fraud 64, 203, 242–3, 247 free movement of persons 9, 180, 237; effect of delay 254 Freedom House-SAR survey (March 2000) 53–4 French revolution 4, 21 ‘front’, ‘frontier’ 42 frontiers, Americans and 17–18, 39; control of external by supranational agency 252; control of external as seen by EU members 241–3; history’s orphans 33; policy distributed across Pillar I 243; shared perceptions of 240–1; territory and 17–21 ‘fundamentalism’ 32

Galicia 149, 151 Garibaldi (Southern Italy) 27 Gelliner, Ernest 53 Geneva Convention, Austrian presidency of EU 202 Genoa 216 geographiers, frontier and 18 geopolitics, enlargement by stages and 99–102; grand strategy and geoeconomics 97–9; meaning 98; new borders and 96 Georgia 91–2, 110 Geremek, Bronislaw 196 German Bund 24 German government, movement of labour and 9 German Länder 150, 221 German Project Group on Visa Harmonization 201 German unification, Bundesgrenzschutz (BGS) 204 German–Czech border 203, 205 German–French reconciliation 54 German–Polish border 54, 85, 202–3 Germany 23, 24, 27, 85, 87, 118–19, 151; contract workers 169; cooperation with CEECs 221–2; Drang nach Osten 40; émigrés from communist era 176; Germans abroad and 127–8; jus sanguinis 33; policing 204, 223; Polish immigration fear 59; relations with Poland 236; residents from Hungary 10; service workers needed for ageing population 179; threat of immigration 57–8, 163, 248; tightening of asylum laws (1993) 196, 201; transition period before free movement of people 198; work permits 58 Gettysburg 33 Gibraltar 84 Giscard d’Estaing, Valéry 38 global terrorism 228 globalization 2, 4–5, 29, 39, 43–5, 95; bribes as downside 64; economic and increase in crime 213; nationalism and 48; territorial jurisdictions and 85; transnational population flows 161; victims of 31 ‘golden banana’ from Barcelona to Livarno 99 good fences, good neighbours? 66–9 Good Friday Agreement (10 April 1998) 152

Index 263 good governance, set of institutions that structure political life 61–2 Gorbachev, Mikhail 82, 88, 98 Grabbe, Heather 48 gradualism, map of Europe and 97 Great Britain see UK Great Depression, territorial governance and 28 Great Power (Grossraum) 42 Great Powers, the 53 Greece 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 on Turkey 110; role in Cyprus 101; wasted structural aid programmes 73 ‘grey list’ 193 Guéhenno, Jean-Marie 13 Guillaume, James 25 Habermas, Jürgen 33 Habsburgs 20–1, 23–4, 53, 119 Haider, Jörg 31, 44, 71 Handelstourismus 163, 170 hard border, members and non-members of EU 2, 245 Hassan, King (Morocco) 104 Hassner, Pierre 5–6, 8–9, 11, 13 Havel, Václav 8, 56 Helsinki summit (December 1999) 38, 47, 51–2, 54, 56–7, 173; ‘parallel principle’ 179; Turkey as eligible for EU membership 91, 110 Heywood, Paul 53 High Commission on National Minorities 139 High-Level Working Group on Asylum and Immigration 242 high-tech security 218 Hildebrandt, Achim 201 Hill, Christopher 5, 7–8, 10–12 Himalayas 42 historians, frontiers and 20 Hobbes, Thomas 20 Holmes, Leslie 200 Holmes, Stephen 65 Holy Roman Empire 86, 119 Home and Justice items 62 Hughes, Kirsty 48 Human Rights Commission 125 human 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; border with former Yugoslavia 55; contract workers 175; EU environmental protection 106; EU membership application 161, 178, 192, 233; external nationalism 54; homosexual associations 123; (im)migration and 161, 167–8, 174–5, 180; internationalization of minority issue 125; law enforcement agents 203; minority population 13, 60, 117–19, 124, 126, 131–2; NATO membership and 108; police seminars 224; problems with Romania 109; rule of law 63; security forces 230; Status Bill 55, 68, 74, 126; struggle to keep borders open 67; Turks pushed out 21; USA police training in 203, 221, 224; workers for EU and 59 Huntington, Samuel 56, 88; ‘The Clash of Civilizations’ 87 Huysmans, Jef 202 Iceland 81–3, 97, 108, 195 identities, fragmentation 45 ‘identity’ politics 13, 113, 122–3, 240 Iglicka, Krystyna 172 imagined borders, real borders and 56 immigration 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 on EU border 72; regulated 207; Schengen and 245; third-country nationals and 153 immigration and emigration countries, within one area 233–4 imperialism 28 Inca 18 inclusion, exclusion 78, 92 India 20, 31 Indian Mutiny 23, 25 Industrial Revolution, spread of 87 informal sector of economies 166–8, 170, 175 ‘insecurity’, definition by EU members 243

264

Index

inside/outside distinction, EU and NATO 83 ‘intelligence’ dream, global surveillance of Muslim communities 216 interdependence 2, 5, 44 interest groups 62 Inter-governmental Conferences, EU enlargement and 91, 110 international conflict, scapegoating outsiders 104 international cross-border cooperation 203, 204–6 International Labour Organization (ILO) 162 International Law Enforcement Academy (ILEA Budapest) 203 International Organization for Migration 162 international travellers, highly skilled from ECE 169 internationalization 124–5, 215 interpenetration, interior and exterior of states 44 Interpol 193, 217, 222, 242, 246–7 INTERREG 12, 153, 205 ‘invention of the Frontiers’ 21 IOM 162, 199 Iran 110 Iraq 2, 110, 244 Ireland 20, 58, 84, 152, 154, 232, 249 Iron Curtain 32, 45, 78, 191–2, 194, 197, 204 Islam 86, 104, 123 Isle of Man 84 Israel 79, 106, 110 Italy 23, 24, 80, 88, 104; Algeria and 5; Confcommercio on crime 200–1; Mediterranean security 111; migration to 163; policing and fight against Mafia 223; problem of controlling external frontier 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, 80 Japanese imperialism 98 Jews 33, 89, 118, 123, 131–3 JHA 13, 59, 62, 240, 244; acquis 51, 65–6, 73; applicant countries and 247; institutional development and implementation 65; scenarios for future

development of cooperation 249–53; Tampere programme and 243 Jonas, Hans 43 Joregensen, Knud Erik 12 Josef, Franz 129 Juárez, Benito 25 judicial cooperation, qualified majority voting 251 Justice and Home Affairs see JHA Kant, I. 6, 43, 88 Kanther, Manfred 203–4 Kashubes 121, 123 Keremans, Bart 178 Kohl, Chancellor 31 kombinacje (shady arrangements) 167–8 Korea 98 Kosovo 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; Western reaction to refugees 236 Kundera, Milan 119 Kurier, ‘Bratislava Connection’ 201 Kyle, Keith 111 Labour Party (1997), frontiers and 240 ‘Lands Between, The’ 119 language use, centre and periphery 30 Latin America 29–30; Iberian States 193 Latvia, EU membership application 57, 100–1, 192, 197; minorities in 117, 124–5, 132, 142–3, 146 League of Nations 125 Lebanon 44 Lebensraum 28, 98 Leninists, dependency theorists and 30 Lichtenstein 84 Liebich, André 9 limes (Roman concept) 3, 18–19, 39, 199 limite (French concept) 18 Lippovans 118 Lithuania, border treaty with Russia 198; cross-border migrations 170; EU membership application 57, 59, 100–1, 192, 197; minorities 117–18, 121, 127, 132 Luhmann, Niklas 83 Luxembourg 58, 150, 154 Maastricht Treaty 51, 84–5, 96, 137, 141, 214; ambiguity of 227; Committee of the Regions 150–1; Europol 251

Index 265 Macedonia 47, 73, 141; Bulgarian border and 68; EU and 90, 106, 109; rule of law 62–3 mafia activities 200, 213–14, 223, 228–9, 233 Magyars 24–5, 55, 119, 134n.6 Mahgreb 90, 104, 111–12 Maier, Charles 4, 6, 13, 97 majority voting 250 male bread-winner family 28 Malta 90, 96, 111, 192 ‘mani pulita’ (‘clean hands’) coalitions 66 map, cousin to the landscape 20 marche (French concept) 3, 18 Maria Theresa’s cameralist administration 21 Marshall Plan aid 80 Marxists 25 Mathaeus programme 250 Maxwell, James Clerk 22 Mearsheimer, John 112 Meciar administration (Slovakia) 194, 197 Médecins sans frontières 39, 43 Meiji Restoration (1867–8) 23 ‘membership action programmes’ 91 mental maps, decision makers 96; physical geography and 88 mercantilism, wealth a national resource 21 Metternich, Count 89 Mexico 23, 73; French imperial ambitions (1867) and 25 Middle East 106, 163, 170, 232 migrants 47, 230; educated ‘professional’ 172; illegal 196, 198; transit 172; victims of crime 202 migration 2, 10, 40, 44; control may be myth 206; crime and 191, 207; fear of invasion 231–3; flows from CEECs changing 234–5; ‘hard shell’ 99; hunchback 178; international 161; political refugees 173; problem of 248; transnational West-East 176–7 ‘migration targets’ 174 Mikhailov, Yevgenii 197 Miller, William 53 Miloševic dynasty 51, 73 Minsk Agreement (December 1991) 137 Mitteleuropa, prejudice against Slavs and Jews 89 Mitterrand, President 91 modern polity, necessity for have clear borders 83–5 Moldova 49, 51, 54, 68, 117; EU

membership application 100, 207; frontier 191; price tag for felonies 64 Monaco 84 Monar, Jörg 62 money laundering 191, 200, 203, 229, 233, 242, 247, 250 Morawska, Ewa 5, 10–11 Morocco 7–8, 97, 104, 111, 153, 241 ‘multi-speed Europe’ 178, 181 multiple ethnicity 24 ‘multiverse’, ‘universe’ 42 Mungiu-Pippidi, Alina 8–9, 11 NAFTA 19, 235 national centralization, imperial models of control and 24 national economic sovereignty, erosion of 5 national identity cards 216 nationalism 48, 53–4, 247; diaspora communities and 128–9; majority’s identity 122 NATO 46–7, 78, 82, 100; article Five 83; bombing of Serbia 86; bridge with Russia 244; CFSP and 102, 113; defining institution 93; enlargement of 38, 48, 72–3, 247; EU inability to supplant 98; impact of EU’s defence dimension 106–7, 112–13; Kosovo war and 70; mistake of high-tech warfare 217–18; Portugal 80; prospect of full membership 90; South-Eastern Europe Stability Pact and 91; terrorism and 216; Turkey and 92; WEU and 108 naturalization 142, 146–7 Nazism 98 Neckel, Sighard 44 Netherlands 58, 88 Neumann, Iver 86, 89 new administrative elites, power and 26 new industry (1850s and 1860s) 26 new sites of growth 30 ‘new threats’, technological 217 New York 30, 216 New Zealand 80, 199 NGOs 31–2, 238; accountability and 62, 72; human-rights 178; militarization of borders and 236; minority rights and 146; unease about CEEC and SIS 231; Western and ECE minority groups 125 nomads 19–20, 40, 43 North Africa 112 North American bison 18 Northern Ireland 111, 125, 152, 155, 235

266

Index

Norway 66, 81, 83, 103, 164; associate member of WEU 108; frontier 241; SIS in 195 observatories 250–1 Offe, Claus 200 Office of a High Commissioner for National Minorities 125 ‘offshore’ financial centres, relationship to EU 84 oil crises (1970s) 29 old aristocracies, land and 26 open-ended incrementalism, advantages 10 Orbán, Viktor (Hungarian PM) 55 organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) 80 Organization for European Economic Cooperation 79–80 organization on Security and Cooperation in Europe see OSCE organized crime 13, 192, 202, 214, 219; beliefs on origins of 229–30; CEECs and 225–6, 228–9, 233; fear of corruption in future member police 230–1; harmonization of law 251; issues of migration and 207, 223, 233; transnational 228 Ortelius, atlases 20 OSCE 47, 80, 92, 107, 109; minority protection and 124–5, 139; Stability Pact (1993–5) 142 ‘other’ alienated Europe 103, 219 ‘other’ as geopolitical problem 104–5 ‘otherness’ 97 Ottoman empire 24, 53, 57, 87, 89, 103, 119 Pact of Regional Security and stability (Russia) 198 paedophilia 246 Palma agreement 219 Paris Commune (1871) 25 Paris conference (1995) 142 Partnership for Peace 109 passport forgery 201 patterns of association 92 Peace of the Pyrenees (1659) 20 penal cooperation, police cooperation and 227 peripheral borderlands, nation-state and 204 periphery, centre and 44, 46, 205

Perroux, François 45 PHARE programmes 65, 72, 142, 195–6, 205 Pharmaciens sans frontières 39 ‘Plan Balladur’ (1995) 125–6 Poland 33, 79, 86, 88–9; border controls 194–5, 205, 235; border with Ukraine 55; boundaries 118; contract workers 175; corruption and accountability 62; EEE quasi-tourists 172, 174; EU concern about borders 67; EU environmental protection 106; EU membership 13, 49, 57–8, 71, 100–1, 161, 178, 192, 233; (im)migration potential 59, 174, 180, 199, 248; key state in power politics (1939) 98; migration and 161, 167–8; minority population 21, 117–19, 123, 128, 132–3; National Bureau of Labour on Western migrants 176–7; NATO membership 108; Poles in ex-Soviet Union 127; police cooperation and 220–1; police seminars 224; problem of agriculture 72; Schengen and 194; security forces and 230; workers for EU 59 Poland and Ukraine, visa requirement between 11, 85 Poland’s Market Economy Research Institute 195 policing, current methods of cooperation with CEECs 219–20; European police of European criminal law 252; institutional cooperation 225–8; networks and 213, 217, 247; on-line access to national Schengen databases 245–6; operational cooperation 220–2; technical assistance and training 222–5 policy of ‘conditionality’ 142 Polish–German border, border guards 11, 85 Polish–Ukrainian border 196 political violence, borders and 232 Pomaks 118, 121 Portugal 58, 80, 84, 96, 165–6, 198 Portuguese and Azorians, cleaning women 19 positive discrimination 123, 136n.18 post-1968 post-materialist ideologies 52 post-Amsterdam Treaty, legal complexities raised 218 post-Cold War Europe 78, 81 post-communist countries 57, 120–1, 123–5, 200, 204

Index 267 post-modernism 29, 40, 97 post-war world, geopolitical understanding of 98 process of ‘securization’ 202 Province of Quebec 145, 149–50 push/pull economic pressures, Westernstyle standard of living 169 Putin, Vladimir 88 Qaddafi’s Libya 111 qualified majority voting, asylum and immigration 251 ‘quasi-species’ 42 Quilès, Paul 246 Quing dynasty, Taiping rebellion 23 railroads, creating modern territoriality (1850–80) 21–7 rapid response system (Sirène offices), transfrontier threat and 193 Reagan, Ronald 31 realpolitik 2, 10, 103; scenarios for post2015 177–81 Recommendation 1201 (1993) 147–8 redistribution, insiders/outsiders and 84 religious cleansing 53 remote policing 217 ‘République une et indivisible’ 124 Retaillé, Denis 45 ‘return of minorities’ 120 ‘return to Europe’ concept 81 ‘rights of free movement’ scenario 180 Rochau, August Ludwig von 22 Roma 59–61, 117–18, 122, 126, 131–4, 143, 154–5 Roman, Orthodox churches 104 Romania 24, 51, 56–7; border with Moldova 55; corruption and accountability 62; dissatisfaction with borders 54; elections (2000) 57, 70; EU membership application 9, 47, 49, 100–1, 192, 197, 234; EU’s common visa regime 85, 106; Hungarians living in 192; immigration potential 59, 163, 174; inter-ethnic problems solved 70; migration 170, 175; minority population 59–60, 117–18, 124, 126, 133, 143; police cooperation 221; rule of law 63; state of judiciary 65; views on Hungarian Status Bill 68; visa regime 67; workers for EU 59 Romans, idea of frontier 18

Rousseau, J.-J. 6; Discourse on the Origin of Inequality 41 Ruggie, John Gerard 6–7, 43, 45–6 Russia 2, 72, 100, 106, 247; Asian country with Europeanized elite 89; Baltic States and 69; British and German entrepreneurs before (1914) 87; Chechnya and 48; citizenship issues 35, 127; Common Strategy by EU 99; empire and 39; Estonia on bad terms with 197, 235; EU enlargement and 97, 102–3, 105, 108–9; external frontier 241; JHA and 247; mafia 229, 233; membership of EU and 9, 92, 207; migration 170, 174, 199; Orthodox rulers 86; OSCE and 107; protest at borders 195; role after fall of Constantinople 89; us and them attitude 105; Western assistance for law enforcement 65–6; Westernizers 81, 88 Russia and EU, security threats to each other 12 Russian, Trans-Siberian railway 23 Russian empire 53, 119 Ruthenes 118, 123 ‘safe third-country’ rule 173 sans frontièrism (borderlessness) 39 Sardinia 111 Savoy 88 Scandinavia 24, 163, 199 Schäffle, A.E. 22 Schäuble, Wolfgang 90 Schengen: acquis 1, 66; applicant countries and 54–5, 58, 206, 253; asylum policy 245; borders and 2, 7, 9–10, 13, 32, 41, 47, 231–3; borders, justification for controls 232; borders, problems of 49, 218; continued development 247; EU and 243; implementation since (March 1995) 191, 193–4, 206; JHA acquis and 66; migration and 202, 245; negotiations for 219; Pillar III 227, 250; policing and 214; problem of criminality and 59, 242; reinforced informal 234; seen as imposed regime 244; Slovakia and 68; visa policy 193, 245 ‘Schengen Europe’, ‘Maze Europe’ 13 Schengen information System see SIS ‘Schengenland’, controls at external frontiers of 192–3 Schmitt, Carl 44; Der Nomos der Erde 42

268

Index

Scotland 154 Scott, James C. 21 SCTIP 220, 223 seasonal agricultural contract workers 169 Second World War see World War II security: cooperation and 206; internal, collaboration with foreign countries 202; links with criminality and immigration 245; wider definitions and bigger problems 105–8 security deficit 213–15, 245 sensitive intelligence, transnational sharing and 246 September 11 (2001) 2, 49, 104, 106, 112; danger of enlarging definition of terrorism 216; security professions and 215 Serbia 13, 24, 33, 41, 46–7, 51, 69; Bulgaria and 118 Service de Cooperation Technique Internationale de Police see SCTIP shabashka (‘kick-off ’ jobs) 171 shadow economy, economic decline and 200 ‘shatterbelts’, geopolitical regions and 99, 244 Shlapentokh, Vladimir 176 Siberian fur animals 18 Sicily 111 Siedel, Jutta 205 Sieur de Beauplan map (Ukraine) 20 Single Market 112, 137, 241 SIS 63–4, 66, 78, 85, 106, 193, 195; CEECs and 213, 231; cooperation between police and 242, 245; networks and 217; second-generation (SIS II) 195, 246 Slovakia 2, 54, 59, 89, 137; EU membership 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; EU membership application 57, 62, 100–1, 108, 192, 233; minority population 117–18, 121, 133–4; Schengen 194, 230; visas for Romanians and Bulgarians (2000) 67 social democratic parties 28 social science, clear and distinct boundaries 29 social welfare deficits 232

socialist parties, market solutions 31 ‘societal security’ 202 Somme 33 South Asians, physicians in New England 19 South Tyrol 155 South-Eastern Europe 69, 72; transparent and effective judiciary 72 South-Eastern Europe Stability Pact (1999) 73, 91, 109 Southern Europe 170, 174 sovereignty 20, 39 Soviet Union 29, 31, 82, 144 Spain 58, 80, 84, 88, 96, 104, 119; Autonomous Communities 149; Gonzàlez, Suàrez 31; Mediterranean security and 111; migration 166, 198; policing 223; separatism 154 Spanish–Spanish reconciliation 54 Special Protocols to the Act of Accession 152 ‘special relationship’, EU and 103 Spinoza, B. 41 stagflation (1970s) 29 Status Bill (Hungary) 55, 68, 74, 126 steamboats 21 Strasbourg 195, 224, 245–6 street prostitution 200, 233 strong media 62 Structural Funds 34, 56, 84, 152, 253 sub-Saharan African nationals, Community law and 153 Süddeutsche Zeitung 196, 201 Südtiroler Volkspartei 145 Suez 98, 112 Sully, Duc de 88 supranationality 31–2, 98, 113 ‘suspect’ Western club 9 Sweden 58, 83, 88, 119, 138, 195; Sami people 152 Switzerland 24, 81, 84, 88, 100, 103, 150; external frontier 241; migration to 164; Russian mafia and 200 symbolic politics, realpolitik and 2, 10 Syria 110 Tampere 96 Tampere Council (1999) 13, 64, 207, 214, 243 Tartars 118 Task Force of senior law officers 245 ‘tax havens’ 84 Taylor, Paul 84

Index 269 technology, focus on networks 30 telegraph 21–2 temporary industrial contract workers 169, 174–5 territorial nationalism, memories of historical greatness 54 ‘territorialists’, ‘globalists’ 6, 29–32; identity space and decision space 31–2 territoriality 19, 21, 28, 34 territoriality triumphant (1880–1968) 27 territorially defined demos 13 terrorism 2, 13, 202, 214; Europol and 216, 246; globalization of 214, 228; harmonization of law and 251; post-11 September 49, 104; protest and 216; see also September 11 Thailand, King Mongut and 23 Thatcher, Margaret 31, 240 ‘third-country nationals’ 153 Third World, (im)migrant labour 173–4, 176, 179–80; policing by EU 220, 224 trade unions 28 Trail of Tears 33 training sessions, technical assistance for police 222, 224 trans-border cooperation, ethnic minorities and 129 Transcaucasus 106, 110 transition, minorities and 122 transnational migrations 161–3 transnational organized crime (TOC) 228 transnational transit, criminal courier networks 173 transnationalization 214, 237 Treaty 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 and security policy) 216, 219, 243–4; Pillar III (security and migration) 216, 218–19, 227, 234, 243–4, 246, 250 Treaty of European Union see Maastricht Treaty Treaty of Nice 151, 243, 249, 253 Treaty of Paris 80 Treaty of Rome 7, 45, 79–80, 84 Treaty of Verdun (843) 18 Treaty of Westphalia (1648) 4, 20 Trevi informal agreement 214, 219 ‘triple transition’, communism and 200 Tudor, Vadim 71

Tunisia 111 Turkey 2, 9, 13, 35, 49; accepted by West during Cold War 81; associate member of WEU 108; Association Agreement 90–91; ‘Atlantic’ Alliance 79; Black Sea and 86–7; border with Greece 88; Central Treaty Organization 79; CFSP discussions, problem of 108; citizens in Germany 128, 153; conflict in Kurdish regions 244; Helsinki summit (1999) and 51; (im)migration 196, 199; NATO and 72, 92, 109; problems over enlargement 97, 109–11; question of EU membership 91, 100–1, 103, 106, 111; WEU and 108 Turkish Constitutional Court, Socialist Party (Kurdish-leaning) 145 Turkmenistan 80 twenty-first century, sovereign territorial state? 4 UK 66, 80, 87–8, 119, 152, 199; Common Travel Area with Ireland (1921) 245; cooperation with CEECs 221; émigrés from communist era 176; EU defence presence and 107; Europol Convention and 246; frontiers and 232, 240–1; JHA and 249; Narcotic Information Service 223; Northern Ireland secession 241; policing methods in EU 223, 231; reaction to enlargement 233; separatism 154; wage level 165; work permits 58 Ukraine 20, 35, 49, 51, 69, 91; borders and 196, 236; EU membership application 9, 92, 100, 108, 207, 234; JHA and 247; migration 170, 174–5, 199; minorities 123, 126; Poles living in 67, 127; slow pace of development 72; wages 64; Westernizers 81 UN 47 UN CIVPOL, police training 223 unanimity rule, asylum and immigration 250 ‘unbounded’ principle of solidarity and community 13 ‘unbundling territoriality’ 6–7, 43 unemployment, borders and 232 United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) 173 United States 23, 29, 39, 96; émigrés from communist era 176; enlargement of EU and 97, 102, 106–7; FBI (Drug

270

Index

Enforcement Agency) 223; investment in Mexico 73; migration to 163–4, 199, 248; mistake of high-tech warfare 217–18; narcotics training for CEECs 231; OSCE and 107; police training in Europe 223; police training for Hungary 203; post-1945 model 87; relations with Mexico and Colombia 226; slowdown of economy 57 universalistic values 44 Urals 4, 17, 88, 96 USSR 87, 121, 163, 174–5 van der Stoel, Max 125 VAT, transferred to EU 84 Vatican state 79, 88 Vauban, Sébastien le Prestre de 21 Vedrine, Hubert (French Foreign Minister) 38 Venice 88 Verdun 33 Verfassungspatriotismus 33 Verheugen, Guenther (EU Commissioner for Enlargement) 70 Versailles Treaty (1919) 52 Vienna 24 Vietnam 174–5 Visegrad (Central European) countries 99, 106 Voltaire 71 Wales 155 Wallace, William 6–8, 56 Waltz, Kenneth 113 Washington Summit (April 1999) 107 ‘wealth’ border 52 weapons trading 191, 201, 203, 246 Weber, Max 3, 20 welfare state, post-World War II 29 Western Europe, ageing of EU population

167; cooperation in justice and home affairs 85; death penalty in various states 80–81; enlargement idea and cost 69, 219; ‘European’ projects 88; exploitive working conditions 168; informal economies 166–8; organized crime seen as threat 192; post-industrial restructuring 165; reactions to enlargement of EU 233; structure of unemployment 177 Western European borders, natural through evolution 53 Western European Union see WEU Western political alignment, inter-class corporatist collaboration 29 Western private investors, partnerships against corruption 73 Westphalian super-state 4, 7, 10, 13, 43 WEU 34, 78, 99, 102, 107–8 White, Stephen 53 White Book 61 ‘white list’ 193 Williams, Derek 17 Witte, Bruno de 128 Witte, Count 23 ‘worker-tourists’ 10 World Bank 72, 162 World Values Survey 56 World War I 26, 28 World War II 28, 89–90, 197; frontiers after 241, 248; wage levels in West 205 Yeltsin, Boris 88 Yugoslavia 52, 54, 57, 69, 90, 103, 109, 121; disintegration 247; minorities 123, 126, 141, 144; successor states 142 zero-sum reasoning 12 Zielonka, Jan 32, 85