With saws and speeches, fireworks and music, borders fell across
Europe Thursday at midnight as the continent's passport-free zone
expanded by nine countries.
All along the Baltic coast, and deep along Germany and Austria's
eastern borders with Hungary, Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia and
Slovenia, the physical barriers fell as thousands of Europeans
watched in the chill night air.
The three Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania went
first, an hour ahead of six other European countries that are part of
the new passport-free zone - the Czech Republic, Hungary, Malta,
Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia.
The enlarged Schengen area, named after the town in Luxembourg
where the free-movement scheme was first signed, now accommodates a
total of 24 countries - all of them European Union countries except
Iceland and Norway.
The free-movement area has been extended by 4,278 kilometres,
allowing people to travel from the icy planes of Norway and Finland
to the sun-drenched beaches of Portugal and Greece without once
having to show their passports.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk
and Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek recalled Europe's divided
past as they celebrated the opening of Germany's borders with its
eastern neighbours Poland and the Czech Republic Friday.
'This is a particularly sweet moment,' Merkel said in the town of
Zittau where the three countries meet in a joint border.
At midnight, border officials lifted the booms at Zittau for the
last time, waving through cars and pedestrians without the usual
formalities of an international border crossing, as the extension of
the Schengen zone to 24 countries took effect.
Younger generations would see open European borders as normal,
Merkel said, speaking of a 'historic moment.' Older generations could
only dream of this kind of freedom, she said.
'We now have a Europe where passport controls from Sweden to
Italy, from Portugal to the Baltic no longer take place,' Merkel
said.
This would facilitate travel and enhance contact between the
various nations of Europe, she said.
Recalling her own youth in communist East Germany, Merkel, who is
54, said: 'For those of us who are a bit older, this is not simply a
matter of course.'
Polish Premier Tusk, speaking at the same event, spoke of a
'triumph of freedom.'
Like Merkel he recalled growing up in a world in which the borders
had appeared insurmountable.
'We have now succeeded in overcoming the most difficult border -
that of fear and anxiety,' Tusk said.
Also present were European Commission President Jose Manuel
Barroso and Portuguese Prime Minister Jose Socrates - Portugal holds
the current presidency of the European Union.
'I remember when we chopped wires in 1989, when I first made it to
Vienna's Mariahilfer Strasse and bought a deep fryer,' the Czech
premier said, referring to the tearing down of the barbed-wired Iron
Curtain after European communism fell in 1989.
'We have today finished a process, which began with cutting wires.
We have become equal by entering the Schengen area,' said Topolanek.
Topolanek and his Polish counterpart Tusk together sawed through a
symbolic red toll gate at the border.
On Friday morning, five schoolchildren from Konecna, an eastern
Czech hamlet that found itself behind a border checkpoint between the
Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1994, went to school for the first
time without flashing their passports.
'People here are really happy,' Tomas Vecera, the mayor of the
village of Bila that administers the hamlet, told Deutsche Presse-
Agentur dpa.
'When they wanted to bring home a fridge, coal or even a sack of
grain, they had to declare it,' he said speaking by telephone from
Friday's festivities, which the village held at the despised border
checkpoint.
Slovak Interior Minister Robert Kalinak was rubber-stamping
passports himself during celebrations at the Slovak-Austrian
Petrzalka/Berg crossing on the outskirts of the Slovak capital
Bratislava, public broadcaster Czech Television reported.
But there was not much to celebrate Friday on the newly-fortified
external borders of the expanded borderless area named after the
Luxembourg village of Schengen.
Trucks formed a long queue through villages leading to the Vysne
Nemecke/Uzhorod border crossing from Slovakia to Ukraine, TA3 news
channel said.
While the dominant mood was one of celebration - on the Estonian-
Latvian border, for example, the European anthem, Beethoven's An Ode
to Joy, blasted through the night - not all were in high spirits.
Austrians largely stayed away from the celebrations at the
Mikulov/Drasenhofen border crossing on the Czech-Austrian border, CTK
agency said.
A large majority of Austria's population is sceptical of abolition
of border checks on eastern borders, fearing a massive influx of
criminal gangs endangering their security. Mindful of the
population's sensibilities, Austria continues to keep up border
security, deploying army and police forces for dragnet controls in
the border region.
But at the St Margarethen border crossing between Austria and
Hungary, Austria's Interior Minister Guenther Platter stressed that
with the fall of the borders, the division of the continent was over
at last.
Concerns have also been raised among Germans that opening the
borders could lead to an increase in smuggling and other cross-border
crime.
Even as police units were being withdrawn from some border
stations, Germany's GdP police union called on the government to let
them stay there in the immediate period after the new rules come into
effect at midnight.
'The end of border controls comes far too early,' said GdP
spokesman Josef Scheuring. 'Germany is not yet ready for it.'
Germany shares a 464-kilometre border with Poland and one of 810
kilometres with the Czech Republic.
Erwin Huber, the head of the Christian Social Union (CSU), the
Bavarian sister party of Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU),
predicted a rise in crime along the border.
Noting the difference in living standards between Germany and its
eastern neighbours, he said: 'I would have preferred to retain the
controls for a couple of years. The police face a large task.'
But European Parliament President Hans-Gert Poettering rejected
these concerns.
The open borders were 'a symbol of unity and reconciliation,' he
said, adding that the three-point border had once stood for a history
characterized by war.
German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble contrasted the
concerns with 'a huge rise in freedom.'
Police would deploy intensified mobile patrols in the 30
kilometres along the border, he said. 'We will actually have an
increase in security, not a decrease.'
Schaeuble also said that regions along the old border would profit
economically. 'They are emerging from a position on the outskirts to
a new centrality,' he said.
In Denmark the Danish People's Party that supports Prime Minister
Anders Fogh Rasmussen's minority government expressed doubts Friday
over the extension of the passport-free zone.
'We know that organized crime committed by eastern Europeans is a
growing problem in Denmark and with the extension of the Schengen
cooperation, many pickpockets, drug smugglers and human traffickers
can enter the country without being checked,' the party's European
affairs spokesman Morten Messerschmidt told broadcaster DR.
'It does not add up, when we on the one hand demand that our
police should secure safety on streets and alleys, and on the other
uncritically allow entry to everyone just because they arrive from a
EU country,' he said, adding that Denmark should reinstate border
checks.
Apart from freeing up travel between the more established EU
members and the states that joined the Brussels-based bloc in May
2004, extending the Schengen rules is expected to underpin closer
economic ties between old and new Europe.
At the Stary Hrozenkov border crossing, Czech Interior Minister
Ivan Langer and his Slovak counterpart Robert Kalinak symbolically
sawed off the toll gate dividing the two young states. The two
Central European members of the European Union and NATO were one
state for 74 years before Czechoslovakia split on January 1, 1993.
Hungary's access to the Schengen zone marked a 'big step towards
European integration,' EU Commissioner Laszlo Kovacs was quoted as
saying by the Austrian press agency.
Of course, the shift of the Schengen borders eastwards presented
not only opportunities for Hungary, but also challenges, he added,
reassuring Austrians that after midnight on Thursday, they would be
as safe as they had been before.
In a nod to the events of 1989, when the Iron Curtain fell on the
Austro-Hungarian border, the then-foreign ministers of Austria and
Hungary, Alois Mock and Gyla Horn also participated in the ceremony.
In 1989 the two politicians were the first to physically cut the
barbed wire separating East and West.
Meanwhile the UN refugee agency UNHCR reported Friday that Poland
has seen a huge influx of asylum seekers mainly from Chechnya and its
neighbour Ingushetia in the Russian Federation since July.
The agency said it believed the country's accession to the
Schengen passport-free zone was the reason why numbers had shot up
from around 250 people a month during the first half of the year, to
335 in July and to 1,148 in November.
There had been just under 5,000 new applications for asylum, of
which more than 70 per cent were lodged after June.
© 2007 dpa - Deutsche Presse-Agentur 
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