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border policy

Free movement inside the Schengen area rests on an assumption: that external borders are controlled well enough that internal checks are unnecessary. When a frontline state visibly loses control of an external border, governments further north reach for temporary internal controls — legally permitted, politically contagious, and economically expensive. France, Germany, Austria and Denmark have all used them in recent years, and the reintroductions have proved far easier to start than to end.

• Internal border checks cost the European economy an estimated several billion euros a year in freight delays and cross-border commuting friction.
• Each reintroduction weakens the norm that made the next one unnecessary.
• Once controls exist, removing them requires a government to declare a problem solved — a claim no interior minister volunteers.