Bye Bye Borders

On 16 September 1989 I threw a book out of a moving train window for the first and last time in my life.

Admittedly, this wasn’t just any book. I happened to be reading ‘The Bass Saxophone’ by banned Czech author Josef Skvorecky. And it wasn’t just any train. This was the service that connected Nurenberg in the former West Germany with Prague in the country once called Czechoslovakia.

As the train approached the Czechoslovak border I remembered that my trusty Lonely Planet guide to Eastern Europe warned tourists against bringing books by outlawed writers into the communist country. So as the train passed through the bucolic Bavarian countryside I hurled the book into a field of bemused cows.

As workmen prepare to dismantle border crossings between Germany and the Czech Republic on December 21, it is hard to believe that less than 20 years ago, this crossing was a frontier of fear that separated two ideologies bent on destroying each other.

“The Iron Curtain was hundreds of miles of barbed wire, watch tower and minefield, with an awful sameness to it,” writes Jan Morris, probably the greatest living English-speaking travel writer. “Travelling from east to west through it was like entering a drab and disturbing dream, a half-lit world of shabby resentments, where anything could be done to you.”

Anything could indeed be done to you. At the German-Czechoslovak border, the train stopped for two hours while armed border guards checked passports for visas, looked for suspicious passengers (“long hair and beards could cause problems,” my Lonely Planet guide advised) and rifled through luggage.

Having spent a day getting my visa in the Czechoslovak embassy in London (“Any irregularity with the visa application, even changing pens halfway through, will mean you’ll have to fill out another form and line up again,” warned my Lonely Planet) and rid myself of my Skvorecky book, I felt confident I would have no problems with the border guards.

But I just hadn’t read my guidebook’s interminable section on red tape closely enough. Having rummaged through my bag and scrupulously checked my passport and visa, the guard told me I would have to get off the train at the next stop – a dingy Bohemian town called Cheb – and exchange 30 Deutschmarks for every day I planned to stay in Czechoslovakia. When I left the country ten days later, another customs officer checked my visa for a stamp verifying I had changed the required amount of money. I had, but only by spending a sackful of unconvertible Czech crowns the previous night by offering everyone in a Karlovy Vary bar free beers for the evening.

Two months after my first trip to Czechoslovakia, communism collapsed and the next time I visited the country – in the summer of 1990 - I didn’t need a visa and the border crossing was like any other in Europe, except for the surly guards. Two years after that the country had ceased to exist and visitors had to show their passports at the Czech and Slovak frontiers.

When both the Czech and Slovak republics joined the European Union in 2004, the Cold war was over, the Iron Curtain was largely gone and Europe could breathe with two lungs again. But citizens from the new member states were not allowed to work in most EU countries, they could not join the eurozone and travellers from the 10 new states still needed a passport to travel elsewhere in the bloc.

On December 21, the final vestiges of a divided Europe will be erased as the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Malta, Slovenia, Estonia, Hungary, Poland, Latvia and Lithuania join the so-called Schengen zone. This means that frontier posts will be dismantled and it will be possible to travel from Talinn to Seville and from Stockholm to Sicily without showing a passport or stopping at a border – although for technical reasons, passport waivers at airports will only take effect in late March.

The effects of this ‘big bang’ removal of borders will be profound. Practically, it means the end of two-hour waits at the Italian-Slovenian or Latvian-Lithuanian land crossings. Travellers can sleep comfortably in the thought that the days of customs officers barging into your train compartment and barking ‘passports please’ at four o’clock in the morning are now over.

The effects on Europe’s geography, and how Europeans view themselves, will also be dramatic. The frontiers of passport-free Europe will extend hundreds of kilometres eastwards to the borders of Russia, Belarus and – when Bulgaria and Romania join the Schengen zone in a few years – Moldova. It is the final nail in the coffin of old and new, east and west Europe, free and unfree Europe – although Britain and Ireland remain stubbornly outside the Schengen system for reasons of national paranoia.

“The last breath of civilization,” thought Chateaubriand in 1806, “expires on this coast where barbarism starts.” The French author was writing in Trieste, the Adriatic port city that in the last century has been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Yugoslavia and Italy. Trieste was where the Iron Curtain ran into the sea and until 1991, when Slovenia broke free from Yugoslavia, it was where the communist and capitalist worlds collided. In 2001, Jan Morris could still write: “Today Trieste still hangs there at the end of its Italian umbilical, formally cut off from its hinterland.” Not any longer. On a recent visit to Ljubljana, the Slovenian capital was crammed with Italian day-trippers and on the streets of Trieste it is almost as common to hear Slavic languages as Latin ones.

It is entirely fitting that the main ceremony to mark the expansion of the Schengen area on December 21 will be in the town Italians call Gorizia and Slovenes know as Nova Gorica. For over 50 years this town was split down the middle, Berlin-style. Now it can become one again.

Over the centuries, tens of millions of Europeans have died fighting over sometimes illogical, often arbitrary and almost always unnatural frontiers. “Central Europe’s borders have influenced world history more than any others,” writes Lubos Palata, Europe editor of Czech daily Lidove Noviny. “They resulted from World War I, caused World War II and repeatedly – during the Berlin Crisis of 1958-62, for example – almost triggered World War III.

As of December 21, many of the frontiers European nations fought over – for example between Poland and Germany – will effectively cease to exist. This will make the prospect of war between EU states even more unthinkable.

It will also further chip away at the foundations of the nation state – that artificial 19th century construct that has been at the root of so much bloodletting in Europe. After all, it is difficult to argue that a person on one side of the border should be taxed, taught and ruled differently from a person on the other side of that border when the frontier separating the two is no longer there.