Schengen Area
Based on Wikipedia: Schengen Area
The Invisible Revolution You Cross Without Noticing
Every single day, 1.7 million Europeans wake up in one country and drive to work in another. They don't show passports. They don't stop at checkpoints. They don't even slow down. This unremarkable commute represents one of the most remarkable political achievements in human history: the Schengen Area.
Named after a tiny wine village in Luxembourg where the original agreement was signed in 1985, the Schengen Area is essentially a system of countries that have agreed to pretend their borders don't exist. Twenty-nine European nations—with a combined population exceeding 450 million people and spanning nearly 4.6 million square kilometers—have abolished passport controls between themselves. You can drive from Lisbon to Tallinn, a distance of roughly 4,000 kilometers crossing through Portugal, Spain, France, Belgium, Germany, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, without once being asked for identification.
The numbers are staggering. In 2015, there were 1.3 billion crossings of internal Schengen borders. Fifty-seven million of those were trucks carrying goods worth 2.8 trillion euros. Economists estimate that simply eliminating the friction of border checks reduces trade costs by somewhere between half a percent and one and a half percent—figures that translate to billions of euros in economic activity.
But perhaps the most fascinating thing about the Schengen Area is how it defies our intuitions about what borders are for.
When Borders Were an Afterthought
Here's something that might surprise you: before World War I, most countries on Earth had essentially no border controls at all. Wealthy young Europeans would embark on the "Grand Tour"—an educational journey across the continent—without ever showing a document to anyone. You simply traveled.
Passports existed, but they were more like letters of introduction than security documents. The modern system of visas, entry stamps, and immigration officers is actually quite recent. It emerged during the paranoid years between the world wars, when nations became obsessed with controlling who came and went. What we think of as the normal state of affairs—presenting your papers at a border—is really just a twentieth-century invention.
After World War II devastated Europe, some countries began experimenting with returning to that earlier openness. The Nordic countries—Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden—created their own passport union in 1954, allowing their citizens to move freely among all five nations. The Benelux countries (Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg) opened their mutual borders in 1960.
Meanwhile, the great European integration project was picking up steam. The European Communities, which would eventually become the European Union, were founded in the 1950s. But here's an interesting wrinkle: those early European institutions focused on economics—trade, coal, steel, atomic energy. They deliberately avoided the politically sensitive question of border controls.
The Schengen Workaround
By 1985, France and West Germany were frustrated. They wanted to eliminate border checks between themselves and their neighbors, but they couldn't get all ten members of the European Economic Community to agree. Some countries (particularly the United Kingdom) were adamantly opposed to abolishing passport controls.
So they did something clever. They simply went around the official European institutions entirely.
On June 14, 1985, representatives of five countries—France, West Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg—gathered in the tiny Luxembourg village of Schengen, right where the borders of Luxembourg, France, and Germany meet. There, aboard a riverboat on the Moselle River (the symbolism of signing a borderless agreement while floating on water that touched three countries was not lost on anyone), they signed what became known as the Schengen Agreement.
This was essentially a workaround. Since they couldn't convince everyone in Europe to abolish borders, they created a separate club of countries that wanted to. The agreement was not part of European Community law—it existed entirely outside those structures.
Five years later, in 1990, the same countries signed a follow-up document called the Schengen Convention, which worked out the practical details: how would they handle visas? What about criminals fleeing across borders? How would police forces cooperate? The actual borderless zone finally came into effect on March 26, 1995, a full decade after the original agreement.
From Outsider to Mainstream
What happened next was almost inevitable. The Schengen system worked so well that other countries wanted in. Spain and Portugal joined. Then Italy, Greece, and Austria. The Scandinavian countries, which already had their own passport union, signed on too.
By 1997, with the Amsterdam Treaty, the European Union essentially absorbed Schengen. What had started as an end-run around European institutions became part of European law itself. Today, joining Schengen is generally expected of new European Union member states—though as we'll see, there are some notable exceptions.
This absorption had an interesting consequence. Because Schengen is now part of European Union law, any changes to its rules happen through European Union processes. The non-European Union countries that are part of Schengen—Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, and Switzerland—have essentially agreed to accept rules they have no vote in making. It's a trade-off: they get access to the borderless zone, but they give up some sovereignty over how that zone is governed.
Who's In, Who's Out, and Why
The Schengen Area currently includes twenty-nine countries. Twenty-five of these are European Union member states. The other four are members of the European Free Trade Association: Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, and Switzerland. These four have signed special association agreements that let them participate in Schengen even though they're not in the European Union.
But wait—there are twenty-seven countries in the European Union. If twenty-five of them are in Schengen, what happened to the other two?
Ireland is one of the holdouts, and its situation is genuinely fascinating. Ireland maintains its own visa policy and keeps border controls with other European Union countries. The reason traces back to 1923, when Ireland and the United Kingdom created something called the Common Travel Area. This allows free movement between Ireland, the United Kingdom, and the Crown Dependencies (the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands). When the Schengen system was being developed, the United Kingdom refused to join—and Ireland faced a choice. It could join Schengen, which would mean putting up a hard border with Northern Ireland, the only place where Ireland shares a land boundary. Or it could stay out of Schengen and preserve its open border with the UK.
Ireland chose the open border with its neighbor. The deep political and historical sensitivities around the Irish border—sensitivities that would later complicate Brexit negotiations—made any other choice unthinkable.
Cyprus is the other European Union member outside Schengen, but for entirely different reasons. Cyprus is legally obligated to join eventually, and its government says it's aiming for 2026. The complication is that the northern third of the island has been occupied by Turkey since 1974. The self-declared Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus isn't recognized by any country except Turkey, but it exists as a practical matter. How do you implement Schengen border controls on an island where part of the territory is occupied by a non-Schengen country that you don't even officially acknowledge exists?
A former Cypriot foreign minister put it bluntly: implementing Schengen controls would create "huge tribulation" for Turkish Cypriots trying to cross into the rest of the island. Until the Cyprus dispute is somehow resolved—and it has resisted resolution for half a century—Schengen membership remains complicated.
The Seventeen-Year Wait
Romania and Bulgaria present the most dramatic example of how politically contentious Schengen membership can become. These two countries joined the European Union in 2007. By 2011, the European Commission had concluded that both countries had fulfilled all the technical requirements for joining Schengen. The European Parliament approved their membership.
Then nothing happened. For seventeen years.
The problem was the Council of Ministers, where any single country can veto new Schengen members. Various countries raised objections over the years. Denmark and Finland cited concerns about corruption and organized crime. The Netherlands insisted on positive reports from an anti-corruption monitoring mechanism before it would approve membership.
Austria was the final holdout, arguing that Romania and Bulgaria had become major transit routes for illegal immigration. After extensive negotiations, Austria finally lifted its veto. Border controls were eliminated for air and sea travel in March 2024, and land border controls finally came down on January 1, 2025—more than seventeen years after the two countries joined the European Union.
The lesson here is that Schengen membership is not automatic, even for European Union countries that have met all the technical requirements. It's a political decision that requires unanimous consent, which means any single country can block it for any reason.
The Curious Case of the Microstates
Europe is dotted with tiny countries—remnants of medieval political arrangements that somehow survived into the modern era. Four of these microstates have an interesting relationship with Schengen: Andorra, Monaco, San Marino, and Vatican City. None of them are officially part of the Schengen Area. But all of them function as if they were.
The reason is simple practicality. These countries are so small, and so completely surrounded by Schengen members, that maintaining meaningful border controls would be essentially impossible. Vatican City is entirely within Rome. San Marino is entirely surrounded by Italy. Monaco is surrounded by France on three sides and the Mediterranean on the fourth. Andorra is nestled in the Pyrenees between France and Spain, with no airport or seaport—the only way in is by road through Schengen countries.
So while these microstates technically aren't Schengen members, they don't conduct systematic border checks with their neighbors. You can walk from Rome into Vatican City, or from France into Monaco, without anyone checking your passport. Legal scholars sometimes describe these places as being "de facto" within the Schengen Area—not officially part of it, but practically indistinguishable.
Andorra is a slight exception: it maintains border control points, but these are primarily focused on customs enforcement (Andorra has very low taxes, making it a popular shopping destination) rather than immigration control.
The Territories That Got Away
Here's where things get genuinely complicated. Not all territory belonging to Schengen countries is actually part of the Schengen Area. The exceptions reveal a lot about the strange, overlapping jurisdictions that characterize European geography.
France is the most interesting case. France has numerous overseas territories scattered around the globe—remnants of its colonial empire. Some of these territories, like French Guiana in South America, or Martinique and Guadeloupe in the Caribbean, are full parts of the European Union. But they're not part of the Schengen Area. A Schengen visa—even one issued by France—doesn't let you visit French Guiana. Each territory operates its own visa regime.
The Dutch situation is equally complex. Only the European part of the Netherlands is in Schengen. The six Dutch Caribbean territories—three special municipalities (Bonaire, Sint Eustatius, and Saba) and three autonomous countries within the Kingdom of the Netherlands (Aruba, Curaçao, and Sint Maarten)—all remain outside. Flying from Amsterdam to Bonaire means passing through full border checks, even though you're technically staying within the Kingdom of the Netherlands.
Then there's Svalbard, the Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic. Svalbard has a unique status under international law, dating back to a 1920 treaty that gave Norway sovereignty while allowing citizens of signatory countries to live and work there. There is no visa system for Svalbard at all—anyone can theoretically go there and work. But there's a catch: it's extremely difficult to reach Svalbard without passing through the Schengen Area first (the main route is through mainland Norway, though there are occasional charter flights from Russia). And since 2011, Norway has imposed systematic border checks for travel between Svalbard and the rest of Norway. So while Svalbard technically has no visa requirements, getting there and back requires a valid Schengen visa if you're from a country that needs one—and it needs to be a multiple-entry visa, so you can return through Norway.
Greenland and the Faroe Islands, both Danish territories, are also outside both the European Union and the Schengen Area. Yet they maintain no border controls on arrivals from Schengen countries. Airlines and ferries are responsible for checking documents before passengers board—a system similar to how travel works within the Schengen Area itself. Nordic citizens traveling to these territories can use almost any form of identification, including driving licenses, though this is discouraged for trips to the Faroe Islands since aircraft might be diverted to Scotland in bad weather—where such identification wouldn't be accepted.
What Schengen Actually Means in Practice
So what does it mean, concretely, to live in the Schengen Area?
If you're a citizen of a Schengen country, it means you can travel freely throughout the area with just a national identity card—you don't even need a passport. You can work, study, or retire in any Schengen country. In some border regions, up to a third of the workforce commutes internationally every day, living in one country and working in another as casually as Americans might commute between suburbs and cities.
If you're from outside the Schengen Area, the system creates a single entry point. A Schengen visa allows you to enter any Schengen country and move freely within the area for up to ninety days within any one-hundred-eighty-day period. You only deal with border controls once, when you enter the area, rather than at every internal border you cross.
The flip side is that Schengen countries have strengthened their external borders—the boundaries between the Schengen Area and the rest of the world. If internal borders are open, then the external border becomes everyone's border. A person who enters through Greece can freely travel to Germany, so Germany has a direct interest in how effectively Greece controls its borders. This has been a source of considerable political tension, particularly during the migration crises of recent years.
The System Behind the Openness
The Schengen Area might seem like pure idealism—European countries deciding to trust each other and abolish borders. But there's significant infrastructure underlying this apparent openness.
The Schengen Information System, often called the SIS, is a vast database shared among all Schengen countries. It contains information about wanted criminals, missing persons, stolen vehicles, and individuals who have been denied entry to the Schengen Area. When you cross into Schengen, border agents can check this database to see if you should be stopped. Police officers throughout the area can also access it during routine checks.
This system is one of the criteria countries must implement before joining Schengen. Cyprus, for instance, joined the Schengen Information System in July 2023—a prerequisite step toward eventual full membership.
There's also extensive police cooperation. Since criminals can easily cross borders, police forces need to be able to work together across those same borders. Schengen includes provisions for "hot pursuit"—if police are chasing a suspect, they can continue the chase across the border into a neighboring country. There are also mechanisms for sharing intelligence, coordinating investigations, and handling extradition.
The common visa policy is another piece of this infrastructure. All Schengen countries agree on which nationalities need visas and which don't. This prevents the obvious problem of someone getting a visa-free entry to one country and then using that to access the entire area.
When Borders Come Back
Despite all this openness, the Schengen Agreement does allow countries to temporarily reimpose border controls in exceptional circumstances. And countries have used this provision—sometimes controversially.
The 2015 migration crisis saw several countries bring back border checks. France reimposed controls after the terrorist attacks in Paris that year and has kept various controls in place, citing ongoing security concerns. The COVID-19 pandemic led to widespread border closures throughout the area, with countries restricting entry even from their Schengen neighbors.
These temporary measures can become semi-permanent. Critics argue that some countries have stretched the meaning of "temporary" well beyond what the agreement intended. The European Commission has pushed back against extended border controls, but enforcement is politically delicate—no one wants to tell a country it can't protect itself against perceived security threats.
What Makes Schengen Remarkable
It's easy to take the Schengen Area for granted if you live in Europe. Border controls just... aren't there. You drive past a sign welcoming you to another country, and that's it.
But step back for a moment and consider what this represents. These are countries that, within living memory, fought devastating wars against each other. Germany and France—the core of the original Schengen Agreement—killed millions of each other's citizens across two world wars. The idea that their citizens would one day cross the border without so much as showing identification would have seemed utopian in 1945.
The Schengen Area isn't just a technical arrangement for facilitating trade and tourism. It's a radical experiment in trust between nations. It embodies the idea that borders, those lines we fight and die over, might actually be less important than we think.
Consider the contrast with most of the world. The United States and Canada share the longest undefended border in the world, but you still need a passport to cross it. The United States and Mexico share a border that has become one of the most politically contentious on Earth. Russia and China, despite their political alliance, maintain strict border controls. The notion that nearly thirty countries could simply agree to act as if their borders don't exist—and make it work—is genuinely extraordinary.
The Schengen Area isn't perfect. There are legitimate debates about security, about the handling of migration, about whether some countries are carrying more than their fair share of the burden of controlling the external border. The system has been strained by terrorist attacks and refugee crises. Some critics argue that it has made Europe more vulnerable.
But it has also demonstrated that another way of organizing the world is possible. Those 1.7 million daily international commuters aren't just going to work. They're living proof that borders, for all their emotional and political significance, are ultimately human inventions—and humans can choose to unmake them.