It's become common to declare that Europe's borderless travel zone must go if security is to be restored after the terrorist attacks in Paris. Before abandoning part of the European Union's most popular achievement--freedom of movement-- let's think it through.
The argument goes like this: Because borderless travel, established in stages through the 1990s and 2000s, never secured Europe's external frontier and intelligence sharing, and because the European Union is too feckless to make that happen now, the best recourse is to resurrect national borders and put the maintenance of security back into the hands of national governments.
Three pieces of evidence are provided. First, the Paris attacks were planned in Belgium, a divided state with an ineffectual intelligence service that allowed the Brussels district of Molenbeek to become a safe zone for Europe's jihadists.
No. 2 is that Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the leader of the Paris attacks and already one of Europe's most wanted men, was able to travel from Syria to Brussels and back again in 2014 without detection.
Finally, Belgium has a lively black market in arms that can be bought by jihadists and brought onto a train or driven to points-anywhere in the EU to launch an attack. Shut the borders, the theory goes, and Belgium's failure to clamp down on its illegal arms trade becomes less concerning.
Would repetition of these failures be prevented if Europe's internal borders were permanently resurrected, as France has done temporarily after the Paris attacks?
Even when there were border controls between the 26 European countries that are signatories to the Schengen Agreement that established the free-travel zone from 1995, traffic flows were so great that most cars were waved through unchecked. That was in the 1980s and '90s, when cars drove at least 500 million fewer passenger miles per year across Europe than they do now.
Europe's illegal small-arms trade draws on weapons that weren't registered when tougher regulations were imposed in countries such as France. It also involves arms trafficked from the ex-Yugoslav countries and weapons that were neutralized for sale as souvenirs or props and are subsequently reactivated. Restoring Europe's internal borders might help a little with one part of this trade--imports from the western Balkans--but not by much, according to Nicholas Marsh, a firearms researcher at the Peace Research Institute Oslo.
Putting Belgium in an isolation bubble wouldn't fix the problem either. According to a 2010 French government estimate, there were about 4,000 automatic rifles circulating in Paris suburbs such as Saint-Denis, where Abaaoud was found and killed. Someone determined enough to give up his life is unlikely to be deterred from finding a gun in Paris if the softer Belgian option is closed.
To address the terrorist threat, Europe's governments would need to do what they should do anyway to bring the Schengen system up to date. They would need to harden external borders, preferably by putting them entirely under a jointly run agency such as the EU's Frontex, using a common terrorist watch list and fingerprint database. That way, for example, agents at the free-travel zone's Balkan borders--in Slovenia and Hungary--could check cars and trains heading north.
The EU should also put more resources into its existing effort to drain the ex-Yugoslav swamp of weapons and should do a better job of clearing out jihadist cells in weak-link countries such as Belgium. But above all, the answer to nearly all these problems is better intelligence and intelligence sharing. That's more likely to happen by modernizing a shared system than by retreating behind resurrected national borders.
The EU's proposals to fix Schengen's weaknesses and crack down on Europe's weapons trade since the Nov. 13 attacks in Paris certainly aren't enough, and the failure to adjust the free-travel zone's rules to cope with the sudden influx of refugees from Syria is serious. But if the EU's responses are implemented, they would do more to counter the terrorist threat than closing borders, and at a far lesser cost.
Editorial on 11/29/2015