Denmark Reintroduces Border Controls:
Under pressure from a growing nationalist movement, the government in Denmark on Thursday reintroduced stringent checks on its borders with Germany and Sweden, dealing a major setback to one of the European Union’s most popular and tangible measures: the freedom to cross frontiers without controls.
It was the second major assault within weeks on an agreement originally signed in 1985 at Schengen, a town in Luxembourg near France and Germany, and has gone a long way toward abolishing border controls across much of Europe.
Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, and Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister, proposed amending the Schengen accord this month in an effort to deal with the wave of refugees fleeing to Italy from North Africa and the Middle East.
For what it’s worth I think the idea of some sort of unification of the present nation-states of Europe isn’t implausible. The Kalmar Union once bound Norden together. But an assemblage which includes Greece and Finland in the same manner as Finland and Sweden is just incoherent geopolitical engineering. A pan-European project has to leverage organic cultural affinities at lower levels first, and integrate in a step-by-step fashion. But that’s hard, so Euro-elites tried to generate unity by fiat.
The European elites mostly still favor open borders, but the European people look like they are finally turning against them. The French National Front has dropped their anti-semitic BS and is focusing more on what Derb calls the “national question”. They might once again get the second most number of votes in the general election, shutting the left out of the runoff.
Whether the people will turn soon enough or too late remains to be seen.
A pan-European project has to leverage organic cultural affinities at lower levels first, and integrate in a step-by-step fashion
How many states have ever been created this way? I believe state-building has always been a top-down affair.
1) i don’t think europe as a ‘nation-state’ is a good model. rather, different levels of integration are possible.
2) i think you can argue that the USA kind of did grow into a nation-state in a piecemeal fashion between 1776 and 1865. but there are so many differences between the two cases….