12/10/0
After entering the European Union, you won't need to touch your passport until the English Channel or the Strait of Gibraltar. After all, without special need, no one will ask for it. So far this applies only to land borders, which is convenient for those traveling for Christmas and New Year by car, bus, or train. At airports, flights between 'new' and 'old' Schengen members (say, between Riga and Brussels) will move from international to domestic only in the spring, with the change of schedule. Among EU members, Great Britain and Ireland remain outside the Schengen area, but Norway and Iceland, which are not EU members, participate. Cyprus asked for a one-year delay – it is not ready yet. Romania and Bulgaria, which joined the EU only this year, will not enter Schengen for now.
Now citizens who have even a single-entry Schengen visa or a residence permit in one of the Schengen countries can travel freely throughout the entire area: from Portugal to Estonia and from Malta to Iceland. But there is another side to the matter. If until now our citizens needed a visa for a trip to Vilnius or Prague, respectively from Lithuania or the Czech Republic, now they will need a full Schengen visa. True, this will not affect tourist flows, tourism experts are sure. The visa application process is quite simple – €35 and five to ten days of waiting. Even if unforeseen circumstances arise, they will not scare citizens away.
Vice President of the European Commission Franco Frattini, who oversees immigration and law enforcement policy of the European Union, told reporters after the meeting of the Brussels Council of Ministers that the decision to accelerate the opening of borders by a whole week was made taking into account checks conducted on the compliance of EU newcomers with European criteria. After all, now their external borders become the external borders of the entire European Union. According to Frattini, this will allow citizens of the new countries of United Europe 'to feel themselves full-fledged Europeans.' However, also 'non-citizens,' for example, of the Baltic states – too.
In general, the expansion of the Schengen area promises changes not only and not so much for the residents of Eastern Europe eager for full European status, but for everyone else. This follows from the experience of journalists' own trips through 'old' and 'new' Europe, as well as from explanations they received from Franco Frattini's office. Between the 'old' Schengen countries, no visible borders remain. They were not built on new highways either, which also simplifies cargo delivery from Europe and transit crossings. And when new asphalt was being laid in front of the Dutch city of Breda and the blue square with twelve yellow stars and the country's name was temporarily removed from the roadside, only memory could tell that up to the Shell gas station and McDonald's it was Belgium, and then further on was Holland. But the German and Czech police officers at the joint checkpoint on the autobahn between Waldhaus and Rozvadov were adamant. After leafing through passports with Schengen visas, they demanded assurances that the purpose of entry into the Czech Republic was exclusively transit on the way home. It is limited in time to five days. And if you are going specifically to the Czech Republic, even for a day, you need a Czech visa.
It must be said that the main principle of the Schengen Agreement is that with the abolition of controls at internal borders, controls at external borders are tightened. The European Union intends to adopt a number of new rules at the end of this year and next year, both for tracking the movement of 'visa-free' guests (in particular, Americans, Japanese) and for modernizing the system of issuing Schengen visas themselves. Emphasis will be placed on new information technologies and biometric data (fingerprints, iris patterns). It is too early to judge what consequences all this may have for our fellow citizens. European officials assure that law-abiding foreigners will find it easier to travel to Europe, while fraudsters, criminals and illegal immigrants will have the road 'closed' to them. One would like to believe.