OPINION

Schengen has become a symbol of what Europe stands for today

Schengen has become a symbol of what Europe stands for today. It’s part of our model of society, of our European way of life. It’s in a way the jewel in our crown. It has not always been like that.

by Margaritis Schinas*

Schengen has become a symbol of what Europe stands for today. It’s part of our model of society, of our European way of life. It’s in a way the jewel in our crown. It has not always been like that. I still remember when I was 15 and travelled for the first time abroad from Greece, I was body searched at the airport of Thessaloniki by very aggressive customs officers who were trying to establish whether I was carrying with me extra foreign currency, and I was seen as a potential criminal, not as a free citizen exercising my right to mobility. Lots of time has passed since these traumatic experiences. Now Europeans move freely across the board.

Schengen is the largest free travel area in the world. It allows more than 400 million EU citizens and visitors to move freely.

It’s also as President von der Leyen said in her State of the Union speech last September the linchpin of the single market and its four freedoms.

Schengen isn’t only about borders, it’s also about the economy. It is clear that no system despite its success can bear the test of time without renewal.

And we saw that Schengen has suffered two sets of very severe acute pressure in the last years. First during the migratory crisis in 2016. But also recently with the pandemic. This led to uncoordinated, sometimes blanket closures, restrictions to free movement and reintroduction of internal border controls that I don’t think helped a lot, and on the contrary harmed our way of life and our understanding of society and rights.

What we are presenting today is a new Schengen Strategy, which will reinforce Schengen. We have to save Schengen by reinforcing and reforming it.

The Strategy takes a comprehensive look at the three pillars that underpin Schengen.

The first is external borders. Contrary to what many people believe, Schengen does not do away with borders altogether but relies on the premise that to have free internal borders, we have to displace our border management capacity to our external borders.

A lot has been done in that respect: a significant reinforcement of Frontex, which is now becoming a fully-fledged the European Border and Coast Guard, the introduction and digitalisation of interoperable interconnected databases, including the Entry/Exit System (EES) and the European Travel Information and Authorisation System (ETIAS).

The second pillar is the idea of alternatives. Schengen must be supported by a vast set of measures that compensate for the absence of internal controls. There is an array of tools and initiatives that can help us.

Schengen is about more than just borders. We can reinforce police cooperation. We have a common European visa policy. We have a common European system of returns. We have a common Security Union. And down the road, we hope we will have the New Pact for Migration and Asylum that will help us with alternatives in border management, and reducing the potential risks of secondary movements and absconding within our borders.

Finally, the third pillar is the governance pillar. Schengen requires a robust governance system. The whole logic of Schengen relies on a spirit of mutual trust, joint accountability and ownership of results.

We have a system in place, the Schengen Evaluation Mechanism, which is a peer-to-peer system that allows us to test continuously the resilience and efficiency of our Schengen controls and mechanisms. This system over time has become a bit cumbersome and bureaucratic. We now want to lighten it up a bit, reform it, modernise it. We also want to bring up these Schengen evaluations more to the political level. It often becomes a discussion among like-minded officials. We want politicians, Ministers in the Council, and Members of the European Parliament to have the opportunity to discuss these issues

Later this year we will come with a separate proposal on the Schengen Borders Code. The revision of this Code would introduce targeted amendments to the rules that govern potential measures at our internal borders. Our objective there is to introduce into the Borders Code the lessons learned from the pandemic. And one of the lessons learned from the pandemic is that unilateral, blanket-type measures of closing borders do not help. We are envisaging more proportional, more logical initiatives, more coordination between neighbouring countries, greater use of the Green Lanes that helped during the pandemic. So in the future proposal on the Schengen Borders Code you should expect to see a different approach.

When we talk about Schengen, we are talking about something which is big, which matters to all in Europe. It works to the benefit of our citizens, our internal market and our economies, and we are determined to protect it and make sure that nothing can threaten all Schengen represents.

*Margaritis Schinas

Vice-President of the European Commission, Commissioner for Promoting the European Way of Life

Together with the US, the EU can keep the internet 'open'

Big Tech New internet legislation puts the EU at risk of falling behind the US and China. But together, the US and the EU can reach an international consensus.A

by Nick Clegg*

European policymakers have proposed the most comprehensive internet legislation ever . That legislation is not only about the frameworks within which companies like Facebook can operate in the future, but also about the competitive position of European companies and the user experience that Europeans have when they use their phone or laptop.

Europe's new 'Digital Services Act' (DSA), Digital Markets Act (DMA) and the recently proposed AI regulation are a big deal for European companies and all companies operating here. Legislators think it could take a few years for the new sets of rules to be finalized. What happens in the next two years will determine the next twenty years.

And the EU is not the only region where new legislation is being worked on. Governments around the world are coming up with proposals on all kinds of topics – from privacy and content , to how data can be stored, shared and used. That is a positive development. Many of these topics are too important to be left to companies.

As policymakers come forward with bills, it is becoming increasingly clear that there are conflicting opinions about what the internet should look like. The EU is in favor of an open, universally accessible internet, in which security and respect for human rights are central. US President Biden has also called for a global alliance of "tech democracies" to protect those values. Together, the US and the EU can lay the groundwork for a broader international consensus. But we cannot take the open internet for granted

The Chinese model – separated from the rest of the internet and under strict supervision – poses a risk to the open internet as we know it. Other countries, including Vietnam, Russia and Turkey, already have moved towards the Chinese model.

The pressure for greater transparency and accountability that underlies many of the European legislative proposals is fundamentally a positive and welcome development. It makes sense to want to hold platforms more accountable for data reporting and auditing systems, rather than micromanaging individual content . It is also good that breaking certain rules can have consequences. Nor is it unreasonable to impose different, stricter obligations on larger platforms than on small start-ups.

When discussing and drafting legislation and regulations, policymakers must avoid two unintended consequences: unnecessarily hindering European innovation and further fragmentation of the worldwide internet. Some of the fine print from the DMA suggests that policymakers could become deeply involved in product design. For example, there are detailed conditions about how users must log in to different apps. This can lead to the way products function becoming completely fixed, hindering technological progress. And proposals designed to prevent large companies from favoring themselves by using their own services to foreclose markets may be well-intentioned, but would benefit from a 'consumer benefit' test to ensure that new entrants with better and cheaper services are not excluded.

Now that policymakers around the world are simultaneously looking for solutions, I hope they learn from each other and prevent them from building islands with their own legislation, especially islands that make that data transfer impossible across the border.

The simple and seamless transfer of data from one side of the world to the other is the heart of the internet. But recent EU court rulings have already cast doubt on that data transfer between the EU and the US. And conditions in the proposed legislation allow for local legislation in member states; legislation that undermines the value of harmonising rules in the EU. Protecting our economies, by allowing a free flow of data between the EU and the US, should be a priority on both sides of the Atlantic.

To protect one global internet, the more rules have been drawn up to complement each other at an international level, the better. It is essential that this topic continues to be discussed in the G7, in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) on digital taxation, in a newly proposed Transatlantic Trade Council and with other international authorities.

The best the EU can do to make its tech sector more competitive is still to create a single digital market. The great thing about this European project has always been that the whole is better than the sum of the individual parts.

A report from last year found that the EU has spawned more than a third of the world's start-ups in the past decade, but only 14 percent of them are so-called "unicorns" worth $1 billion or more. Removing existing barriers within the EU would be better for the European economy than creating new barriers.

Europe has long been a pioneer in internet law, but lags behind China and the US when it comes to building global tech companies. As the EU drafts its most ambitious digital legislation yet, it faces a choice: it could fall behind the US and China for good, or it could create conditions that allow European tech companies to grow massively in the coming years.

*Nick Clegg

Nick Clegg a former UK Vice Prime Minister is Vice President Global Affairs and Communication of Facebook Article was first published in NRC Handelsblad, Amsterdam

The EU’s Green Agenda for the Western Balkans Packs a Risky Geopolitical Agenda

by Allison Carragher*

At a recent Clingendael Institute event, Directorate-General for Climate Action (DG CLIMA) Policy Officer Stine Rasmussen stated she was “not very worried when it comes to China” as a threat to the European Commission’s Green Agenda for the Western Balkans. She should be.

Given the concentration of both Chinese and Russian economic activity in energy, industry, and other pollution and energy-intensive sectors in the region, the Green Agenda directly threatens China and Russia’s interests. It is foolhardy to expect these countries to sit idly by as their investments and strategic priorities are undermined.

It is equally imprudent to simply urge Western Balkan governments to bolster their “political will,” which Rasmussen identified as the top challenge to the Green Agenda. This comment overlooks the fact that the political will of two global powers is likely to be channeled toward conflicting objectives.

To analyze how China and Russia’s objectives with respect to the planned green transformation might solidify, we need to examine their current interests.

In the Western Balkans, China equals coal. Today, coal provides some 70 percent of the region’s electricity. Given that these economies are between two and five

times more energy-intensive than the EU average, the outcome is a region half the size of Germany producing more coal emissions than the entire European Union.

As a result, all Western Balkan states minus Albania topped IQAir’s list for worst air quality in Europe— with Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) even making it into the global top ten. Coal is also the single biggest contributor to anthropogenic climate change.

Beyond coal, China has targeted other strategic sectors relevant to its Belt and Road Initiative, including mining, industry, and transport infrastructure. These sectors are also big polluters. Furthermore, Chinese projects have repeatedly been criticized for skipped environmental impact assessments and lax environmental standards.

Serbia’s Kostolac B coal plant provides a particularly egregious example. It unilaterally emits more sulfur dioxide than the Energy Community Treaty—which Serbia and other Western Balkan states have ratified— allocates to Serbia, Kosovo, BiH, and North Macedonia combined.

Ironically, Kostolac B is also the only plant in the region recently fitted with desulfurization equipment— built by the China Machinery Engineering Corporation and financed by the Exim Bank of China.

Despite all evidence to the contrary, the Chinese Communist Party prefers to be viewed as a constructive global actor on climate issues. A strategic Chinese response to the Green Agenda could see a greening, or at least “greenwashing,” of Chinese projects and investments into strategic infrastructure.

Better still for China, absent an international procurement instrument or foreign subsidies instrument applied to all EU funds, its state-owned companies can compete for EU and domestically funded green contracts.

In fact, this is already happening. A consortium including China’s Shanghai Electric Power Company constructed Montenegro’s second-largest wind farm—using Chinese turbines. A Chinese firm runs the FeitianSuye plastic recycling plant in northern Serbia—though its work was recently halted by the local environmental inspectorate.

And earlier this year, Serbia signed €3.2 billion ($3.8 billion) in contracts with the China Road and Bridge Corporation for municipal wastewater treatment and landfill projects.

Russian investment is more subtle in most Western Balkans countries, but it is likewise environmentally damaging. In much of the region, Russian oil and gas are king. The Kremlin leverages these countries’ energy reliance to resist energy diversification and market liberalization. Inflexible long-term contracts and planned pipeline projects suggest this trend will continue.

Russian ownership and operation of oil refineries is also problematic. In BiH, where Russia controls the country’s only two refineries, promised investments in facility modernization have fallen short.

The Bosanski Brod refinery pumped air pollution into Bosnia and neighboring Croatia for over a decade until the plant was finally shut down in 2019 for upgrades. Russian investment is also substantial in the mining, banking, and real estate sectors.

Russia is often content to play the spoiler, and in response to the Green Agenda should be expected to leverage its network in the banking and energy industries to do just that. Moscow’s stronger ties to kleptocrats and local officials may also facilitate Russian involvement in what is quickly becoming a regional trend of graft and corruption in renewable energy projects.

In sum, public and private funding mobilized by the EU for the Western Balkans’ green transformation could ultimately be transferred right into the pockets of Russian and Chinese state-owned enterprises.

Such an outcome may improve environmental conditions, but hardly satisfies the EU’s larger strategic imperatives for the region—including enlargement and securing its supply chains.

As the strategy fundamentally aimed at slowing global warming turns up the heat on the West’s two main geopolitical rivals, the European Commission would be remiss to turn a blind eye to the geopolitical implications of its Green Agenda for the Western Balkans.

*Allison Carragher

Allison Carragher is a visiting scholar at Carnegie Europe, where she specializes in economic engagement in the Western Balkans and countries of the former Yugoslavia.