The Border That Keeps Moving

The Guardian reported this week that nine European Union countries, Italy among them, have again postponed the introduction of the Entry/Exit System, the biometric register meant to record every non-EU traveller crossing the external frontier. France, Greece and Portugal joined the request; the reason given was the pressure that busy airports would face in the summer months. The system has now been deferred so often that its name has become a byword in the foreign press for European intentions outrunning European capacity.

For readers abroad, the story is filed under travel: queues, fingerprints, the small indignities of a holiday. Seen from Italy, the register touches something larger. This is a country whose external border is largely a maritime one, and whose airports at Rome, Milan and Catania are the first European ground many travellers touch. A system designed to know who enters and who overstays must work at Lampedusa as well as at Heathrow, and the two are not the same problem.

We note the irony without pleasure. A union that speaks constantly of a common frontier still cannot agree on the machinery of it, and each delay is presented as administrative prudence rather than as the political failure it also is. The Guardian's reporting makes clear that the objections are practical, not principled; nobody in the nine capitals is arguing against the register itself. That is precisely what makes the postponement telling.

What the world should take from this is not that Italy is obstructive. It is that the countries of first arrival carry a burden the countries of destination do not, and that the technical language of border management conceals a familiar asymmetry. Until that asymmetry is addressed in the same breath as the timetable, the Entry/Exit System will keep arriving, and keep being postponed.