The Checks We Put on Each Other

Italy said on Tuesday that it would extend for another fifteen days its border checks for travellers arriving from Spain, and Madrid answered in kind, according to The Local Italy. Two founding members of the European project, joined for four decades by the promise that their citizens might cross a frontier without producing papers, are now asking those citizens to prove who they are. The dispute is described as a spat over migration, and it is that. But it is also something quieter and more consequential: a demonstration of how easily a common space is reopened as a set of national doors.

The mechanism is familiar to anyone who has watched the Mediterranean frontier closely. When arrivals rise, the country of first landing is judged by its neighbours to have failed at a duty that the neighbours themselves did not wish to assume. The response is rarely a common policy. It is a fence, a patrol, a delay at the airport gate. What began as a shared obligation becomes a bilateral grievance, and each side can then present its measure as a proportionate reply to the other's. In this way a European problem is settled, temporarily, as a quarrel between two states — and the quarrel is renewed every fifteen days, which is to say it is never settled at all.

We note the timing. The same week brought word from The Guardian that nine EU countries, Italy among them, have asked for further delay in implementing the Entry/Exit System, the biometric register meant to replace the passport stamp at the external border. The reasons given are practical: busy airports, insufficient equipment, the fear of queues in the holiday months. The reasons are honest. But taken together with the Italian–Spanish exchange, they sketch an uncomfortable picture. Europe is building an elaborate apparatus for knowing exactly who enters and leaves, while its internal frontiers are being quietly restored by the very states that commissioned the apparatus. The machinery of control grows more sophisticated; the trust it was meant to express grows thinner.

There is an Italian vantage on this that the wire does not always supply. A country that is, by geography, the principal point of arrival for boats crossing from North Africa has for years asked its partners to treat migration as a European question rather than an Italian one. That request has been met, more often than not, with sympathy in principle and reluctance in practice. It is therefore worth asking whether the border checks with Spain are a policy at all, or a gesture — a way of showing a domestic audience that something is being done, at a moment when the thing that would actually help, a binding system of shared responsibility, remains out of reach. A gesture repeated every fifteen days begins to look less like resolve than like a habit of postponement.

None of this argues that frontiers are imaginary or that a state should not know who crosses them. It argues that the European idea is tested precisely at such moments, and that it is currently failing the test in small, administrative, reversible increments. The traveller from Madrid who is stopped at an Italian airport will not experience a debate about burden-sharing. He will experience a queue, a question, a stamp. That is how a common space is unmade — not by treaty, but by the accumulation of small proofs that no one quite trusts anyone else. We would prefer to report a different story. For the moment, the wire gives us this one.