The ghost of the fortress of Europe again roams the continent. Three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the debate is flaring up again: Should the European Union put up fences and barbed wire to protect its borders? In fact, it already exists. Over the past eight years, member states have built more than 1,700 kilometers of walls not to protect themselves from tanks or soldiers, but rather from migrants and refugees.

The main question is who will pay. Should European funds fund concrete, steel and barbed wire fences as they are already funding the purchase of radars or drones? Discussions are tumultuous, but the European Council’s February 9 conclusions suggest that supporters of physical restrictions are gaining ground.

The European Commission and some countries such as Spain and Germany refuse to use EU money to build new walls. They believe there are better ways to curb illegal immigration. But the movement in favor of border walls, led by the Visegrad Group (Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia and Hungary) and supported by Italy, Greece and Austria, wants to be pragmatic: we must build doors if you want to be able to close them.

After 2015

Basically the problem goes beyond the issue of walls. The question is how Europe will stand in the face of the challenges of immigration, current and future, and whether it is ready to tighten its policies to deal with them. Currently, everything says yes.

The European Union may have been founded on the elimination of internal borders, but it has always strengthened its external borders. Nervousness about the security of their borders regularly resurfaces. With the exception of February 9, the previous episode dates back just over a year ago, when, in October 2021, home ministers from 12 countries wrote to the European Commission asking it to examine “in priority” financing “physical barriers” at the outer borders.

Physical barriers have protected parts of Europe’s outer borders for decades. The fences of Ceuta (1993) and Melilla (1996) were among the first to be erected, but the walls and other physical barriers have subsequently increased and now cover over 2,000 kilometers. Bulgaria, for example, the poorest country in the EU, maintains a fence on 98% of its border with Turkey.

The refugee crisis of 2015, with the arrival of more than a million people fleeing mainly from the war in Syria, justified a new building momentum to stop people who try to enter the European continent. Fences have multiplied in Hungary, Latvia, Slovenia, Austria and even France.

A few years later, when migration flows were relatively low, the EU faced