No, No, No
Austria vetoed Romania and Bulgaria's entry into the Schengen Area at a European summit last week, resulting in domestic and international fallout
Servus!
I wrote to you last week previewing Austria’s impending showdown with its European partners over a possible enlargement of the Schengen common travel era. In November, the European Commission deemed Croatia, Romania, and Bulgaria fit to join the bloc within which passport and other types of border control have been more-or-less abolished, the countries have met the necessary criteria on security, corruption, and other issues. Their accession to the Schengen Area had the crucial support of the EU’s two most powerful member states, France and Germany. Austria, however, had other ideas.
At a meeting of the European Council in Brussels on Thursday, Austria waved through Croatian entry into Schengen while vetoing accession for Romania and Bulgaria. The purported reason for this was migration. In an appearance on the Austrian public broadcaster ORF on Sunday, chancellor Karl Nehammer described the decision as a “question of security for Austria.” The Austrian position—though it is not only Austria’s view, for the Netherlands is also in agreement here—is that when Europe’s external borders are weak, when almost 100,000 irregular migrants have arrived in Austria in a single year, internal barriers to movement cannot be pulled down.
The reaction from Bucharest and Sofia was swift. The Romanian foreign ministry recalled its ambassador in Vienna and accused the Austrian government of playing Russian president Vladimir Putin’s game by undermining European unity. Romanian-language social media was awash with calls to boycott Austrian companies with business interests in Romania, among them the state-run oil concern OMV, which runs a network of gas stations in the country, and the big banks Raiffeisen and Erste Bank. Small wonder that Erste Group CEO Willibald Cernko was among those to take umbrage with the Austrian government’s veto call.
Also displeased with the People’s Party’s (ÖVP) hardline on Schengen were their coalition partners, the Greens. Austrian president Alexander Van der Bellen called the decision “extraordinary,” and in doing so, he spoke for a party that had been putting pressure on the ÖVP behind closed doors not to veto Romanian and Bulgarian entry. Unfortunately for them, all of the crucial ministries in this regard—the chancellery, the interior ministry, the foreign ministry, and the Europe portfolio—are all in the hands of the ÖVP; the Greens had little leverage. The ÖVP—and specifically Nehammer and interior minister Gerhard Karner—were intent on exercising their veto power. And so they did.
The Greens’ Europe spokesperson Michel Reimon views the ÖVP’s veto decision as nakedly political and linked to forthcoming regional elections in Lower Austria—and he is, to no small extent, right. And the ÖVP’s approach to migration is bound up by inherent contradictions. It is true that Bulgaria is a critical entry point for irregular migrants looking to reach western Europe. But the typical route of choice for asylum seekers right now is not via Romania as much as through Serbia and up into Hungary. Yet while Romania has been cast out into the cold, Serbian president Aleksandar Vučić and Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán—aspiring authoritarians both—are treated as friends and allies in the war on migration.
Romania and Bulgaria will likely have to wait until next summer or fall before taking another crack into entry into Schengen. While I would still expect the ÖVP-Green coalition to still be in place, by then, the political winds may have shifted, superficial concerns may have been allied, and Austria may be more amenable to lifting its veto. Whether the ÖVP will experience any short-term political gain from its actions in Brussels last week will only become clear next month when voters in Lower Austria go to the polls. But any domestic benefit will have come at the expense of undermining Austria’s standing in Europe and its relations with its European partners, not only in Bucharest and Sofia but Paris and Berlin too.
Bis bald!
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