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by DoDo
Open borders feel liberating, feel symbolic of transition to peace, and they are the most recognised effect of the EU.
Yesterday (21 December 2007), the Schengen Area was expanded East and South to take up most of the ten new EU members from 2005 (Cyprus is the exception). Thus some borders with rather heavy history became transparent in Central Europe. These included most of what was the Iron Curtain (all but the long gone German-German part). But where I was today was the border of Slovakia and Hungary. Below some personalised words on that border, and some photos I took (which are utter crap due to awful light conditions, I only dare to post them for the documentary value).
I went to the section of the border along the Ipeľ (H: Ipoly) river. Though the Ottoman Empire's vague Northern border was around here from 1552 to c. 1686, this border as a sharp line is relatively new. It was created as the border of Czechoslovakia and Hungary by the post-WWI peace agreements that cut up Austria-Hungary.
The borders weren't drawn exactly along geographic or ethnic borders. Not the least because there were no clear ethnic borders. But the economic cohesion of the new states was also used as argument, so sometimes it was ensured that a railway line would stay in one country.
Already between the wars, neighbour relations between the nation states weren't exactly friendly. Hungary's leaders for their part pursued border corrections ("irredentism") in similar fashion as Hitler: first demand areas with ethnic majority, but aim for a later conquest of the rest. The first part was 'awarded' in 1939 by Hitler and Mussolini at the Vienna conference, so for six years there was again no border here -- that was when one set of my grandparents met. When the Red Army marched through here at the end of 1944, and collected all males of suspected military age, one great-uncle -- who was in a youth organisation that was taken to work in factories in Germany, but ran away and walked home on foot -- was hidden by a friendly Slovak family (and met his future wife) in Vyškovce/Visk.
In communist times, official language always added "friendly" as an epithet to the name of every Warshaw Pact country. Yet, the borders of those friendly countries were anything but friendly. In fact, for a decade or so, normal people couldn't cross the borders at all (not even for a funeral of one's mother, as happened to my other grandmother and Romania). East of Šahy/Ipolyság, where the border again follows the Ipeľ/Ipoly, it happened that my relatives, including then 7, 5 and 3-year-old children, were arrested by the Hungarian border guards during a winter walk. Tho', maybe that came to be because the sergeant suspected that the mysterious guy smuggling stuff across the river by night is one of my great-uncles... Later on, travel was made easier for common people, and even later the only-once-in-three-years rule remained only for the West. Still, the border meant barbed wire, soldiers with guns and dogs; and border crossing meant stopping at border stations for at least half an hour, while children were told to stay quiet and unsuspicious, and waiting to be checked by guards of both countries, one after the other. After 1989, the procedure was steadily softened -- no limits and requirements on money, friendlier guards, just one check per direction, then with EU membership fast-tracking of nationals on both sides, who could just use their ID cards instead of a passport requirement.
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Open Borders | 35 comments (35 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)
Open Borders | 35 comments (35 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)
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