The fog clears in Europe
Slovakia, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovenia and the Czech Republic all join the Schengen Zone tonight.
That is the part of the EU where the member countries trust each other enough to abolish the visa- and border controls (But beware! At airports, the new members won’t benefit from the abolition of controls until the end of March in 2008). In the member countries of the Schengen Agreement, when crossing the border to another member country you don’t need to show your passport or ID, and don’t need a visa to enter the country. It speeds up arrival at sea- and airports and means there are no border controls on road links. The member countries also share data on criminals via the Schengen Information System and their police forces cooperate with each other to fight crime.
The new members bring nearly all of the European countries into the zone – even some non-EU countries such as Norway and Iceland are members, and Switzerland joined in 2004, but will actually implement the changes in 2008.
You can probably guess that the only major European country which will then not belong is the same country where a leading national paper is alleged to have run the headline “Fog In Channel: Continent Cut Off“. Well, that’s not quite true – as well as the UK, the Republic of Ireland has not implemented the reduction of border controls either.