“Wall of the EU”, “Wall of the Schengen”: The Minority Questions on the ‘Outside’ of Integration

Cultural Perspectives and International Relations Studies

Abstract

The Euro currency was circulated from January 2002 by the EU 11 member countries. The EU and NATO's enlargement policy towards Central European countries are also progressing very swiftly. In the EU summit meeting in Brussels in the middle of December 2001, it declared that almost 10 EU Applicants in Central and Eastern Europe (Hungary, Cyprus, Slovenia, Czech, Slovakia, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, and Malta) may join to the EU in 2004. NATO will also decide it's enlargement towards some Central European countries in the NATO summit of Prague in the autumn of 2002. According to these two enlargement, much of “Eastern-half” of Europe will be included to ‘Europe’ virtually (Most successor countries of the old Soviet Union and Eastern Europe are already included to the OSCE, EAPC and Partnership for Peace groups).
In accordance with the evaluation of the EU integration and the coming into effect of Schengen Convention, the free movement of people, goods, currency and information is guaranteed in Europe, and such “liberty and wealth” of Europe will be enjoyed by 450 million people in the near future.
In this process of EU enlargement, however, the words ‘wall of the EU’ or ‘wall of the Schengen’ came to be heard by the ethnicities and minorities ‘outside’ of Integration. By the EU enlargement, “European borders” are moving to the East until they reach the Russian border, and it influences and causes frictions to people who lived and co-existed in the eastern-part of Europe historically. Now that the border will be drawn the middle of Central and Eastern Europe, people ‘outside’ of Integration will feel estranged by the ‘wall’ of the Schengen.
The author investigates the gravity of that invisible defending ‘wall’ against the outsiders of integration for insider's security and comfort, and how we can solve these problems in the coming years in order they will not feel estranged from the EU free world. She concentrates especially that Hungarian Minority's Law in June 2001 towards the so called 3 million Hungarians who live outside the border, and its problems with neighboring countries.
The author also investigates the Kaliningrad case of Russia's detached estate, surrounding by the Polish and Lithuanian border. Poland is already a member of NATO and if Lithuania will join to NATO or EU in the near future, Kaliningrad will be completely isolated by the two countries' border, even though it has strong connections with Baltic and East European countries economically, politically, and in people's every day's life.
By researching such cases, we can consider the contradictions or one-sided utopia of the free movement, co-existence and comfort ‘inside’ the EU, which is guaranteed by making higher walls: more severe controls for security against the ‘outsiders’ of the EU.