Europe grows - and borders evaporate

The rest of the world may not be all that interested, but as Spiegel OnLineInternational reports, the map and face of Europe has just changed in a fairly momentous way:

"The number of European countries doing away with border checks expanded by nine early on Friday morning. Most of those joined were behind the Iron Curtain just 20 years ago.

Europe just got bigger. At one minute after midnight local time on early Friday morning, border controls vanished for nine more European Union members, many of them former members of the Soviet Bloc. Fireworks, cheers, music and speeches throughout the morning welcomed the expansion, which means that travelers can move from the far corners of Estonia all the way to the Atlantic coast in Portugal without once encountering a border guard.

"This is an especially beautiful moment," said German Chancellor Angela Merkel at a Friday morning ceremony at the German border with Poland and the Czech Republic. "It is a source of great pleasure that coming generations will experience open borders as the European normalcy."

European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso was also present, as was Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk. Barroso held up a border-crossing sign and referred to it as an archaeological relic. Border checks in airports will remain in place until March, however.

The ceremony was just one of many across Eastern Europe as Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia and Malta all joined the so-called Schengen zone, as the open-border area is known. The Schengen Agreement is named for the village in Luxembourg where it was first signed in 1985.

There are now 24 countries -- including two non-EU states, Norway and Iceland -- populated by 400 million people in the border-free travel zone. Switzerland is set to join in 2008, with Cyprus, Romania and Bulgaria likewise in line."

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