On Saturday December 30th, citizens of European Union member states Romania and Bulgaria were informed that they would be allowed to travel passport-free by sea or air to most of the EU’s member states, starting at the end of March 2024, thanks to the consensus reached within the European Council.
In a surprise development, visa-free travel was also opened up to Kosovars seeking to cross into the EU’s Schengen Area, which permits over 400 million EU citizens free movement.
While Ireland and Cyprus will still require some form of travel documents—as they are not part of Schengen—non-EU members Norway and Switzerland will now also admit Bulgarians, Romanians, and Kosovars without requiring them to show their passports.
The Schengen Convention states that residents of member countries can travel freely through them, subject to the unanimous agreement of member states. The area now consists of 27 countries, four of which are not EU member states. In the case of Kosovo, which is not yet a full-fledged member of the Schengen Area, the rules have been relaxed allowing its residents to travel freely within Schengen signatory countries.
In a press statement, the European Commission praised this first step towards Romania and Bulgaria’s full Schengen membership, saying that “an enlarged Schengen area will make the EU stronger as a Union, internally and on the global stage.” Little further explanation is offered for the policy shift.
Bulgaria and Romania have been waiting to join since their accession to the European Union in 2007, when they first sought the Schengen signatory status. Previously, the Netherlands consistently blocked this, voicing rule-of-law concerns about crime and corruption. For some observers, this struck an incongruous note, since the EU also condemned its then member the United Kingdom for delaying its own acceptance of Bulgarian and Romanian free movement.
Likewise, until now the Netherlands and Austria have long opposed extending Schengen to the two eastern states; Austria only announced in December that it would no longer object to either country’s accession (but would not yet lift passport checks at its land borders to their citizens).
If this policy reversal seems abrupt, allowing Kosovars visa-free into the Schengen Area represents a bigger outlier. Until recently, citizens of Kosovo still needed visas to enter any of the Schengen Convention’s signatories. Five EU member states—Cyprus, Greece, Romania, Slovakia, and Spain—do not even recognize Kosovo’s 2008 independence declaration and in effect treat it as part of Serbia.
Whilst Kosovo Prime Minister Albin Kurti celebrates, others are bemused that a non-EU member/candidate member is joining Schengen right now (or at all). As recently as 2018, the Netherlands, along with France, had blocked Kosovo’s accession out of fear they would be hit by waves of migrants—a concern not wholly unjustified. In the wake of Croatia’s accession at the beginning of 2023, its illegal migration figure skyrocketed by 140%.
Long-established opposition to changing the composition of the Schengen Area has been rapidly overturned. While the consequences of this have yet to be determined, it clearly illustrates the lack of transparency in European Commission decision making.
