Salmoneus wrote:There are borders and there are borders. Nobody wants open borders with Belgium right now, given... well, Belgium. Would you like to be the politician who had to tell the public, "sorry about that terrorist atrocity - we could have stopped it by having some mildly inconvenient border guards, but an incredibly rich multinational company told us to take the guards away, so naturally I did, because, hey, you have to do what corporations say, right, even when people's lives are on the line?" ? I don't think that would be a great political strategy.
Things about Belgium recently:
- correct, detailed plans of the attack on the airport had been discovered by the Greek police (at a flat owned by a Paris attacker) and handed over to the Belgian authorities, who were unable to do anything about it
- the Belgian police didn't ask Abdeslam anything about future or ongoing terrorist plans, or his co-conspirators. They asked about the Paris attacks and he talked freely with them, then they warned him about the possibility of extradition to France and he refused to say anything else
- it took from November to March to catch Abdeslam. This is despite the fact he was living literally around the corner from where he grew up, and despite the fact that his known radical friend was known to be there (it was his mother's house) since a tip-off in December, but nobody bothered to follow it up
- after the airport bombings, the Belgian authorities decided to shut down the metro and evacuate it, just in case there was a further attack. Unfortunately, the Belgian authorities couldn't organise a piss-up in Belgium can't actually communicate or implement any plans outside of their own offices, so none of this happened. The government decided to tell the metro operator to evacuate, and thought that it had done so... but the metro operator did not actually receive any sort of communication from the government to tell THEM that the form saying that they'd been told had been filled in. So they didn't evacuate, and there was another bomb, more than an hour after the first attacks. The government then STILL didn't communicate anything to the metro company, who eventually took the initiative to close the system down themselves.
We're moving from the point where Belgium is the laughingstock of Europe to the point where people would really quite like them to get their damn shit together.
Hey look Salmoneous, I agree with you. Belgium has been absolutely shit at everything you mentioned. There's always a breakdown in Belgium because the country is federalized and everything has to be sent through government after government, language after language, and this has created a bureaucratic nightmare that probably rivals that of France. Belgium let this radicalism grow under their nose, we all know it, and we even had two ministers try to hand in their resignation due to mishandling of information communicated to them.
But none of that matters because of one reason, Schengen. Europe agreed on Schengen in 1995 and Belgium was a signatory. That means that the agreement is to be respected by all current signatories, even in Belgium, even when there seems to be every reason to temporarily put the agreement aside.
So now it's to Europe to decide which is more important, the success of free movement in Europe or the ability to control borders. If Europe wants to move backwards, to an Europe pre-Schengen, then it needs to be an unanimous decision within each state, an annulment of the state's signature to uphold the agreement must be made, and the fact that doing so will cause a huge economic loss for that state/Europe needs to be taken into account, not to mention that each member state must agree to fund full 24 hour controls on all borders, not just highways but on backroads, otherwise the controls are completely useless.
But this half-assed reinstating of border controls here and there, against certain states within Schengen, etc. is not going to fly. It will soon be in violation of the agreement. So either countries like Sweden, Denmark, Hungary, Belgium, Austria consider leaving Schengen completely or they get their shit together and realize that upholding the agreement was never going to be easy work but an open Europe is a freer Europe.