If you haven’t noticed – and it’s likely you have not, attention has now moved on elsewhere – the financial task for Cyprus is now quite a bit steeper than was the case at first (that’s from the FT, so in English; free, but registration required). We had been talking about the country being asked to contribute €7 billion to get a €10 billion bailout; now the tab has risen to €13 billion for that €10 billion bailout.

Among other things, this is going to mean an even BIGGER hit to those holding accounts in excess of the €100,000 threshold at the island’s two biggest banks. Yes, many of these are Russian nationals. So that now, as Die Zeit reports, the Cypriot government has come up with a scheme to at least offer an easier path to EU citizenship for high-net-worth individuals.

The Die Zeit piece (no byline) states right off that this measure is meant as outright compensation for confiscation – i.e. for the monetary losses these people are incurring as Cyprus tries to grab the money it needs. And indeed, it further reports that President Anastasiades first announced the measure in a presentation he made yesterday before a group of Russian businessmen in Limassol (Cyprus’ second-biggest city, so filled with Russians that many just call it “Limassolgrad”!).

But does this move make sense? How receptive were those Russian businessmen likely to have been? “OK, you’ll never be able to trust our banks ever again, but do stay anyway for the sake of the nice warm Mediterranean sea-breezes and
the souvlaki!” (more…)

Geography buffs find particularly interesting places in the world where major urban centers come close together but under different jurisdictions: the greater New York City metropolis, say, or the Liège-Maastricht-Aachen area in NW Europe. But there is one other that is more interesting even than these, featuring major urban centers once divided by the Iron Curtain during the Cold War, and that is the Vienna-Bratislava area along the Danube. (Which, if you enlarge it even further, also includes the Hungarian city of Mosonmagyaróvár – OK, we’ll forget about that one for now . . .)

Indeed, a major Bratislava residential area known as Petržalka (to the south, and infamous for its very many drab panelák Communist pre-fab high-rise apartment buildings, still there today) has for years crowded right up to the line beyond which no one was allowed to be seen, lest they be shot. Ever since that regime fell in 1989, travelers heading to Bratislava on the bus from Vienna’s Schwechat airport (e.g. your humble blogger) have still found it remarkable the way the villages and fields lying to that city’s east abruptly give way to crowds of buildings once you cross the border.

But now there is no more “border” – that part of the world is now in the EU’s Schengen Area. Slovaks are no longer constrained, and so now they’re breaking out::

Novinky: Bratislavané se stěhují do Maďarska a Rakouska: http://t.co/8XyLzZ69

January 4, 2013 1:14 pm via twitterfeedReplyRetweetFavorite

@Zpravy

Zpravy

“Bratislavans are moving to Hungary and Austria,” it reads. Yes: “moving,” as in “house.” This article – and note, it’s on a Czech news website – mainly discusses Slovak settlement in two neighboring places, namely the Austrian village of Wolfsthal – which you ride through on that airport bus – and the Hungarian town of Rajka, in the other direction but still only about 20km from Bratislava.

As recently as 2007, there were only three Slovaks in Wolfsthal, out of a population of around 720; now it’s 230 Slovaks making up a population of 900. The mayor, Gerhard Schödinger, certainly speaks Slovak – he has a Slovak wife! (And he used to be an Austrian customs official, back when there was a border.) As we can see, he also makes sure that the public signs dotting this Austrian town are bilingual German/Slovak. The Slovaks living there like it mainly because, well, everything is so German – “It’s peaceful here,” says one, “with beautiful Nature, order and safety in the streets” – but also because the Austrian government offers great social welfare benefits, topped off by easily-attainable and cheap loans of up to €50,000 for home improvement. (more…)

Free movement of goods; free movement of ideas; free movement of money; free movement of people: these all used to be points of pride for the European Union, milestone-accomplishments as it succeeded in bridging national differences to create unprecedented levels of cooperation between European states. And along with that, unprecedented levels of trust; all of those freedoms required each participant state to have confidence that the others would not let them down and cause them to regret such openness.

Now “freedom of movement” once again seems to be under peril, as can be seen in today’s Süddeutsche Zeitung exclusive article Berlin and Paris want to bring back border controls. This is all about the EU’s Schengen Agreement, begun in 1985 and expanded since then to include most, if not all, member-states in a regime where travellers are not checked at “internal” EU borders between member-states but, on the other hand, “external” borders between member-states and non-member-states are policed ever more carefully, since someone getting past those then has free access to other states party to the Agreement.

Or at least those external borders are supposed to be carefully policed. In reality, doubts have arisen as to whether this really is the case, particularly when it comes to asylum-seekers making their way from North Africa across the Mediterranean, usually to Italy. When the pressure got turned up last year due to the Libyan civil war and many thousands more attempted this boat trip than usual, French confidence that the Italians were performing their proper border-control duties disappeared, to the point that border controls were reimposed for a few days on those countries’ “internal” common EU border – in violation of the Schengen agreement, of course. Denmark last year also chose unilaterally to reimpose controls on its border with Germany for a while. (more…)

This is the first EuroSavant post I can recall that is in the nature of a travel advisory. The Berlin newspaper taz reports today (Switzers rip off air-guests) on a particular nasty racket that the Swiss authorities are running out of Zürich airport.

It affects non-EU nationals who have the right to visa-free travel within the EU’s common border control-free “Schengen” area – e.g. from the US, Canada, Brazil, Australia, Japan, as well as the states making up the former Yugoslavia. Ordinarily such citizens can stay within the Schengen area for 90 days, except that many Schengen states (such as even German and France) actually allow a longer stay, still without any visa.

The authorities at Zürich airport will have none of that, though: they have taken to imposing hefty fines on such non-EU nationals trying to fly back home after stays in the Schengen area that exceeded 90 days. The taz piece highlights the story of a 61 year-old American writer who was fined 9,000 Swiss francs (~€8,100) for trying to leave after having “overstayed” within Schengen for eight (8) days. But apparently this sort of thing has happened to 3,116 people in 2009, to 3,504 in 2010, resulting in 1.7 million Swiss francs in fines that latter year. (Switzerland entered the Schengen area only in December 2008.) The cruel thing about this is that those Zürich authorities demand the money just before the victim’s long-distance flight back home – if you offer any resistance or argument, you’ll miss your flight!

Reactions? The official in charge of this policy, one Hanspeter Frei, makes comments to the taz reflecting a seeming profound satisfaction with how things are. On the other hand, the Swiss Office for Non-EU Visitors can only recommend that people not use Zürich to fly out of. And the director of the National Tourist Office is quite disturbed by the whole thing.

Now this is interesting – if also a little obscure. One of the current lesser crises going on (so that you barely hear about it) is the erosion of the EU’s Schengen Treaty whereby a large subset of member-states allow travel among themselves with absolutely no border controls. Now this arrangement – formerly the pride of the EU, on par with the common currenchy – is on the back foot, mainly due to the flood of refugees coming from North Africa (a by-product of the “Arab Spring”) and the general loss of member-state confidence that the Italian authorities at the first line of defence can keep them out before they do get into Italy and thereby into the Schengen zone, from where they have many options for further uncontrolled inter-EU travel. France was loudly talking about re-imposing controls on its Italian border a while back, while Denmark has actually done so on its border with Germany – to the sputtering protests (with no attendant action) of EU authorities.

In the middle of this, as the leading Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza now reports, the EU Commission is likely to open up visa-free travel from Russia. Well, not really all of Russia – but rather that strange Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, stuck there between Poland and Lithuania, outside of Russia proper. Oh, and they won’t actually be able to go to Lithuania – just to Poland. And, to make it clear, there still will be border controls in place, these Kaliningradians (?) will just be able to go through them (presumably flashing their Russian passports) without having to go through the trouble of getting a visa beforehand.

Then again, Poland itself has been within the Schengen zone for a while now; who knows where some of them will want to go on to from there? But the Commission is seemingly willing to take that chance and announce such visa-free entry tomorrow; according to the article (no by-line), it’s motivation is essentially that it feels sorry for the Kaliningradians, they must be so lonely: “to avoid the isolation of Kaliningrad from its immediate neighbors, it is necessary to ease the travel of its citizens.” Because that sort of isolation can’t be very healthy for any body politic.

Don’t laugh: since Kaliningrad was first isolated this way by the independence of Lithuania in 1990, it’s been mainly known (when noticed at all) for the shady activities of all sorts going on there: weapon-smuggling, alcohol/cigarette-smuggling, the dispatch of freighters with suspicious cargoes, and the like. This is quite simply a gesture to persuade people there to start behaving themselves.

The Danish opinion newspaper Information is now carrying this brief piece from the Ritzau news agency. Denmark only joined the EU’s Schengen Area of visa-free state-to-state travel with the other Nordic states in March, 2001, but now calls are issuing from some Danish politicians to temporarily re-impose border controls in the run-up to that “Cop15” United Nations Climate Change Conference taking place in Copenhagen starting the second week of December that you might have heard about.

Who specifically is making this demand? No surprise: it’s the Danish People’s Party, the influential and powerful party (although it’s not part of the current government) best known for its strict attitude towards immigrants, asylum-seekers, and foreigners in general. In particular, it was that party’s foreign affairs spokesman, Søren Espersen, who raised this demand when being interviewed on a Danish TV news show. “We want only proper (ordentlige) people come to Denmark,” he proclaimed – presumably referring only to the period around the climate conference, although you need to be careful because, if it could, the People’s Party would clearly raise that principle to general applicability. This is no idle request, either: Espersen made clear in that same interview that the People’s Party wants to see movement towards re-imposing those border controls before it will resume cooperating with the government in pushing an important new financial law through the Danish parliament, the Folketing.

The point is of course to try to keep out those elements who might try to come to Copenhagen to make trouble in the streets while all the international bureaucrats and heads of state/government are assembled for the climate conference. The Schengen Treaty apparently does allow for the sort of temporary re-imposition of border controls that the People’s Party is requesting (not that it particularly matters to the party’s politicians whether it is allowed or not). Their demand has also won support from the Danish Conservative Party, which is important since they’re actually in the government. (It has been dismissed, on the other hand, by the Socialist People’s Party – which matters less, since they are not.)

So are you planning to head to Denmark in the near future? (In particular: Are you planning to be in Copenhagen for the big conference? Really? How on earth did you find a hotel room, or do you have friends there?) If so, better be prepared for some extra checks as you cross the border.

Failure in December – but success in June! At their just-concluded Brussels summit the European Union’s now twenty-five members finally accepted a draft to put forward to their constituent parliaments and/or voters as the new European Constitution. Perhaps this summit’s productive result can be ascribed to the rotating EU presidency being held now by Bertie Ahern and the diplomatically-astute Irish, whereas Italy and Silvio Berlusconi were in charge last December – the Council presidency will cease to rotate this way once the new Constitution is enacted, by the way – or maybe it was all due to the new governments in place in Spain and Poland, the two “medium-sized” EU states that were the principle obstacles to progress at the last summit in December. One thing is sure, though: France and Jacques Chirac were once again in the middle of the goings-on, and so a review of French reporting and comment is appropriate. (Tony Blair was also a leading protagonist – or at least according to the French press, as we shall see – but I’ll let you read the on-line British papers about that yourself – and pay for it, in the case of The Times.) (more…)