WSJ: As Europe Expands, Tensions Build Up Along New Borders

July 2, 2004

As Europe Expands, Tensions Build Up Along New Borders
Now So Close to EU, Ukraine Asks Why It Can't Come In;
French-Russian Frontier?
Little Szelmenc's 'Iron Curtain'

By MARC CHAMPION
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
July*2,*2004;*Page*A1

MAP:
http://tinyurl.com/2wqvk

LITTLE SZELMENC, Ukraine -- Earlier this year, Peter Lizak left his
home to visit a cousin who lives at the other end of this small,
ethnically Hungarian village. It should have been about a five-minute
walk.

But the border between Slovakia and Ukraine cuts through the middle of
the village, and Mr. Lizak is separated from his cousin by two
10-foot-high wire fences. Mr. Lizak, 60 years old, had to spend three
days and travel 420 miles to buy a $36 visa and find a border crossing
before he and his cousin could meet.

"I would like to be able to walk over to the other side without going
all around the country," says Mr. Lizak.

After the Berlin Wall fell 15 years ago, the borders of Eastern Europe
grew relatively easy to cross. But boundaries are growing restrictive
again for the citizens of "Big Szelmenc," as the Slovakian side of
this village is known, and those in "Little Szelmenc" on the Ukrainian
side. The reason: Slovakia joined the European Union on May 1, and
Ukraine didn't.

That means new immigration controls, trade restrictions and a heavily
guarded border are once again dividing these neighbors. The result:
Even as the EU seeks to unify the Continent, people on both sides of
Szelmenc now decry a new "iron curtain" a few hundred miles east of
the original.

As the EU grapples with the challenges of integrating the 10 new
nations it admitted on May 1, tensions are already building up along
its new borders. The EU demands that new members such as Slovakia
maintain strict border controls and visa regimes to clamp down on
illegal immigration, organized crime and smuggling, so new members are
pouring money into high-tech equipment and training at border posts.
Yet such controls stem the flow of goods and people -- a flow that a
growing number of Eastern Europeans have grown to rely upon for their
livelihood since the end of the Cold War.

Confronted with the promise of easy trade and rising living standards
just outside their reach, the EU's new next-door neighbors
increasingly want in. The EU hasn't been eager to admit former Soviet
Republics, some of which are as poor as Haiti and fractured by
separatist movements. But pressure is building to give further thought
to adding Ukraine's 48.7 million citizens to the EU, mainly from the
club's newest members, which want to create a more stable and
prosperous neighborhood for themselves.

Moving the EU's boundaries that far east, however, would further
burden the current EU countries financially, and move the union into
an even poorer and less stable region. Because many of the internal
borders of the EU are open, admitting Ukraine effectively would shift
the border of longtime members such as France to the doorstep of
Russia. Or, if Turkey is one day admitted to the union as some now
advocate, the EU would border Iraq and Syria.

To many, the EU is already an unwieldy behemoth, with 450 million
citizens and 25 countries. In 2007, it is due to expand again, to
include Romania, Bulgaria and possibly Croatia. Add to that the
monumental task of integrating this year's 10 new inductees, which
will cost tens of billions of dollars in annual subsidies for years to
come, and many say the redrawing of borders should stop.

Dutch EU commissioner Fritz Bolkestein argues in a new book, "The
Limits of Europe," that expansion should stop short of Ukraine and
Turkey because including them could overstretch the EU, diluting it to
a simple customs union or even causing its disintegration. "We should
not be ashamed to recognize that borders exist," Mr. Bolkestein
writes.

Others see positive effects from the spread of the EU. German Foreign
Minister Joschka Fischer, for example, argues that integrating Turkey,
a Muslim country, is strategically important to help spread
European-style stability into the Middle East. In December, the EU is
due to decide if it wants to start membership talks with Turkey. The
issue digs deep into religious prejudice in the mainly Christian EU,
but many say Turkey will get a green light, to avoid further tensions
between the Muslim world and the West.

Szelmenc's border problems began in 1944 when Soviet troops knocked
down a house to run through the dividing line. For the next 45 years,
brothers and sisters couldn't visit each other. When villagers died,
relatives had to watch the funerals through the wire fences,
overlooked by a guard tower.

As a girl, Eriko Rigan, now 41, says she and her friends used to flirt
with the boys across the border, but they couldn't meet. "The guards
would roar up in their jeeps and we would all scatter," she recalls.

All that seemed to be in the past when the Berlin Wall was torn down
in 1989. Borders throughout the former Soviet bloc were relaxed, and
the villagers on both sides of Szelmenc could visit each other without
a visa. For a period, the border guards would even let the villagers
through the fence unrestricted on holidays.

Szelmenc is a poor village in the pancake-flat plains where the Magyar
tribes first settled after crossing the Carpathian mountains on their
way from the East, before spreading further across modern Hungary.
Most families traditionally have been farmers, but in Little Szelmenc
the local state farm has closed, leaving few jobs. About a third of
the labor force in this southwestern corner of Ukraine works outside
the country.

On the Ukrainian side, hope ran high that the Cold War divisions were
gone forever. Villagers in Little Szelmenc and throughout
Transcarpathia, as the region is called, set their clocks by Central
European Time -- one hour behind the official Ukrainian time. It's a
statement of where people belong, in a region where the elderly have
lived under as many as five different governments, from Hungarian to
Soviet, without moving. "We feel that we live in Central Europe," says
Mrs. Rigan's husband, Istvan, 43.

Slovakia's efforts to bring its border in line with EU visa
requirements have closed the brief period of reunion. In 1999, the
last year Ukrainians could travel without a visa to Slovakia, 2.9
million people crossed the border. In 2001, the first full year when
visas were required, that number dropped to 801,000. And as Slovakia
prepares to join the EU's borderless internal travel zone, the EU's
frontier with Ukraine is going to get even tougher to cross.

Only a handful of people among Little Szelmenc's 250 inhabitants have
regular jobs. Others are on irregularly paid Ukrainian pensions of
around $50 a month, making the cost of a visa and travel to get to Big
Szelmenc prohibitive.

Until recently, Ukrainians traveled freely to Poland from Lviv, the
capital of western Ukraine, either to work or to supplement their
incomes by selling diesel fuel, cigarettes and other goods that are
cheaper here. An estimated 10 million people crossed the border with
Poland each year. Last October, however, Poland reluctantly enforced
an EU-mandated visa regime. Every day now, 1,500 to 2,000 people line
up outside the Polish consulate in Lviv for visas. Crossing the border
by car takes from six hours to two days.

It is easy to understand why the EU's boundaries have yet to include
Ukraine. In today's EU, Ukraine would be the fifth biggest member --
bigger than Poland, which has lobbied for it to get into the EU --
with voting rights to match. Yet its judicial system and the
transparency of its major companies compare unfavorably even with
Russia's, while democratic institutions are weak.

Ukraine's economy has been growing fast recently -- at 9.4% in 2003 --
but the country remains poor. According to the World Bank, Ukraine's
annual per capita gross national income in 2002 was $4,650, adjusted
for purchasing power, compared with $10,130 in Poland and an average
$24,900 in the 12 countries that share the euro, Europe's common
currency.

Drawing a new border east of Ukraine would also complicate EU
relations with Russia -- a major energy supplier for most EU
economies. Russia sees Ukraine as part of its natural sphere of
influence and sees the EU as a competitor in what Russians call their
"near abroad." At least eight million ethnic Russians live in Ukraine,
and Russian companies already own four of Ukraine's six oil
refineries, accounting for about 80% of output, while pipelines
carrying Russian gas and oil to Europe are a big source of income.
Ukraine this year joined a loose economic union with Russia, Belarus
and Kazakhstan.

"The Ukrainians are in a terrible position -- they cannot choose"
between the EU and Russia, says Fyodor Lukyanov, editor of a new
journal called Russia in Global Affairs.

Back in 1996, the American academic Samuel Huntington published a map
of the outer limits of Western Civilization in his book "The Clash of
Civilizations," which predicted that the world's next big conflicts
would follow religious rather than ideological divides.

The EU's new border largely follows Mr. Huntington's line. All eight
former communist bloc countries that joined the EU last month fall
west of the line. All those left out, except Croatia, fall east of it.
Ukraine is cut in two. Most people in Eastern Ukraine belong to a
Ukrainian Orthodox Church, headed by the Patriarch of the Russian
Church in Moscow. Mostpeople in Western Ukraine, for centuries a part
of Poland or the Austro-Hungarian empire, belong to the Greek Catholic
Church, which follows Orthodox rites but is headed by the Pope, in
Rome.

The EU has offered Ukraine and other former Soviet Republics that are
interested in EU membership a special "Wider Europe" program that
involves some financial aid and encourages them to adopt EU legal,
trade and other standards. But crucially, the EU isn't offering these
countries the prospect of membership -- a key incentive to make the
tough decisions involved.

Since 2001, the villagers of Szelmenc have been pressing for a special
border crossing for locals only, forbidden under current EU law. They
built a carved wooden gate, cut it in half and placed the halves on
each side of the border fence to symbolize their division. They hope
to put the two parts together when they get a crossing.

In April, the mayors of Little and Big Szelmenc traveled to
Washington, where a Hungarian lobby had organized a special briefing
for the U.S. Congress on the village's border problem. It was the
first time the two mayors had met without a fence between them. But
only one member of Congress, Rep. Diane Watson, a California Democrat,
showed up.

Although a proposal is in the works to change EU law to allow for a
restricted border crossing, all 25 member countries will have to agree
for that to happen, said Elisabeth Schrödter, a German member of the
European parliament who has taken up Szelmenc's cause.

"The problem is that this concerns so many sensitive issues within the
EU, about stopping illegal immigrants, crime and so on," says Ms.
Schrödter. "I'm afraid it could take years."

--Carolyn Chapman in Big Szelmenc, Slovakia, contributed to this
article.


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