"Of course, we understand that this will be the border of Western Europe," said Lieutenant Colonel Andrej Wojcik, commander of the newly strengthened Polish Border Guards in this area, giving a tour of the new post. He introduces some of the 1,500 men and women under his command, shows them the new weapons and vehicles and even the very clean and secure lockup rooms where future captured illegal immigrants will be temporarily held.
Given its way, Poland would probably not be fortifying its eastern borders quite to this extent. The country is concerned about creating what some people here call a new Iron Curtain or a new Rio Grande between it and its former allies in the Soviet bloc, namely Ukraine, Belarus and the Russian Federation, whose citizens, once able to cross into Poland by showing just their passports, now need visas, a requirement that, at least temporarily, has cut down on exchanges between Poland and the East. But a tightly controlled, nearly impermeable border was one of many conditions that this country had to fulfill to gain EU membership, which it will receive on May 1 this year, along with nine other countries from Malta and Cyprus in the south to Estonia in the north. "There was a belief that hordes of illegal migrants are waiting outside our borders and that our controls were inefficient," Jan Truszczynski, Poland's chief EU negotiator, said in an interview in Warsaw. "We had to confront this type of thinking, that Poland's borders were more dangerous than other European borders," Truszczynski said, "which means that we had to beef up resources and investment along our eastern frontier."
There are several ways of considering what will be the new European border, not least of them using the grand perspective of history. The new eastern land border of Europe - Europe defined politically and economically by the soon-to-be-25-member EU - will be some 3,860 kilometers, running roughly northeast to southwest, essentially differentiating the "West" from the "East," Europe from the rest of the Eurasian continent. "This is very moving," Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer of Germany said in a recent interview, speaking in general of the shift of the European border several hundred kilometers to the east. "It's a historic moment. It will be the first time in modern history that Germany will be the center of Europe without direct threats to our border and without us threatening anybody." Jerzy Holzer, director of the Institute for Politics of the Polish Academy of Science, put this idea from the Polish perspective: "Poland will no longer be between two big nations, Germany and Russia, which was always a dangerous situation, but in a union with many other nations who will be partners," he said. |