Each day 74,900 people cross in trains and 17,000 in road vehicles the magnificent 12- kilometre Öresund Bridge and tunnel that links Denmark and Sweden. It is the lifeline, built in the 1990s with the help of the EU, between Copenhagen and Malmö, for more than 8,000 daily commuters. Malmö is in effect a suburb of the Danish capital, a tangible expression of the borderless Europe that EU integration and the Schengen passport-free travel system were creating. Not any more.
And the imposition by Sweden last week of border controls with passport and ID checks on the Öresund traffic, domino-like, as if linked by an invisible, automatic chain, drew down simultaneously one more series of barriers to the south, as Denmark enforced what it describes as “temporary” controls on its German border. Carl Bildt, a former prime minister and foreign minister of Sweden, condemnedthe measures introduced by his country, calling them on Twitter “a dark day for our Nordic region”.
The mass influx this year of more than one million refugees from the Middle East has already prompted similar lowering of gates and the erection of many new barriers across the European Community on borders as far away as Macedonia and Hungary; what makes the Öresund controls a particularly sad and noteworthy moment, however, is the reality that this is the cutting not of a flow of migrants , regrettable as that might be, but the blocking of an internal artery, the first step in the reversal of the EU's great achievement of internal integration. Schengen is being demolished step by step. "For the first time since the 1950s, one will now need an ID-card to cross" over to Sweden, Danish prime minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen lamented.
Is this our future too? The trains stopping at Dundalk to unload the Belfast shoppers, the business travellers and the Southern relatives up for the day, to join the long passport queues? And then the customs controls. When, or if, that is, the UK joins the disintegration bandwagon and votes to leave the EU behind.