I recently travelled by car from Germany to Luxembourg and back to Germany. From Germany to Luxembourg, everything is normal; after all, this is Europe, where there is a single market and freedom of movement for all citizens, although the volume of traffic on this motorway (the E 44) can be compared to that within Germany. So far, so good.
On the return journey from Luxembourg to Germany, however, you are quickly disabused of any illusions about Europe. Immediately after a construction site, which has already necessitated single-lane traffic and caused a long tailback, the German state intervenes in traffic with brute force and, with a great deal of fuss (such as batteries of headlights), makes the motorway single-lane again. Overall, my navigation showed a delay of over half an hour at a time in the afternoon when the evening traffic had not yet started.
As a normal person, you instinctively wonder how the German police intend to control these traffic masses, which have a very high proportion of lorries, given the very heavy traffic. The answer is simple: they don’t even try. When you finally reach the checkpoint after a long wait, the first thing you notice is a single police officer on the left-hand side using a large sign to urge drivers to pass through the checkpoint as quickly as possible. On the other side, four police officers stand and ignore the traffic, instead paying attention to their mobile phones.
So that’s how you find out if there are illegal immigrants on the road from Luxembourg to Germany! Well done, it has never been more clearly demonstrated how absurd this measure is, which many in Germany see as having no alternative. Where the European single market really works, you obviously can’t control it with a few police officers. The only thing that can be achieved with the controls is a huge amount of frustration for those for whom crossing a European border is an everyday routine.
I admit that, in the provincial narrow-mindedness of the German inland, where the Federal Minister of the Interior comes from, one cannot imagine this at all. Therefore, it is time to install a real success control. I propose to narrow the motorway from three to one lane on the A3 from Hesse to Bavaria and to systematically, that is day and night, ‘control’ the entire traffic as between Luxembourg and Germany. I bet they will find just as many illegal migrants and criminals at these checkpoints as they do at the German borders, and just as they do between Luxembourg and Germany, they will simply look the other way for most of the day because it is simply impossible to direct the sheer volume of traffic into one lane without provoking a mega traffic jam.
As someone who has really lived in Europe and not just in Germany for more than two decades, I can only marvel at German narrow-mindedness time and again. Did the European blockade triggered by Mr Seehofer during the Corona period not show with sufficient clarity how nonsensical the idea was that the virus could be stopped with the police at a European border? Have we still not grasped the enormous damage that German stubbornness caused in Europe at the time, without even the slightest benefit? Is it simply impossible for people in Berlin and Frankfurt to imagine that national borders have lost their significance for many millions of people because they literally live without borders?
No, the people in the German provinces don’t want to know about this, nor do they want to acknowledge it. The main thing is that we do symbolic politics. However, if we draw attention to the significance of national borders, we are directly promoting the agenda of nationalists at home and abroad, because this confirms their belief that Europe is a source of danger in its own right. At the same time, we are indirectly harming Europe by constantly emphasising the negative aspects of Europe from a national point of view and downplaying the importance of free movement in Europe, which is one of its key advantages. Once again, we are promoting the nationalist illusion that everything would be easier and better without Europe. We are always promoting the right-wing parties, even though we claim to want to fight them. National narrow-mindedness comes at a high price.