This European Border Is Still Open. But for How Long?
The border between Austria and Slovenia runs through Armin Tement’s backyard. Literally.
Not that you would know it. Neat rows of vines march up and down the valley like military columns with no regard for a frontier laid down by man, why here, no one can quite remember. The Slovene wine workers speak German. The Austrians speak Slovenian, or at least try.
As for the wine, well, says Mr. Tement, 32, “it tastes exactly the same on both sides.”
When Mr. Tement’s family started making wine back in the 19th century, there was no border here. The region of Styria, straddling what is now southeastern Austria and northeastern Slovenia, was part of the Hapsburg Empire.
When the empire was broken up after World War I, Upper Styria became Austrian and Lower Styria became part of Yugoslavia — until the 1990s, when that country, too, was broken up and Slovenia gained its independence.
The border, a hundred years old this year, was briefly eliminated by advancing Nazi armies, then heavily policed during the Cold War, before vanishing in all but name when Slovenia joined the European Union’s passport-free travel zone in 2007.
“It was a great moment,” recalled Janez Valdhuber, 53, a winemaker on the Slovenian side. To celebrate, he grabbed his young children, climbed the steep vineyard opposite his house to the top where the border runs, and unfurled a European flag.
The interrogations at the border stopped, and Mr. Valdhuber’s car trunk was no longer searched when entering Austria.
But some worry Europe’s open borders might slowly be closing again, one checkpoint at a time.
This month, Germany announced that at its Bavarian border, it would turn back asylum seekers registered in other European Union countries, a move reintroducing a hard border of sorts with Austria.
Austria, now run by a conservative government in coalition with the far right, threatened to do the same on its southern border with Italy, Europe’s busiest north-south trade route. And as if to demonstrate its resolve, Austria briefly resurrected checkpoints at the Brenner Pass this month.
The border at Spielfeld, an Austrian town with barely 1,000 inhabitants, became a stop on the migrant route in 2015, and for a few traumatic weeks that year, tens of thousands of refugees came through.
Since then, Austrian soldiers have returned.
They ride in military jeeps along the “Wine Route,” a winding country road that zigzags back and forth across the border. They have built a fence along a small border stretch near Spielfeld and set up makeshift checkpoints in the hills — only sporadically manned, but there — on otherwise deserted lanes.
No one here reports having seen any refugees in more than two years, and so far the border checks are relatively rare.
But this month, the Austrian military and police staged a high-profile military exercise, simulating another mass arrival of migrants.
A platform was set up for the photographers. Two Black Hawk helicopters circled overhead. Two hundred students from the police academy were enlisted as “refugees.” Later, the defense ministry released a video.
“It feels a bit like we’re backsliding into the old days,” said Marko Oraze, a member of Austria’s Slovene-speaking minority who runs the Council of Carinthian Slovenes.
Mr. Oraze lives in Austria but gets his car fixed in Slovenia. Many of his friends commute across the border every day.
“More and more of them are stopped at the border on their way to work,” he said.
Some in Spielfeld applaud the tougher stance taken by Austria.
“It’s about time,” said Walpurga Sternad, who runs a restaurant with her husband near the highway connecting Austria and Slovenia. “They should just close all the borders in Europe, go back to what we used to have,” she said, as a group of friends nodded in approval.
Ms. Sternad remembers the day in October 2015, when some 6,000 migrants poured over the border in Spielfeld, filling the motorway and spilling into her own front yard. “It was scary,” she said. “So many people. They kept coming.”
https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/07/23/world/23Spielfeld2/merlin_141405090_9c9a0d35-5ad5-48fe-b166-2f2eb3f315c4-superJumbo.jpg?quality=90&auto=webp#.jpg 
https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/07/25/world/25border-dispatch-1-print/23Spielfeld1-superJumbo-v3.jpg?quality=90&auto=webp#.jpg 
https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/07/25/world/25border-dispatch-2-print/merlin_141405063_70357a76-f786-44bb-bd48-0f88678ad854-superJumbo.jpg?quality=90&auto=webp#.jpg ▻https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/24/world/europe/austria-slovenia-border-migrants-spielfeld-schengen.html#click=https://t.co/YWlazq9xGU
#frontières #asile #migrations #réfugiés #Autriche #Slovénie #fermeture_des_frontières #Schengen (fin de -) #militarisation_des_frontières #armée #frontière_sud-alpine
