Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics

by Tim Marshall

A stark example came in early 2016 when, for the first time in half a century, Sweden began checking the documents of travellers from Denmark. This was a direct response to the numbers of refugees and migrants flowing into northern Europe from the wider Middle East and to the IS attacks on Paris in November 2015. The idea of the EU’s ‘Schengen Zone’, a border-free area comprising twenty-six countries, has taken some heavy blows, with different countries at different times reintroducing border controls on the grounds of security. Fearing a bottleneck, Denmark then began checking people crossing from Germany. This all has an economic cost, makes travel more difficult, and is both a physical and conceptual attack on ‘ever closer union’. Some analysts have begun to speak of a ‘Fortress Europe’ due to bids to reduce immigration levels, but this misses the fact that there is also a drift towards a ‘Fortress Nation State’.