Romania's Schengen Accession a Historic Success

Younger generations need to know where we started from.

Crossing Hungarian-Romanian border in 1989 (Photo: Fortepan / Ivan Varhelyi)

When I arrived at the Hungarian embassy in Bucharest, a good ten years ago, the advanced state of negotiations suggested that Romania was likely to be admitted to the Schengen area during my four years of diplomatic service. This did not happen, as the Netherlands and Austria blocked accession for a long time, citing corruption and shortcomings in the judiciary; later, Austria's government added the increase in illegal migration to the list of these partly justified objections.

However, the Hungarian presidency of the Council of the European Union achieved a historic success by getting the full accession of Romania and Bulgaria signed this year. Soon, what the border crossing into Transylvania used to be will become just a distant bad memory.

Crossing the border was normalized in the decades after the fall of the Romanian dictator thirty-five years ago, but the completely free land crossing from January 1, 2025 will bring a new quality. Not only for truck drivers and businesses, and for millions of Romanian guest workers in the West, but also for our largest ethnic Hungarian minority and for relations with the mother country.

The lifting of border controls between Hungary and Romania on January 1, 2025 can be truly appreciated by those who were often kept waiting, searched and occasionally intimidated at the border during the dark years of the Ceausescu dictatorship. Like the writer of these lines, who, from the 1970s onward, regularly crossed the Eastern Iron Curtain, not as a diplomat but as an ordinary university student with sound national sentiments. At the border crossing point at Bors, we usually had to wait for hours for the Romanian border guard to finally approach our car, even if there was no one in front of us. A gift of soap or a packet of cigarettes, almost obligatory at customs, was only good for not having to completely unload the trunk.

On one occasion I wanted to bring to Hungary an artistic carving by the famous Kudor family living in Banffyhunyad (Huedin). 

I was not allowed to.

They didn't confiscate it, that's true, they just told me to take it back. I handed it over to parish priest Jozsef Tempfli, the later bishop, for safekeeping at the Nagyvarad-Olaszi (Oradea) parish. I arrived at the border again, now without the carving. However, in the meantime, there was a shift change at the customs office. I could hardly believe my eyes: the customs officer who turned me back was already hoeing the corn on his land near the border crossing. From the cornfield, he signaled to his shift partner that he could leave me alone, because I had already been checked.

On another occasion, on my way home, I was viewed with suspicion at the customs inspection at Oradea railway station because I had no luggage. They took the only item hidden in my handbag, a memorial album of the martyrs of Arad. Without any written acknowledgement of confiscation, of course. I was more fortunate when I was able to bring over hidden in my rucksack, a wood carving by sculptor Jeno Szervatiusz, depicting renowned composer and lutenist Balint Bakfark as a gift to the rector of the Academy of Music in Budapest.

Another absurdity of the eighties was that "foreigners" like myself from the motherland were no longer allowed to stay with relatives; only in officially approved accommodation. The border guard checking my passport instructed someone to follow me from Oradea railway station to the Black Eagle Hotel. Even at night, they followed me to the toilets down the unlit corridor. And in the morning, in the porter's booth, the Securitate agent would organize the reels of wiretapped conversations of the hotel guests without the faintest sign of secrecy.

In the final days of the dictatorship, the names of those entering the country were openly checked at the border. In addition to mine, Balazs, it wasn't difficult to find on the passport list the name of Ferenc Bartis, who had resettled in Hungary. When I had earlier asked Andras Suto about Bartis's book entitled 'Behind Bars in Romania' published in Hungarian, the Transylvanian Hungarian writer and playwright said that unfortunately, everything in it was true.

The recollection of some grotesque and in spots horrifying memories of a bygone era only adds to our joy that young generations are now free to enjoy, without restrictions, an important achievement of the European Union.

But at the same time, the younger generations also need to be aware of where we started from. This makes the elation over Schengen accession, of crossing borders quickly and without obstacles, all the more authentic and blissful.
The lines of Mihaly Babits, one of our most pro-European poets, in his work entitled 'Transylvania',  are fitting here, even if they were inspired by entirely different historical circumstances.

Now into verse I rise, Transylvania, to proclaim,
That no border gates can halt your magic's flame.
An old pilot, Transylvania, takes his seat once more,
Yearning to soar across his youthful skies of yore...

The author is a retired ambassador extraordinary and plenipotentiary.