Bulgarien und Rumänien sind Vollmitglieder des Schengen-Raums geworden.

Welcome from Germany <3

Hopefully the UK can take the stick out of their hole and rejoin the EU so Ireland can join Schengen without an NI/ROI hard border.

Love it. Hopefully one day all of Europe

As an Austrian, I am deeply ashamed of our current Chancellor Nehammer, who delayed the accession to the Schengen Area because of a provincial election in Lower Austria. As the national elections have taken place and his ÖVP suffered heavy losses, there is no apparent reason for him anymore to keep the Schengen veto.

A major test for Schengen will be its ability to withstand new refugee flows in a better way than the 2015-17 wave.

That wave played a major part in causing Brexit, increasing polarization in most European countries and stretching some parts of Europe to the breaking point (especially Sicily and the Greek Islands).

I worked with Bulgarian embassy in 2012, when they were only becoming candidates for Schengen Area, a Bulgarian visa was the easiest to get. It has been a long journey. Congratulations for the Bulgarians!

 Is that gray area of countries on the Mediterranean mostly former Yugoslavian countries?

Fuck, now everybody that is immigrating can simply walk to where there is overpopulation (caused by immigration)

did they have ffom before this?

I hope the Northern Cyprus controversy may soon be solved, so Cyprus can join Schengen.

It’s now clear that Brexit was a mistake for the UK. If Britain had at least remained in the EFTA, both UK and Ireland would be in Schengen and the entire EU would be finally truly united.

They only needed over a decade to join, because some shit politicians (mainly from Netherlands and Austria) decided to oppose to it out of petty local political games or because they invented subjective political criterias not applied to anyone else before. This abusive treatment has led to a growing resentment towards the EU and to a degree to the surge of extremist/populist/far right parties that were given more ammunition for their anti-EU propaganda (”the EU wants you on your knees”, ”Bruxelles doesn’t respect you, you are seen just as a colony or a mere consumer market”, ”the EU humiliates us”, ”our traditional parties politicians are weak and sold themselves to the interests of the bigger richer EU countries and no longer represent the interests of the romanian people”, etc.).

It’s a good thing that it happened, but it came far far too late. I don’t even want to get in the appalling, deeply unfair and discriminatory behavior of the austrian politicians who accepted Croatia in Schengen and 5 minutes later rejected Romania and Bulgaria on made up, straight up lies and the claim ”Schengen must be fixed and not expanded”. Wasn’t Schengen also supposed to be fixed 5 minutes earlier, you double standards, hypocrite, bag of shit!?