From: London Review of Books
Short Cuts
Daniel Trilling
The European Union’s eastern frontier cuts through Selmentsi, a village on the border of Slovakia and Ukraine. On the Ukrainian side, the road leading to the checkpoint is lined with shops selling fake designer clothes. The villagers serving in the shops slip easily between Hungarian, Russian, Ukrainian and Slovakian, a legacy of the region’s contested history. Once part of the Habsburg Empire, this section of the Carpathian mountains was taken by the Soviet Union in 1945. A glance at a map shows why Stalin coveted it: across a span of just a few hundred kilometres, Transcarpathia borders Romania, Hungary, Slovakia and Poland which is very convenient for an empire looking to keep its satellite states in check.
Smuggling sustains the economy of Transcarpathian villages like Selmentsi. Cheap, Slovak-registered cars in one direction, cigarettes and other contraband in the other, along with a cargo that villagers in Selmentsi refer to as ‘the blacks’: refugees and other undocumented migrants from Somalia, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, the Middle East and beyond. Although far fewer people enter the EU this way than cross the Mediterranean in leaky boats from North Africa or Turkey, this eastern route has long been an area of concern for the planners charged with keeping EU borders secure. In 2008, Ukraine signed a readmission agreement with the EU which was intended to make it easier and quicker for the EU to expel unwanted migrants. Turkey signed a similar agreement in 2013: the idea is that the EU’s neighbours act as a buffer zone, taking on the task of processing and deporting migrants in return for fewer restrictions on the movement around Europe of their own citizens.
