For those living in Eastern Europe in the early 2000s: how did you life change when the border controls with Western Europe were abolished?

26 comments

1. Didnt the free travel only start when each of those countries joined the EU?

2. I think biggest change for most Czechs and Slovaks was that when we go to vacation in Croatia we no longer get stopped at the Austrian border in long queues. Those now happen just on the Croatian border 😂

3. It personally didn’t change anything for me but for my dad.

   My dad’s company has construction sites in Germeny, the company itself is Polish. He was required to go there on delegation since 2005. Poland only joined the Schengen in 2007. It meant that he had to have a passport, wait on the border for few hours. Regular border crossing.

   Since joining Schengen, all of that wasn’t required all of a sudden and he could just go and work. No passports, no waiting. Getting to work was finally easy.

   It got better when the EU abolished roaming so he could call my mom with his regular phone number and pay much less for the calls.

4. Well before 2007, it wouldn’t have been possible for me to stay and study in Germany for 7 years without queuing up for a visa and then I guess citizenship. Schengen is still up though, so we still have border controls here.

5. Aside from other things mentioned here, abolishment of borders was a great boost for local tourism – most Czech mountains are at borders of Germany, Austria, Poland and Slovakia and now one can seamlessly hike or bike there.

6. first we joined EU and customs check were abolished, not a big change at the borders unless you was transporting some goods for business. In this case the waiting time dropped from hours to minutes.

   three years later we joined Schengen and border check disappear completely (except Prague airport, as there wasn’t schengen terminal ready at the time)

7. I remember driving down to Croatia from Sweden sometime around 1998 and as we were crossing the German, Austrian border everyone had their passports ready. We crawled through with the car, looking around, just kept going, nothing, and we’re in Austria.

   It was shocking not having to show any passport. But that was the Schengen agreement, nothing to do with West Germany.

8. The border checks weren’t nearly as much of a change as freedom of movement. Latvia jointed the EU in 2004, and Schengen in 2007. Dismantling the border checks in 2007 of course made travel more convenient, but it just saves some time. I’m sure it’s different for people who cross borders often, but for most it’s just added convenience.

   Getting to use the EU’s freedom of movement, now that was life-changing for many. Hundreds of thousands of Latvians went to work or study abroad, which became far easier than before.

9. Not at all, the border checks were just a formality (took literally 5 seconds).

10. We no longer had to wait in long lines at the border control points. I don’t think I heard my dad say Grüß Gott since then. Too bad it happened after I already moved away because of my school so we never went there as a family again to enjoy it. I do enjoy it when I go shopping there now though. I would definitely not go as often if there still were border checks.

11. I actually remember waiting on border with our “brother country” Slovakia before Schengen. I was just a child so I probably remember it worse than it was, but I rememeber we were in something which I would call a traffic congestion nowdays, even so the control itself didn’t take long at all. So yeah, this improved… Tho this is not an answer to the question.

    Traveling to west is something almost nobody did back then. Why would you travel to country which had no sea or warm weather but you paid 5 times more for a beer or a lunch? As mentioned already – it was used more the other way West -> East.

    Nowdays it’s obviously a different thing. Way more people travel to West and back – even so vast majority just for a job or purchase of used car.

12. I always wanted to have a passport full of border stamps and visas, my first disappointment when I went abroad westwards in 1999 was that I won’t get stamps for all the countries I’m goingthrough.

    Also after we got visaless travel to EU, I tried to get back VAT for a minidisc walkman I bought in the West, but it required the border customs control to stamp your VAT-return form to confirm exporting of the item, and this was impossible at the border train station as the border control was a cursory one, just some dude in uniform going through the train lengthwise, and no customs control and no time to disembark to look for the right guys to stamp my form, so, overall I lost money from the VAT return because the border wasn’t tightly closed.

13. You could recognize people who worked abroad by the clothes they wore. Branded clothes were very hard to find, there were no shopping malls, the market was low quality with many retailers selling merchandise from China or Turkey. So someone who wore branded clothes was either a businessman or a worker from abroad :))

14. Not from a Eastern Europe country, but my mother used to live next to the Hungarian border and told me that with open borders hordes of Hungarians came to Austria to buy stuff like dishwashers and washing machines.
    They would just put them on the roofs of their cars and drive back so Hungary.

15. Well, not much. We have traveled much even before 2004/2007… My mother was employed in the DACH region since the 90s and we never had any problems, as there was no language barrier. I can not remember any long queues at the crossing between SK/AT.

    BUT it certainly made a difference while i was looking for jobs. No border controls meant i can “live at home” and work abroad without much hassle.

16. On the other side of the experience, I saw polish construction workers everywhere and I still do.

    So it’s some great jobs opportunities for them.

17. Frankly, the change of border checks was not so big, as in our case it was only really noticeable with 1 of the 4 neighbours: Finland is over the sea, so you need ferry tickets etc anyways, same for Sweden. Then there’s Russia, no changes there. So only driving to Latvia was notably changed, though it was also very easy before.

    But as others have pointed out, it’s not so much about open borders than freedom of movement, that allows you to live and work anywhere in the EU.

    Btw, as kids, we used to mock some EU “friendship-promoting” measures such as international teen camps and events (“so the EU just pays the bill for them to get drunk, they don’t care about the topic of the event”), but actually all these events and all the other stuff did change a lot in the society over just a decade or even less. The world feels so much more open, a Portugese gal is a homeboy and everyone knows someone who is or has been living and working abroad, no EU country is a mystery. We are aware, that nobody still knows a thing about Estonia, but at least we know quite some things about other countries and feel more involved.

18. I remember there were always updates about the border situation and waiting times in the news. It was as common as a weather forecast. I still remember many names of the border crossings as I was hearing them every day.

    Otherwise not much changed, the queues were usually quite short, only few hours of waiting.

19. We lived quite close to the polish border and when they finally joined Schengen we kind of went there quite often, to get gas at least.

    Bad part of it was that my dad now had to travel longer to work because he was working for the German customs at that time.

20. I was studying in bigger city than my original town and during first two years I was mugged three times before they managed to steal my phone. Once UK opened for work without any problems all those morons left making good money doing anything really. Robimy someone for 50GBP phone, or often less, wouldn’t worth it anymore if you could earn that much in a day in UK doing simple things. People would go and rent a house with 10+ other and then eat the cheapest food available to save money.

21. For me personally it didn’t change much as I had no money to travel. Till I moved away Westwards in mid 2000s. The trip was by car and there were border controls on every border. Some were easy, show passports, go. Lithuania-Poland border was a nightmare not because of control of our family but because of several kilometres long lines of trucks waiting to cross. It was said they waited there for days and weeks, no food except what they had with them, no sanitation, no toilets, all forest full of shit. As a light passenger car we didn’t have to wait in that line but even passing it was scary, shocking, idk. Latvia was already in EU at the time but no Schengen yet.

22. No longer felt like a begger/refugee when traveling as a tourist.

23. I was a baby then but I remember that the only thing that’s changed was that we no longer had to wait at borders for hours and we didn’t need to show our passports. That’s all I noticed.

24. It didn’t change that much because travel was pretty much unrestricted already. A bigger impact was joining the EU and rapid increase of prosperity leading to more means to travel because money was the biggest obstactle to traveling around.

25. Poland is in Central Europe.

    Now responding to the question. It didn’t change to much.

26. Romanian villages suffered a lot. Majority of hard working young people left and all that was left was an aging population that could not take care of the land, could not keep the traditions and customs alive. In the Transylvanian village where I grew up, we had traditions and customs for all holidays, we had a big community of handcrafters, from tailors and furriers to carpenter, shoemakers and blacksmith. None of those exist anymore.

    The schools suffered a lot too. The school that taught me to read, add 1 + 1 and later encouraged me to continue education (I’m a software programmer now), has almost no qualified teachers anymore. Under the communism, young graduates that studied to become teachers, were assigned to teach to all corners of the country (mandatory for 3 or so years), where they had to work their first few years after graduation (some stayed until retirement). We always got in that period young, excited teachers that wanted to prove their worth. I feel lucky that I grew up in Romania in that period and not now.

    By the way, I’m not pointing fingers to the people that left. I also left in that period. It’s too bad though that the departure of the generations around my age, pretty much destroyed the Romanian villages.