Taking Off #7: Borders

[Image: Belgium (Brussels) airport entry passport stamp, per Wikipedia]

Here’s how I’ve imagined getting around among the countries in the European Union: just like getting around among the states in the US. Y’know — walk across a narrow bridge and bam, there you are. Drive on an interstate highway, or the European equivalent, and keep your eyes peeled for the Welcome to the Next State! billboard. And so on.

Well, it is like that. Kinda.

The biggest difference lies in the fact that you’re crossing international borders — not mere political subdivisions of a single nation. The word “international” comes with teeth which the phrase “state-to-state” does not — specifically, the teeth bared to ward off excessive immigration.

This post won’t address the pros and cons of immigration policies, in general or, specifically, one vs. another. The history and culture and politics and demographics of a country, after all, will drive its own such policies; some countries might by nature be more inclined to liberal policies, and some, to conservative (even xenophobic) ones.

But a “union” of countries, now: what might that mean for plain old travel among the members?

“Travel” (especially of the tourist sort) isn’t synonymous with “immigration,” of course. On the other hand, plainly, no more than a vague line separates the words’ connotations: if you travel to Country X for a week, then move on, then sure, call it a vacation; but if your visit extends to, say, five years — then surely you might as well say you’ve immigrated to X. But where’s the cutoff point?

Given a natural desire to ease travel among them, the members of the EU must have struggled with reconciling their various answers to that question. Eventually, a substantial subset of them came up with a solution they could all live with — not a perfect, maybe even a grudging one, but a solution. The solution is called the Schengen Convention. (The term comes from the name of the town in Luxembourg where the original agreement was signed.)

Roughly speaking, the Schengen area corresponds to the EU area — but the Venn-diagram circles don’t 100% overlap. At the moment, the EU comprises 28 countries; the Schengen area, 26. Here’s the Schengen list:

Austria	Hungary	Norway
Belgium	Iceland	Poland
Czech Republic	Italy	Portugal
Denmark	Latvia	Slovakia
Estonia	Liechtenstein	Slovenia
Finland	Lithuania	Spain
France	Luxemburg	Sweden
Germany	Malta	Switzerland
Greece	Netherlands

(Note that most significantly missing from the list are the UK and Ireland: all the Schengen countries are on the Continent proper.)

If you’re a citizen of a Schengen country, great! Travel freely! Stay as long as like — anywhere in any of the others!

But if you — like The Missus and I — are not Schengen citizens, then we’re bound by the Schengen rules for tourists. Most problematically, we’re subject to what might be called (maybe it even is called, I dunno) the 90-in-180 rule:

• Before traveling to the Schengen area, you must get a Schengen travel visa.
• When you first enter the Schengen area, your passport gets stamped and a clock starts ticking. The alarm goes off in 180 days — not “six months,” not “half a year” or “two seasons” or whatever, but 180 days.
• Within that 180-day period, you may freely travel among the Schengen countries, and getting your passport stamped as you exit each one and enter the next…
• …as long as you don’t stay in the Schengen area for more than 90 days.
• Starting on your 91st day, you’re subject to deportation to your home country. (Further: your passport will be stamped to indicate you’re a, uh, a visa violator. There are no doubt awful consequences of that, but for our purposes the point is clear: we don’t want to violate the terms of the visa.)

Now, if you look back over some of the earlier posts in this Temporarily Expatting series, you’ll immediately see a problem. We’ve been planning a trip of six months’ duration, more or less, divided roughly equally among (1) the UK and Ireland; (2) northern Europe; and (3) southern Europe. (The Schengen area comprises nearly all of areas (2) and (3).) You can also see that the list of 30(ish) cities we hope to visit breaks down roughly evenly — so we’d spend two months, plus or minus, in each of the three segments.

Sooooo… how to arrange things so that we somehow still spend about 120 days in northern and southern Europe, without violating the 90-in-180 rule? At a certain level, this seems easily doable — until you start to drill down into the permutations.

To help ease analyzing all of it, the EU has provided an official “Schengen calculator.” (The link takes you to the English-language version; click on a national flag to get a version suited to that country’s language.) The idea is, you enter the blocks of time during which you plan to stay in Schengen territory, and it tells you how many days you’ve got left.

I confess I find the official calculator confusing as bejeezus to use. (This unofficial one I found much easier.) For starters, all the dates need to be entered in dd/mm/yy format — standard, I suppose, in Europe but completely alien to me.

And should you mis-enter a date, the error messages aren’t, umm, reliably useful. For instance, the calculator can’t deal with dates earlier than April 30, 2013. (When you’re not used to the dd/mm/yy format, it’s not that hard to mistype it.) If you do enter such a date, says the user guide at the site, here’s the message you receive in a pop-up box:

The date of entry into force of the “new” definition of “short stay” is 18 October 2013 and therefore the calculator cannot be used for entries/stays earlier than 22 April 2013 (= 18.10.13 minus six months). The calculator does not support calculation of entries/stays earlier than 22 April 2013. The “old” definition applies for such entries/stays (“3 months in 6 months from the date of first entry).

(I was already lost when I encountered the phrase “date of entry into force.”)

For another thing, there’s that heading: “Enter previous stay(s) in the Schengen area.” Previous to, uh, when? Previous to the, uh, “Date of Entry/Control”?

The example at right shows how to use it correctly, I think.

If I’ve got this right, the Date of entry/Control field would be the date we might be thinking to re-enter the area, following at least one previous visit. What this example says, in effect:

• We don’t care where you were or how long you stayed before setting foot in the Schengen area.
• You’re planning to enter the Schengen area on July 15, 2020 (“15/07/20”), and plan to stay there through October 12 (“12/10/20”)
• … at which point time’s up! that’s your 90 days! (Hence the “90” in the small light-gray-shaded box in the third column.)

In the larger gray box to the right of the column, under all the flags, you see some further useful information — much of which is likewise (to me) confusing. What I want to focus on here is the last line, which pretty plainly says: we’d need to wait until January 11, 2021 before being eligible for another 90-day visa.

So, argh! While we’re a bit flexible on the length of our overall stay, I don’t think either of us wants to stay that long — which, again, would only be the start of our return to Schengen. (We do have a retirement in the US to which we’re also looking forward.)

Well, suppose we enter the (approximate) dates following our original itinerary (60 days in the UK/Ireland, 120 days on the continent)? (Image at right.)

What this result tells us:

• The total length of the stay (small gray box): 120 days. Great! That’s what we want!
• …but we will have overstayed our welcome to the Schengen area by 30 days — because, of course, we can’t stay 120 days in a single 180-day period: only 90.

There are a number of ways to get around all this. For example, we can move one Schengen visit into the first part of the trip, move a loooonger version of the UK/Ireland trip to the middle, and continue on with Southern Europe. Or we could mix in some non-Schengen countries, such as (currently) Romania and San Marino (a tiny little country completely surrounded by Italy). There’s also an option to get a separate “long-stay visa” from one Schengen country or another, in addition to the Schengen-wide one, and this might (if I understand it right) allow us to linger in that country beyond the 90 days.

But for now, well — I just learned about this whole Schengen thing in the last few days. Now the itinerary is all out of sorts. And I’m all verklempt!