Passport-free future to blow dust from Old Europe

By Gunta Gasuna

TEREHOVA, Latvia (Reuters) - Optimists call it the end of the Iron Curtain. Pessimists fear a "Fortress Europe" or a wave of illegal immigration from December 21, when passports will be checked at fewer European borders.

When the European Union's passport-free Schengen zone expands to include nine mostly former communist states, travellers in the EU will not need a passport to cross land and sea borders in an area about one-third the size of the United States, from Narva in Estonia to Narbonne in France.

From next March the extended zone will also include airports in a total of 24 European countries, where more than 400 million people live.

On what will be one of the front lines between Europe and Russia, chief border guard Andris Bulis is relishing the challenge.

"I feel responsibility, only responsibility -- because all the emphasis will be on the external borders," said Bulis at the Terekhova checkpoint on the border between Latvia and Russia.

He and thousands of eastern European colleagues will become responsible for the EU's borders with neighbours including Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and Croatia: fighting illegal immigration as well as drug- and people-trafficking.

The Schengen zone, named after a village in Luxembourg where a first agreement was signed in 1985 between the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany and France, has been gradually expanding: but the next extension will be the biggest so far.

After ministers approved it, Czech Interior Minister Ivan Langer said: "The last remnant of the Berlin Wall or the Iron Curtain is falling," according to the Czech news agency CTK.