The Schengen Area is a group of 29 European countries that have abolished routine passport checks at their shared borders. It includes 25 of the 27 EU members (all except Cyprus and Ireland) plus Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland, and it covers more than 450 million people across about 4.6 million square kilometres. The area is named after Schengen, a wine village in Luxembourg, where the founding agreement was signed in 1985 and its implementing convention in 1990. Inside the area the borders remain on the map but are usually not checked. The border that matters for travellers is the external one, made up of nearly 9,000 km of land frontier and more than 42,000 km of coastline, facing Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, Turkey and five Western Balkan states. This article traces, in order, the agreements and enlargements that created that border.
Before 1985: Nordic and Benelux Precedents
Passports and routine border checks were not always a feature of European travel. Before the First World War most countries had relaxed border rules. Visas and checkpoints spread in the years between the two world wars, and after 1945 they stayed in place even as Western Europe began to integrate its economies. The 1957 Treaty of Rome made free movement of people one of the aims of the European Economic Community, and EEC citizens could travel to other member states with a passport or national ID card. They still had to show that document at almost every border, however.
Two regional groups showed that open borders could work. The Nordic countries allowed free movement and residence among themselves from 1954. The three Benelux countries, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, later dropped controls on their shared borders as part of the Benelux Economic Union. Attempts to do the same across the whole Community stalled, partly because the ten members could not agree on whether the Community even had the authority to abolish border checks.
14 June 1985: Five Signatures on the Moselle
Five of the ten members decided not to wait for the others. On 14 June 1985, representatives of Belgium, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and West Germany signed an agreement on board the riverboat MS Princesse Marie-Astrid, on the Moselle near Schengen, at the tripoint where France, Germany and Luxembourg meet in the river. Because the treaty was signed outside the Community's institutions, the countries that were ready could go ahead without the others.
The 1985 text did not remove border posts. It committed the five countries to gradually easing checks. Guards would look over cars as they slowed down instead of stopping every one, people living in border areas could cross away from the official checkpoints, and the five would work toward common visa rules. The village itself is small, with 704 residents in 2025, and in 2006 its commune took the name Schengen because the name had become so well known. The European Museum, which covers the history of the agreements, opened there on 13 June 2010, a day short of the 25th anniversary of the signing.
From the 1990 Convention to 26 March 1995
The agreement became a working system through the Schengen Convention, signed on 19 June 1990. It called for internal border controls to be abolished completely and set out the rest of the package: common rules for short-stay visas, cooperation between police and courts, and a shared police database, the Schengen Information System. More countries signed up before it came into force. Italy signed on 27 November 1990, Spain and Portugal on 25 June 1991, and Greece on 6 November 1992.
Almost five years passed before the systems were ready. On 26 March 1995 the convention came into force for seven countries: the original five plus Spain and Portugal. That date is when the Schengen Area started operating. Italy lifted its checks on 26 October 1997, Austria, which had signed in April 1995, on 1 December 1997, and Greece on 1 January 2000.
Amsterdam, 1997: Schengen Becomes EU Law
By the mid-1990s almost every EU member had signed, so keeping Schengen as a separate treaty no longer made sense. During the negotiations on the Treaty of Amsterdam in 1997, the governments agreed to bring the Schengen agreements and all the rules made under them into EU law. The treaty took effect in 1999. After that, any new EU member was obliged to join the Schengen Area once it met the technical requirements. Changes to the rules now go through the EU's normal legislative process, and non-EU associates can accept them or withdraw but have no vote.
Amsterdam also created the two opt-outs. The United Kingdom would not give up its own border controls, and Ireland stayed out so that it could keep the Common Travel Area, the passport-free arrangement it has shared with the UK and the Crown Dependencies since 1923. Ireland has still asked to take part in some Schengen cooperation, including the Schengen Information System.
2001 to 2011: The Nordic Countries, the 2004 Entrants and Switzerland
The Nordic countries joined together on 25 March 2001. Denmark, Finland and Sweden came in as EU members, and Iceland and Norway, which are not in the EU, came in through association agreements signed in 1999. All five members of the Nordic Passport Union therefore entered on the same day. After this enlargement Finland's long frontier with Russia became part of the external border.
The largest single enlargement followed the EU's 2004 expansion. On 21 December 2007, nine countries lifted their internal controls on the same day: the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia. Border posts that had divided Germany from Poland and Austria from Hungary were closed or dismantled. The main external land border moved east to Poland's and the Baltic states' frontiers with Belarus, Russia and Ukraine.
Switzerland, which is not an EU member, signed its association agreement on 26 October 2004 and approved it in a 2005 referendum. It lifted its checks on 12 December 2008. One side effect was that travel between Büsingen am Hochrhein, a German village entirely surrounded by Switzerland, and the rest of Germany no longer involved identity checks. Liechtenstein followed on 19 December 2011, completing the four associated non-EU states. The microstates of Monaco, San Marino, Vatican City and Andorra are not formal members, but in practice they keep open or semi-open borders with the area.
Croatia, Bulgaria and Romania, 2023 to 2025
Bulgaria and Romania joined the EU in 2007, and the European Commission declared them technically ready for Schengen in 2011. Their entry was then blocked for more than a decade by vetoes at various points from Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands and Austria, which cited corruption, organised crime and illegal migration. Croatia, which joined the EU later, got in first. The Council approved it on 8 December 2022, and it joined on 1 January 2023, which moved the external border to Croatia's long frontier with Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Bulgaria and Romania were admitted in two stages. Air and sea checks ended on 31 March 2024, and land checks ended on 1 January 2025, which brought the area to 29 countries. Cyprus, the last EU member obliged to join, passed its technical evaluation in June 2026. A Council vote is expected by December 2026, although the island's division has been the main complication throughout. Meanwhile Gibraltar, which is not in the EU, reached a treaty with the EU that has been provisionally applied since 15 July 2026. It opened the land border with Spain, and Schengen entry checks are now carried out at Gibraltar's airport and port instead.
November 2015 Onward: Temporary Checks Return Inside the Area
The rules have always allowed a member to bring back internal checks for a short time if there is a serious threat to public order or internal security. From 2015 onward, that exception has been used often. When large numbers of asylum seekers arrived in 2015 and after the Paris attacks that November, several countries reinstated checks. France has renewed its controls continuously since 13 November 2015. In 2016 seven countries had them in place: Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Norway, Poland and Sweden. Checks returned across the whole area during the COVID-19 pandemic, and Germany has checked all of its internal borders since 16 September 2024. In April 2022 the European Court of Justice ruled that checks for the same threat may not last longer than six months, which strengthened criticism of countries that keep renewing them. Today's checks are mostly random, with patrols pulling over selected vehicles rather than stopping every car.
12 October 2025: The Entry/Exit System at the Outer Edge
Most of the recent changes have been at the external border. The Entry/Exit System started on 12 October 2025 and has been fully running at every external crossing since 10 April 2026. It replaced passport stamps with fingerprint and facial-image records for travellers from outside the EU and EFTA. ETIAS, a pre-travel authorisation costing €20 for visitors who do not need a visa, is due in 2027. The open internal borders still carry heavy traffic. There were 1.3 billion crossings of Schengen borders in 2015, and about 1.7 million people commute across an internal border every day.
For every participating state, see our list of Schengen countries. For the country where the process began, see our Luxembourg guide, and for the two Spanish cities where Schengen rules still come with passport checks, see the borders of Ceuta and Melilla.