Defending the European Miracle: Borders, Asylum, and Security with Gerald Knaus

In this Vienna Coffee House Conversation, Ivan Vejvoda interviews Gerald Knaus about the origins, achievements, and current challenges of Europe’s border-free Schengen zone. Knaus recounts how the European Coal and Steel Community, the Treaty of Rome, and the Schengen Agreement built a single market underpinned by mutual trust and shared law enforcement. He then assesses the strain placed on Schengen by the Syrian and Ukrainian refugee movements, and explains the collapse of the Dublin system under free movement. Turning to solutions, Knaus advocates centrist, humane control via safe-third-country agreements, expanded resettlement and labour migration in a Canadian/Australian model, and credible European deterrence independent of US guarantees. He closes by arguing for clear, merit-based EU enlargement and better storytelling to engage younger Europeans on peace, security, and the climate. 

Gerald Knaus is an Austrian social scientist and co-founder and chairman of the European Stability Initiative (ESI), which he helped establish in Sarajevo in June 1999. An alumni of the University of Oxford, the Institut d’Études Européennes in Brussels, and the Johns Hopkins University Bologna Center, Knaus taught macroeconomics at the State University of Chernivtsi in Ukraine, worked for NGOs and international organisations in Bulgaria and Bosnia-Herzegovina and directed the Lessons Learned and Analysis Unit of the EU pillar of UNMIK in Kosovo. He is a founding member of the European Council on Foreign Relations and served as an Associate Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. Knaus was a Mercator-IPC Senior Fellow in Istanbul and a Europe’s Futures Fellow of the IWM and ERSTE Foundation.