Gorizia: a reminder of what's at stake with Germany's EU border checks

The German government's decision to reimpose passport checks at all of its internal EU borders risks re-erecting the walls which took so long for Schengen to tear down.

I’ve been at the Italian-Slovenian border over the past days, where the neighboring cities of Gorizia and Nova Gorica are preparing to jointly be the European Capital of Culture for 2025. Until 1947, these two were one city - first within Austria, and then within Italy after World War I. But the post-war treaty between Italy and Yugoslavia forced Rome to give up their Dalmatian, Istrian and Venezia Giulia territories, and it was decided to split Gorizia in two. A wall was erected through the city, and the Eastern section was renamed “Nova Gorica” by the Yugoslavs.

Berlin wasn’t the only city divided in two by the Iron Curtain. The “Gorizia Wall”, as it came to be called, also became a hotspot for people trying to escape Communist rule. Even after Italy-Yugoslav relations thawed after the Soviet-Yugoslav split, this was a severe border. The city’s northern train station ended up just on the Yugoslav side of the wall, and the southern station ended up on the Italian side. Even after the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, the Gorizia Wall remained in place for another two decades - until Slovenia joined the European Union in 2004.

The Iron Curtain as described by Winston Churchill in 1947

The reason, of course, is that while the fall of Communism in East Germany resulted in West Germany absorbing the state, that didn’t happen elsewhere. National borders remained where they were, and the cities and towns that had been divided by the redrawn post-WW2 borders remained divided. But when the EU’s Eastern countries joined the passport-free Schengen area in 2007, several towns split in two by the post-war settlement were reunited including Frankfurt-an-der-Oder, Görlitz and Gorizia. The wall that ran through Transalpina Square in front of Nova Gorica train station was dismantled, and for the first time in 60 years people could freely walk across the square.