Ynet:
Spain’s Interior Minister Jorge Fernandez Diaz said Sunday he will make the case in Paris for a modification to the Schengen treaty allowing border controls in order to limit the movements of Islamic fighters returning to Europe from the Middle East.
“We are going to back border controls and it is possible that as a consequence it will be necessary to modify the Schengen treaty,” he told the daily El Pais ahead of a ministerial meeting on the subject in Paris.
The EU’s Schengen Agreement essentially abolishes internal border controls within the EU for almost all its member states (the U.K. and Ireland are exempted, as, for now, are some Eastern European countries and Cyprus). External controls are maintained; thus those opposed to the Spanish plan will argue that this is enough to monitor European citizens returning to the EU after fighting, say, in Syria.
The Spanish clearly do not think that this is enough.
They will shortly discover that this too bad, that this is no longer their decision to make and that border controls within the Schengen area are not coming back. They are just so “nation state.”