TEREHOVA, Latvia - 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.
A key factor in the freer movement of people who live in the area is economic, as red tape is stripped away in the expanded 1.4 million sq mile zone.
All but one of the new members -- Malta -- are eastern European states, and some anachronistic legacies from "old Europe" will disappear, making life more convenient.
For instance, the town of Valga-Valka on the Estonian-Latvian border will shed border posts in the middle of Seminar street in Latvia, which becomes Sepa street in Estonia.
People travelling between the Slovak-Hungarian town of Komarno-Komarom will no longer have to go through border controls on the Slovak side of the bridge.
EASIER FREIGHT
So far, businesses seem geared more for an end to petty inconveniences than reform: in the Hungarian town of Gyor near the Austrian border, car maker Audi expects a reduction in losses from delays and hopes planning will be easier.
"Besides employees travelling in a car not having to wait at the border, the real advantage is a more predictable border-crossing process for freight vehicles," said Monika Czechmeister, corporate communications chief at Audi Hungaria.
That freedom has raised fears about an increase in organised crime.
"This has for long been a major fear in the old Schengen states: there indeed have been problems for a long time, they did not have the same level of security," said Jerome Bacquias, from the European Policy Centre, a Brussels-based think-tank.
