Today, at midnight, all the countries from Eastern europe will let cars goes through the border without stopping them or checking the identity of the passengers.
More importantly poeple will be able to cross the Poland/German or the Austrian/Slovakian border without stopping their car.
I'm the first surprised because eastern-europeans have always had staunch border watch and never missed a single car for checking. That will make a change of mentality bigger even than that of the EU membership.
It's in fact the culminating point of the european integration.
The next step will be introducing the euro currency, but that's another story... (not before 2010)

Theoricaly and legaly, we won't need even a passport to travel from Portugal to Estonia.

East european will also get the purple passport, like west european do, instead of the soviet-style green one.


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Switzerland will join what? They aren't even in the EU at large. They don't even have a free market among swiss cantons (or provinces)!
maybe you know something I don't...

Pass color: some countries like lithuania still have green passports. It's like car plates: not everybody updated it yet.

Yes, but on your home country too, you are supposed to carry it... The point is that nobody will ask you to show it (except for routine police controls). It doesn't change whether you will be in Poland or not.

Personaly, I won't travel more, but I will travel faster.
By car, I will gain at least one hour between Lithuania (where I live) and Belgium (where I'm originated from).

Now bear in mind that the right to work or to stay is still not garanteed everywhere and still vary from one place to another.

The funny thing is that this event made barely 30 seconds on the news here in LT. Normal: Lithuanians move basicaly to Ireland and UK which are not in the Shengen zone (for them Shengen is a town in China), so they are not concerned.

I didn't know countries could be inside the Shengen zone and outside the EU at the same time...
Wierd. But the EU is a wierd thing.
It's a multilevel union and everyone choose which level to be in and which option to enable or disable from the menu. The union treaty à la carte.

ok, ok, enough jokes about Shenzhen (China) and Schengen (Luxembourg).

I went trough the new inner borders during the holidays (.si-.at-.cz and back). Buildings are still there and will be demolished trough the next few months. Last place in the country to get a cup of coffee was almost empty (I was the only customer).