Between a Schengen country and a non-Schengen country?
What kind?
On an airfield, a shipping port or a land border?
How are you moving?
With a vehicle or just you?
Who are you?
A Citizen of a Schengen country?
A Citizen of the EU?
A Citizen of the United States, Canada, Japan, Australia or New-Zealand?
A Citizen of another country?
What do you look like?
All have different rules governing what border patrols can/may/must do and the other variables determine what you're up against depending on the can/may bit. Hard to know your rights (sometimes the guards don't even know...), and your obligations.
Amongst what you could encounter:
- fixed stop-all checks
- mobile checks
- abandoned borders
- randomly manned borders
- nothing at all
EU border strategy is pretty messy. Even on the outside borders of the EU it is very much dependent on where you are what you'll encounter.
Some borders are so porous they might as well not exist, others are so locked up that even though technically cross border traffic is open in practice it's just like it was before or worse.
If you want to know about borders in the EU: become a trucker for a few years.
I remember cycling across the border from France to Italy once. Just a deserted alpine road, it was beautiful...
Also, come to think of it, the sleeper train from Paris to Munich last summer didn't ask me for any ID at all...
The time we drove from Croatia to Italy was a different story though (come to think of it, that was before it joined the EU a month ago, so probably not relevant.)
As an example of a really porous border, the German/Swiss border. I used to live right at it (there are 3 bridges in my town leading into switzerland). There's one which you can only walk/bike over which used to have a border control which is now deserted. The other 2 ones have border controls, but they seem to be solely tasked with checking whether cars are allowed to drive in switzerland (road fees), whether swiss people are buying more stuff in Germany than they're allowed to (the price differences are immense, so we've got people comming from as far as Zurich to shop here), and sales tax refunds (Swiss people buying in Germany don't have to pay the Mehrwertsteuer of 19%, but the significantly lower Swiss sales tax. As the MwS. is factored into the purchase price, it's centrally refunded at the border).
It's more of a tollbooth/administrativa affair, really.
Between .ch and one of the surrounding countries?
Between any two Schengen countries?
Between a Schengen country and a non-Schengen country?
What kind?
On an airfield, a shipping port or a land border?
How are you moving?
With a vehicle or just you?
Who are you?
A Citizen of a Schengen country?
A Citizen of the EU?
A Citizen of the United States, Canada, Japan, Australia or New-Zealand?
A Citizen of another country?
What do you look like?
All have different rules governing what border patrols can/may/must do and the other variables determine what you're up against depending on the can/may bit. Hard to know your rights (sometimes the guards don't even know...), and your obligations.
Amongst what you could encounter:
- fixed stop-all checks
- mobile checks
- abandoned borders
- randomly manned borders
- nothing at all
EU border strategy is pretty messy. Even on the outside borders of the EU it is very much dependent on where you are what you'll encounter.
Some borders are so porous they might as well not exist, others are so locked up that even though technically cross border traffic is open in practice it's just like it was before or worse.
If you want to know about borders in the EU: become a trucker for a few years.