Europe cannot simply pull up the drawbridge and begin intensive security checks similar to those administered by America's Department of Homeland Security in the wake of the Paris attacks, according to experts, NBC News reported.
"We are fundamentally different [to the U.S.] in that regard," said Nick Whitney, the co-director of the European power program at the European Council on Foreign Relations. "Even if we wanted to go down that intensive Homeland Security route it simply isn't possible because of geography."
Under the Schengen Agreement of 1995, travel without passport checks is permitted within 26 countries on the European mainland. That means once migrants arrive in a country like Greece, they are free to make their way across huge swaths of the continent without facing border controls. At least one of the Paris attackers arrived in Greece on a migrant boat last month and later entered Serbia using a Syrian passport.
Doug Ollivant, a senior fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based New America think tank, said that France was inevitably now facing a period of soul-searching.
"As is often the case with major terrorist events like this, the question now facing the French is how much security are they willing to accept without changing the character of the public space of Paris," he added. "They can do all kinds of security checks and increase surveillance, but they will have to strike a balance ... That's really the dilemma the French are going to be faced with."
