Want to understand Europe? Hit the road

Growing up, my family would prep our run-down Volkswagen Sharan with the usual suspects come late July. Filled to the brim with chocolate, clothes, appliances, and anything else we could “bring from Europe” to our extended family living in Türkiye, we'd, like millions of others, start our journey down South. There was never a need to plan routes or schedules. Driving across Europe can be surprisingly easy: we headed East towards Austria, and looked for other Turkish families crammed in equally stuffed cars. The route Inevitably befriending someone at a gas station, we'd follow each other until we lost them, or they lost us. Then we'd tag along behind someone else, and repeat that for three to four days. We'd return at the end of the season in late August, having swapped all the chocolate for plenty of vegetables. Since the 1960s, diasporas in Western Europe have shared similar stories as they took the same journey down South to Türkiye, Greece, and former Yugoslavia. This collective road trip follows the “guest worker route”, named after labour migration in the 1960s. Driven by demand for labour in manufacturing, construction, and heavy industry in the post-WW2 economic booms, millions of workers came to Western and Northern Europe. Until the mid-1980s, the route mostly followed the old E5 highway, stretching across roughly 3000 km from West Germany through Austria to Yugoslavia, before branching out to either Greece or Türkiye through Bulgaria. Called sıla yolu in Turkish (“Road to Homeland”), the route was notoriously chaotic: blocked roads, robberies, and deaths tainted the journey from the 1960s to 1990s – stretches of the journey were briefly dubbed the “death road”. In 2026, things look a little different. The E5 is now the E75 and E80. The Yugoslavian sections of the route are now Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, and North Macedonia. EU border procedures are stricter. Road trips everywhere But the guest worker route has evolved rather than disappeared. Serbia, as the main non-Schengen country along the route, has become a bottleneck. The introduction of the Schengen Entry/Exit System in 2025, which collects biometric data, fingerprints, and facial images of non-EU citizens to track visas, slowed down Serbian border crossings. Transport associations argued that the visa restrictions (limiting stays in the Schengen area to 90 days within a 180 day period) are too short for freight times, compromising deliveries in and out of the EU and limiting Western Balkan producers' business. More importantly, several cross-border communities face drastic changes: what used to be daily commutes to schools, families, work, or leisure now all count as one day in the strictly-tracked visa system. And yet, roughly the same amount of vehicles (around 3 million) passed through Serbia's biggest crossings last summer compared to 10 years ago – it just took a lot longer. Earlier this month, high traffic and stricter EU rules created a 7km long traffic jam at a key Croatian/Serbian border crossing. Speaking from my own experience of melting in the heat at the same crossing as a child, I recommend turning the engine off and befriending whoever has ice cream left – a valuable currency on the trip. Protecting a European heritage How is it that despite recent EU restrictions on mobility, these road trips continue? Ultimately, no matter the exact route chosen, people find a way to move. Turkish authorities reported tracking over five million diaspora entering Türkiye via its land borders in the “guest worker season” of 2025 alone (11 July-7 September). The Balkan/Turkish guest worker route is not the only diaspora corridor in Europe. Stretching from the Netherlands through Belgium and France and ending at a port in the south of Spain lies another massive channel: Moroccan diaspora returning for the summer. Annually, around 3.5 million people go on the journey. Portuguese diaspora return from France, Luxembourg, or Belgium. Romanians return from Italy, Italians from France, and the trail of tightly packed cars up and down Europe's highways goes on. Yet sixty years into the “guest worker route,” it feels surreal to drive it today, while the EU has highly securitised the parallel Western Balkan corridor to deter migration by all means. Migration doesn't stop once you settle somewhere. Nor should it. Mobility has made Europe what it is today, from traditional guest worker diasporas to today's Erasmus+ students and cross-border workers. It's brought in the millions of workers that built Europe's economic growth and could continue filling critical shortages – something the political far-right and an increasing number of centrist parties seem to have forgotten as of late, as the Taliban visit Brussels to plan deportations and leaders instrumentalise human beings for political gain. This week, the Danish and Italian prime ministers pledged more migration restrictions in the name of protecting “Europe's Christian heritage”. What's clearly missing, beyond an evidence-based migration policy, is an understanding of what defines European identity today. Nothing that a summer road trip can't fix – after all, what's more European than crossing seven countries, speaking five languages, and having your fifth coffee of the day in the sun?