The Schengen system of free movement across borders for nationals of its 29 member-states symbolises the promise of liberal internationalism in Europe after its long history of conflicts and war.
Originating in an interstate treaty signed in 1985 between France, West Germany, Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands, it went public in 1990 after intense negotiation between state officials just after the Berlin Wall fell.
Over the following decades it embraced most states and more than 450 million people. Ireland and Cyprus are its only EU non-members. Ireland preferred to maintain the similar Common Travel Area with Britain, which never joined Schengen.
This book by a US journalist and academic is a detailed history of how the Schengen system was created. Based on extensive archival research it has an acute sense of the system’s humanist and cosmopolitan promise alongside market and border limits.
It breaks new ground by revealing the abiding tensions in Schengen’s construction and operation: between freedom of movement for people and citizens compared with market freedom for capital and workers – and between the rights conferred on nationals of its member-states and strict restrictions on outsiders.
Stanley-Becker skilfully relates these tensions to the politics of immigration in Europe after decolonisation. Schengen “was a laboratory of free movement always meant to join Euro-nationalist rules of exclusion with neoliberal principles of market freedom”, he writes.
Two contrasting protests frame his study: one by lorry drivers against long border queues, which pushed Helmut Kohl and François Mitterrand into their Saarbrucken initiative in 1984 to ease Franco-German border controls by sharing them with other countries, in the name of a Citizen’s Europe. And then, in 1996 and after, came protests by sans-papiers immigrants in favour of free movement as a human right. The contrast is inherent in the racial hierarchies that defined nationals of these former colonies as “undesirables” in secret police lists.
The book is strong on the legal and philosophical history and political arguments surrounding these Schengen rights, much less so on the huge everyday freedoms they gave to the many European citizens and workers who have benefitted from them and value them highly. These hard-won freedoms are now severely challenged by the new right-wing politics of immigration and identity on the continent.
