The contested creation of free movement-for people and goods-in the Schengen area of Europe
Europe is a place of free movement among nations-or is it? The Schengen area, established in 1985 and today encompassing twenty-nine European countries, allows people, goods, and capital to cross borders without restraint. Schengen transformed European life, advancing both a democratic project of transnational citizenship and a neoliberal project of international free trade. But the right of free movement always excluded non-Europeans, especially migrants of color from former colonies of the Schengen states. In Europe without Borders, Isaac Stanley-Becker explores the contested creation of free movement in Schengen, from treatymaking at European summits and disputes in international courts to the street protests of undocumented immigrants who claimed free movement as a human right.
Schengen laid the groundwork for the making of a single market and the founding of the European Union. Yet its emergence is one of the great untold stories of modern European history, one hidden in archives long embargoed. Stanley-Becker is among the first to have access to records of the treatymaking-such as letters between France's François Mitterrand and West Germany's Helmut Kohl-and Europe without Borders offers a pathbreaking account of Schengen's creation. Stanley-Becker argues that Schengen gave a humanist cast to a market paradigm; but even in pairing the border crossing of human beings with the principles of free-market exchange, this vision of free movement was hedged by alarm about foreign migrants. Meanwhile, these migrants-the sans-papiers-saw in the promise of a borderless Europe only a neocolonial enterprise. Isaac Stanley-Becker is an investigative reporter for the Washington Post who has reported from across Europe and the United States. He earned a PhD in history from the University of Oxford, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar. "The European Union, the great political experiment of our time, deserves more accounts like this: alive to detail, aware of setting, measured in judgment. An important contemporary history."-Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
"We have long needed an authoritative account of the origins of the Schengen free travel area, perhaps the single achievement of European integration most valued by the Europeans who benefit from it. Here it is. Isaac Stanley-Becker offers a rigorous analysis based on all the relevant sources, enlivened by vivid sketches of the resulting human reality-for those included, and for those excluded."-Timothy Garton Ash, author of Homelands: A Personal History of Europe
"Isaac Stanley-Becker has written an incisive, compelling, and humane history that explains how the Schengen treaty enshrined freedom of movement for European nationals while excluding others who contested the restrictions. I cannot think of a better or more measured guide to the issues and the various actors involved in this project. Europe without Borders is altogether a formidable achievement."-Peter Gatrell, author of The Unsettling of Europe: How Migration Reshaped a Continent
"Europe without Borders takes us into closed-door diplomatic meetings and onto precarious rafts on the Mediterranean to tell a pathbreaking history of the Schengen treaty. Proponents of Schengen, it turns out, hoped to move beyond economic rationales for free movement, but in practice protecting internal freedom led to fortifying external borders, reinscribing free market logics, and collapsing universalism into regional chauvinism. Essential reading, this book speaks to our own contemporary debates over migration, inequality, law, and the European Union, as it unearths how Schengen's limits and inner contradictions spawned the birth of new social and legal movements that demanded free movement as a universal human right."-Giuliana Chamedes
