Double Negative
Europe without Borders: A History
Isaac Stanley-Becker
Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691261768
Most Europeans (I’m guessing) don’t know much about the history of Schengen, by which I mean the Schengen Agreement and the Schengen Area, not the village of Schengen in Luxembourg after which those things are named (although probably that too). That non-knowledge is itself Schengen’s achievement.
The Schengen Agreement is what makes possible the Schengen Area, which comprises 29 European countries, between which goods and people can bounce with no border checks. The website of the European Commission trumpets the Schengen Area as « the world’s largest area of freedom, security and justice without internal frontiers » — a fine sentiment, though Schengen’s history, like the histories of other European Union institutions, is convoluted, even byzantine. It starts in 1985, when five of the ten states that then made up the European Economic Community convened at the little village on the western bank of the Moselle River — the nexus-point of France, West Germany and the Benelux countries. (Goethe passed through Schengen; Victor Hugo sketched a castle there.) At first, the Schengen Agreement applied only to those five countries. The treaty was signed on a boat on the Moselle on 14 June 1985 (the anniversary of the German occupation of Paris in 1940) and went largely unnoticed in the press.
Then came the years-long slog of drafting an actual Schengen convention — the protocols promised and demanded by the treaty. The gears of Schengen negotiations turned alongside other gears of European institution-forming, other moves toward integration, other treaties. And they turned in the background of more dramatic historical events. The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, most spectacularly, did not make Schengen easier: the collapse of that one most famous « internal frontier » threw a wrench into the longed-for dismantling of all the others (one of many ironies to which we will return). The convention was signed by the same five countries on 19 June 1990, with considerably more fanfare than the first treaty had been. Then came the next slog, in which Schengen passed through the gauntlets of ratification in the various national legislatures. That took a few years, whereupon began the further slog of implementation in 1995.
At every step of this process, as Isaac Stanley-Becker shows in a new, well-wrought scholarly history, freedom of movement wasn’t, well, free. Schengen is « a system of dualisms — of freedom and security, unity and exclusion, and cosmopolitan exchange and national autonomy. » It was never not a system of those dualisms. The book is called Europe Without Borders: A History, but the pivotal « without » of that title drips with an irony both bitter and melancholic. The dismantling of « internal » borders meant the strengthening of « external » ones, and it meant the construction of novel surveillance regimes to saturate the pseudo-borderless realm through which « Europeans » and « foreigners » are fated to move, freely or unfreely — a realm that soon grew far vaster than the five countries that first constituted it.1
Why read a history of Schengen? The book arrives several years into the ambient feeling that Schengen is somehow « broken », that European « freedom of movement » is imperiled, that one more structure of liberal Europe is being washed illiberally away. To historicize Schengen is to see the constructedness or artificiality or contingency of that freedom, and thereby pop the illusion of liberality. It is instructive, too, to see Schengen’s history from inside and out: to get the citizen’s-eye-view and the undocumented’s-eye-view, the view from the EU beside the view from the sans-papier movement that emerged in Schengen’s immediate wake.
the citizen’s-eye-view & the undocumented’s-eye-view
It is best to go into Schengen’s history unshocked by contradiction, to accept the sad historical fact that Schengen, whatever its initial ideals, allowed — and even ended up spurring — European countries to restrict immigration, to place yet more burdens on asylum-seekers, to retreat from protections promised to refugees. Schengen’s historical or dramatic arc, if such a thing can have an arc, would be neither « progress nor declension », but something more zero-sum. « Freedom of movement » never didn’t depend on structured unfreedoms. « Never were all persons meant to circulate as freely within borders as were goods and capital, » Stanley-Becker writes. To grasp Schengen in full is to see « Pan-European humanism » married to « principles of neoliberalism and practices of neocolonialism ».
If the history starts in a Luxembourgian village, it ends in Lampedusa, the island between Sicily and Tunisia. Lampedusa would become « the landing place of most maritime migrants en route to Europe »; from its coast, in October 2013, the deaths of 368 people on a ship from Libya were visible, « one of the deadliest migrant shipwrecks then recorded ». That is one of several destinations of Stanley-Becker’s epilogue. Another is a morbid return to the village itself, where in 2015 the French far-right National Front performed a mock funeral for Schengen, complete with a wreath, gloating over the resurrection of national borders amidst the refugee crisis. (The far-right loathed freedom of movement because of the threat it seemed to pose to national sovereignty, and because of the refugees it seemed to [but didn’t really] welcome.) The book’s very last image is of the Schengen Museum (opened in 2010), where, in a perfect allegory, part of the ceiling collapsed in 2016. The walls still stood.
The slogan Kein Mensch ist illegal (« no one is illegal ») made its art-world debut at documenta X in Kassel in 1997. Coincident with Schengen’s implementation, it was taken up by the sans-papiers. The rhetorical power of Kein Mensch ist illegal lies in the grammar of a double-negative. That grammar suits Schengen, which is double-negatives all the way down.
Stanley-Becker’s account begins in 1984, a year before the first Schengen gathering, when the European Council gathered at Fontainebleau Palace, southwest of Paris, and articulated an ideal of a « Citizen’s Europe ». Such an ideal could register as salvific for Western Europeans whose childhoods were structured by fascism and war, and who could now smile at how far Europe had come. French president François Mitterrand, a Social Democrat and « onetime Vichy official who joined the Resistance », shook hands with his German counterpart, Helmut Kohl of the CDU, who had been a conscript in the Hitler Youth.
The book marshals a diverse intellectual and ideological history of free movement as an ideal — from Immanuel Kant’s late-eighteenth-century vision of a European « pacific federation » that would sustain « perpetual peace » and encourage a « universal cosmopolitan existence », through Victor Hugo’s prophesied « United States of Europe », and through varied twentieth-century disciples and Europhile philosopher-politicians. Between the world wars, for instance, Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi (« a philosopher-politician of Austrian and Japanese descent » whom Hitler would condemn as a « cosmopolitan bastard » in Mein Kampf) pushed for a Pan-Europa that would « save Europe » from both « Russian hegemony » and « American capital ». Later, that vision could fit the imperatives of the Cold War, too. Pan-European visions tended to fold African colonization into that liberal project (for Coudenhove-Kalergi, Africa was both Europe’s « nearest neighbor » and its « plantation »); postwar expressions of those visions often papered over decolonization and its reckonings. The ideal of free movement also had a leftist flank, notably the Italian Eurocommunist Altiero Spinelli, who co-wrote the manifesto per un’Europa libera e unita (For a Free and United Europe) in 1941, and who would become one of the EU’s founding figures.
To found a Europe on that ideal was to reach above mere markets and a merely political union — above, that is, the fundaments of the European Coal and Steel Community that had come into being in 1951, and of the European Economic Community created by the Treaty of Rome in 1957. Those formations had the common market as their foundation, such that when other rights and privileges were articulated, they were articulated with the market as their philosophical bedrock. Euro-statesmen had various attitudes toward that bedrock: resignation, realism, triumphalism. One case that came before the European Court of Justice — Gravier v. City of Liége, decided February 1985 — was paradigmatic: Françoise Gravier, an aspiring French cartoonist who had enrolled in the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Liège, Belgium, brought a case against the extra tuition she had to pay. She won, but the case cemented a logic: Gravier was free to make that intra-European move because cartooning was deemed economic activity.
Less philosophical were the trucks stalled at various national borders: the Europe of the traffic jam. « Sometimes the wait at the borders lasted as long as 20 hours, » Stanley-Becker notes. « Freight perished in the cold — livestock, milk, and millions of eggs. » These jams spurred truckers’ uprisings, for instance at Italy’s borders with France and Austria.2 Such frustrations with inefficiency, such protests for easier economic circulation, were surely on the horizons of the diplomats from the five first Schengen countries — all from the center right and center left, and mostly lawyers — who gathered in Brussels in February 1985 to work out the first treaty, though they did not mention the blockades.
the Europe of the traffic jam
The treaty they propounded at Schengen on the boat in June of that year had a prosaic title — Agreement between the Governments of the States of the Benelux Economic Union, the Federal Republic of Germany, and the French Republic on the Gradual Abolition of Checks at Their Common Border — but it signaled, or wanted to signal, a shift of paradigm: beyond mere economism. It emphasized persons not workers, indeed did not mention the word « worker ». The treaty’s makers did mention asylum and « illegal immigration », which at the signing ceremony they pledged to combat. The signing ceremony attracted protests to the banks of the Moselle, too, by « by SOS-Racism of Luxembourg, the Radical Socialist Party, and a Committee of Support for Political Prisoners of Western Europe. »
Key to what we might call Schengen’s shadow history were the annexes appended — confidentially — to that first treaty: « lists of countries seen as posing immigration risks to the European community — countries whose nationals were classified as ‘undesirables’, » including East Germany, Poland, Algeria, Yemen, South Africa, China. « Many were former colonies. » The undesirables lists were kept from the public at the request of West Germany. A smoking hypocritical gun? Yes and no. Europhiles believed that freedom of movement would create something, that it was a step toward the telos of European integration, moving through the market to transcend the market. That belief (or wish, or expectation) could be cast in religious or sacramental terms: free movement would miraculously transubstantiate the common market (advantageous but spiritually inert) into a genuine body politic. That teleology is what made the compromises and trade-offs palatable. Ironies abound: today the Schengen Area encompasses whole swaths of once-« undesirable » Europe. Disappointment was likely inevitable. Schengen was a solution that didn’t solve so much as multiply and rearrange the « problem ».
What froze the fantasy of Europeans moving freely was the specter of non-Europeans moving freely. This is the steady refrain of Stanley-Becker’s reconstruction of the Schengen debates — both the convention-drafting stage and the ratification stage. Ratification of Schengen would spur new national restrictions on immigration; implementation of Schengen would mean displacing the question of asylum to Europe’s ever-crueler outer edges.
Take, for instance, the « seemingly banal topic » of visa rules: visas were more-or-less manageable as a « national » matter, but once transnationalized, visas became sudden sources of risk. Someone with a visa for one Schengen country would be able to move unchecked around the Area. The issue nearly derailed the drafting of the Schengen conventions. The need to « harmonize » such rules only exacerbated tensions between Schengen countries. West Germany complained about illegal immigration in France, France complained about Italy’s own undocumented population.3 Schengen made pots call kettles black. The imagined solutions could be at once cruel and pragmatic. In a secret memo from November 1985, the Benelux contingent proposed a ranking of risk, country by country, from « major » to « moderate » to « latent ». Among the « major » risks were « Morocco and Tunisia, as well as Iran, Iraq, Poland, and Suriname. » Such harmonization would only make the process more stringent for visa-seekers, onto whom would devolve the burden of furnishing further proof of « an intent to exit, such as a return ticket. »
The matter of asylum was even more rancorous, and it cut to the quick of the stories that European countries liked to tell themselves about themselves. Refugee organizations were not consulted. Only late in the drafting process, in April and May 1990, was the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees « made privy to a draft of the treaty ». A draft made its way, unofficially, to participants in a Colloquy on Human Rights without Frontiers, convened by the Council of Europe and attended by asylum agencies. Those agencies claimed that the Schengen proposals failed to protect refugees and asylum-seekers. Some « declined to certify that Schengen complied with the Geneva Convention on asylum ». But by then « the treatymaking had ended ». Amnesty International came out against ratification in 1991.
What froze the fantasy of Europeans moving freely was the specter of non-Europeans moving freely.
Schengen became a portal through which different ideologies and political currents were funneled — particularly in France and Germany, where the book’s focus falls. In France, the Gaullist argument was that Schengen would erode the national independence that had been « wrested from the Axis powers and secured in postwar constitutions. » That argument drew particular inspiration from the father of France’s 1958 constitution, Michel Debré, who through the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s had decried European integration in all its forms. Stanley-Becker quotes Debré’s Français, choisissons l’espoir (1979), which warned against an internationalism that would destroy national sovereignty. Such internationalism, Debré wrote with fervor, « has taken and will always take a thousand faces, including in the past those of the Holy Roman Empire and the temporal power of the Papacy. » Supranational Europe was a false god.
The Rally for the Republic (Jacques Chirac’s party, founded in 1976) was divided; the majority gravitated toward a reinstatement of immigration restrictions to offset Schengen’s risks. Jean-Marie Le Pen’s far-right National Front, founded in 1972, charged more stridently that « our country will no longer have its own borders », singling out Zairians, Indonesians, and Iranians who lived in neighboring Schengen states. The French Catholic paper Présent, affiliated with the National Front, clamored that « We sail in full fog », and attacked the « obscure technocrats » lurking behind the supranational « euphoria ». Schengen was a Trojan horse for « socialist ideology, globalist ideology, third-world ideology, the ideology of so-called anti-racism, the soft ideology of totalitarian humanitarianisms … the religion of modern times, of our dechristianized and secularized times. » Quite a list!
The Berlin Wall fell, inconveniently, in November 1989, four years into the prolonged hammering-out of the convention. Through Schengen’s lens, the end of the Cold War was less a cause for celebration than a hatching of yet more intractable riddles. The Gaullists, Stanley-Becker writes, worried that « the collapse of Cold War political geography would unleash migratory pressure that Western nations could not withstand. » Pro-Schengen Socialists in the National Assembly, like François Loncle, could then ask, « You want to rebuild the Berlin Wall? »
If only rebuilding a wall were so simple. West Germany had already wanted exemptions from visa rules for possible East German defectors.4 In France, that German desire smacked uncomfortably of « a transcendent German patrimony ». The wall’s fall tolled the bell of a « German question » that would reverberate into the ratification stage. On one hand, Germany experienced a Europaeuphorie; on the other hand, a reunited Germany meant that a Schengen area would include far more « undesirables » already residing in — or able to slip in to — East Germany. In fact, the West German government in Bonn asked to delay the signing of the convention, needing « an additional time of reflection ».
Where the French ratification debate had turned on the specter of terrorism, Germany’s turned on the « large influxes of people seeking asylum », as the interior minister Friedrich Zimmermann put it, especially from Palestine, Iran, Ghana, Pakistan and Bangladesh. The right to asylum that was enshrined in the German Grundgesetz (Basic Law) of 1949 clashed with 1992’s reality of Germany « absorbing more than two-thirds of all refugees in the European Community »; Schengen’s opponents could look to an eight hundred percent rise in « the number of attacks on non-Europeans » as evidence of the volatile effects. The center right sought an amendment to narrow those rights.
Schengen, in that political context, was a paradoxical cocktail of the supranational and the national, the external and the internal: its « supranational rules » made possible « new assertions of German sovereignty designed to turn back the tide of asylum seekers ». The humanitarian point was articulated, though to little avail. Konrad Weiß (Alliance 90 / Green) reminded people why that right to asylum was there in the Basic Law in the first place. Weiß called Article 16 of the Basic Law (« People persecuted politically enjoy the right to asylum ») « one of the most precious sentences ever written in the German language ». But the wheel turned the other way. Compromise came in the form of a constitutional amendment, now Article 16a: German soil still offered asylum, technically, but asylum rights could « not be invoked by a person who enters the federal territory from a member state of the European Communities ». Thus was enshrined the now-well-worn logic of the country of first entry.
In both France and Germany, then, Schengen crystallized a political center in a post-Cold War Western Europe, but the cracks were visible. Implementing a supranational « freedom of movement » for Europeans would necessitate renewed national vigilance on non-European circulation within. Center-left and center-right found sufficient agreement; farther-right and farther-left found fault with Schengen, though from radically different premises. In Stanley-Becker’s handy distillation, the right viewed Schengen’s pairing of freedom and security as « unworkable », while the left found it « unethical. » Jean-Claude Lefort of the French Communist Party foresaw Schengen’s logic: the imperative of « external » security would activate a « transfer of police powers to private persons » and a « violation of human rights »; the treaty (and the country-of-first-entry rule) in effect allowed European countries to ignore asylum requests while paying lip-service to the principle. The low common denominator prevailed.
What claims does this history support? Schengen became, Stanley-Becker shows, « an instrument of racial exclusion ». Such a claim is more descriptive than polemical. The book is emphatically not a scolding indictment of the European citizens and comfortably-documented travelers who happen to enjoy Schengen’s freedoms. After all, Schengen was not the manifestation of some European popular will, whatever that would mean; the treaty and the convention came into being behind closed bureaucratic doors, as such things generally must. To explain or historicize Schengen means narrating a negative — insofar as Schengen sought the removal of something (internal borders) — and then putting in order the forces that filled the void. If a longed-for « European belonging » was to be predicated on « the dismantling of internal borders », it is not surprising that « other markers of identity, and, by proxy, race, » would become more decisive.
Schengen’s proponents often spoke of it as a « laboratory ». The metaphor is worth dwelling on (beside the more dismally familiar metaphors of « Fortress Europe » and « Sieve Europe »). Laboratory casts Schengen’s designers as — what exactly? Chemists? Should we picture politico-chemical engineers in a lab, with white coats under fluorescent lights? They measure beakers of combustible substances — supranationalism, sovereignty, economic efficiency, xenophobia — and try to find a stable emulsion. That laboratory, if one were to extend the metaphor, is nested inside other experimental spaces — the laboratory of the common market, the laboratory of the EU. In 1992, the German interior minister (Rudolf Seiters, CDU) made the case for Schengen as « a preliminary stage and test bed for the cooperation … in the common internal market ». Another available metaphor, more botanical, was the garden: in 1999, the European Parliament would call Schengen an « experimental garden », which sounds nice until you remember the pruning that gardening requires, and the pesticides.
Should we picture politico-chemical engineers in a lab, with white coats under fluorescent lights?
The aspirational metaphors of laboratory and garden soon clash with less aspirational ones. Advocates for human rights (a substance that does not lend itself to measuring in a beaker) accused Schengen countries of playing « games of ping-pong in which they forget the balls are human beings ».5 Asylum-seekers, meanwhile, were assigned a mix of other metaphors. « Refugees in orbit », for instance: Stanley-Becker catches glimpses of such human asteroids in the archives, such as « a stateless Palestinian who voyaged as a stowaway from Morocco to France » sometime in the 1980s, worked in France as an itinerant laborer for some years, « and then traveled by train to Belgium, where he worked briefly as a painter, and then took a train to the Netherlands, where he was denied asylum, and then went to West Germany, and later to Britain, where he was also refused asylum and sent back to the Netherlands. » As of 1992, he had left Europe, « stowed away on a ship bound for Australia ». Some politicians and policy makers would dub such a trajectory « asylum tourism »; Schengen advertised an orderly deterrence to it.
These metaphors have suffused Schengen as a European discourse — or Schengen as a European’s discourse. One way to puncture them is to follow the money — or, more precisely, to follow the machinery. In 1995, the Schengen Information System (SIS) was turned on, after years of preparation: French software running on German hardware, all of it housed at the border city of Strasbourg. Controlling a borderless Schengen Area made early and innovative use of the internet: « a transnational panopticon of the information age », Stanley-Becker calls it, and certainly Schengen lends itself to a Foucaultian argument. Its ostensible freedoms generated new forms of disciplining. Creating a common space to match the common market necessitated the creation of « a common police ». The French newspaper La Tribune had warned in 1991 about the emergence of « a sort of a European FBI ». Europol, the transnational police force, emerged in parallel to Schengen, and was first housed in the same Strasbourg complex as the SIS.
French software running on German hardware, all of it housed at the border city of Strasbourg
The other escape from Schengen’s metaphors for itself is via the expressions of the sans-papiers. It was the people made more precarious by Schengen’s logics, after all, who would give Schengen its most vivid literary form. Stanley-Becker’s last chapter offers a worthy primer on the sans-papiers movement, foregrounding two of its most prominent spokespeople, both born in Senegal (a French colony until 1960). Madjiguène Cissé, born in 1951 in Dakar, had studied in Saarbrücken in the mid-1970s, returned to Dakar as a German teacher, and then moved to Paris in 1993. Deported in 2002, she died in Senegal in 2023. Diop was younger: born in 1969, he left Senegal for France in 1988.
On 28 June 1996, Cissé and Diop were among the three hundred undocumented people, mostly from « undesirable » West African countries, who occupied Paris’s Saint-Bernard de la Chapelle, a nineteenth-century neo-Gothic church in the working-class Goutte d’Or neighborhood. It became the epicenter of the sans-papiers movement. Diop’s Dans la peau d’un sans-papier (1997) is the richest text in Stanley-Becker’s archive: a memoir occasioned by the church’s eviction seven weeks later. (It has not been translated into English but should be.) The book opens with an intriguing analogy to communal exorcisms in Senegal — a ritual known as a ndeup — as if the stigma of undocumentedness and the apparatuses of oppression were being purged like a demon. The occupation began the ndeup; the book was its next stage. « Maybe I’ll finally be able to shed the undocumented skin I’ve been forced to inhabit because of the constant red tape I’ve had to endure, like thousands of undocumented migrants in France, » Diop suggests. « But I don’t think I can. » Other transformations will come, though, as when the movement consciously embraces the label sans-papier over and against « clandestins », which suggested invisibility and illegality. An absence (without-papers) became a powerfully paradoxical insistance on visibility. To be a sans-papier was to be « les sans-culotte contemporains », Diop argued, assuming the mantle and lineage of the French Revolution, and bearing the rights of man more truly than anyone else. My own favorite twist of metaphor comes when the church is evicted. The armored police, in Diop’s account, are the real aliens — as in actual extraterrestrials: « The mobile guards looked like Martians descended to earth with weapons and gear, » he wrote, « menacing in their ridiculous attire. » If the cops are « Martiens intergalactiques », then who is a citoyen?6
Other occupations and demonstrations followed the occupation of Saint-Bernard, across the Schengen Area that was itself expanding. In September 1998, Stanley-Becker notes, « sans-papiers in France traveled to greet a caravan of migrants journeying through Germany » and met them on the Pont de l’Europe bridge over the Rhine, « an iconic site of postwar reconciliation that first opened for travel in September 1960 ». In 1999, sans-papiers protested at an EU summit in Tampere, Finland, where member states had gathered to work out « the terms of a common European arrest warrant » and to harmonize the suppression of « asylum tourism ». In July 2002, three thousand people encamped in Strasbourg for ten days at the site of the Schengen Information System. Among the documents produced for that encampment was a pamphlet by the Bureau d’Etudes art collective called refuse the BIOPOLICE: a cartography of contemporary control systems. Its jargon is surprisingly festive: « Beyond the biopolice is a biopoetics. Move beyond the spectacle of party politics as we know it: throw a party on all sides of the borders! »
A zero-sum history like Schengen’s does not end with a bang. The drama of the sans-papier movement notwithstanding, Europe Without Borders is concerned, by design and necessity, with the stuff of procedural politics and everyday life — with a subject at once arcane and mundane. It is about how spaces and populations have been ordered and layered, and about how that ordering and layering became habitual.
For three decades, Europe has been habituated to Schengen, to use a term that the philosopher Jacques Derrida (himself Algerian-born) would use at a demonstration for undocumented migrants in 1996. He was speaking four months after the eviction of the Saint-Bernard church, which brought between fifteen and twenty thousand Parisians to the streets in protest. Derrida lamented the criminalization of hospitality — by which he meant the church’s hospitality to the sans-papiers in particular, and, more philosophically, the very notion of a « crime of hospitality ». He called for civil disobedience; he asked his listeners to « demand (…) that parties of the so-called left be consistent with their principles ». Schengen’s logic was not hard to deconstruct; the « internationalization » or « so-called globalization » of which it was a piece was « the last commonplace of the worst confusions and even of calculated mystifications. »7
Derrida’s was the sort of speech that would go both over and under the heads of Schengen’s creators and apologists, for it riffed on abstractions and conceptual histories. But his improvised remarks captured well the « terrifying » classifications of avec vs. sans papiers. What, he asked, is a sans-papiers lacking, exactly? « The expression is a strange one, at once disturbing and terribly familiar. One does not know if it is an adjective, an attribute, or a noun, whether it is pronounced in the singular or the plural. » What was lacking, he observed, was « the right, the right to a right » (here likely gesturing to Hannah Arendt’s « right to have rights »). Beneath the term, he suggested, was « an entire process (…) that was sometimes slow and insidious, at other times explosive, brutal, accelerated like a police raid on a church. » And here the metaphor of habit entered the analysis: « This terrifying habituation that has acclimatized this word to our lexicon would deserve long analyses. » Europe without Borders is a worthy contribution to that long analysis.