Europe without Borders
A History
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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.
About this Author
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.
Reviews
"Meticulously researched and engagingly written."---Andrew Moravcsik, Foreign Affairs
"Isaac Stanley-Becker's excellent history of the emergence of the Schengen border-free zone, Europe without Borders, raises difficult questions about borders--especially for the left. Stanley-Becker meticulously reconstructs the thinking of EU leaders in the 1980s, when the Schengen agreement was being negotiated, and the context in which it took place, capturing the mix of idealistic motives and blind spots that animated the project."---Hans Kundnani, Dissent
"[Europe Without Borders] not only functions as an engaging study of Europe's past, but also as an explanation of its present condition"---Tim Brinkhoff, Jacobin
"In melding rigorous scholarship with a keen eye for the human nature behind the events described, Stanley-Becker has created an authoritative, and readable, text. It is a text that both lays out the history of the Schengen area and highlights the inherent contradictions between borders as an internal crossing-point and external boundary."---Ed Bedford, The Indiependent
"Europe without Borders is a concise, clearly compiled, very compelling and at times, enlightening book."
"The book is rich in documentary detail, uncovering secret and often scandalous compromises that defined the treaty- making processes."
"Becker's Europe Without Borders is key. The book aims to overcome a simplistic 'either-or' understanding of Schengen, thanks to a comprehensive reconstruction of the phases leading to the Schengen Agreement and its aftermath."
"A new, well-wrought scholarly history."
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