Double negative

It’s best to go into Schengen’s history unshocked by contradiction.

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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.