Double negative

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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.

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.

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.