Europe without Borders: a detailed history of the Schengen system - Skilful account of a tense balancing of freedoms
Europe without Borders, A History
Author
:
Isaac Stanley-Becker
ISBN-13
:
978-0691261768
Publisher
:
Princeton University Press
Guideline Price
:
£30
The Schengen system of free movement across borders for nationals of its 29 member-states symbolises the promise of liberal internationalism in Europe after its long history of conflicts and war.
Originating in an interstate treaty signed in 1985 between France, West Germany, Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands, it went public in 1990 after intense negotiation between state officials just after the Berlin Wall fell.
Over the following decades it embraced most states and more than 450 million people. Ireland and Cyprus are its only EU non-members. Ireland preferred to maintain the similar Common Travel Area with Britain, which never joined Schengen.
This book by a US journalist and academic is a detailed history of how the Schengen system was created. Based on extensive archival research it has an acute sense of the system's humanist and cosmopolitan promise alongside market and border limits.
READ MORE
It breaks new ground by revealing the abiding tensions in Schengen's construction and operation: between freedom of movement for people and citizens compared with market freedom for capital and workers – and between the rights conferred on nationals of its member-states and strict restrictions on outsiders.
Stanley-Becker skilfully relates these tensions to the politics of
immigration
in Europe after decolonisation. Schengen 'was a laboratory of free movement always meant to join Euro-nationalist rules of exclusion with neoliberal principles of market freedom', he writes.
Two contrasting protests frame his study: one by lorry drivers against long border queues, which pushed Helmut Kohl and François Mitterrand into their Saarbrucken initiative in 1984 to ease Franco-German border controls by sharing them with other countries, in the name of a Citizen's Europe. And then, in 1996 and after, came protests by sans-papiers
immigrants in favour of free movement as a human right. The contrast is inherent in the racial hierarchies that defined nationals of these former colonies as 'undesirables' in secret police lists.
The book is strong on the legal and philosophical history and political arguments surrounding these Schengen rights, much less so on the huge everyday freedoms they gave to the many European citizens and workers who have benefitted from them and value them highly. These hard-won freedoms are now severely challenged by the new right-wing politics of immigration and identity on the continent.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Irish Times
2 hours ago
- Irish Times
Mahmoud Khalil released after US judge says standards for detention ‘clearly not met'
Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil was released from US immigration detention, where he had been held for more than three months over his activism against Israel's war on Gaza . Khalil, the most high profile of the students to be arrested by the Trump administration for their pro-Palestinian activism, and the last of them still in detention, was ordered to be released by a federal judge on Friday afternoon from an Ice facility in Jena, Louisiana, where he had been held since shortly after plainclothes immigration agents detained him in early March in the lobby of his Columbia building. The 30-year-old emerged from the remote detention centre just after 6.30pm local time, walking through two towering gates topped with razor wire and accompanied by two attorneys into the late afternoon sun and intense humidity. He briefly addressed the small group of media assembled outside. READ MORE 'Although justice prevailed it's very long overdue and this shouldn't have taken three months,' he said. 'I leave some incredible men behind me, over 1,000 people behind me, in a place where they shouldn't have been.' Asked to respond to allegations made by the Trump administration, which has fought for months to keep him detained, that his pro-Palestinian organising constituted a national security threat, he said: 'Trump and his administration, they chose the wrong person for this. That doesn't mean there is a right person for this. There is no right person who should be detained for actually protesting a genocide.' Khalil told reporters he was looking forward to returning home to spend time with his infant son, who was born while his father was detained. 'I can actually hug him,' Khalil said. The federal judge, Michael Farbiarz, said during the hearing on Friday that Khalil is not a flight risk, and 'is not a danger to the community. Period, full stop.' 'It is highly, highly unusual to be seeking detention of a petitioner given the factual record of today,' Farbiarz also said during the hearing. Farbiarz said that the government had 'clearly not met' the standards for detention. Later on Friday, Khalil was ordered to surrender his passport and green card to Ice officials in Jena as part of his conditional release. The order also stipulated that Khalil's travel be limited to a handful of US states, including New York, as Louisiana, Michigan and New Jersey for court appearances. Khalil's arrest was widely decried as a dangerous escalation in the Trump administration's campaign against speech protected by the first amendment to the US constitution. Khalil has not been charged with a crime. His detention was the first in a series of arrests of international student activists, and his release marks the latest in a series of defeats for the administration, which had promised to deport pro-Palestinian international students en masse. Three other students detained on similar grounds – Rümeysa Öztürk, Badar Khan Suri and Mohsen Mahdawi – were previously released while their immigration cases are pending. A number of others voluntarily left the country after deportation proceedings against them were opened; another is in hiding as she fights her case. Farbiarz, of the federal district court in Newark, New Jersey, had previously found that the law invoked to detain Khalil – a rarely used immigration provision allowing the secretary of state to order the deportation of anyone found to have an adverse effect on US foreign policy – is probably unconstitutional. Government officials had accused Khalil of anti-Semitism and of pro-Hamas advocacy, without providing any evidence. Jewish students and faculty had submitted court documents on Khalil's behalf, and he was quoted last year on CNN saying that 'the liberation of the Palestinian people and the Jewish people are intertwined and go hand-by-hand, and you cannot achieve one without the other'. Farbiaz ordered Khalil's release in his federal court case, which was brought to challenge his detention. His immigration case will proceed on a separate track. While the government has suffered setbacks to its foreign policy argument in multiple courts, it is likely to continue arguing that its efforts to deport Khalil are also supported by alleged omissions in his green card application – arguments it brought several weeks after he was first detained, and which his attorneys have rejected. Khalil is married to a US citizen, Noor Abdallah, who gave birth to their first child during her husband's detention. 'I fight for you, and for every Palestinian child whose life deserves safety, tenderness and freedom,' Khalil wrote to his newborn son, Deen, last month. 'I hope one day you will stand tall knowing your father was not absent out of apathy, but out of conviction.' In a statement provided by Khalil's lawyers, Abdalla said she can finally 'breathe a sigh of relief' after the ruling. 'We know this ruling does not begin to address the injustices the Trump administration has brought upon our family, and so many others, but today we are celebrating Mahmoud coming back to New York to be reunited with our little family.' In response to the news that the judge had ordered Khalil to be released on Friday, Amnesty International USA celebrated the decision, calling it 'overdue' and called on the Trump administration to 'immediately comply with this order'. - Guardian
Irish Times
2 hours ago
- Irish Times
Ireland needs to ditch empty promises and economic fairy tales and start confronting reality
The next six weeks or so are going to go a long way to defining the Government's term in office. The printers are going to be busy. We are due an updated housing plan, a new strategy on competitiveness and productivity, the Summer Economic Statement and a new medium-term budget strategy along with a revised National Development Plan outlining state investment plans. Then, in the middle of all this, there is the deadline for the US/EU tariff talks on July 9th. The Government needs to use this crucial period to set some kind of coherent economic narrative for its term. So far it has been firing blanks. For example, bits of its housing plan are drip-feeding out in an often-disorganised fashion. Perhaps this is meant to give the impression of busyness, but all it does is confuse people. READ MORE At the heart of all this is credibility. A believable strategy must have some hope of delivery. And here the State – in the widest sense of the Government and the public service – is struggling. It is not just that things are happening late – like the National Children's Hospital. Or that there are signs of waste and carelessness with public money – step forward the Leinster House bike shed. It is that a lot of vital stuff is simply not happening at all. It is a stretch to believe that the Metro will ever get built. Or the giant project to bring water from Shannon across the State. Or the offshore wind infrastructure that is meant to be at the heart of our energy transition , where the Draghi report on EU competitiveness showed Ireland has one of the most long-drawn out consent mechanisms in Europe. In this context, government targets take on an air of fantasy. Less than six months into the Coalition's term, Minister for Housing James Browne told us this week that the target of building 41,000 homes this year is not going to happen. So why should we believe the target for 2026 or the 300,000 plus homes promised during the Coalition's term? The Departments of Finance and of Public Expenditure will publish a budget strategy over the summer, based, we must assume, on tighter control of day-to-day spending. But key spending targets have ended up being roundly ignored in recent years. Central Bank researchers estimated this week that permanent Government spending has risen by 37 per cent since 2021. Had the annual spending limits of 5 per cent set by the previous administration been adhered to, the increase would have been 16 per cent. That is a €16 billion difference. Official documents and targets seem to exist in some kind of parallel universe where no one really expects them to happen. They are more fairy stories than strategy. And the risk with the plans coming in the weeks ahead is that these are more endless checklists of stuff that is happening already and stuff that might or might not happen at all. Some central themes and directions are urgently needed. And some convincing messages of actual action to get things done. Investment is built on certainty, yet in key areas such as climate change and housing this is simply missing. The current drift has a cost. The stalling of investment across the economy is in part due to threats of tariffs from Donald Trump . There isn't much the Government can do about that. But it can start to get its own story straight. Lack of clarity about housing policy is causing parts of the construction industry to sit on its hands. With talk of more incentives and tax breaks on the way, and uncertainty on state commitment in areas of social housing, builders wait to see what emerges. House building volumes slipped by 4.3 per cent in the first quarter of this year, compared to the previous three months. Meanwhile, big foreign investors – and their international headquarters – are starting to realise that promises to deliver better energy and water infrastructure are simply not being met. Investment plans, on hold to see how the US/EU talks work out, will restart at some stage. Ireland is at risk of not being in the frame. The first real alarm bell for this was when Intel ditched Oranmore in Co Galway as a possible site for a big new plant in 2021 because the State could not guarantee how long planning would take on vital supporting infrastructure. This followed the seemingly endless planning saga for the Apple data centre in Athenry , also Co Galway. A convincing economic narrative needs a few central points that everyone has signed up to. Read the Central Bank research out this week for a convincing case on how state investment remains low here, despite tripling over the past decade. This is because the economy and population have grown so fast and the economy was already hobbled by years of underinvestment after the financial crash. To allow space for investment to continue to grow – and provide a buffer if the public finances tighten – other parts of the budget need to be under control. This means keeping the budget in surplus and continuing to put away excess corporate taxes in the funds for the future. This needs to be a central part of a coherent strategy. To be credible, the whole Government – including Micheál Martin and Simon Harris – need to explicitly sign up to this. If it is just a creature of the budget departments, then it will be there to be negotiated away during the budget process. It goes without saying that the second leg of any strategy needs to focus on prioritisation and delivery. Many thousands of words have been written about this. And the challenges are significant. But Ireland, for now anyway, is in a uniquely privileged position with a flush Exchequer and room for manoeuvre. The resources are there. Spending them well is the challenge. Ireland can consider how to respond as the Trump story plays out. The odds are that it will continue to do so long after the July 9th talks deadline. But the Government needs a convincing narrative of how it is going to manage what is under its control and use what may prove to be transitory budgetary riches. There are dangers ahead. But we are starting from a good position, with full employment and flush coffers that are the envy of many other countries. The Government needs to start telling a better story – not just to the public and investors, but also to itself.
Irish Times
3 hours ago
- Irish Times
Fingal council not only party to blame for farce of Dublin Airport passenger cap
Under a planning restriction imposed by Fingal County Council dating from 2007, Dublin Airport's passenger numbers are supposed to be capped at 32 million a year. But, as we all know, this restriction is pure fiction. More than 33 million passengers went through the doors of the airport last year and 36 million-plus are expected to use it this year as a result of court rulings that have put a stay on the cap while we await a ruling from Europe . It's an Irish solution to an Irish problem. To add to the confusion and mess, the council this week issued an enforcement notice to DAA on foot of complaints by local residents. Nobody comes out of this shambles well. Government should have moved long ago to sort out the cap and remove planning regulation of Dublin Airport from the remit of the council. Minister for Transport Darragh O'Brien promised a solution on taking office in January, but none has emerged to date. READ MORE DAA described Fingal's enforcement notice as a 'sorry indictment of the mess that is the Irish planning system, particularly when it comes to the most vital piece of transport infrastructure on this island'. That might be so, but it is also an indictment of DAA's dithering over 16 years before submitting an infrastructure application in December 2023 that would allow it to increase traffic through Dublin Airport. And it is not a good look for a state-owned company to breach legally binding planning rules. [ `Zombie' Dublin Airport passenger cap could be removed by legislation Opens in new window ] Willie Walsh, the former Aer Lingus and IAG chief who is now head of Geneva-based airlines trade body IATA, has said we are a laughing stock internationally, with people scratching their heads as to why a small island nation on the edge of western Europe that relies heavily on foreign direct investment would be tying itself up in knots with a cap on growth at its biggest international airport. He's not wrong.
