Undesirables

“So closely is Schengen tied to a triumphal account of European union,” writes Stanley-Becker, “that the birth pangs of the project of free movement have been all but obscured.” If Schengen brought the European states a little closer together, it did so by further separating the continent from the rest of the world. As internal borders were taken down, external ones were reinforced to ward off migrants from “undesirable” countries in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.

Far from creating the kind of open, tolerant, cosmopolitan society Stefan Zweig yearned for in his postwar memoirs The World of Yesterday, the Schengen Agreement arguably created the kind of Europe described in journalist Hans Kundnani’s 2023 book Eurowhiteness: Culture, Empire and Race in the European Project, which posits that the EU’s emphasis on internal harmony undercuts a long-overdue reckoning with the continent’s colonial past and imperial ambitions.

Echoing Eurowhiteness, Stanley-Becker suggests that even the most humanistic aspirations of the Schengen Agreement cannot be separated from their imperialist, colonialist roots. The first chapter of Europe without Borders looks at Schengen in the context of Pan-European legislation and political thought, from the 1957 Treaties of Rome to French president François Mitterrand’s Citizens’ Europe campaign. Both, Stanley-Becker writes, took inspiration from the German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s support for a United States of Europe — not only as a means to preserve peace, but also to harness the continent’s full potential on the world stage. In this regard, Kant found an ally in the Romanticist Victor Hugo, author of Les Misérables and Hunchback of Notre-Dame. “God offers Africa to Europe,” Hugo wrote, waxing poetic about the latter’s responsibility to unite and civilize every corner of the globe. “Principles of democratic universalism,” Stanley-Becker deduces, “also vindicated European colonialism.”

Another major influence on early European policymakers, including Aristide Briand, Léon Blum, and Konrad Adenauer, was Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi, an Austrian Japanese thinker and founding member of the Paneuropean Union, a precursor to the EU. Coudenhove-Kalergi, too, linked European cosmopolitanism to colonial aspirations, presenting the political integration of Europe as a bulwark to both “Russian hegemony” and “American capital.” He also referred to Africa as “Europe’s plantation,” providing the latter with “materials for its industry, food for its population, [and] settlement area for its overpopulation.” Confronted with such statements, Stanley-Becker concludes that colonization was not a reward for political integration so much as a condition: “Africa,” he writes, “would allow Europe to become one.”

Although the creation of open-border zones within Europe had been proposed before, the Schengen Agreement appeared unique in that it defined movement as a universal human right as opposed to a purely economic concern. With the exception of the Citizens’ Europe initiative, most policymakers had regarded movement as a privilege reserved for goods, services, and employees — in short, a means of strengthening the European economy. Although Schengen’s architects certainly acknowledged the economic value of their plan, its ultimate aim, as paraphrased by Stanley-Becker, was to define “the crossing of national borders not simply as a need of the market but as a freedom of everyday life.”

Universal Rights, But Not for You

What Schengen’s architects did not acknowledge was the glaring fallacy at the center of the agreement: that this supposedly universal right was granted only to residents of participating states. While media coverage parroted the positive sentiments shared above, policymakers secretly drafted an exhaustive list of close to a hundred countries — including just about every former European colony — whose nationals were classified as “undesirables.”

To prevent these “undesirables” from entering the Schengen area — and placate conservative movements that saw open borders as a risk to national security and sovereignty — the agreement called for the creation of exactly the kind of transnational policing and surveillance networks that previously existed east of the Iron Curtain, allowing law enforcement to pursue suspects outside their jurisdiction and implementing explicitly discreet controls on a basis of racial profiling.

From the outset, the Schengen Agreement divided rather than united its member states, being met with criticism from both sides of the political spectrum. On the Right, concerns of self-determination mixed with talk of what is now known as the “Great Replacement” theory, with people like Paul Masson — a senator for France’s Gaullist Rally for the Republic party — arguing that submitting to the agreement meant giving up the power and independence his country had regained after World War II. Masson also warned of the imminent arrival of “terrorist bands similar to those which bloodied Paris” in 1986, when jihadists associated with Hezbollah and the Iranian government carried out bombings that took the lives of twenty people.

On the Left, human rights organizations like Luxembourg’s SOS Racisme, France’s Radical-Socialist Party, and the Committee of Support for Political Prisoners of Western Europe staged demonstrations on the banks of the river Moselle, the agreement’s symbolic birthplace. A 1989 conference by the Council of Europe argued Schengen’s architects were playing “games of ping-pong in which they forget the balls are human beings,” while Amnesty International announced that their policies on “undesirables” put “refugees and asylum seekers at risk of human rights violations.”

Even at the top of the European political ladder, officials sympathetic to the Schengen project hinted that, at the end of the day, the agreement’s humanitarian ideals were subservient to the need to maintain existing power dynamics between countries. Mitterrand, as supportive of Schengen as he had been of his own Citizens’ Europe project, seemed to get cold feet when the fall of the Berlin Wall gave way to a bigger, more powerful Germany. He claimed, as quoted by Stanley-Becker:

The sudden prospect of reunification had delivered a sort of mental shock to the Germans. Its effect had been to turn them once again into the “bad” Germans they used to be. They were behaving with a certain brutality and concentrating on reunification to the exclusion of everything else. . . . Of course the Germans had the right to self-determination. But they did not have the right to upset the political realities of Europe.

Perhaps most disadvantaged were the undocumented immigrants already living and working in the Schengen area, who feared the agreement’s enhanced policing apparatuses could result in their deportation. On June 28, 1996, a group of people calling themselves sans-papiers (undocumented migrants) mostly from “undesirable” West Africa, sought refuge at the Saint-Bernard de la Chapelle church in Paris’s Goutte d’Or neighborhood, beginning an anti-Schengen protest that would last nearly two months. They derived the term sans-papiers from the sans-culottes, radical urban workers from the French Revolution who called for direct as opposed to representative democracy. They thus associated the Schengen crisis with other, historical acts of economic exploitation and violated rights.

Another church occupation, this time by undocumented immigrants from the former French colonies of Mali, Mauritania, Ivory Coast, Senegal, and Guinea, followed later that same year, sparking public demonstrations throughout the Schengen area and illustrating, as Stanley-Becker puts it, “how the barriers against the movement of persons bear the stamp of colonialism.”

“We did not come to France by chance,” one protester, Ababacar Diop, explained in his 1997 memoirs, Dans la peau d’un sans-papiers. “Our countries have suffered and continue to suffer from colonization. Our riches have been and are still being exploited by France [and] other European countries.” “We no longer want France to continue to submit us to the same relations it maintains with the states of our countries of origin built on exploitation, contempt and paternalism,” declared another prominent sans-papiers activist, Madjiguène Cissé. For many undocumented immigrants, the Schengen Agreement’s discriminatory restrictions on movement weren’t just antidemocratic, but an outright refusal to take responsibility for Europe’s colonial past.

The sans-papiers were right to be afraid, for the agreement not only created new, transnational rules on immigration, but also motivated participating states to bolster their own domestic policies. In the last and least theoretical chapter of Europe without Borders, Stanley-Becker provides a comprehensive overview of how such policies — and the increasingly popular right-wing movements behind them — shaped the current political climate.

In France, interior minister Charles Pasqua introduced laws tightening residency rules, accelerating deportations, and expanding police power. Subsequent laws, passed after Schengen went into full effect, made it more difficult for immigrants to obtain social welfare, appeal the decisions of immigration courts, and obtain legal status for minors. Pasqua’s equally xenophobic successor, Jean-Louis Debré, expanded identity checks at workplaces to reduce illegal employment and made harboring immigrants a criminal offense. Most divisive of all, the country repealed birthright citizenship, “revoking a right guaranteed for more than a century.”

“France has been a country of immigration,” Stanley-Becker quotes Pasqua, speaking in 1993, “it doesn’t want to be anymore.” Thanks to laws passed by him and his successors, each reflecting “rising concern that immigrants would surge into France as a consequence of Schengen,” immigration fell by 40 percent between 1992 and 1995, all while the revocation of birthright citizenship caused the number of sans-papiers to swell.

Some People Are Illegal

In the epilogue of Europe without Borders, Stanley-Becker notes that the issues raised by Schengen, which now encompasses twenty-nine countries, stretching from Spain to Romania and Bulgaria, continue to this day. As recently as 2014, undocumented immigrants launched a March for Freedom, taking s from all over Western Europe on a one-month journey from Strasbourg to Brussels, shouting slogans like “No one is illegal,” “Freedom of movement for all,” and — in a dig at Schengen’s supposedly noneconomic paradigm, “We are the trash of capitalism.”

But while grassroots movements for immigrant rights have expanded and intensified, so have the political movements that wish to restrict their already limited freedom even further. A string of financial and geopolitical implosions, from the 2015 European migrant crisis and Brexit to the coronavirus pandemic and Russia’s war against Ukraine, have not only led to the reestablishment of selective, internal border checks to curb the spread of viruses and immigrants alike — undermining the whole point of the Schengen Agreement — but also expedited the rise of demagogic, illiberal, racist, and Euroskeptic leaders across the continent, including Marine Le Pen in France, Alice Weidel in Germany, Giorgia Meloni in Italy, and Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, to name just the best-known.

Stanley-Becker does not imply that these leaders rose to prominence because of the Schengen Agreement but does stress that its implications gave them a consistent platform. As such, his book not only functions as an engaging study of Europe’s past, but also as an explanation of its present condition.

“Two decades of open borders in the EU ended,” spokespersons for the UN warned in 2015, when the first of those internal checkpoints began to pop up. As it turns out, they were never truly open to begin with.