Citizen's Europe: free movement, free markets, and the making of Schengen

Thesis

This thesis explores the roots of the 1985 Schengen Agreement and the 1990 convention implementing its terms. The central questions are why the Schengen system emerged, first among France, Germany, and the Benelux states, and how it transformed the principle of free movement of persons.

I use delegate lists, draft agreements, diplomatic memoranda, and confidential annexes — archived in state agencies and closed to public view for thirty years — to explore the backroom dealings that produced the accord. I reveal how free movement developed as a guarantee linked to the market but distinct from economic life — a concept that expressed aspirations for European citizens’ rights and that arose within the burgeoning human rights discourse of the postwar era. The account, also drawing on the voices of journalists and judges and unwelcome migrants, sets the development of the Schengen accord, a complex administrative instrument, against the backdrop of global and national events — the end of the Cold War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, cycles of economic recession and recovery, intensifying migration flows, and deepening fear of terrorism. All shaped the boundaries of free movement

I argue that Schengen’s crucial innovation was to classify the bearers of the freedom to cross borders as persons rather than as economic actors. Under the accord, all people who were nationals of EC member states became free to traverse Schengen’s internal borders. This differed from the 1957 Treaty of Rome, which predicated cross-border mobility on economic pursuits. Shorn of that condition, Schengen reinforced distinctions based on nationality in seeking to pair liberty with security, giving rise to new mechanisms of surveillance and crime control that produced an outcry from non-Europeans in the Schengen space.

The thesis contributes to greater understanding of globalisation and the integration of Europe; security and transnational sovereignty; and citizenship and individual rights.

Authors: Stanley-Becker, I

• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: globalisation; human rights; migration; European Union; Schengen