Schengen Surveillance
Schengen Surveillance
By removing checks on borders between European countries while hardening those on the edges of Europe, the EU has redrawn borders along civilizational lines.
Europe without Borders: A History
by Isaac Stanley-Becker
Princeton University Press, 2025, 416 pp.
In 1985, at a meeting in the village of Schengen, Luxembourg, five neighboring Western European countries—Belgium, France, West Germany, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands—committed to remove border controls. In legal terms, the borders between them would remain. But there would no longer be checks on people and goods traveling across them—and eventually even border infrastructure would be dismantled. The agreement was initially outside the legal framework of what was then the European Community, but it was incorporated into the European Union in 1997. The Schengen area grew to include twenty-nine European countries—including some, like Switzerland, that are not even in the European Union—though some EU member states, like Ireland and the United Kingdom, remained outside the area.
Along with the euro, the other project within the European project that was conceived around the same time (and from which the UK also opted out), Schengen is often seen as a triumph of integration that must be protected, especially from the far right, which campaigns for stronger borders. But although the removal of border checks within the Schengen area made everyday life easier for Europeans, or at least for those who lived close to intra-Schengen borders or frequently crossed them, it also gave rise to both a new transnational system of surveillance within the EU and to a hardening of the EU’s external border. This is why, in much of the rest of the world, Schengen stands not for openness but for closedness.
Isaac Stanley-Becker’s excellent history of the emergence of the Schengen border-free zone, Europe without Borders, raises difficult questions about borders—especially for the left. Stanley-Becker meticulously reconstructs the thinking of EU leaders in the 1980s, when the Schengen agreement was being negotiated, and the context in which it took place, capturing the mix of idealistic motives and blind spots that animated the project. In Stanley-Becker’s account, Schengen is defined by tension between a market-driven logic and what he calls a “humanist” logic—that is, one centered on people as people rather than as labor. The agreement, he writes, was “a site of dualisms, where freedom would join with security, and cosmopolitanism with the exclusion of non-Europeans.”
Freedom of Movement and Schengen
It is important to differentiate the principle of freedom of movement—that is, the right to settle in another EU member state—from the idea of a border-free zone. The Treaty of Rome, signed in 1957, the second major step in European integration after the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951, established a common market based on the idea of the so-called “four freedoms”: freedom of movement for capital, goods, persons, and services. Initially, the focus was on freeing up capital and goods; to the extent that people were also able to move freely, it was as workers. Not until the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 were EU citizens granted the right to settle in another member state even without a job.
The right to freedom of movement only ever applied to citizens of EU member states and excluded citizens of other states living in Europe. For example, by the time the UK was negotiating accession to the European Economic Community in the early 1970s, there were a large number of citizens of Commonwealth countries living in the UK (like my father, who moved to London from India in the 1960s). Because of Britain’s imperial history and the way this had shaped British nationality law, these immigrants had a right to settle in the UK and enjoyed almost all the same rights as British citizens, including the right to vote. But because they were not British citizens, freedom of movement would not apply to them.
The gradual development of this right to settle in another EU member state is quite different from the removal of border checks. It would have been perfectly possible, at least in theory, to develop this right without removing border checks: EU citizens would have a legal right to settle in other member states, but officials would still check their documents when they crossed intra-EU borders. Again, it is clarifying to look at the UK: while the country was still an EU member state, British citizens enjoyed the same right of freedom of movement as did citizens of any other member state, but because the UK was not in Schengen, their passports would still be checked when, say, they got on the Eurostar to Paris.
The Schengen project is thus quite distinct from freedom of movement as such, yet the two are constantly conflated. As Stanley-Becker shows, ever since the agreement was negotiated, EU leaders have frequently celebrated Schengen as a huge step forward in freedom of movement. But Stanley-Becker himself also often confuses the two. For example, he describes Schengen as a “treaty of free movement” that created a “territory of free movement.” But while border checks between European countries can be thought of as “obstacles to free movement” in a loose sense, they are not obstacles to freedom of movement in the legal sense of the term as it is used in EU.
To further complicate things, the Schengen project emerged in the 1980s in parallel with the development of the four freedoms. In the 1970s, European integration had stalled: there had been no major breakthrough in political integration since the Treaty of Rome, though judicial integration had continued through the rulings of the European Court of Justice. But in the 1980s, a series of steps were taken toward integration that are widely seen as having remade the EU along neoliberal lines. In particular, the Single European Act, advocated by Margaret Thatcher and signed in 1986, went further in removing barriers to the movement of capital and goods in the EEC. This was the context in which Schengen began.
Stanley-Becker shows how Schengen was in effect a fusion of two smaller border-free zones: the Benelux Union, which dated to the final years of the Second World War, and the zone created by the Saarbrucken Agreement between France and West Germany in 1984. He also notes that the immediate impetus for Schengen came from protests by truckers about customs checks that caused delays at borders. While Schengen would be retrospectively imagined as a visionary project, in reality it was driven by banal imperatives around cost and convenience. Its later exalted status is an example of a tendency to idealize European integration that, as the historian Tony Judt argued, runs through the whole history of the European project.
From Border Checks to Big Brother
Once the decision had been made in 1985 to remove border checks within the Schengen area, the basic dilemma for officials was how to make movement easier for Europeans while preventing non-Europeans—especially those from countries they designated as “undesirable”—from moving across intra-European borders. But it was the principle of freedom of movement, not Schengen itself, that had excluded non-EU citizens. In fact, the problem with Schengen from the point of view of policymakers was that the removal of border checks took away the main means of policing the movement of non-EU citizens across borders.
In pre-Schengen Europe, it had been impossible to cross borders without the right passport or visa—or at least to do so legally. But the decision to remove border checks meant that there was no longer any way of stopping people going from one continental European country to another, or even of knowing that they had done so. Since their movements could no longer be monitored at the border, they would have to be monitored elsewhere—which meant everywhere. “Under the Treaty, security would not be lodged in physical checkpoints but rather in digital information,” Stanley-Becker writes. Thus border checks were replaced by Big Brother.
Stanley-Becker shows how the Schengen Information System, based in Strasbourg, was created to compensate for the absence of border checks. The core of what he aptly calls “a transnational panopticon for the information age” was a system of surveillance and information sharing between national police forces, which from 1994 were also integrated into Europol at the same Strasbourg location. The new surveillance architecture “constituted an unprecedented concentration of power to detect, classify, record and exclude.” Stanley-Becker quotes the center-right French senator Jacques Thyraud, who saw it as a paradox that a space created for the free movement of people might result in increased surveillance. But that was the logic of Schengen.
The implementation of the agreement in the 1990s also went hand in hand with the harmonization of asylum policy in the EU. The Dublin Convention, signed in 1990, required asylum seekers to apply in the first EU member state in which they arrived. A month before Germany finally ratified the Schengen agreement in 1993, it amended its Basic Law to deny a right to asylum to those who had come through other “safe” countries of origin. But the surveillance system created by Schengen inevitably expanded beyond the identification of asylum seekers who had moved from one Schengen country to another; in particular, it was increasingly merged with EU counterterrorism operations.
In the last chapter of Europe without Borders, Stanley-Becker discusses protests by migrants in Europe in the 1990s. He focuses on the sans-papiers (“without papers”) movement in France in the 1990s, which emerged in protest not so much against Schengen itself as against the series of so-called Pasqua laws that restricted the rights of migrants in France. But it was not just undocumented migrants like the sans-papiers but also non-EU citizens living perfectly legally within the EU, and even nonwhite EU citizens, who might be affected by the racial profiling within the Schengen system. In the absence of border checks, nonwhite people were automatically suspect.
The Refugee Crisis
When Schengen was first developed, it was still possible for optimistic “pro-Europeans” to imagine that the removal of borders within Europe might be a first step toward a borderless world. Few of the EU officials whom Stanley-Becker writes about seem to have thought of Schengen in this way; they were much more pragmatic and focused on security. But some European intellectuals, like the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, did believe that the EU was a cosmopolitan project capable of overcoming the “territorial principle” altogether. The implication was that the EU was “de-bordering” (that is, removing borders altogether) rather than just “re-bordering” (that is, moving borders from one place to another).
Stanley-Becker cites an essay by the French philosopher Bernard Henri-Lévy, published on the fiftieth anniversary of the Treaty of Rome in 2007—a triumphalist moment in the history of European integration, before the EU was hit with a series of crises in the 2010s—that perfectly captures this “pro-European” wishful thinking. “All human communities have a border,” he wrote. “All have a territorial limit which literally defines every one of them. With the exception of Europe. Only Europe has freed itself from that fatal obsession which earlier communities of men and women had with frontiers.” Europe was “an undeclared, inorganic, virtual community” that “can only be a stranger to the language of borders.”
The refugee crisis in 2015 ended that illusion, making clear that the necessary corollary of the removal of internal borders was a hard external border. In particular, the crisis led to a massive expansion of Frontex, the EU border agency that had been set up in 2004 and whose budget went from €143 million in 2015 to €754 million in 2022. (Throughout that period, the agency’s director was Fabrice Leggeri, who was forced to resign in 2022 after a series of scandals and is now a member of the European Parliament for Marine Le Pen’s far-right Rassemblement National party.) Over 30,000 people have died trying to cross the Mediterranean since 2014. In 2022, Human Rights Watch said EU policy could be summed up in three words: Let them die.
It was because of Schengen that the refugee crisis took the particular form it did. The removal of border checks meant that once asylum seekers made it to a country like Greece or Italy, they could easily travel on to Germany or Sweden, where many of them wanted to go. The Dublin Convention was meant to prevent these “secondary movements,” and for a while it did. Even as Greece and Italy began to be overwhelmed by the numbers of arrivals in the early 2010s, Germany insisted that Dublin meant it was their responsibility alone. But by the summer of 2015 the system had broken down, and the German government belatedly realized that a million people were going to apply for asylum in Germany that year.
Schengen allowed member states to reinstate border checks for up to two years in an emergency, as Germany did in September 2015. This did not suspend the principle of freedom of movement; it was again more a matter of costs and convenience, especially for German industry, which since Schengen had integrated its central European neighbors into its supply chains. But to “pro-European” politicians who once again conflated freedom of movement and the removal of border checks, the return of border checks was a threat to the integrity of the single market—especially after southeastern European countries followed Germany and reinstated checks on their own borders and thus shut down the so-called Balkan route.
Although the refugee crisis was often framed as a battle between German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, they both agreed that the flow of migrants needed to be stopped. Where they disagreed was on the question of how to move asylum seekers from one EU member state to another so that each would take its fair share—in other words, the question of burden sharing within the EU. To ease the burden on Germany, Merkel wanted to impose mandatory quotas, which Orbán, who saw the crisis as a German problem rather than a European one, vehemently opposed. Last year member states agreed to a new “migration pact,” which required them to either accept the quota or pay a financial penalty, but Orbán is refusing to comply with this compromise.
Because so much attention focused on this battle, there was little discussion of how the new system of relocating asylum seekers across the EU would work or what the consequences might be. It was simply assumed, including by many on the left, that it would be a good thing if Orbán agreed to the system of quotas and border checks within the Schengen area were once again removed. But the pact takes the logic of Schengen further. In the absence of border checks, there is little to stop an asylum seeker who has been allocated to Slovakia from traveling on to Germany. Preventing such journeys is likely to require the further expansion of the system of surveillance produced by Schengen.
The Left and Borders
The story that Stanley-Becker tells shows how the removal of border checks within a limited space can be as exclusive as it is inclusive. It is tempting to think of the creation of a border-free zone as a step toward a wider removal of borders or even a world without borders altogether, as Habermas imagined it. But the story of Schengen shows instead that the removal of border checks within a limited space requires that space to have a hard external border—especially if it is a relatively wealthy region like Europe. Thus such regional border-free zones do not actually remove borders but simply move them from one place to another. They should be understood as “re-bordering” rather than “de-bordering.”
Even if we do ultimately want a world without borders, the question is how to get there—and the story of Schengen suggests that removing border checks between some countries can lead to a situation that is in some ways worse than the one that preceded it. In particular, by removing checks on borders between European countries while hardening the external borders of Europe, the EU has redrawn borders along civilizational lines and replaced a Europe in which nation-states were separated by borders with one that is internally open but excludes the Global South. From a left perspective, Schengen—not so much a “Europe without borders” as a Europe without internal border checks—has created as many problems as it has solved.
Hans Kundnani is an OSF Ideas Workshop Fellow and the author of Eurowhiteness.
