Schengen Is a Border-Free Zone Surrounded by Barbed Wire

Review of Europe Without Borders: A History by Isaac Stanley-Becker (Princeton University Press, 2025)

Outside the European Museum Schengen, dedicated to the eponymous 1985 agreement in which France, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands promised to dismantle their internal borders, stand two sections of the Berlin Wall. The thirteen-foot-high blocks, one of which bears the portrait of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, symbolize the agreement’s commitment to ensuring freedom of movement as a universal human right. At least, in theory.

As investigative reporter and Oxford-educated historian Isaac Stanley-Becker points out in the opening of his forthcoming book Europe without Borders: A History, Schengen’s architects could hardly have picked a more appropriate place to craft their plan for a borderless zone. Indeed, the area surrounding the Luxembourgian town of the same name had been disputed ground for centuries. The agreement itself was signed on June 14, forty-five years to the day since Nazi Germany began its occupation of France. Now, thanks to the Schengen Agreement, residents from both countries can cross each other’s borders at will, without checks or documentation.

Drafting of the Schengen Agreement began toward the tail end of the Cold War, when the first signs of Soviet collapse were beginning to show. But while the agreement was — and continues to be — hailed as a triumph of democracy, civil liberties, and international collaboration following decades of militant nationalism and totalitarian subjugation, this is far from the whole truth.

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