Europe without Borders

A History

Isaac Stanley-Becker

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Hardback

Forthcoming
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English

Princeton University Press
01 May 2025

European history; Social & cultural history; Migration, immigration & emigration; Human rights; Civil rights & citizenship

The contested creation of free movement

for people and goods

in the Schengen area of Europe.

Europe is a place of free movement among nations

or is it? The Schengen area, established in 1985 and today encompassing twenty-nine European countries, allows people, goods, and capital to cross borders without restraint. Schengen transformed European life, advancing both a democratic project of transnational citizenship and a neoliberal project of international free trade. But the right of free movement always excluded non-Europeans, especially migrants of colour from former colonies of the Schengen states. In Europe without Borders, Isaac Stanley-Becker explores the contested creation of free movement in Schengen, from treatymaking at European summits and disputes in international courts to the street protests of undocumented immigrants who claimed free movement as a human right.

Schengen laid the groundwork for the making of a single market and the founding of the European Union. Yet its emergence is one of the great untold stories of modern European history, one hidden in archives long embargoed. Stanley-Becker is among the first to have access to records of the treatymaking

such as letters between France's Francois Mitterrand and West Germany's Helmut Kohl

and Europe without Borders offers a pathbreaking account of Schengen's creation. Stanley-Becker argues that Schengen gave a humanist cast to a market paradigm; but even in pairing the border crossing of human beings with the principles of free-market exchange, this vision of free movement was hedged by alarm about foreign migrants. Meanwhile, these migrants

the sans-papiers

saw in the promise of a borderless Europe only a neocolonial enterprise.

By: Isaac Stanley-Becker
Imprint: Princeton University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 235mm, Width: 156mm,
ISBN: 9780691261768
ISBN 10: 0691261768
Pages: 416
Publication Date: 01 May 2025
Audience: College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , General/trade , Primary , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Isaac Stanley-Becker is an investigative reporter for the Washington Post who has reported from across Europe and the United States. He earned a PhD in history from the University of Oxford, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar.

Reviews for Europe without Borders: A History

""[Europe Without Borders] not only functions as an engaging study of Europe’s past, but also as an explanation of its present condition""---Tim Brinkhoff, Jacobin ""The book is rich in documentary detail, uncovering secret and often scandalous compromises that defined the treaty- making processes."" * Foreword *