The Idea of Europe

The idea of Europe: this civilizational vision informed the best of European integration as it “emerged from the ashes of war,”¹ but it also contributed to its tragic dimension. While many regard the European Union (EU) as a high achievement of liberal internationalism, especially in its economic aspect, it reveals an exclusionary logic. We see this in the tensions animating the 1985 Schengen Agreement from the beginning.

With roots in the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), Schengen aimed to create a zone of free movement for European nationals and goods, reflecting classical liberal ideals—but it excluded migrants. While those from Europe enjoyed considerable freedom, those outside faced steep limits on their freedom. European policymakers limited certain kinds of migration, drawing on a transnational surveillance system that privileged the freedom and mobility of Europeans over non-Europeans.

Isaac Stanley-Becker, an Oxford DPhil and journalist for The Atlantic, recently published a superb history of Schengen, Europe Without Borders: A History (Princeton University Press, 2025). He uncovers the inner tensions in a treaty that reconciled neoliberal economics with democratic humanism, but in so doing also created a framework that systematically excluded non-Europeans. Given a gap in historical scholarship on the inception of free movement in Schengen, Stanley-Becker seeks “to reveal the cruel anomalies of human movement in a world where capital and commodities travel globally with far less restraint and where national citizenship is an enduring precondition for the exercise of fundamental rights.”²

While seemingly critical of Schengen’s neoliberalism, Stanley-Becker’s survey remains largely intellectual rather than polemical, focusing on the historical circumstances. In unveiling the history of Schengen and what its guarantee of free movement concealed, he “traces how the free movement of persons developed as a concept linked to the market but distinct from economic life,” and relates it to contemporaneous developments like decolonization and human rights.³ To make his argument, Stanley-Becker draws on recently available government archives with materials from Schengen’s history.

The exclusion that Stanley-Becker draws attention to, despite Schengen’s laboratory for free movement, continues today. Mass migration from the Middle East and North Africa since 2015 catalyzed the resurgence of hard borders across Europe, as well as a discourse on the limits of hospitality and assimilation for those perceived as culturally other.

Many European governments in the recent Ceuta migrant crisis, for instance, called for Spain’s suspension from the Schengen Area and for greater control of the EU’s external border. And in broader debates, Europe’s idea of a shared civilizational identity and culture also plays a strong role. That said, one must recognize the reality of substantial migration into Europe since World War II, in contrast with later constraints on free movement after the EU’s establishment.

Stanley-Becker’s project helps us reflect on the idea of Europe historically, revealing the ways in which European integration relied on exclusion despite its productive economic liberalism. Furthermore, by uncovering the history of Schengen’s mass surveillance, Stanley-Becker’s work will interest classical liberals seeking to understand the EU through the lens of freedom and privacy. Once the exemplar of liberal internationalism, the EU now promotes a paradigm of security that employs widespread surveillance to enforce border controls and track human movement.

Despite its comprehensive history, Europe Without Borders also has a few underdeveloped areas. Stanley-Becker does not sufficiently attend to the democratic element of European integration and the ways integration positively impacted world order through law. Meanwhile, he fails to elucidate the role of the welfare state in migrants’ treatment under Schengen, an evolving subject with current movements toward state hospitality as well as nationalist counterreactions.

Neoliberalism and Democracy in Schengen

Renowned for its single market, a cornerstone of neoliberalism, the EU has moved away from neoliberalism recently. In particular, Pascal Lamy’s Geneva Consensus sought to humanize and reform what some saw as the excesses of the Washington Consensus.⁴ That said, the EU’s roots in classical liberal ideals are still worth appreciating. The Rome Treaty of 1957 created the European Economic Community, a single market for goods, capital, labor, and services. And the European Court of Justice ruled in Gravier v. City of Liège that only economic agents had the right to circulate freely within the European Community. Gravier thus limited the free movement of citizens to workers, revealing an economic rationality.

In a pointed remark on this neoliberalism and its relation to exclusion, Stanley-Becker contends that “Schengen was a laboratory of free movement always meant to join Euro-nationalist rules of exclusion with neoliberal principles of market freedom.”⁵ Even so, Schengen’s history reveals another face beyond the economic: the democratic. In Stanley-Becker’s reading, “Schengen made concrete a political ideal of democratic civil solidarity,” as French president François Mitterrand’s concept of Citizens’ Europe attests.

There is a civilizational history behind European political union, including Paneuropa as well as colonial programs in Africa. Nineteenth-century Italian political theorist Giuseppe Mazzini likewise theorized a “United States of Europe,” to which Stanley-Becker alludes in dialogue with Enlightenment conceptions of a cosmopolitan community, especially Kant on pacific federation. But a “very different kind of Pan-European regime: the Third Reich”⁶ ultimately overtook these proposals for integration.

Due to World War II, “mass death on the continent breathed new life into European cosmopolitanism.”⁷ In particular, Stanley-Becker highlights the Union of European Federalists’ founding in 1946, the Mont Pelerin Society’s formation in 1947, and the 1948 Congress of Europe, all committed to free movement and interstate federation. That said, only workers and Europeans enjoyed full freedom of movement—though one must note that no state in history has offered genuinely unrestricted mobility for foreign nationals, not least because of practical constraints.

Furthermore, in pursuing integration, Schengen and now the EU have sought to reconcile the economic with the democratic. The common market is still very much alive, while the EU features some of the most vibrant democracies in the world, especially countries like Switzerland committed to direct democracy. But Stanley-Becker does not fully develop the democratic element in Europe Without Borders, raising the question of whether initial European liberalism might have existed in tension with a self-governance more aligned with positive liberty—freedom as agency through the state’s provision of basic goods.

Why did Schengen move from the neoliberal to the democratic? Stanley-Becker does not say, leaving the reader to hazard a guess. Still, his history excels. In particular, Stanley-Becker’s discussion of the Spinelli Draft Treaty for the EU uncovers the ideal of political union as “a work of democratic humanism, not simply a common market” through “principles of pluralist democracy, respect for human rights and the rule of law.”⁸ These latter ideas define global constitutionalism, a theory of world law that European jurists advanced.

While Stanley-Becker focuses on the extent of free movement in Schengen, it would have been ideal to discuss the concrete meaning of European integration for world order. Schengen excluded non-Europeans, to be sure. But the vision of integration shaped many European jurists who advanced some of the most compelling proposals for a peaceful world order, such as global constitutionalism, many of which reflect liberal principles. Absent from Europe Without Borders is a recognition of European integration’s positive effects for peace, especially through Schengen’s democratic and humanist ethos—though admittedly not equality at its widest.

Freedom and Exclusion in Schengen

Today, the resurgence of nationalism amid the EU’s ongoing migration crisis reveals a logic of exclusion that traces to Schengen’s roots—even granting legitimate concerns about the challenge of assimilation. But this nationalism largely exists among the people and certain political parties rather than among heads of state, as the latter often take a centrist stance.

Nationalism’s return also attests to the supremacy of nation-states despite Schengen’s, and later the EU’s, largely postnational constellation. As Stanley-Becker shows, even though Schengen opened borders, in its history nation-states could decide on the fate of migrants. Schengen’s guarantees of free movement, then, were “at once expansive and exclusionary: expansive in applying to people, but exclusionary in including only European nationals.”⁹

European countries further wrestled with the tension between freedom and security. “From its inception, Schengen paired cosmopolitan freedom with exclusion enforced by sovereign nations,” Stanley-Becker notes.¹⁰ Security intersected with national sovereignty, too. After the Berlin Wall’s fall, sustained disputes arose over what national sovereignty meant and how to reconcile it with European cosmopolitanism. Some stakeholders thought Schengen violated sovereignty, while others countered that nation-states still controlled migratory flows.

In looking to the history of the Saarbrücken Agreement between France and West Germany, Stanley-Becker uncovers the way the idea of Europe drove this treaty’s exclusionary logic, in tension with the liberal elements of European integration. Although the Saarbrücken Agreement sought a humane opening of borders between the two states, its history revealed “secret lists of the undesirables,”¹¹ largely from former French colonies in Africa, who had to furnish proof of legitimate travel.

Stanley-Becker’s chronicling of the sans-papiers (“without papers”) movement, too, highlights the supremacy of sovereign and racialized exclusion in tension with European liberalism. The sans-papiers invoked free movement as a human right, beyond the logics of citizenship and the market that prevailed in Schengen. But they met resistance from the judiciary. In a case study from France, the Constitutional Council ruled that Schengen would still permit French sovereignty, particularly France’s jurisdiction to guarantee free movement, police borders, and control persons—though Stanley-Becker does not specify what controlling persons meant.¹²

Even with respect to asylum, Schengen’s rules assigned responsibility to the nation of first entry, limiting the free movement of migrants and undermining the rights the sans-papiers sought as a perceived matter of justice. Stanley-Becker thus concludes that “in contrasting ways, the constitutional reform arising from Schengen’s ratification affirmed national sovereignty.”¹³ Hence sovereign exigency ultimately constrained the free movement Schengen supposedly advanced.

Despite its well-researched uncovering of Schengen’s exclusion, Europe Without Borders does not address the extent to which migrants had access to European welfare states. But Stanley-Becker does mention in passing the longstanding “concern about nonnationals becoming public charges . . . as old as doctrines of settlement that excluded foreigners from poor relief,” though he does not elaborate on the history.¹⁴

Historically, European welfare states served citizens but not migrants. Currently, however, some people seeking asylum in Europe do receive hospitable treatment such as state-provided accommodation and weekly stipends, though this lies beyond the temporal scope of Stanley-Becker’s focus—and might even contradict his central thesis. Still, it would have been ideal to elucidate the history and evolution of how European welfarism, an outcome of certain perspectives on positive liberty, existed in tension with Schengen’s neoliberalism and initial exclusion of migrants, but Stanley-Becker does not venture this far.

Mass Surveillance in Schengen

Since Schengen was a place of free movement, Stanley-Becker argues, it was also a place of risk. He relates this to a major theme relevant to classical liberals: mass surveillance. Security drove the Schengen program, no longer through physical checkpoints but through digital information—strongly furthering the European surveillance state that continues today. These developments might concern classical liberals, as surveillance has grown even in constitutional democracies, infringing on civil liberties that free societies ideally preserve, especially privacy.

Hence, the most novel finding of Europe Without Borders lies in uncovering the history of mass surveillance in Schengen. While the EU’s current use of surveillance receives global attention, especially through AI-driven airport biometrics, its historical roots in Schengen remain largely unknown. Even though the Schengen Information System (SIS) predated AI, it could still conduct extensive surveillance with the purpose of excluding certain individuals or groups.

Reflecting Michel Foucault’s insights in Discipline and Punish, Stanley-Becker notes that “from the Schengen laboratory, then, emerged a transnational panopticon of the information age.”¹⁵ The panopticon signifies a hidden mode of surveillance that still leads persons to alter their behavior. Since transnational policing prevailed in Schengen, its surveillance system “challenged venerable doctrines that defined security as coterminous with physical territory.”¹⁶ Moving beyond a territorial security that upheld the nation-state’s monopoly on violence, the SIS’s domain was more comprehensive.

That Schengen’s security program transcended the nation should be of concern to classical liberals, as it tended toward a world state that, in Rana Dasgupta’s words, would be “violent beyond imagination.”¹⁷ Indeed, many note that the EU marks the first step toward a postnational order. Though the system of nation-states will likely endure in world order, that surveillance systems have real power extending beyond the nation poses risks to civil liberties, as these systems are not accountable to the people. Stanley-Becker acknowledges as much: Schengen’s information system “put at risk both individual privacy and state sovereignty, core aspects of self-determination.”¹⁸

“Schengen had no government of its own . . . and yet it would have a powerful transnational security apparatus.”¹⁹ This panopticon was noncorporeal, using digital intelligence as “mechanisms of discipline and exclusion.”²⁰ In his history, Stanley-Becker notes events in Schengen’s development that grappled with civil liberties like privacy. Ultimately, however, stakeholders agreed to facilitate information exchange among Schengen countries despite its privacy violations. But the greatest conflict involved surveillance for criminal justice, particularly how to harmonize rules about data use for extradition.

“Schengen’s information system constituted an unprecedented concentration of power to detect, classify, record, and exclude.”²¹ Those formulating the treaty noted its risk to freedom but proceeded still, suggesting that security from non-European nationals took priority over freedom. But a surveillance state risks data insecurity for the average person, even European nationals, given the possibility of state abuse. We see this priority of security today despite the persistence of economic freedom in the EU’s common market. The intensifying crises of citizenship and migration, too, demonstrate that national and even transnational security is becoming all-encompassing and is stronger now with AI.

Conclusion

In Europe Without Borders, Stanley-Becker concludes that his project was to trace “Schengen’s place in a Europe no longer divided by borders between sovereign nations, where humanist values lent legitimacy to free market mechanisms and multilateral security measures protected the liberties of European nationals.”²²

Though this vision seems inclusive and democratic, Stanley-Becker compellingly illustrates how Schengen’s capaciousness permitted only the free flow of European nationals and goods, excluding migrants unless they were workers. A surveillance system that transcended the nation drove Schengen’s priority of security from non-Europeans, a latent world state that continues today. But Stanley-Becker’s history, while exceptionally well-researched, would be enriched by more engagement with notions of democracy, world order, and the welfare state as they intersected with European integration.

Schengen had worthwhile economic origins, to be sure. Its design reflected the doux commerce thesis that trade enhances peace, in which open flows of capital required open borders for goods and workers. And while Schengen’s idea of Europe rightly resonates with much of what people admire in Europe’s civilizational heritage, its program of surveillance existed in tension with classical liberalism.

In its turn to a circumscribed democratic humanism and its use of surveillance for security, Schengen excluded migrants and sans-papiers from full freedom of movement, in contrast with liberalism’s universality. This reality has only intensified today. Stanley-Becker’s history in Europe Without Borders vitally enriches the discourse on Europe’s idea and what borders mean for freedom in its political and economic meanings.