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PORTSIDE CULTURE

DOUBLE NEGATIVE  
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George Blaustein
May 1, 2025
The European Review of Books
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_ This book is a detailed history of an aspect of modern European
history and the treaty that catalyzed that story. _

,

 

_Europe without Borders: A History_
Isaac Stanley-Becker
Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691261768

Most Europeans (I’m guessing) don’t know much about the history of
Schengen, by which I mean the Schengen Agreement and the Schengen
Area, not the village of Schengen in Luxembourg after which those
things are named (although probably that too). That non-knowledge is
itself Schengen’s achievement.

The Schengen Agreement is what makes possible the Schengen Area, which
comprises 29 European countries, between which goods and people can
bounce with no border checks. The website of the European Commission
trumpets the Schengen Area as « the world’s largest area of
freedom, security and justice without internal frontiers » — a
fine sentiment, though Schengen’s history, like the histories of
other European Union institutions, is convoluted, even byzantine. It
starts in 1985, when five of the ten states that then made up the
European Economic Community convened at the little village on the
western bank of the Moselle River — the nexus-point of France, West
Germany and the Benelux countries. (Goethe passed through Schengen;
Victor Hugo sketched a castle there.) At first, the Schengen Agreement
applied only to those five countries. The treaty was signed on a boat
on the Moselle on 14 June 1985 (the anniversary of the German
occupation of Paris in 1940) and went largely unnoticed in the press.

Then came the years-long slog of drafting an actual Schengen
_convention_ — the protocols promised and demanded by the treaty.
The gears of Schengen negotiations turned alongside other gears of
European institution-forming, other moves toward integration, other
treaties. And they turned in the background of more dramatic
_historical events_. The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989,
most spectacularly, did not make Schengen easier: the collapse of that
one most famous « internal frontier » threw a wrench into the
longed-for dismantling of all the others (one of many ironies to which
we will return). The convention was signed by the same five countries
on 19 June 1990, with considerably more fanfare than the first treaty
had been. Then came the next slog, in which Schengen passed through
the gauntlets of ratification in the various national legislatures.
That took a few years, whereupon began the further slog of
implementation in 1995.

At every step of this process, as Isaac Stanley-Becker shows in a new,
well-wrought scholarly history, freedom of movement wasn’t, well,
free. Schengen is « a system of dualisms — of freedom and
security, unity and exclusion, and cosmopolitan exchange and national
autonomy. » It was _never not_ a system of those dualisms. The book
is called_ Europe Without Borders: A History_, but the pivotal
« without » of that title drips with an irony both bitter and
melancholic. The dismantling of « internal » borders meant the
strengthening of « external » ones, and it meant the construction
of novel surveillance regimes to saturate the pseudo-borderless realm
through which « Europeans » and « foreigners » are fated to
move, freely or unfreely — a realm that soon grew far vaster than
the five countries that first constituted it.1
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Why read a history of Schengen? The book arrives several years into
the ambient feeling that Schengen is somehow « broken », that
European « freedom of movement » is imperiled, that one more
structure of liberal Europe is being washed illiberally away. To
historicize Schengen is to see the constructedness or artificiality or
contingency of that freedom, and thereby pop the illusion of
liberality. It is instructive, too, to see Schengen’s history from
inside and out: to get the citizen’s-eye-view and the
undocumented’s-eye-view, the view from the EU beside the view from
the _sans-papier_ movement that emerged in Schengen’s immediate
wake.

the citizen’s-eye-view & the undocumented’s-eye-view

It is best to go into Schengen’s history unshocked by contradiction,
to accept the sad historical fact that Schengen, whatever its initial
ideals, allowed — and even ended up spurring — European
countries to restrict immigration, to place yet more burdens on
asylum-seekers, to retreat from protections promised to refugees.
Schengen’s historical or dramatic arc, if such a thing can have an
arc, would be neither « progress nor declension », but something
more zero-sum. « Freedom of movement » _never didn’t_ depend on
structured unfreedoms. « Never were all persons meant to circulate
as freely within borders as were goods and capital, » Stanley-Becker
writes. To grasp Schengen in full is to see « Pan-European
humanism » married to « principles of neoliberalism and practices
of neocolonialism ».

If the history starts in a Luxembourgian village, it ends in
Lampedusa, the island between Sicily and Tunisia. Lampedusa would
become « the landing place of most maritime migrants en route to
Europe »; from its coast, in October 2013, the deaths of 368 people
on a ship from Libya were visible, « one of the deadliest migrant
shipwrecks then recorded ». That is one of several destinations of
Stanley-Becker’s epilogue. Another is a morbid return to the village
itself, where in 2015 the French far-right National Front performed a
mock funeral for Schengen, complete with a wreath, gloating over the
resurrection of national borders amidst the refugee crisis. (The
far-right loathed freedom of movement because of the threat it seemed
to pose to national sovereignty, and because of the refugees it seemed
to [but didn’t really] welcome.) The book’s very last image is of
the Schengen Museum (opened in 2010), where, in a perfect allegory,
part of the ceiling collapsed in 2016. The walls still stood.

The slogan _Kein Mensch ist illegal_ (« no one is illegal ») made
its art-world debut at documenta X in Kassel in 1997. Coincident with
Schengen’s implementation, it was taken up by the _sans-papiers_.
The rhetorical power of _Kein_ _Mensch ist illegal_ lies in the
grammar of a double-negative. That grammar suits Schengen, which is
double-negatives all the way down.

Stanley-Becker’s account begins in 1984, a year before the first
Schengen gathering, when the European Council gathered at
Fontainebleau Palace, southwest of Paris, and articulated an ideal of
a « Citizen’s Europe ». Such an ideal could register as salvific
for Western Europeans whose childhoods were structured by fascism and
war, and who could now smile at how far Europe had come. French
president François Mitterrand, a Social Democrat and « onetime
Vichy official who joined the Resistance », shook hands with his
German counterpart, Helmut Kohl of the CDU, who had been a conscript
in the Hitler Youth.

The book marshals a diverse intellectual and ideological history of
free movement as an ideal — from Immanuel Kant’s
late-eighteenth-century vision of a European « pacific
federation » that would sustain « perpetual peace » and
encourage a « universal _cosmopolitan existence_ », through Victor
Hugo’s prophesied « United States of Europe », and through
varied twentieth-century disciples and Europhile
philosopher-politicians. Between the world wars, for instance, Richard
Coudenhove-Kalergi (« a philosopher-politician of Austrian and
Japanese descent » whom Hitler would condemn as a « cosmopolitan
bastard » in _Mein Kampf_) pushed for a _Pan-Europa_ that would
« save Europe » from both « Russian hegemony » and
« American capital ». Later, that vision could fit the imperatives
of the Cold War, too. Pan-European visions tended to fold African
colonization into that liberal project (for Coudenhove-Kalergi, Africa
was both Europe’s « nearest neighbor » and its
« plantation »); postwar expressions of those visions often
papered over decolonization and its reckonings. The ideal of free
movement also had a leftist flank, notably the Italian Eurocommunist
Altiero Spinelli, who co-wrote the manifesto _per_ _un’Europa libera
e unita_ (For a Free and United Europe) in 1941, and who would become
one of the EU’s founding figures.

To found a Europe on _that_ ideal was to reach above mere markets and
a merely political union — above, that is, the fundaments of the
European Coal and Steel Community that had come into being in 1951,
and of the European Economic Community created by the Treaty of Rome
in 1957. Those formations had the common market as their foundation,
such that when other rights and privileges were articulated, they were
articulated with the market as their philosophical bedrock.
Euro-statesmen had various attitudes toward that bedrock: resignation,
realism, triumphalism. One case that came before the European Court of
Justice — _Gravier v. City_ _of Liége_, decided February 1985 —
was paradigmatic: Françoise Gravier, an aspiring French cartoonist
who had enrolled in the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Liège,
Belgium, brought a case against the extra tuition she had to pay. She
won, but the case cemented a logic: Gravier was free to make that
intra-European move because cartooning was deemed _economic activity_.

Less philosophical were the trucks stalled at various national
borders: the Europe of the traffic jam. « Sometimes the wait at the
borders lasted as long as 20 hours, » Stanley-Becker notes.
« Freight perished in the cold — livestock, milk, and millions of
eggs. » These jams spurred truckers’ uprisings, for instance at
Italy’s borders with France and Austria.2
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Such frustrations with inefficiency, such protests for easier economic
circulation, were surely on the horizons of the diplomats from the
five first Schengen countries — all from the center right and
center left, and mostly lawyers — who gathered in Brussels in
February 1985 to work out the first treaty, though they did not
mention the blockades.

the Europe of the traffic jam

The treaty they propounded at Schengen on the boat in June of that
year had a prosaic title — _Agreement between the Governments of
the_ _States of the Benelux Economic Union, the Federal_ _Republic of
Germany, and the French Republic on_ _the Gradual Abolition of Checks
at Their Common_ _Border_ — but it signaled, or wanted to signal, a
shift of paradigm: beyond mere economism. It emphasized _persons_ not
_workers_, indeed did not mention the word « worker ». The
treaty’s makers did mention asylum and « illegal immigration »,
which at the signing ceremony they pledged to combat. The signing
ceremony attracted protests to the banks of the Moselle, too, by
« by SOS-Racism of Luxembourg, the Radical Socialist Party, and a
Committee of Support for Political Prisoners of Western Europe. »

Key to what we might call Schengen’s shadow history were the annexes
appended — confidentially — to that first treaty: « lists of
countries seen as posing immigration risks to the European
community — countries whose nationals were classified as
‘undesirables’, » including East Germany, Poland, Algeria,
Yemen, South Africa, China. « Many were former colonies. » The
undesirables lists were kept from the public at the request of West
Germany. A smoking hypocritical gun? Yes and no. Europhiles believed
that freedom of movement would _create_ something, that it was a step
toward the telos of European integration, moving _through_ the market
to transcend the market. That belief (or wish, or expectation) could
be cast in religious or sacramental terms: free movement would
miraculously transubstantiate the common market (advantageous but
spiritually inert) into a genuine _body politic_. That teleology is
what made the compromises and trade-offs palatable. Ironies abound:
today the Schengen Area encompasses whole swaths of
once-« undesirable » Europe. Disappointment was likely inevitable.
Schengen was a solution that didn’t solve so much as multiply and
rearrange the « problem ».

What froze the fantasy of Europeans moving freely was the specter of
non-Europeans moving freely. This is the steady refrain of
Stanley-Becker’s reconstruction of the Schengen debates — both
the convention-drafting stage and the ratification stage. Ratification
of Schengen would spur new national restrictions on immigration;
implementation of Schengen would mean displacing the question of
asylum to Europe’s ever-crueler outer edges.

Take, for instance, the « seemingly banal topic » of visa rules:
visas were more-or-less manageable as a « national » matter, but
once transnationalized, visas became sudden sources of risk. Someone
with a visa for one Schengen country would be able to move unchecked
around the Area. The issue nearly derailed the drafting of the
Schengen conventions. The need to « harmonize » such rules only
exacerbated tensions between Schengen countries. West Germany
complained about illegal immigration in France, France complained
about Italy’s own undocumented population.3
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Schengen made pots call kettles black. The imagined solutions could be
at once cruel and pragmatic. In a secret memo from November 1985, the
Benelux contingent proposed a ranking of risk, country by country,
from « major » to « moderate » to « latent ». Among the
« major » risks were « Morocco and Tunisia, as well as Iran,
Iraq, Poland, and Suriname. » Such harmonization would only make the
process more stringent for visa-seekers, onto whom would devolve the
burden of furnishing further proof of « an intent to exit, such as a
return ticket. »

The matter of asylum was even more rancorous, and it cut to the quick
of the stories that European countries liked to tell themselves about
themselves. Refugee organizations were not consulted. Only late in the
drafting process, in April and May 1990, was the United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees « made privy to a draft of the treaty ».
A draft made its way, unofficially, to participants in a Colloquy on
Human Rights without Frontiers, convened by the Council of Europe and
attended by asylum agencies. Those agencies claimed that the Schengen
proposals failed to protect refugees and asylum-seekers. Some
« declined to certify that Schengen complied with the Geneva
Convention on asylum ». But by then « the treatymaking had
ended ». Amnesty International came out against ratification in
1991.

What froze the fantasy of Europeans moving freely was the specter of
non-Europeans moving freely.

Schengen became a portal through which different ideologies and
political currents were funneled — particularly in France and
Germany, where the book’s focus falls. In France, the Gaullist
argument was that Schengen would erode the national independence that
had been « wrested from the Axis powers and secured in postwar
constitutions. » That argument drew particular inspiration from the
father of France’s 1958 constitution, Michel Debré, who through the
1960s, 1970s and 1980s had decried European integration in all its
forms. Stanley-Becker quotes Debré’s _Français, choisissons
l’espoir_ (1979), which warned against an internationalism that
would destroy national sovereignty. Such internationalism, Debré
wrote with fervor, « has taken and will always take a thousand
faces, including in the past those of the Holy Roman Empire and the
temporal power of the Papacy. » Supranational Europe was a false
god.

The Rally for the Republic (Jacques Chirac’s party, founded in 1976)
was divided; the majority gravitated toward a reinstatement of
immigration restrictions to offset Schengen’s risks. Jean-Marie Le
Pen’s far-right National Front, founded in 1972, charged more
stridently that « our country will no longer have its own
borders », singling out Zairians, Indonesians, and Iranians who
lived in neighboring Schengen states. The French Catholic paper
_Présent_, affiliated with the National Front, clamored that « We
sail in full fog », and attacked the « obscure technocrats »
lurking behind the supranational « euphoria ». Schengen was a
Trojan horse for « socialist ideology, globalist ideology,
third-world ideology, the ideology of so-called anti-racism, the soft
ideology of totalitarian humanitarianisms … the religion of modern
times, of our dechristianized and secularized times. » Quite a list!

The Berlin Wall fell, inconveniently, in November 1989, four years
into the prolonged hammering-out of the convention. Through
Schengen’s lens, the end of the Cold War was less a cause for
celebration than a hatching of yet more intractable riddles. The
Gaullists, Stanley-Becker writes, worried that « the collapse of
Cold War political geography would unleash migratory pressure that
Western nations could not withstand. » Pro-Schengen Socialists in
the National Assembly, like François Loncle, could then ask, « You
want to rebuild the Berlin Wall? »

If only rebuilding a wall were so simple. West Germany had already
wanted exemptions from visa rules for possible East German defectors.4
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In France, that German desire smacked uncomfortably of « a
transcendent German patrimony ». The wall’s fall tolled the bell
of a « German question » that would reverberate into the
ratification stage. On one hand, Germany experienced a
_Europaeuphorie_; on the other hand, a reunited Germany meant that a
Schengen area would include far more « undesirables » already
residing in — or able to slip in _to_ — East Germany. In fact,
the West German government in Bonn asked to delay the signing of the
convention, needing « an additional time of reflection ».
 

Where the French ratification debate had turned on the specter of
terrorism, Germany’s turned on the « large influxes of people
seeking asylum », as the interior minister Friedrich Zimmermann put
it, especially from Palestine, Iran, Ghana, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
The right to asylum that was enshrined in the German _Grundgesetz_
(Basic Law) of 1949 clashed with 1992’s reality of Germany
« absorbing more than two-thirds of all refugees in the European
Community »; Schengen’s opponents could look to an eight hundred
percent rise in « the number of attacks on non-Europeans » as
evidence of the volatile effects. The center right sought an amendment
to narrow those rights.

Schengen, in that political context, was a paradoxical cocktail of the
supranational and the national, the external and the internal: its
« supranational rules » made possible « new assertions of German
sovereignty designed to turn back the tide of asylum seekers ». The
humanitarian point was articulated, though to little avail. Konrad
Weiß (Alliance 90 / Green) reminded people why that right to asylum
was there in the Basic Law in the first place. Weiß called Article 16
of the Basic Law (« People persecuted politically enjoy the right to
asylum ») « one of the most precious sentences ever written in the
German language ». But the wheel turned the other way. Compromise
came in the form of a constitutional amendment, now Article 16a:
German soil still offered asylum, technically, but asylum rights could
« not be invoked by a person who enters the federal territory from a
member state of the European Communities ». Thus was enshrined the
now-well-worn logic of the country of first entry.

In both France and Germany, then, Schengen crystallized a political
center in a post-Cold War Western Europe, but the cracks were visible.
Implementing a supranational « freedom of movement » for Europeans
would necessitate renewed national vigilance on non-European
circulation within. Center-left and center-right found sufficient
agreement; farther-right and farther-left found fault with Schengen,
though from radically different premises. In Stanley-Becker’s handy
distillation, the right viewed Schengen’s pairing of freedom and
security as « unworkable », while the left found it
« unethical. » Jean-Claude Lefort of the French Communist Party
foresaw Schengen’s logic: the imperative of « external »
security would activate a « transfer of police powers to private
persons » and a « violation of human rights »; the treaty (and
the country-of-first-entry rule) in effect allowed European countries
to ignore asylum requests while paying lip-service to the principle.
The low common denominator prevailed.

What claims does this history support? Schengen became, Stanley-Becker
shows, « an instrument of racial exclusion ». Such a claim is more
descriptive than polemical. The book is emphatically not a scolding
indictment of the European citizens and comfortably-documented
travelers who happen to enjoy Schengen’s freedoms. After all,
Schengen was not the manifestation of some European popular will,
whatever that would mean; the treaty and the convention came into
being behind closed bureaucratic doors, as such things generally must.
To explain or historicize Schengen means narrating a _negative_ —
insofar as Schengen sought the _removal_ of something (internal
borders) — and then putting in order the forces that filled the
void. If a longed-for « European belonging » was to be predicated
on « the dismantling of internal borders », it is not surprising
that « other markers of identity, and, by proxy, race, » would
become more decisive.

Schengen’s proponents often spoke of it as a « laboratory ». The
metaphor is worth dwelling on (beside the more dismally familiar
metaphors of « Fortress Europe » and « Sieve Europe »).
_Laboratory_ casts Schengen’s designers as — what exactly?
Chemists? Should we picture politico-chemical engineers in a lab, with
white coats under fluorescent lights? They measure beakers of
combustible substances — supranationalism, sovereignty, economic
efficiency, xenophobia — and try to find a stable emulsion. That
laboratory, if one were to extend the metaphor, is nested inside other
experimental spaces — the laboratory of the common market, the
laboratory of the EU. In 1992, the German interior minister (Rudolf
Seiters, CDU) made the case for Schengen as « a preliminary stage
and test bed for the cooperation … in the common internal
market ». Another available metaphor, more botanical, was the
garden: in 1999, the European Parliament would call Schengen an
« experimental garden », which sounds nice until you remember the
pruning that gardening requires, and the pesticides.

Should we picture politico-chemical engineers in a lab, with white
coats under fluorescent lights?

The aspirational metaphors of laboratory and garden soon clash with
less aspirational ones. Advocates for human rights (a substance that
does not lend itself to measuring in a beaker) accused Schengen
countries of playing « games of ping-pong in which they forget the
balls are human beings ».5
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Asylum-seekers, meanwhile, were assigned a mix of other metaphors.
« Refugees in orbit », for instance: Stanley-Becker catches
glimpses of such human asteroids in the archives, such as « a
stateless Palestinian who voyaged as a stowaway from Morocco to
France » sometime in the 1980s, worked in France as an itinerant
laborer for some years, « and then traveled by train to Belgium,
where he worked briefly as a painter, and then took a train to the
Netherlands, where he was denied asylum, and then went to West
Germany, and later to Britain, where he was also refused asylum and
sent back to the Netherlands. » As of 1992, he had left Europe,
« stowed away on a ship bound for Australia ». Some politicians
and policy makers would dub such a trajectory « asylum tourism »;
Schengen advertised an orderly deterrence to it.

These metaphors have suffused Schengen as a European discourse — or
Schengen as a _European_’s discourse. One way to puncture them is to
follow the money — or, more precisely, to follow the machinery. In
1995, the Schengen Information System (SIS) was turned on, after years
of preparation: French software running on German hardware, all of it
housed at the border city of Strasbourg. Controlling a borderless
Schengen Area made early and innovative use of the internet: « a
transnational panopticon of the information age », Stanley-Becker
calls it, and certainly Schengen lends itself to a Foucaultian
argument. Its ostensible freedoms generated new forms of disciplining.
Creating a _common_ _space_ to match the _common market_ necessitated
the creation of « a common police ». The French newspaper _La
Tribune_ had warned in 1991 about the emergence of « a sort of a
European FBI ». Europol, the transnational police force, emerged in
parallel to Schengen, and was first housed in the same Strasbourg
complex as the SIS.

French software running on German hardware, all of it housed at the
border city of Strasbourg

The other escape from Schengen’s metaphors for itself is via the
expressions of the _sans-papiers_. It was the people made more
precarious by Schengen’s logics, after all, who would give Schengen
its most vivid literary form. Stanley-Becker’s last chapter offers a
worthy primer on the _sans-papiers_ movement, foregrounding two of its
most prominent spokespeople, both born in Senegal (a French colony
until 1960). Madjiguène Cissé, born in 1951 in Dakar, had studied in
Saarbrücken in the mid-1970s, returned to Dakar as a German teacher,
and then moved to Paris in 1993. Deported in 2002, she died in Senegal
in 2023. Diop was younger: born in 1969, he left Senegal for France in
1988.

On 28 June 1996, Cissé and Diop were among the three hundred
undocumented people, mostly from « undesirable » West African
countries, who occupied Paris’s Saint-Bernard de la Chapelle, a
nineteenth-century neo-Gothic church in the working-class Goutte
d’Or neighborhood. It became the epicenter of the _sans-papiers_
movement. Diop’s _Dans la peau d’un_ _sans-papier_ (1997) is the
richest text in Stanley-Becker’s archive: a memoir occasioned by the
church’s eviction seven weeks later. (It has not been translated
into English but should be.) The book opens with an intriguing analogy
to communal exorcisms in Senegal — a ritual known as a _ndeup_ —
as if the stigma of undocumentedness and the apparatuses of oppression
were being purged like a demon. The occupation began the _ndeup_; the
book was its next stage. « Maybe I’ll finally be able to shed the
undocumented skin I’ve been forced to inhabit because of the
constant red tape I’ve had to endure, like thousands of undocumented
migrants in France, » Diop suggests. « But I don’t think I
can. » Other transformations will come, though, as when the movement
consciously embraces the label _sans-papier_ over and against
« _clandestins_ », which suggested invisibility and illegality. An
absence (_without_-papers) became a powerfully paradoxical insistance
on visibility. To be a _sans-papier_ was to be « _les sans-culotte_
_contemporains_ », Diop argued, assuming the mantle and lineage of
the French Revolution, and bearing the rights of man more truly than
anyone else. My own favorite twist of metaphor comes when the church
is evicted. The armored police, in Diop’s account, are the real
aliens — as in actual extraterrestrials: « The mobile guards
looked like Martians descended to earth with weapons and gear, » he
wrote, « menacing in their ridiculous attire. » If the cops are
« _Martiens_ _intergalactiques_ », then who is a _citoyen_?6
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Other occupations and demonstrations followed the occupation of
Saint-Bernard, across the Schengen Area that was itself expanding. In
September 1998, Stanley-Becker notes, « _sans-papiers_ in France
traveled to greet a caravan of migrants journeying through Germany »
and met them on the Pont de l’Europe bridge over the Rhine, « an
iconic site of postwar reconciliation that first opened for travel in
September 1960 ». In 1999, _sans-papiers_ protested at an EU summit
in Tampere, Finland, where member states had gathered to work out
« the terms of a common European arrest warrant » and to harmonize
the suppression of « asylum tourism ». In July 2002, three
thousand people encamped in Strasbourg for ten days at the site of the
Schengen Information System. Among the documents produced for that
encampment was a pamphlet by the Bureau d’Etudes art collective
called _refuse the BIOPOLICE: a cartography of contemporary control
systems_. Its jargon is surprisingly festive: « Beyond the biopolice
is a biopoetics. Move beyond the spectacle of party politics as we
know it: throw a party on all sides of the borders! »

A zero-sum history like Schengen’s does not end with a bang. The
drama of the _sans-papier_ movement notwithstanding, _Europe Without_
_Borders_ is concerned, by design and necessity, with the stuff of
procedural politics and everyday life — with a subject at once
arcane and mundane. It is about how spaces and populations have been
ordered and layered, and about how that ordering and layering became
habitual.

For three decades, Europe has been _habituated_ to Schengen, to use a
term that the philosopher Jacques Derrida (himself Algerian-born)
would use at a demonstration for undocumented migrants in 1996. He was
speaking four months after the eviction of the Saint-Bernard church,
which brought between fifteen and twenty thousand Parisians to the
streets in protest. Derrida lamented the criminalization of
hospitality — by which he meant the church’s hospitality to the
_sans-papiers_ in particular, and, more philosophically, the very
notion of a « crime of hospitality ». He called for civil
disobedience; he asked his listeners to « demand (…) that parties
of the so-called left be consistent with their principles ».
Schengen’s logic was not hard to deconstruct; the
« internationalization » or « so-called globalization » of
which it was a piece was « the last commonplace of the worst
confusions and even of calculated mystifications. »7
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Derrida’s was the sort of speech that would go both over and under
the heads of Schengen’s creators and apologists, for it riffed on
abstractions and conceptual histories. But his improvised remarks
captured well the « terrifying » classifications of _avec_ vs.
_sans papiers_. What, he asked, is a _sans-papiers_ lacking, exactly?
« The expression is a strange one, at once disturbing and terribly
familiar. One does not know if it is an adjective, an attribute, or a
noun, whether it is pronounced in the singular or the plural. » What
was lacking, he observed, was « the right, the right to a right »
(here likely gesturing to Hannah Arendt’s « right to have
rights »). Beneath the term, he suggested, was « an entire
process (…) that was sometimes slow and insidious, at other times
explosive, brutal, accelerated like a police raid on a church. » And
here the metaphor of _habit_ entered the analysis: « This terrifying
habituation that has acclimatized this word to our lexicon would
deserve long analyses. » _Europe without Borders_ is a worthy
contribution to that long analysis.

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