Isaac Stanley-Becker — Europe Without Borders: A History - with Ishaan Tharoor

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 color 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 François 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.PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780691261768?ic_referral=4PdMwp3wpcu2NcuIRQxH07hDKPAMLjpj1-lle2lj3BEwM83qQ24xUSmzdUd9rbBZxX0zhNV_LyDeKrqtwrUDNOhBTkm5zZO6fXJP0t1jh8Ww_3iyjsgNCgQkbbNBEBw6OBbxUAIsaac 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.Stanley-Becker is in conversation with Ishaan Tharoor. Tharoor is a columnist on the foreign desk of the Washington Post, where he authors the Today's WorldView newsletter and column. In 2021, he won the Arthur Ross Media Award in Commentary, a prize administered by the American Academy of Diplomacy. He previously was a senior editor and correspondent at Time magazine, based first in Hong Kong and later in New York. He also periodically teaches an undergraduate seminar at Georgetown University on digital affairs and the global age.*recorded 2/22/2025