Revisiting Schengen: Europe and the emergence of a new culture of border control

Abstract

In concomitance with the recent abolition of national border controls across the region and the creation of new common external frontiers around the continent's edges, an ‘intensive trans-governmental’ system of border governance has emerged in Europe. How was this event possible? What explains the establishment of a ‘post-national’ approach to manage Europe's external frontiers? In order to address this question, I propose a sociological analytical framework centred on the concept of ‘culture of border control’. The emergence of a new approach to border control in Europe is the result of the evolution of a nationalist (‘Westphalian’) culture – or set of background assumptions and related practices shared by a border control policy community – into a regional one (‘Schengen’). The new approach was pursued and eventually selected because the culture in which it was embedded demonstrated in practice to be more effective in addressing relevant problems than its main rival (what I call a ‘Brussels culture of border control’). I illustrate this argument by critically re-examining the crucial phases that led to the emergence of Schengen, focusing on the parallel developments in the two main institutional forums where discussions over border control in Europe took place in this period (Schengen and the EC/EU). My contention is that a ‘culturalist’ analytical framework can not only offer a more nuanced and persuasive account of the evolution of border control in Europe than it is currently available in the literature, but also shed some light on possible future trends characterizing this policy field.