The Queue That Changed Europe
It started with truckers. In the early 1980s, lines of idling lorries stretched for miles at Franco-German border crossings—drivers fuming as customs officers meticulously checked paperwork. The scene became a potent symbol of Europe's self-imposed barriers. When Helmut Kohl and François Mitterrand met in 1984, they envisioned something radical: borders that didn't feel like borders.
The Fine Print of Freedom
What emerged was Schengen—a system granting seamless travel to 450 million Europeans while constructing what scholar Isaac Stanley-Becker calls "a laboratory of exclusion." The book Europe without Borders reveals how:
- Police secretly maintained lists of "undesirables" from former colonies
- Free movement rights were carefully restricted to EU nationals
- The 1996 sans-papiers protests exposed the system's racial hierarchies
The Border That Never Left
Today, German police conduct checks at the Dutch frontier—not for trucks, but for failed asylum seekers. It's a paradox: the most borderless place on Earth remains obsessed with borders. As right-wing parties gain ground, Schengen's original tension resurfaces: is freedom a privilege of citizenship, or a fundamental human right?
Stanley-Becker's research suggests we've been asking the wrong question. The real divide isn't between open and closed borders—it's about who gets to be free, and who remains forever on the outside looking in.