Navigating Schengen: Rediscovering Empowering Historical Legacies on the EU’s Free Movement of Persons, 1985-2015

This paper will address the transnational roots, debates and conditions for the diachronic implementation of a game-changing policy: The EU’s Free Movement of Persons. Its main objective is to highlight the revealing value of critical historical analysis in this field and the normative legacies on human mobility rights in the European integration process to address current challenges in migration and asylum policy-making. This paper focuses on the case of European Parliament because of its constant and ground-breaking critiques to the building modalities of the Schengen Area, which it accused of lacking democratic legitimacy, of side-lining the independent power of the judiciary and of downplaying the supranational dimension of human mobility rights in Europe. In turn, the EP drafted numerous human-rights cantered proposals which deeply reconnect with the societal discussions of our present. You are invited to discover the rich diversity of this documentary corpus that can help us ‘look back’ in order to ‘see beyond’ on this very timely issue: the belonging and displacement of transnational mobile populations, whose migration patterns built up principles, norms, political cultures and entire civilizations on their wake. The main questions to be addressed are: What are the evolving modes of exclusion in transnational mobility in Europe and beyond? How can historical critiques be relevant to today’s challenges to free movement of persons? What are the neglected differential solidarity and diversity dimensions of European integration? In this light, can we articulate responses to humanitarian dilemmas beyond security-centred conceptions of transnational mobility? And normatively, are narratives on ‘shared values’ in the EU and beyond, sufficient to mediate countervailing factors of exclusion? This enquiry on EP sources is based on archival research at the Historical Archives of the EU in Florence, at the Historical Archives of the EP in Luxembourg and at the EP Research Services. These sources also include a large set of Oral History interviews conducted with key decision-makers at the European institutions on ways of influencing the dynamics resulting from introducing a ‘solidarity’ and a fundamental rights element within the EU’s ‘free movement of persons’ policy-making.