Keen On

The world is shutting its borders to immigrants. Yesterday, we featured a conversation with Laurie Trautman who dates the Covid crisis of 2020 as the tragic moment when the entire world closed its doors to immigrants. But even in the internationalist EU, border policy is tightening. According to Washington Post’s Isaac Stanley-Becker, author of the new book Europe Without Borders: A History, borders have emerged as a critical geopolitical flashpoint within the EU. Against this backdrop, Stanley-Becker examines the 40-year history of Europe's Schengen Agreement, which eliminated internal borders between participating European nations. He explores how this landmark agreement, signed in 1985 in a small Luxembourg town, represented both a practical economic arrangement and a bold experiment in post-war European integration. Stanley-Becker reveals the complex negotiations between France and Germany that drove the initiative, as well as how the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 dramatically reshaped the agreement's i