The Schengen Area
The European states participating in the Schengen agreement, which removed systematic checks at their shared internal borders.
Schengen began in 1985 as a deal between five governments outside the European Community's formal structures, and it worked by trading internal openness for shared external control. That trade required infrastructure: a common visa policy, police cooperation, and a joint database on people and objects. Free movement inside the area is the visible half of an arrangement whose other half is a shared information system. Read the full story in our article on Digital Bureaucracies and the Expansion of European Governance: The Schengen Information System’s Impact, 1995–2010.
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