No abstract

No abstract

Border controls within the Schengen area are meant to be a thing of the past. Yet, since the refugee crisis of 2015, “temporary” border controls have become quasi permanent in several European Union Member States. Although these controls are against the letter and spirit of the Schengen Borders Code, the Commission has not taken any measures to enforce these rules. One of the reasons for the dismal state of the Schengen area is the one-sided focus on the abolition of internal border controls as primarily functional for the establishment of the internal market. This comes at the expense of Union citizens’ rights and disregards the fundamental role that the abolition of border controls has on how citizens see the Union in political terms and conceive themselves as Union citizens. Against this background, we argue that from its beginning the objective of the project to abolish border controls was to foster a supranational political identity of Union citizens by transforming citizens’ spatial experience. Union citizenship in the current EU Treaty framework constitutes the legal expression of that historical connection between the abolition of border controls and free movement. Emphasizing the citizenship dimension of an area without internal frontiers provides a different perspective on current controls at the Schengen internal borders.

The relationship between citizenship and immigration law is often conceived as a conceptual dichotomy in which the former functions as the rhetorical domain of inclusion while immigration law does the dirty work of detention, deportation and snooping into peoples’ lives in order to uphold the inclusive values of the internal domain. States however employ a variety of practices of immigration control that infringe citizens’ rights and produce lasting dilatory effects on citizenship itself. Focusing on two specific case studies – racial profiling in identity checks carried out for immigration purposes and the standards of interpretation developed by the European Court of Human Rights in regard to the right to family life in expulsion cases – this article argues that current practices of immigration control result in a transformation of citizenship along racialised lines, which hollows citizenship's normative core of equality and liberty.

No abstract