Chapter 9 - Safeguarding Schengen The next EU leadership should return to fact-based policies

Marie De Somer dedicates her contribution to ‘Safeguarding Schengen: The next European leadership should return to fact-based policies’. She argues that as the past three years have shown, buying time, hoping for the dust to settle or the political pressure from the (far-)right to ease is not a viable strategy for securing continued free movement with respect to Schengen. If the next EU leadership fails to bring Schengen back to its normal, that is, pre-2015 state of affairs, the long-term consequences will be grave. To do so, EU leaders must counter the distorted discourses that currently surround the Union’s valued free movement acquis. They need to lift border checks at once and end the spill-over of negative, discursive dynamics in EU affairs.

Read the paper here