Any American who has traveled to Europe during the past decade is certainly aware of the dramatic changes in how frontiers are governed. After landing at a gateway airport within most of the European Union, and passing through passport control and customs, you can then go on to any other country within the “Schengen Area” of (now) 26 European countries as if you are taking a domestic flight. This “borderless” area includes (or will include) almost all of the countries of the European Union (with the exception of the UK and Ireland), as well as Switzerland, Norway, Iceland, and Lichtenstein.

The members of Schengenland have surrendered absolute power to control the movement of people across what had been their national borders (now the “internal” frontiers of Europe), and those countries whose borders form part of the “external” frontier of Europe have agreed to share responsibility for frontier control with their partners, what Ruben Zaiotti calls “a redistribution of implementation” (p. 3). These developments have not been without problems, as the recent crisis in this system provoked by the massive arrival of asylum seekers on the Italian island of Lampedusa demonstrates.

Nevertheless, as Ruben Zaiotti notes at the beginning of this book, the development and institutionalization of this common area has been a remarkable achievement. Although the reconstruction of Europe's borders has received considerable scholarly attention, Zaiotti argues that it has been generally seen as just one aspect of the development of European governance, and as a “logical response” to developmental problems. He offers a different approach, a cultural approach that argues that the Schengen initiative emerged from a shift in the culture of the border-control policy community. This is a book about policy change that is both broad and fundamental: “How was it possible to go against what, until recently, represented the established order throughout the Continent? Why did European governments collectively assent to relinquish part of their sovereign authority on a sensitive issue like border control?” (p. 6).

The change, the author argues, was, on the one hand, the acceptance of the Schengen model (the Schengen Implementation Agreement of 1990) of internal open borders and an external common frontier in place of the Westphalia model of national frontiers that are nationally governed. On the other hand, the process involved the rejection of the “Brussels model” (The External Borders Convention of 1991) proposed coincidentally with Schengen by the European Commission in the context of the Single European Act. As elaborated in this study, the difference between the two alternatives involved process and institutional responsibility.

Schengen was a Franco-German initiative in 1984, later embraced by the Benelux countries, to ease border controls along their common frontiers. The initiative was outside of the European framework, therefore not subject to the community decision-making process. For this reason, Zaiotti argues, it was always under the control of the participating governments, specifically under the control of ministries of the interior/home affairs and ministries of foreign affairs. Although the goal was, from the very beginning, the elimination of internal border controls, a more important goal was the securitization of the external frontier. The author demonstrates how the long negotiations about the implementation agreement in 1990 focused on the common border.

The dismantling of intra-European border controls was developed with “compensatory measures” that made entry into the Schengen area more difficult and that strengthened the ability of the police to track those who entered. The most important of these measures, agreed to by the Schengen partners on June 19, 1990, is the Schengen Information System (SIS), a vast database (the Council of the EU reports that there are now 32 million entries, and growing), nominally under French responsibility, and controlled by a committee that has the responsibility to protect the personal data collected. The second important measure elaborated in the 1990 agreement eliminates “asylum shopping” by making the initial country of entry responsible (according to its own rules) for any decision on asylum applications.

Finally, the Schengen process for enlargement required that candidate countries demonstrate their “fitness” for membership, a series of tests that focused on border control capabilities. Formally, the process was the same for all candidate countries. In practice, there were substantial differences in the approach that tended to vary from north to south. Zaiotti has an excellent section on “Italy's Bumpy Road to Schengen.” He also shows how Schengen developed its own foreign policy in the 1990s in support of a more secure external frontier. By the time the Schengen system was integrated into the European Union in the Amsterdam Treaty in 1999, it had become fully developed as a parallel system.

The parallel Brussels initiative, on the other hand, never took off. It was blocked by disagreements among member states about free movement of third-country nationals, and finally blocked completely after 1994 by a dispute between Britain and Spain about its territorial application to Gibraltar. Zaiotti notes that the two proposals never appeared to be in conflict. They just proceeded along different tracks, one of which led to nowhere.

This is a fine, stimulating narrative of the development and consolidation of the Schengen regime. This study is mostly successful in demonstrating that it was more than simply a “logical response” to a policy deficit (although it was a logical response to enlargement); its success was very much linked to its performance. Although Zaiotti never quite says so, the Brussels alternative was never really in play.

Although much of the narrative is compelling, the cultural argument is not. Indeed, “culture” as used here seems to be very close to concepts of framing used in other studies. In the introduction, the author equates cultural change with “normative shift” (p. 6), and this shift is associated with a political community. In the narrative, he clearly demonstrates a policy shift over time, negotiated and developed by institutional actors. However, he never demonstrates any link between this shift and a normative shift among the actors in the policy community.

This analytical framework would seem to imply a focus on policy community actors and debates and discussions about policy rationale. There is, however, very little discussion of the community of actors (mostly on the ministerial level) who formulated, approved, and pursued the Schengen system. While they are mentioned, their interactions are never analyzed. Nor is there much analysis of policy norms or policy debates (there is some in the analysis of the Brussels model). In fact, although Schengen and Brussels can be understood as alternative frameworks, there is no indication that they ever were by the policy actors involved, many of whom took part in both initiatives. In fact, most of this book consists of an excellent analysis of policy development, an analysis that stands well by itself apart from the cultural framework.