ABSTRACT
The 90s were a very optimistic decade. The Cold War had just ended, the economy was booming, globalisation opened up international markets and liberalism seemed inexorable in granting peace and prosperity. It was a time of confidence and forwardness. This optimism echoed in the academic production, particularly when we look at how mobility was then conceptualised: movement and mobility systematically appeared as something positive, linked to notions or representations of modernity, progress and freedom. It was with this esprit du temps that Schengen emerged. Once utopic, the idea of borderless nation-states was made real, with mobility being codified as a fundamental right of Europeans. From that moment on, European citizens were allowed to traverse borders without checkpoints or inspections, without even having to produce personal passports at the various national frontiers. This led to a conceptualisation of the modern European citizen as a flexible, rootless and cosmopolitan individual, best characterised by logics of flows, rather than by territorial and national fixes. European citizenship emerged as nomadology, as flaneurism, as the embodiment of speed. Inspired by this, mobility appeared in the EU’s architecture as a symbol of integration, capable of producing a presumable European identity, of fostering belonging to Europe or, as some put it, feelings of Europeanness.
