A Patchwork of Intra-Schengen Policing: Border Games over National Identity and National Sovereignty

By focusing on these “article 23 SBC checks”, this article will argue that the Schengen Agreement and the Schengen Border Code are—and always have been—incomplete policy responses to the tension that was felt from the very beginning of “Schengen” between (national) security and freedom of movement. In fact, by drawing from the work of Wonders on the flexibilization of state power which interlinks with Mofette’s and Valverde’s work on jurisdiction and interlegality as well as with the ideas around conscious incompleteness of agreements and regulation, the article will argue that member states as well as enforcement agencies have been consciously using the interplay between the normative regime on the European level and the normative regime and implementation and execution thereof on the national and local level.