Crisis of Schengen? The effect of two ‘migrant crises’ (2011 and 2015) on the free movement of people at an internal Schengen border

The reintroduction of border checks as a chain of reactions during the 2015 ‘migrant crisis’ was interpreted as the dislocation of the Schengen area, and as a ‘Schengen crisis’. Free movement, understood as a complete removal of border checks at internal borders of the Schengen area, would be at risk. However, very few studies have examined the implementation of free movement, and consequently no work has been done on the consequences of such crises on the activities of street-level border guards. This article investigates the activities of the French border police at the France-Italy border in an open border setting in 2008 and 2009, and at two moments of crisis and border closing in 2011 and 2015–2016. By adopting a bottom-up approach toward EU policy implementation, this article shows that regardless of government’s attempt at spectacularising checks at the internal border, the extent to which the border is either ‘closed’ or ‘open’ relies on the member states’ administrations. At the bottom of the chain of command, street-level bureaucrats are tasked with managing the inherent ambiguities of free movement as defined in the Schengen convention, concentrating the checks on third-country nationals and leaving the vast majorities of border crossings unaffected.