The “Schengen Turn” as the Reshaping of the French-Italian Border: The Critical Convergence of the Geography of Border Controls and Capitalist Dynamics (1990s-2000s)

On the 1st of January 1993, border controls at the French-Italian border were officially “abolished” in the framework of the Schengen area. However, the border didn’t disappear; rather, its geography adjusted to the evolution of the capitalist logics of the European market, creating a hierarchized borderzone where “boundaries and scales intersect to fuel further expansion of (…) the frontiers of capital” (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013, 321). The article draws on the fields of critical border studies and radical geography to show the critical convergence of capitalist dynamics and border police practices in the French-Italian border zone. This has been reflected in the production of transport infrastructures enabling high-speed cross-border circulation at the expense of local roads and practices. Moreover, the evolution from “fixed” border control to “random and mobile” identity checks led to the creation of a police targeting system that selects passengers on the basis of a social-racial profiling. After the Schengen agreements, the French-Italian border became a mobile device allowing the accumulation of capital through the selection of “legitimate travelers” and the control of “illegal migrants”, enacting locally the “polarization of mobility” (Bauman 1998) that occured at a global scale at the turn of the twenty-first century.