Online presentation

This presentation will address the transnational roots, debates and conditions for the diachronic implementation of a game-changing policy: The EU’s Free Movement of Persons. Its main objective is to highlight the revealing value of critical historical analysis in this field and the normative legacies on human mobility rights in the European integration process to address current challenges in migration and asylum policy-making.

The main consulted archives comprise the Historical Archives of the EU (HAEU) in Florence, the Historical Archives of the European Parliament (HAEP) in Luxembourg and the ‘Barbara Sloan EU Delegation to the US Collection’ (BSEUDC) at the University of Pittsburgh.

This lecture focuses on the case of European Parliament because of its constant and groundbreaking critiques to the building modalities of the Schengen Area, which it accused of lacking democratic legitimacy, of sidelining the independent power of the judiciary and of downplaying the supranational dimension of human mobility rights in Europe. In turn, the EP drafted numerous human-rights centered proposals which deeply reconnect with the societal discussions of our present.

You are invited to discover the rich diversity of this documentary corpus that can help us ‘look back’ in order to ‘see beyond’ on this very timely issue: the belonging and displacement of transnational mobile populations, whose migration patterns built up principles, norms, political cultures and entire civilizations on their wake.

Dr. Cristina Blanco Sío-López is EU Horizon 2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Senior Global Fellow and Principal Investigator (PI) of the research project ‘Navigating Schengen: Historical Challenges and Potentialities of the EU’s Free Movement of Persons, 1985-2015’ based at the University of Pittsburgh from 2019 to 2021. She will soon join the Ca' Foscari University of Venice. She previously was Assistant Professor in ‘European Culture and Politics’ at the University of Groningen and ‘Santander’ Senior Fellow in European Studies at the European Studies Centre (ESC) – St. Antony’s College of the University of Oxford, where she remains a Senior Member. She obtained her PhD in History and Civilization (European Integration History) at the European University Institute of Florence (EUI), for which she received the FAEY ‘Best PhD Thesis European Research and Mobility Award’ 2008.