Emmanuel Comte's book The Formation of the European Migration Regime will be published by Routledge later this year in their Studies in Modern European History. This book explains why the international migration regime in Europe has taken after the Second World War a path different from both the global migration regime and the migration regimes in other regions of the world. The free movement of workers and people within the European Union, European citizenship, the Schengen agreements in their internal and external dimensions are unique at the global level both for the openness they create within Europe and for the closure they produce toward migrants from outside Europe. This book reveals that German geopolitical and geo-economic strategies during the Cold War shaped the openness of that original regime. This regime resulted from the necessity for Germany after the Second World War to create in Western Europe a stable international order, conducive to German reunification and the end of the Cold War. The book also highlights the role of French concerns in producing the restrictive regime towards migrants from outside Europe.
