The iron curtain revisited: the ‘Austrian way’ of policing the internal Schengen border

Abstract

Since 1990 draftees of the Austrian army have been stationed at the border to Hungary, and later to Slovakia, as a reaction to both the system change in Eastern Europe as well as the expected increase in cross-border crime. This so-called ‘support deployment’ was initially planned to last no longer than 10 weeks, but soon it became apparent that the military's border security deployment could also serve other ends than mere security goals. Since then it has been prolonged numerous times. In scrutinising the strategies of the various actors involved, the paper shows that the support deployment can be considered an act of securitisation and is as such almost entirely decoupled from the actual policing of the Schengen internal border. Furthermore, it argues to ‘bring the audience back in’ and to recognise the audience's agency in the analysis of securitisation processes.

Keywords:

• Austria
• Schengen
• Eastern Europe
• securitisation
• military

Notes

1. The empirical research was collected in 2008 during four months of field research in the Austrian Ministry of the Interior, the Federal Criminal Police Office and other police and security units in the Austrian lands. I conducted qualitative interviews and informal conversations with political actors and practitioners, all of whom were concerned with different aspects of the 2007 Schengen enlargement.

2. ‘Bundesheer-Infoecke (BHI)’. Available from http://www.bhi.at/ [Accessed 21 April 2010], complemented by the private ‘BHI-Wiki’. Available from http://www.floriankollmann.at/wiki_bhi/doku.php [Accessed 21 April 2010].

3. I am most grateful to Guido Tiemann, Linda Jakubowicz, Patrick Pasquet and the anonymous referee for valuable suggestions and most helpful comments on previous drafts of this article.

4. Militiamen in the Austrian armed forces are part of the Bundesheer, but are civilians and only become militarily active for training and deployment purposes.

5. All quotations from German sources are the author's translations.

6. For the purpose of this analysis I have chosen not to treat the media as a separate actor. I have elaborated on this issue elsewhere (Schwell 2009).

7. Last year's anniversary of 1989 has spurred ethnographically informed research along the former Iron Curtain that supports this finding; see the contributions in Lozoviuk 2009.

8. Open Letter of the Austrian Militia Association to Federal Chancellor Faymann, 27 May 2009, emphasis in original.

9. Open letter of the Officers Society to General Mag. Edmund Entacher, 15 February 2010.

10. All quotes are taken from BHI.at; screenshots and documentation are available upon request.

11. Interview with ministry official, Vienna, 18 November 2008.