T.H. Marshall at the Limit: Hiding out in Maas–Rhein Euregio

Abstract

The 1990s and early 2000s have witnessed a flourishing of cross-border institutional initiatives in Europe, most notably in the establishment of administrative cross-border regions (or euregios) along the dorsal spine of its former internal political borders. As self-confessed ‘laboratories of European integration’, they provide windows through which to observe the tensions inherent in the European project, in reconciling macroeconomic integration with the social and political goal of building an authentic transnational demos. Given the on-going problematic of democratic deficit in the euregios, this paper argues that, in order to grasp the stakes involved in creating new transborder regional governance structures in Europe today, one must shift from the political economic analysis pioneered by Alfred Marshall to theories of citizenship elaborated by T. H. Marshall. Reviewing the fraught experience of transboundary governance in the Maas–Rhein euregio, and drawing on T. H. Marshall's tripartite evolutionary schema of citizenship based on civic, political and social rights, the authors reflect on the limits of Marshall's conceptual enframing for understanding the dynamics of internal border regions which are increasingly assuming the exclusionary geopolitical logics of political frontiers. Building on this critique, they propose the idea of the ‘frontier political’ as a widening horizon of social rights to replace that of a cross-border politics rooted in a priori civic or political rights. They conclude that such a repoliticised arena, defined by qualities of partial invisibility and ‘hiddenness’ exemplified by the stark constellation of migrant detention camps located at both the inner and outer borders of the EU, offers a chance to rename the problem of euregional citizenship from the perspective of its multiple constitutive outsides.

Olivier Kramsch would like to thank Paul Stubbs and Despina Syrri for providing a warm and hospitable environment in which to worry about the issues raised in this paper (Transnational Governmentality in South Eastern Europe: Translating Neo-liberalism on the Sovereign Frontier, Rabac, Croatia, 1–3 June 2007). The supportive comments of two anonymous referees are also gratefully acknowledged.

Notes

1. This programme, which ran in two stages throughout the 1990s, has become the largest single scheme (worth 2.9 billion euros in its second, 1994–99, phase), in a series of what are labelled ‘Community Initiatives’. A third stage, extending from 2000 to 2006, had a budget of 4.9 billion euros. Such Community Initiatives comprise the largest share (over 90 per cent) of the wider EU Structural Funds. INTERREG programmes operate through a wide range of community and state apparatus: local, regional and national governments; planning and development agencies; universities and research institutions; the European Commission and the Association of European Border Regions. These in turn are incorporated in a formal network of information, expertise and knowledge funded by the Commission. Thirteen offices of ‘Linkage, Co-operation and Assistance’ (LACE) for eastern European border regions are conceived as key nodes in this network. Border regions are hereby visualised as ‘anticipatory geographies’ (Sparke, 2000), as ‘laboratories in miniature’ of European integration (Virtanen, 2004). Relative isolation and marginality are thus rescripted as centrality within a wider project of cohesion and harmonisation.

2. Convening employers, an interregional labour council and various regional employment agencies, including political representatives at the provincial and EU level, the Stichting-operated steering committee responsible for EURES attempts to provide the Maas–Rhein's cross-border labour force with the same information available to public- and private-sector firms, with the ultimate aim of improving cross-border mobility (Stichting Maas–Rhein, 1996). Within the framework of a bi- and multilateral co-operation program promoted “on the ground” by a working staff of self-designated “Euro-counsellors”, EURES seeks to improve communication and dialogue between those bodies concerned with the provision of employment within the partner regions, as well as offering the cross-border labour community information relating to employment supply and demand, changing labour market conditions and variable quality of life issues.

3. When queried about the willingness of the inhabitants of the German part of the euregio to cross to the French-language city of Liege–Verviers, a tour guide recently commented to the authors: “When they go to such a city they are simply not interested in the culture or the food. They treat the place as if it were an exotic destination, like Thailand” (H. A. Dux, Alsdorf, 27 November 2003, personal communication; translated from German by the authors).

4. With a book title that could very well have acted as a response to T. H. Marshall's queries from the vantage-point of the contemporaneous colonial antipodes, C. L. R. James, in his delightful treatise on cricket, destroyed any pretensions as to a pure British ‘legacy’ to which the colonial had to submit in the realm of sport. As James reminds us, “beyond a certain limit dark could not aspire” in cricket; but the very identity of cricket could no longer be placed geographically in England, as it, like the nationalism for which it became its seedbed, “contained elements of universality that went beyond the bounds of the originating nation” (James, 1963, pp. 141, 218).

5. As the phrasing suggests, the term ‘frontier political’ is not to be confused with ‘political frontier’; whereas the former denotes the ‘hidden’ outside institutionalised politics, the latter is more closely associated with fixed territorial boundaries and limits that contain and fortify this legitimate, institutionalised realm.

6. Bialasiewicz et al. (2005, p. 342) helpfully remind us that all acts of constitution-building are predicated on foundational acts of exclusion and violence, an insight which we share in our conceptualisation of the ‘frontier political’. In examining the constitutional logics underlying “Europe's many spatialities”, however, they largely assume the Derridean impulse of “bringing into daylight … à metre au jour, en lui donnant le jour], that which one claims to reflect so as to take note of it, as though it were a matter of recording what will have been there” (Bialasiewicz et al., 2005, p. 343; Derrida, 1987, p. 457). The implicit and ‘unspoken’ contradictions observed between state-territorial and non-territorialisable (or ‘aspirational’) logics of the EU constitution thereby erupt in their analysis as self-defeating ‘paradoxes’, the ambiguities of which were rightly condemned in their view by French and Dutch electorates voting against the referendum in May and June 2005. By our reading, Bialasiewicz et al.'s ‘unpacking’ of the EU constitution and its electoral consequences shoehorns the realm of the excluded political back into the realm of institutionalised politics, whose domain is circumscribed by state-centric territoriality. In so doing, we believe a crucial quality of the European ‘frontier political’ is lost: a space of hiding-at-the-border which grasps the paradoxical aspects of EU constitutionalism and its contending spatialities as intrinsic to modern state sovereignty. Rather than a Derridean metre à jour, this borderland savoir requires an imaginative metre à nuit of European sovereignty in order to push its constituent ambiguities further, reopening a space for what is yet to come, from a geographical ‘beyond’ ushered in by this founding constitutional aporia. It is in this sense, we argue, that ‘hiddenness’ acquires a properly political dimension.