Where Are Europe’s New Borders? Ontology, Methodology and Framing

Abstract

What do we refer to when we talk about European borders? What, for that matter, do we mean when we talk about borders more generally? Asking the question ‘where are Europe’s new borders’ orients researchers to consider what important European bordering currently looks like, where these often contradictory bordering processes can be found and the implications of this bordering on the way we think about Europe more generally and its place in the world. At the same time, looking for new borders necessarily facilitates fresh insights into bordering more generally, particularly in relation to their symbolic importance/function/meaning, how they continually transform and how they are maintained in novel and less obvious or immediate ways. This introduction, and indeed special issue, frames and advances the general debate by staking a claim for the need to question the established importance of some European borders over others. To do this, we must continually offer multiple frames of reference upon which to understand and deconstruct Europe and European bordering (a broad approach reflected more specifically by the individual contributions).

Key Words:

• Critical border studies
• Europe
• EU
• security
• mobilities
• European governance

Introduction

The history of border formation and the EU’s attempts at framing a borders policy allow us to recognize the great heterogeneity of border regions and border issues. (Liam O’Dowd 2002, 30)

We must think creatively about what borders are in this European spatial landscape, something, which foremost involves showing for whom they are and how those for whom they are, enact and perform them. (Anderson and Sandberg 2012, 7)

One of the most visible ways in which societal space is organised is in borders. (Delanty 2006, 183)

From the late spring to early autumn of 2015, (at the time of writing this editorial) Europe’s borders were the subject of particularly vexed and highly contentious discussions taking place across the European mainstream media and between political elites. While harrowing and deeply distressing reports of desperate people who survived the perilous but more often than not deadly journey over land and sea could be read, heard and watched, officials and commentators alike operating at national and European Union (EU) level discussed the ‘realpolitik’ of just what should be done to prevent (or ‘solve’) such a situation and exactly who is responsible for dealing with it. The resultant media- and public-driven discourse concerning ‘Europe’s’ borders has subsequently been rendered a repetitious merry-go-round (which continues to turn) of strained and highly politicised arguments revolving around the clear and present issue (danger/fear) of supposedly unfettered migration towards the continent of Europe and the EU. To this end, the EU Government responses thus far have been numerous and diverse (but in many ways unsurprising).

In August 2015, Angela Merkel stated that ‘Europe needed to act together’, while at the same time, her government was warning that they would ‘reintroduce national border controls unless other countries step up to the plate and share the refugee burden more equitably’ (Guardian, 24 August 2015). In the previous month, the UK Home Secretary, Teresa May, responded to the migrant crisis in the port town of Calais on the north coast of France by proposing a ‘secure zone’, whereby trucks could park without hindrance as they waited to board ferries bound for the UK. The ‘solution’ here was to invest in more policing and fencing in Calais and, of course, to publicly state the intention to do so (BBC, 14 July 2015a). For his part, the UK Prime Minister David Cameron referred to a ‘swarm of people coming across the Mediterranean seeking a better life’, later stating that ‘everything that can be done will be done to make sure our borders are secure’ [emphasis added] (BBC, 30 July 2015c). However, due to a groundswell of public opinion, Cameron took less of a hard-line approach when he later announced that the UK would accept 20000 Syrian refugees over a five-year period (BBC, 7 September 2015b). Elsewhere in Europe, and in response to those questioning the construction of a four-metre high barbed wire fence along the Hungarian/Serbian border (also an EU external border), the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban stated ‘if a question is complicated, choose the easiest solution … the state will defend its external borders’ [emphasis added] (New York Times, 19 June 2015). Most recently, (at the time of writing) it was being reported that Hungary has sealed the main railway station in Budapest in order to ‘restore order and enforce EU rules’ (BBC, 1 September 2015e). There are many other examples that could be listed here that are along the same lines.

The diversity of responses from EU governments notwithstanding, it is possible to observe a general, self-replicating and ‘top-down’ consensus over the supposed location of Europe’s borders (or where they should be), who is doing the bordering and who is being bordered out (or invited in). In this singular and tidy context, the borders that are most ‘visible’ (albeit in the mainstream media espoused by political elites) are those taken-for-granted peripheral borders of the state or EU that function (or not) to provide the perception of security, comfort and demarcation to and for the borderers. While providing a very real example of the sheer violence that can occur when people are excluded and disciplined, the border imaginary on offer is an oversimplification, reinforcing a particular naturalised vision of ordered space, territory and geography (see Ó Tuathail [1996, 6]; see also Bueno Lacy and van Houtum in this special issue). What it does highlight, however, including the violence, is that a focus on changing borders is important or even central in understanding the transforming characteristics of contemporary Europe, evidenced from the use of popular designations such as networked Europe, regional Europe, multi-level Europe and, of course, the ever popular fortress Europe (Rumford 2007, 328), which all allude to a different spatial landscape of European borders (and where the important borders are to be found).

The main thrust of this special issue is to question the often taken-for-granted relationships between borders, borderers and the bordered and ask whether these component processes, and the relationships between them, are so clearly and uncritically identifiable and explainable. Doing so in the context of contemporary Europe, it is argued, unravels popular and entrenched (internal/external) geopolitical mindsets, thus highlighting the complex and everyday border practices that determine diffuse regulatory regimes, the nature of cross-border cooperation and ultimately the ‘where’ of EUropean borders that are not by definition determined by obvious (homogenous) centres in obvious places. In their approach to the broad question (and special issue title) ‘where are Europe’s new borders’, the contributors attempt to go beyond overtly descriptive and wholly geopolitical accounts of European bordering strategies and imaginaries in order to explore more deeply what is at stake when borders are constructed, imposed, maintained and resisted at different levels of analysis and employing different theoretical lenses, such as post-colonialism, violence, cartography, the rise of the far right and migration. The borders that matter here, in other words, are not necessarily the borders in Europe, but also the borders of Europe.

If the individual contributors put forward their own thinking on what they consider to be EUropes new and important borders, then the purpose of this introduction is to stake a claim for the need to do so. Before proceeding, however, it should be noted that ‘state-like’ political borders are the prominent and ostensive frame of reference here rather than ethnographic boundaries, although it is acknowledged and will become apparent that all ‘types’ (borders, boundaries, frontiers and so on) ‘inevitably fold into one another’ (Vaughan-Williams 2009, 1). At the same time, emphasis is also placed upon the political/social/cultural construction of state-like borders and the inherently subjective nature of these processes. Finally, it is important to point out that the purpose of the title question (and thrust of the special issue) is not to suggest a break with history resulting in oversimplification and de-historisation with regard to the study of borders. Rather, evoking the ‘new’ is designed to orient researchers to think about what important European bordering looks like and why it is to be considered important relative to other bordering. What immediately follows is a brief exposition of border studies as a multidisciplinary ‘sub-field’ outlining some relevant key points (a conceptual toolbox) before moving on to an overview of ‘borderings’ in Europe, outlining the importance of studying borders in a European context and understanding Europe from the perspective of bordering.

Border Studies

The idea of a ‘borderless world’—popular during the 1990s (Kinnvall and Svensson 2015)—has long fallen by the academic wayside in terms of it being a serious research pursuit. On the other hand, we equally do not live in a world of neatly patterned, unproblematic and pre-given territorial lines on a map (or in the sand). Rather, as Anderson, O’Dowd, and Wilson (2002, 7) have pointed out:

Borders should be studied not just because they enclose and hence shape national polities and societies, but because they are a central constitutive element of contradictory world system. They continue to serve as sites and agents of order and disorder in a dynamic global landscape.

For those pursuing research on borders in general terms, arguably, one of the most important aspects of study has been the fundamental concern with borders as processes—as bordering—and not borders as singular pre-given lines (often observed as a secondary and/or stable expression of state territorial and sovereign power and/or the outcome of geopolitical arguments between states). Scott (2012, 84) argues that borders are ‘processes that cannot be finalized’ and van Houtum et al. (2005) have talked about ‘b/ordering’ as a way of framing the entwine between the ordering of life (chaos) and border-making (Amilhat et al. 2012). van Houtum (2005, 672) has broadly defined contemporary border studies as being ‘characterised as the study of human practices that constitute and represent differences in space’ and bordering in general terms as ‘the communication of socio-spatial differences’. More specifically, emphasis has shifted to critically revaluating bordering as being a key socio-geographical process in the politics of mobility, citizenship, identity, cosmopolitanism and the economy (Bauder 2011, 1126) as well as understanding how this bordering influences but is influenced by these socio-spatial political processes. Not surprisingly, borders are studied from a variety of different disciplinary (and theoretical and methodological) vantage points, which all target specific borders, boundaries, frontiers and borderlands and differ in their approaches to studying them. As Kinnvall and Svensson (2015, 2) neatly point out, all these approaches to studying borders ‘have come to draw upon and employ nearly every psychological or geographic conception of space while addressing the problem of pinning down and making borders, boundaries or limits theoretically cognizable’. There are some key, overlapping, observations that rest upon the idea of the border as process.

•	Not a borderless world, then, but one in which borders are now everywhere (Balibar 1998), but this observation in itself requires further qualification. Surveying the literature, Paasi (2011) offers two distinct but overlapping positions. On the one hand, (state) borders should not be approached simply in terms of fences and watchtowers but, as Paasi himself has so clearly shown, more deeply understood as constructions and reconstructions of historical narratives and discourse manifesting as diffuse textual constructs such as newspapers, monuments, paintings, songs, maps and national curriculums and so on (see also Paasi 1996; Struver 2004). On the other hand, attention has been drawn to the ways in which borders function to regulate and manage mobility wherever it is deemed to be required (Balibar 2002), evoking metaphors such as ‘firewalls’ (Walters 2006) and ‘asymmetric membranes’ (Hedetoft 2003), which serve to visualise the dynamic in which borders disproportionately channel usually inward but increasingly outward flows of people and things. Again, this securitised post-9/11 (re)bordering (Andreas 2003) does not have to resemble the usual border suspects in the usual areas—the fences, checkpoints, guards and so on—but is increasingly more mobile, networked, surveillance oriented and less (or more) visible depending on who you are. The advent of the ‘biometric border’—see also e-borders/virtual borders—is pertinent in this regard (see Amoore 2006, 338). These governance and control regimes become mobile and spatial to the point of complete diffusion, which requires some borders to even require mobility to be borders (see Cooper and Perkins 2015).
•	Observing that the process of bordering is everywhere, securitised or otherwise, as a way of moving away from the simplistic idea of borders as priori lines of division, has also placed a good deal of emphasis on how to study and understand bordering. The key here has been the importance and ability to take into account the lived experience of borders and the ‘everyday’ mundane border practices and performances that constitute such experience (methodological consideration and direction also becomes significant here). In this regard, a good deal of emphasis has been placed upon the ways in which people construct material narratives of and via borders, which form an integral aspect of our commonplace daily life practices (Paasi 1996; Anderson 2005; Struver 2004; Newman 2006) and more generally an integral aspect of our wider cultural landscape (Donnan and Wilson 1999, 4). On this logic, the border ‘comes to life’ when studied at the everyday level of narratives and communication (van Houtum et al. 2005; van Houtum 2005; Newman 2006, 152).
•	If bordering is everywhere, and the lived experiences of bordering are particularly important, then a third important aspect to consider is the meaning attributed to and from borders, wherever they are, whatever forms they take, whatever their function vis-à-vis whoever is bordering and whoever is being bordered. Borders are both ‘meaning-making’ and ‘meaning-carrying entities’ (Donnan and Wilson 1999, 4) and, for Balibar (2002), borders mean different things to different people and act differently upon different groups—what he calls polysemy—which mirrors the differentiated filtering function captured by Hedetoft’s ‘asymmetric membrane’ mentioned above. For Bauder (2011), borders have multiple meanings to the extent that a coherent concept of bordering becomes impossible and undesirable and this very lack of coherency—indicative of the spatiality of the term itself—provides conditions for possibility and action. In this regard, Bauder (2011, 1135) urges us to continually challenge the border as a concept and to seek out new meanings, practices and anticipate new material possibilities: ‘to facilitate the drawing of new border aspects and draw the atlases that make these aspects noticeable’.
•	A final point to consider is the role of the state and its ‘top-down’ position as the great territorial divider. Kramsch (2010, 1005) stresses that borders are not simply part of the state (security) landscape of control—designating inside/outside binaries of belonging or not belonging—but rather ‘spaces of transit from one world to another’. For Kramsch, this evokes a kind of ‘border worlding’ because they create encounters with the other (irreducible difference) that serves to break down—or unfix (Perkins and Rumford 2013)—institutionalised narratives of society, justice and equality that become sedimented and thus meaningful in particular places at particular times (see also Andersen, Kramsch and Sandbergs’s paper in this special issue). For Rumford (2012), borders are constructed in new ways, in different locations and by a diverse set of actors when placed in a particularly contemporary context. Rumford stresses the need to focus on borders in their own right—to see like a border rather than a state—in order to subjugate conventional thinking: Does a border require recognition by all parties to be a border? Can, therefore, important borders be visible to some and less visible/invisible to others (do borders exist for some people and not for others)? How do borders connect as well as divide? (see also Cooper and Rumford 2013) This ‘multiperspectival’ border studies (Rumford 2012, 897) focuses on borderwork, which is designed to capture and frame multiple and localised border practices involving non-state actors in non-traditional places: gated communities, respects zones, communities of CCTV watching citizens, etc (Rumford 2008). This is not to eradicate the importance of the state—to exclude history in O’Dowd’s (2010) terms—but rather to argue that the state is becoming only one, albeit important, borderworker of many.

Border Studies in the Context of Europe

Historically, the question of ‘where are Europe’s borders’ was forcibly framed in terms of the supposed unity between civilisation, culture and geography (Delanty 2006); again, see also Bueno Lacy and van Houtum’s paper in this special issue for a more contemporary, cartopolitical, expression of this framing). Concomitantly, argues O’Dowd (2002, 15), ‘Europe has always been a continent of unsettled political borders’, continuing, ‘[a]t times, Europe has been fragmented into hundreds of political entities; at other times it has been the subject of grand projects of unification’. He also notes the violence that has more often than not characterised dramatic border change in Europe. In terms of the recent study of borders in and of Europe, focus has generally revolved around trying to understand the often-paradoxical complexity of Europe’s political borders and, by definition, their changing character, particularly in terms of function, location, symbolism and meaning, with specific attention not surprisingly given to the EU in this regard. The EU has seen periods of expansion, particularly to the east, whereby national borders have become internal or external EU borders and old borders have been replaced with new ones, with changing meanings and symbolism attached to them. For Scott (2012, 85), process of EU integration has fundamentally affected how borders are perceived, from the perspective of both researchers and in everyday life.

Indeed, the EU in particular—taken as ‘a grand project of unification’—has come to symbolise the opening of internal borders/space and the promotion of national, regional and local cross-border cooperation and opportunity—expressed both normatively and practically—consequently muting, as the logic goes, the importance of (member) state territorial borders. Over several decades, the EU has outlined and entrenched many fundamental norms and policy goals. Framed in terms of the free movement of ‘citizens’ within member states, the Treaty on the EU (Maastricht Treaty) (1992), for example, outlined areas such as common and shared interests on matters to do with (amongst other things) asylum policy, rules governing the crossing of member state external borders, immigration policy regarding third-party nationals, cross-border police cooperation, illegal immigration and conditions of entry and movement into member states by third-party nationals. Alongside other policy considerations and trajectories such as common foreign and security policy and further commitment to ever deepening economic integration and monitory union, Maastricht frames European integration in terms of liberty, democracy, human rights and the rule of law, particularly in relation to the strengthening of European identity and the commitment to common citizenship (but see Alexandria J. Innes’ paper in this special issue). Later treaties would seek to further entrench these (political) policy norms, such as the entrenchment of Schengen into law and the ability to legislate on immigration matters, contained within the Treaty of Amsterdam (1999), or the commitment to a gradual system of external border management and the entrenchment of a common internal area of freedom, security, justice and well-being for the people, as outlined in the Lisbon Treaty (2007). Likewise, structural funding projects, such as INTERREG, address, promote and provide recourses for regional cross-border cooperation and cohesion development. EU borders have become bridges as well as barriers, resources and symbols of identity via the expression of European cooperation (O’Dowd 2002, 27).

To this end, a good deal of recent attention concerning European re/debordering has focused upon the spatial organisation and governance of Europe (Rumford, 2007, 329). In the first instance, an example of this could be the, perhaps unsurprising, re-emergence of the ‘fortress Europe’ designation that has been increasingly banded about of late to describe the EU’s current border regime in terms of the unfolding immigration ‘crisis’. This is perhaps further entrenched when framed in relation to the somewhat recent shift to the right amongst the European citizenry, the (re)emergence of the far right across Europe and an overlapping mainstream public questioning of the European ideal of open borders (see Kinnvall’s article in this special issue). While the designation of ‘fortress Europe’ is certainly emotive, and it is certainly true that European bordering is being increasingly fortified to the extent that people are forced into taking even more perilous routes to circumvent them, the designation itself lacks analytical purchase. This is because its logical geo-political implication suggests a neat and unproblematic awareness of ‘Europe’ defined in relation to what and where Europe is separate from. In terms of this special issue, it provides a definitive inward looking answer to, and a preoccupation with, the question of where Europe begins and ends (see Rumford 2007; see also van Houtum and Pijpers 2007; Buhari-Gulmez and Rumford 2015).

Nevertheless, extended focus has been given to the ways in which individual state passport controls have given way to the unfettered freedom of movement across national borders within the Schengen area, alongside the single market, general harmonisation of migration policies including visa and asylum controls and police cooperation strategies (Anderson and Sandberg, 2012). While, at the same time, much has been written about the supposed ‘re-bordering’ of Europe (and the EU) in terms of strengthened and securitised territorial borders in light of terror threats post-9/11 which, more recently, have arguably and cynically merged into a preoccupation with welfare migrants and so-called bogus asylum seekers. On the one hand, normative symbolism is expressed in terms of openness and cooperation, and on the other hand, accelerated security (exclusionary and external) governance regimes. There is, of course, an obvious tension in the way that territorial (re)bordering strategies (increasingly framed as they are in terms of who has rite of passage) sit uneasily alongside ‘European’ foundational ideals such as open borders (Schengen), the promotion of cross-border cooperation and burden sharing, as well as Europe’s place in the world as a diplomatic soft power. Yet, simultaneously summing up and calling into question this preoccupation with the two positions of borderless Europe and securitised/re-bordered Europe, Andersen and Sandberg (2012, 3) point out that ‘[an apparent] distinction exists between regulatory practices performed internally to the Schengen area and those performed externally’, but when the everyday life experiences of borders and border practices are taken into account, ‘the distinction between inside and outside becomes less apparent’.

Locating Europe’s borderings becomes a more complex business, but this is by no means a bad situation. Attention shifts to the governance regimes and regulatory practices that are just as prevalent inside so-called ‘borderless’ Europe as they are at the supposed external periphery or beyond. Some have emphasised the increasing importance of multilevel ‘Euroregions’ in light of EU expansion, and the increasing EU promoted competitiveness of regional and local actors under the rubric of EU identity and citizenship (Paasi 2009, 2002), as well as the local ‘us/them’ dynamics often displayed (Scott 2006), but equally rooted in ‘bottom-up’ everyday political, social and cultural practices (Scott 2012, 90). Attention elsewhere has been given to the mutually constitutive relationship between networks and borders (Axford 2006), which also brings into sharp focus the ways in which European borders simultaneously function to filter the ‘goods’ from the ‘bads’ in unexpected places. In early June 2015, for example, the BBC reported on the immigration crisis (continually) unfolding in the French port town of Calais by interviewing truck drivers en route to the UK. The response of one truck driver was particularly interesting telling the reporter that ‘I’m a trucker and not an immigration officer’ (BBC, 10 June 2015d). This terse riposte was in reference to the UK Government policy of fining truck drivers (or the haulage companies) £2000 for every ‘illegal’ stowaway found on the vehicle on or after entry to the UK, an attempt to put pressure on the drivers themselves to police their own trucks on behalf of the UK immigration authority and ultimately ‘border out’ those who are deemed unwelcome. This example directly conforms to an earlier observation by Walters (2006, 195), in which ‘the border transforms into a mobile, non-contiguous zone materializing at the very surface of the truck and every place it stops’. It also highlights another overlapping dynamic termed ‘remote control’, whereby the job of bordering is contracted out (or indeed forced upon) non-state actors such as truck drivers, travel agents, hotel personal and supermarket staff and so on (Guiraudon 2003).

The example also evokes EUrope not as a closed and fixed fortress, but as ‘gated community’, premised upon selective processes and fear-induced isolation (van Houtum and Pijpers 2007), or a ‘border machine’ (van Houtum 2010), protecting the ‘home’ where guests are invited but come at our invitation (Walters 2004). To this end, Balibar (2004) suggests that ‘Europeans’ are increasingly situated in the midst of a ‘ubiquitous and multiple border, which establishes unmediated contacts with all parts of the world—a world-border’. Elsewhere still, and moving away from a preoccupation with security regimes per se, Rumford (2007, 329) has placed Europe in a more general global context by suggesting that Europe may even have ‘cosmopolitan borders’. Here, on the one hand, familiar (geo)political reference points such as east/west, territorial primacy and the bordered unity between politics, society and culture can no longer be taken for granted, while, on the other hand, control of bordering is no longer under the sole remit of nation states, what Rumford, of course, calls borderwork.

Borders, then, are integral to any approach or designation of Europe because it becomes clear that borders are not weakened internally and do not belong solely at the periphery. What is clear is that rather than the top-down imposition of clearly defined (securitised) territorial borders, or, for that matter, top-down EU support for regional development and cross-border cooperation, European de/re-bordering is better approached as the product of a complex and dynamic multiplicity of re-scaled social practices that determine the nature of cross-border cooperation, regulatory practices and new security regimes that take place throughout everyday life (Paasi 1996; Scott 2006; Andersen and Sandberg 2012). Yet, Kramsch (2010) reminds us that, for all of the historically informed emphasis placed upon border spatiality, contestation and territorial transformation within the border studies literature, more often than not we always seem to arrive back where we started: at territorially institutionalised ‘state’ power entrenching the state as the primary border and borderer.

Where Are Europe’s New Borders? The Special Issue Contributions

To reiterate, this special issue (re)examines the complexity of contemporary European bordering and, of course, bordering in general terms. In its design, the intention has been to provide a broad analytical starting point to examine what important European bordering currently ‘looks like’, where these important borders and borderers can be found (and the contradictions between them) and the implications of this bordering on the way we think about Europe more generally, particularly in a wider global context. There is no right or wrong answer here in the sense that the four papers contained within this special issue focus on examples of different (but of course overlapping) European bordering as well as employing different approaches to, and motivations for, the study of them.

What does unify the contributions, however, is a critical engagement with the key themes of border studies with a concern for the different meaning and importance that borders can have on all stakeholders and the relationships between them—particularly the complex array of borderers and bordered. In the context of this special issue, to talk about border meaning (including the perspective of the researchers themselves), and how that meaning continually (re)creates, and is (re)created by borders, is to also critically question where the important borders lie, why and for whom do they matter and how are they imposed, maintained and resisted. Across all the papers to follow, attention is given to individual actors and/or contexts in these borderings and, in doing so, the contributors necessarily consider issues of power and violence: Who, for example, is able to impose meaning and/or order space, to resist and disorder, and, importantly, who is empowered or disempowered from all of this? Taken together, the papers collectively also show, in different ways, why and how Europe can only be understood in relation to political/economic processes (borderings) occurring globally and involving a variety of actors.

The first paper by Dorte J. Andersen, Olivier Thomas Kramsch and Marie Sandberg (Inverting the Telescope on the Borders that Matter: Conversations in Café Europa) takes as its starting premise what they consider to be an impasse at the heart of contemporary critical border studies, namely the inability to move away from the border line and its violent and political disciplinary/exclusionary effects, despite the best intentions to do so by many researchers in the field. As a remedy, they argue the need to fashion ‘a robust normative lens’ [emphasis added] that takes into account the multiplicity of large-scale dynamics such as capitalist globalisation, extensive cultural transformation and macro European territorial governance, on the one hand, while at the same time capturing particular localised expressions of bordering that matters in places that bordering matters (i.e. at the interface of local practice and global design). Drawing upon and looking through Benedict Anderson’s ‘inverted telescope’, they look at three European border sites—Italy/Croatia/Slovenia, Denmark/Poland and French Guyana/Brazil—in order to show how the multiplicity of ‘European’ border practices and encounters cannot be framed by conventional European territorial imaginaries. The authors conceptualise this as an ‘ontological politics of bordering’ and locate it in the ‘real-and-imagined space called Café Europa’.

The second paper by Rodrigo Bueno Lacy and Henk van Houtum (Lies, Damned Lies and Maps: The EU’s Cartopolitical Invention of Europe) looks at the power relations behind the struggle (scramble) to draw and redraw Europe’s political borders—to make ‘Europe’ meaningful. via a rich examination of the way that maps have historically promoted and therefore naturalised discourses underlying the modern political authority defining and defined by strict territorial boundaries, the paper shows how the EU—or ‘Europeanization’—has configured and laid claim to contemporary European space and how people have come to understand and accept this ‘closing off’. The authors draw upon and interpret EU maps, symbols and associated imagery (raging from several historical maps to contemporary EU banknotes) in order to call into question those objective descriptions and ‘mere dispassionate statements’ of European wholeness—those imagined boundaries—that are (kept) immune to contestation. Doing so, they argue, may allow the reimagination of Europe and inspire refreshing and more democratic ways to think about and locate European borders. We need to unimagine the EU’s cartographic cage, they further argue, and free our own cartographic minds in order to put forward other imaginations of Europe.

The third paper by Alexandria J. Innes (The Never-Ending Journey? Exclusive Jurisdictions and Migrant Mobility in Europe) charts the journey of (and gives a voice to) a Sudanese migrant called Ali as he seeks to join his family who had filed for asylum in France. The paper convincingly shows how Ali’s identity as an irregular migrant is not only produced but also continually reproduced by European immigration standards such as the Dublin II regulation, in turn making his journey ‘never ending’ and excluding him from supposed (and taken for granted) European norms and ideals such as democracy and human rights. As a result of this continual mobility, exclusion and illegality, the borders that matter for Ali become ‘phenomenological’, rather than physical. Drawing upon the tensions between these norms and security concerns from the perspective of a migrant trapped in the middle of them, however, the paper also shows how restrictions to migration do not stop the fact of migration as migrants themselves assert agency and negotiate, challenge, and find ways to change the route, nature and experience of the journey. While at the same time, outside of legal jurisdictions, in ‘zones of irregularity’, migrants have increased difficulty re-entering situations of legal regularity or normalcy. The margins of Europe become visible across European space when seen and experienced by the marginalised.

The fourth and final paper by Catarina Kinnvall (Borders and Fear: Insecurity, Gender and the Far Right in Europe) looks at the recent emergence of the far right in Europe and, via their engagement with and influence on national and European politics, examines the effects of this emergence on the ideals of open borders and freedom of movement. The paper keys into debates about the de/rebordering of European space, powered by the relationship between bordering and the politics of belonging that, in itself, is further rooted in a politics of fear, insecurity and threat. The paper examines the structural and socio-psychological conditions behind the emergence of far right politics and political parties, stressing the importance of ‘subjective deprivation’ and the role of gender as a way of framing the bordering of essentialist identities. In this regard, understanding the role of ‘emotive governance’ and ‘nativism’ in the appeal of the far right movements and the redefinition of national and European borders is also stressed. The paper argues that recent European joint cooperation over border security is less of a linear development of EU national border politics and more about the mixture of intergovernmental and supranational attempts to appease far right political movements. Less about the politics of exception and more about the normalisation of securitised boundaries of nationhood, gender and culture in response to fears were fed upon by the far right.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.