Concluding remarks to the special issue ‘Rethinking periphery in Europe: redistributing the cards’

ABSTRACT

The articles in the present issue update, exemplify and deepen the ideas on Europe’s margins that I and fellow researchers developed in the context of the 1990s enlargement. There are two broad categories of pressure from the margins of Europe upon its centre: attempts to reinterpret and/or relocate Europe’s central identity; and attempts to challenge it, by claiming alternative identities for Europe. Articles examining the latter are particularly fruitful in terms of modifying our theorizations of the margins. The article goes on to sketch out a notion of ‘seeing like a margin’ (with obvious forebears!). There is frequently more insight in seeing like a margins than seeing from the centre. On the other hand, especially at present, a number of ‘pathologies of the margin’ are arising, where misleading claims about being marginalized are made, especially by populist politicians who push bogus solutions.

KEYWORDS:

• Margins
• Europe
• periphery

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Leslie Budd, Peter Bugge, Christopher G. Flood, Hugo Frey, Helen H. Hartnell, Anne Kennard, Valerio Lintner, José Magone, Mina Toksoz.

2. A partial exception to this was Peter Bugge’s chapter in Parker and Armstrong 2000. Peter, a close observer of Czech politics and culture, saw in the writings of Vaclev Klaus (later Czech president between 2003 and 2013) understood how this nationalism might be counterposed to EU pluralism.

3. A key element of Rumford’s account of state borders is that those living at or near the border do not see the border in the way that states do, giving rise to ‘vernacular’ bordering from below (Rumford 2014, 22–38).