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Introduction
Globalization has not led to a ‘borderless world’. Rather, globalization has led both to a proliferation of borders and their diffusion throughout society. In Europe, the transformation of borders has also been driven by processes associated with EU integration, leading to a tension between the need to remove borders (as barriers to trade and mobility) and the need to reinstall borders in the face of perceived security threats from terrorists, drug traffickers and illegal immigrants.
The research network comprises a multi-disciplinary group of academic scholars studying the impact of globalization on Europe’s borders from a variety of national and intellectual perspectives. The network is designed to bring together scholars with expertise in the areas of globalization and Europe’s borders, and also incorporate expertise on key related topics such as European integration, networks, cross-border communication, sub-national regions, spatial planning, and human mobilities.
Four seminars are planned in the series, scheduled to take place between September 2007 and May 2009. The first seminar focuses on theoretical innovation in understanding globalization and borders in the European context, and to this end it explores the networked, diffuse, differentiated and mobile nature of borders. Following this the seminar series proceeds to focus on three key issues central to the study of the impact of globalization on borders in Europe: the idea of networked borders and the regulation of mobility; the emergence of new external frontiers represented by the idea of borderlands; and the global dynamics of transnational regions, which requires a new appreciation of the relationship between regions and European integration.
Research network members
Principal Organizer:
Chris Rumford, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK
Eiki Berg, University of Tartu, Estonia
Klaus Eder, Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin
Robert Holton, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland
Caterina Kinnvall, Lund University, Sweden
Olivier Thomas Kramsch, Nijmegen Centre for Border Research, The Netherlands
Anssi Paasi, University of Oulu, Finland
Tim Richardson, Aalborg University, Denmark
Maria Rovisco, ISCTE-University of Lisbon, Portugal
Noralv Veggeland, Lillehammer University, Norway
Intellectual background
In recent years, the study of borders in Europe has been preoccupied with two key themes: (i) the need for greater security and forms of ‘rebordering’ in the wake of terrorist attack and the perception of threats posed by the mobilities of migrants, refugees, workers, traffickers, smugglers and terrorists; and (ii) a celebration of Europe san frontiers as a consequence the establishment of the Single Market. These two visions of Europe’s borders clearly exist in a state of tension: open borders create problems for securitization; closed borders diminish economic opportunities. The debate on borderless versus securitized Europe has reached an impasse, precisely because it lacks a global dimension on the transformation of borders. Globalization has had a major impact on the changing nature and dynamics of Europe’s borders, and yet the global processes at work, the societal dynamics of borders, the changing relationship between territory, borders and governance that this entails, and the political consequences of the growing diffusion, differentiation and networking of borders are little understood.
Understanding the changing nature of borders is central to any attempt to understand contemporary Europe. For example, successive enlargements, the establishment of the single market, the Eurozone, and Schengenland have all multiplied the borders of Europe and substituted new borders for old ones. The need to understanding the changing nature of borders is also apparent from the range of popular designations applied to contemporary Europe: multi-level governance; postwestern Europe; Fortress Europe; network Europe; Europe of the regions. The centrality of borders is further reinforced by a range of processes and developments deemed to be shaping Europe’s future: securitization and rebordering post 9/11; cosmopolitanization; further enlargement, ‘Neighbourhood policy’ and the governance of new borderlands.
This preoccupation with shifting borders is much more than inward-looking self-scrutiny. Debate on the sometimes contradictory nature of bordering and debordering has made it impossible to pretend that Europe is separate from the rest of the world as in the once-popular idea of ‘Fortress Europe’. Nevertheless, studies of the EU have been noticeably reluctant to place Europe in the context of global processes, choosing instead to see globalization as something ‘out there’ beyond Europe’s borders, posing a threat to European nation-state and against which post-Maastricht integration is a necessary defensive response. The changing dynamics of borders places Europe in a global context, not simply because the EU’s concern with borders extends to Asia as result of recent Eastern enlargement, or even because of the interest in exporting the European model of governance beyond the near abroad, but because the processes contributing to Europe’s bordering and rebordering are global. Borders, and mobility across borders, are common to both imaging Europe as a coherent space and imagining the world as a single place. As Balibar reminds us, borders have both a local function (dividing particular territories) and at the same time they partition the world.
The transformation of Europe’s borders provokes many important questions (which the seminar network is designed to address): how has globalization resulted not in the removal of borders (as was widely predicted) but in a Europe where borders are multiplied, new borders types of borders have emerged, and borders are increasingly differentiated (barriers to some, gateways to others)?
The seminar series
Seminar I: Theorizing European transformation: globalization and borders
Royal Holloway, University of London, September 2007
Borders have not become obsolete in a world ordered by global processes. Thus, the ‘borderless world’ thesis, sometimes seen a paradigmatic of globalization, does not stand up to scrutiny in a world where borders proliferate and bordering, debordering and rebordering are core components of the social transformation that is shaping Europe. This does not mean however that borders remain geopolitical and territorial. Rather, borders are also multiple, diffused and relativized. Etienne Balibar makes the point that as well as defining the political territory of the nation-state through the construction of managed perimeters, borders are increasingly dispersed throughout society. It is clear that we no longer live only in world of bounded territorial nation-states, where inside and outside, foreign and domestic are easy to distinguish. Borders and mobilities are not antithetical. A globalizing world is a world of networks, flows and mobility; it is also a world of borders. Bearing this in mind, it is possible to argue that Europe’s borders have a marked cosmopolitan dimension. In this context, cosmopolitanism is best understood as the constant negotiation and crossing of borders. A cosmopolitan is not only a citizen of the world, someone who embraces multiculturalism, or even a ‘frequent flyer.’ A cosmopolitan lives in and across borders. Borders connect the ‘inner mobility’ of our lives with both the multiplicity of communities we may elect to become members of and the cross-cutting tendencies of polities to impose their border regimes on us in ways which compromise our mobilities, freedoms, rights, and even identities. The incessant mobility which is often seen as characteristic of contemporary life is only one part of the story. The other side of the coin is the bordering and de- and re-bordering processes which point to the cosmopolitanization of society.
Seminar II: Network Europe: Spaces, borders, and global connectivity
Aalborg University, Denmark
The pursuit of ‘network Europe’ envisions borders between member states as potential barriers to freedom of mobility that need to be surmounted to create the conditions for a single internal market and global competitiveness. This has led to a focus of policy attention on the different types of barriers to mobility posed by borders: legal, technical, financial, operational, and simply by missing links between national infrastructure networks. Strategies to work across borders have led to a plethora of re-territorialised spaces at different scales, which in different ways seek to develop border-crossing capacities. At the same time, global connectivity has become a crucial, if less noticed, aspect of the realisation of network Europe, because accessing and dominating global markets is the strategic end game. This creates several dilemmas. Firstly, borders between European states must regulate mobilities in ways that support an idea of balanced competition within the EU, whilst enabling differentiated mobilities that are seen as key to global competitiveness. Secondly, external borders (which are recognised not to be just ‘on the edge’) need to play a twin role of containing the single market whilst ensuring global reach. The seminar explores the strategies being directed towards different types of borders, and the consequent practices of bordering, to explore how such differentiation is being operationalised, in terms of relational and other spatial logics, actual and potential mobilities, and territorial reconfiguration. This strategic perspective is located alongside an everyday life perspective, of how such bordering logics and practices relate to everyday practices of border crossings. Through this investigation, the aim is to rethink the strategic positioning and actual functioning of European borders within a global networked space, in terms of producing, channelling, restricting, and facilitating differentiated mobilities
Seminar III: B/ordering Europe: the frontier
Radboud Universiteit, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
Following recent waves of eastward enlargement (10 new Central and European member states in May, 2004; Romania and Bulgaria, January, 2007), in tandem with the French and Dutch “No” votes on the Constitutional Treaty, the European Union now confronts the limits of territorial aggrandizement and has shifted focus towards the management of its newly contiguous “outside”. As embodied in new policy domains such as the European Neighborhood Initiative (ENPI), or “Wider Europe”, such a shift augurs an unprecedentedly vast and complex relationship with its external borderlands, as problems of migration and repatriation, drug- and people-trafficking, arms smuggling and other security risks must now be addressed across the length and breadth of the EU’s outer frontier rather than merely through bilateral agreement. This has provoked debate on the efficacy of ‘soft’ versus ‘hard’ borders. The term “frontier” is itself historically charged, both as space of opportunity and self-reinvention, as reflected classically in Jackson Turner’s America, but also in the experience of earlier rounds of overseas European imperial expansion. As such, the European frontier has also traditionally been a site of paradox and contradiction, a laboratory where the supposedly universal values of Enlightenment modernity and civilization founder and must be rethought anew. The impact of globalization on Europe’s borders is clearly manifested in the challenges for Europe awaiting it at its outer frontier, conceived not so much as a physical dividing line separating Europe from non-Europe but as a sinuous, undulating zone of contact, resistance and unplanned hybridity from where we may be able to capture the transformation of the EU as a political project from its margins.
Seminar IV: Global dynamics of Europe’s transborder regions
University of Oulu, Finland
Accounts of globalization and the EU which see the former as the catalyst for integration tend not to allow for other outcomes. A key aspect of globalization is the way economic, social and political actors can be animated from a distance in such a way as to lead to the internal differentiation and fragmentation of societies. Globalization destabilizes the established hierarchies upon which the economy is ordered, and fosters new relationships between regions, nation-states and the EU. One feature of EU studies is the way supranational governance is assumed to be a redistribution of government power internal to the EU (passed upwards from the nation-state to the EU, and downwards to sub-national regions). This has led to the belief that a ‘Europe of the regions’ works for integration and can be utilized to manage globalization: regions are deemed to be the site upon which the global acts upon the EU, and the level at which the EU has determined that the processes of globalization can best be accommodated (Rumford 2002: 156). This view discounts the possibility that regions can become autonomous of both the nation-state and the EU and that the Euro-region can be energized by global forces outside of EU control. Globalization has modified regional structures, particularly through the creation of transborder regions: changing spatial constellations of power where local, regional, state and supra-state processes come together. This seminar will concentrate on how emerging global links and processes are manifesting themselves in various European transborder regions, and modify these regions. It has been suggested that boundaries are unique. Therefore, a particularly significant theme for the seminar is not only what are the lessons that we can learn from various contexts, but also how can we generalize on this basis.