Rethinking Borders Beyond the State
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Rethinking Borders Beyond the State1 William Walters Department of Political Science, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1S 5B6. E-mail: [email protected]
This paper explores three ways of imagining borders in Europe. The first is the most common. It sees borders in relation to an emergent European region-state or polity. The second looks beyond conventional political figures and uses the gated community to think about the complex political affects and social identities that invest the border. The third also breaks with standard political images, but this time by drawing upon the realm of information technology. Here I thematize the firewall — a non-geographical, non-territorial figure, and non-linear form of border. My second and third images are closer to Foucault’s idea of a diagram. The point of the exercise is not to establish which is the most accurate. If borders are multiplicities then we need a plurality of concepts to think their different dimensions and changing functions. Comparative European Politics (2006) 4, 141–159. doi:10.1057/palgrave.cep.6110076 Keywords: borders; frontiers; power; European Union; political imagination; spatiality
If the fortified town is an immobile machine, the military engineer’s specific task is to fight against its inertia. ‘The goal of fortification is not to stop armies, to contain them, but to dominate, even facilitate their movements’.2
On the Borders of Europe For a long while the study of state borders and border regions was quite marginal to the discipline of political science. Largely confined to specialist sub-disciplines like political geography (Prescott, 1965) and the realm of diplomatic know-how (Curzon, 1908), when questions of borders did arise within political science it was typically in relation to nationalist projects of territorial acquisition and interstate conflict. This is clearly no longer the case. If political science has begun to confront what Agnew has called the ‘territorial trap’ (Agnew, 1994) — the set of geographical assumptions that have combined to obscure the historicity and mutability of political space and territory within international relations and comparative politics — then one consequence has been to move the border from the periphery of the study of polities and international relations and to accord it a more prominent location within research agendas (Ruggie, 1993;
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Albert et al., 2001; Migdal, 2004).3 This is especially true for researchers of European politics, perhaps because it is in Europe that experimentation and readjustment in the relationship between governance, political space and bordering has arguably gone furthest. There is now an emerging and highly promising field of studies which has made European space a laboratory for the study of new forms of territoriality (Berezin and Schain, 2003) and more specifically the changing geography, function, ideology, symbolism and politics of borders in Europe (Anderson and Bort, 2001; Balibar, 2002; Zielonka, 2002; Gro
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