Globalization and the transformation of Europe’s borders A seminar series/research network funded by Norface globalborders.org.uk Principal Organizer: Chris Rumford, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK

Special issue of ‘Environment and Planning D: Society and Space on ‘Global borders’ (Guest editor: Chris Rumford) http://www.envplan.com/D.html

Synopsis: The global age has not led to a 'borderless world' but a world in which rebordering, securitization, and social closure/exclusion are on the rise. Recent trends in border studies have emphasized the importance of new borders replacing old ones (‘the wall after the wall’, the Schengen Wall, the ‘wall around the West’ etc) and the extent to which borders can be ‘everywhere’ and spread throughout ‘control society’. Accompanying these shifts have been increasing references to global borders, global borderlands, and global frontiers seen as necessary to regulate the flows, mobilities, and networks which are constitutive of globalization. However, the idea of global borders remains under- theorized and has hardly progressed beyond superficial description, geopolitical cliché, or advertising slogan (‘banking crosses global borders'). Questions such as to what extent and in what ways 'global borders' might differ from other borders are rarely asked.

The papers included here explore the idea of global borders from a range of disciplinary and theoretical perspectives. Key themes include the securitization of borders through global regimes of border governance, the openness of borders versus the need to ensure closure, and the role of borders in cultural connectivity. The special issue also examines the usefulness of the idea of global borders and the dichotomous categories of thought associated with it: inside/outside, open/closed, global/local, border/borderless. The papers collected here represent a major step forward in thinking about ‘global borders’ moving the debate beyond simplistic accounts of the global role of local borders on the one hand, and narratives of governance which demand that the untrammeled global motilities associated with terrorism and trafficking be contained by global borders, on the other.

1. Global borders: beyond asymmetry and consensus

Chris Rumford, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK

The paper offers two challenges to current thinking on global borders. First, against the ‘rebordering’ thesis (Andreas) and the notion that in a world of increasing securitization ‘borders are everywhere’ it is argued that there exists no consensus on what constitutes a border, where borders are to be found, or which borders are the most important. Borders are seen as increasingly ‘asymmetric’ (Hedetoft), allowing increased mobility for those on the inside while curtailing the mobility of those beyond. This is only part of the story; borders can constitute a barrier to those living on the outside while hardly registering in the consciousness of those living on the inside. In this sense borders can be more ‘asymmetric’ than hitherto appreciated. Second, the paper takes issue with Balibar’s idea that local borders can also be endowed with a global function (overdetermination): at the same time as being ‘merely local’ a border also works to ‘partition the world’. However, for a border to be global in the sense advanced by Balibar a map of the world’s borders would have to be recognized by all peoples. Who would draw up this map, and how would it come to be recognized as the map of the world? Are the Palestinians, the US Homeland Security Agency, and African migrants crossing the Mediterranean by boat all viewing the same map of the world and its borders? It is problematic to assume that any border, even a border accorded key international status such as the Mexico-US border or the wall between the West Bank and Israel, is or could be a global border.

2. How much bordering do we need? The openness of the global borderland

Henk van Houtum, Nijmegen Centre for Border Research. Radboud University, The Netherlands

One outcome of thinking about globalization has been the growing research interest in transnational identities and transnational communities. However, in the last few years processes of transnationalism such as migration streams that risk ‘flooding’ the protective and protected lands of domestic sovereignty have become feared. Borders thus display an apparent contradictory spatiality, reflected in their capacity to articulate both transcendent closure and immanent openness. Producing the phantasy of a safe interior, borders are meant to create a membrane or buffer-zone separating an inside from an outside by selecting and prioritizing people and social relations. For some this is an illustration of the fact that the world is not borderless, but rather comprising global borderlands (Duffield) or a ‘global frontierland’ (Bauman) which work to separate the wanted from the unwanted, and the global rich from global poor. In this paper I wish to explore and discuss the Janus-faced tension that seemingly lies at the heart of current border practices, that is on the one hand practices of biopolitical control, fear-mongering security politics, the production of citizens and strangers, the carving up of domains of knowledge and purified ‘dreamlands’ of id/entity; and on the other hand the generation of a (dreamland of) escape into radical openness, into a world of global development and global distributive justice. How open are the national borders in the current world? How much transnationalism and globalisation can we bear? How much home and belonging do we need? In short, rather than to attempt to strategise on the national political issue of finding measures for increased assimilation and control, I wish to inverse the question and analyse to what extent do we allow and can we optimise the openness of borders for migration in our transworld.

3. Organized Migration? The International Organization for Migration and the neoliberal governance of the global border

Rutvica Andrijasevic (Oxford University, UK) and William Walters (Carleton University, Canada)

Rather than leading to a “borderless world globalization has been accompanied by a thickening, spreading and networking of borders such that border functions and effects are proliferating in proportion to political dynamics of fear, insecurity and suspicion. Borders appear not as contiguous lines but as zones, bands, intensities of control and contestation. Border regimes function not as delineations of nations, peoples, territories, but as a matrix of control that is immanent to transnational spaces of culture, production and association. This paper examines the International Organization for Migration, an international agency at the forefront of the attempt to regulate, rationalize and in certain respects globalize this regime of borders. Despite its prominent role in the international regulation of border controls and migratory flows, IOM has been largely ignored by critical border scholarship. In cases where the IOM has been the subject of critical attention, it has been by activists who have tended to demonize it, likening it to the WTO and other avatars of neo-imperialism. While we recognize that such accusations are not unmerited, we argue for a different view of the IOM. Drawing on the literature on international neoliberalism (Hindess, Duffield. Ong), and especially Foucauldian analytics of government, we emphasize the distinctly indirect ways in which IOM advances a global ‘management’ of state borders and migratory flows. It does this though a variety of mechanisms which implicate national actors and other nongovernmental actors in strategies of migration control. Only by appreciating the very subtle and apparently benign ways in which ‘border management’ is advanced as a regional and global norm and technology do we begin to grasp the dynamics as well as the limits of the contemporary global regime of borders.

4. The Rabelaisian border

Olivier Thomas Kramsch, Nijmegen Centre for Border Research. Radboud University, The Netherlands

Working against the grain of accounts which attempt to narrate the contemporary functioning of borders and border regions in Europe as either low-grade technical achievements on the one hand or the outcome of localized, mundane and incremental regulatory practices on the other, this paper suggests that a spatiality more akin to the excess of Francois Rabelais’ (1532) Gargantua and Pantagruel may be more suitable for making sense of the practical as well as theoretical stakes in European re-bordering practices today. In adopting a Rabelaisian lens, I focus on three aspects crucial to what might productively be called the ‘worldly logic’ of the European borderland: 1) a politics of the ‘monstruous’; 2) the skill and pleasure of translation; and 3) the art of ‘playfulness’. Hoisted into our bordered present, I argue, these spatio-philosophical elements may provide us an alchemy for a novel transboundary metis, a way of re-figuring Europe in ways that move us beyond t he ‘border conundrum’ (Rumford) expressed in the ‘impossible’ choice between a local, territorially bordered and fully global borderless world.

5. Putting time back into border studies: a historical sociology of ‘global borders’

Liam O’Dowd, Centre for International Borders Research, Queens University, Belfast, UK

This article interrogates the theme of ‘global borders’ from the perspective of historical sociology. The first section argues that the recent border studies literature has privileged spatiality over temporality and, relatedly, has overused (and over-extended) the ‘border’ metaphor to illuminate contemporary globalization. It goes on to argue that a revived historical sociology of empires and states (e.g., in the work of Charles Tilly and Michael Mann) holds out the promise of putting ‘time’ back into border studies. The second section re-examines the intersection of imperial, national and regional territorialities, challenging assumptions that we live in a post-imperial or post-national era. The argument is illustrated empirically by reference to the ‘EU Neighbourhood’ and Britain/Ireland.

6. The end of borders? Rebordering and the securitization of religion in a global era

Caterina Kinnvall, Lund University, Sweden

Are we living in an increasingly borderless world? From one perspective, borders appear to have lost their significance as states are rapidly losing traditional forms of power. Here transnationalism and the establishment of global (cosmopolitan) democracy seem to be adequate answers to such changes in the world structure. However, from another perspective growing transnationalism and attempts towards cosmopolitan solutions do not necessarily lead to either fewer borders or to a more democratic world. Instead we are witnessing increasing tendencies to define current events in terms of danger and insecurity where the answers to such insecurities include efforts to reborder and securitize identity. This article attempts to understand the socio-psychological foundation of rebordering in a global era. In particular it shows how religion has become a pertinent source of identification in a global world characterized by discourses of terror and insecurity. The article discusses some possible reasons why religion appears to be growing in significance as a securitizing force and how it may affect the social-psychology of rebordering.

7. The ethics of global border security

Nick Vaughan-Williams, University of Exeter, UK

In March 2007 the UK Home Office published a document entitled Securing the UK Border: Our Vision and Strategy for the Future. According to this document ‘border control can no longer just be a fixed line on a map’: rather, drawing upon biometric approaches to risk management, the aim is to develop a ‘new offshore line of defence, checking individuals as far from the UK as possible and through each stage of their journey’. The expressed purpose of this new global border security strategy is not simply to prevent flows of people but to profile and manage them ‘to make legitimate travel easier, yet prevent those who might cause us harm from travelling here’. Such a strategy involves a negotiation between being hospitable to some people perceived to be of value or in need on the one hand, and inhospitable to others deemed to be bogus or threatening on the other. Whilst such a negotiation used to take place mostly at traditional border sites located at the outer-edge of the state the UK’s new border doctrine implies a different approach that spans a global biopolitical terrain. The paper seeks to explore the off-shoring of this negotiation as an ethics of global border security in order to identify and interrogate the grounds upon which decisions about hospitality are made in this context. It aims to explore the algorithmic logics according to which such decisions are made and question the extent to which new ethical-political cartographies are being developed as a result of new global border security initiatives in the context of the War on Terror. In this way, the paper will contribute to the relatively underdeveloped area of the literature that considers the relation between borders, security and ethics in contemporary global life.

8. Reframing Europe and the global: conceptualising the border in cultural encounters

Maria Rovisco, University of Lisbon, Portugal

This paper explores the inadequacy of the representation of the border that is underpinned by a grammar of friend and foe, superior and inferior, interior and exterior in accounts of the dynamics of globalization. It is argued that this representation loses sight of more nuanced patterns of cultural proximity and distance and of alternative perspectives on historical processes of transnational contact. More specifically, the paper takes on the case of Europe - understood both as a political project and a cultural space – to probe the possibility of a new border imaginary. Drawing on the work of Gruzinski and Taylor I critically engage the limitations of Mignolo’s proposition for a ‘critical border thinking’ that is grounded in the experiences of the colonies and subaltern empires. Analysing a complex set of cultural productions – the creative combination of European modes of thought, texts and styles in the visual and performative arts, with indigenous local artistic styles and mindsets - I show that, as early as the sixteenth-century, the rise of a ‘global imagination’ is the result of complex relations of connectivity between Europe and other parts of the world. I conclude by arguing that a cosmopolitan grammar that is informed by the notions of the ‘familiar’ and the ‘foreign’ is better suited to explain: (i) how and why borders ‘move’, and (ii) why a new representation of the border is required to account for new experiences of cultural engagement and forms of political integration in the European context. This cosmopolitan grammar posits that the borders between self and other, us and them, can be negotiated in a variety of cultural encounters.

9. Impure global processes? the constitution of global borders and the (im)morality of openness

Barrie Axford, Oxford Brookes University, UK

If there are such things as global borders, they sit at the intersection of what Appadurai calls the vertebrate and cellular global systems. At such intersections, some territorial alignments once “encased” in national border regimes have become non-geographic, globalized through the mobility of people, things and information. The result, pace Sassen, is a welter of “mixed spatio-temporal assemblages”, produced through the overlapping and intersecting spaces and times of the national (including the local) and the global. Such is the constitutive process of complex globality which involves both openings and closings. This article explores this process by examining two areas of much current interest, one relatively benign, the other intimating a truly global field of generic surveillance and both sharing the threat and promise of digital information technologies to compress the world . The first canvasses the idea of global civil society built “from below” through transnational networks of actors; the second assesses the prospects for and the architectures of a global surveillance regime. The article ends with some reflection on the regressive or emancipatory potential which follows from the intersection of different types of global system.

10. Spectres of the border: reconfiguring a European frontier

Luiza Bialasiewicz and Claudio Minca, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK

In this paper, we consider representations of one of Cold War Europe’s most iconic frontiers: the (ex-)Yugoslav border at Trieste. The ‘Iron Curtain’ at Trieste was, in many ways, a potent symbol of the ‘overdetermination’ of (some) ‘local’ borders: here, the confine was presumably also an unbreachable partition between two worlds.

We contest such readings and argue, rather, that the border was constituted here for over forty years through a shifting play of absence and presence, through a series of ‘spectral’ geographies. The border at Trieste was an always shifting identitary horizon and mirror, an always unstable threshold at which meaning was defined and reflected; constituted through what Edgar Morin has termed a ‘permanent dialogical simmer’ of conflicting spatialities and temporalities – a series of ‘ghosts’, past, present and future, marking a never fully-defineable but for that no less real ‘frontier identity’ (Magris, 1982). Moving beyond the ‘local’ and ‘global’ dichotomy, we query what happens to this identity – constituted at/by the Cold War border – with the latter’s disappearance and the reconfiguration of this borderland as part of the Schengen space; we ask what happens to such ‘ghosts’ in today’s allegedly borderless Europe.