Border Shifts

New Mobilities in Europe and Beyond

N. Ribas-Mateos

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781349697090, 9781137493583
• eBook ISBN: 9781137493590
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Civil Rights in Law
• Index: Social Sciences

Border Shifts develops a more complex and multifaceted understanding of global borders, analysing internal and external EU borders from the Mediterranean region to the US-Mexico border, and exploring a range of issues including securitization, irregular migration, race, gender and human trafficking.

1

Exploring the Shifting Contours

The changing map

Cartography has offered fertile ground upon which to stress border changes throughout history. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries scholarly literature gradually made the distinction between boundaries and frontiers clearer by differentiating between a linear and a spatial concept. In the twentieth century, the lexical mismatch between English and Latin languages – as we shall see, ‘frontier’ always had military connotations – also played a role: where ‘frontier’ would refer more to a fuzzy border to a zone, in contrast, ‘boundary’ would refer to the linear legal division and would mostly be set in the context of the restrictive division of nation-states. Nevertheless, today’s tendency is to focus on a more complex understanding of such concepts, but with a special emphasis on the dynamic, interactive, multilayered nature of border relations. Therefore, I have chosen to explore the shifting and active character of the frontier, as well as the scope of its broader social context in different settings, in Mediterranean case studies,¹ in the US–Mexico region and in intra-European case studies.

Nowadays, we are witnessing a whole new approach to the study of borders and mobilities. We now have literature that covers a range of perspectives from trends in securitization,² surveillance to digital borders, biometric borders, materialization of violence at borders, the environment of borders, the externalization of borders (especially by extending maritime boundaries) and the impact of EU enlargement on borders, particularly after the changes witnessed in Eastern Europe³ during the 1990s.⁴ Moreover, between 1989 and 1991, 14,000 km of new international borders were created (Foucher 2007).

Of specific interest for my present purpose with this work is to clarify the juxtaposition of the external and internal EU borders in relation to mobility. As we shall see, the idea of the ‘wild frontier’⁵ in Europe would still seem to be present in a number of ways. Let us turn next to how I propose to untangle such a hypothesis.

Firstly, from my perspective, the suggested framework points to an emergence of a border paradigm shift, with regard to EU borders, that actively seeks to contain mobility. Such a paradigm is theorized as the intersection between external (as previously discussed in Ribas-Mateos 2005) and internal borders. Drawing on multiple examples from my own research as well as from numerous debates in the following sections, one key idea that emerges from the literature is that there is a complex form of deterritorialization that can be our guide in future discussions. This idea has been criticized by many, but its effects have never before been so intense or so far-reaching.

Even if state and territory continue to play an important role, state territorial power is re-articulated and reterritorialized in relation to both sub- and supra-state scales (Brenner 1999b: 3). Here, the nation-state reproduces both old and new roles for administrative forms, including categories and sub-categories of how they classify mobilities and populations. In other words, one can appreciate that border places are configured as a highly complex variety of filtering effects. Such deterritorialization involves a simultaneous reterritorialization process.⁶ In order to illustrate this, I shall point to some instances of deterritorialization of border controls, in the sense that controls are now exercised by transportation companies and within the consulates of most countries. As Anderson points out, the controls that were formally concentrated at national border posts are now exercised by a variety of means (2000: 25).

Secondly, this work aims to take the different fragments of research and combine them into a more complete work on the transformation of borders. This will require a rethinking of borders in light of the relation between mobility and global borders. Each chapter of the book will present different aspects of this research and will be summarized in a final concluding narrative.

Thirdly, another overarching perspective presented here is that borders are defined as key sites in the construction of the world today. This echoes similar perspectives of the oft-quoted French historian Pierre Vilar that the ‘history of the world can be best observed from the frontier’ (1985: 23).⁷ In addition, as a well-known historian of the Mediterranean would note: ‘History makes borders take roots and permits them to become natural features incorporated into space, difficult to displace’ (Braudel 1993: 302–303). The relevance of borders as a world view (cosmovisione) was not solely underlined by such quotations. Other authors such as Sahlins would reinforce them through their own research by showing how at the border there is an intensification of specific instances. Furthermore, borders continue to be an open display of such strategic sites for understanding historical processes, a usefully prismatic lens on the changing shape but within a shifting context that goes beyond national and regional mapping and which allow us a multilayered reading of the global overview.

Mezzadra and Neilson (2012: 60) also add, referring to the topology of global space and borders: ‘At the border there is a certain intensification of political and even existential stakes that crystallize relations of domination and exploitation, subjection and subjectivation, power and resistance.’

Consequently, if we do think about a changing map, we should first consider what this new cartography can lead us to. Authors (particularly in political geography) do tend to consider cartography connected to globalization literature in relation to deterritorialization. If we look back and pick up specific examples, Spark (2011) proposes a different cartography away from the maps of Newfoundland in America, which could be used instead of native mapping that gave the appearance of colonial surveillance, while redrawing the geography from a native perspective and moving away from ‘original’ European assertions of newness. Through this exercise he shows how maps are not only bound up with imperial power-knowledge but also with masculinist power; therefore, I would add here, the maps and their borders are both part of such knowledge. Thus, the white man’s colonial map could become re-readable as a palimpsest of power-knowledge, in which counter-hegemonic cartographies could be read – along Foucauldian lines – in terms of its capillary circulation through social relations, including those of resistance as much as of dominance and governance.

Processes of the border shift

A new lens for looking at borders

Borders are normally weighted visually and often expressed, in the idea of a wall, as an object (Ribas-Mateos 2008). Such restrictions about the border being a physical object assert that bordered spatialities are inherently partial, selective and opportunistic, both in their representation as well as in the interests they serve. It is precisely in the unfamiliarity of this in-between and beyond-space that we are challenged to unbound our thinking and practices (Van Houtum et al. 2005: 3).

For centuries we have been used to the classic concept of the frontier implying a geographical notion incorporating the administrative limits of political and strategic functions. Borderlands are sites and symbols of powers that have been studied across a wide multidisciplinary context. Traditionally, they were setting a connection between political geography and international political theory.

Contemporary borders as a theme have become more important to academic research than their limitations had previously been to geographers and anthropologists. On the one hand, Wilson (2009) adds that today the study of borders – including their territorial, geophysical, political and cultural dimensions – has become a primary interest across the disciplines due to changing scholarly approaches to key research subjects and objects such as the state, nation, sovereignty, citizenship, migration and the overarching forces and practices of globalization.

In such an epistemological change, the re-ordering of disciplines, methodologies and the diffusion and concepts of special vocabularies have definitely helped to visualize the border as the quintessence of the images of mobility and globalization. Therefore, I want to argue, based on evidence of my own and existing research, that we are bringing a central concept to the contemporary world: the border as a place of contemporary global construction.

But we also have to consider in this literature review all the work on ‘border theory’ as opposed to ‘border studies’ (as we shall see in Chapter 3), the latter referring to border metaphors related to hybridity, creolization, multiculturalism and post-colonialism, especially when we look at scholarly output from the US.

However, even if we consider this new scope of interdisciplinarity the turning point, as well as our own point of departure as to where to locate change, it is sharply in contrast to classic geopolitical studies where borders are portrayed⁸ as inert frameworks. The change in border conceptualization has also altered and is linked with a broader shift related to other geographical concepts such as space, place and container, socio-anthropological ideas of social processes and relations, and overall to the big notions of modern thought: subject, nation, culture. I feel the use of the spatial metaphor is important as it implies the use of spatial images, which evoke mobility or destabilization, including a reformulation of cultural, political and subjective categories.

Thus, this work attempts to visualize borders as giving a form of expression for intricate socio-economic global processes, in which borders act as frameworks rather than objects, from which we can observe current socio-economic processes, linked for example to deterritorialization, delocalization and relocalization (Ribas-Mateos 2005, Ribas-Mateos 2011a).

Indeed, such research sites are privileged spaces in which social interaction takes place (Foucher 1991: 10), where space represents a means (rather than being an historical actor), a framework, an enjeu, which contains resources of use and interest to many. This highlights the idea that borders are constructed socially and defined as an interrelation of social groups, as stressed by Barth (1969), when discussing ethnic groups and their possible social relations between ethnic borders,⁹ where differences were border products. Thus, borders are not limited to being a mere ‘social product’ or social process, but are instead alive and dynamic.

Shaping a nature of ambiguities and multiplicities

More than conceiving of borders as an open¹⁰ – closed dichotomy, as I have done myself in the past (Ribas-Mateos 2005), we now look at them from a complex and multifaceted perspective, in an attempt to address multiplicity.¹¹

The first feature is multiplicity itself. Through this, Anderson and O’Dowd, for example, have identified some simultaneous yet contradictory functions of borders. ‘They are at once gateways and barriers to the “outside world”, protective and imprisoning, areas of opportunity and/or insecurity, zones of contact and/or conflict, of co-operation and/or competition, of ambivalent identities and/or the aggressive assertion of difference’¹² (Anderson and O’Dowd 1999: 595). In a way, other authors connect with my vision of multiplicity: they refer to the ‘proliferation of borders’ (Mezzadra and Nelson 2013). They too bear witness to the paradox that boundaries between inclusion and exclusion seem to be breaking down at the same time as points of differentiation and control are multiplying.

The second feature is filtering, and this characteristic of borders is especially well summarized by the works of Heyman. Cunningham and Heyman go further in exploring this complexity by providing the notion of sorting and filtering with variable degrees of permeability, which show how borders in the global context are not simply unbounded but rebounded; thus, openness and closedness happen simultaneously, so that mobilities and enclosures co-exist (Cunningham and Heyman 2004). Therefore, the paradoxical filtering between mobility and enclosure will be a factor in the analyses inside Europe, outside Europe or else at the global scale. In such cases, I use a very wide view of the notion of mobilities (which I have recently applied in the context of gender and age differences; Ribas-Mateos 2013, 2014a, 2014b), partially based on the mobilities paradigm constructed by Sheller and Urry (2006).

This second feature seeks to underline a differentiated mobility on borders, which is also apparent in all the chapters of the book. In other words, by looking at how contemporary borders activate a filter for different populations by using the idea of sorting, a concept that has become the main axis of Heyman’s ethnographic works in recent years. It implies the process of sorting people and commodities built up in the base of a complex matrix of social, cultural and economic inequalities. The cosmopolitan class (and their cosmopolitan influences) in the neo-liberal context would profit the most from being transnationally mobile in this multi-divided and multi-actor scene of filtering the border. It is in this filtering instance that Heyman (2011) distinguishes how privileged users respond to a liberal cosmopolitanism as the ‘imagined community’ of a prosperous globalist life by avoiding border closure processes. We can here include all borders, even airports. Such sorting helps us to elucidate the open and closed simultaneity of borders, which is shown by the regulatory filters of mobility.

The third feature is ambiguity. This may be illustrated in research conducted by Eski (2011), especially when he refers to how the social worlds of ports (and port securities) have an ambiguous nature. On the one hand, they are highly globalized and formed by communities that have a cosmopolitan attitude; on the other, they are considered as closed and hidden away from the public eye. In this context, security would be shaped by their identities, cultures and authorities. For Eski, ports are late-modern hubs of transnational insecurities such as terrorism, illegal drug and human trafficking and environmental pollution. This is especially true since 9/11, which has influenced port regulation by governments and international bodies, resulting in the construction of ports as security bubbles where law is marginalized by the exercise of raw sovereign power and where port authorities are compelled to improve and manage security.

What happens at ports can be translated into many types of border situation. Such a persistent focus on borders, and on many occasions within border cities in particular, further highlights the interest in recovering those physical places that form part of economic globalization, albeit from a spatial heterogeneity¹³ in which multiple trajectories and processes under ongoing construction are to be found. This vision of these processes is also taken as the movement of a ‘permanent construction site’. In that respect, authors such as Nevins indicate that not only walls and fences, but national identities and exclusivities are frenetic works in progress. Here, too, politicians and bureaucrats manufacture the self-serving myths that advance their interests in the ‘border control industry’ (see the introduction to the work on Operation Gatekeeper, Nevins 2002). Such a dynamic view can be carved through a complex moving picture of the specific research site as can also be seen in Staudt and Spener (1998), when they indicate that borders are continually made and remade, rebordered and debordered, in concert with larger circulations of migration, state projects, the implementation of trade agreements and the political responses of those experiencing these processes at first hand. Another source of such a dynamic site is seen through the observation of borders in the Southern Cone, when Grimson (2012: 194) reminds us that the border is never a fixed ‘fact’ but always remains unfinished and unstable. He underlines its quality of non-fixity by describing it as an object that is constantly being contested and, as the historical outcome of human action, it is something that can be – and is – restructured and resignified over time. Furthermore, he adds that it is characterized by regimes of material and symbolic movement across it, and has a great variety of economic, political, social and cultural relations.

The fourth feature is related to enabling empirical grounded research. I insist on a perspective that provides an evidence base to such theorizing, so to elaborate on these claims, I shall use empirical cases, especially concerning selected EU-related case studies. As Deleuze would put it (2004), ideas are presented in the form of the creation of concepts and concepts take us to extremely simple things, to very concrete things. In this research, I shall address one specific border shift. Of particular interest for my present purposes is the juxtaposition of external and internal EU borders in relation to mobility. As I shall show later, different cases will serve to illustrate some of the conceptual, methodological and empirical issues aimed at detecting such articulations and simultaneities and, by doing so, will signal the existence of novel types in the bordering process.

In fact, the two processes – the bordering and rebordering of both space and contemporary mobilities – cannot be separated. This central hypothesis will be supported by detailing different social processes that I think are key in EU border spaces and beyond (e.g. the process of bordering has opened a rebordering in ethnic and confessional lines such as in Iraq, Nigeria and Syria). All of these processes will reveal different elements about what some scholars would refer to either as border regimes (grenzeregime) or mobility regimes. This is taken here as being four exhaustive processes which are contoured by globalization, Europeanization, memory and mobilities. When I talk about ‘mobilities’ in a border setting, I rev...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Exploring the Shifting Contours
• 2. Locating EU-Mediterranean Borders
• 3. A Border Laboratory? The Mexican-US Border as a Reference
• 4. The Luso-Galician Raia (Line)
• 5. The Catalan Border
• Postface
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index