Geopolitics of European Union Enlargement

The Fortress Empire

Warwick Armstrong, James Anderson

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780415479660
• eBook ISBN: 9781134301317
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Under the impact of accelerated globalization, transnational integration and international security concerns, the geopolitics of Europe's borders and border regions has become an area of critical interest. The progressive enlargement of the EU has positioned its borders at the heart of recent discussions on the changing nature of the EU, the meaning of 'Europe' and what constitutional shape a more politically unified Europe might take.With enlargement, the EU must elaborate strategies to contend with a fiercely competitive world - and to build fortress-like defences against perceived tensions arising from greater cultural mixing and threats such as terrorism. The authors build up an integral picture of the EU's internal and external borders and borderlands to reveal the processes of re-bordering and social change currently taking place in Europe. They explore issues such as security, immigration, economic development and changing social and political attitudes, as well as the EU's relations with the Islamic world and other world powers. The book embraces an array of disciplinary, ideological and theoretical perspectives, offering detailed case studies of different border regions and the concerns of the local inhabitants, while engaging in broader discussions of developments across Europe, state policies and the EU's relations with neighbouring states. Geopolitics of European Union Enlargement will be of key interest to students and researchers in the fields of European politics, geography, international studies, sociology and anthropology.

1 Singular Europe

An empire once again?

James Anderson

What is the nature of Europe’s geopolitics and what is now the European Union? In what directions are they evolving? Since the ‘Common Market’ was established fifty years ago there have been various answers, some of them heavily conditioned by normative beliefs about what Europe should and should not be. With enlargement there is the additional question ‘where is Europe’ – how far should the EU extend? What are its relations with neighbouring states and other powers, and the implications for its internal borders? Europe, we are told, is being ‘de-territorialised’ and ‘re-territorialised’, but what does it all mean?

This chapter considers a range of answers encapsulated in five competing visions of Europe’s territorial future: a ‘Europe of nations’, a ‘federal European superstate’, or a ‘Europe of regions’; ideas about a ‘new medieval Europe’; and, more recently, ‘Europe an empire’. These options reflect distinct though partly overlapping conceptions of political space and territoriality – national, medieval and imperial. The territorialities embody different ideas and ideals about the homogeneity/heterogeneity of political, social and cultural space, and the equality/inequality of its constituent elements; about political authority and the relationship between sovereignty and territory; and about borders as lines sharply dichotomising inside/outside or more fuzzy zones of gradual change or border-crossing interrelationships.

We look at the five options in turn, starting with the first three as variants of the familiar national territoriality and then ‘work backwards’ through medievalism to the imperial territoriality of empire. While the first three differ markedly – prioritising either national states and national sovereignty, a centralised ‘federal Europe’ typically modelled on the USA, or decentralised sub-state regions – they all uncritically accept a national or ‘modernist’ conception of territoriality and sovereignty. As a threesome, they are criticised as a ‘Gulliver fallacy’ in which the only conceivable alternatives to the existing national state are scale-model replicas.

The more recent fourth and fifth options signal more radical changes in political territoriality and more appreciation of the possible diversity of state forms. They look back to the past (or idealised versions of it) in an attempt to capture something elusively new, a recourse to ‘history repeating itself’ which of course it never (quite) does. The ‘new medieval’ metaphor draws analogies from pre-national Europe’s fragmented, multi-level and often border-crossing authority systems in order to understand the contemporary EU sharing of sovereignty across national borders and different ‘levels’ of authority, though it sometimes gives the confusing impression that the EU is now ‘post-national’.

The ‘empire’ metaphor has a wider canvas, harking back to imperialisms such as the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the empire of Charlemagne and even earlier to Rome. It encompasses the EU’s external relations as well as its internal territorial form, a potentially decisive advantage over the other four models. It chimes better with enlargement and the EU’s standing vis-à-vis other world powers, as well as with its internal empire-like heterogeneity. And crucially, in referring to the Roman Empire and its symbolic recreation by Charlemagne, it refers to periods before medieval ‘decentralisation’ when Europe’s territories were seen to be organised by or around a single imperial core. Considering that Europe has been dominated by a multiplicity of competing political centres for over a thousand years (in fact ever since Charlemagne’s brief empire fragmented in the ninth century), and that this multiplicity was arguably a major source of Europe’s success (over, for instance, the technologically more advanced but singular and moribund Chinese empire), a return to ‘empire’ and a single-centred Europe would indeed be both a radical and a paradoxical development.

It would be yet more radical if Europe’s ‘empire’ were to prove real rather than simply metaphorical. Here our fifth option transmutes into a sixth possibility: that rather than present or future territorial forms being merely reminiscent of the past, there could be a real return to a European imperialist polity in the singular. Singularity will only have substantial significance to the extent that the EU literally has imperial features internally and imperialistic relations with other parts of the world, other world powers including the presently hegemonic USA, and of course the rest of Europe. All the options have a tendency to conflate the EU and ‘Europe’, forgetting that a sizeable proportion of the continent is not in the EU, nor is it envisaged that all of it ever will be. However, EU enlargement means the non-EU proportion is decreasing; and the concept of empire begins to make some limited sense of the still-unjustified conflation to the extent that Europe, including its non-EU part, is indeed beginning to gravitate around an EU core.

There is considerable potential for empire to be more than a metaphor, not least because of interacting with some of the other options.¹ While they are usually seen as mutually exclusive visions of varying (im)plausibility, each of them in fact captures some partial aspects of Europe’s evolving reality, and all contribute to an overall sense of Europe’s trajectory which is indeed elusive. They can be seen as different tendencies which interact to shape Europe’s destiny, and how it progresses or perhaps regresses is an open question. Thus ‘Europe as empire’ might be derailed if for example the ‘Europe of nations’ tendency were to strengthen national rivalries or block a legitimising supranational democracy. Alternatively, an empire future could be boosted by tendencies toward a ‘federal Europe’, sub-state regionalism and/or ‘new medievalism’. It could absorb elements of all of these – even elements of nationalism – for empire is perhaps the most trans-historical, flexible and heterogeneous of territorial polities. There are ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ variants, and (while we must reject a postmodern parody of empire as singular not to Europe but to the whole world!) empire has taken on new meanings in contemporary capitalism.

But will the EU become an empire, and if so, will it come to dominate Europe to the point of singularity? Cooperative and competitive relations with other hegemonic and would-be hegemonic world powers drive EU enlargement and integration, objectively calling for a single Europe ‘speaking with one voice’. On the other hand, Europe could be divided by these external relations acting on its internal fissures of national rivalry (e.g. as in different responses to the US invasion of Iraq). The USA as ‘interfering hegemon’, and Russia as a partly European rival, threaten singularity. And so, after presenting the case for empire and singularity, we conclude by looking at how these possibilities might be undone.

National territoriality and the ‘Gullliver fallacy’

Territoriality at its most general is ‘a spatial strategy to affect, influence, or control resources and people, by controlling area’; bordered space or territory is used to control, classify and communicate (Sack 1986, 21–34). But its use varies greatly in different historical contexts, and of our three ‘ideal types’ of political or state territoriality, the historically most recent national type is also the simplest. It reached its apogee in the heyday of the national state after the Second World War – in fact just as the EU was being born; and while it had also overlapped with empires since the eighteenth century, it is very different from earlier territorialities (see Liam O’Dowd’s account in Chapter 2). Ernest Gellner made a revealing comparison, likening the pre-modern, pre-nationalism map to a Kokoschka painting: a ‘riot’ of colours, no clear pattern in the detail, though a clear overall pattern of diversity, plurality and complexity. In contrast his political map of the modern world resembles a Modigliani – very little shading, neat flat surfaces clearly separated from each other, clarity where one begins and another ends, little if any ambiguity or overlap – the familiar representation of national states (Gellner 1983, 139–140).

The claimed characteristics of national space are uniformity or homogeneity within clearly defined state borders; democratic equality for members of the population seen in nationalist doctrine as a cultural community; and independent or absolute sovereignty within its borders. ‘Sovereignty’ is a slipppery and disputed concept but refers to the claim that final political authority resides within the political community and its territory (Hinsley 1986); and here space is usually conceived in unchanging absolute or physical rather than relative, social terms.² There is a formal sovereign equality between the different national states; and a sharp ‘inside/outside’ dichotomy at their borders between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ relations (mirrored in the debilitating academic division of labour between ‘political science’ and ‘international relations’ – see Walker 1993).

Abstract models in absolute space

It is therefore not surprising to find that our first three options as variants of national territoriality are almost entirely preoccupied with the internal shape of the EU and ignore its external relations. Initially, national space was virtually the only type conceivable or conceived. Even if a federal superstate was not considered a serious possibility, the early, smaller European Community was nevertheless often perceived like a national state. There was for example the official aspiration that its economic space should be rendered homogeneous by regional policies to bring lagging areas and the new and poorer member states such as the Irish Republic and Greece up to the level of existing members. In contrast, such interventionist policies are no longer seen as ‘realistic’ in the contemporary neo-liberal EU of over twenty-five member states. Its internal space is becoming, and coming to be accepted as, less homogeneous, and in fact more unequal, heterogeneous and empire-like.

Up to the 1980s, debates on the European Community’s future were often responses to its so-called ‘democratic deficits’ (see Newman 1996, 2002). They were about which of the EU’s three main territorial ‘levels’ of elected assemblies was the best for a re-grounding of liberal democracy and sovereignty: a new federal superstate, or a reassertion of existing national states, or the level of sub-state regions. The problem of democracy was abstracted from economic and political realities and reduced to a matter of levels or scale rather than process: to whether national parliaments should cede powers to the European Parliament ‘above’, or to sub-state regional assemblies ‘below’. There was often a spurious zero-sum formulation where more democracy at one level automatically meant less at another, as if there were some fixed total to be shared between levels (Anderson and Goodman 1995, Goodman 1997).

This resonated with contemporary notions that national states were becoming an anachronism, too small for global competition but too big and remote for cultural identification and participatory citizenship. They were apparently losing power simultaneously upwards and downwards, caught in a pincer movement by the EU from above and regions from below. However, the sharing of sovereignty in the EU impinges on state sovereignty very unevenly, strongly in some policy areas (e.g. with repect to economic competitiveness) and more weakly in others (e.g. education, health), and individual states can gain power and leverage by sharing sovereignty (otherwise would they all do it?). In reality, national states have continued to be largely in control both of the EU and their own regions. Rumours of the ‘death of the national state’ were greatly exaggerated – after all, the hegemonic world power, the USA, is are also a national state which belies the nonsense of imminent demise.

However, because most issues had been collapsed by state-centrism to the one level of the national state, it followed that when other alternatives were considered they were almost invariably national state-like bodies at other levels, ‘above and below’. Any serious threat or replacement could apparently come only from scale replicas of the existing national state – the state ‘writ large’, as in a federal ‘United States of Europe’, or ‘writ small’ as in ‘regional governments’. It was ‘business as (nearly) usual’, the only changes being ones of geographical scale in absolute space. There was no real recognition that political processes and institutions at different levels are likely to be qualitatively (not just quantitatively) different in character, and not least because of the (ignored) interrelationships between levels. This is the ‘Gulliver fallacy’, named after the societies that Gulliver met on his travels, one a society of giants, the other of midgets, but both exact replicas of human society.

The fallacy follows from national territoriality dominating to the exclusion of other conceptions, testimony to the power of the familiar and the ideology of nationalism, and perhaps to the fact that other conceptions – medieval or imperial – do not have similar ideological backing or popular appeal. It also points to the limits of conventional sovereignty and national democracy when dealing with transnational entities and processes. All three national variants simply accept the standard liberal practice of equating democracy with representative parliamentary democracy, and representation with a fixed territory. But these simple equations hardly exhaust the democratic possibilities, nor are they adequate to a multilevel transnational entity like the EU. National representative democracy, while it has to be defended and indeed strengthened (for it is probably our main democratic arena for the foreseeable future), also needs to be supplemented by participatory forms of democracy which are often better suited to relations between levels and across borders. In reality the EU does not conform to any of the three national variants, nor is it likely, or arguably desirable, that it will in the future (see Anderson 2006a).

‘Europe of nations’

The ‘Europe of nations’ option, which revealingly conflates ‘nation’ with ‘state’, assumes that the EU necessarily undermines national sovereignty and democracy. It plays the zero-sum game where more democracy at an EU (or a sub-region) level must mean less at national level. Hence its advocates generally oppose any strengthening of democracy (and legitimacy) in the EU Parliament, any increase in central Commission competencies, and any decrease in national vetoing powers in inter-governmental bargaining. In its milder forms (in practice indulged in opportunistically by opponents as well as by advocates) this nationalistic perspective may delay or weaken the EU’s integration and cohesion. In its strong ‘Eurosceptic’ or ‘Europhobic’ forms, the restoration of traditional national sovereignty as enjoyed when the Common Market was merely an economic association of independent national states would put the clock back on EU integration, stop the project in its tracks and probably wreck it. The present reality is that the sharing of sovereignty in the EU, and its intricate web of multilevel and transnational links and institutions, already comprises much more than the traditional intergovernmental relations between independent states (the so-called Westphalian system) which is the Europhobe heaven. Already in 1993 John Ruggie was suggesting that the partial ‘unbundling’ of national territorial sovereignty had gone further in the European Community than anywhere else: it was the world’s ‘first truly postmodern international political form … the first “multiperspectival polity” to emerge since the advent of the modern era’ (Ruggie 1993, 140, 171–2).

‘Federal Europe’

The ‘federal Europe’ vision is also blind to such transnational possibilities, again not surprisingly. Its main propagandists have not in fact been enthusiastic European federalists but rather the Europhobes who use it as a bogeyman, a dire warning of supposed outcomes if their own ‘Europe of nations’ is not accepted and their precious national sovereignties are pooled (and hence ‘lost’) in a United States of Europe. Unfortunately, public debates about the EU (at least in Britain) are often conducted around these two simplistically misleading poles: they have little to do with genuine European issues and more to do with the elitist manipulation of electorates for national or local ends – perhaps part of the reason for the lack of popular interest in the EU?

With national states remaining powerful players, the EU is not a federal state, nor likely to become one. Nor is a superstate on the model of the USA a desirable possibility. As John Agnew (2002) has shown, the US federal model is inappropriate and inadequate both for Europe and contemporary circumstances generally. It does not address transnationalism; and its archaic division and dispersal of public power was devised in the eighteenth century to ensure that government was decentralised and limited, rather than representative or effective. Its division of powers is enshrined in an inflexible written constitution; it relies on consensus more than oppositional politics; and on a rigid hierarchy of territorial levels (emphasising scale rather than process, like the Gulliver fallacy). In sum, it cannot easily be adapted to changing circumstances and can produce federal sclerosis. But in any case the federal option is implausible – the most to be expected is ‘arrested federalisation’ (Anderson 1995), a long way short of a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Map
• Introduction: borders in an unequal world
• 1 Singular Europe: an empire once again?
• 2 From empire to the European Union via the national state: the three ages of the Irish border
• 3 Europeanisation, identity and policy in the Northern Ireland borderlands
• 4 Creating border space in Ireland: an EU approach to ethno-national threat and insecurity
• 5 Coping with ‘Fortress Europe’: views from four seaports on the Spanish–Moroccan border
• 6 Europe and Islam: Partnership or peripheral dependence?
• 7 Inside/outside the European Union: enlargement, migration policy and the search for Europe’s identity
• 8 Fixing capitalism and Europe’s peripheries: west European imperialism
• 9 Carving out a ‘ring of friends’: the impact of the ENP on the shape of Europe
• 10 New borders in a new Europe: eliminating and making borders in Central Europe
• 11 Citizenship beyond the state: on the formation of civil society in the Three-Border Region
• 12 Evolution and perspectives on intercultural coexistence at the Slovene–Italian border
• 13 Ideologies of ‘Fortress Europe’ in two Slovenian–Croatian borderlands: case studies from Žumberak and Bela Krajina
• 14 Fortress frontiers: global power, global and local justice
• Index