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The Frontiers of theEuropean Union: AGeostrategic PerspectiveWilliam Walters aa Carleton University , Ottawa, K1S 3A6 E-mail:Published online: 10 Aug 2010.

To cite this article: William Walters (2004) The Frontiers of the EuropeanUnion: A Geostrategic Perspective, Geopolitics, 9:3, 674-698, DOI:10.1080/14650040490478738

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Geopolitics, Vol.9, No.3 (Autumn 2004) pp.674–698Copyright © Taylor & Francis, Inc.ISSN: 1465-0045 pr in tDOI: 10 .1080/14650040490478738

The Frontiers of the European Union: A Geostrategic Perspective

WILLIAM WALTERS

While state borders remain the pre-eminent frontiers within geopolitics, regional blocsare also acquiring frontier characteristics. How might we understand the function andidentity of such frontiers? Taking the European Union as its focus, this article offersanswers to these questions by developing the idea of geostrategy. Four geostrategiesare identified: networked (non)borders, march, colonial frontiers and limes. Eachcorresponds with a particular way of territorialising the space of the border, as well as acertain idea of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, and of the risks and problems that the border is togovern. A geostrategic perspective uses contemporary social forms (such as networks)but also historical forms of borders (march, limes) in order to enhance the intelligibilityof the frontiers of the EU. As such, this approach seeks to capture the multiplicity andplurality of borders.

In a recent article in Geopolitics Gerald Blake observes that, far from spellingthe demise of state borders, globalisation can be associated with the reasser-tion of territoriality and the proliferation of border forms and functions. Whilehe notes the dangers of making facile projections as far as the future of bordersis concerned, Blake draws special attention to the tendency towards the ‘region-alisation of border functions’. ‘Before long, the world political map depictedas a mosaic of brightly coloured independent sovereign states of equal statuswill have become meaningless. It will need to be replaced by a map thatshows the major political and economic blocs, distinguishing between theinternal and the external boundaries of the blocs’.1

This article takes up Blake’s call to examine borders in the context of theseregional blocs, and especially ‘how the external boundaries of the blocs func-tion’.2 My focus is the regionalisation of borders in Europe where transforma-tions in form and function have been particularly pronounced. The study ofborders is rapidly developing as a major area of interest for scholars ofEuropean integration as well as geopolitics. In the first section of the articleI briefly outline the principal ways in which the regionalisation of borders atthe level of the EU have been framed. I then make an argument for a different

William Walters, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Carleton University,Ottawa K1S 3A6. E-mail: <wwalters@ccs.carleton.ca>.

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perspective, one that takes up the theme of ‘geostrategies’. I identify a numberof different geostrategies in order to emphasise the plurality of the EU’s fron-tiers. Each geostrategy corresponds with a particular way of organising thespace of the border. It presupposes many things, including particular defini-tions of the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of the polity, the types of threat or problemwhich the border is to address, and specific accounts of the time and the spaceof the border. Geostrategies entail certain territorialisations. Each impliesa particular form of controlling space and population. But they also presupposeparticular definitions as to the identity and political rationality of Europe.

By adopting a perspective of geostrategies we can address the problem ofreductionism which is a feature of certain studies of Europe’s changing fron-tiers. By this I mean the tendency to search for the origins or the explanationof border forms in some kind of transformation located at a privileged level.Sometimes it is Europe understood as a polity or system of governance,a system of states. In other cases it is Europe understood as a political-economicformation or as site within a global system. While such modes of analysis mayproduce tidy narratives, they often do so by magnifying one set of tendencieswhile eclipsing others. They also tend to present change in evolutionary terms.A perspective of geostrategies eschews the search for an essence or cause.Instead, it is purposefully irreductionist and entails a multiplication of formsof intelligibility. The territorialisation of frontiers is presented in terms ofmultiple, competing geostrategies.

Theorising the Frontiers of the EU

There already exists a considerable literature either directly or tangentiallyexploring the connection between European integration and the frontiers andborders of the EU. This literature can be presented under at least three head-ings. First, there is now a large body of work at the intersection of migrationstudies,3 refugee and asylum law,4 citizenship studies,5 security theory,6 andincreasingly from specialists of European integration who are studying theEuropeanisation of justice and home affairs.7 Here one finds detailed discussionof the various EU policies and institutions and their implications for exclusionand inclusion. While it is not always explicitly about the frontiers of the EU,this literature has considerable relevance for their study. It stresses the drive toliberalise European frontiers has been accompanied by an equal if not greateremphasis on control. In its cruder formulations, this literature conceptualisesthe territorial implications of the Europeanisation of migration and domesticsecurity policy in terms of the figure of an emerging ‘Fortress Europe’. Butothers have suggested this is a very imprecise and misleading concept. Forinstance, while recognising that human rights and civil liberties activists havemobilised the figure of ‘Fortress Europe’ as a critical and polemical intervention,

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Didier Bigo argues it is not an adequate concept for the reality of Europe’sborders. Bigo argues that it is better to understand Fortress Europe not as anemergent reality but in terms of a discursive field. Here it functions as thecounter-pole to the fear of ‘Sieve Europe’, an idea which is typically mobilisedby security experts and police and military officials. Sieve Europe is a Europeopen and vulnerable to all manner of transnational threats. Bigo emphasisesthat Fortress Europe is something of an impossible dream. For the idea thatsocial and security problems can ultimately be solved by the total control ofborders is chimerical and logistically impossible.8

Second, we can identify an ongoing debate about the EU’s frontiers from theperspective of the EU as an emerging polity. Here the analysis proceeds bycomparing the EU with a stylised Westphalian state which, among other things,is presumed to have fixed borders delimiting its territory and a single sovereigncentre. In contrast, for some observers, the EU evokes a post-Westphalian andpostmodern polity which is moving away from a strong emphasis on boundedterritory.9 Instead, it is characterised by multiple, fluid spaces of regions,markets and cities connected by networks of communication, transportationand traversed by flows of goods, people, information and capital. On thisreading, the accent is on the EU as a moment of deterritorialisation. Itsinvolvement in border control and internal policing is downplayed. The EU isregarded as tending towards a space of flows rather than a space of places,a space where the lines between inside and outside are increasingly blurred.

But not all polity-focused analyses agree on its postmodernity. Othershave rejected the de-bordering and de-territorialisation themes, and in place ofthe postmodern, have emphasised analogies with medieval political space ormetaphorical empires. Here it is argued that the connections between territoryand function have become unbundled. In the past the functions of economicregulation, taxation, law, security etc. coincided across the same geographicallimit. Within the EU they no longer converge across the same territory, butmerely overlap. Borders do not become meaningless, but they are increasingly‘fuzzy’. The edges of the EU are better characterised as frontier zones ratherthan lines. This shift is deemed to correspond more generally with a post-ColdWar geopolitics in which the organisation of European political space is bettercharacterised in terms of a return to the logic of empires than by a bipolar divi-sion into rival blocs. The EU is considered as the principal empire, but Turkeyand Russia can also be seen in this way. These empires sustain a range of rela-tionships and levels of influence with surrounding states and populations.10

They radiate their influence outwards in a space that is imagined in terms ofripples of concentric circles.

A third line of analysis of the EU’s borders comes from political geogra-phers.11 Here research has placed the transformation of EU borders within alarger history of borders. One of the defining features and principal virtues of

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this work is its attention to specificity and context. Whereas certain polity-centred analyses tend to generalise based on a model of political-systemchange, this literature has been more careful to analyse the character ofspecific borders and to see changes in a more comparative context. This hasarguably made for richer analysis than the polity approach.

While each of these literatures has undoubtedly advanced our understand-ing of the frontiers of the EU, the argument of this article is that furtherprogress can be made at both theoretical and empirical levels. While thisarticle will intersect with themes raised by these three literatures, and utilisetheir findings, it will also draw upon other sources of theoretical inspiration.Two bodies of work can be mentioned in this respect. First, from criticalgeopolitics I take the need to go beyond structural and institutional accountsof the border and to attend to its representational and discursive aspects.12 Weneed to know how transformations in borders are underpinned and legitimatedby particular symbols and images, and by particular geographies of uneaseand insecurity. What kinds of imagined territories authorise attempts to trans-form the character and function of the EU’s frontiers? What types of historicalmemory do they invoke?

But I also draw upon work in ‘governmentality’.13 This line of thoughtemphasises, among other things, that governance is always a problematisingactivity.14 Governmentality research raises the possibility that we can writethe history of frontiers in terms of the particular problems to which the frontieris to respond. What and how does a frontier govern? What particular arts ofgovernment invest the border? Within what regimes of knowledge and prac-tice can it be located?15 Governmentality has emphasised the orientation ofpolitical power around questions of population rather than a juridical model.While one would not discount that borders have a deeply established connec-tion with sovereignty and territory, we should not overlook their relationshipwith the government and ordering of things and people. Governmentality canoffer an effective complement to critical geopolitics. Nigel Thrift has recentlysuggested that critical geopolitics has been good at deconstructing representa-tions, but has paid insufficient attention to the numerous, quotidian little prac-tices through which geo-power is exercised.16 Governmentality, on the otherhand, has privileged the latter. Between them, they allow us to locate fields ofinquiry between knowledge and practice.

The article proposes four analytics in order to conceptualise differentfacets of the EU’s changing borders. I call these the networked (non)border,the march, the colonial frontier and the limes. This approach, as well as theuse of the archaisms of march and limes, is inspired by the French theorist ofgeopolitics, Michel Foucher and his impressive study of the geopolitics ofEuropean frontiers. I argue that each of these analytics can be associated witha particular ‘geo-strategy’. Foucher uses the neologism of geostratregy to

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describe ‘the application of geographical reasoning to the conduct of war and/orto the setting up of a (national) defense scheme’.17 Geostrategy is the space ofcalculation concerning lines of defence and attack; it concerns such problemsas the movement and deployment of troops across territory, the defence ofstrategic zones and places, and the identification of the enemy’s weak points,their Achilles heel.

My use of the notion of geostrategy detaches it from this military associa-tion. The frontiers of the EU have certainly witnessed the flaring of militaryconflict – most notably with the wars in the former Yugoslavia. However, it isnot calculations and problems of a military nature which animate discussionsof the EU’s frontiers. Rather, the question of its frontiers is more immediatelyconnected with a series of highly charged socio-political issues, with so-called‘new’ security concerns such as drugs smuggling, terrorism, people trafficking,arms dealing and asylum seeking. While these issues are quite different innature they have become linked together by populist political rhetoric, mediarepresentations, security agencies and other ‘professionals in the managementof unease’18 to form what Bigo calls a ‘security continuum’.19 Whereas Foucher’sgeostrategies address military threats, the kinds of threats which our geostrate-gies confront are of a more specifically social and transnational character. AsI understand it, the geostrategic moment involves the instrumentalisation ofterritory for the purposes of governing one or more of these new securityissues.

My understanding of geostrategy also touches on the question of thetemporality of the border. One could reasonably argue that recent studies ofborders (and particularly those of the EU) have tended to privilege the spatialityof the border over its temporality. Yet the latter is arguably as constitutive ofthe identity of the border as its spatiality. While it does not foreground thisimportant theme, my argument touches on the temporality of the border in atleast two ways. First, in our discussion of the third geostratgy, the colonialfrontier, we encounter a form of border that is not fixed. Modern bordersbetween states may have been subject to periodic redrawing, particularly inthe wake of military conflicts. However, this is not the case for the type ofcolonial frontier that is typified by westward expansion in North America.There, constant movement and the assimilation of new territory, rather thanfixity, is a core feature of its mode of governance.

Second, there is a point about repetition and historical forms of borders.There is a powerful current within contemporary social theory that sees ourown age as entirely unprecedented. Ours is a global age, we are told, and assuch, a time unlike any other. The point of using archaisms like march andlimes is to introduce an element of circumspection into our analyses. It is tointimate that contemporary transformations in the frontiers of the EU and else-where are not entirely novel. On the contrary, they might be seen as recalling or

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reactivating much older figures of territory, forms of identity and geopower,albeit in ways that combine the old with the new.

There are two additional points to make by way of clarifying my conceptof geostrategy. First, a geostrategy is not intended to be a totalising descriptionof a particular reality but rather a concept to identify particular political pro-grammes and logics. Geostrategy is to be understood at the level of politicalaspirations, objectives and ambitions. To identify particular geostrategies isnot to assume that these aspirations are necessarily accomplished or fullyrealised. Hence, to speak of the march or the networked (non)border is not toimply that the EU’s frontiers fully conform to these images, only that this isone possible play of forces or line of development. The geostrategy is more acase of a certain will to shape reality according to a particular image than anactual state of affairs. This theoretical position means that we can acknowledgethe possibility of multiple geostrategies converging on, and investing a particular,concrete borderspace.

Finally, a point about power. The promise of an analysis couched in termsof multiple geostrategies is that we can move away from seeing borders asexpressions of a state power which is already there. Instead, it allows us toanalyse power from the ground up. Geostrategies are irreducible; they are theconditions of possibility for the exercise of power, not merely its local mani-festation.

The Geostrategies of EU Frontiers

The territoriality of the modern frontier was, in its ideal form, a dividing linebetween juridically equal but somewhat distrustful sovereign states. Of course,some were more open than others. But ostensibly it reflected John Agnew’simage of political space organised like a field of forces, that is, a world inwhich the relationship between states is purely external.20 How might wemake sense of the territoriality of the EU’s borders? How might we theorisetheir implications for territory and identity?

The Networked (Non)Border

The first geostrategy is the one that, on first appearance at least, resonatesmost powerfully with themes of deterritorialisation and arguments about‘borderless worlds’. It is a movement driven by the neoliberal imperative toremove obstacles to the ‘free movement’ of people, goods and services, or inthe more elevated prose of the Treaty of Rome, ‘to eliminate the barrierswhich divide Europe’.21 It is the removal of border controls from fixed posi-tions along the geographical borderlines of most EU states. But this is not tobe confused with the removal of controls more generally. Under the terms ofthe Schengen Agreement, states remove border controls along their common

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frontiers, but only within a framework in which these controls are replacedwith new forms of regulation. The most notable of these are the enhancementof cross-border police cooperation, mobile surveillance teams operatingwithin an extended border strip on either side of the old frontier, a commitmentto information exchange, common visas and the gradual harmonisation ofmigration and asylum policy, and the recognition of common standards in themanagement of the EU’s external frontier. This is the phenomenon I want tocall the rise of the networked (non)border. This term is meant to convey thesense in which networks of control come to substitute for the functions thatwere previously physically concentrated at the border.

For some countries, depending on their history and geography, this is theessence of Schengen. As one observer puts it: ‘cross-border co-operation . . . isprobably the most important part [of Schengen] if you talk to a Frenchman[sic] or a Spaniard. For them Schengen is police co-operation between neigh-bours’. This is the principle of ‘direct links’ which is at the heart of Schengen– the police phone their counterparts across the border rather than goingthrough the Ministries of Justice.22 According to Michel Pinauldt, a FrenchRepresentative on the Central Group of Schengen:

The security services were used to having fixed border posts that wereproperly set up with the necessary facilities to carry out border checks,they were used to covering a limited amount of terrain which they werevery familiar with and practically overnight they had to change theirworking method finding that they no longer had fixed border posts todeal with but were rather on the move, moving much more into thehinterland to carry out checks.23

Observing the way in which Schengen replaces internal borders withextended zones of police cooperation, researchers have suggested that what isat stake is a sort of diffusion or dispersal of the old border.24 Michel Fouchersuggests that: ‘On the one hand, frontier functions are disintegrating in aspatial sense. On the other hand, in certain respects, the entire national terri-tory is now being treated as an expanded frontier.’25 Didier Bigo takes theimplications of the networked (non) border even further. He relates it to therise of a new field of internal security, a meeting zone of various police andmilitary agencies, private security actors, etc which increasingly operateaccording to transnational and transversal logics.

Policing is now carried out using networks: networks of administrativebodies in which customs officers, immigration offices, consulates and evenprivate transport companies and private security companies join forceswith the national police forces and gendarmes; networks of informationtechnology with the creation of national or European data files on wanted

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or missing persons, on those who have been denied residence, expelled,turned back at the frontier or refused asylum . . . networks of liaisonofficers who have been sent abroad to represent their governments andenable information exchange; networks of semantics in which newdoctrines and new concepts on conflict and political violence aredeveloped’.26

These and other observations suggest a diffusion and a decentring of theborder. They seem to chime with the idea of deterritorialisation that is pre-valent within political geography and international relations. This describes amovement that is deprivileging or even escaping from fixed, geographicalterritory. This apparent sublimation of fixed territorial controls by networks ofcontrol and surveillance seems to fit the definition. But what if we considerDeleuze and Guattari’s use of this term, where territorialisation is any move-ment which striates, draws lines, fixes, orders, localises and segments.27 Thenwe are enjoined to consider the various movements of reterritorialisationwhich intersect this moment. What are the new territories which take shapefrom the old ones, which cut across or emerge at tangents to it?

In this case, Bigo’s field of internal security represents a movement ofreterritorialisation, comparable to the way in which modern policing formedin the nineteenth century. One important way that it territorialises is the mannerin which it locates a very diverse collection of issues – migration, narcoticssmuggling, weapons trading, political asylum, terrorism, football hooliganism –on the same plane.28 Where previously these were located in other adminis-trative fields (for instance, immigration was closely linked – conceptually andinstitutionally – to labour market policy), the internal security concept makesthem appear with an almost natural affinity to one another. They are all madeintelligible as exemplars of this more general problem of ‘transnational’risks. There are projects to govern them as mobile, elusive, ‘deterritorialised’threats to internal security and order. Think of previous spatialisations of the‘criminal problem’; how the nineteenth century understood it as a ‘disease’located in a social organism; or how the twentieth century came to see it as aconsequence of the dysfunctions of a social system. Today, the very fact ofnaming ‘crime’ and other threats in terms of networks (of terror, of people-smuggling, of drug smuggling . . . ) is itself a form of territorialisation.

This concept of internal security, depending as it does on such notions ofdeterritorialised risks, defines security in relation to a new territory. It is onethat alters the idea of what is inside and outside. This is well illustrated indiscussions concerning the reform of border controls in eastern Europe withthe prospect of these countries joining the EU. Here we find the clash betweenold and new practices, between quite different concepts of the border. Con-sider the evidence of a Pekka Järviö, Finnish border expert, before a House of

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Lords inquiry into the eastern extension of the Schengen project. It seems thatthe Finnish–Russian border is exemplary of how external frontiers shouldbe run.

The idea is to build an atmosphere of a joint task, although performedseparately, of keeping the border secure. This is something that we feelspeaks very strongly for our model and it speaks very strongly againstthe model which is applied in some countries, which is that at least partof the border is the responsibility of the military, of the Ministry ofDefence . . . It is important that it is done by professionals, not by themilitary. It is not military co-operation, it is border management.29

Here we see the strategic moment of this kind of border: effective frontiercontrol is to be sought through cooperation between state agencies on bothsides of the frontier. The activity of police must reconfigure itself as networksand ‘joint tasks’ to counteract a series of threats that are considered now totake the same form. Rather than a line which divides armed installations, or azone of confrontation, the border becomes a joint responsibility and the locusof a new practice of police cooperation. In the past the enemy stood, or moreevocatively massed, on the other side of the border. Force against force.Under the rubric of transnational threats, and deterritorialised risk, the enemyno longer has quite the same solidity, nor certainly the same kind of fixednational identity. The enemy is the networks, gangs, terrorists which cutacross/under borders. The criminalised enemy becomes the new threat, thebasis on which there can be cooperation and the ethos of the joint task on thepart of former adversaries; under this dispensation the logic is to unite the policeagencies and authorities across borders in the name of a perpetual struggle orwar against a postnational (and postpolitical) enemy. Rather than the edge orthe wall, the border becomes a strategic node within a transnational networkof control.

Yet it bears repeating that the ethos of joint cooperation and of policingnetworks traversing, and in places supplanting fixed borders, is a strategy andnot intended as a description of reality. As Anderson notes, many of these newpractices are far from being perfected; Schengen and Europol are in theirinfancy and face legal, political and technical problems. Joint policing is ham-pered by mistrust between agencies, especially at the eastern border. Europehas no singular model which it might generalise. On the contrary, there arerivalries amongst the French, German and British efforts to export theirown models to candidate countries, and these are often underpinned by thefinancial interests of different national security industries in exporting theirtechnology.30 Nevertheless, it is fair to say that networked policing is increas-ingly a norm in terms of which knowledges of borders are generated with theaim of bringing practices into line.31

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One last point about the networked (non)border is that it points away fromthe idea of the border as a contiguous space, a skin or enclosure of the state.But it does not dispense with material sites of control or gateways. Space doesnot sublimate into a post-territorial, informationalised ether. Consider the caseof international airports which are accorded special attention within theSchengen acquis. With the rise of air travel, airports have become pre-eminentgateways into national and EU spaces. Schengen has required airports tobe redesigned, and in some cases partially rebuilt so as to separate flows oftravellers between those that are ‘domestic’ to the EU, and those from outside.In this respect, the external border of states and the EU region is increasinglylocated in the interior, not at the geographical edges of the state.32 In otherwords, accompanying the rise of air travel, there is a disjunction between thepolitical-territorial borders of the polity, and the space of border control whichis now partly configured around a network of airports. They no longer neatlycoincide. In the calculated and controlled space of the international airport wehave another instance of reterritorialisation. Far from being transcended,physical space is reorganised and redeployed within new control strategies.Indeed, we can observe that the space of the airport becomes a key site inpractical searches for procedures capable of mediating between the twinimperative of Schengen, namely the principles of greater security and freedomof movement.33

March

A theme running throughout this article is that we should not consider thedeterritorialisation of borders without posing the question of new territoriali-sations – both of geographical space, but also other territories of control andidentity. To confine our discussion of EU borders to networks, or even to pri-vilege this form of spatiality, would be to risk the rather partial, and potentiallyideological representation of the EU as a debordered, postmodern polity.For the delocalisation and dispersal of border controls onto networked spaces(but spaces which articulate physical sites like the airport or the train station)is only one tendency. It needs to be seen alongside other transformations ofthe border, particularly at the ‘external’ frontier of Schengenland. The first ofthese involves the reappearance of the march.

The march is an archaic name that in many ways pertains to a premodernterritoriality when states and peoples were not divided by strict lines. Instead,it was common to find the march – ‘a neutral strip or belt of severance’.34 Tak-ing the cases of the Anglo-Gaelic and Anglo-Welsh marchs, Ellis describesthese as regions where ‘English settlements were often interspersed withnative areas, so creating multiple, localised frontiers which were fragmentedand fluid, rather than consolidated blocs. Both were zones of interactionand assimilation between peoples of very different cultures.’35 Pounds likens

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the march to a belt ‘without inhabitants or value, awaiting settlement andapportionment to one side or the other’. The march, then, is something like aninterzone between powers.36

While the march could be found in many places, it has a very long, historicalassociation with central and eastern Europe. The precise meaning of the wordUkraine is ‘march’ or ‘border area’.37 Foucher suggests that the march isreturning in central Europe which, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, representssomething of a security vacuum.

From the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, and perhaps part of the shores of theAdriatic Sea, a kind of ‘Middle Europe’ (Europe médiane, Mitteleuropa),an in-between Europe, is reviving, whose fate will be decided partlyfrom outside the region, in Washington, Moscow, Bonn/Berlin and,perhaps, in London and Paris.38

This idea of Middle or Central Europe, the space in-between, certainly pre-existed the Cold War division of Europe. Sir Halford Mackinder is sometimescredited with coining the term ‘Central Europe’ at the turn of the century, todenote a supranational state that would serve as a strong buffer zone betweenthe great powers of Germany and Russia. In the context of the VersaillesPeace Conference, he argued that the Wilsonian principle of self-determinationcould not apply to this zone, lest it created an unstable region populated bysmall, vulnerable states.39

I want to argue that it is not just with respect to traditional geopoliticsconcerns, but in relation to questions of ‘internal security’ that we can identifythe reemergence of the march. As we noted at the outset, it is not invasion byhostile armies which the EU states fear, but the permeation of criminalnetworks, and above all the entrance of clandestine migrants. In this respect,the post-Cold War subject now known collectively as the ‘central and easternEuropean countries’ (CEECs) find themselves located within a framework ofpolicies which seeks to organise them as a buffer zone, insulating the EU fromwhat many strategists perceive as the turbulent, chaotic spaces of the crum-bling Soviet empire to the east, and more generally, from global movementsof refugees and economic migrants. These measures include the ‘safe thirdcountry’ agreements and readmission treaties which seek to smooth thedeflection or expulsion of rejected asylum-seekers and unwanted migrantsfrom many EU states. But also the various programmes and policies which,either in exchange for aid, or as a condition for future membership, ‘encourage’bordering countries to close down known routes of clandestine entry, toimprove their detection and surveillance procedures.40 A particular phenomenonis of bordering countries strengthening their eastern borders. This leadsin places to developments which appear to invert the logic of the Cold Warborder regime. For instance, Hungary has downgraded the offence of crossing

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into Austria while fortifying its east. At the same time, it is Austria rather thanHungary which is most concerned with the security of their shared border.41

CEECs are keenly aware of the dangers of buffer zone status and doubtlesssee membership in international organisations like the EU and NATO, amongother things, as counter-measures. Hence it might be argued that the march isa temporary phenomenon, and that with Poland or the Czech Republic becomingfull EU members, they will cease to serve as buffers. However, there are certainfactors which seem to act to maintain the geostrategic relationship of themarch, that is a situation in which a belt of territories and states is accordedthe task of insulating an interior. First, there is the prospect that it will simplymove eastwards. In other words, the likelihood that as members of the EU,Slovakia or the Czech Republic will in future reproduce the march within theireastern neighbours.

Second, there is the question of the distribution of the massive financialburden of policing the EU’s external frontiers. One aspect of the enlargementproject is the displacement of this cost from states like Germany to the acces-sion countries. Of course, there are bilateral and EU schemes (e.g., GROTIUSand PHARE) to provide financial and technical assistance to the accessionstates to enhance, among other things, the capacity of their border controlsystems and in many cases fully consolidate these systems on a civilian ratherthan a military footing. However, these programmes cover only a fraction ofthe cost of policing the external frontiers. While a perception of transnationalcrime as a risk facing all EU states exists, and therefore, a sense that the easternmembers will police the external frontiers on behalf of the whole EU, thereseems little prospect for any significant EU-wide socialisation or redistributionof the costs of this undertaking across EU member states in the near future.42

Put differently, even within the EU, the likelihood is that the CEECs will con-tinue to function as a territorial security mechanism for the other members.

Finally, it would be mistaken to assume that the march can only take theform of a belt of territory. Here we might identify two tendencies. The firstis the territorialisation of a more global but also more dispersed march. Inthe previous section we noted that as international airports become strategicgateways into national and EU territory, and more generally, with the shiftfrom border control to more dispersed control networks, we see the consolid-ation of a non-contiguous border space. But we can also point to a paralleltrend for the march. Certain studies have highlighted how national and EUmigration and border policies are using such measures as carrier-liabilitylegislation, liaison officers in distant airports and consulates, and visa policiesto anticipate or intercept unwanted migration long before it can appear at theborder.43 In this way they encourage an extended, globalised buffer zone, onethat implicates in its network not only the border guards and officials ofCEECs, but a diverse array of private and commercial actors as well.

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But we might also observe that the march can materialise within the border.This is certainly one way of interpreting the controversial phenomenon ofzones d’attente at French international airports. These are spaces that theFrench authorities have defined as being outside the official territory ofFrance such that persons seeking asylum find themselves in a situation akin tobeing on the ‘high seas’.44 Here the foreigner can be detained for several daysbefore the intervention of French judicial authorities. For Giorgio Agambenthese ‘spaces of indistinction’, like the proliferation of refugee camps anddetention centres, are signs that the modern political order of territorialisedcitizenship is no longer adequate to the task of encompassing and regulatinghuman life.45 But we might add that zones d’attente might also be consideredas the actualisation of the march at a micropolitical level, complementing itsappearance at the macrolevel of geopolitical space.

Reflecting on what we have seen so far, it should be apparent that there is acertain resonance between the networked (non)border and the march. If thegeostrategic relationship of the march is one where particular states or territor-ies serve to protect and insulate an interior, today it is the proliferating networksof policing, information exchange and development assistance which – at thesame time that they relocate control functions away from many of the oldborder areas of western Europe – serve to reconstitute the march in new forms.Historically speaking, the figure of the march long predates the rise of infor-mation and control networks. But its reappearance today owes much to theorganisational possibilities presented by the network.

The Colonial Frontier

However, there are other aspects of the EU’s frontiers that are captured neitherin terms of the figure of the networked (non)border, nor the more archaicmarch. In their quest to make sense of the complexities of post-Cold Wargeopolitics, an increasing number of scholars are looking to models and meta-phors of ‘empire’. With the likelihood of further enlargement, and of an asym-metrical and multi-speed integration project, ‘both NATO and the EuropeanUnion may begin to look more like traditional empires, with [the] distinctionbetween centre and periphery . . . becoming almost as important as the distinc-tion between members and non-members’.46 This is particularly the case withstudies of the European Union as it seeks to enlarge eastwards. While I makeno attempt to summarise this literature here, my remaining two geostrategiessuggest it may also be useful to consider the EU’s borders through suchlenses.

The first of these imperial geostrategies is one I want to call the colonialfrontier. This was famously analysed in Frederick Jackson Turner’s TheFrontier in American History (1920). Of course, Turner’s account betraysmany of the racial and ethnocentric assumptions of its time. He saw the West

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of the American continent as essentially an empty wilderness populated onlyby ‘Indians’ who were less an existing civilisation but more typically under-stood as savagery. And Turner certainly contributed to the mythologisation ofwestward expansion. But while we need to recognise these aspects of Turner’swork, his account nevertheless enables us to name a certain kind of borderstrategy.

Like many illustrious observers before him – perhaps most notably deTocqueville – Turner produces a certain account of the uniqueness of Americathrough a comparison with Europe. Where the European border is ‘a fortifiedboundary line running through dense populations’, the American frontier is‘the outer edge of the wave – the meeting point between savagery and civilisa-tion’.47 This frontier is a dynamic space, a meeting point between a power,a culture and its outside. It is a space of interaction, assimilation, violence butalso pacification. But in Turner’s reading the colonial frontier is a creativezone – through settlement, expansion and colonisation it was not a matter oftransforming a territory in the image of the settler, the pioneer, the colonist –as though that identity were already given in advance. For the frontier actuallyproduces America and the American as a novel experience and subjectivityrespectively. ‘Little by little he [sic] transforms the wilderness, but the out-come is not the old Europe, not simply the development of Germanicgerms . . .The fact is, that here is a new product that is American.’48 If Americawill come to condense such themes as individualism, self-creation, opportunityand enterprise, then according to Turner these attributes are actualised withthe westward movement of the frontier. ‘American social development hasbeen continually beginning over again on the frontier.’49

What does this geostrategy bring to our understanding of the frontiers of theEU? If one can speak of a march with the CEECs, can we also conceptualiseaspects of eastern enlargement within this figure of the colonial frontier?Anderson and Bort recognise that the EU frontier has in common with theAmerican frontier the fact that both are mobile. Unlike state borders, colonialborders are less fixed; their movement can be a normal rather than an excep-tional feature of their identity.50 Yet they reject further parallels with Turner’sfrontier since the eastern frontier of the EU involves the enlargement of aunion of states, rather than an empire, but also ‘it is not the spread of a peopleor a “civilisation” across a continent. The EU expansion may diffuse certainnorms, values and practices, but it leaves many others in place’.51

While some observers have looked to ideas of Europe as a civilisation ina bid to demarcate its edges (most notably Samuel Huntington), it is true thatthe eastern expansion of the EU is certainly not proceeding under the auspicesof a nineteenth-century style civilisation mission. Rather, EU enlargement ismostly rationalised in terms of a discourse of markets, prosperity and stability.Moreover, the EU does not seek to subsume independent states and peoples,

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but articulate them into complex regimes of supranational and internationalregulation. However, the eastern frontier could be said to resemble Turner’scolonial frontier in at least one crucial respect. It represents a zone where anorganised power meets its outside in a relationship of transformation andassimilation. It is the setting of an asymmetrical relationship in which theexpanding power assumes a right to define what is appropriate and just. It isan organisation of political space in which the centre is the acknowledgedrepository and arbitrator of what is proper. What has changed is that the normswhich the EU upholds and generalises through its encounter with the acces-sion states are no longer the racial or explicitly cultural norms associated withnotions of civilisation. Rather, they are the seemingly more neutral, technicaland universal norms of political and economic ‘governance’ – from practicesof financial regulation to standards of border control.

The border acquires a particular identity within this geostrategy. It functionsas a temporary necessity, an expedient measure which can be removed once agreater equilibrium is attained between the inside and the outside. Considerthe point of view of one German expert on borders and security: ‘The issue ofinternal security in connection with EU enlargement is a very central issue inGermany, and we can only consider an opening of the present EU easternfrontier if the new EU external border standards meet the old standards’.52 Theimage is like a lock gate or a decompression chamber. Hence the controlsbetween Germany and Poland can be lifted, or more accurately transferred tothe Poland–Ukraine or Poland–Russia border the more that Poland is ‘integrated’within the EU space.

But it is important to stress that the colonial border does not just trace aline of integration of new areas into its empire. If its movement can be consid-ered as defining a greater or a wider European space, an enlarged EU-rope, itis simultaneously implicated in a practice we might designate as Europeandis-integration. The triumphant westward movement of the American frontierhad as its dismal and bloody underside the liquidation of indigenous peoplesand cultures. The consequences of European disintegration are not dramaticor genocidal like this. But it does entail the disruption of settled regional,economic and geopolitical relations.53 One example concerns Poland andUkraine. Since 1997 Poland has sought to tighten its eastern border controlswith a view to strengthening its ties to the EU, and ultimately acquiring fullmembership. This has had negative consequences for regional economies onboth sides of the Poland–Ukraine border, and proved detrimental for thoseUkrainian families which depend for their income on members working inPoland. Another example concerns Hungary and its eastern neighbours. In thiscase as well, the prospect of integration for one central European state hasimplications for its relationship with its neighbour, implications that areplayed out at the border. In this case, the key concern is Hungary’s adoption of

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the common EU visa policy and its ramifications for the three million or soethnic Hungarians living in surrounding countries, especially in Romania. Inthe past these groups have been able to travel and work in Hungary withoutvisas. However, by adopting the EU’s common visa policy, Hungary will facepolitical and cultural dilemmas, and practical challenges as to how to maintainthis historic and cultural relationship with foreign Hungarians, while avoidingantagonising their national government. In both the Polish and the Hungariancases, these challenges may not be insurmountable. For example, the Hungariangovernment might issue ethnic Hungarians with 10-year visas. However, thebigger point is that in each case, the colonial border has processes of disinte-gration as its flip side.

This has implications for the way that we understand European integration.Dominant approaches within EU studies have tended to represent Europeanintegration in state-centric terms. Typically it is depicted as a process in whichindependent nation-states become progressively embedded in regional polit-ical, economic and social structures.54 My problem with this representation isthat it is unduly narrow. It fails to recognise that the political space of Europehas rarely, if ever, been comprised solely of nation-states. As historical sociolo-gists of international relations have reminded us, for much of its history thenation-state has existed side by side, and often in competition with, a range ofother polities, such as city-states and empires.55 The major academic perspectiveson European integration treat countries like Britain and France as self-contained nation-states; they gloss over the fact that, until well into the twenti-eth century, such countries were also the centres of worldwide empires. Butonce we recognise this imperial identity more fully another account of Europeanintegration becomes possible. Instead of, or perhaps as well as, a process thatconnects formerly autonomous nation-states into a more integrated regionalorder, European integration might be seen as a shift within and between sys-tems of regional order and territoriality. For the formation of the EuropeanCommunity went hand in hand with the break-up of the European empires.Eastern enlargement suggests a similar process. The corollary of the enlargementof the European Union is the dismantling and reorganisation of social relationsthat are the legacy of previous systems of regional, international and supra-national order. Hungary is not integrated into Europe as though its territory andits population were previously ‘unintegrated’, as if it stood as a completelyautonomous, self-contained entity. Rather, what is at stake is Hungary’s dis-articulation from previous regional arrangements – the Warsaw Pact, the easternbloc, the Soviet ‘Empire’ – and its rearticulation into new ones. Europeanintegration implies, and manages, processes of dis-integration.

There is one final point raised by this suggestive figure of the colonialfrontier. We have said that this is a transformative, dynamic space in whichsocial relations are recreated. But more specifically, here we might press

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Turner’s argument that the political and cultural identity of America is incertain ways produced on the frontier. Can we say something similar ofEurope? The immediate answer must surely be not. While the colonial frontierentails a transformation in bureaucratic and regulatory practices, and while itmay disrupt existing political and social spaces, there is little evidence that adistinctly European culture or way of life is being fabricated at the frontier.Indeed, scholars have observed more generally that the project of Europeanintegration has not seen the emergence of a European identity or loyalty on thepart of its publics that might in any way rival national or regional identities.56

That said, it is nevertheless possible to argue that we can associate the gen-eration of a certain concept of Europe with the colonial frontier. As KrishanKumar, amongst others, has noted, it is in countries like the Czech Republicand Hungary that intellectual and public debates concerning Europeannesshave perhaps been most intense. We noted earlier how Central Europe can bethe ‘in-between’ land. But it is a complex identity. Kumar notes the variousmoves and elisions by which certain intellectuals have sought to establish the‘Western’ credentials of Central Europe.

‘Central Europe’ is ‘Europe’ (but perhaps temporarily ‘de-Europeanised’),and ‘Europe’ is really Western Europe. In the recoil from ‘EasternEurope’, the most eloquent and enthusiastic partisans of the CentralEuropean idea have come to insist ever more strongly that CentralEurope is essentially a part of Western Europe. Its incorporation in EasternEurope as ‘western Asia’ (Joseph Brodsky) has been a grotesque andtragic error. Properly viewed, it is at the edge of Western Europe.57

Hence, the end of the Cold War has seen the reinvention and popularisa-tion of an idea of Central Europe. But rather than a political project of institu-tionalising some form of collective Central European identity, reflectedperhaps in distinctive regional organisations of its own, these debates aboutEurope have been part of an ‘unseemly scramble’ to ‘rejoin’ the West. AsKumar seems to suggest, there is a sense in which ‘Western Europe’ as muchas ‘Central Europe’ is invented at the border.

Limes

But there are, of course, other types of border than can be derived fromimperial history. One of these is the ‘strategic figure’ that Rome, in its imper-ial phase, knew as the limes.58 If the space of the march is a area betweenpowers, an interzone, and that of the modern frontier a finite line demarcatingand separating territories, then the limes is more like an edge, fringe or limit.Whereas the modern frontier resembles a line between two formally equalmasses, the limes is like the colonial frontier: it takes shape between a power

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and its outside: ‘un monde et son contraire’,59 between the Empire and thebarbarians, or cosmos and chaos.60 Perhaps the principal difference betweenthe limes and the expansionary frontier is that with the latter, the line betweenthe civilised interior and the barbarian outside is always provisional, always inmotion. The limes occupies a somewhat different spatio-temporal matrix fromthe expansionary frontier. While the limes has a certain haziness, and mobility,it is nevertheless more permanent. While it may be a site of limited conflicts,the idea of limes is to create around the Empire a zone of stability and peace.61

Foucher describes limes as ‘essentially a strategy aiming both at containingunwelcome migrants and at organising trade with Romanised peoples and tobring them into a sustained peaceful relationship with the Empire’.62 Thestrategy of limes does not envisage a progressive or eventual subsumption ofthe exterior territory and its inhabitants. Instead, it effects the institutio-nalisation of asymmetries of economy, culture and order. Of course, modernfrontiers frequently separate and regulate relations between unequal powers.However, the limes involves differences of a qualitative nature. It is an‘asymmetrical relationship which remains a permanent source of tension’.63

Whereas the expansionary frontier reflects an aspiration to assimilate, tostabilise through expansion and colonisation, the limes draws a line. Its contri-bution to the Empire’s stability is to maintain peace and stability on itsfringes, to insulate; to maintain a distinction between the stability and orderwithin, and disorder, nomadism, barbarism outside. We have already notedthat Turner saw the frontier as central to the constitution of the polity since itis one of its key (re)generative mechanisms. The frontier is the challengewhich sets in motion forces of creativity and innovation. The limes is alsocentral to the polity, but as a different mechanism – this time as consolidative:let us draw a line here and preserve what we have.

Is the limes applicable to the European Union? Consider the telling remarkof Christian Deubner, a German specialist on border issues:

Borders are an essential instrument . . . for any functioning politicalentity, as long as the whole world is not organised on the same highstandard. So the better you want to organise and the higher you wantyour standards, the more important borders become for you for thebetter or worse of those who are outside.64

The area of Europe where the limes materialises more than anywheretoday is its Mediterranean frontier. The Mediterranean may have been thecentre of civilised world – mare nostrum – for the Romans. And for thenineteenth century it was internal to the cultural and economic space ofempires. But today it is a limes between North and South, between the ‘highlyorganised’ and ‘those who are outside’. If the geopolitical world was defined

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by the East–West line in the past, it is this limes which, for Rufin, is its axistoday. If the eastern frontier is moving, there is far less prospect of EU expansionto the south. Instead, from the point of view of the EU, the task becomes oneof containment in the face of a world that is viewed as profoundly alien.Perhaps nothing better suggests the materialisation of the limes than the wallthat has been built at Ceuta.65 Financed jointly by the EU and the Spanishgovernment, it is to defend this Spanish enclave at the tip of North Africafrom migrants seeking their way into the EU.

But the limes materialises in other places and in other ways. According toWhittaker ‘the Roman ideology of power . . . always claimed to reach beyondthe formal lines of administered territory’.66 He goes on to say that ‘the needfor political control beyond the administrative boundary, either through directmilitary occupation or through alliances, explains why limes came to meana frontier zone as well as some sort of boundary’.67 This tactic is echoed wher-ever EU states look to form alliances and ‘partnerships’ with police forces andborder authorities in Russia, Ukraine and elsewhere. Theorising these arrange-ments under the heading of the networked (non)border suggested their affinitywith other elements of ‘network societies’ and new logics of power. But herewe can see that they also echo a premodern past; they stand within a muchlonger historical trajectory of geopower relations.

We can contrast the different presuppositions about security at work here.The geostrategy of the expansionary frontier represents the spatial manifesta-tion of liberal globalisation and good governance. This is to extend the normsand institutions of market capitalism and liberal democracy into the formerterritories of communism and state planning. This is a model of security andorder premised on market civilisation. ‘Enlargement widens the pole of securitywhich was founded more than fifty years ago on the basis of Franco-Germanreconciliation . . . Increased prosperity brought about through the Single Mar-ket is itself a strong factor in support of stability’.68 The tactic is to draw thesecountries into a ‘wider zone of stability and prosperity’. The task of the borderis to manage this process.

The security of limes is not the same. It tends towards a more negativeconcept. It can be associated with the spatial limits of globalisation, the phe-nomenon Michael Mann names as ‘exclusive’ or ‘ostracising imperialism’.This concept is an important corrective to assumptions about the globality oruniversality of globalisation. This term ‘indicates that one part of the worldboth avoids and dominates the economy of the other, the precise mixture ofthese relationships varying by region and through time’.69 With the limes theaccent is on ‘avoidance’. The problem facing those outside, as Hirst andThompson point out, is ‘not imperial domination or attempts to annex theirresources, it is neglect and exclusion.’70 Seen from this perspective, the limesfigure the European community as a gated community.

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Concluding Observations

I have presented four geostrategies, though others could certainly be identi-fied. The spirit of this discussion of geostrategies is to be exemplary ratherthan exhaustive. One of the points in speaking of strategies is to emphasisethat this is a not realist account of actual political space. Unlike certain institu-tionalist accounts of the EU, I do not seek to capture its essence. The EU, likeany political entity, can be regarded as a multiplicity, a shifting ensemble ofheterogeneous political rationalities and practices. Hence, these geostrategiesare not mutually exclusive. Rather, they might be regarded as tendencies orvectors. A given border will be the setting for more than one. But in mostcases it should be possible to identify dominant and subordinate or secondarygeostrategies. To take the case of the EU’s southern frontier, for example, thegeostrategy of limes seems to be dominant at present. But it is not exclusive.One reading of the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership which arose from theBarcelona Declaration, is that this merely strengthens the limes by seeking tostabilise the frontier through various programmes of regional assistance anddevelopment. However, with its stated aim of promoting regional orderthrough economic and political development, and in particular the goal of aEuro-Mediterranean Free Trade Area by 2010, one might see this partnershipas a point of passage by which the limes could be transformed into a morefully colonial and integrative frontier. Similarly, police partnerships whichtraverse the EU’s external frontier might be considered to occupy a spacesomewhere between the networked (non)border and the limes. Only furtherempirical work can establish whether such arrangements are attempts toextend control beyond the frontier, or whether they actually presage and effecta shift in strategy away from the control of narrowly fixed territory towardsmore dispersed control.

Drawing upon historical precedents and examples, geostrategies have thepotential to offer a much more nuanced and topographical account of the pro-duction of geopolitical space in Europe than do concepts like ‘fuzzy borders’or Fortress Europe. Moreover, they can conceptualise power relations in away that the largely institutionalist governance literature does not. In addition,archaisms like march and limes avoid the tendency of certain globalisationtheorists to see our own time as completely novel or unprecedented. On thecontrary, they allow for a more nuanced and qualified account of politicaltransformation, one that acknowledges that the exercise of political orgeopower is not infinitely elastic, but mobilises a certain historical repertoireof governmental forms, technologies and identities.71

Further research could fruitfully explore the strategic aspect of geostrategies.This could emphasise border tactics and games – the often tacit rules, tactics,assumptions in operation. For instance, the networked border involves a game

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of mobilising networks to fight networks, just as modern warfare pittedbureaucratic armies against one another. Similarly, one might investigate themarch as a game in which the EU states exploit the political desire of acces-sion states to join the EU. This could be contrasted with the EU’s southernborder with the North African states. Here is has been less successful at win-ning the cooperation of North African authorities, and involving them in jointpolicing operations. This perhaps reflects the fact that the CEECs have agreater stake in such games given their desire for accession.72 Limes, ratherthan march, figures the southern border. Hence ‘the wall’ may have largelydisappeared from the East only to reappear on the southern frontier of the EU.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Canadian Political Science AssociationAnnual Meetings, University of Toronto May 31, 2002. Funding for this research was providedby the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Standard Research GrantsProgram, #410-2000-1415.

NOTES

1. G. Blake, ‘State Limits in the Early Twenty-First Century: Observations on Form and Function’,Geopolitics 5/1 (2000) p.1.

2. Ibid., p.16. 3. R. Miles and D. Thränhardt, Migration and European Integration: The Dynamics of Inclusion

and Exclusion (London: Pinter Publishers 1995); G. Lahav, ‘Immigration and the State: TheDevolution and Privatization of Immigration Control in the EU’, Journal of Ethnic and Migra-tion Studies 24/1 (1998) pp.675–94; M. Ugur, ‘Freedom of Movement Versus Exclusion:A Reinterpretation of the “Iinsider” – “Outsider” Divide in the European Union’, InternationalMigration Review 29 (1995) pp.964–99.

4. J. van der Klaauw, ‘Towards a Common Asylum Procedure’, in Elspeth Guild and Carol Harlow(eds), Implementing Amsterdam: Immigration and Asylum Rights in EC (Oxford: Hart 2001);G. Noll, ‘Prisoners’ Dilemma in Fortress Europe: On the Prospects for Equitable Burden-Sharing in the European Union’, German Yearbook of International Law 40 (1997).

5. É. Balibar, Nous, Citoyens d’Europe? (Paris: Éditions La Découverte & Syros 2001). 6. D. Bigo, ‘Frontiers and Security in the European Union: The Illusion of Migration Control’, in

Malcolm Anderson and Eberhard Bort (eds), The Frontiers of Europe (London and Washington,DC: Pinter 1998); J. Huysmans, ‘The European Union and the Securitization of Migration’,Journal of Common Market Studies 38/5 (2000) pp.751–77.

7. H. Grabbe, ‘The Sharp Edges of Europe: Extending Schengen Eastwards’, InternationalJournal 76/3 (2000) pp.519–36; J. Monar, ‘The Impact of Schengen on Justice and HomeAffairs in the European Union: An Assessment on the Threshold to is Incorporation’, in Monicaden Boer (ed.), Schengen Still Going Strong (Maastricht: European Institute of Public Admin-istration 2000); M. den Boer, ‘Moving between Bogus and Bona Fide: The Policing of Inclu-sion and Exclusion in Europe’, in Miles and Thränhardt (note 3) pp.92–111; A. Geddes,Immigration and European Integration: Towards Fortress Europe? (Manchester: ManchesterUniversity Press 1999); S. Lavenex, Security Threat or Human Right? Conflicting Frames inthe Eastern Enlargement of the EU Asylum and Immigration Policies, EUI Working Paper,RSC, No.2000/7 (San Domenico di Fiesole: European University Institute Robert SchumanCentre 2000).

8. D. Bigo, ‘Frontiers and Security’ (note 6).

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9. B. Axford and R. Huggins, ‘Towards a Post-National Polity: The Emergence of the NetworkSociety in Europe’, in D. Smith and S. Wright (eds), Whose Europe? The Turn towardsDemocracy (Oxford: Blackwell 1999) come close to this position when they contrast the EUas a postnational space of flows with the territorial logic of the state system: They argue that‘transnational networks and flows are an augury of a postnational polity in Europe, whereborders of various sorts are less and less relevant to the conduct of governance and, more con-tentiously, to definitions of political community and civil society’ (pp.196–7). However, theydo not see this as the present reality of the EU, but rather a trend; ‘for the foreseeable futuresuch developments do not mean the death of the territorial state . . . Rather, the postnationalpolity will subsist both as a post-modern space of flows and a modern space of places.’ Similarly,van Ham, despite recognising Schengen and the ‘political prominence of border controls’,suggests that ‘Europe is characterised by borders and boundaries that pass everywhere, mak-ing the concept of internal and sovereign territory increasingly irrelevant’ (p.95); P. van Ham,European Integration and the Postmodern Condition (London: Routledge 2001). See alsoR. Cooper, The Postmodern State and the World Order (London: Demos/The Foreign PolicyCentre 2000) for whom the world is divisible into premodern, modern and postmodernregions. The EU exemplifies the postmodern world where security is no longer linked to con-trol over territory.

10. One of the fuller statements of the empire analogy regarding the EU is O. Wæver, ‘ImperialMetaphors: Emerging European Analogies to Pre-Nation-State Imperial Systems’, in OlaTunander, Pavel Bayev and Victoria Ingrid Einagel (eds), Geopolitics in Post-Wall Europe:Security, Territory and Identity (London and Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage 1997). But see alsoT. Christiansen, ‘Fuzzy Politics around Fuzzy Borders: The EU’s Near Abroad’, Cooperationand Conflict 35/4 (2000) pp.389–416; J. Zielonka, ‘How Enlarged Borders will Reshape theEuropean Union’, Journal of Common Market Studies 39 (2001). On the intellectual originsof neo-medieval concepts, including Hedley Bull’s seminal work, see N.J. Rennger,‘European Communities in a Neo-Medieval Global Polity: The Dilemmas of Fairyland?’, inMorten Kelstrup and Michael Williams (eds), International Relations Theory and the Politicsof European Integration (London: Routledge 2000).

11. Here a major contribution has been made by Malcolm Anderson and his colleagues.See M. Anderson, Frontiers. Territory and State Formation in the Modern World(Cambridge: Polity 1996); M. Anderson and E. Bort (eds), Boundaries and Identities: TheEastern Frontier of the European Union (Edinburgh: ISSI 1996); M. Anderson andE. Bort (eds), Schengen and EU Enlargement: Security and Cooperation at the EasternFrontier of the European Union (Edinburgh: ISSI 1997); M. Anderson and E. Bort, TheFrontiers of the European Union (New York: Palgrave 2001); J. Langer, ‘Towards aConceptualization of Border: The Central European Experience’, in Heikki Eskelinen,Ikka Liikanen and Jukka Oksa (eds), Curtains of Iron and Gold: Reconstructing Bordersand Scales of Integration (Aldershot: Ashgate 1999) pp.25–42; A. Paasi, ‘The PoliticalGeography of Boundaries at the End of the Millennium: Challenges of the De-Territorial-izing World’, in Eskelinen, Liikanen and Oksa, pp.2–9. Following Martinez, we need tonote the different contexts of borders – from ‘alienated’ to ‘co-existent’ and from ‘inter-dependent’ and ‘integrated ‘ Cited by A. Paasi, ‘Boundaries as Social Processes: Territor-iality in the World of Flows’, in David Newman (ed.), Boundaries, Territory andPostmodernity (London: Frank Cass 1999) p.72. Or, following Bottin, we might differen-tiate between ‘la limite’, ‘la frontière-contact’ and ‘la frontière-obstacle’; M. Bottin, ‘LaFrontière de ‘l’état’. Approche Historique et Juridique’, Sciences de la Société 37 (1996)pp.15–26.

12. S. Dalby and G. Ó Tuathail, Rethinking Geopolitics (New York: Routledge 1998); J. Agnew,Geopolitics: Re-visioning World Politics (London: Routledge 1998).

13. M. Foucault, ‘Governmentality’, plus essays by other contributors in Graham Burchell, ColinGordon, and Peter Miller (eds), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago,IL: University of Chicago Press 1991); M. Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Mod-ern Society (London: Sage 1999).

14. N. Rose and P. Miller, ‘Political Power beyond the State: Problematics of Government’,British Journal of Sociology 43/2 (1992) pp.172–205.

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15. I have pursued these questions at further length elsewhere. See W. Walters, ‘Mapping Schen-genland: Denaturalizing the Border’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 20/5(2002) pp.561–80; idem, ‘The Power of Inscription: Beyond Social Construction and Decon-struction in European Union Studies’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 31 (2002)pp.83–108.

16. N. Thrift, ‘It’s the Little Things’, in K. Dodds and D. Atkinson (eds), Geopolitical Traditions:A Century of Geopolitical Thought (London: Routledge 2000).

17. M. Foucher, ‘The Geopolitics of Frontlines and Borderlines’, in Jacques Lévy (ed.), FromGeopolitics to Global Politics: A French Connection (London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass2001) p.165.

18. D. Bigo, ‘Security and Immigration: Toward a Critique of the Governmentality of Unease’,Alternatives 27, special issue (2002) p.64.

19. D. Bigo, ‘The European Internal Security Field: Stakes and Rivalries in a Newly DevelopingArea of Police Intervention’ in M. Anderson and M. Den Boer (eds), Policing across NationalBoundaries (London: Pinter 1994).

20. J. Agnew, ‘Mapping Political Power beyond State Boundaries: Territory, Identity, and Move-ment in World Politics’, Millennium 28/3 (1999) pp.499–521.

21. Treaty Establishing the European Economic Community, Rome, 25 March 1957, Preamble,cited in H. Grabbe, ‘The Sharp Edges of Europe: Extending Schengen Eastwards’, Inter-national Journal 76/3 (2000) p.520.

22. Pekka Järviö, Justice and Home Affairs Coordinator, Finish Ministry of the Interior in Houseof Lords, ‘Enlargement and EU External Frontier Controls’, European Union Committee,Seventeenth Report, Session 1999–2000, HL 110 (London: The Stationery Office), Minutesof Evidence (28 June), Qn 244.

23. House of Lords, ‘Schengen and the United Kingdom’s Border Controls’, Select Committeeon European Communities, Seventh Report, Session 1998–1999, HL 37 (London: The Station-ery Office), Minutes of Evidence (December 2), Qn 48.

24. M. Anderson, Border Regimes and Security in an Enlarged European Community: Implicationsof the Entry into Force of the Amsterdam Treaty, EUI working paper, RSC; no.2000/8 (SanDomenico di Fiesole: European University Institute Robert Schuman Centre, 2000) p.4.

25. M. Foucher, ‘The Geopolitics of European Frontiers’, in Anderson and Bort, The Frontiers ofEurope (note 6) p.238.

26. D. Bigo, ‘When Two become One: Internal and External Securitisations in Europe’, in Kelstrupand Williams (note 10) p.185.

27. G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans.Massumi, Brian (London: Athlone Press 1987).

28. We need names to map these new conceptual territories. Hence Grabbe’s (note 7) useful termfor this space – ‘Trevi transnationlism’, after the Trevi group, one of the more longstandingintergovernmental and interagency forums dealing with transnational threats.

29. House of Lords (note 22), Qn 262. 30. ‘When it comes to police cooperation with the Central and East European candidate coun-

tries, endemic problems of lack of trust and reciprocity, readiness to invoke cultural stereo-types, and the absence of a common EU model of policing are all too apparent . . . Policecooperation is further encumbered by the diversity of models of policing across Europe,which makes it difficult at the EU level to prescribe a single model for training the CEEpolice forces. There is much evidence of competition between, for example, French, Germanand British efforts to export their own model to the candidate countries, often backed by theinterests of national security industries in exporting their technology’. G. Amato and J. Batt,The Long-Term Implications of EU Enlargement: The Nature of the New Border: FinalReport of the Reflection Group (San Domenico di Fiesole: European University InstituteRobert Schuman Centre 1999).

31. See, for example, the Collective Evaluation Mechanism of the EU Council. This represents a‘detailed structured checklist’, a kind of audit of the frontier control capacities of candidatecountries covering such matters as ‘international cooperation, surveillance standards and staffand training issues’. House of Lords, ‘Enlargement and EU External Frontier Controls’,Seventeenth Report, Session 1999–2000, para.20.

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32. The focus on the airport as the border of ‘Europe’ is set to become more intense. For instance,it has recently been reported in the context of a meeting of EU interior ministers, that inter-national airports are now more vulnerable to ‘illegal’ entry than land borders. As a counter meas-ure, a project to create a special border police for airports is being piloted at Rome airport,Agence Presse, 30 May 2002; US Department of State, International Information Program,<http:/ /usinfo.state.gov/regional/ea/chinaaliens/innewsmay02.htm>, accessed 6 November 2002.

33. W. Walters, ‘The Power of Inscription: Beyond Social Construction and Deconstruction inEuropean Union Studies’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 31 (2002) pp.83–108.

34. Lord Curzon, Frontiers (The Romanes Lecture 1907) (Oxford: Clarendon 1908) p.28. 35. S. Ellis, Tudor Frontiers and Noble Power: The Making of the British State (Oxford: Clarendon

Press 1995). 36. N. Pounds, ‘The Origin of the Idea of Natural Frontiers in France’, Annals of the Association

of American Geographers 41 (1951) pp.146–57. 37. Foucher, ‘The Geopolitics of European Frontiers’ (note 24) p.236. 38. Ibid. 39. K. Kumar, 1989: Revolutionary Ideas and Ideals, (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota

Press 2001) p.77–8. 40. N. Bhutta, Pass Laws in the Global Village: Enemy Aliens – Asylum Seekers, Economic Migrants

and Border Controls, 2001, available at <http:/ /www.antimedia.net/xborder/index.html>, accessed3 March 2002.

41. M. King, ‘The Impact of Western European Border Policies on the Control of Refugees inEastern and Central Europe’, New Community 19/2 (1993).

42. The House of Lords report that ‘there can be no doubt that the candidate countries will stillfor many years be unable to meet the exacting Schengen standards without further supportfrom the EU, primarily because of their huge deficits in moden frontier control installationsand equipment. So far the EU – faced with severe budgetary restrictions for the foreseeablefuture – has been reluctant to make any commitments in this respect’; House of Lords,‘Enlargement and EU External Frontier Controls’, Seventeenth Report, Session 1999–2000,para.22. As the EU moves from being a small, compact club of states with a rough parity interms of socioeconomic development, to a much wider and possibly multi-tiered organizationof states bearing much more diverse levels of wealth, then the prospects for redistributionschemes along the lines of the old Common Agricultural Policy, or the Regional Develop-ment Funds would seem to worsen.

43. Lahav (note 3). 44. For a fuller discussion of zones d’attente, see Committee on Migration, Refugees and

Demography, (Parliamentary Assembly to the Council of Europe), Arrival of Asylum Seekersat European Airports, Doc.8761, 8 June 2000.

45. See G. Agamben, ‘What is a Camp?’ in his collected essays: Means without End: Notes onPolitics (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press 2000).

46. P. Hassner, ‘Obstinate and Obsolete: Non-Territorial Transnational Forces versus theEuropean Territorial State’, in Tunander, Bayev and Einagel (note 10).

47. F.J. Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York: Henry Holt and Company 1920)p.3.

48. Ibid., p.4. 49. Ibid., p.2. Compare the way in which Turner privileges the border as a site of creation with

Wæver’s relative de-emphasis on imperial borders. For Wæver the imperial border is a rela-tively minor affair; a zone of diminished social energy. ‘Nation-states, at least in principle,have a “constant energy” across their territory. While the energy in empires fades out and islow at the periphery, states stand with full force at their borders’. He suggests that there maybe conflictual zones, ‘but empires will not rub against each other in the same way nation-states do’. Wæver (note 10) p.78

50. Anderson, Border Regimes (note 24) p.4. We can note as a general point that the spatiality ofborders has been privileged over their temporality. Yet the temporality of the border – its fixity,its relationship to historical memory, etc. – is also a constitutive feature of its identity. This isan area of border studies that surely invites further research.

51. Anderson and Bort, The Frontiers of the European Union (note 11) p.143.

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52. Dr Gerold Lehngruth, Ministerialdirektor, German Ministry of Interior, quoted in House ofLords, ‘Enlargement and EU External Frontier Controls’, European Union Committee,Seventeenth Report, Session 1999–2000, Minutes of Evidence, 5 July 2000, Qn 266.

53. Extended discussions of the political, social and economic implications of the external front-ier in central and eastern Europe can be found in House of Lords, ‘Enlargement and EUExternal Frontier Controls’; Amato and Batt (note 32); H. Grabbe, ‘The Sharp Edges ofEurope: Extending Schengen Eastwards’, International Journal 76/3 (2000) pp.519–36.

54. For instance, see Hettne’s characterization of regionalism as the expression of an emerging‘post-Westphalian’ world; ‘The fate of citizenship in post-Westphalia’, Citizenship Studies 4/1(2000) pp.31–46.

55. For example, see Y. Ferguson and R. Mansbach, ‘Political Space and Westphalian States in aWorld of “Polities”: Beyond Inside and Outside’, Global Governance 2 (1996) pp.261–87;H. Spruyt, The Sovereign State and its Competitors: An Analysis of Systems Change (Princeton,NJ: Princeton University Press 1994).

56. C. Shore, Building Europe: The Cultural Politics of European Integration (London: Routledge2000); A.D. Smith, ‘A Europe of Nations or a Nation of Europe’, Journal of Peace Research30/2 (1993).

57. Kumar (note 39) p.81. 58. J.-C. Rufin, L’empire et les nouveaux barbares (Paris: JC Lattès 2001) p.145. 59. Ibid., p.149. 60. O. Tunander, ‘Post-Cold War Europe: Synthesis of a Bipolar Friend-Foe Structure and a

Hierarchic Cosmos-Chaos Structure?’, in Tunander, Bayev and Einagel (note 10). 61. Rufin (note 58) pp.145–51. 62. Foucher, ‘The Geopolitics of European Frontiers’ (note 24) p.236. 63. Ibid., p.236. 64. Dr Christian Deubner, Head, Research Group, Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, Munich;

evidence to House of Lords, ‘Enlargement and EU External Frontier Controls’, EuropeanUnion Committee, Seventeenth Report, Session 1999–2000, Minutes of Evidence, Qn 57.

65. Tunander (note 60) p.26. 66. C.R. Whittaker, Frontiers of the Roman Empire. A Social and Economic Study (Baltimore

and London: Johns Hopkins University Press 1994) p.200. 67. Ibid., p.201. 68. J. Solana, EU High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy, ‘Europe:

Security in the Twenty-First Century’, The Olaf Palme Memorial Lecture, Stockholm, 20June 2001.

69. M. Mann, ‘Globalization and September 11’, New Left Review 12 (2nd series) (2002) p.53. 70. P. Hirst and G. Thompson, ‘Globalization and the Future of the Nation State,’ Economy and

Society 24/3 (1995), p.419. 71. See, for example, Foucault’s observation that modern states contain the potential to become

‘really demonic’. As Dean explains, this is because they contain elements of political powerderived from very different sources: on the one hand the ‘city-citizen game’ of the ancientGreeks, on the other, the pastoral ‘shepherd flock game’ of early Christianity. Genocide andthe development of total war can be understood in terms of particular, lethal combinations ofthese ‘two trajectories of rule’. See M. Dean, ‘Powers of Life and Death beyond Governmen-tality’, Cultural Values 6/1 (2002) p.121; M.Foucault, ‘ “Omnes et Singulatim”: Toward a Critiqueof Political Reason’, in James Faubion (ed.), Michel Foucault. Power. (Essential Works ofMichel Foucault Vol.3) (New York: New Press 2000).

72. Anderson and Bort, The Frontiers of the European Union (note 11).

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