Europe as Borderland

The essay “Europe as borderland” is based on a lecture given by Étienne Balibar on 10 November 2004 at the Radhoud University Nijmegen; the text can be found in English as the actual transcript of Balibar’s lecture and in a revised version in form of an article in the journal Society and Space. A French version is included in Balibar’s Europe Constitution Frontière (2005). The journal article summed up here consists of two main parts plus a summary cum conclusion.

In the first part, Balibar puts the focus on political spaces and introduces his understanding and use of some key concepts. He begins by outlining the conditionality of borders for political spaces. The territorialization of spaces functions as a precondition of “politics,” and also serves “to assign ‘identities’ for collective subjects within structures of power” (p. 192). He draws the historical development and the invention of borders in Europe from ancient forms of “marches” or “limes,” border(lines) of realms of sovereigns and free cities, borders as markers of national territories, towards more recent global borders as the Iron Curtain and the subsequent North-South divide, and resulting in today’s complex situation of blurred internal and external borders in Europe. Balibar explains how these shifting understandings and functions of the border correlate with changing notions of sovereignty and citizenship. In order to be able to analyze the situation of Europe with its complex and interwoven net of internal and external borders, Balibar presents three models of political spaces (“Clash-of-Civilization,” “Global Network,” and “Center vs. Periphery”) and suggests a fourth one, which he considers fitting to present and future Europe (“Europe as Borderland”) (pp. 194 et seqq). The model of Europe as a borderland allows for a contemporality of all previous models; it enables us to overcome the binary thinking of interior vs. exterior and immagines “ubiquitous and multiple” borders (p. 1 lecture). His idea of Europe as borderland is reflected in a picture showing open overlapping spaces on the cover of Balibar’s Les frontiéres de la democratie:

In the second part of his article, Balibar suggests a rethinking of the “dialectics of ‘territorialization’ and ‘deterritorialization’” (p. 201). In today’s globalized world, especially in Europe, the place where Balibar applies and where he deduces his theoretical ideas from, the distinction between ‘interior and ‘exterior’ can no longer be upheld.

Contemporarily applying conflicting patterns of political spaces to the ‘figure’ of Europe in the world highlights policies which affect both the interior and the exterior, as he exemplifies with his analysis of security policies and cultural-linguistic differences in Europe. Balibar argues that “the ‘material constitution’ of Europe, underlying the emergence of the ‘European citizen’ as a new historic figure […] oscillates” between two opposing poles, namely on the one hand “violent process[es] of exclusion,” e.g. through the brutal enforcement of ‘security borders,’ and on the other, through “’civil’ process[es] of elaboration of differences,” e.g. through the creation and promotion of Europe’s cultural ‘identity’ (p. 202). In discussing the “‘spatial political’ figure of Europe,” Balibar observes the dislocatedness and ubiquitousness of borders, which, on the one hand, become “replicated […] within the territories of the European states” and, on the other, are “transport[ed] beyond the borderline” (p. 203). Furthermore, Balibar analyzes the role of the transforming border in the production of strangers/foreigners, bringing his argument back to the topic of citizenship. Relying on Umberto Eco’s idea of translation as the common language of Europe and also Rosi Braidotti’s reflections on the nomad as a multilingual and –cultural individual, Balibar suggests translation as “a form of virtual deterritorialization” which “makes it possible also to ‘appropriate’ or ‘inhabit’ a transnational space and transform it into a new public sphere” (p. 207).

In his conclusion, Balibar sums up: “’Borderland’ is the name of the place where the opposites flow into one another” and raises “the issue of a ‘transnational […] figure of citizenship, which takes place within borders and beyond borders” (p. 210).