The symbolic role of national borders for cross-border regionalisation remains little-known. In order to broaden our understanding of the meaning-making capacity of borders, this paper looks at what happens when the border is apparently not the object of a symbolisation strategy. The case of Greater Geneva appears particularly informative as this cross-border cooperation seeks to develop an integrated urban agglomeration marked by the ‘erasure’ of the Franco-Swiss border. Rather than an absence of symbolisation, the border is recoded as a ‘planned obsolescence’ through its ‘invisibilization’ in the Genevan borderscape. However, the dissonance between this recoding by cross-border cooperation elites and existing popular imaginations weakens the cooperation project. To the extent that borders are powerful symbols which are intended to stimulate emotions and empathy, the ability to mobilize their meaning-making capacity is at the heart of symbolisation politics, as much for the proponents of open borders and cross-border cooperation as for the reactionary forces that emphasize national interests and ontological insecurity.
Chiara Brambilla considers globalised capitalism as a fundamentally geographical project, insofar as it is based on the relation between State, territory and capital, which are themselves closely connected to geographical concepts such as borders and landscapes. The resulting unevenly developed landscape constitutes the basis of modern capitalism. For Chiara Brambilla, it is necessary to offer new concepts for rather classical and static key geographical concepts such as “landscapes” and “borders” in order to produce an alternative (geo)political vision of capitalism. This is how she came up with the borderscape concept, which refers to the processual character of border landscapes, and uses it by drawing on Mezzadra and Neilson (2013) in order to produce a geographical opposition to capitalism.
