Henk van Houtum

Bordering, Ordering and Othering

In 1988, geographer David Sibley argued in his thought-provoking article on the purification of space that ‘there has been a failure to recognise boundary maintenance and the rejection of difference as something which is central to geography’ (1988, p. 410). Now, more than a decade later, it is almost a truism to say that the symbolisation and (discursive) institutionalisation of differences in space have gained central attention in present socalled critical geography debates. Forwarded mainly by post-structural and post-colonial theorisations, the post-modern concern with difference has almost become, as Jacobs (2000) argues, a shibboleth in human geography. Representing good political correctness for some and a form of unwanted celebration of subjectivity and hyper relativity for others, the usage and exploitation of the term ‘difference’ has become a differential principle itself among those who claim or believe themselves to be critical geographers and those who claim or believe themselves to be mainstream. Despite such agonistic tendencies, we believe the interesting and stimulating debate on difference has put the spotlight on relevant issues. The exclusionary consequences of the securing and governing of the ‘own’ economic welfare and identity has gained a more central and just place in the geographical debate. It is this topic that we define as bordering, which we relate to practices of othering, that is a central theme in this special issue. In particular, the practices of ordering and the discursive differentiation between us and them, seen through the lens of spatial bordering, are topics of interest here. Which are our contemporary bordering and ordering spatial routines and practices that seem to prevail daily praxis? Special attention is drawn to the awareness and perception of migrant others in our bordering discourses and practices. The challenging and sometimes horrifying reality of present territorial processes demands our constant critical awareness and attendance of processes of (b)ordering and othering, which have gained only more relevance in the light of current geo-political developments following the 11 September 2001 attack in the USA. The purpose of this special issue of TESG is to contribute to the geographical debate on (b)ordering and othering processes, focusing in particular on the issue of (im)mobility. A selection is offered of promising theoretical insights from various geographical contributors to the debate, drawing from spatially diverse actual cases. This introductory paper to the theme explores the concepts thought to be most significant in the debate on (b)ordering and othering, some elements of which are examined in more detail by the contributors to the issue. This paper begins by discussing the issue of bordering through immobilising people. This is followed by a debate on the making of places for economic or political strangers, the transnational places.

Human Blacklisting: The Global Apartheid of the EU's External Border Regime

Over the last few years, the global face of the EU has been changing. The EU is spinning a global border web with regard to the battle against irregular migration. At the borders of the EU, a powerful and security-obsessed distinction between travellers is increasingly being constructed between the travellers who ‘belong to’ the EU and those who do not, based on the fate of birth. To this end, the EU has composed a so-called ‘white and black’ Schengen list, recently relabelled a ‘positive and negative’ list, which is used as a criterion for visa applications. What is striking is that on the negative list a significantly high number of Muslim and developing states are listed. Hence, there is an implicit, strong inclination to use this list not only as a tool to guarantee security in physical terms or in terms of ‘Western’ identity protection but also as a means of keeping the worlds poorest out. Such global apartheid geopolitics—loaded with rhetoric on selective access, burden, and masses—provokes the dehumanisation and illegalisation of the travel of those who were born in what the EU has defined as the ‘wrong country’, the wastable and deportable lives from countries on the negative list. Such unauthorised travelling is increasingly dangerous as the high death toll suggests. It has led to a new and yet all too familiar geopolitical landscape in Europe, a scene many of us hope to never see again in postwar Europe, a landscape of barbed wire surveillance and camps. And hence, the EU—which started out as a means to produce a zone of peace and comfort ruled by law and order—has now in its self-proclaimed war on illegal migrants created a border industry that coconstructs more, not less, ‘illegality’, xenophobia, and fear: the EU as a global border machine.

The Geopolitics of Borders and Boundaries

What a joy it was. Re-reading two of the classic works in boundary and border studies, that is Julian Minghi’s overview and review of boundaries studies in political geography of 1963 and Victor Prescott’s work on the geography of frontiers and boundaries published in 1965, in order to write this commentary under the rubric ‘the classics revisited’, gave me a lot of enjoyment. It was an inspiring experience to be reminded again of the early insights of what could be considered two of the founding-persons in boundary and border studies. It was for instance pleasantly narcissistic and flattering for a boundary/border scholar to be reminded again by Minghi that boundaries touch the heart of the political geographical discipline: boundaries ‘are perhaps the most palpable political geographic phenomena’. 1 I could not agree more. Re-reading these two classics particularly reminded me as well of how embedded the past (as well as current) boundary and border paradigms and themes have been and are in the dominant academic thinking of the various times. We are children of our time. In the beginning of the twentieth century, different themes were debated, different approaches were popular and different views were held on how to approach and study the boundary/border. Where in the early 1960s the field of border studies was pre-dominantly focused on the study of the demarcation of boundaries, the lines, now the field of boundaries and border studies has arguably shifted from boundary studies to border studies. 2 Put differently, the attention has moved away from the study of the evolution and changes of the territorial line to the border, more complexly understood as a site at and through which socio-spatial differences are communicated. Hence, border studies can now dominantly be characterised as the study of human practices that constitute and represent differences in space. In other words, the border is now understood as a verb in the sense of bordering. 3 Confusingly, in anthropology, the definition is usually precisely opposite, here a boundary generally means the socio-spatially constructed differences between cultures/ categories and a border generally stands for a line demarcated in space. 4

Internationalisation and Mental Borders

Borders are barriers and barriers are to be removed. That was the basic idea of the European Commission in 1988 when publishing the White Paper, EC, 1985. The different juridical, ®scal, social, technical and economic frameworks of the European countries in the Community were believed to be a severe limitation on the growth of Europes competitiveness. Hence, a paradoxical measure had to be taken: the institutionalisation of a free market in the European Community. The speeding of the opening up of the borders within the European market has spawned a vast amount of literature on the economic geographical consequences of the uni®cation of the various countries. Surprisingly little, however, has been written from the perspective of human agents. The focus of economic geography tends to be on the spatial impact of the opening up of borders, and the development or economic pace and potential gains of European integration for cities and regions. How individuals perceive the opening up of borders has not received a great deal of attention in economic geographical literature. Neither have the mechanisms ± by which their actual behaviour is geared with respect to matters of the economic integration process ± been studied in depth. Yet, the micro-level of the integration process might render us important insights, which could enrich meso and macro theory development and policy. This paper makes a plea for the inclusion of the psychology of the behaviour of human agents in the study of economic geographical border issues.

III European perspectives on borderlands

Abstract The number of geographical studies on borders and border regions has increased over the last few decades due to the process of globalization. The European Union (EU) integration process in particular has created demand for such studies of its internal borders and the changing views about them. This research aims to define trends within these geographical studies in terms of the EU integration process and discover commonalities of themes and methods within them. Three approaches are identified (flow, cross‐border cooperation, and people), geographical studies of borders and border regions are categorized within them, and the approaches are compared to one another in an attempt to better understand the trends in geographical research on European borders and border regions.

Re-imagining spaces of (in)difference: Contextualising and reflecting on the intertwining of cities across borders

In his harmonious and appealing collected accounts on the modern city, James Donald claims that the way we live has a lot to do with the way we live together (p. xi, 1999). A city, he argues, ‘has always stood not only for the vanities, the squalor and the injustice of human society, but also for the aspiration to civilized sociation’ (p. xi). In this special issue, it is not the sociation of people within one city which is being debated, but the intent to find ways to gather and ‘cosmopolise’ people from two neighbouring cities. What is more, it concerns the sociation of citizens of two neighbouring cities across state borders. As this special issue presents a colourful set of special empirically rich case studies on efforts to aggregate various cities across borders, we were asked to scrub the surface of the various approaches put forward in this issue and when we felt necessary, to scrub against their grain. We express our gratitude to the editors for giving us this honourable task. We feel indebted to the various contributors in this issue, as they have given us an extensive body of information, insights and accounts on the making of bi-national cities, thus making our task of reflection arguably lighter than theirs. Their output was our input. Our epilogue embeds itself in the critical geographical debate that is focused on the denial of the opposition between reality and the immateriality of the city (see Donald, 1999). A city does not exist outside of the imagination, a city is made real through imagination. In principle then, creating one city out of two cities is merely a matter of boundless imagination. It is a matter of forgetting about scales, community or national borders or spatial fixations; it is a question of tapping into the ability and willingness to think the unthinkable. In this paper, we would like to scrutinise the current utopian dreamings and imaginations of crossing the border. Following Tourraine’s (2000) rhetorical book title ‘Can we live together?’, we particularly focus on the ‘together’ and on the word ‘Co’ in the images and imaginations of coexistence and cooperation between neighbouring cities. How is the strategic co-ing mapped out when constructing (the imagination of) a bi-national city? And how does this reimagining and reinscripting of the city relate to and unfold itself in current practices of citizens living in the imagined bi-national city? We start off by reflecting the complexity of the endeavours of objectifying cities, move onwards to reflect on current practices of reinscribing places across national borders and end by summarising our reflections on the potential of ‘co-ing’ cities across borders.

The Brave New World of the Post-society: The Mass-production of the Individual Consumer and the Emergence of Template Cities

Abstract Aldous Huxleys novel Brave New World (Longman, Harlow, 1932/1991) portrayed a post-human world, a world where human beings were mass-produced like clones and kept in complete happiness through an endless variation of seductions and pleasures. This essay explores parallels in contemporary urban society by analysing why and how we consume—goods, places, and ultimately ourselves—in our daily shopping spaces. In todays post-society, new fashions, representations and make-overs are introduced onto the global market at breakneck speed. Globalization implies an inexhaustible resource for change in local consumption spaces, creating continuous opportunities to transform our personal identities as well as our urban environments. In our world of globalization, hyper-capitalism, and mass-individualism, there seems to be no escape from having and parading a personal identity, no escape from the commercial template for seductive urban shopping spaces. Are we in control of our own destinies? Who are we fooling when we hide in the consumerist maze of fiction and fantasy? What brave new world are we living in?

Shifts in Governmentality, Territoriality and Governance: An Introduction

This introductory chapter discusses the relationship between state governance and specific forms of policy making in the light of three major kind of changes, in governmentality, territoriality and governance itself. Our basic assertion is that policy-specific developments are not just derivative but co-constitutive of broader discourses and practices, such as associated with the rise of neo-liberalism and multi-actor, multi-level governance. We then introduce the way we will explore our questions in the remainder of the book.