Luiza Bialasiewicz

Off-shoring and Out-sourcing the Borders of EUrope: Libya and EU Border Work in the Mediterranean

The article examines some of the novel ways in which the European Union carries out its ‘border-work’– border-work that stretches far beyond the external borders of the current Union. It highlights, in particular, the role of EUropes neighbours in new strategies of securitisation, drawing attention to some of the actors, sites and mechanisms that make the Unions border-work possible. The emphasis in the paper is on the Mediterranean, long the premier laboratory for creative solutions to the policing of EU borders. The discussion focuses predominantly on a difficult neighbour turned ‘friend’ – Libya – and its role in the EUropean archipelago of border-work.

Re-scaling ‘EU’rope: EU macro-regional fantasies in the Mediterranean

This article engages with the most recent spatial fantasy for the making of ‘EU’ropean space: the idea of trans-European macro-regions, currently in vogue in the policy literature. In particular, we focus on the imaginings of a Mediterranean macro-region as the latest incarnation of the macro-regional fad, but also as a useful prism for reflecting on some of the underlying conceptual as well as political and geopolitical challenges of the on-going remaking and rescaling of ‘EU’ropean space. We argue that, although there exists by now a vast literature by geographers and other scholars that engages with the production of ‘EU’ropean spaces through regionalization, the policy literature generated by EU ‘macro-regional experts’ appears to entirely ignore these debates, professing an understanding of regions that is a conceptual pastiche at best, and that entirely occludes the political and geopolitical implications of region-making within, at, and beyond ‘EU’rope’s borders

Mapping the political geographies of Europeanization: National discourses, external perceptions and the question of popular culture

Political geographers have significantly contributed to understandings of the spatialities of Europeanization. We review some of this work, while also highlighting research themes where further political-geographic research would be insightful. We note the importance of work that captures both the diverse expressions and meanings attributed to Europe, European integration and ‘European power’ in different places within and beyond the EU, and the variegated manifestations of ‘Europeanizing’ processes across these different spaces. We also suggest that political-geographic research can add crucial input to reconceptualizing European integration as well as Europeanization as it now unfolds in a time of ‘crisis’.

Upper Silesia: Rebirth of a Regional Identity in Poland

Despite a decade of fundamental constitutional reforms, the question of the restructuring of the institutions of local governance continues to dominate the political scene in post-communist Poland. A far-reaching administrative reform of the Polish state was, at long last, implemented on 1 January 1999. The reform created 16 new regions (wojewodztwa), completing the process of administrative decentralization begun in 1990, and granting a whole series of capabilities to the new regional councils including, for the first time, responsibility for developing and implementing regional economic policies (see Kisielowska-Lipman’s contribution). The enactment of the new institutional architecture, however, has only further ignited the debate over the proper division of competences between the various levels of territorial governance and their relation to the national state. Decentralization holds high symbolic value in the post-communist political imagination and, since 1989, has been touted both by representatives of the Polish state and by citizen groups as a key indicator of the transition to participatory democracy. This phenomenon is not unique to Poland (see for example, Fowler’s discussion of the Hungarian case in this volume) and, just as in other post-communist contexts, in Poland too there exists broad consensus across party and ideological divides on the need for decentralization, a principle also enshrined by the new Polish constitution that ‘guarantees the decentralization of public authorities’ and recognizes the municipalities (gminy) as the basic units of territorial self-rule. Calls for territorial-administrative reform also reflect the rediscovery of historical-cultural regional and local specificities within a national space declared homogeneous during the 45 years of communist rule. Such a rediscovery is emotionally charged, and opens up new opportunities for collective self-definition, with the articulation of local and regional difference becoming a key locus of cultural politics as people reclaim their past and declare their belonging. It should also be noted, however, that internal reforms in the post-communist states do not proceed in a geopolitical vacuum, and much has been written about the weight of ‘Western’ models in shaping domestic political and economic choices in

‘The Death of the West’: Samuel Huntington, Oriana Fallaci and a New ‘Moral’ Geopolitics of Births and Bodies

The ‘War on Terror’ has justified a whole new set of re-territorialisations of security and identity, also in the ‘West’. In this paper, I highlight one particularly powerful aspect of the idea of the ‘West under threat’: one wedded to the idea of a demographic-reproductive menace. Such ideas are not only the prerogative of extremist fringes, for the two authors whose work is discussed in this piece are very much part of the mainstream: Samuel Huntington, whose latest book Who Are We? Americas Great Debate focuses on the ‘deconstruction’ of American identity and the threat represented by hyper-fertile immigrant populations and Italian writer-journalist Oriana Fallaci, whose two most recent books have launched an offensive against the ‘Islamic Reverse Crusade’ that threatens to ‘submerge and subjugate’ Europe. Certainly, the intimations of a ‘threat’ to the West are in no way new, nor are they a unique product of the ‘War on Terror’. What is new, however, is the force with which they are being articulated today and the ways in which they are entering into popular circulation, in both Europe and America. What is more, on both sides of the Atlantic, those raising the sound of alarm for ‘The Death of the West’ prescribe not only a re-affirmation of (Western) ideals, but also – and increasingly – a set of policies for the biological survival of the West. ‘The Death of the West’ is thus not only a parable of political and geopolitical decline, but also a morality play regarding real deaths and, especially, real births.

The ‘Border Within’: Inhabiting the Border in Trieste:

In this paper we look to the Italian border city of Trieste—at various points in its past, a cosmopolitan port, Austrias urbs europeissima, but also a battleground for competing understandings of territoriality, identity, and belonging and a paragon of the violent application of an ethnoterritorial logic to a plurinational, plurilingual urban context; a paragon of the violence of modern borders. At the same time—and precisely by virtue of its border condition—Trieste has often found itself within the cracks of European modernity, rendering it a unique site for the rearticulation and reappropriation of that which Walter Mignolo terms “global designs”. In our analysis, we ask what lessons the experience of a city like Trieste in ‘inhabiting the border’ can hold for Mignolos notion of “border thinking” and for the elaboration of alternative geopolitical imaginaries.

Another Europe: remembering Habsburg Galicja

The past ten years have brought about a profound reordering of the spatial imaginary of Europe. It is a reordering, however, that continues to this day, and the tracing (symbolic as well as institutional) of the future ‘Eastern’ confine of the common European space remains a highly contested - and politically salient - issue. This paper examines one alternative geographical imaginary seeking to narrate and negate this emergent confine and its binary division of the European space by drawing upon the memory of the multinational Austro-Hungarian empire. In particular, I look to the ways in which the Habsburg myth is being adopted and articulated within the context of the erstwhile Austrian province of Galicja - now torn between the states of Poland and the Ukraine and straddling the probable future border of the European Union. Through an analysis of the spatial imaginary of the imperial Galicja felix, the paper attempts to trace the ways in which the Habsburg ideal of a liminal space of multinational coexistence is being resurrected in the present day in order to subvert the (national and soon supranational) borderlines cutting through these territories’ heart - and to argue for their reconceptualization as a wholly European border-space.

Geographies of Production and the Contexts of Politics: Dis-Location and New Ecologies of Fear in the Veneto Città Diffusa

Scholars of regionalist mobilisation have focused their attentions largely on the ideal and idealised landscapes that are an integral part of regional mythmaking, noting the ways in which such ‘representative landscapes’ are deployed by regional ideologues to convey belonging and emplace identity. I argue that to understand regionalist mobilisation it is equally important to consider the lived, everyday spaces of the region, spaces within which such regionalist politics are born. In this paper, I focus on the Veneto region in the Italian North East: one of the wealthiest productive areas in Europe but also the site of some of the most reactionary regionalist and localist rhetorics. I explore the links between the transformations in the Venetos production landscapes over the past decades and the emergence of new political discourses, arguing that it is only through an understanding of the new geographies of production and consumption that structure the Veneto space—a space that is increasingly deterritorialised and decentred, suspended between its rural past and an unaccomplished urbanisation—that we can begin to understand fully the regions increasingly exclusionary identity politics, and the ways in which the globalised Veneto città diffusa that has made its fortunes on the global market and on global migrants is increasingly reacting against both and finding refuge in hyperlocalised myths of belonging.

Europe as/at the border: Trieste and the meaning of Europe

In this paper, I try to ‘think Europe’ through a cosmopolitan city like Trieste, and its recent and not so recent past. I develop my argument through the analysis of two powerful ‘myths’ that, I argue, limit understandings of Europe and the European project today: (1) the ‘myth of diversity’; and (2) the ‘myth of an identity in crisis’. In doing so, I rely in great part on the work of French sociologist and philosopher Edgar Morin and his conceptualisation of European identity as a permanent negotiation of difference; what Morin (1990) terms ‘a permanent dialogical simmer’. Starting from Morins critical genealogy of European identity, I try to consider some of the ways in which we can go beyond territorial understandings of identity and citizenship, using Triestes experience as a mirror of the broader European condition.

The Global Economic Crisis and Regional Divides in the European Union: Spatial Patterns of Unemployment in Estonia and Poland

A team of European geographers examines regional disparities in unemployment rates in Estonia and Poland extending from 1989 to the onset of the global financial crisis in late 2008. A particular focus of the research is on the extent to which east-west disparities in unemployment existed within each country (and within Eastern and Central European countries more broadly) both before and after the onset of the crisis. The results of the two case studies provide a basis for questioning the validity of certain imagined economic geographies of the region based on a core-periphery logic and point to the importance of considering context-specific understandings as well as historical trajectories and underlying differentials that pre-date the years of economic transition and the current financial crisis. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: E240, J600, P250. 4 tables, 5 figures, 96 references.