Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER
7
Human Blacklisting
The Global Apartheid of the EU's
External Border Regime
HENK VAN HOUTUM
Opening
And now what shall become of us without any barbarians?
Those people were some kind of solution.
—Konstantinos Petrou Kavafis (1904)
In 1992, in her beautiful essay on boundaries, Dagmar Reichert posed the following
intriguing question: The limit, the frontier, the boundary, time-series of boundaries, or
ditches, the void, or
differance
, they are all modifications of the line, the form of to-
pological thinking. Can we escape this thinking in terms of spatial metaphors (Reichert
1992)? The spirit of openness and opening borders that Reichert was after has perhaps
been grounded to some extent in the topological thinking inherent in the cross-border
mobility policies of one of the significant global border lands, a unity of countries that
increasingly sees itself as a soft empire—the European Union. Yet, at the same time, the
internal opening of the borders has led to the rise of new fears and new walls in its ex-
ternal peripheries asamanifestation ofits increasingly divisionary view ofcountries. For
a decade or so now, and especially after 9/11, the Zeitgeist of global freedom and open-
ing borders—that special moment in Europe after 1989 in which a change in the wall-in-
spired logic that dominated Europe for so many decades was truly believed in—has be-
come a ghost that haunts EU external border politics today. The desire to control and re-
claim space, power, and national identity has found new populist political adherents and
partisans. As a result, rather than focusing on maximal inclusion, cross-border mobility,
and harmonious integration into the rapidly grown container of the EU that has domin-
ated the debate in the EU over the past decades, the emphasis has now shifted towards
