Geography Reference
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aconstitutive“management”ofexclusionofthe“Other”inhabitantsoftheworld.Some
speak of the three global wars that have become dominant—the war on drugs; the war
on terror; and, increasingly dubiously intertwined with the latter, the war on “illegal”
migration (see also Inda 2006). For some this renewed focus on (preemptive and often
military) protection and territorial identity is an illustration that the world is not border-
less. Rather, it consists of global borderlands (Duffield 2001; Rumford 2007, 2008) or
“planetary frontier lands” (Bauman 2002a, 2002b) in which power, identity, and sov-
ereignty are being disconnected from territorial nation-state politics yet are not becom-
ing institutionalised in a new global territorial order. Hence, what we see is a constant
border-work trying to separate the wanted from the unwanted, the barbarians from the
civilised, and the global rich from the global poor in the territorial society. In so do-
ing the EU increasingly is not only defining itself via its internal affairs, its ordering
practices, but also by the production of new border rules and legislation towards its in-
coming migrants. The migration of the undocumented paradoxically, therefore, also in-
duces and evokes a stronger political community and new bordering legislation of the
EU, thereby reinforcing that which the migrants wish to escape or cross, fierce borders
(see also Zapata-Barrero 2009). Obviously, these practices of geopolitical and biopolit-
ical control—this carving up of territorial containers and purified “dreamlands” of iden-
tity—haveacounterpart,theotherfaceoftheJanusborder(vanHoutum2010):thegen-
eration of (a dreamland of) escape into far-reaching openness and freedom, into a world
of global cosmopolitan development and global distributive justice (see also Rumford
2007,2008).Butitseemsthatthislatterdevelopmentiscurrentlymuchlessonthepolit-
ical agenda now. In so doing, the ontological multidimensionality, which is intrinsic to
any border, is increasingly being deprived and depressed to make place for only the
tightening and filtering dimension of a border. The border, which is more a necessary
and unfixable continuum between openness and closure than it is a line, is being rein-
terpreted into a super position of lines of security and protection, often coinciding with
an inward-looking reproduction and canonisation of its self-constructed history and cul-
ture (see also Balibar 2004a, 2004b). The global course towards stronger protectionist
and identity politics has gained considerable momentum again in today's global geopol-
itics (see also Bigo and Guild 2005). The desire to open the border, to seize the spirit of
the fall of that Ur-border and the Berlin Wall and to escape topological thinking seems
rather far removed from us.
So somewhat less than two decennia after Reichert's intriguing article, the quest that
her imaginary questions embrace is still most inspiring; that is, the quest for the justi-
fication for and the way we draw borders in society and space. In this paper I will take
up the quest to understand in more depth and detail how the EU is currently bordering
itself by focusing on the current topological practices we endorse, manifest, and legit-
