Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
imise in the drawing of borders for people. More particularly, I will focus on the often
tacit or implicit justification and modus operandi of our border regimes that should pre-
vent, select, and prioritise the movement of certain people across borders in the world
of today. In order to complement existing efforts that seek to understand the desires and
fearsexpressedinthecurrentmoralchoreographyofthe(future)externalbordersfroma
conceptual point of view, this article scrutinises the visions and long-term EU strategies
with regard to the external border regime vis-à-vis the so-called unwanted migrants. To
gaininsightintothesepowergeopoliticsoftheEUexpressedthroughitsexternalborder
regime, I direct my attention to the border ideology, the “borderology,” the EU is devel-
oping. Next, I critically scrutinise the everyday institutional practices recently enforced
at the external border proper. In particular, I will navigate my way through a new, expli-
citly moral landscape that has been built at the external borders of the EU that consists
of waiting zones, camps, new fences, and new bio-metric methods of patrol. Hence, an
EUscape with increasingly defensive external borders is being erected. Building on the
theoretical insights that have been gained, uttered, and brought forward already on vari-
ouselementsoftheexternalborderoftheEU,thisarticlecouldbereadasatheoretically
inspired conceptual protest, a counternarrative against what I see as an off beam and in-
creasingly mechanic external border choreography of the EU.
B/ordering and Othering
The act of bordering is critical to understanding the building or transformation of a spe-
cific sociospatial entity. To quote geographer Anssi Paasi: ''through the institutional-
isation process and the struggles inherent in it, the territorial units in question 'receive'
their boundaries and their symbols which distinguish them from other regions'' (1996,
33). The EU's external border regime and immigration policy towards the outer borders
touch the heart of the EU as a macroborderland. When desiring to understand the im-
portance of borders for a given entity, in this case the EU, it is not enough to study the
line, the limit, the border itself; there is a need to also study the transformation pro-
cess, the genealogy of that line: the bordering (e.g., van Houtum and Naerssen 2002;
van Houtum, Kramsch, and Zierhofer 2005). A border should first and foremost be un-
derstood as a process, as a verb (van Houtum 2011). Analytically, three different di-
mensions can be seen to play a role in this process of border production acting in close
cooperation and simultaneously, yet in different nuances and degrees for different con-
texts—bordering, ordering, and othering (van Houtum and Naerssen 2002). Together
these dimensions of the border process can be seen as a generic lens through which the
building or transformation of a specific sociospatial entity can be analysed. Obviously,
one has to bear in mind that any schematic description of the multidimensional border-
productionprocessescanoffernothingmorethananabstractedframeofmindthatneeds
