Uncertainty at the EU's borders: narratives of EU external relations in the revised European Neighbourhood Policy towards the southern borderlands

This article analyses the role of narratives in European Union (EU) external relations in the revised European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) and systematically explores how they operate in practice in the context of the EU's border management practices vis-à-vis the “southern borderlands”, in particular with respect to their inclusionary and exclusionary potential. Key EU documents and statements by EU agents, released throughout the first three years of Arab uprisings and pertaining to the revised ENP, will be subjected to a thorough examination which highlights four observations: first, in spite of the fact that the revised ENP is rooted in several narratives, some nevertheless dominate over others; second, the simultaneous presence of and recourse to different narratives contribute to an increase, rather than a decrease, of uncertainty in the EU's southern borderlands; third, despite a multitude of narratives which serve to legitimize EU action in the framework of the revised ENP, the latter perpetuates the logics of its predecessor by generating benefits mainly for the EU itself; fourth, that the first three years of the revised ENP have in practice demonstrated that an imbalance exists between on the one hand the original acceptance of the narratives by EU stakeholders and on the other hand their willingness to abide by them and fill them with life.     

Transnational cooperation: a network analysis of town twinning in the Baltic Sea region

The patterns of cooperation between regions and urban spaces are no longer influenced, to the same extent, by national borders. Political integrative events changed the extent of transborder urban cooperation in the Baltic borderlands, a region that has undergone extensive changes. A social network analysis of cooperative ties in the form of town twinning indicates that the end of the Cold War strongly changed the network of town twinning in this region, whereas the effect of the various EU enlargement rounds seems to be more nuanced.     

Integrating Rijeka into socialist Yugoslavia: the politics of national identity and the new city’s image (1947–1955)

This article investigates the politics of national identity implemented in Rijeka after World War II, when the city was integrated into socialist Yugoslavia. These national and political transitions posed various challenges to the consolidation of the Yugoslav Communists’ power. The nationalities policy embedded in the slogan “Brotherhood and Unity” was the official answer to the national question, promoting collaboration among the Croatian majority, the Italian minority, and other national communities in the city. This article focuses on the definition of postwar Rijeka’s image, investigating the relationship between Yugoslav socialism and national identities in everyday political practice. The negotiation of the representation of national identities in a socialist society led to ambivalences, contradictions, and contentions expressed in and through Rijeka’s public spaces, highlighting the different orientations of cultural and political actors. The process of building socialist Yugoslavia in this specific borderland context reveals the balance and tension between the multinational framework and the integrative tendencies pertaining to the legitimization and consolidation of the socialist system.     

Memories of ethnic cleansing and the local Iron Curtain in the Czech–German borderlands

The Czech–German borderlands are an archetypal European border region. They evoke not only Cold War histories, but also shelter layers of European memories of the ethnic reshaping of early post-war Europe. By means of life story interviews with German speakers of the border region, this article analyzes the symbolic meaning of and the individual dealing with the local Iron Curtain. It will shed light on the biographical and narrative interconnectedness of experiences of ethnic cleansing in the early post-war period and retrospective perceptions of the Iron Curtain in these borderlands. In particular, it inquires whether and to what extent the local Iron Curtain intensified fractures caused by the region's post-and pre-war attempts to halt the multiethnic composition of the border communities. The article suggests that the local Czech–German Iron Curtain would have never endured as strongly if the border communities' common identity had not already been severely damaged in the course of the region's traumatic history and forced population transfers.     

The evolution of nationhood in twentieth century Europe: lessons from the Northern Adriatic borderlands

This article is a short introduction for a special edition on Italian nationhood. The articles that comprise the special edition are the following: From a cosmopolitan to a fascist land: Adriatic irredentism in motion; Erecting fascism: nation, identity, and space in Trieste in the first half of the twentieth century; Building Italianità in northern Adriatic: The case of population from Pola.     

Gendering the border effect: the double impact of Colombian insecurity and the Venezuelan refugee crisis

Abstract

In the Colombian–Venezuelan borderlands, the reconfiguration of armed group presence and mass migration create and reinforce conditions of high violence and risk. Against this backdrop, we ask: What are the gendered security implications of the double crisis in the borderlands? Based on fieldwork in four regions along the border, this article argues that the border effect is gendered; the very factors that coalesce to produce this effect exacerbate existing gendered power dynamics, particularly as these relate to gender-based violence. Accordingly, this article demonstrates the specific ways in which the border – as a facilitator, deterrent, magnet and/or disguise – reinforces experiences of gendered insecurity in this region. The article finishes by outlining the implications for other international borderland settings.     

The bridge that divides: local perceptions of the connected state in the Kyrgyzstan–Tajikistan–China borderlands

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 brought profound changes to the borderlands of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Xinjiang. In eastern Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan’s Gorno-Badakhshan region, present-day weaknesses in territorial control of the post-Soviet state’s edges are directly wedded to borderlanders’ memories of Soviet-era practices of bordering, perceived locally as both systemically stronger and cognitively more beneficial to local lifeworlds than contemporary ‘Chinese penetration’. Across the border in Xinjiang, a formerly distant state has been brought into borderlanders’ locales and inscribed into everyday lifeworlds through novel manifestations of the state, which significantly affect cross-border interaction. By comparing how borderlanders on both sides of this frontier themselves choose to characterize border processes between ‘their’ states in the initial two decades of connections to Xinjiang, I explore how and why Kyrgyz and Tajik/Pamiri borderlanders voice strong opinions about what it is they feel has changed in these administrative-territorial homelands. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork on both sides of this frontier, I argue that the gradual bridging of this formerly sealed border has led to neither the development of a new trans-frontier identity nor locally established trans-frontier networks but, instead, reconfirmed borders between China and Central Asia.     

Getting stuck within flows: limited interaction and peripheralization at the Kazakhstan–China border

For more than two decades, the Sino–Soviet border was almost hermetically closed to the exchange of people and goods. In the late 1980s, however, exchanges resumed at a remarkable pace between the immediate border communities of Zharkent, in Kazakhstan, and Chinese Khorgos. But this situation was short-lived. Currently, trade turnover in consumer goods between the two countries is conducted primarily via the hub bazaars of Urumqi, in China, and Almaty, in Kazakhstan, several hundred kilometres inland from the border. While the borderland population’s agency in these trade processes remains limited, top-down modernization efforts to upgrade infrastructure in the borderlands and to ‘centralize the periphery’ are the subject of popular controversy. The article explores local representations of development and exchange in the Kazakhstan–China borderland town of Zharkent and the everyday social practice and discourses they generate. I examine the peripheralization of this borderland community, which remains largely bypassed by commodity flows, at a moment characterized by multi-scalar attempts at modernization. In so doing, I argue that the trajectories of borderland lives perpetuate a subjective positioning in social space that reinforces perceptions of ‘remoteness’ and ‘disconnection’, despite powerful state-advocated visions of modernity.     

Frontier constellations: agrarian expansion and sovereignty on the Indonesian-Malaysian border

Borderland regions in Southeast Asia have increasingly been reimagined as resource-rich, unexploited ‘wastelands’ targeted for large-scale development schemes for economic integration and control. Common and overlapping features of these regions are processes of resource extraction, agricultural expansion, population resettlement and securitization, and the confluence of these dynamic processes creates special frontier constellations. Through the case of the Indonesian-Malaysian borderlands, I explore how processes of frontier colonization through agricultural expansion have been a recurrent product of Indonesian development and security policies since the early 1960s. I argue that frontier development accelerates and intensifies when national discourses of security and sovereignty and state-led agrarian expansion intersect along national borders. The study generates new insights into how contemporary state-capitalist processes of agricultural expansion in the borderlands of Indonesia and other parts of Southeast Asia are justified through discourses of national sovereignty and notions of ‘untamed’ and ‘wild’ resource frontiers. I highlight the multiple meanings and notions associated with regions where resource frontiers and national borders interlock. The study offers an explanation of how frontiers as discursive constructs and material realities play out along national borders.     

CONCEIVING THE “WEST”: EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY VISIONS OF KHAM

Abstract

As the nineteenth century drew to a close, the Tibetan plateau in the eyes of the gentry and officials of Sichuan Province was little more than a defensive fence bolting the back door of the empire. Although a stone stele erected in 1727 proclaimed much of the Kham region of ethnographic Tibet to be under Sichuan's jurisdiction, its invested rulers were administered by a “loose rein” policy, leaving its polities effectively independent of Chinese authority, the borderland and its inhabitants being of little interest to the Qing state. Yet the turn of the nineteenth century marked the reenvisioning of the once-barren borderland as a resource-rich terrain worthy of industrial development and inhabited by a population in need of cultural transformation. This article examines the convergence of local and regional dangers and opportunities with the influence of absolutist notions of two newly globalizing norms, territoriality and sovereignty, a convergence that fostered this new vision of Kham as integral to the burgeoning Chinese state and nation. The ramifications of this transformation in perceptions of the former imperial frontier as “West” would resonate across China's western interior throughout the twentieth century.