Beyond the Borders of Europe: Diaspora and Migration
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First five lectures Beyond the Borders of Europe: Diaspora and Migration
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Beyond the Borders of Europe: Diaspora and Migration
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Universiteit Van Amsterdam (UvA)
The first five lectures of the course Beyond the Borders of Europe: Diaspora and Migration for the upcoming exam on 30 April. For the readings, see my other document.
Beyond the Borders of Europe: Diaspora and Migration
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Lectures Beyond the Borders of Europe: Diaspora and Migration
Lecture 1: Introduction
The initial response to the pandemic – even though the virus does not respect borders – is the
closing of national borders and to manage personal/national borders by imposing restrictions:
closing territorial borders, closing flows at the national level, social distancing. The implementation of
borders and the experience of the pandemic differs per location. Today, borders matter even more
than ever: states exercise unprecedented powers in the control both of their own citizens’ internal
mobility, as well as of their territorial confines (authoritarian and democratic states) and states take
on an even greater role not just in the management of national territory but also in the management
of national bodies. At the same time, such bordering practises have not been expanded and
extended equally through space (different locations, different effects) and individual (non)citizens.
Mobility has become increasingly unequal, which is clearly visible with the pandemic. Also,
border-making poses fundamental challenges to Europe's stated liberal values, already before the
pandemic but even more clearly visible during the pandemic, whether it is about the respect of basic
rights (for migrants/immigrants), the challenge of freedom of movement, migration across borders,
labor migrants, vulnerable peoples, refugees (whom all posed health risks and factors of transmission
of disease, especially in the media present) etc. So, the unequal pandemic per country/state/
population etc. and the different bordering responses: selective character of borders! So, which
borders emerged, where, and for whom and how have they changed?
The Digital Green Certificate provides a manner to facilitate safe free movement of citizens in the
EU; it will provide proof of vaccination, immunity to COVID-19 or a negative test. Issues raised
regarding the Certificate are the unequal distribution of the vaccine-campaign in Europe
(generational divide, regional divide), data-protection issues and if you are vaccinated, it does not
mean that you cannot still spread the virus. So, with this certificate you can cross borders and safely
travel but when you are vaccinated yourself it does not mean that you are not a carrier of the virus
and you can still spread it! Only safe for yourself, but a danger to others.
According to political philosopher Etienne Balibar ‘’borders are no longer [only] at the border, an
institutionalised site that could be materialised on the ground and inscribed on the map, where one
sovereignty ends, and another begins”. The traditional understanding of the border as something
that lies at the external edges of national territory still exists and quite strongly so, but borders have
stretched both outside and within the space of the state. Especially since the war on terror, new
types of borders emerged to counter de-territorialized threats (biosecurity, terrorist threats), at
home and abroad, and new mobilities and technologies emerged to control the border and
surveillance was present everywhere. Thus, de-territorialized threats were being controlled through
territorial borders and security measures to control dangerous flows of peoples, things by people on
the ground and surveillance. The border is now everywhere: it has moved within national territory
(to cities), it has moved beyond through externalisation agreements and the border control has
strongly been militarized which is a new phenomenon since the 2000s. External and internal security
functions have blurred: the idea of ‘’smart borders’’ introduced two decades ago is the idea that
borders should not simply block flows; a border should selectively let through ‘’good’’ flows and
stop/block ‘’bad’’ flows of people and goods, even before they reached the border actually as they
should be stopped on their way or security should know you’re coming.
Border theorist Didier Bigo suggested the term Archipelago of policing functions as a fluid
assemblage of functions, mechanisms, and actors that come together as necessary in variable
geometries depending on what you must do, who you must stop and where: bringing in different
agents such as hotel chains, agents, airports etc. Melding (internal) policing functions – and
(external) security functions. Bordering, thus happens everywhere: at schools, in hotels, in cities etc.
, States, a modern historical phenomenon, are an increasingly powerful actor that not only borders
but also controls our borders in significant ways. The institutional idea of the ‘’state’’ went hand in
hand with the idea of a ‘’nation’’ as a community of belonging. In history, there is a progressive
accumulation of state power/functions that is not natural but a result of an accumulation of powers
which has to do with political needs/changes. The state’s role in a variety of realms (from defence to
welfare) is legitimized (but, thus, not natural). Political geographer Taylor (1994) traces the evolution
of containerisation: from power, economic, cultural/identity, to social containers (gathering in of
functions progressively). The need for another territorial power made itself evident at the end of the
16th century that laid between the ground/abstract powers of empires/the papacy (dynastic power)
and local authorities (cities, noblemen). Modern nation states, unlike empires that governed at the
centre but whose power was dispersed throughout imperial territory, presumed that the state and
the state’s sovereign exercised power in equal fashion throughout the entire territory. So, at the end
of the 16th century, various European sovereigns began to realise that for war-making and defence
reasons territorial claims begun to be focused on accumulating land to produce compact and
contiguous units based on a shift in military organisation and in conceptual terms of how power is
conceived. Exclusive power in an exclusive territory. The modern state for the first time claimed
to be an exclusive power (claiming all spheres of life), whereas before people had allegiances to their
sovereign but also to their local duke and to their religion (no competing loyalties or obligations
anymore for people). Modern nation states defined itself within a binary territorial logic of what lies
within and what lies outside its territory. Porous/indistinct imperial borders that shifted over
time versus hard territorial borders of nation states: demarcating territory which is exclusively
yours. The Treaty of Westphalia (1648) was the first treaty in Europe that laid down the basis for
interstate law: it argued that states cannot meddle in each other’s affairs and states are fully
sovereign in their own territory. Modern nation states were seen by contemporaries as a solution to
the problem of a lack of stability and order in European politics and as the ultimate unit of protection
which is easier to defend than empires. To have the economic and military resources to protect a
territory, early instruments of ‘’governmentality’’/state as a power container (now seen as a
‘’natural’’ function of the state which it was not) were put into place in the 16 th century: centralised
bureaucracies, taxation systems (to go to war), conscription-based armies. There were also new ways
of disciplining the population to extract the resources necessary to govern but also to make sure
people enter the army to wage the state’s wars. In the 17 th century and at the beginning of the 18 th
century, the idea of the state as an economic container and the ideal functionary for wealth began
to consolidate (especially the mercantile state in the Netherlands): no longer locales or empires that
conducted economic welfare and accumulate wealth but states that accumulated wealth and
combined it with warfare. Exercising sovereignty but making sure you have the needs:
protection of state interests to the protection of economic interests. The state as a
cultural/identity container emerged with the social and political changes that were driven by the
American and the French revolution in the 18 th century with new claims of sovereignty and the
emergence of the notion of ‘’the people’’ as the true source of state legitimation. Legitimation came
from the population living within the boundaries of the state and it was a population which for the
first time was conceived as unitary. The state’s legitimacy could now no longer be taken for granted
or militarily assured but states needed to elaborate new mechanisms of political and military
legitimisation and discipline in the late 1700s and early 1800s. They did so through the expansion of
governmentality (who is in my state?) with new institutions and bordering, education/schooling
(discipline your mind and your body through school hours), taxation, capillary network of military
outposts, and institutions of national conscription. Fundamental shift: birth of nationalism as an
ideology which only enhanced modern nation states and their accumulation of power!
Lecture 2: Border-work I: Bordering insecurities
The emergence of modern nation-states and their accumulation of power and state functions which
transformed states from war-making entities to economic containers to life-administering
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