Interventions on Europe's political futures

Abstract

At the best of times Europe is a vast and unwieldy topic. As was the case 25 years agoanother moment when a culmination of events warranted reflection on Europe's political futures-writing from the midst of geopolitical and geo-economic upheaval raises the challenge of how to gain perspective, to reflect on what is happening and to reassess how we approach issues. Yet as critical scholars it is imperative that we do so. In reflecting on the manifold challenges to the idea and space of Europe the interventions that follow are provocations: posing questions, unsettling taken for granted frameworks, and calling for new ways of thinking about and politically contributing to 'Europe'. Each author approaches Europe from a distinct perspective and offers a particular lens on contemporary European issues, bringing in ideas and framings from international relations, law, economic geography and migration studies. They also each draw on insights from their extensive empirical research in and on Europe. Cross-cutting the interventions are two calls to action: to rethink our analytical approaches to Europe, and to reframe our role as critical scholars. The interventions make the case for a renewed analytical toolbox through a focus on three themes that have long animated political geography scholarship on Europe: borders, power and crises. The spatial politics of Europe is a topic that has consistently featured in the pages of this journal. Underpinning much of this work has been an interest in Europe's borders: their post-Cold War realignment, the differentiation between 'permeable' internal and 'fortress' external borders of the EU (Scott and van Houtum 2009; Carr 2012) and the Union's relationship with its neighbours (Bialasiewicz et al 2009; Petrakos et al 2016). The interventions by Smith and Vaughan-Williams speak to this work on Europe's borders, and, in drawing on the work of Balibar and Derrida respectively, do so in ways that bring to the fore vital questions of inclusion and exclusion, openness to the Other and violent closures. Vaughan-Williams calls for attention to be turned to the emergence of bordering practices that are enacted under the guise of humanitarian action in order to render 'irregular' populations 'knowable' and thus 'governable'. Meanwhile Smith argues that paying attention to borders as an intermingling of the geopolitical and geo-economic is crucial to mapping out emerging political geographies of difference, (uneven) development and power(lessness) in Europe today. As illustrated by Smith's focus on inequality and marginalisation, the question of the nature of power in Europe runs through the interventions. Whilst much existing work has focused on the changing dynamics of EU 'soft' and 'civilian' power (Bachmann and Sidaway 2009;

Interventions on European nationalist populism and bordering in time of emergencies

“…Once they are in office, like the Hungarian party Fidesz, led by the charismatic Viktor Orbán, their border representations are even more consequential (as with Slovakia--see Kazharski, 2018 ). The complexity of Orbán's border rhetoric is particularly notable for its combination of seemingly contradictory elements: building fences while maintaining open borders in Schengen; closing the border for migrants while keeping it open for co-ethnics living outside the EU ( Lamour & Varga, 2017 ; Crawley's intervention in McConnell et al., 2017 ; Varga, 2017 ; Scott, 2018 ). Varga (2019) demonstrates the differences in the border framings of Viktor Orbán and Marine Le Pen between 2015 and 2017, noting that Le Pen, before changing the name of her party into Rassemblement national and abandoning the goal of leaving the euro and the EU (as explained above), was mobilizing the border at the national level exclusively; Orbán, meanwhile, was claiming to defend the borders of the nation but also those of European civilization and of the Schengenzone.…”

State Power, Spatial Inequality, and Geographical Expertise: Notes on Method

“…The question is not who has the upper hand in the relations between Brussels and the member states. The question is how to analyse regulatory power in Europe without that binary of Brussels and the member states and without the national matrix that imagines power in state-based terms and thereby unimagines transnational connections (Kuus 2017b).…”

Everyday Brexits

“…Brexit becomes one more case of a resurgence of populist nationalism after the financial crisis of 2008 onwards and, as such, a symptom of a European‐wide “crisis of liberalism” and identity (Douzinas, ; Wodak, ), to give but some of many explanations. In commenting on Brexit's conditions, geographers have honed in on the legacies of Empire, imperial geography and Britain's geopolitical decline, ignorance of the European Union's structure and powers (McConnell et al., ), and the political geographies of new and growing forms of territorial fragmentation and uneven development (Bachmann & Sidaway, ; Dorling, ; Ingram, ). At the same time, early analyses of electoral geographies have underscored the significance of education, income, and age to voting behaviour, while pointing to an “unfairly blamed” working class, who were less crucial to the result than was widely reported (Dorling, , p. 1).…”

“…Brexit becomes the expression of a fragmented nation as the vote to stay or leave is correlated with various indices of social difference and position (Barnett, 2017). In commenting on Brexit's conditions, geographers have honed in on the legacies of Empire, imperial geography and Britain's geopolitical decline, ignorance of the European Union's structure and powers (McConnell et al, 2017), and the political geographies of new and growing forms of territorial fragmentation and uneven development (Bachmann & Sidaway, 2016;Dorling, 2016;Ingram, 2017). Brexit becomes one more case of a resurgence of populist nationalism after the financial crisis of 2008 onwards and, as such, a symptom of a European-wide "crisis of liberalism" and identity (Douzinas, 2013;Wodak, 2013), to give but some of many explanations.…”