On the nature of the beast: re‐charting political geographies of the european union

Abstract

: On the nature of the beast: Re-charting political geographies of the European Union. Geogr. Ann ., 88 B (1): 1-14.ABSTRACT. This review paper begins with the premise that since the European Union remains a process of construction with no agreed or pre-designated end-point, its power structure is open to a diverse range of interpretations. Moreover, the apparent novelty of the EU renders it hard to characterize according to familiar taxonomies. The novelty lies in part in the complex territorial configurations of authority in the EU. Different conceptualizations of the EU are varied readings of the structure, balance and scales of authority -which thereby invoke different actions and spaces of possibility.

The Hybrid Continent: Tensions and Resilience in Europe's Neoterritorial Model

“…Notes 1 For a review of the literature on the territorial dimension of European integration, see Rumford (2006), Mamadouh (2001), and Sidaway (2006); see also Ansell and Di (2004), Bialasiewicz, Elden, and Painter (2005), Bort (1998), Walters (2004), Groenendijk, Guild, and Minderhoud (2003), and Jönsson, Tägil, and Törnqvist (2000). 2 The EU has been compared to other historical examples of empire, such as the Austro-Hungarian (Farago 1995), the Roman (Brague 1993), and the Mesopotamian (Waever 1997).…”

“We are not animals!” Humanitarian border security and zoopolitical spaces in EUrope1

“…As such, the article responds to extant calls for the development of alternative border imaginaries apposite to the complexities of bordering practices in global politics (Johnson et al 2011;Mezzadra and Neilson 2013;Parker and Vaughan-Williams 2012;Rumford 2008;Walker 2010), the further elaboration of the (post)biopolitical paradigm (Debrix and Barder 2012;Wolfe 2012), and the exploration of how Derrida's zoopolitical treatment of the relationship between biopolitics, sovereignty and the human/animal distinction might help 'inform a new, critical geography' (Rasmussen 2013(Rasmussen : 1130. Crucially, however, the analysis departs from recent efforts to bring 'the animal' and animal-human relations back in to political geography and border-making (Philo and Wilbert 2000;Brown and Rasmussen 2010;Collard 2012;Sundberg 2011 example, Balibar 1998Balibar , 2009Bialasiewicz 2011;Bigo 2001;Guild 2009;van Houtum 2010;Rumford 2008;Sidaway 2006;Walker 2000;Walters 2002Walters , 2011. Against this backdrop a number of commentators have noted the neoliberalisation of border control, which is increasingly characterised by the 'managerial language of cooperation and partnership' (Bialasiewicz 2012), the rise of for-profit public-private partnerships as part of a EUropewide homeland security industry (Prokkola 2013), and a new emphasis on 'customer experience' and levels of satisfaction among so-called 'trusted travellers' at 'regular' land, sea, and air border crossing points (Vaughan-Williams 2010).…”

Beyond Fortress Europe. Unbounding European Normative Power and the Neighbourhood Policy

“…A proper understanding of the EU's normative power requires an interrogation of not only the limits of conditionality and the ENP's contradictions and hypocrisies. What is needed is also a reflection about the peculiarities and the more recent crisis of the EU project as a post‐national or post‐Westphalian polity, as a trans‐territorial or non‐territorial “unidentified political object”, or as a postmodern and neo‐Medieval empire, to mention just a few of the expressions which have been used to define such a multilevel and dissociated system of authority (Anderson ; Sidaway ; Zielonka ). As Luiza Bialasiewicz brilliantly summarized, “EUropean space making is explicitly about the political production of ‘European spaces’, rather than simply the deployment of ‘European’ policies in already existing political space” (Bialasiewicz et al , p. 60).…”

“…It is easy today to see the kind of ambivalent, incomplete, abnormal geographical ‘beast’ (Sidaway ), the European Union is in both its internal constituency and external projection. The landscape looked far more consolidated and open when the Neighbourhood Policy was launched during the first half of the 2000s.…”