Borders and Border Regimes - Part Two

What do I mean by a “border regime”? I’m using the concept in order to capture the way in which the government of a given international border is not just best captured by the legal regulations that govern it in theory, but the range of social and political relations within which these regulations operate and interact. “Border regimes” shift, depending not only on their political context, but also as a consequence of the changes in the ways in which borderland societies interact with the reality of their border, and each other.

In recent years the history of borders has become a topic that has attracted considerable interest. Most of this literature is a history of how the linear borders of modern territorial states came into being – at least in so far as they examine borders within Europe. This strong point of this literature is that it demonstrates that the linear, well-defined border between states has never been a natural state of affairs, but became hegemonic across the continent at the end of the nineteenth century. It has also underlined the way in which this was the product of historical forces and of events. Its weak point stems from the fact that most of the work done hitherto regards the formation of the territorial state as the end of the story. It fails to examine a reality of border-making as an incomplete and profoundly contested project.

Since 2004, I have been researching the history of a stretch of the Austrian-Hungarian border between 1938 and 1960. This border had been defined as a linear border between two states, regulated by international law as the product of a process of a contestation between 1918 and 1921. The borderland had before been a multi-lingual, culturally-shared region. The border certainly re-shaped this reality, but did not lead automatically to a separation of the territories that lay on either side. Throughout the inter-war years the Austrian-Hungarian border was a region that was contested politically, while remaining a culturally-shared space. In 1938, with Austria’s incorporation into Germany the nature of the border regime shifted. Strangely, the designs of some of those who supported the new National Socialist regime on territories within Hungary populated by German speakers, and Hungarian reactions to those designs preserved the culturally-shared nature of the borderland. As I have argued in a recent article, it was the end of the Second World War and its consequences, with the expulsion of German speakers and the related growth of mutual suspicion across the border that initiated a dynamic of separation which divided the region. This process of separation complemented the broader international dynamic, which marked the beginning of the Cold War in Europe, and reinforced many of its effects. The cold war border – with its watch-towers, barbed wire and minefields – reduced cross-border traffic sharply, but was seen as deeply illegitimate by populations on both sides of the border, though for different reasons. While the Austrian population saw the presence of the Cold War border as actively threatening, for many Hungarians it symbolized a lack of political freedom. Thus, when the regime attempted de-Stalinization in summer 1956, one of its early steps was to remove the barbed wire and minefields (only to replace them after the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution later that year). It played a central, and relatively little-known role in the events of 1989.

The broader conclusion I draw from this is that international borders and border regimes have shifted constantly throughout the century. Both historians and commentators more generally should play close attention to the attitudes and mentalities of those who seek to cross them, and who live either side of them. Attempts to control these borders through the policies of restriction are likely to prove ineffective.

As an historian I am bound to say that the first lesson of this analysis is that more research needs to be done on the different border regimes, raising the issue of how borderland populations interacted with them on an everyday level throughout the twentieth century. Starting from specialized local studies we should aim to use comparison in order to examine why border regimes have shifted during the period. From this kind of work, we would gain, I think, a much greater appreciation of how Europe is changing than we have now.

Although there is much we do not know, I think the following comments might be made about the state of border regimes, and about migration-related controversy in contemporary Europe. The first point I would make is the one I would make above is about the futility of a policy of restriction. For the past thirty years western European governments have introduced ever more restrictive policies in an attempt to shut migrants from the South out. The human costs of this policy in terms of the real human suffering of those attempting to reach the EU illegally are deeply worrying. Furthermore, they have contributed to a huge shadow workforce of illegal immigrants in many European states who live in conditions of deep insecurity and misery, while the bargaining power of certain sections of the documented workforce is undermined profoundly. Secondly, much discussion of globalization has highlighted its cultural and economic dimensions, and has neglected the pull of globalization on the world’s workforce through mass migration. Certainly, mass migration in search of greater economic opportunity is nothing new, as the social history of territories such as the United States shows. However, larger numbers of people are increasingly prepared to move across well controlled international borders in search of economic opportunity. Behind this lays one of the largest social justice issues of our time; that of the yawning economic chasm between different states and regions within the world economy, and its very real and disturbing human consequences. Thirdly and lastly, the politics of migration and border control have helped drive the growing saliency of radical right-wing politics across much of western Europe. While plain racism and xenophobia is a substantial part of the explanation for this development it is also the product of another process. During the twentieth century notions of citizenship were re-defined by the process of both war, and the making of welfare settlements as national social citizenship. States have been expected to provide jobs and basic material welfare to their citizens. Over the past twenty-five years the ability of states to meet these aspirations have been eroded by the hegemony of neo-liberal politics. Protest – as projects such as the pan-European SIREN project have shown – has become displaced onto migrants.

All of these developments suggest that the dynamic history of “border regimes” in contemporary Europe is far from over ………

Borders and Border Regimes - Part One

Borders have been at the heart of political discussion in Europe during the past two decades, and throughout the post-war period. They symbolized the political division of the continent into "east" and "west" prior to the events of 1989-1991. Their symbolic centrality to the events of 1989 is clear.




The video above is a reminder of the ways in which the events of 1989 were experienced. Based on footage from the Bornholmer Strasse checkpoint between East and West Berlin taken on the evening of 9th November 1989 it captures the uncertainty and confusion that characterized the wall opening. It is also a reminder that for those living on either side of them borders form part of an everyday reality of division.

The "border regime" that exists in contemporary Europe has changed considerably over the last nineteen years. With the entrance of former socialist states into the European Union beginning in May 2004, and their entry into Schengen area in December 2007, restrictions on travel for the citizens of their states have eased considerably. Europe has not become borderless: the UK and Ireland still retain border controls, while more importantly a patchwork of restrictions - allowed as transitional measures under the terms of accession treaties - prevents citizens of Central and Eastern Europe from participating legally in many western European labour markets. Most importantly, the Schengen regime has established a fortress-like wall between the interior of the European Economic Area, and those states that lie outside it; especially those states in the South that lack the bargaining power with Brussels, London, or Paris, to negotiate exemptions to the stringent visa requirements imposed. In Spain's African enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla physical barriers have been built to literally fence Europe off to those who would travel to it from outside. In a brilliant essay, Navid Kermani has drawn our attention to the ways in which the management of Europe's borders reveals a striking contrast between the success of Europeans in overcoming internal political divisions, and their utter failure in managing the consequences of the economic gulf that separates Europeans from the majority of the global population that live in the South.

This emergent "Schengen border regime" is contested in a number of ways in contemporary Europe. Populist politics directed against immigration are one of these ways. Yet this populist politics rests on a notion that the border of a territorial state, firmly under the control of its national government is somehow the natural state of things - hence the tabloid demand for secure borders. An examination of the "border regimes" that have existed in Europe's recent history suggests that this notion is flawed ......

Why Rethinking Europe?

Most commentary on Europe starts from a cold war perspective, which, almost twenty years after the end of the political division of the continent into east and west persists in both journalistic commentary and in historical writing. I don't wish to deny the importance of this division for thinking about what happened in Europe between 1945 and the end of the 1980s. Nor do I wish to deny the importance of its legacy - especially as far as the differences in living standards, and general levels of economic prosperity are concerned for the two halves of continent. What I'm really getting at is the ways in which commentators (including some historians) have sought to use this past political division to explain events/phenomena in ways which distort their reality.

I'll give an example of what I mean here. Not too long ago I was present at an academic conference where the participants began to discuss the relative political significance of consumerism in socialist Central and Eastern Europe, and capitalist western Europe. One participant argued that the difference was that east of the "iron curtain" consumption was politicized, while west of the dividing line it was not. Coming from the UK, where at least until the arrival of Tony Blair, Labour argued for the primacy of collective consumption (council housing, free state-provided health care, education, extensive welfare benefits), and the Conservatives challenged them by advocating a greater role for consumer choice and the private sector (council-house sales, half-hearted promotion of private health care, private pensions etc.) I found this a little difficult to accept.

The lesson I drew from this was that while there were important differences between "western" and "eastern" Europe, many of which still persist, the nature of those differences are still poorly understood by commentators and specialists alike. There is, therefore, a need for some form of discussion which advances understanding of these differences, and engages, however, partially in the task of both "re-thinking European history", and "re-thinking" what we mean by "Europe".

This has become a more urgent task since May 2004, and the beginnings of the "eastern" enlargement of the European Union. Four years on, there is a growing recognition of the radical implications of expanding the EU not only for the social, economic and political structures that exist across the continent, but for identities in the former "east", as well as the former "west". I also believe, unsurprisingly given my own professional background, that "History" is important in understanding the nature of this change.

As an academic I could have explored these theme through the traditional format of the publication of a programmatic article in a journal somewhere. I've opted for a blog for three reasons, which are interconnected:

1. The formats of academic publication would require to me to have well-formed, highly-polished answers to the questions that I am raising here, that I could defend. They would then be used to advance the discussion. I am not altogether sure that my ideas are as well-worked out as necessary.
2. My academic research and publication addresses these themes anyway through the medium of highly-specialized, focussed academic research (on workers in Hungary, and now the social history of the Austrian-Hungarian border). I wanted to do something different, more open-ended, and also more fragmented in content here.
3. I also wanted to experiment with the blog as a forum for advancing ideas, and engaging with these themes. I want to find out whether keeping a blog is a meaningful activity, and whether it is capable of advancing debate. How useful, therefore, is a blog, as a tool for the dissemination of ideas, and for discussion of them?

While the blog is focussed around large themes, it also reflects my local interests as a specialist of the history of modern Hungary, and of Central and Eastern Europe more generally. I believe that this focus can shed much light on broader European processes, and hope to be able to demonstrate that here. I don't believe that it is the only standpoint at all.

That is also why most of the resources have a Hungarian focus. Please do note that while I will write in English, not all of the resources posted here will be.