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2023 | Book

Introduction: Identities, Borders and Orders in Central and Eastern Europe Read chapter Read first chapter

Identities, Borderscapes, Orders

(In)Security, (Im)Mobility and Crisis in the EU and Ukraine

Author: Benjamin Tallis

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Book Series : Frontiers in International Relations

Part of: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

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About this book

This book provides a pre-history of Russia's war on Ukraine and Europe’s relations to it, illuminating the deep roots of the EU’s neighbourhood crisis as well as the migration crises it created in the last decade. To do so, the book employs a new and innovative framework that allows for a comprehensive, yet nuanced analysis of borders and a more cogent interpretation of their socio-political consequences.

Drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship the book analytically examines the key common elements of borderscapes and links them in related arrays to allow for nuanced evaluation of both their particular and cumulative effects, as well as interpretation of their overall consequences, particularly for issues of identities and orders. The book offers a significant conceptual and theoretical advance, providing a transferable conceptualization of borderscape to guide research, analysis, and interpretation. Drawing on the author’s experience in policy, practice and academia, it also makes a methodological contribution by pushing the boundaries of reflexivity in interpretive International Relations (IR) research.

Analyzing three main sites in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), the book challenges conventional critical wisdom on EU bordering in the Schengen zone, at its external frontiers, and in its Eastern neighborhood. In so doing, it sheds new light on the post-communist transitions as well as the contemporary politics of CEE. It also shows how European Union bordering and its relations to identities and orders created great benefits for many Europeans, but also hindered the lives of many others and became self-defeating. This book is a must-read for scholars, students, and policy-makers, interested in a better understanding of Critical Border Studies (CBS) in particular, and International Relations in general. It will also appeal to anyone interested in CEE or wishing to get a deeper understanding of Russia’s war and the fight for Europe’s future.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter
Chapter 1. Introduction: Identities, Borders and Orders in Central and Eastern Europe
Abstract
Ukraine hit the headlines across Europe in 2013 when the mass demonstrations, triggered by President Viktor Yanukovych’s last-minute rejection of an ‘Association Agreement’ with the European Union (EU), met with a violent response from riot police. This crackdown only strengthened the resolve of the (largely) peaceful protestors who, rallying under the banner of ‘Euromaidan’, braved the police bullets that proved fatal for many of them. The EU rarely arouses much positive popular excitement (at least within its borders), yet here were Ukrainians on the freezing yet fiery streets of Kyiv, waving the Union’s flag and risking their lives in support of their country’s ‘European direction’ and the chance to live in accordance with ‘European values’. Despite this—and the success of its previous Eastern enlargement, the EU remained hesitant to embrace Ukraine. This chapter introduces the contradictions in the EU’s approach to Central and Eastern European states in the period 2004–2014 and shows how the puzzles that motivated this book arose. Drawing on my practical experience working for the EU in Ukraine and on analysis of the wider political context it highlights connections between identities, borders and orders and their particular constellations in Europe’s ‘movable East’ that are elaborated throughout the book.
Benjamin Tallis
Chapter 2. Conceptualising the Borderscape
Abstract
This chapter provides a comprehensive picture of the theoretical and conceptual advance provided by the book. Drawing on extensive engagement with multi-disciplinary literature, it introduces previous approaches to borders and bordering beyond their ‘traditional’ locations at state frontiers. The chapter highlights the scope left by this literature for further development, particularly in relation to problems of ‘over-generalisation’ and ‘over-specification’. It then presents the newly conceptualised borderscape framework that I developed for my research and on which the book’s arguments are based. The chapter distils and defines the key ‘constituents’ of the borderscape as related arrays of ‘discourses’, ‘practices’ and ‘spatio-material’ features that occur at or are produced through the intersection of (in)security and (im)mobility. The chapter shows how I complement this interpretive distinction of the borderscape from the wider social world by also connecting it to political questions of identities and orders, drawing on and updating previous work in the ‘IBO tradition’. This chapter also identifies key socio-political, spatial and temporal underpinnings of my research and explains how I draw on or synthesise their insights—as well as how my approach is distinct from them—thus situating the book in relation to various fields of academic inquiry and key debates. This exposition is integrated with a discussion of how the research was tailored to the regional particularities of Post-Cold War Central and Eastern Europe, which provides an example of how the general framework can be applied to a specific setting and also provides orientation for readers who are not (yet) regional specialists.
Benjamin Tallis
Chapter 3. Interpretively Researching the CEE Borderscape
Abstract
This chapter pushes the boundaries of reflexivity in IR scholarship. It situates the book in the burgeoning field of interpretive IR research and develops a key aspect of this approach—the commitment to thoroughgoing reflexivity in the conduct, analysis and representation of scholarly work. As well as discussing the novel combination of ‘quasi-ethnographic’ methods employed in the research, the chapter provides ‘auto-ethnographic’ elaboration on aspects of my research journey thus fulfilling my commitment to overt and open reflexivity. Importantly, this chapter deals with the genesis of the project in my professional experience as an EU security practitioner and how my transition from practice to academia, as well as through different modes of ‘being academic’, ‘being critical’ and ‘being impactful’, influenced my research and this book. The chapter also discusses practical questions of negotiating power relations in the field, as well how to deal with familiarity and proximity to, rather than distance from, one’s interlocutors. It outlines practical ways to meet the demands of interpretive research—such as mapping for ‘exposure’ and ‘intertext’ and discusses the challenges of integrating theory into fieldwork and research design, as well as the wider difficulties of ‘knowing what you are doing’ when you are doing research. This chapter will interest (IR) scholars seeking to conduct interpretive fieldwork and anyone interested in the possibilities and pitfalls of crossing between academia, policy and practice.
Benjamin Tallis
Chapter 4. A Diverse Archipelago: Borderscape Features
Abstract
This chapter presents the spatio-material border ‘features’ that I define as particular combinations of bordering forms and functions that take place in particular settings. The chapter provides a typology of the key features that comprise the Central and East European Borderscape and uses a series of conceptual metaphors to express their manifestations, particular effects and relations to identities and orders. The five types of border feature it identifies—‘Firewalls’, ‘Shadows’, ‘Filters (Not Fortresses)’, ‘Curtain Walls’ and ‘Twisted Mirrors’—are shown to constitute the EU’s diverse ‘border archipelago’ that stretches from the cities of the Schengen interior, through intra-Schengen and external frontiers, into Ukraine and the Eastern Neighbourhood. The chapter shows that the EU has created an ambiguous array of border features, which in some cases defy commonplace ‘critical’ characterisations and support the Union’s order and interests, but in others have proved self-defeating as well as detrimental to the mobilities and lives of Ukrainians. The chapter thus offers a unique spatio-material analysis of European borders and shows how EU bordering has long contained the seeds of avoidable crises in its neighbourhood—and of migration more widely.
Benjamin Tallis
Chapter 5. Euro-renovations: Borderscape Discourses
Abstract
This chapter analyses and provides a typology of the second ‘related array’ of constituents of the CEE borderscape—‘discourses’. It shows how the EU and EU member states have produced a combined discourse of ‘Freedom, Justice and Security’, which is central to Schengen zone governance. The accession of the EU-8 to the EU and the Schengen zone showed a transitional discourse ‘from Hierarchy to Belonging’ while the development of the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) and Eastern Partnership (EaP) rested simultaneously on discourses of ‘Shared Values and Interests’ and ‘Divergent Values and Interests’. Finally, the EU’s relations with its Eastern Neighbours and Partners, including Ukraine, were also characterised by securitizing discourses of ‘Threats and Fears’. The chapter highlights how these discourses enacted borderings and how these borderings impacted on identities and orders in CEE. The chapter also shows the often contradictory nature of these discourses, which juxtaposed integrative narratives with exclusionary tendencies. Overall, the chapter argues that the EU has layered negative, exclusionary discourses over the positive, inclusionary discourses that characterised its own historical achievements. In this way it failed to learn lessons from its own successes and created some of the conditions for the neighbourhood and migration crises. Yet this layering is shown to be shoddy work, of the kind familiar to Ukrainians under the name ‘Euro-Renovations’, and thus leaves open the possibility to transform these crises should the EU and its member states summon the political will and discursive ability to do so.
Benjamin Tallis
Chapter 6. Limiting Europe: Borderscape Practices
Abstract
This chapter explores and typologises the key bordering ‘practices’ in CEE: ‘Europeanising’, ‘Knowing’, ‘Protecting’, ‘Facilitating’ and ‘Moving’. It shows how Europeanising emerged as a ‘master practice’ due to the obligations and responsibilities of shared borders created by Schengen membership—and the imbalanced partnerships the EU forged in its neighbourhood. The chapter then discusses other key practices that have variously contributed to EU successes or been detrimental to its aims, as well as to the life chances of Ukrainians. Chief among these are the ways of ‘knowing’ migrants and mobility, primarily through Risk Analysis, which skewed the picture of both—and of the neighbourhood. Yet also important are the contradictory—and perhaps counter-intuitive—consequence of the Union’s focus on ‘protecting’ both borders and migrants, which both point to the failure to learn lessons from past success. The chapter goes on to look at the practices of ‘facilitating’ mobility (both licit and illicit) as well as the ways people actually move in and through the region and how these mobilities contest or complement the other practices. Overall, the chapter concludes that the EU’s bordering practices not only serve to delimit Europe, with correlate effects on ‘EU-European’ and ‘Eastern-European’ identities, but also to limit the EU’s effectiveness in spreading its own order—and the benefits of such—to its Eastern neighbours. Complementing the analyses of spatio-material (Chap. 4) and discursive (Chap. 5) borderings, this chapter complete the book’s uniquely comprehensive analyse of European bordering.
Benjamin Tallis
Chapter 7. Conclusion: A Moveable East and the EU’s Unfulfilled Potential
Abstract
This concluding chapter draws together the analyses from Chaps. 4–6 to highlight their variously cumulative and contradictory effects on identities and orders in Central and Eastern Europe. This synthesis directly addresses the puzzles that motivated my research and answers the research questions that were posed to explore them. The conclusion highlights the positive aspects of the EU’s bordering, thus providing a corrective to much of the (overly) critical literature on the topic. However, the conclusion also identifies the ways in which EU bordering has hindered the protection, promotion and pursuit of the Union’s own values and interests, as well as negatively impacting the lives of many Ukrainians and other Europeans. Overall, I argue that had the EU stuck more confidently to the methods that drove its one internal success in creating and spreading peace and prosperity as well as upholding its proclaimed values and principles, then it would have been more successful in extending its mode of governance to its neighbours. This would have benefitted both Ukrainians and EU citizens alike. Despite the Union’s failure to do so, the way that it ‘moved’ its ‘East’ (including in response to pressure from people and politicians in states that became the EU-8) shows the latent potential to challenge and change the borderings that hindered the EU and Ukraine. This chapter also uses the synthetic analysis to show how EU bordering has long exhibited tendencies that contributed to its neighbourhood and migration crises. Based on these conclusions, the chapter provides suggestions for further research that could extend the scope of the analysis—and also offers recommendations to improve EU border policy, practice and discourse.
Benjamin Tallis
Chapter 8. Epilogue: Europe Through the Prism of Russia’s War on Ukraine
Abstract
This Epilogue brings the themes addressed in the book up to date and orients them to the future. It specifically addresses the challenges, opportunities and issues raised by Russia’s renewed invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, including for international ordering, the EU as an actor in international affairs and for its (future) bordering. The chapter traces the development of bordering issues related to security and mobility, including the 2017 liberalisation of Schengen visa requirements for Ukrainians, through the EU’s repeated migration crises and the refugee flows generated by Russia’s assault. The Epilogue looks at the development of the EU as a security and geopolitical actor in this period and the journey of CEE states back to the periphery of the EU and, then, back to the core again thanks to their support for Ukraine. Finally, it reflects on possible futures for the EU, Ukraine and CEE—including in light of the emergence of ‘Neo-Idealist’ approaches to geostrategy in the region. Overall, the Epilogue thus provides one of the most innovative and up-to-date summaries of security and mobility issues as well as of EU and CEE (geo)politics over the last decade.
Benjamin Tallis
Backmatter
Metadata
Title
Identities, Borderscapes, Orders
Author
Benjamin Tallis
Copyright Year
2023
Electronic ISBN
978-3-031-23249-7
Print ISBN
978-3-031-23248-0
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23249-7

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