Introduction

The recent uprisings across the Middle East and North Africa, as well as the ongoing tragedy in Syria, have once again triggered a widespread desire among European populations to secure the borders of the European Union (EU) from unwanted flows of migration. Whereas people inside the member states have been allowed to move at least relatively freely within the space designated as the EU, refugees have been met with increasingly aggressively patrolled physical borders. Bordering discourses, most obviously but far from exclusively promoted by right-wing populist political parties, have provided various rationales for why the EU should expand its bor-der controls. Such anxiety has sometimes been expressed in terms of fears over an increased competition for jobs. At other times, however, anxiety about migration from certain parts of the world has been expressed in terms of that elusive thing that often goes under the name of identity. Would the arrival of a large number of migrants enable Europe to ‘remain European,’ or to put it in the theoretical terms that I will use in this book: would too many migrants threaten the alleged self-identity of Europe? Clearly, a link between the EU’s borders and European identity has often been made. Sometimes, moreover, such anxieties have been more loosely linked to conceptions of order.