6. Limiting Europe: Borderscape Practices

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.