Policing Europe: Border Controls and European Integration

The demarcation of boundaries is a precondition of territorial identity. Do external European borders and a new system of European policing indicate a definite step towards the transformation of the European Union into a state with its own territory, citizens and regime of territorial rule or, perhaps, even the evaporation of traditional concepts of the territorial state? This question is analyzed by discussing the problems that arouse in the effort of the EU to abolish internal borders and to set up a European regime of border checks (Schengen treaty). It is argued that we neither witness an integration of national borders into larger European ones nor the persistence of the traditional territorial nation-state borders.