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E-book Borderlands : Europe and the Mediterranean Middle East

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Penilaian

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In recent years, images of migrants and refugees risking their lives to reachEurope from the Middle East and Africa havefilled the pages and screens ofEuropean media. Migration has turned into a highly politicized matter inEurope, galvanized by xenophobic movements and right-wing parties alike.Increasingly restrictive policies towards migrants and refugees, adopted bynumerous European countries, have become the norm. As the MediterraneanSea turned into a maritime cemetery, with over 20,000 migrants and refugeesclassified as either dead or missing on their journey across the sea between2014 and 2020 (IOM 2020), and Europe closed its borders to people escapingwar, repression, and misery, the idea of‘Fortress Europe’seemed to beconfirmed.¹Yet Europe’s increasingly restrictive border policies towards its‘southernneighbourhood’reflect just one dimension of the complex relationshipbetween Europe—defined here as the European Union and its memberstates—and the countries on the southern shore of the Mediterranean Sea.Not only do these states in the Mediterranean Middle East and North Africashare an extensive history with Europe, with many of them still maintainingbroad although often ambivalent cultural ties with their former colonial rulers.They also engage in significant cooperation with the Europeans across a rangeof policy areas, including trade, energy, security, migration, and border con-trols. For Europe, the countries of the Mediterranean Middle East andNorth Africa, and ranging from Morocco in the west to Turkey in the east(seefigure 1.1) and abbreviated here as MENA,² are of vital importance due totheir geographical proximity, abundance of natural resources and role asexport markets for European goods and services. Given that MENA statestake part in a variety of programs and activities conducted by the EuropeanUnion (EU), Europe and these MENA states are thus deeply interconnected. The reality of this wide-ranging and often less visible cooperation acrossdifferent issue-areas challenges the notion of Europe and the Middle East astwo entirely distinct regions separated by the Mediterranean Sea. While theconcept of‘Fortress Europe’may apply to the circulation of unwantedmigrants, the broader context of Europe-Middle East relations clearly defiesthis notion. How, then, are we to understand relations between Europe and thestates in the Mediterranean Middle East and North Africa, Europe’s‘southernneighbours’? What are we to make of Europe’sofficial claim that its policiestowards that region aim to promote stability, prosperity, and peace—claimsthat the academic literature has been all too ready to take at face value? Anddoes the idea that Europe’s power and influence in the region are negligible–particularly when compared to the United States, until recently the mainexternal player in the Middle East–hold any substance?By investigating the relations between Europe and the so-called southernMediterranean through the concept of borderlands, this book proposes afundamentally different reading of these relations. Here, borderlands aredefined as areas in close geographic proximity to a border. Very often, theseareas are characterized by multiple and disaggregated borders with differentdegrees of permeability. These borders are differentiated according to differentkinds of issues, types of goods, and categories of people. As a result, border-lands often become hybrid zones of crossover from one political, socio-economic, and legal order to another. As discussed in more detail later,European policies towards these MENA states rely on processes by whichEurope seeks to extend many of its rules and practices to the countries in thesouthern neighbourhood, thereby transforming them into Europe’s border-lands. They connect the European core with the periphery through variousborder regimes, shared rules and practices, and the selective outsourcing ofsome EU border control duties. This modus operandi amounts to a geopoliticalstrategy, perhaps best encapsulated in the EU’s‘European NeighbourhoodPolicy’(ENP), a policy framework that was adopted in 2003–2004 (Del Sartoand Schumacher 2005; Bialasiewicz et al. 2009; Browning and Joenniemi 2008).³Exploring Europe–MENA region relations through this conceptual lenssheds light on the rationale and modalities of European policies towards theregion while avoiding the ideological tendencies of the literature on the EU’sallegedly normative power.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

327 DEL b

Penerbit

London : : Oxford University Press., 2021

Deskripsi Fisik

205 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9780198833550

Klasifikasi

327

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

-

Subjek

International Relations

Info Detail Spesifik

-

Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

-

Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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