Frontiers are an important subject of study and research . Too often,
in the past, historians, geographers and political scientists have been
served interests of states and have been the partisan exponents of nationalist
causes. The task is now the analysis and understanding of the profound
changes which have occurred in recent years and not to engage in prejudiced
argument in favour of interests.
The significance of frontiers between states has come to centre stage
in the 1990s. The frontiers of the EU are controversial at several levels,
although the frontiers between member states are no longer disputed. The
potential impact of the abolition of border checks at internal frontiers
and of the hardening of the external frontier is uncertain. The eventual
location of the external frontier and the effect increased membership on
the Union are complicated matters subject to several interpretations. And
the most general level, arguments about what frontiers are for are implicit
in many public controversies. Although the political context is new, some
of these arguments are as old as the sovereign state.
What is the International Frontier?
Frontiers are not simply lines on maps, a one-dimensional geographical feature of political life, where one state ends and another begins. There are institutions established by political decisions and regulated by legal texts. The frontier has been, and in important senses remains, the basic political institution: no rule0bound economic, social or political life in advanced societies could be organized without them. System of law assume bounded territories in which disputes can be arbitrated and sanctions imposed; distributive justice in the allocation of resources is indisociable from specified communities within defined frontiers; constitutional politics requires a defined territories and populations, with restricted access to the bundle of rights and obligations called citizenship. Despite the introduction of European Union citizenship rights, citizenship rights are constrained by the territorial state.
Within its frontiers, the state has been regarded as a sovereign jurisdiction and the Weberian doctrine of the state’s monopoly of the legitimate use of force on its territory is still almost universally recognized. The claim of the modern State to be ‘the sole, exclusive fount of all powers and prerogatives of rule’ could only be realised if its frontiers were made impermeable to unwanted external intrusion. But this view of the frontier of the sovereign state was not and is not part of an immutable natural order. Different conceptions of the frontier exited before the modern sovereign state and other kinds will emerge after its demise.
In addition to being part of any elaborated definition of the ‘sovereign’ state, frontiers have been part of political processes in three senses. First, frontiers have been instruments of state policy because governments have attempted to change, to their own advantage, the location and/or the functions of frontiers. Second, the policies and practices of the state are constrained by the degree of de facto control which the government exercises over the state frontier. The incapacity of governments in the contemporary world to control much of the traffic of persons, goods and information across their frontiers is changing the nature of both states and frontier. Third, frontiers are basic maker of identity – in the twentieth century usually of national identity, but political identity may be larger or smaller than the nation state. Frontiers, in this sense, are part of political beliefs and myths about the unity of the people, and sometimes myths about the ‘natural’ unity of the territory.
What frontiers are, and what they represent, is constantly reconstituted by human beings who are regulated, influenced and limited by them. But these reconstructions are influenced by political change and the, often unpredictable, outcome of great conflicts, against a background of technological innovation. The military technology developed in the closing stages of the Second World War altered the strategic significance of control of territory; the capability of independent military of many sovereign states was drastically reduced and the frontiers of these States became indefensible. Now, with instantaneous communication of information, ‘information sovereignty’ has been lost; the development of mass, rapid and inexpensive systems of transport have resulted in important erosion of state authority in the economic and social domains.
The allegedly new elements in political argument concerning frontiers, posed by the collapse of communism, European integration and globalisation, are, in part, re-formulation of old questions. Many traces of past themes about universalism, sovereignty and fragmented authority are present in contemporary political analyses. Old concepts remain embedded in political language. But there may now a need to discard the assumptions about frontiers inherited from the past.
The Political Context of the Debate on Frontiers
The contemporary debate of frontiers is essentially European and, in a somewhat different form (not discussed in this paper), North American . A certain Eurocentrism is inevitable in most general discussions of frontiers because contemporary international frontier developed as a political-legal institution and as a set of political understandings on the western facade of Europe, slowly moving into central Europe and subsequently exported to the rest of the world. The linear frontier, delimiting sovereign authority and within the confines of which governments attempted to monopolise control of all legitimate use of coercive power, spread to other continents through imperial domination by the European powers. The new transformation of frontiers apparent in western Europe, now moving eastwards, may similar have a global effects, though this cannot be predicted with any certainty.
This transformation is recent. European frontiers were removed from the European political agenda by the Cold War and the long domination of the continent of Europe by two hegemonies, the USA and the USSR. European frontiers were therefore stable between the late 1940s and the late 1980s – until the political cataclysm of 1989 and its aftermath resulted in, as Michel Foucher points out , the drawing of 8,000 miles of new international boundaries in Central and Eastern Europe. In the forty year period of European territorial stability questions of frontiers and boundaries were, of course, raised in a variety of forms but these were usually regarded as marginal to the great questions of domestic and international politics.
There were local frontier disputes concerning territorial waters unresolved local situations such as a Trieste frontier. There were also minority-related boundary-questions in Europe (Northern Irish, South Tyrolese, Basques, Slovenes, Corsicans) but separatist and autonomist parties were widely dismissed as pursuing impractical chimera. Initiatives, with the potential of making frontiers more permeable, were launched in the area of cross-border co-operation between local and regional authorities. These developed particularly in the 1970s, driven by infrastructure planning considerations, and anti-pollution and environmental campaigns. Transfrontier labour markets emerged, sometimes in the frontiers of two EC Member States as on the Rhine frontier, sometimes between a Member State and a neighbouring state such as at the Basel and Geneva frontiers. From the 1970s, transfrontier flows in certain regions of people, goods and information increased to levels which raised vague concerns about the ability of states to control and police their frontiers and the activities which took place on their territories.
The middle of the 1980s marks a turning point dramatic changes occurred which produced new perspectives on frontiers and frontier policy. These changes ware linked to well known developments and events. The dismantling of frontier control in the EC, implicit in the four freedoms contained in the Treaty of Rome of 1957 – freedom of movement of goods, services, capital and labour, progressed slowly until the 1985 Single European Act. The European Commission’s White Paper, which followed it, containing a long list of measures to achieve a completely integrated market by January 1993. Some countries forged ahead to plan for the consequences of the dismantling of frontier controls by signing the Schengen agreement of 1985, followed by implementation agreement of 1990. All countries of the EU eventually signed these agreements with the exception of Britain and Ireland. At the time of writing, the Schengen agreement has not been fully implemented and the desire of Britain Ireland and Denmark to retain sovereign control over border checks on person is a complicating element in the current Inter Governmental Conference.
Increased co-operation in Justice and Home Affairs was an important element of the 1992 Treaty of European Union (popularly known as the Maastricht Treaty) as a ‘compensation’ for the loss of security which frontier controls were alleged to provide. Improved co-operation in this area is a likely outcome of the current intergovernmental conference. On another level, border regions became target zones for EC regional policies through the regional fund/cohesion fund and, more specifically, the two Interreg programmes which transfrontier initiatives at the local level. These were directed towards reducing the long-standing psychological and material effects of proximity to international frontiers.
Developments within the EC were, therefore, in train from mid 1980s but they matured within the context of a radically changed external environment. Germany was re-united; ‘alienated borderlands’ on the eastern frontier of the EC/EU were transformed into ‘open borders’; new members were accepted in 1995 by the EU (the neutral countries Sweden, Finland and Austria) and further extensions to the east were envisaged; direct military threat to western Europe was removed and the whole framework of collective security in Europe became a matter for consideration. These changes brought new opportunities and problems. Euphoria about the end of the Cold War euphoria quickly gave way to anxieties in western European countries, partly led by ministers and public servants, about actual and potential problems. These include alarm at the possible large scale immigration, ‘unfair’ competition from low labour cost Eastern countries in agricultural and industrial goods, cross-border crime and new routes into Europe for illegal drugs, and the spread of political disorder.
Underlying these anxieties was the impression of navigating through uncharted waters. The geopolitical certainties of the Cold War were replaced by a whole series of uncertainties and question. Were the 8,000 miles of new frontiers stable in central and eastern Europe? Would a resurgence of exclusive nationalism have uncontrollable consequences and result in further modification of frontiers? Could all of newly independent states survive? What sort of security guarantees could they and should they be given? What is the role of United States in the new security framework? Does membership of the EU imply a security guarantee? Is it desirable to pursue a policy of maintaining a buffer state system between the EU and Russia? How far East should the EU expand? This raised the old, unanswerable questions – what is Europe? Where is Europe? Is there a core Europe (perhaps composed of the original signatories to the Treaty of Rome) surrounded by a series of peripheral Europes? Is Turkey genuinely a potential member of the EU or are there deep cultural and/or religious divides marking some frontiers, namely, between Islam and Christendom and even between Orthodox Christendom and Western Christianity? Did the huge economic gulf between the EU and the its neighbours to the East and to the South exacerbate these cultural differences and make for an inevitable increase in tension and violence? Could the EU as whole develop coherent strategies with regard to the complex and very varied ‘neighbourhoods’ to the South and East?
Accompanying these typical questions posed by policy makers, the politics of cultural anxiety seems once again to permeate European politics and society. Mysterious and alien threats are posed to the values and security of west European societies – illegal immigrants, mafias, terrorists, islamic fundamentalists. Looming over all these is an alleged general threat of globalisation capable of destroying European cultural values.
The new threats resulted in a re-definition of the requirements of European security and they could, many argued, be kept under control only by increased co-operation between police and security forces, and improved intelligence and surveillance techniques . The second was more difficult because inexorable pressure of integrated world markets, new technologies and cultural homogenisation could not be controlled. Globalisation is a vague concept covering a spectrum of developments which has provoked in some restricted publics, something akin to a moral panic. The degree and the nature of globalisation is frequently been exaggerated. This has exposed the globalisation thesis to some stringent criticism. Although Charles Kindelberger, as long ago as 1969, expressed a currently popular view «the nation state is just about through as an economic unit» , recent work has tended to throw doubt on whether there is now a greater degree of economic integration at the global level than there was in the decade preceding the first World War.
Nonetheless, cheap air travel, instantaneous electronic communications
systems, direct satellite television broadcasting, new weapons technologies
have created new forms of interdependency which have reduced the cultural,
economic, military and political autonomy of states. Globalisation seemed
to imply that all frontiers, not only those of Europe, would be effaced.
Europe could not opt out of the global economy, but frontiers as lines
of cultural defence had increased salience, and were regarded in some countries,
notably France, as instruments behind which some kind of protection against
external forces could be mounted.
There is an element of myth-making promotion the anxieties about the
new «threats» and about globalisation – some of it is conscious and deliberate
in order to further either particular policies or a general strategy to
defend group and sectional interests. Sometimes this results in a political
dynamic over an issue which causes damage to the social fabric and loss
of international influence, such as, notoriously, the immigration issue
in France and «Euroscepticism» in Britain. There is a dialectic in these
cases between the emergence of new factors in the environment and voluntarist
political action. Outcomes of this process are unpredictable.
The Political Science Literature on Frontiers
The modifications of frontiers within the EU and hardening of the external frontier poses serious problems for the contemporary analysis . Although frontiers can be analysed (and, in normative political theory, criticised) in the same way as other political institutions and processes, but the effects of contemporary frontier changes on the behaviour and valued of the populations enclosed by them are difficult to assess. There are basic differences of view about frontiers in the historical and political science literature.
Some historical and political scientists regard the characteristics and functions of frontiers as dependent on the internal organisation of societies, and the way in which political power is exercised in the core regions of states. Debates in the international relations literature arise out of different views about the nature of the state; frontiers are usually treated in the international relations debate as epiphenomena whose role and function are dependent on the core characteristics on the state. For others, the characteristics of the frontier are fundamental influences on the way a society develops and on the political options open to it. These include most political geographers: the most subtle and impressive examples remain the writings of the French human geographers, Lucien Febvre and Jean Gottman.
The vast literature specifically on frontiers – the historical classics of Turner and Prescott Webb , geographical treatises, borderland studies and a very diverse literature on border disputes – gives little guidance for the examination of the great changes now occurring as states are easing frontier controls or finding that they cannot use frontier controls to police and control their territory. However, the openness the frontiers within the European Union and the relative closure of the external frontier to the outside world is likely to produce a sense of a common space in Europe which will lead to greater social and political interpenetration of the core countries of the Union. A social process of developing cohesion across societies previously characterised by differing dominant values will tend to produce sentiments of solidarity against the outsider, the different, the non-European. This may, of course, be counter-balanced, as Kenachie Ohmae has suggested, by the increasingly dense network of relations between all the highly developed city regions in the world, marginalising less dynamic regions .
A New Field of Enquiry
As stated above, a renewed focus on European frontiers – in particular the frontiers both internal and external of the European Union – is justified by evidence that changes to the characteristics and functions of these frontiers has been more radical than elsewhere. These frontiers are also the subject of controversy. Currently, there are five main headings under which arguments may be grouped relating to the internal and external frontiers of the European Union –
i. The administration and policing of frontiers
The main arguments concern the possible adverse effects of dismantling controls at internal frontier and the measures to be taken to counter these. The effects have been widely identified as illegal immigration and increasing transfrontier crime, in particular, drug trafficking. The fundamental difficulty is that little hard evidence exists about the prevalence of transfrontier crime and how many illegal immigrants enter the European Union by evading controls (rather than entering on tourist visas and staying beyond the admissible period). The diverse practices of administering frontier controls, and their relative efficacy, have not been systematically analysed and studies done within the law enforcement community are usually not available for public scrutiny.
The effects of this lack of hard evidence has been to allow assumptions about threats to the stability of European societies to dominate political debate. The treats are often conceived as coming from «the other within» as well as «the other without». In other words, the threat comes not only from the Colombian, Nigerian, Pakistani, North African etc. drug traffickers, it comes from those individuals, groups and authorities who disagree with a policy of straightforward repression of the non-medical use of drugs. This threat from «the other within» has practical effects on frontier policy – the French government refused to lift frontier controls, as it was required to do by the entry into force, in March 1996, of the Schengen agreements, at the Belgium and Luxembourg frontiers because the Dutch drugs law enforcement did not meet the repressive standards of the French.
The arguments about the measure to be taken in the light of dismantling of the controls at the internal frontiers is the nature and degree of the hardening of the external frontier, the extent to which there are leaky external frontiers, the treatment of anomalies such as Norway and Iceland, the harmonisation of border checks, the systems of police cooperation and the control of transfrontier data flows about individuals, the adaptation of criminal law procedures, whether a European criminal law jurisdiction should eventually emerge, the harmonisation of refugee, asylum and immigration policy, whether can be or should be a variable speed Europe as regards frontier controls.
ii. The attitudes towards and perception of frontiers, particularly as instruments of ‘cultural defence’
The arguments here concern the link beween frontiers and identities, and the aguments about the protection of languages and cultural forms. Whether an identity is national (e.g. French), regional (e.g.Bavarian), or local (e.g. the Cerdarge), it has a limit to it beyond which is «the other». A core argument is that the dissolving fromtiers within Europe as the limits of «security communities» and the dismantling of frontier controls, frontiers are increasingly becoming symbolic - they mark the limits of the area in which people with certain cultural characteristics are in the majority. As «new institutionalists» argue, legal and institutional frameworks are inseparable from social norms and practices – as these frameworks change so too must markers of identity.
The sense of identity apparent in the major European nations seemed to be becoming less exclusive in the 1960s and 1970s, during which period, in Stanley Hoffman’s phrase, there seemed to be «a disappearance of the past» , and, at list until the debate over the Maastricht Treaty, a growing sense, sometimes deliberately and officially sponsored, of a European cultural identity.
A certain reaction has occurred, partly because of some important intellectual contributions reviving a sense of a shared past , partly because popular reaction and political campaigns against immigrants from different cultural backgrounds, and partly because of political/institutional changes. Both national and regional frontiers are being re-considered as instruments of cultural defence; the French campaign for the «exception culturelle» during the conclusion of the GATT Uruguay Round and measures to promote and protect the French language are highly publicised examples. The political arguments about the issue of cultural defence are often crude and confused but there is a real issue at stake since language frontiers often mark the practical limits of community. Arguments about permissible language use are likely to figure large in the politics of the EU in the next millennium. The smaller countries are likely to be increasing insistent on the protection of their languages and cultures.
iii. The development of institutions and practices of transfrontier cooperation
The arguments here concern the «abolition» of frontiers. When the number
and intensity of transaction between neighbouring local and regional authorities
separated by an inter-state frontier within the European Union approaches
those between neighbouring authorities within the same state, then it can
be argued frontiers between states within the EU are abolished.
The arguments about the transfrontier associations and institutions
(e.g. the bi-partite and tri-partite commissions for the Upper Rhine) which
bring together regional and local authorities in different countries have
changed their characteristics since they first appeared in the 1950s and
have posed some interesting and significant legal problems . They now cover
all the land frontiers of the EU and some bridge the external frontier
such as Alpe Adria (which includes the now sovereign states of Slovenia
and Groatia as well as Austrian, Italian and Swiss authorities) and the
five EUREGIOs associating German with Polish and Czech authorities. The
ealiest transfrontier land-use planning and economic development office,
the REGIO based on Basel is now over forty years old. Some have either
been created (Working Group of the Pyrenees) or were revived (Alpazur)
with the completion of the internal market which resulted in even more
urgent need to know about industrial location decisions and land-use planning
on the other side of frontiers . Joint projects, the most common being
transfrontier data bases, information exchanges and measures for environmental
protection, have been encouraged by the EU’s two Interreg programmes.
There are a range arguments about enviromental policy (siting of nuclear power stations, improvement of transport facilities), social policy (transfrontier workers, immigrants), transport policy (road and rail links), education and training policies (joint ventures) issues involve neighbouring local and regional governments in frontier regions, bringing them into contact with the European Commission, sometimes setting them at odds with their own central governments. A new kind of politics has undoubtedly emerged and with it a new set of arguments.
iv. Conflicts of interest over frontiers or created by frontiers
The problem of externalities creatd by frontiers between member states (but not the external frontier) of the EU in principle disappeared with the full implementation of the internal market because there should not, in principle, be any impediments to mutually advantageous trades; everyone within the market is subject to the same ground rules concerning the enviroment, employment practices, etc. The argument is whether this has been achieved and whether it is perceived to have been achieved by populations which suffer, for example, from downstream pollution and transit traffic.
There are also argument about access to public goods and even to private property situated across a frontier. The Danish opt out from the Treaty of European Union allowing Denmark to maintain its ban on non-residents (directed against Germans) buying holiday homes in the country is a breach of the basic principle of the single market that all tradable goods should be available on equal terms throughout the EU. Arguments such as these and arguments about access to means of legal redress across frontiers which particularly affect populations of frontier regions, who, in certain areas, increasingly identify common interests across borders, thus creating embryonic «bottom-up» regions. Transfrontier «communities of interest» are emerging in areas like the upper Rhine and the Pyrenees which have the potential to be troublesome for governments in a different way from the familiar transboundary ethic and linguistic minorities.
On the external frontier, the main area of conflicts arises when a member state has, based on a calculation of national interest, a frontier policy which is a variance with the view of other member states. The question of Macedonia and other issues concerning the northern frontier of Greece, the Aegean and Cyprus are notable examples. Particular legacies from the past such as the claim to property rights in the Czech Republic by Sudetan Germans have the potential to complicate argument about the significance of frontiers. The difference between Spain and the UK over Gibraltar, an apparently peripheral issue, is holding up agreement on the External Frontier Convention. The examples could be multiplied.
v. The exploitation of frontier or territorial anomalies
A large number of territorial anomalies which make it impossible for the European Union to establish a consistent external frontier regime. The issues concerning tax evasion, smuggling and money laundering are evident but public debate about them is muffled. No one example, taken in isolation presents large problems but taken together, and if the possibilities offered by them are ruthlessly exploited, they pose a threat which could undermine EU policies, because of different customs and tax regimes, different residence and visa requirements, different law enforcement procedures, etc. The facilities which they offer are valuable, in terms of «off-shore» banking facilities, to powerful interests (not all of them legal).
Territorial anomalies, which include Liechtenstein, Andorra, Gibraltar, the Channel Island, the French and Dutch Antilles, and the Cayman islands, are of the following types –
Conclusion
Much political analysis conducted has approached topics under the above headings in a piecemeal manner. With little prospect of a satisfactory general theory of frontiers, a defensible modest ambition of political science is to identity limited connections between the fields and questions outlined above. These are bound to be provisional: ‘the owl of Minerva flies at dusk’ and historical processes cannot, in an important sense, be understood until we know the end of the story.
As I have written elsewhere – ‘Frontiers are inseparable from the entities they enclose - and European frontiers no exception. The degree of practical administrative, regulatory, political, social and cultural integration achieved in Europe can be assessed by examining changes in the internal and external frontiers of the EU. Changes are not even over the whole territory of the European Union, and indeed some of the external frontiers of the EU may be more ‘open’ in some sense than the frontiers which divide Member States. Global economic and technological change affects all European frontiers but some more than others – evidence about these uneven effects is lacking.
Changes in the global context have raised issues about the security and the protective functions of frontiers which will not quickly be resolved. The dissolving of internal frontier controls is resulting in some merging of the regalian powers of the state: the criminal law and criminal law enforcement are no longer purely the domestic concerns of the state. In the domain of external security, the EU external frontier is taking on some of the character of an imperial boundary – less a linear boundary and more of a broad zone (limes or the classic conception of the imperial frontier) where the influence of the EU (and Member States) gradually fade with distance from the frontier. Relations across this frontier, with a very diverse range of neighbourhoods, are complex and are likely to become even more so.
State policy and EU policy the internal and external frontiers raise
a broad spectrum of issues concerning, for example, the relationship between
frontiers and citizenship, the politicisation of cultural identities, the
doctrine of territorial sovereignty, the importance of micro- states, cooperation
on policing and the surveillance of populations, and the extent to which
the EU can become a genuine security community through the development
of a genuine common foreign and security policy. The modest aim of this
paper is to summarise issues and arguments to illustrate the changing significance
of frontiers in European.