Abyssal Lines and their Contestation in the Construction of Modern Europe: A De-Colonial Perspective of the Spanish Case (original) (raw)

Borders in Contemporary History

The European Experience: A Multi-Perspective History of Modern Europe, 1500–2000, 2023

Political borders in twentieth-century Europe are usually thought of as lines on a map, separating one nation-state from another. In practice, however, there are many borderlands and border zones where belonging is ambiguous, arbitrary, or unstable. Throughout the twentieth century, European borders shifted repeatedly, and some have reemerged or continued to divide people long after being dismantled. What borders mean and how they are represented has also changed over time. This chapter examines how European borders changed over the course of the twentieth century, and analyses what they have meant at different times.

Europe's Shifting Borders: Rhetoric and Reality

The rise of the bounded state as a political unit necessitated a concern with the drawing and redrawing of political borders and the formalisation of territorial arrangements. Events such as the Congresses of Vienna and Berlin in the 19 th century represented attempts by political leaders of the world's major powers and their representatives to apportion territory to states and to (re)draw the borders between them (Blacksell, 2006). The interest of the 'great powers' in this was hardly neutral. Rather they considered larger strategic interests. In the words of Lord Curzon, British viceroy in India at the start of the 20 th century: "Turkestan, Afghanistan, Transcaspia, Persia-to many these words breathe only a sense of utter remoteness, or a memory of strange vicissitudes and of moribund romance. To me I confess they are pieces on a chessboard upon which is being played out a game for the domination of the world" (cited in Kleveman 2003, p3). Subsequently Curzon, by then British Foreign Secretary, was involved in the post-World War 1 repartitioning of Europe at the conference of Versailles. At that same conference US geographer Isaiah Bowman, as part of the US delegation, was similarly instrumental in the reconfiguring of Europe's internal borders (Smith, 2003). While considerations of physical features (such as rivers and mountain ranges as 'natural' frontiers) and cultural characteristics of populations entered into such decisions, these major conferences can primarily be read as responses to the geo-strategic considerations of the larger powers. Traditionally political geographers have had an interest in borders. In the past much of this did not extend far beyond classifying borders as natural or artificial. This classification in itself is of course flawed and misleading in that borders are social and political constructs. The decision to make the Rio

ON NATIONS AND INTERNATIONAL BOUNDARIES – THE EUROPEAN CASE

It seems that our world is made of mainly nation states – independent states based on one particular nation, sometimes with some minorities in that state. Thus the model seams to be 'a nation is establishing its boundaries'. On the other hand, our world also has the 'boundaries that made a nation' model, in which a nation was created after boundaries were drawn. Most independent European countries belong to the first model but Spain, Belgium, and five tiny states belong to the second model.

The Eastern Borders of the European Union: From Peace to Conflict

Eurolimes, edited by Edina Lilla Mészáros, Klára Czimre, Mykola Palinchak , 2022

Investigating the meaning and utility of borders/frontiers and also their timely evolution, has been on the agenda of researchers since antiquity. However, the specialised literature does not offer the reader a unified approach on the definition, rationale or classification of borders/frontiers. While some pundits identify them simply as geographic structures, other scholars confer them political, financial, judicial, affective, ideological, cultural or even symbolical meanings.1 Examining borders in terms of functionality, customarily, they were described as spatial demarcation lines delimiting the territory and the legal jurisdiction of a state entity. As regards terminology, the European and the American scholarly tradition have a different understanding of the concept under investigation. According to the European Border Studies, the border is an official delimitation line between collective entities, politically organised identities in states or equivalent of states, with a twofold identity, a political and a symbolical one. While from a political point of view, the function of the border is to protect a set of laws and regulations, in a symbolical sense, it appears as the defender of a set of norms, values, traditions and of cultural identities. Accordingly, a border is an imaginary line or area that delimits two territories or regions.

Assessing the significance of borders and territoriality in a globalized Europe

Regions and Cohesion, 2013

During the 1990s a deterritorialization emerged, a "borderless world" trend that tended to dismiss borders as increasingly irrelevant to the human experience. Thus, the idea that borders were becoming increasingly fuzzy became popular in political discourse, particularly in Europe. This article challenges this vision, which, despite losing importance in academic circles, has now been reproduced in popular culture, arguing that borders have not been removed and that territoriality still plays a crucial role at the beginning of the 21st century. This claim will be justifi ed with evidence stemming from diff erent policies, dynamics, and discourses. By analyzing the importance of territoriality from three diff erent angles (policy, territorial disputes, and discourses), the article aims to demonstrate that borders and their "barrier" function are likely to continue being signifi cant in the foreseeable future.

Borders and the Limits of Authority 1

Anthropology of East Europe Review, 2021

In this article I introduce a variety of social, political and economic collectivities to analyze ways in which their interactions are influenced by borders as the territorial delimitations of legal authority, or jurisdictions. The limits of authority within such collectivities are seen in the overlapping grants of authority that impact them. To the extent that borders delineate spheres of legitimate action by governments, they can be defensive of the rights of people within them as well as protective of the rights of governments to impinge on those same rights, or both simultaneously. Borders can thus be constraining of those who cannot easily pass across them, yet simultaneously unconstraining of international actors who may be predatory on those who expect their state to protect them. If we are to understand borders, boundaries and cognate phenomena, we need always to take both sets of relations into account.