Borders/Confines*, Migrations and Citizenship (1) by Sandro Mezzadra

English Translation by Maribel Casas Cortés and Sebastian Cobarrubias of the Notas Rojas collective**

Prologue

In the introduction to an exhibit titled «Border Devices», presented in Módena (Italy) during the ‘Philosophy Festival’, the organizers wrote that the proliferation of borders/confines, and their prismatic de-composition and re-composition, constitute “the other side of globalization”. They added: “the dream of a completely fluid and passable world-space is perhaps the last utopia of the 20th century. At a closer look of the territory, though, the smooth quality supposedly inherent to contemporary space seems to fail. Thus, one of the immediate results of global interconnections and movements appears to be a proliferation of borders, security systems, checkpoints, physical and virtual frontiers. This phenomenon can be observed both at the micro-level of our surroundings, and on the macro-scale of global flows. Borders are, in fact, all around us. They are both conventional and geographical, abstract and real, ordinary and controversial. An encompassing view of this combination of flows (of people, goods, ideas…) and restrictions on a given territory unfolds the complexity of both individual and collective identities that are, at the same time, constructed and diffracted by the experience of border-crossing.” (2)

2. The classical concept of the Border/Confine

The background of this talk is constituted by a series of research initiatives dealing with contemporary migratory movements (3) and work focused on clarifying the historical concepts of modern western and European citizenship. Work that has demonstrated how, throughout history, there has been a constitutive replacement, of this concept -that which I have defined elsewhere as the ‘borders/confines of citizenship’- whose value goes beyond what we could call for comfort’s sake –the ‘geopolitical’ dimension- or the ‘modes’ in which the individual has been historically constructed and imagined as a citizen. The starting point for my talk is what we could define as the ‘classic’ concept of the border/confine, which emerges from the contemporaneous developments of both- the general doctrine of the State and of “political geography”- in Germany during the 19th and 20th centuries. Interestingly, “the connection between territory and State” is the title of the first part of the well-known treatise on political geography published by Ratzel in 1897: “Every State”, we read towards the beginning of this work “is a portion of humanity and a portion of territory. Man is unthinkable without land, and much less the greatest work of man on the planet, that is- the State” (7).

* Translators note (English version): the author uses the term “confin” instead of frontera (border) throughout the text. However, in order to avoid any confusion of the concept of “confin” with its literal translation as ‘confine’/’confinement’, we have used the duet border/confine. The difference between ‘border’ and ‘confine’ is explained by the author as such: «while the concept of border refers to a “space of transition”, where distinct forces and subjects enter into relation, collide and find themselves challenging (and changing) eachother’s “identity”; the confine, understood in its original snese, as a furrow plowed in the earth, represents a line-which divides and protects constituted and consolidated poltical, social and symbolic spaces» (p. 112). In S. Mezzadra, Diritto di fuga. Migrazioni, cittadinanza, globalizzazione, Ombre corte, Verona, 2001, ch. 3.

o Autonomous network of translators focusing on material by social movements’ literature.

Ratzel himself emphasizes the convergence between this image of the State with the definition of sovereignty as jus territoriale, elaborated during the same years as the general doctrine of the State (8). In Allgemeine Staatslehre, by Georg Jellinek (1900), the unitary character of the territory of the state is – together with the concomitant unity of the people of the State and of the power of the State - one of the three essential elements that concur in the very definition of the State. Within this framework, the definition of border/confine is relatively unproblematic: it is the abstraction which permits defining and limiting the dynamic process of expansion of the political form of a People (9), or the territorial limits to the legitimacy of the power of the State ( Jellinek). In a different tradition, Lord Curzon affirms in 1908 that “the integrity of its borders is the condition for existence of the State”, the visible sign of the distinction between internal and external, which was the only thing that could guarantee order and peace. Lord Curzon was quick to add that borders/confines are “the shaving razor against which questions of war and peace are pressed” (10).

It is important to consider how the geopolitical and juridical architecture surrounding the concept of ‘border/confine’ constitituted the framework within which the history of migrations in Europe unfolded during the 19th and 20th centuries. The conceptualization of the border/confine, and the clear-cut distinction between internal and external that it guaranteed, has been the condition that has allowed the formation of determinate migratory systems and a relatively ordered geography of international migrations. One could object that that this presupposition has often lead to an idyllic and peaceful representation of migrations in Europe, forgetting that which Saskia Sassen has defined as “the shadowy cone over the history of Europe” in which “there are masses of errant, deported and eradicated individuals who live in a foreign land, in countries that don’t recognize their ‘belonging’” (11). But for a “typological” reconstruction, oriented towards highlighting the peculiarities of the current situation, it is perhaps more relevant to observe how that architecture began to falter at those points where the apparent presupposition of a co-pertinence between State and territory was most problematic: in territories furrowed or plowed by lines of “national”, “ethnic”, and “linguistic” fracture; as in the eastern Prussian provinces during the last decade of the 19th century (12) or during the fugitive crisis after the First World War (according to the classic analysis developed by Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism).

3. Exceeding the Borders/Confines

Re-examining some indications from Carl Shmitt (The Nomos of the Earth, 1950), we can affirm that the architecture referenced to above, was founded on the existence of what could be called a “metaborder”: that is, one which divided the ‘European’ lands (and later “western”), from those lands open to colonial conquest. In this sense I interpret what Etienne Balibar has written: “Europe is the point from which all parts of the world have been traversed by border lines, because Europe is the birthplace of the very concept of border,” and for this reason the problem of the borders/confines of Europe always coincides with the political organization of the world’s space (14).

Two particularly important consequences derive from this point: firstly, a field of inquiry and study is opened-up about the function of the border/confine in the colonial world, instituting uncanny parallels between colonialism and the development of anti-colonial movements throughout the 20th century; secondly, if we assume as a hypothesis that the present is characterized by a decrease of this “metaborder”, then the possibility is opened to the fact that some 'disjecta membra' of colonialism (such as the distinction between ‘citizen’ and ‘subject’) could be reproduced within what were once the metropoles.

From this point of view, it is possible to develop the idea that the proliferation of borders/confines constitutes the “other side of globalization”, that is to say, that globalization is characterized not by the end of borders, but rather by the crisis of the connection between State and territory, that as we have seen, constituted the basic conceptual presupposition of the “classic” definition of border/confine. The border/confine no longer clearly separates the space of the “city” from its exterior, rather the border decomposes prismatically, reproducing itself in the interior of the city and projecting itself towards that city’s exterior. 'The Space is out of joint', as the most adept geographers have recognized (16). At the same time, the ‘straightforward’ “geopolitical” definition of the border/confine is up for discussion, and other meanings of the concept- cultural, symbolic, or “cognitive” (17)- become primary in current political workings of the border.

4. Global migrations

It is my conviction that contemporary migratory movements allow us to explore the thesis presented above, in-depth. Migratory movements show the intensity of the tensions and conflicts of this double movement of the de-and re-compositions of borders/confines. Without forgetting the continuities between the most recent migratory movements and the migrations of a century ago, it is necessary to emphasize some of the indisputable novelties of the former (18): multiplication of migratory models; strong acceleration of its flows; increasing complexity of their composition (e.g. increasing female presence); and the increasing unpredictability of their directions (19).

The trait that increasingly characterizes current migratory movements is their turbulence (20). This becomes visible the moment one attempts to map the geography of contemporary displacements of population, for example: during post WW2 conditions, it was quite feasible to isolate the dominant flows, each with their points of departure and arrival, with such a stability that it was possible to define precise “migratory systems” (21). On the contrary, nowadays, “flows go everywhere” and each attempt to provide a “graphic representation” of the migratory phenomenon ends up in a “checkmate”, “unless one wants to create a representation that looks like a plate of spaghettis” (22).

International research is experiencing a crisis of it previously held “hydraulic” models of analysis –both in their neoclassical and neomarxist versions- with their exclusive focus on factors of “push and pull” as final determinants of the choice of whether or not to migrate (23): Increasingly, it is not possible to reduce migratory movements to frameworks of understanding based on “objective” elements. Better yet, the excess of subjective behaviors in current migratory behavior surpasses even the most obvious “objective” reasons to migrate. While on the analytical side increasing attention is given to the role of family and “community” networks in order to determine the different phases of the migratory process, on the side of migratory policy the “utopia” of total control and absolute governance of such “flows” is allowing for frameworks such as the “actors in chain approach” to gain credence. This last approach attempts to treat the margin of unpredictability embedded in concepts such us “excess” and “turbulence” in a contingent and “opportunistic” way (24).

5.Border studies

It is important to take the relationship between the new characteristics of contemporary migratory movements and the border/confine into account. Border Studies, as it is being developed in the US, offers a particularly relevant contribution to understanding this relationship, especially through the ethnographic, geographic, sociological and juridical research done on the US-Mexico border/confine (25). These studies have pointed to the process of hybridization produced by the experience of the border/confine. Both recently incoming Mexican migrants and Chicano/as experience a continuous “displacement” of the borders/confines of identity. As Jose David Salvídar states: “the US-Mexico borderconfine is a paradigm of crossing, of circulation, of the mixing of materials and of resistance” (26).

At the beginning of Gloria Anzaldúa’s book, often considered a main reference point in border studies-, the following is said about the border/confine: “this place of contradictions ,… is not a comfortable territory in which to live: … hate, rage and exploitation are the preeminent characteristics of this landscape” (27). “This is my home, this thin edge of barbwire". That is how the chicana author and poet expresses herself, returning to prose: “the US-Mexico border is an open wound where the Third World encounter the First and bleeds” (28). Anzaldua’s thesis about the border/confine as a “third space” has nurtured a new orthodoxy in border studies. Additionally, it has been the object of increasing critique for its “aestheticizing” treatments–in particular by Mexican scholars (29). In my own opinion, books such as Anzaldua’s, beyond being an extraordinarily fascinating reading, capture elements of ‘reality’, and represent a healthy challenge to the cultural essentialism widespread throughout scientific discourse and in common sense understandings of “multiculturalism”. One could follow Pablo Vila’s invitation to revisit the theory of the border/confine, placing attention on the ambivalence, and on the dialectic, embodied in the very experience of migrants about border crossing and border reinforcing (30).

This ambivalence, which I have tried to emphasize through the distinctions I made between “border” and “confine”, emerges as much more clearly in one of the most innovative fields of studies working on migration: the works related to the concept of “transnationalism”. They emphasize how the tendency of contemporary migratory movements to produce and multiply transnational social spaces, thus contributing to the continuous remixing of the geographical map of the planet, cannot be denied. It is important to pay attention to the potential this tendency has for rethinking the notion of citizenship. Yet a merely ‘aestheticizing’ reading of transnationalism would be unable to capture its profound ambivalence: the reproduction of old and new hierarchies of class and gender in transnational spaces (33).

In order to analyze the metamorphoses of the border in the midst of contemporary processes of globalization it is not indispensable to look at the US-Mexico border: precisely Europe constitutes an excellent case study. Here, a new regime of border control (in many ways paradigmatic), based around the rhetoric of a necessary response to “clandestine immigration”, is taking shape (34). It is a flexible regime and a changing geometry, which more than consolidating the walls of a “fortress” that would trace a rigid line of demarcation between inside and outside, is signaling towards the governance of a process of differential inclusion of migrant populations. The new border regime I am referring to constitutes a structurally hybrid regime when it comes to exercising sovereignty, whose definition and functioning involves nation-states, post-national formations such as the EU, new global actors such as the International Organization of Migration, private agents such as airline companies and NGOs with humanitarian aims.

I think this could go well along with what Enrica Rigo has recently written about these processes: “the progressive de-territorialization of the external and internal borders/confines of the European polis makes its juridical space discontinuous and suggests a sovereignty that is shared among different actors, both public and private” (35). By deterritorialization one should understand both the displacement of the typical functions of border/confine control as well as beyond those same functions (one could imagine not only what has been happening in recent months in Libya, but also what has been happening on a daily basis in the Mediterranean, a space now traversed by what has been designated by the European Council during last November’s meeting as “virtual confines”, in reference to the vessels that transport migrants), such as the dissemination of those same functions of control inside the very spaces that the border/confine should designate (e.g. the detention centers for migrants awaiting expulsion, widespread in almost all European countries). More generally, the border prolongs and projects its action towards the interior of the city from another vantage point as well: reaffirming the tendency to produce a plurality of differentiated juridical positions within the very heart of citizenship (36).

6. Conflicts over citizenship

This tendency, exemplified most effectively (and usually dramatically) by migrants, plays an essential role in the material constitution of European citizenship as well as in the very functioning of the labor market within the various European countries. To such an extent, that nowadays the border/confine can be considered one of the pillars around which ‘citizenship’ and ‘labor market’ are reorganized (37). These phenomena are often discussed in the sociological literature under the label of “exclusion”, although I think it would be more accurate to speak about “differential inclusion”, given that the former category runs the risk of distracting us if its meaning is taken literally.

If we study the process of formation of European citizenship, taking its ‘borders/confines’ as the privileged point from which to observe the process, allows us to understand the profound transformations that are affecting both the ‘semantics’ and ‘forms’ of inclusion. Although this year the politics of control over the external borders/confines of the EU are organized rhetorically around the goal of blocking the movements of refugees and fugitives, its effect has not been the hermetic closure of the confines. Rather than the construction of a “fortress” and its walls, we have witnessed the deployment of a system of “dykes”, mechanisms of “filtration” and selective governance of mobility (38). Similarly to what was said about the US-Mexico confine, it is possible to affirm that the politics of control over the external European confines have ended up determining “an active process of inclusion of the migrant work through his/her clandestinization” (39).

I would like to add that an analysis of citizenship cannot be limited to its juridico-institutional definition. Recent research has helped us to understand how important is to consider the set of social practices, of the movements and behaviors of subjects that, even when inscribed within the institutional perimeter of citizenship itself, can put it into question, (in particular, forcing its confines). From this point of view, contemporary migratory movements can be considered as traversed and constituted by a complex set of subjective demands for a citizenship that contest, on a daily basis, the very confines of European citizenship. And in this way citizenship can again become, not a domesticating illusion, but rather a space of conflict.

1. This text is based on an oral presentation given in the ‘Bolzano Convention’ by Sandro Mezzadra. A previous version was published in «Scienza & Politica», n. 30, 2004

2. See www.multiplicity.it

3. S. Mezzadra, Diritto di fuga. Migrazioni, cittadinanza, globalizzazione. Ombre corte, Verona, 2001;
S. Mezzadra (Ed.) I confini della libertà. Per un’analisi politica delle migrazioni contemporanee. Derive Approdi, Roma, 2004.

4. See S. Mezzadra (Ed.), Cittadinanza. Ordine, soggetti, diritti. Clueb, Bologna, 2004.

5. E. Santoro, Autonomia individuale, libertà e diritti. Una critica dell’antropologia liberale. ETS, Pisa, 1999;
P. Costa, Civitas, Storia della cittadinanza in Europa, 4 voll. Laterza, Roma – Bari, 1999-­2001;
S. Mezzadra, Immagini della cittadinanza nella crisi dell’antropologia politica moderna. Gli studi postcoloniali, in R. Gherardi (ed), Politica, consenso, legittimazione. Trasformazioni e prospettive. Carocci, Roma, 2002, pp. 85­100.

6. See J.R.V. Prescott, Political Frontiers and Borders. Allen & Unwin, London, 1987.

7. F. Ratzel, Politische Geographie (1897), 3. Auf l., durchgesehen und ergänzt von E. Oberhummer. Oldenbourg, München – Berlin, 1923, p. 2. One of the most interesting among the recent studies on Ratzel is the essay by F. Farinelli, Friedrich Ratzel
and the Nature of (Political) Geography, in «Political Geography», 19, 2000, pp. 943­955. Rich in reference to Ratzel is aaslo the recent volume by A. Cavalletti, La città bi opolitica. Mitologie della sicurezza, Bruno Mondadori, Milano, 2005.

8. F. Ratzel, Politische Geographie, cit., p. 3 . See the three essential elements that form the very definition of the state.

9. Ivi, pp. 384 ss.

10. Lord Curzon, Frontiers The Romanes Lecture 1907, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1908, p. 7.

11. S. Sassen, Migranti, coloni, rifugiati. Dall’emigrazione di massa alla fortezza Europa (1996). Feltrinelli, Milano, 1999, p. 18

12. S. Mezzadra, Diritto di fuga, cit., cap. 1.

13. S. Mezzadra – E. Rigo, Diritti d'Europa. A post-colonial perspective about colonial law is in press: A. Mazzacane , Oltremare. Diritto e istituzioni dal colonialismo all'età postcoloniale. Liguori, Napoli, 2005.

14. E. Balibar, Le crainte des masses. Politique et philosophie avant et après Marx. Galilee, Paris, 1997, pp. 382 e 387 ss.

15. See the recent compilation of essays by Di R. Samaddar, The Politics of Dialogue: Living Under the Geopolitical Histories of War and Peace. Ashgate, Aldershot, 2004.

16. M. Neve, Itinerari nella geografia contemporanea, Carocci, Roma, 2004, pp. 27 (see pp. 38 for the specific issue of the border).

17. Cfr. P. Zanini, Significati del confine. I limiti naturali, storici, mentali. Bruno Mondadori, Milano, 1997; and S. Tagliagambe, Epistemologia del confine. Il Saggiatore, Milano, 1997

18. Cfr. G. Gozzini, Migrazioni ieri e oggi: un tentativo di comparazione, in «Passato e presente», XXII (2004), n. 61, pp. 35­63.

19. S.Castles– M. J. Miller, The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World, The Guilford Press, New York, 2003. For two serious comparative analyses of migratory movements of both ‘yesterday’ and ‘today', see G. Gozzini, Migrazioni ieri e oggi: un tentativo di comparazione , in «Passato e presente», 22, 2004, pp. 35­63 ed E. Morawska, Immigrati di ieri e di oggi in Europa e fuori: insediamento e integrazione , in T. Caponio – A. Colombo (a cura di), Migrazioni globali, integrazioni locali. Bologna, Il Mulino, 2005, pp. 23­85.

20. N. Papastergiadis, The Turbulence of Migration. Globalization, Deterritorialization und Hybridity. Polity Press, Cambridge, 2000.

21. S. Sassen, Migranti, coloni, rifugiati, cit., pp. 95 ss.

22. M. I. Macioti – E. Pugliese, L’esperienza migratoria e rifugiati in Italia. Laterza, Roma – Bari, 2003, p. 17.

23. See S. Mezzadra, Capitalismo, migrazioni, lotte sociali. Appunti per una teoria dell’autonomia delle migrazioni, in Id. (a cura di), I confini della libertà , cit., pp. 7­19.

24. In relation to the European case, see Th. Veenkamp – T. Bentley – A. Buonfino, People Flow. Managing Migration in a New European Commonwealth (2003) www.demos.co.uk/peoplef low_pdf_media_public.aspx

26. J. D. Saldívar, Border Matters. Remapping American Cultural Studies. University of California Press, Berkeley, 1997.

27. G. Anzaldúa, Terre di confine, cit., p. 21.

28. Ibidem, p. 29.

29. M. S. Tabuenca Córdoba, Aproximaciones críticas sobre las literaturas de las fronteras, en «Frontera Norte», IX, 1997, 18, pp. 85­11

30. P. Vila, The Limits of American Border Theor y, en P. Vila (ed), Ethnography at the Border. Univeristy of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis – London, 2003, pp. 306­341.

31. S. Mezzadra, Diritto di fuga, cit., cap. 3. Also, see translator’s note for distinction between ‘confine’ and ‘border’

32. R. Salih, Gender in Transnationalism. Home, Longing and Belonging Among Moroccan Migrant Women. Routledge, London – New York, 2003.

33. See also as an example: A. Ong, Flexible Citizenship. The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Duke University Press, Durham – London, 1999.

34. As another example see: W. Walters, Mapping Schengenland: Denaturalizing the Border, in «Environment and Planning D: Society and Space», Vol. 20, 2002, 5, pp. 561­58. See also the recent volume by U. Beck e E. Grande, Das kosmopolitische Europa, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a.M., 2004, where the mobility and flexibility of borders are identified as fundamental characteristics of the very institutional structure of the European Union.

35. E. Rigo, Ai confini dell’Europa. Cittadinanze post­coloniali nella nuova Europa allargata, in S. Mezzadra (ed), I confini della libertà , cit., p. 82

36. E. Balibar, Noi cittadini d’Europa? Le frontiere, lo Stato, il popolo (2001). Manifestolibri, Roma, 2004

37. F. Raimondi – M. Ricciardi (ed), Lavoro migrante. Esperienza e prospectiva. Derive Approdi, Roma, 2004.

38. See the beautiful essay by W. Walters, Secure Borders, Safe Haven, Domopolitics, in «Citizenship Studies», 8, 2004, pp. 237­260.

39. N.P. De Genova, Migrant “Illegality” and Deportability in Everyday Life, in «Annual Review of Anthropology», 31, 2001, pp. 419­447.