Border Anxieties

Abstract

Chapter 5 focuses on EU citizens’ border anxieties and vernacular narratives of ontological (in)security; it argues that such narratives offer insights into the everyday politics of desire for border security predicated upon fantasies of control. Analysis of group discussions centres on how citizens conceptualized ‘the border’, what they understood by ‘tougher’ borders, and why they found bordering practices—including walling—appealing as a policy paradigm for responding to migration in the contemporary EU context. The discussion engages critically with interdisciplinary debates about psycho-social approaches to bordering and the politics of ‘ontological security’. Work orientated by the dominant Laing–Giddens paradigm offers a conceptualization of the relationship between macro-level and micro-level bordering practices, notions of home and belonging, and the illusion of the bounded nation-state as the origin of a pure and stable identity, but it presumes that ‘more bordering’ equates to ‘greater security’. By contrast, Brown’s (2010) psychoanalytical approach to walling offers tools for understanding the counter-intuitive process whereby excessive bordering practices may result from and further stimulate the repression of anxieties, which leads to an obsessive drive that produces the very dangers it seeks to negate. But while Brown’s view helps in part to address the puzzle posed by the contemporary EU context, it ultimately leaves no possibility of escape, no potential for change, and no recognition of actually existing alternatives to ever more bordered states and lives, and yet these counter-narratives are also rendered visible by a vernacular approach to European border security.