FROM THE PERIPHERY TO THE CENTRE: THE AMBIVALENCE OF THE EUROPEAN BORDERLAND

Abstract

The article is devoted to the consideration of conceptual approaches to the analysis of the internal political spaces of Europe, which have acquired characteristic features of the border and peripheral systems. The reasons and conditions of the conceptual reinterpretation of the concepts of "periphery" and "center" under the conditions of variable border systems are traced using the example of the Western European and Eastern European borders. An analysis of the most pragmatic theories of border development applied to European border landscapes is offered. The main attention is paid to three models: 1) the Western European border landscape, which was formed between imperial centers due to the creation of a network socio-economic trade system, providing a spatial border with buffer political organizations, within which small, economically, and politically effective states of the offshore type function; 2) the Eastern European border landscape, which was formed within the borders of the Three Seas, between the centers of continental empires, which marginalized the border space, turning it into a competitive multicultural buffer zone; 3) models of the space of Europe within the European Union, which is formed as a network institutionalized socio-cultural system, where the process of abandoning universal territorial and political systems in favor of post-national ones, capable of taking into account the plurality of individual and collective identities, is gradually taking place. The focus is on the problem of the transformation of the peripheral spaces of the EU, which are interpreted within the framework of two approaches: 1) as an expansionist political strategy of "enlargement" of the Union, which is implemented due to the standardization of institutions and norms, and the integration of peripheral territorial-political and local actors takes place within "neighborhood policies"; 2) as a wide use of frontier discourse in relation to the project of expanding the political and geographical space of Europe. The intermediate border spaces are transformed into a system of cross-border interaction, which determines the movement of the borders of macro-regions.