On the Borders of European Pluriversalism. Thinking Europe With/Beyond the Limits of Balibar

Abstract

ABSTRACT The article aims to initiate a dialogue with Étienne Balibar’s writings on borders, Europe, and universalism, in the context of the contemporary transformations of the borders of Europe and the current crisis of universalist politics. Its first motivation is to demonstrate how Balibar’s work could serve as a theoretical framework for border studies to understand the link between the vacillation of borders and the crisis of European universalism. The figure of boundary, limit, or horizon played a key role in the emancipatory narratives on the idea of Europe. Balibar recognized how the metamorphoses of borders revealed the fundamental aporia of European universalism of any kind: each universalism, no matter how inclusive and radical, has to adopt the particular carrier and designate its limits. Hence the politics of universality tends to be border politics: it rests on constant and infinite transgression of the limits to universalism, without the prospect of overcoming the aporia. The second motivation is to revisit Balibar’s philosophy of borders of Europe by drawing out lessons from contemporary research on border transformations. Answering Balibar’s call to the need to theorize pluriversalism, the article shows how European borders became recently the new sites of pluriversal politics.