Transboundary Governmentality on Europe's Postcolonial Edge: The Cypriot Green Line

Abstract

Social constructivist approaches to European border studies are at a theoretical impasse, resulting in part from an inability to conceptualize the terrain of a cross-boundary politics other than in terms that reinforce and reinscribe already existent dualities (‘Us/Them’, ‘Self/Other’) while fetishizing European borderland contact zones as ‘merely’ local, context-dependent scales of interaction. The author traces the lineaments of this impasse through a selective reading of the contemporary European borderland literature, while situating existing thought constraints within the context of a wider epistemological blockage on the Left. Particularly against the backdrop of European enlargement and contemporaneous attempts on the part of the Commission to negotiate novel and highly ambivalent relations with its adjacent neighbors to the east and south, a plea is made for a much more globally oriented geo-history of EU boundaries set in the governmentalizing longue duree of Europe's colonial contact zones. Drawing on the work of recent colonial scholarship as well as the political writings of Frantz Fanon, the author develops conceptual building blocks for thinking through the logic of contemporary EU governance within its weakly nationalized borderland shatterbelts. The ghost of Fanon is conjured to hover over a chronology of failed EU/UN-Cyprus negotiations in the long run-up to accession, and is invited to float between the lines of recent interview data conducted by the author on either side of the Cypriot Green Line. A brief reflection on the future of a post-constructivist approach to European border studies follows.