Presentism in Bordering
This edited book concerns the European refugee reception crisis dating back to the 1990s; its most recent peak occurred in 2015, when 1.2 million first-time asylum seekers registered in the European Union (Eurostat 2016). The utopia of a borderless Europe that was celebrated in the European Union after the end of the Cold War was soon replaced by tightened borders elsewhere on the continent and the extraction of unwanted migrants through detention and deportation (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013; de Genova 2018). A key moment took place in 2015, when internal European Union borders and identity checks began to resurface, including at borders within the Schengen area, such as the Danish–Swedish border.
The public debate about refugees and border crossing in Europe tends to be ahistorical, treating the situation as a sudden emergency appearing from nowhere. The public discourse on borders in Europe seems to take borders for granted, and border regimes render borders natural features of the political landscape. The flattening out of temporality and context reinforces presentism, “an unintended and unremarked privileging of contemporary concerns and dispositions” (Inglis 2013: 100). This temporal short-sightedness is further reinforced by digitalization and the way in which digital search tools confuse time and space. Fluid data transfer facilitated by network technologies has replaced organized archives as a means to construct an image of past events (Hoskins 2009). Paradoxically, online technology allows us to retrieve and share historical documents and stories easier than ever before, and representations of past events are more readily available. In one of the earliest texts about digitized culture and memory, Andreas Huyssen (2000) contrasted the consumable “imagined memory” of “cyberspace” to “lived memory,” which is “active, alive, embodied in the social—that is, in individuals, families, groups, nations, and regions” (Huyssen 2000: 38) and is therefore longer-lasting. However, the connection between lived and mediated memory is more entangled now than it was when Huyssen published his article in 2000. Everyday life and social relationships are now deeply mediated, and there is often no distinction between “imagined” and “lived.” This is also true in the lives of migrants whose lives are often connected transnationally to here and multiple theres simultaneously (see e.g. Hegde 2016).
Across academia, media, and politics, the so-called refugee crisis of 2015 and 2016 is characterized as “unprecedented.” While this is true in many respects and historical comparisons have their limitations, there nevertheless are comparable moments in European history, which are sometimes evoked in the public domain but other times simply forgotten. In the early 1990s, the number of asylum seekers was high in many countries mainly because of the Yugoslav Wars.1 Further back in time, Germany resettled 12–14 million “ethnic Germans” who had been expelled primarily from Central and Eastern Europe after WWII. Finland relocated some 400,000 people evacuated from the ceded territories in eastern Finland during and after the wars with the Soviet Union in 1939–1945. It is fair to say that resettling 400,000 displaced persons in a war-torn country is a vastly larger undertaking than processing the 32,000 people who sought asylum in Finland in 2015. Furthermore, Finnish families sent 70,000 “war children”—unaccompanied minors in today’s vocabulary—to the other Nordic countries during WWII.
The popular term used widely in media and political discourse, “the European refugee crisis,” suggests that the problem is created by refugees—by their arrival and presence. It does not acknowledge that the crisis could instead be a crisis of reception—a result of the inability to respond to wars, dictatorships, and disasters in a sustainable way. As the civil war in Syria intensified and the numbers of refugees in its neighbouring countries grew during the years leading up to the “crisis” in Europe, the Global North and the wealthy Gulf countries looked away. Issues such as military involvement, weapons sales, and economic exploitation also tend to be forgotten.
Similarly, Europe’s own histories of emigration, refugee production and reception, and colonialism are selectively remembered in relation to present-day forced migration. Memory in the cultural and public sphere, outside of formal history writing (see e.g. the term cultural memory in Sturken 1997: 3–6 and Erll and Rigney 2012), is evoked from the needs of the present. Memories are “used” for something important in the present and therefore need to be meaningful for the collective that is remembering. Selective forgetting, then, may be ignorance stemming from an unintended presentism, or an intentional forgetting that, for example, hides the ways in which European societies have been implicated in the production of the “crisis.”
Bordering as Production
One outcome of presentism and cultural amnesia is the unquestioned assumption that borders can be impenetrable. Contrary to the political discourse on the right, however, borders are often porous, with holes and openings. Borders often fail to fully divide and exclude, and in fact, they can also be contact zones. In writing about the U.S.–Mexico border, Edward Casey (2011) argues that La Frontera should not be seen as a rigid line, but as a softer boundary, where the endings and beginnings of cultures, languages, and polities are not definite and clear, but rather characterized by multiple transitions, histories, and political circumstances. Casey (2011) argues that recalling the relaxed historical circumstances in which La Frontera was more a porous boundary than a sealed wall opens a perspective to understand the border in different temporal and spatial terms than are common today.
In a similar way, a number of scholars, activists, artists, and refugees are working to counter the presentism that fails to acknowledge the historical trajectories of border production. One such example is Festival Sabir, which is organized by civic actors in the Mediterranean region who resist the bordering of the sea by drawing on the shared cultural heritage of the region. Global attention on the Mediterranean tends to focus on the southern sea borders and the drama of migrant death and survival, as well as European rescue efforts and militarization. The mediation of this border spectacle produces an imaginary of where Europe ends and Africa begins. The civic actors of Festival Sabir publicly recall historical circumstances under which the sea was not a border, but a zone of contact. They draw on the shared cultural heritage of the region, as the name of their festival suggests: Sabir is the Frenchified term for the lingua franca—a mix of Romance languages, Arabic, vulgar Greek, and Turkish—that was used on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea from the fifteenth century until the late nineteenth century to facilitate the economic growth of the region.
By evoking a shared heritage, the festival organizers counter exclusionist boundary-making and create a vocabulary to articulate a self-identity of openness and an alternative present and future with a relaxed spatial understanding of the border. As the examples of Sabir and La Frontera demonstrate, history can be used to criticize the contemporary practices of bordering and to expose the present as a temporary phenomenon (see also Boe and Horsti 2018).
Visible border demarcations and border objects, such as fences and border posts, and mediated borders, such as those represented in texts, maps, and images, are fundamental in thinking about bordering in present-day Europe. Nevertheless, the notion of border that we draw on in this book is broader and more ambiguous. Borders are not only geographical or physical markers of differentiation but also practices that are dispersed in socio-political spaces. Critical border scholars have highlighted that borders are made: they are ideological, technological, administrative, political, social, and cultural productions. (See Brambilla 2015; Casey 2011; Mezzadra and Neilson 2013; Bürkner 2014; Pellander and Horsti 2018; de Genova 2018.)
The concept of borderscape exemplifies this understanding of borders (Br...