ABSTRACT
Contemporary Europe represents a unique laboratory for the conduct of political experiments involving territoriality (Green 2013). The most far-reaching of these experiments is the unbundling of what has traditionally been a national prerogative – the management of a country’s borders – and the ‘pooling’ of this task among multiple national and regional political entities. Today, border practices in Europe are no longer limited to the territorial edges separating sovereign states, nor are they managed by a single, hierarchically defined authority; they are instead geographically diffused both within and beyond the continent and their governance is polycentric and network-like (Delanty 2006; Axford 2006; Parker and Adler-Nissen 2012). In this post-national territorial arrangement, the fortified lines that once separated European countries have become ‘internal’ crossing points monitored only in exceptional circumstances. In turn, some borders are now both national and European, since they are situated along the continent’s external perimeter. Although they have not disappeared, borders have also become more ‘ephemeral and impalpable’ (Vaughan-Williams 2009: 583) thanks to sophisticated new techniques such as surveillance and data mining.
