1,721,036 research outputs found
Another Europe: remembering Habsburg Galicja
Full text linkThe past ten years have brought about a profound reordering of the spatial imaginary of Europe. It is a reordering, however, that continues to this day, and the tracing (symbolic as well as institutional) of the future 'Eastern' confine of the common European space remains a highly contested - and politically salient - issue. This paper examines one alternative geographical imaginary seeking to narrate and negate this emergent confine and its binary division of the European space by drawing upon the memory of the multinational Austro-Hungarian empire. In particular, I look to the ways in which the Habsburg myth is being adopted and articulated within the context of the erstwhile Austrian province of Galicja - now torn between the states of Poland and the Ukraine and straddling the probable future border of the European Union. Through an analysis of the spatial imaginary of the imperial Galicja felix, the paper attempts to trace the ways in which the Habsburg ideal of a liminal space of multinational coexistence is being resurrected in the present day in order to subvert the (national and soon supranational) borderlines cutting through these territories' heart - and to argue for their reconceptualization as a wholly European border-space
Geographies of production and the contexts of politics: dis-location and new ecologies of fear in the Veneto città diffusa
Full text linkScholars of regionalist mobilisation have focused their attentions largely on the ideal and idealised landscapes that are an integral part of regional mythmaking, noting the ways in which such ‘representative landscapes’ are deployed by regional ideologues to convey belonging and emplace identity. I argue that to understand regionalist mobilisation it is equally important to consider the lived, everyday spaces of the region, spaces within which such regionalist politics are born. In this paper, I focus on the Veneto region in the Italian North East: one of the wealthiest productive areas in Europe but also the site of some of the most reactionary regionalist and localist rhetorics. I explore the links between the transformations in the Veneto’s production landscapes over the past decades and the emergence of new political discourses, arguing that it is only through an understanding of the new geographies of production and consumption that structure the Veneto space—a space that is increasingly deterritorialised and decentred, suspended between its rural past and an unaccomplished urbanisation—that we can begin to understand fully the region’s increasingly exclusionary identity politics, and the ways in which the globalised Veneto città diffusa that has made its fortunes on the global market and on global migrants is increasingly reacting against both and finding refuge in hyperlocalised myths of belonging
The social and spatial forms of the Far Right across Europe
Full text linkIn this piece, I raise three notes of caution for political geographers attempting to
understand the forms that the Far-Right is taking across Europe. First,
we need to appreciate the specific contexts within which these groups
and parties emerge, taking into account not simply their national political
genealogies but also the distinct local circumstances within which
they find rooting and success. Secondly, we need to be more critical of
the apparent coherence of the Far-Right universe, which is, in fact, much
less coherent in terms of organization, orientations and platforms than is
commonly assumed. Finally, we need to be cognizant of what I will
argue is the most elusive danger posed by such movements: their role in
normalizing nativist and revanchist discourses (and, increasingly, actions),
taken up in ‘lite’ fashion by more respectable political forces
Geographical storylines and the Russian invasion of Ukraine: Narrative power and narrative taboos, a (difficult) conversation
Full text linkHow does the Russo-Ukrainian war end? On what territorial terms? Who – and where – has the right to decide on negotiations towards a settlement? These are all deeply geographical questions, and geographical storylines have been powerfully deployed in analyses of the conflict since the start of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. In this conversation forum, we bring together a provocative article by Gerard Toal identifying what he terms a ‘territorial taboo’ espoused by discursive communities in both the US and Europe: a set of geographical storylines that, Toal suggests, render impossible any negotiated end to the war. To respond to Toal’s argument, we have reached out to three expert commentators on the topic: international relations scholar Kseniya Oksamytna, historian Michael Kimmage, and political scientist Veronica Anghel
Off-shoring and out-sourcing the borders of EUrope: Libya and EU border work in the Mediterranean
Full text linkThe article examines some of the novel ways in which the European Union carries out its ‘border-work’- border-work that stretches far beyond the external borders of the current Union. It highlights, in particular, the role of EUrope's neighbours in new strategies of securitisation, drawing attention to some of the actors, sites and mechanisms that make the Union's border-work possible. The emphasis in the paper is on the Mediterranean, long the premier laboratory for creative solutions to the policing of EU borders. The discussion focuses predominantly on a difficult neighbour turned ‘friend’ - Libya - and its role in the EUropean archipelago of border-work
Spectres of Europe: Europe's past, present and future
Full text linkSince the late eighteenth century, the division of Europe into ‘East’ and ‘West’ bespoke not only a particular geography but also a particular temporal divide. Over the past two decades, a number of leading European thinkers have attempted to trace the ‘geo-philosophy’ of the European idea focusing on the idea of Europe as a civitas futura. This article discusses changing understandings of Europe in (and through) time, focusing on how different understandings of Europe's relation to its past, present, and future have been reflected in radically different visions for European geopolitics. After considering the myth of the Habsburg Empire, it looks at Europe after the Iraq war. The article then argues that contemporary visions of Europe's role in the world (in particular, the geographical imaginations of Europe's presumed ‘spaces of responsibility’) are inescapably bound up with certain historical shadows, but also rely in great part on distinct ‘spectres’ of a future to come
'The death of the west': Samuel Huntington, Oriana Fallaci and a new 'moral' geopolitics of births and bodies
Full text linkThe 'War on Terror' has justified a whole new set of re-territorialisations of security and identity, also in the 'West'. In this paper, I highlight one particularly powerful aspect of the idea of the 'West under threat': one wedded to the idea of a demographic-reproductive menace. Such ideas are not only the prerogative of extremist fringes, for the two authors whose work is discussed in this piece are very much part of the mainstream: Samuel Huntington, whose latest book Who Are We? America's Great Debate focuses on the 'deconstruction' of American identity and the threat represented by hyper-fertile immigrant populations and Italian writer-journalist Oriana Fallaci, whose two most recent books have launched an offensive against the 'Islamic Reverse Crusade' that threatens to 'submerge and subjugate' Europe. Certainly, the intimations of a 'threat' to the West are in no way new, nor are they a unique product of the 'War on Terror'. What is new, however, is the force with which they are being articulated today and the ways in which they are entering into popular circulation, in both Europe and America. What is more, on both sides of the Atlantic, those raising the sound of alarm for 'The Death of the West' prescribe not only a re-affirmation of (Western) ideals, but also -and increasingly -a set of policies for the biological survival of the West. 'The Death of the West' is thus not only a parable of political and geopolitical decline, but also a morality play regarding real deaths and, especially, real births
Europe in the World?
Full text linkThis introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book highlights the tension between the ideal Europe of policy statements and proclaimed European values’ and European Union (EU) practices: Political, geopolitical, and economic. It offers a geopolitical analysis of the various Mediterranean-building’ initiatives that, over the years, have attempted to symbolically, territorially and institutionally construct a Mediterranean region’ as a space for EU action, from the Association Agreements of the 1960s, to the Barcelona Process, to the Union for the Mediterranean launched in the summer of 2008. The book examines how EU development policy acts to transfer the modus operandi of the EU’s system of political-economic organization to European external relations and thus determine the structure of the international system, as well as the ways and modes of interaction for different actors in it’. It describes the number of key characteristics to the new E.</p
Old Europe, new Europe: For a geopolitics of translation
Full text linkThis paper looks to the role of geographical metaphors in the 'battle of words' to describe Europe and its presumed identity. The facile adoption of banal cartographies such as those of a 'New' and 'Old' Europe highlights two concerns: first, that despite the imperial and isolationistic temptations of the current American administration, its geopolitical imagination remains firmly wedded to - indeed, cannot but define itself by - its relationship with the 'Old Continent'. Secondly, it reveals an astonishing distance between such cartographic abstractions and the variety of non-territorial metaphors - in particular, those of mediation and translation - that are increasingly being invoked to inscribe possible futures for the European project
Europe in the world: EU geopolitics and the making of European space
No full textThis edited volume provides an innovative contribution to the debate on contemporary European geopolitics by tracing some of the new political geographies and geographical imaginations emergent within - and made possible by - the EU's actions in the international arena. Drawing on case studies that range from the Arctic to East Africa, the nine empirical chapters provide a critical geopolitical reading of the ways in which particular places, countries, and regions are brought into the EU's orbit and the ways in which they are made to work for 'EU'rope. The analyses look at how the spaces of 'EU'ropean power and actorness are narrated and created, but also at how 'EU'rope's discursive (and material) strategies of incorporation are differently appropriated by local and regional elites, from the southern shores of the Mediterranean to Eastern Europe and the Balkans. The question of EU border management is a particularly important concern of several contributions, highlighting some of the ways in which the Union's border-work is actively (re)making the European space. © Luiza Bialasiewicz 2011. All rights reserved
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