COST Action IS0803 Workgroups 2010
WS4: Time: Pasts & Futures
The Path Dependence of Borders' Making and Breaking
Second Workshop 4 meeting
Interdisciplinary Center
Herzliya (Israel)
5-6 October 2010
The WS4 2010 summary report is now available.
Convenors:
Maoz Rosenthal
mrosenthal@idc.ac.il
+972-9-9602805
Zeev Rosenhek
zeevro@openu.ac.il
+972-9-7781727
Description:
The first WS4 workshop considered the relationship between histories, hopes for the future and the materialities of landscapes as a means to begin the conversation about the relationship between pasts, futures and borders. This workshop takes a different tack, and aims to explore the idea that the making (and breaking) of borders could be viewed as a temporal series of decisions, social norms and/or formal rules made by social, economic and political people, collectives and organizations. Within this perspective, borders are social institutions that can be depicted as tidemarks: an outcome of past actions with varying levels of influence on the present and the future.
In this light, past activities create a reality (or a sense of a reality) that affects future activities relating to the social institution of borders. This could be called the path dependence of borders' making and breaking: an interactive process of shared meanings (or not), fragments of existence, conflicting or shared interests, organizational "garbage cans" and structural power relations. Thus, this workshop encourages studies that relate to the dynamic and contextual changes of borders,
between states and other states, between states and non-state entities (such as various ethnic groups and social classes) and among non-state entities. Contributions to this workshop are encouraged to critically discuss the theoretical conceptualization of these dynamics. This can yield support for existing theories, theoretical hybrids or aim at creating a new theoretical conceptualization, stemming from a diverse contextual background. It should be noted that a multiplicity of theoretical approaches and methodological orientations is highly welcomed. The end result of our workshop should include a set of concepts that relate to the temporality of the interaction between borders and society.
Participant: Emilio Cocco
Dept of Theories and Policies of Social Development
University of Teramo
Italy
Email: ecocco@unite.it
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Borders of Sense. A social phenomenological reflection on border-making processes
My paper develops the theoretical issue of the threefold relationship between material, temporal and social dimension of borders that has been challenged in the WG2-Rome. There, we stated that the contemporary lack of transparency of social processes (black box) stress territorial borders, which are trapped in a neverending provisional condition between past and future. Therefore, my thesis is that borders cannot be observed just as material assets that change with time and according to social dynamics. Differently, they shall be observed as “processes” of social construction of sense, which takes firstly place within the inter-subjective flow of experience along time in the lifeworld (Lebenswelt). Accordingly, my paper will investigate the process of social construction of borders grasping them as “borders of sense”, which deserve phenomenological investigation of the intentional actions within the scheme of double contingency. Consequently, borders should be observed from multiple perspectives of different functional systems, organisations and interactive groups and
their semantics. I will particularly explore borders-making process along the dimensions of sense (time, social, material), focusing on the time dimension and its interaction. I shall combine inter-disciplinary contributions from the functional theory of the social systems, epistemology, cybernetic and communication studies.
Participant: Gideon Doron
Political Science Department
Tel-Aviv University
Israel
Email: gideond@tau.ac.il
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Discussant
Participant: Carolin Leutloff-Grandits
Center for South Eastern European History
University of Graz
Austria
Email: carolin.leutloff@uni-graz.at
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
From Transmigrant to Emigrant: the changing meaning of borders and family solidarity in Kosovar migration after the war in 1999
Kosovo has been a region of labour migration from the 1960s on, and many Kosovars spent often decades in the country of emigration. Different from other labour migrants, most Kosovars decided to leave their wife and children at home, entrusting them to their parents and brothers. By sending money to family members, investing in houses and infrastructure as well as financing national resistance against Serbian domination, Kosovar migrants can be seen as true transnationals. From the 1990s and especially in the last decade, Kosovar migration has changed profoundly. Based on the war in Kosovo, the socio-economic crisis, and the migration regimes of Western European states supporting family
completion before new migration, many former labour migrants finally decided to fetch their families and started to shift their centre of life to the country of immigration. The fact that Kosovo declared its independence did not halt this process, but underlined the division of larger family networks by creation of new state borders. Based on a pilot study conducted in Kosovo in 2009, this paper wants to look at the meaning of borders and family networks after the end of war in Kosovo in 1999, which is for many Kosovoars not only the end of Serbian domination, but also the beginning of the “ice age of kinship relations” and the end of transnational solidarity.
Participant: Aija Lulle
Centre for Science and Technology Studies
Latvian Academy of Science
Lativa
Email: aija.lulle@gmail.com
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Discussant
Participant: Anaïs Marin
Collegium for Advanced Studies
University of Helsinki
Finland
Email: anais.marin@helsinki.fi
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
"Are Euroregions border-breakers? A comparative assessment of trans-border region-building in the EU's Eastern borderlands"
This comparative study focuses on trans-border region-building and networking trends that led to the emergence, over the past two decades, of about twenty Euroregions across the EU’s borders with Russia and so-called Eastern neighbors. As a contribution to the debate launched by Sarah Green with the notion of "tidemarks", I wish to update the concept of "relict boundaries" in order to address the issue of path dependence of borders’ evolutions in Eastern European peripheries. Coined by American political geographers in the mid -1930s, this concept is now popular among Polish scholars for thinking of contested Eastern borderlands as places where historical border changes left traces that inform on the orientation of contemporary cross-border practices. One hypothesis, tested within research networks such as EXLINEA and EUDimensions, is that Euroregions help heal the wounds left by "scar borders" (in Karelia, Galicia, Bessarabia, etc.) in restoring confidence among neighbors. Building on the findings I presented in WG3/2009 on Belarusian Euroregions and
on additional fieldwork (cf. WS1/2010 on Euroregion Lower Danube), my aim is to show that institutional
bridges built across border rivers, usually with EU support (ENPI), help overcome "stump syndromes" in making borders more flexible, porous and user-friendly for borderlanders.
Participant: David Newman
Ben Gurion University of the Negev
Israel
Email: newman@bgu.ac.il
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Closing, Opening and Re-Closing of Borders: A Space-Time perspective
The study of borders during the past two decades has closely reflected the changing agendas of both academics and border practitioners. The globalization discourses of the 1980's and early 1990's focused on notions of borderless and deterritorialized worlds, paralleling political and social changes such as the development of cyberspace, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the expanding of the EU borderless zone. A limited counter narrative during the 1990's pointed to the processes of reterritorialization which, rather than accept the idea that borders were disappearing altogether,
examined the re-scaling of borders away from the level of the State and a shift to regional and local bordering processes. The events of 9/11, in their turn, resulted in a refocusing on discourses of physical securitization and a move towards the reconstruction of inter-State borders, with new fences, walls, barriers and surveillance. Thus, the functional analysis of borders is contingent upon political and historical events, as much as it differs throughout space – opening in some places and closing in others. An agenda for the continued study of borders and bordering dynamics has to take account of these parallel changes – in both time and space – at one and the same time, rather than relate to any single discourse (closing / opening) as a universal phenomenon.
Participant: Basia Nikiforova
Culture, Philosophy and Arts Research Institute
Lithuania
Email: bnikiforova@gmail.com
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
The Temporary Broken Border
In our project “The Lithuanian-Polish-Belarusian borderland: yesterday, today and tomorrow” we analyze the inhabitant’s reflection on a changing borders using narrative and the visual methods for collection materials, opinions, photo images of border landscape and its inhabitants. Research through historical reconstruction give possibility of new vision on border perception changes during this period and allow seeing axiological border measurement as a statehood symbol or visual limit of territory. The «feeling of border distance» and “tension of border” sometime can be softer or even disappeared.
Lithuanian-Polish-Belarusian borderland is a specific area which has two analyzing parameters: a space where historically coexist some ethno-cultural groups, and special type of the inhabitant who is defined by an accessory to several cultures. The festival ‘Be2gether’ on the border between the EU (Lithuania) and Belarus at the Norvilishkes Castle is a good case study about the idea of breaking of borders and could be viewed as a temporal cultural event. The participants were able to pass border without visa during three days. This event gathers thousands of people for being together despite their nationality, citizenship, age or religions without confinement, despite the differences of political systems in both countries. The abstract could refer to video records with music and graffiti artistic idioms.
Participant: Orlanda Obad
Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research
Croatia
Email: orlanda@ief.hr
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
The Importance of Being Central European: Traces of Imperial Border(s) in Croatian Accession to the EU
Although inherent to some of the seminal theoretical concepts which articulated the “patterns of representation” of and in the Balkan region, the nature of national, regional, cultural and civilizational borders was not the central point of interest in the work of authors such as Milica Baki•-Hayden or Maria Todorova in the 1990s. As these concepts were reused and reinterpreted in the era of the so-called Eastern enlargement of the EU, in the 2000s, a number of authors have attempted to demonstrate that the EU’s application of the strict conditionality policy and the concurrent shifting of the Schengen border zone, was discursively dominated by the notion of Eastern Europe as continent’s periphery, in which each country envisages its own Eastern borders as “Europe’s last outpost.” This paper will draw upon the examples from my research on the social perception of the EU in Croatia to demonstrate how the fuzzy and porous cultural and civilizational borders of “Central Europe” and “Balkan” may be interpreted as tidemarks whose distinctive traces – such are proofs of Austro- Hungarian legacy – reappear and resume their importance in the changed political context.
Participant: Petros Petsimeris
Faculty of Geography
University Paris 1-Sorbonne
France
Email: petros.petsimeris@wanadoo.fr
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
New migration New borders? The impact of eastern European migration on the social structuration of the west European Metropolis.
The aim of this paper is to study the impact of eastern European migration in the structure of the west European city. The new migration flows have an impact on the structuration of the metropolitan space of cities, including London, Milan Turin, Barcelona, Athens, Rome and Madrid. This has as a consequence new forms of appropriation of intra-urban space and the creation of new frontiers within the metropolitan space of the receiving cities. These frontiers are material in terms of spatial concentration and immaterial in terms of perception of the local population. The paper shows new forms of social division of metropolitan space, new forms of ‘living together’ in terms of the residential and business locations of the various ethnic groups.
Participant: Zeev Rosenhek
Sociology, Political Science and Communication
The Open University of Israel
Israel
Email: zeevro@openu.ac.il
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Covenor WS4 2010
Participant: Maoz Rosenthal
The Lauder School of Government, Diplomacy and Strategy
The Interdisciplinary Center (IDC)
Israel
Email: mrosenthal@idc.ac.il
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Covenor WS4 2010
Participant: Alexandra Schwell
Department of European Ethnology
University of Vienna
Austria
Email: alexandra.schwell@univie.ac.at
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Austria’s Eastern borders as bridge or barrier, or: The ever-lasting persistence of the East-West divide
The abolishment of controls at the borders with the Eastern European neighbours in the course of EU and Schengen enlargement was not only a technical but also a highly emotional matter. The borders along the former Iron Curtain have undergone fundamental changes and have been in flux since the end of the Cold War. Nevertheless, the mental boundary between East and West has not shifted eastwards at the same rate, but remains remarkably stable on the part of Western Europe. The image of the “East” as untrustworthy, threatening and fundamentally different from an imagined “Western” community is strongly rooted. The paper aims at scrutinising to what extent the accession of eight East-European member states to the EU and the Schengen area can potentially entail a perceptive change of security threats from an imagined “East”, and thus of the East-West-asymmetry. Drawing on field research in Austrian state institutions, the paper will explore how the border between Eastern and Western Europe has been and is constantly reproduced and reified as a
“barrier” rather than as a “bridge”. The underlying question is: Who under which conditions has the capability to categorise and define security issues? The paper will thus shed some light on the interaction effects of the various levels in the analysis and will discuss the framing of micro level interactions by institutional constraints.
Participant: Eleni Sideri
History, Archeology and Social Anthropology
University of Thessaly
Greece
Email: eliej73@yahoo.gr; elsideri@hotmail.com
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Con-Frontiering the family: past networks and future webs among the Greek-Georgians
Bryceson and Vuorela (2002) in their work,The transnational Family. New Europe, Frontiers and Global Networks, launched the terms of ‘frontiering’ and ‘relativizing’ in order to illustrate first, the ways families in migration try to “make a home” and/or “feel at home” in new and sometimes hostile spaces. Secondly, they underline how and to what degree these affinities become quite eclectic in their intensity and expression. With these terms the two social scientists aspire at drawing our attention to the multiple ways the formation of the familial takes place, which often oscillate from being friendly and cooperative to more antagonistic and conflicting one. They also point out to the various backgrounds (social or cultural) or institutions (for instance, the legal systems) involved . Following their incite, this paper will try to apply the notions of ‘frontiering’ and ‘relativizing’ not only spatially but also temporally in the context of the Greek-Georgian families that opt for migration. My account will examine their strategies and how their past experiences and aspirations for the
future take advantage family and diasporic networks, but also how the latter deal with institutional or (trans) national boundaries. In this way, this paper will try to conceptualize the ways borders become relativized within families, but also how the latter often turn into frontiers of their own.
Participant: Irena Šumi
Head of Institute, European Centre Maribor
Institute for Multicultural and Jewish Studies
Slovenia
Email: irena.sumi@guest.arnes.si
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Boundary as a Theoretical Concept in Studies of Ethnicity and Social Class
Most current theories and/or paradigmatic frameworks describe borders and boundaries as negotiable and fluid, as either physically or mentally stretching between the absolutes of both "barriers" and "bridges". The historic conjunction between studies in geography, history and political science on the one hand, and anthropology that brought boundaries into its conceptual toolbox mainly through ethnic studies in the 1950s and 1960s on the other, suggests that the concept itself has to do with demarcation of (perceived and socially functioning) difference of practically any order in the processes of human interaction. It will be argued that the said conjunction indeed proves fruitful in that the bordering processes which produce such boundaries can be seen as universally present in human functioning, can be theoretically modelled, and can produce epistemologically sound analytical scheme whose applicabitily encompasses all vital difference producing
social processes from personhood (i.e. issues raised by “identity studies”) to class, gender, ethnic, “racial” and “international” relations. The model is built on the description of the structure of boundary from its event horizon of either passable or impassable difference, to its core rampart of opposing meanings that transform, in the bordering process, into purposes.
Participant: Martin van der Velde
Nijmegen Centre for Border Research
Radboud University Nijmegen
Netherlands
Email: m.vandervelde@fm.ru.nl
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Unfamiliarity as signs of European times: scrutinizing historical representations of otherness and contemporary daily practices in border regions
This presentation wants to elaborate on the historical stickiness of borders. National borders usually are considered to constrain the international flow of products, services, people and capital. In order to promote more international interaction and more cohesive cross-border regions and European Union as a whole, the EU aims to dissolve borders between member states. However, as physical borders may be removed relatively easy, mental borders and images of ‘otherness’ can be incredibly ‘sticky’. The presentation is bases on a proposal for a project that will look for uses of history in developing images of cultural identity, nationality and Europeanness and analyse how these are reflected in contemporary representations of borderlands. These images have, among others things, been shaped through different
historical representations, and the project will study the changing contextual and conceptual frameworks that have informed these representations. In this contribution I will explain the proposal and continue the discussion on the concept of unfamiliarity that I introduced during the workshop in Ljubljana in this COST Action Program.
Participant: Eftychia Voutyra
University of Macedonia
Greece
Email: voutira@uom.gr
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Diaspora migratory capital over time and space
This paper focuses on the dynamics of ethnic group formation by drawing on empirical research on a particular diaspora ethnic group (Pontic Greeks) studied over time (100 years) and theoretical comparisons with other
diaspora groups. The paper addresses theoretical issues related to cultural creativity, adaptation and transmission of skills on the inter-generational level. It focuses on the livelihood strategies developed over time in closed
border (FSU) and open border contexts across which members of diaspora groups achieve the sustainability of continuous interaction and maintenance of viable communication networks despite the barriers imposed by different
regimes and historical circumstances (mass exiles, deportations, rehabilitations). It aims at offering a conceptual framework for understanding the strategies of mobilisation of specific migration-related resources, the use of family stories of successful border crossings and achievements perceived, transmitted and cultivated as part of the group's cultural capital, heritage and source of pride.
Participant: Nikolai Vukov
Institute of Folklore Studies
Bulgarian Academy of Sciences
Bulgaria
Email: nikolai.vukov@gmail.com
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Borders and Border Crossing as Experiential Anchors: The Making and Breaking of the Bulgarian-Turkish Border in Communist Bulgaria
Being since late 1940s the most staunchly guarded frontier in Bulgaria, the border with Turkey provides a multitude of examples of attempts for breaking through, prosecutions, deaths and imprisonments. On its turn, it was an
inexhaustible resource of narratives about its guarding and transgression, becoming thus a memory anchor in the experience of the people in this borderline area. The current presentation will compare different cases
related to the breaking of Bulgarian-Turkish border during the communist period in Bulgaria, among which memory accounts of people who have attempted to cross it with or without success; testimonies of soldiers, whose army
service passed in locations along the frontier; narratives of people living in the area who have observed (or directly taken part) in attempts for border crossing, etc. Focusing on empirical material related to the 1970s
and early 1980s, and positioning them in nowadays’ theoretical discussions on border conceptualizations, the presentation will outline the role of borders and border crossing as anchors in the experience and memories about those times; the divergence in the experiential reconstructions of border functions; and the repercussion of border’s path dependency on its subsequent interpretations in memory and society.