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549044-L-os-Lacy

In the image of Kronos— or how Europe keeps devouring itself

The iconological construction of EUropean identity, its geopolitical implications for the project of European integration and why it needs to be re-imagined

by Rodrigo Bueno Lacy

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549044-L-bw-Lacy Processed on: 29-9-2020 PDF page: 1 This research was conducted at the Nijmegen Centre for Border Research (NCBR) and it was mostly financed by EUBORDERSCAPES, an FP7 project by the Research and Innovation Department at the European Commission that ran from 2012 to 2016 (grant number 290775). However, once this money ran out, this research was re-connected to the respirator by the good offices of the Depart- ment of Geography, Urban Planning and Environment and the timely intervention of the Faculty of Management at Radboud University, which graciously extended my contract.

ISBN 978-94-6421-058-3

Cover Designed by the author: A visual portmanteau superposing Saturn devouring his son (1819-1823), an oil-on-canvas rendition by Spanish painter Francisco de Goya (1746-1828); and the anthropomorphic map Europe as Queen (aka Europa Regina), found in the Cosmographia (1544), by German cartographer Sebastian Münster (1488-1552).

Print Ipskamp Printing

© Rodrigo Bueno Lacy, 2020 All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, distributed, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without prior written permission of the author.

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The iconological construction of EUropean identity, its geopolitical implications for the project of EUropean integration and why it needs to be re-imagined

Proefschrift

ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor

aan de Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen

op gezag van de rector magnificus prof. dr. J.H.J.M. van Krieken,

volgens besluit van het college van decanen

in het openbaar te verdedigen op vrijdag 13 november 2020

om 12.30 uur precies

door

Rodrigo Bueno Lacy

geboren op 13 oktober 1985

te Mexico-Stad, Mexico

549044-L-bw-Lacy Processed on: 29-9-2020 PDF page: 3 Promotoren

Prof. dr. Henk van Houtum

Prof. dr. Arnoud Lagendijk

Manuscriptcommissie

Prof. dr. Peter Ache

Prof. dr. James Scott (University of Eastern Finland, Finland)

Dr. Olivier Thomas Kramsch

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The iconological construction of EUropean identity, its geopolitical implications for the project of EUropean integration and why it

needs to be re-imagined

Doctoral Thesis

to obtain the degree of doctor

from Radboud University Nijmegen

on the authority of the Rector Magnificus prof. dr. J.H.J.M. van Krieken,

according to the decision of the Council of Deans

to be defended in public on Friday, November 13, 2020

at 12:30 hours

Rodrigo Bueno Lacy

born on October 13, 1985

in Mexico City (Mexico)

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Prof. dr. Henk van Houtum

Prof. dr. Arnoud Lagendijk

Doctoral Thesis Committee

Prof. dr. Peter Ache

Prof. dr. James Scott (University of Eastern Finland, Finland)

Dr. Olivier Thomas Kramsch

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549044-L-bw-Lacy Processed on: 29-9-2020 PDF page: 6 Omnia dicta fortiora si dicta Latina

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549044-L-bw-Lacy Processed on: 29-9-2020 PDF page: 8 Contents

List of figures ...... xiii An unassuming cascade of thankfulness ...... xvii Foreword ...... xix

Introduction ...... 1

First section Building Europe ...... 29

CHAPTER 1 The power of images and geographical imaginations ...... 31

CHAPTER 2 Lies, Damned Lies & Maps: The EU’s Cartopolitical Invention of Europe ...... 61

CHAPTER 3 The Glocal Green Line: The Imperial Cartopolitical Puppeteering of Cyprus...... 93

Second section Autoimmunity ...... 135

CHAPTER 4 On the autoimmunity of the EU’s deadly b/ordering regime ...... 137

CHAPTER 5 The Political Extreme as the New Normal ...... 169

CHAPTER 6 The Migration Map Trap: On the invasion arrows in the cartography of migration ...... 197

Third section Other Europes ...... 237

CHAPTER 7 Freeing Europe’s Image: EUrope’s unwitting alliance against itself ...... 239

EPILOGUE Towards new visualisations of Europe: On the usurpation of history, the explosion of representations and the transformation of political identity ...... 289

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549044-L-bw-Lacy Processed on: 29-9-2020 PDF page: 10 List of figures

Foreword

Figure A. Saturn devouring his son (1636), by Peter Paul Rubens………p. xxii

Figure B. The new Europeans………p. xxiii

Chapter 1

Figure 1.1. European stereotypes………p. 36

Figure 1.2. World map of stereotypes………p. 40

Figure 1.3. The Clash of Ignorance………p. 40

Figure 1.4. Scopic regime’s assembly line………p. 51

Figure 1.5. Scopic regimes and geopolitics………p. 51

Figure 1.6. Cartopolitical manufacture………p. 52

Figure 1.7. Cartopolitical montage………p. 52

Figure 1.8. Critical cartopolitics………p. 53

Chapter 2

Figure 2.1. Misleading objectivity: EU banknotes offer a geopolitically charged Europe presented as a dispassionate representation………p. 70

Figure 2.2. Unspoken Europe: The boundaries of the EU go far beyond what EU banknotes are willing to admit………p. 70

Figure 2.3. The cartopolitical cleansing of Europe………p. 72

Figure 2.4. Not long ago, European diversity was a source of violence rather than unity………p. 76

Figure 2.5. Europa Regina, published in Sebastian Mu¨nster’s Cosmographia (1570) ……p. 77

Figure 2.6. Leo Belgicus, Nicolo Iohannis Visscher (1648). The first depictions of the ‘Bel- gian Lion’ were made by Michael von Eitzinger in 1587………p. 78

Figure 2.7. The world as a clover leaf. Published in Heinrich Bu¨nting’s Itinerarium Sacrae Scriptura (1581) ………p. 79

Figure 2.8. Ebstorf map. Composed ca. 1239 and destroyed during the bombing of Han- nover during World War II………p. 81

Figure 2.9. Hereford map. Designed by Richard de Bello ca. 1290 and today located in the Hereford Cathedral in Hereford, England………p. 82

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Figure 3.1. Celle-ci n’est pas la Ligne Verte………p. 96

Figure 3.2. Cypriots through imperial eyes: ‘Native Types of Cyprus’, image of Cyprus from the Illustrated London News of 1895………p. 103

Figure 3.3. Herbert Kitchener’s map of Cyprus, 1885………p. 105

Figure 3.4. Map of Greater Greece, circa 1919………p. 107

Figure 3.5. The Romantic embodiment of the Greek nation. Greece on the Ruins of Misso- longhi, by Eugène Delacroix (1826)………p. 111

Figure 3.6. The other side of the Megali Idea. Map of the Turkish Republic (1927), by Ki- taphane-yi Sûdî………p. 112

Figure 3.7. Example of Greek Cypriot history books with a cover based on the ‘bleeding island’ theme………p. 119

Figure 3.8. A bloody cartopolitical imagination………p. 120

Figure 3.9. Snatching Cyprus away from Anatolia………p. 123

Chapter 4: Autoimmunity

Figure 4.1. The paper fortress of the EU………p. 147

Figure 4.2. The rise of the deadly EU border………p. 149

Figure 4.3. Expanding the Fortress. Source: Transnational Institute………p. 153

Figure 4.4. The vicious EU’s autoimmune b/ordering regime………p. 154

Figure 4.5. The encampment in EUrope and near abroad………p. 156

Chapter 5: Radicalisation

Figure 5.1. Breaking Point………p. 183

Figure 5.2. Brexit and Nazi propaganda………p. 184

Chapter 6: Phobiocartography

Figure 6.1. The Frontex Map of 2017………p. 201

Figure 6.2. The Frontex Map of 2015………p. 202

Figure 6.3. Invasion map (1940)………p. 207

Figure 6.4. ‘Dutch School Maps’: ‘Origin’ of asylum seekers in Europe………p. 209

Figure 6.5. ‘White Supremacist Map’………p. 213

Figure 6.6. ‘Brexit Map’ ………p. 215

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Figure 6.8. Counter Frontex Maps: ‘The geography of an unwanted humanity’……p. 217

Figure 6.9. Counter Frontex map: ‘The forbidden world’………p. 218

Figure 6.10. ‘Radical Map’: Make war, expect migration, by Platon (2016)………p. 219

Figure 6.11. The journey of Mustafa, by Migreurop (2017)………p. 220

Chapter 7: Imperial biopolitics

Figure 7.1. Europa recens descripta (1617), by Guiljelmo Blaeuw………p. 252

Figure 7.2. Americae nova tabula (1630), by Guiljelmo Blaeuw………p. 256

Figure 7.3. Visual layout of a Rariteitkamer of crabs………p. 257

Figure 7.4. “The Merry Family”, by Jan Steen (1668)………p. 259

Figure 7.5. Casta painting (ca. 18th century) depicting the classification of racial combinations in the American Spanish colonies………p. 262

Figure 7.6. The sophistication of a racialised view of the world………p. 270

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An unassuming cascade of thankfulness

As always, my opening words of gratitude go to Guadalupe and Alfredo: a curious Mexican couple who, for reasons as yet unknown, had the resolute persistence to send me to school since my earliest childhood and, to this iniquitous day, remain stoically good parents in spite of my scandalous neglect.

Academically, I owe my largest debt to Prof. Henk van Houtum. As co-author of most of the articles that embellish this doctoral dissertation in the guise of chapters, he is not only responsible for some of the boldest ideas that inspired them but also for the invaluable freedom that allowed me to write from a perspective and in a voice that, I am certain, would have hardly been offered a stage in most other academic theatres. His unwavering support over the last decade has allowed me to carve a narrow path through an scientific field whose dereliction often frus- trates the journey of those foolish enough to dare an idealistic attempt at critical social science. Besides Henk’s academic guidance, I also have the honour to count him among my friends, which is not only a prosaic personal pleasure but also a scientifically prolific breeding ground for projects that brew a livelier flavour under the fermenting influence of dipsomaniac conversations.

I am also profoundly grateful to Prof. Arnoud Lagendijk. To my fortune, he had the serendipitous judgement to become involved in my research when, late in its development, it underwent the bold mutation from a disparate collection of academic articles into a more coherent doctoral proposal. His genuine interest for scientific discussion and incisive criticism—always delivered with infallible polite- ness—has allowed me to polish some of the most rugged aspects of this dissertation. Moreover, his steadfast support for my research since the very beginning has provided a much-needed buttress to my professional development at the Geogra- phy, Planning and Environment Department and I thank him heartfeltly for dis- pensing so much trust so swiftly to this ferociously eccentric project.

Regarding the approval of this dissertation, I would like to extend an effu- sion of appreciation to the unadjectivisably honourable members of my manuscript committee.

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549044-L-bw-Lacy Processed on: 29-9-2020 PDF page: 15 First, a special thanks goes to Dr. Olivier Kramsch, whose post-colonial reading group laid the grounds for much needed yet hardly-ever cultivated debate on a range of topics central to this work. Such community has been a magnet for a number of peerless characters whose musings have greatly improved the atmosphere of this department and made my stay much more stimulating than it would have been otherwise. Second, a very generous portion of my recognition goes to Prof. Peter Ache, who graciously agreed to chair my manuscript committee and with whom I have shared few but meaningful conversations over the years—ranging from debating the merits of a critical approach to the cartography of spatial planning to reminiscing about his days in the ghastly depths of the German coal mines. Likewise, I would also like to pour a bucket of thankfulness over Prof. James Scott, whose immense modesty has always belied his intellectual stature. It has been my pleasure to recurrently meet him and the multifarious collection of border scholars that he brings together.

Overall, I am enormously and genuinely glad that Olivier, Peter and James, scholars whom I genuinely appreciate for a disparate number of bulky reasons, had the humility to lend me their patience, time and honesty to assess my doctoral research. As for the external members of my manuscript committee, I first would like to send much of my unbridled thankfulness to Dr. Anna Casaglia. Throughout the last decade, I have had the sporadic satisfaction of occasionally running into her during conferences and work meetings across Europe. Besides striking grip- ping conversations about an unorthodox range of topics, our staccato collaboration has afforded me the privilege of enjoying her profuse expertise on migration— particularly regarding the securitisation of the migratory phenomenon shaping the borders of the EU. She was the first person approached to become part of my manuscript committee and she agreed immediately, for which I extend her my most sincere appreciation. Concerning the last two members, my acquaintance with them is one-sided yet oddly copious. I have had the delight to get acquainted with Prof. Luiza Bialasiewicz and Dr. Philippe Rekacewicz solely through their texts and maps, respectively. Since my days as a master’s student, exposure to Prof. Bi- alasiewicz’s Humboldt lecture on the Italian-Libyan border deal, as well as to her neat understanding of the complex mechanisms that turn history, politics and ideas into European borders, have served as a source of inspiration to my work. Over the years, I have frequently consulted her writings (particularly a single article, “Spectres of Europe: Europe’s Past, Present and Future”) and, time and again, their richness has animated what I have had the arrogance to consider some astute thoughts of my own. As for Dr. Rekacewicz, he is someone whose maps I have profoundly admired even before I knew how rare and valuable they were. Unlike cartographers, who have largely confined representations of the world to the service of states and power—or critical but purely theoretical cartographers, who have demolished traditional cartography to a pulp yet produced no maps of their own to provide an alternative and reflect their insights—Dr. Rekacewicz is a true

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mapmaker (in the sense extolled by Denis Wood). His political maps reveal an awareness of the unavoidable political statements that these visual artefacts cannot help themselves to make. Their nonchalant visual design, together with their scientific rigour, imbue them with an iconological refinement that functions as an implicit but devastating indictment on the political cartography—particularly on migration—which they implicitly defy. Dr. Rekacewicz’s work reveals the feebleness of technical barriers that contemporary cartography seems to have erected and which precludes most of us from depicting the world on the basis of science, a humanist morality and our own relation with space, its people and culture instead of sheepishly accepting the representations of the world that unscrupulous interests have made hegemonic. Although the occasion lends itself to outbursts of trite obsequiousness, I am truly humbled by the presence of people whose qualities and work I keep in such high regard.

…

On a more personal note, a very immodest display of gratitude goes to Kevin Raaphorst, whose ever-opportune insights into the fields of cartography, semiotics, iconography and bona fide musical virtuosi have been an invaluable contribution to this modest doctoral research. Ever since we shared a room enlivened by the blasts of two small but overconfident loudspeakers at the very beginning of my doctoral incursion, we have kept a close friendship at a distance which keeps being nourished by unconventional writing projects—for which we have more enthusiasm than either time or knowledge. Although our culinary and distillation-infused rendezvous have been decimated by an army of commitments and the tyranny of babies, we still hold the conviction that such ritualisations are required to unleash the intellectual trance that stimulating research badly needs.

In the same spirit, the Nijmegen Centre for Border Research (NCBR) and its worldwide network of border scholars deserves a cornucopia of praise. This collection of critical and radical people of science keeps bringing together much in- trepid scholarship on borders and the life-and-death dramas that shape them. I have benefitted enormously from having the NCBR as my research platform and its members as my daily—or intermittent—colleagues. The NCBR remains a Euro- pean bastion for the kind of unapologetically critical research that, unfortunately, has so relentlessly been driven out of academia in most other places.

I also would like to dedicate many sincere thanks the Faculty of Manage- ment and, in particular, to two people. First, to Anouk van de Kerkhof, who has spared no efforts in helping me out with essential matters related to my stay at the university whenever the ungenerous timing of the situation has so required. Sec- ond, to Prof. Paul Hendriks—aka “The Dean”—whose support has allowed me to conclude this dissertation in the most auspicious conditions while conducting my post-doctoral research.

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549044-L-bw-Lacy Processed on: 29-9-2020 PDF page: 17 Finally, on a more cryptic mood, I would also like to thank Rena Buijze for having the charity of keeping her delightful company next to my reprobate existence without making much fuss about it. She has been an indefatigable source of undeserved love in a world otherwise corrupted by the inexorable erosion of unfathomable doubt. As for my husband—with whom she shares her questionable taste—words can barely begin to describe the Sisyphian impetus that encourages him to keep ceaselessly breaking and building just as the world keeps crumbling around.

Postscriptorially, I would like to express my monstrous—if modest—gratitude to a swollen collection of inspirational vertebrates whose lively raptures of spontaneity have been among this research’s richest sources of motivation—even if their idiosyncratic approach to respectability would make their detailed introduction better suited for an epilogic appendix to this work. They deserve no mention other than a loving warning: you know who you are and I am delighted that you are that way.

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Foreword

The title of this work takes its inspiration from the symbolism of Kronos, an ancient Greek agricultural deity that since Antiquity has been associated to “chronos” (χρόνος)—the word in ancient and modern Greek for “time” as well as the suffix many other languages employ for time-related concepts. According to the crea- tional myth of ancient Olympian religion, Gaia (the Earth), incited her own unborn son, Cronos, to challenge his father, Uranus (the Sky). Uranus insisted on preventing the birth of Cronos and his siblings out of a relentless apprehension that they would dethrone him. Cronos, however, managed to overpower him. Following his mother’s advice, Cronos decided to castrate him with a sickle upon his own birth and then take his place. Later, fearing his own children to follow in his own parricidal footsteps, Cronos decided to do like his father before him and swallow them whole as soon as they were born.

The myth of Cronos devouring his children has served as one of the most powerful allegories about the calamitous inexorability of time: an endless cycle of self-devouring creation and death where the past gobbles the present and the present tears the future apart. The unmerciful feast of parricidal cannibalism evoked by this myth also serves as a parable to warn about the self-destructive impetus humanity implaccably seems to eventually relapse into in spite of the wisdom one would expect it to accumulate with the pass of generations and the horrors that have scarred them. Cronos offers a powerful myth evoking the ceaseless tragedies which humanity has persistently gotten itself into throughout history: the endless ways in which it keeps wolfing down its own children in spite of the inevitable self-defeating suicide such course of action implies.

Although the violence of Cronos’ serial infanticide has been imagined in all its violent forcefulness by a multitude of artists—including Francisco de Goya, whose rendition of Cronos’ myth is blended into the image of this work’s cover— Peter Paul Rubens’ interpretation of the myth’s most morbid scene is particularly harrowing (see Figure A). Rubens’ Cronos is a deranged old man whose violent insanity is signalled by the tension of his naked musculature; dishevelled grey mane and beard; and the psychotic imperturbability of his gaze fixed upon the excruciating agony of his own child as its chest’s tender flesh gets torn apart by his own father’s murderous teeth.

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Figure A. Saturn devouring his son (1636), by Peter Paul Rubens. Source: Museo del Prado (Wikimedia Commons: https://tinyurl.com/njg7rmz)

I believe that the classical myth of Cronos offers an overarching metaphor able to capture the common thread running through the following chapters: just like Cro- nos, the EU is devouring its own children. No other geopolitical drama embodies the doom called to mind by Cronos’ suicidal disorder as inexorably as the current EU’s migration policy: by designing a border regime that produces so much suffering, torture and death, the EU is not only undermining its own ethos but effectively sabotaging an entire generation of would-be European citizens and, in so doing, eating its own people, its own principles and its own future (see Figure B).

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Figure B. The New Europeans. Source: https://tinyurl.com/ybragh7b

This the story of Europe persistently sleepwalking into an abyss of horrors that the continent has seen not only once (Clarke 2014), but several times before (Baumann 2012). My ambition is to show that the despairing certitude of Europe’s autoimmune catastrophes can be explained and foretold—including the Hydra-like crisis ominously looming in the near horizon—by a piecemeal collection of its images, maps and the mental geographies and cartographies that such artefacts have engendered and keep nourishing. This is a story told by the many images which, travelling through time, have borne witness to the “Cronic” cycle of Europe’s glorious rise and its cataclysmic falls.

This research is inspired by distrust for one of those images: Europe. The meaning of such grand geopolitical constructs, i.e., impressive and unchallenged notions of territories and their boundaries, their inhabitants and the particular cultures that they produce—e.g., “The Muslim World”, “The Anglo-Saxon World”, “Latin America”—among many more. The significance of the politico-cartographic imaginations that this geopolitical taxonomy engenders can hardly be

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549044-L-bw-Lacy Processed on: 29-9-2020 PDF page: 21 overstated: by compartmentalising large swathes of the world and endowing them with meaning—e.g., as countries, cultures or civilisations—grand geopolitical constructs allow people to make sense of the world’s complexity, classify it, represent it, imagine it, fill it with narratives, meaning, purpose and, ultimately, motivate political action.

In this work, I focus on “Europe”: a grand geopolitical construct whose image today is inevitably bound to the European Union (EU) and the post-war project of European integration that it embodies. The image of Europe that I am trying to sketch does not refer to a particular depiction—except when so specified—but to a broader notion that is assembled by discourses of a decisively visual nature. I contend that visuality is crucial to understand how such grand geopolitical ideas take shape: every single chapter examines how Europe’s visualisation, be it representations with a physical existence or those fabricated by the cinematic exploits of the imagination, puts together the image of Europe that we are used to see in maps, read in novels, or conjure up as tourists. Although the boundary between reality and representation has always been blurry, the bewildering development of information technologies over the past half century has detonated an explosion of representations that has confused this boundary even further. The extent of the increasingly imperceptible overlap between reality and representation has made it a central topic of world and national politics (e.g., fake news and deep fakes, artificial intelligence, the Cambridge Analytica Files, the regulation of internet and social media, a crackdown on press freedom and “left-wing” indoctrination etc.). Thus, even though this work abundantly relies on media to discuss the power of representations—for most have been breaking news during the writing of its chapters—, it does not offer more than a tangential discussion on information technologies. However, as I conclude in the Epilogue, this explosion of realities is such a disrupting phenomenon in that it warrants an entire research agenda, especially for the study of its dramatic geopolitical implications (e.g., war and conflict, identity and exclusion, democracy and representation, etc.).

Following the conviction that a scattered collection of seemingly inconsequential yet ceaselessly reproduced, rarely challenged and ubiquitous everyday images, narratives and practices greatly edited by power surreptitiously paint the big picture of the world that shapes world politics, I conduct an iconological exploration of the geopolitical iconography (e.g. maps, architecture, mythical symbols, historical narratives, political metaphors, etc) that puts together “the image of Europe”. My aim is to analyse the political implications that this image exerts upon the geopolitics of the EU and, more transcendentally, reflect on its long-term implications for the post-war project of European integration.

Throughout this work, I have persistently tried to capture the distrust for geographical compartmentalisations in a concept that Henk van Houtum first termed cartopolitics: drawing-table politics (2012: 412)—and which we have refined

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throughout the joint articles that constitute the main body of this dissertation. “Drawing-table politics” evokes the image of emperors overseeing cartographic representations of territories they have never seen yet command from the comfort of their thrones; supercilious imperial officers—like Mark Sykes and François- Georges Picot—severing hundreds of years of common history across otherwise continuous populations with ruler-drawn lines; statesmen and generals pointing their finger on a globe to declare wars and invasions, thus sealing the fate of faraway communities or entire nations or even unleashing the devastation of entire portions of the world; government officials turning cartographic straits, seas and mountains into boundaries, thus implying that immigration amounts to a threat and thereby justifying the creation of cost guards to keep outsiders at bay; politicians designating isolated locations as detention centres, thus effectively sentenc- ing millions of undocumented migrants and asylum seekers to indefinite prison terms beyond the public’s supervision. Drawing-table politics is a useful metaphor that allows us to envision a terrible truth of world politics: political interests literally draw the world and with its image shape the lives of millions of people—for better and worse—through the distance of their offices, the hierarchy of their authority and the unscrupulous exercise of their enormous power. I argue that the historical idea of Europe and its influence in the geopolitics of the EU is a paramount example of such cartopolitics.

References

Van Houtum H (2012) Remapping Borders. In: Wilson TM and Donnan H (eds) A Companion to Border Studies. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell: 405–418.

Clarke C (2012) The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914. New York: Harper Perennial.

Bauman Z (2012) Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Warburg A (2012) Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne (Vol I & II). München: De Gruyter.

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Introduction

Although scrupulous readers might find the following style of argumentation somewhat boisterous and bold—and rightfully so—, I would ask them not to think of it as a bad thing. Even though the magnitude and general direction of such assessment would be mostly accurate, it would also suggest a misleading nuance. Instead, I would humbly describe it as rather moderately vibrant and a bit daring. Either way, the divergence between the author and the reader may not lie in recognizing the style’s noisy and straightforward character—which I certainly spot— but rather in qualifying it. Ultimately, however, I am unapologetic about the tone and there are several reasons behind this lack of remorse.

First, there is a matter of scientific integrity. When it comes to the appraisal of any text’s quality, I believe one should never decouple form from content: what one writes is as important as how one writes it—or, as Orwell put it, “the slovenli- ness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts” (1946). The power of words—and, beyond language, of all representations—to imitate, misrepresent or supplant reality (itself a perennially elusive concept) and thus their seismic ability to chisel the shape of our world is a central concern shared by the philosophers, geographers, writers and thinkers whose representation-related reflections the following chapters continuously draw upon. I refer to the likes of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Ro- land Barthes and Jean Baudrillard, John Brian Harley and Mark Monmonier, Ed- ward Said and Derek Gregory, René Magritte and Maurits Cornelis Escher, Gearóid Ó Tuathail and John Agnew—among many others. I find that Orwell’s advice neatly condenses a caution raised by all of them which I deem particularly relevant for scientific analyses of society: its objects of study are often matters of general social agreement rather than immutable physical laws and thus are interpretation-dependant truths constantly vulnerable to persuasion—who can unequivocally answer what a good society is or whether this or that policy contributes to its nurture? Since persuasion is an inextricable component of what we consider valid scientific knowledge of society, the use of uncircumspect language to describe any social phenomenon might be as grave a scientific neglect as either the sloppiest data collection or the most inattentive methodological design.

549044-L-bw-Lacy Processed on: 29-9-2020 PDF page: 25 Critical Social Theory

Words, representations and geographical imaginations

In the study of EU geopolitics, the scientific analysis of some of the most pressing social phenomena swaying voters across the EU today (such as immigration and terrorism) implies unavoidably interpretative choices. The identification of these phenomena’s historical “origins” (a historiographical notion repeatedly assailed in this work) entails implicit moral judgements about who, where and how they emerged and, thus, unspoken geopolitical allocations of blame and victimhood; the tacit demarcation of borders among friends and enemies; as well as the grave policy recommendations that derive from both these assumptions and the analyses that rely on them.

The edition and tone embedded in the narration of geopolitical phenomena often makes the difference between what electorates regard as justified or unjustified policy. Examples of the power of narratives abound: the perception of a war as either a war of aggression or a just war; an immigration system’s reputation as either a humanitarian border policy or a collection of concentration camps; the characterisation of immigrants as either an invasion by hordes of the world’s un- desirables or a cry for help by some of the world’s most vulnerable wretches; an Islamist terrorist attack as either a crime perpetrated by members of a culture antithetical to Western civilisation or an indiscriminate suicidal revenge by yet another extremist outlier of an EU Member State’s disaffected post-colonial diaspora; and so forth. Moreover, geopolitical phenomena—by their very nature—involve such a vast geographical diversity that they require us to envision a world much larger than what most people have seen or are familiar with: they require us to imagine great portions of a world known to many of us only through mediated representations—what we see in movies, read in books or observe in everyday practices.

Given the gravity of these geopolitical spectacles—and spectacles they are, for they take place in the ubiquitous stages of screens before global audiences (Debord 1967)—, one needs to be bold when talking about them or when criticising the way others talk about them, for narratives on violent conflict and the management of borders impact on the life of entire countries or cultures in the most dramatic ways. Crucially, those that have an extraordinary power to influence such representations are the state, deep-pocketed lobbies for all sorts of surreptitious interests, perennially war-dependant military-industrial complexes and a predatory fauna of transnational corporate behemoths—among others. Therefore, one needs much more courage to scrutinize the geopolitical representations in which those powers have a stake and which they purposefully and finely modulate to the extent of making entire nations see a certain geopolitical topic through the filter of their own interests. Throughout history, we have grown used to see geopolitics through mediated representations—ideas of how the world looks like channelled through all sorts of media—, which in the following chapters are defined in the

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broadest sense possible as signs that replace the concepts that they evoke, i.e., as signifiers of the things they signify (e.g., from commonplace proverbs to block- buster films; from children’s school drawings to comprehensive topographic maps, etc.).

Unlike other geographical imaginations, geopolitical representations exert dramatic consequences on the lives of the millions of people they directly or indirectly affect: think of the plight that the EU border regime forces upon entire groups of immigrants and—as chapters 4, 5 and 6 explain—how these dehumanising policies are legitimizing ever more violent politics in the EU Member States that enforce them. How can one not be boisterous and bold upon realising that geopolitical catastrophes of this magnitude are often not even acknowledged or, when they are, the public figures that peddle either unintended misperceptions, calculated misrepresentations or outright lies are rarely confronted? In other words, the ethical inescapability of geopolitical representations forces those talking about them to take an unavoidable moral stand. The belief that one can confine their views to mere objective description is not only a scientific delusion but a moral downward slope.

It horrifies me to realise that social scientists analysing phenomena involv- ing the physical or mental health of entire populations often confuse sitting on the fence with objectivity and dispassion with sobriety. Some politics are objectively hateful, immoral, and inhumane: this is a sober verdict that can be reached not on the basis of any opinionated researcher’s flawed subjectivity but simply by check- ing the congruence between such politics and the principles proclaimed in the national constitutions, international agreements and foundational treaties of the polities where they take place. Thus, social scientists who believe that their research would warrant a heavily stacked moral assessment should have the courage and scientific integrity to say so without pulling any punches. Take the detention camps along the EU’s external borders as a contemporary example: in this dissertation I refer to some of them as “concentration camps” instead of “detention camps”. This is a conscious choice not intended to elicit a historical comparison that scores points for audacity but—as I argue in Chapter 8—it rather constitutes a scientific conviction that derives from my research: I genuinely believe that there are more than enough scientific evidence and arguments to warrant such a comparison.

Social scientists are not simple technicians: they do not merely “discover” history, geography or social phenomena but they actually make part of them by imprinting their inevitable personal bias—however subtly and unintendedly—on their scientific formulation and interpretation. Geographically, the particular way in which social scientists narrate the history of certain political events endows the places, people and cultures that they associate with them with a particular story, morality and meaning. Historically, the subjective—and at times arbitrary or

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questionable—relations that a social scientist might draw between the past and events with contemporary political resonance might demarcate anachronistic borders between us and them whose foundations may lie in the researcher’s biographical accidents rather than in the prolonged historical structures she identifies. For example, the uncritical production and reproduction of arbitrary categories of analysis for the study of world politics promotes a mental cartography of essentialised civilisations, nations or any other ethno-cultural entities which have not always conceived themselves in those terms or whose borders have never been as clear-cut as these categories suggest—e.g., “Latin America” and “The Global South”. Rather than telling us something about the world, these categories reveal that the very infrastructure of language and knowledge about geopolitics is imbri- cated with the society, history, culture and relative geopolitical position and social position that the researcher occupies in it. In the case of Europe, this is what the Peruvian humanist Anibal Quijano called the coloniality of power (2000). The researcher’s explicit or insinuated cultural praise or disapproval in the description and interpretation of particular geographies and cultures, peoples and territories, histories and legacies where such phenomena are located may also delineate certain geo-emotional borders. The systematic framing of Islamist terrorism in the EU as a longstanding confrontation between a peace-loving “Western civilisation” and a rage-prone “Muslim World” (e.g., Lewis 1990), for example, may cultivate a deep-rooted racism for Muslims in society.

The inexorable percolation of bias, interests and power into science occurs not only as consequence of dishonesty and cowardice but also as a result of uncritical or reckless language. Why, for example, do universities keep teaching courses about “Western literature”, filling entirely libraries with “Western history” books, praising “Western art” or even making maps depicting “Western countries”? This is odd given the amount of excellent scholarly work in the fields of history, anthropology, sociology, psychology, geography, border studies and—do I dare mention?—, even evolutionary biology (even though its association with racist ration- alisations since Linnaeus until the atrocities of the 20th century should give us some pause for caution) (Smedley and Smedley 2005). How can we take the essentialism of hard borders seriously when there is so much evidence about the smooth tran- sition that there has always been between what are today considered distinct cultures, countries and civilisations? Yet, we keep referring to grand civilisational categories like “the West” even as this unfounded civilisational essentialisation serves to legitimise the fears of those who fret about the West’s decay at the hands of foreign influences. How can social scientists escape the racist, imperial and spuri- ously essentialising connotations of these geopolitical categories when they represent the basic infrastructure of their analysis and scientific language? I propose that, in order to overcome the racism and, on a larger scale, the overwhelming amount of sheer prejudice embedded in traditional and powerful forms of hegemonic knowledge that such geopolitical categories represent, it is necessary to

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exert what the Argentinian semiotician Walter Mignolo has called epistemic disobedience (Mignolo 2009). In other words, it is necessary to blur the neat borders to which our maps have gotten us used to in order to reveal the subtle colour degradation they conceal.

Historiographical jurisdictions such as national or regional histories (e.g., “Spanish history” or “European history”) are only justifiable as a matter of classificatory convenience. However, to take them as scientific evidence of a particular history or geographical distinctiveness is not only a methodological aberration but a demagogic strategy. From a scientific point of view, there is only one global history and to pretend that the same people keep living in the same place and practicing the same culture for centuries and millennia without influence from the rest of the world is to engage in blatant propaganda, not science (Balibar 1990; Hobsbawm 1997). The history, art, culture, places and even people comprised in the geographical category of “the West” are neither exclusively located in the western hemisphere nor are they confined to the boundaries of physiographical conventions like “Europe” (as I suggest in Chapter 8). I assume that, for good measure, the appeal of such misleading geopolitical categories is due to the inertia of a sloppy vocabulary that keeps getting shoved to the fore in the absence of any alternatives. However, solving this geographical and, ultimately, geopolitical slop- piness requires more than alternatives: it demands a conscious, daring and sustained effort to dismantle the entire system of thought and power that makes them seem so self-evident.

Geopolitical categories matter because they allow us to think and discuss the world and complex topics like international politics, violent conflict, identity, borders, etc., that define it. Yet, instead of challenging evidently flawed geopolitical categories and coming up with better, more precise ones, scientists uncritically adopt these clumsy geopolitical labels and popularize them together with their inherent Orientalist, racist, immoral and anti-scientific bias. The problem with seemingly insignificant blunders like framing a research with the scope of “European history” or classifying a cultural expression as part of “Western culture” is their cumulative effect: when everybody describes the world in the same flawed way, it is hard to even ponder that the image of it such descriptions put together is distorted. The consequence of this conceptual delinquency is that scientists—and all those who should know better yet rely on defective categories of analysis—end up promoting the fundamental vocabulary and worldviews of those who are more interested in advancing their power than in understanding humanity and the world. It is thus urgent to replace these hard borders carved by power in our mental cartographies for more intelligent, nuanced, cultured, dynamic, porous, hybrid, ephemeral and, overall, more scientifically accurate notions of borders backed by scientific research (Brubaker 2012). The elaboration of new theories, methodologies, language, concepts and imaginations of Europe is perhaps the most perilous ambition of this research, for it requires to go against the grain of much accepted

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practice and knowledge in a variety of scientific fields. I excuse myself if in this radical attempt I have left some explanations vague, some concepts undertheorized or if I have committed some interpretational overreach. My effort is humbled by its scope: the chapters of this work should not be taken as a complete grand theory but rather as scientific essays in the pursuit of novel ways to think about geography, history, maps, art, identities, geopolitical discourse, grand geopolitical constructs like Europe and whatever comes to mind whenever we think about “the world”. The ambition is, the way I see it, to root out much of the untenable assumptions and questionable science on which our understanding of political identities and the geopolitics that they justify has been built.

Anti-scientific power surreptitiously penetrates society not only by defining the very geographical categories and cartographical borders that its narratives are built upon but also by reifying such narratives as all sorts of representations, symbolism and practices—e.g., state policies like primary textbooks, national symbols and immigration policies. For example, the EU’s enthronement of Charlemagne as the earliest precedent of primordial European unity is a tacit Orientalist rebuke of Islam’s place in Europe that squarely fits with the European right-wing’s Islam- ophobia and their glorification of medieval Christian zealotry (see chapters 2 and 6). Meanwhile, the mass incarceration, illegal deportation (refoulement) and vilifi- cation of Muslim asylum seekers—or people who fit the European stereotype of “the Muslim” as consequence of their phenotype, provenance, language, religion or social milieu—across the EU’s internal and external borders is a reaffirmation of nativist Islamophobia. In science as in politics, interpretations of social phenomena unaware of the inescapable bias of those who make them are liable to contrive an apocryphal representation of the social relations they attempt to unearth. As consequence, such representations may inspire misguided or even self-defeating policies. In other words, careless language—Orwell’s behind-the-scenes mechanism responsible for churning out our thoughts and actions—may promote scientific misrepresentations and these, in turn, may serve as the distorted models and, in fact, as the taken-for-granted reality that politics relies upon to shape the world.

Looking from this perspective, my conviction is that, in the idea of Euro- pean identity constructed by the EU, one can perceive more than enough foolish thoughts, careless language and counterproductive policies to warrant a comprehensive critique—the overarching aim of this study. My thesis is that the hegemonic image of Europe today is a wrongheaded political myth whose flaws are inextricably bound to the mutually reinforcing interaction between the geo-historical symbolism promoted by the EU and its geopolitical practice. As chapters 1, 3, 4 and 8 explain, political myth refers, succinctly put, to a grand but vague notion of collective identity whose historical and geographical evocations have the potential to move entire political communities to action in spite of these notions’ abundant narrative, historical or moral inconsistencies (Bottici 2007). The mechanism of this myth construction in the EU works roughly like this: the EU’s discourses on

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Europe (symbolism, narratives/images and policies) demarcate the silhouette of a historical European community—in terms of space, people and culture—while its geopolitics reify it by making the EU’s territory resemble it as much as possible— e.g., through policies that shape its borders, demographics and culture in accord- ance with the pre-conceived idea of Europe popularized by such discourses. The EU’s symbolism evokes notions of European identity that portray the EU as the natural evolution of a historical heritage belonging to specific peoples characterised by a shared unique culture located within a well-delimited European space— which, conveniently, coincides with the current borders of the EU. As this dissertation continuously argues, this political myth seems to be spectacularly backfiring and unravelling the EU—or at least the EU with humanist ambitions we have known so far—rather than strengthening its political project or the principles that have guided it until recently.

My intuition is that, rather than a political asset, the political myth of EU- rope is largely responsible for envisioning an anachronistic ideal of Europe that can only be pursued by undermining the very foundations that support the project of post-war European integration. As any political myth, EUrope’s is a grand idea rather than a meticulously detailed and congruent narrative; it is a general image of Europe painted with scattered and rough brushstrokes rather than a neatly con- toured perfectionist composition—a surrealist rather than a neo-classicist composition; more Claude Monnet than Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres; an attempt to capture a faint memory rather than to varnish over the mistiness of the past. Ulti- mately, I argue that this political myth and the geographical imaginations, visions and aspirations of Europe that derive from it put a straitjacket around the EU’s ability to imagine more open, diverse and less change-averse Europes.

Since the aptitude to paint a desirable future is a vital sign of any political project, particularly in times of hardship, it is my conviction that the EU’s insipid proto-national symbolism and the dark geographical imaginations of Europe that it evokes constitutes one of the EU’s most vulnerable yet unrecognized weak- nesses. When economic trouble strikes and political communities are pushed to distribute scarcer resources, their most egoistic, opportunistic or risk-averse members might start asking who is a real member of the community and is thus entitled to solidarity—and, in consequence, who is not. When indiscriminate violence sows widespread panic and political communities might feel inclined to accept extraordinary security measures, their most anxious members might start to blur the boundary between what they consider unthreatening signs of difference (e.g., phenotype, language, ethnicity, nationality, dress, etc.) and what they fear as a threat (e.g., a certain group’s inclination to violence, criminality and terrorism) (Hether- ington & Weiler 2009; MacWilliams 2016).

This work cannot stress enough the political importance of a political project’s ability to visualize an enticing future through the imagination of a

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community that is worth being created, maintained and shaped. This is a fundamental yet unattended task for the EU and the project of European integration it embodies. The EU represents a project that has always relied on the possibility to re-imagine Europe—from a collection of recurrent enemies in the aftermath of the Second World War to an economic and political union of interdependent allies; and, recurrently, from a club of less to a club of ever more members. Unfortunately, the EU’s symbolic, narrative and geopolitical limitations have prevented it from cultivating the kind of visions of EUrope that preceded every single previous enlargement and this has grave geopolitical implications for the openness on which its model of continuous territorial rebordering relies (Bueno Lacy 2011).

Iconology and Maps

So how to study both the EU’s vision of its political project as well as how it fares in comparison to Europe’s past visions of itself? My analysis and critique of EUro- pean identity-making discourses relies on an iconological methodology to study how images or image-evoking discourses construct an imaginary but symbolically meaningful EUropean geography, thus justifying identity-driven political action. The relevance of this study lies in examining the connection between the construction of political identity and the geopolitical iconology through which it is promoted: in other words, how images—either practical, symbolic or narrative—construct geographical imaginations of political projects and thus influence the politics through which they shape space, population and culture.

The most compelling visual artefacts that have literally allowed me to flip through the historical transformation of Europe’s political myths as well as through the geographical imaginations that have been associated with them are maps—predominantly those of an eminently political character. Maps constitute this dissertation’s main source of evidence because, throughout history, powerful political actors have engraved their grand geopolitical dreams—together with their prejudices and ambitions—of Europe in cartographic artefacts. The collection of visual elements they display provides a comprehensive overview of the geopolitical imaginations on which their makers’ idiosyncratic conception of the world was based. As chapters 1, 2, 3 and particularly chapters 7 and 8 illustrate, an analysis of the visual choreography between maps’ strictly cartographic elements (e.g., projection, zoom, colours, borders, cartouches, scale, legend, orientation, drawings, symbols, etc.) and their meta-cartographic information (e.g., authorship, manufacture, funding and historical context) reveals the geographical imaginations that they carry with them as well as the political orientation of their makers. Maps constitute this investigation’s central—though not exclusive—evidence not only because they provide the most comprehensive portraits of grand geopolitical constructs like “Europe” but also because, throughout history, their manufacture

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has been closely associated to the pursuit of power and, in the case of modern cartography, to the peculiar development of “the idea of Europe” as a civilisation (Hay 1968).

As most of the chapters will hopefully elucidate, there is yet another reason to rely on maps: although political cartography relies on a certain degree of semiotic and iconographic skill to manipulate its audience, the lack of visual sophistication among the general public is often not much worse than that of the cartographic puppeteers trying to manipulate their worldviews. This is suggested by the bluntness of the visual devices that most political maps employ, which also expose their makers’ unnuanced geopolitical opinions. Put differently: even though mapmakers may be aware of how finely tuned cartographic propositions could sway people’s views, they might not be so aware of how the same visual choices might also reveal worldviews that they would otherwise hide or which they would be more careful to conceal in written or spoken language. Thus, as Chapter 7 shows, through iconological analyses of what could appear as seemingly straightforward and uncontroversial cartographic choices (e.g., colours, lines and arrows), one can unveil the worldviews of their makers with more honesty than they would find comfortable to openly admit. In this regard, maps might be richer sources than interviews or written texts to approximate the true intentions, purposes, ideology, prejudices and ambitions fuelling the actions, words and policies favoured by political figures who may have much to lose from telling the truth. In other words, maps are unusually valuable sources to study geopolitics and power.

The disparity between a political map’s “external” message (i.e., what one can see at first sight) and its “hidden” message (what one can interpret through scientific research) after either an iconological interpretation of its visual composition or a comparative discourse analysis that checks its consistency against analogous texts, speeches, or geopolitical practices might be uncannily useful to unmask the discrepancies among cartographic representation, rhetorical geopolitics, actual geopolitical practice and power’s unconfessed political designs. For example, as I will elaborate in Chapter 7, some Frontex maps of undocumented migration to EUrope seem like nothing more than uncontroversial visual aids for policymakers. Yet, under close examination they tell a much more callous story about how the EU perceives refugees than official EU texts, speeches or interviews would reveal. These maps let us see how the uncompromising values and noble intentions that EU officials or politicians of EU Member States steadily peddle in op-eds and lofty speeches look like rather empty rhetoric when checked against the execrable message of the Frontex map, which is in tune with the EU’s abominable border regime.

Showing the disparity between the EU’s official intentions and its actual geopolitical practice is one of my main goals, for the difference between them is where the EU’s true intentions lie hidden. Thus, this dissertation focuses much of its attention on what I interpret to be the salient contradictions between maps of

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EUrope and what the EU and its Member States avow to be their universalist ideology, imperturbable moral compass and humanitarian intentions. From the conception of Schengen in 1985 to the EU’s morally, historically and materially repug- nant refugee camps (e.g., the Moria camp in Lesbos), the EU has been taking a series of concrete geopolitical decisions that have been demarcating EUrope’s borders with increasingly indelible lines of history, space, culture and race. This recurrent practice has turned arbitrary 19th-century physiographical conventions of European continental borders and a poorly conceived EU symbolism into a geopolitical reality of EUrope that is devoid of its initial openness and flexibility.

The visualisations of EUrope afforded by the symbolism, images, narratives and policies favoured by the EU promote a geographical imagination of European people, culture and territory that gives credence to a particular political myth of Europe and a particular way of imagining its normal geography. This work raises a persistent warning against this normal EUropean geography as well as against the symbolically ruinous and counterproductive geopolitics that the EU has been pursuing over the last decades to counter crises of finance, immigration, terrorism, solidarity and ultimately, of identity and borders.

The urgent social and political justification for this research is, evidently, central to its relevance. EUropean unity will certainly not be achieved all at once, yet it is surely being dismantled one ill-conceived symbol, one hypocritical speech and one misguided border policy at a time. My ambition is that, through a meticulous critique of what is wrong with today’s image of EUrope—i.e., the notion of the EU as the contemporary expression of Europe’s historical legacy—, we might be able to reimagine it. EUrope, I am convinced, will not be saved with patchwork- like and short-sighted policies—which is what has been on offer until now—but rather with a grand vision of a future in which EUrope’s openness, liberal democracy, cultural diversity, respect for human rights and the rule of law might be associated to symbols, practices and an overall political myth that bring to mind a much more emotionally appealing EUrope. Such emotional volatility is crucial, for it makes a political myth capable of mobilising large numbers of people to work in its construction and preservation. The European Coal and Steal Community (ECSC), for all its narrow scope and uninspiring ambitions, was conceived as the modest beginning of an overambitious vision: a Europe united by openness. Such utopian vision is missing today.

Political imaginations of the world matter because they have deeply ingrained geographical associations to ethnicity, race, class, religion, wealth, phenotype, fashion, nationality, language, dialect, taste of all sorts, etc., that define geopolitical thought and action. How could European populations be vulnerable to fear Syrian refugees if news outlets, politicians, intellectuals and artists all across the EU were not regularly reinforcing the stereotype of Muslims as having either a penchant for terrorism or a culture inexorably antithetical to Europe’s? How

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would exclusionary ethno-nationalists exploit the trope of Europe’s Christian heritage to stoke fear for an “Islamisation of Europe” if EU citizens were taught the colossal millenarian Arab-Islamic influence that Berbers, Moors, Turks, Arabs, Per- sians have exerted on every aspect of European culture throughout centuries—and which remains pouring thanks to contemporary European Muslims? How could the world’s military-industrial complexes amass billions of dollars in weapons sales if wars were under the tight democratic control of societies educated by a structural flow of textbooks, all sorts of media reports and political speech that consistently represented war as one of the most abhorrent actions a state can carry out against any other population—regardless of ethnicity, language or politics? How would wealthy and militarily unchallenged liberal democracies muster the electoral will to wage wars against infinitely poorer countries on the other side of the world if their national security elites were not constantly exaggerating the potential of poor and faraway countries as existential and imminent national threats (Barsamian, Chomsky, Abrahamian and Mozaffari 2007)? What if most states, instead of glorifying the nation’s uniqueness and past military victories against other countries, would instead spend their educational, propagandistic and overall public resources in feverishly promoting the view that war is an entirely unpalatable political course of action? Why does it not seem absurd for the French state to re- taliate against an Islamist terrorist attack by bombing Syria when most of the perpetrators were either French or EUropean (Rubin and Barnard 2015)? Would EU populations support the inhumane border policies of the EU along its external borders without constant maps and media footage showing them apocalyptic invasions by destitute and dangerous masses of Africans, Asians and Muslims coming into the EU from the farthest corners of the world? Why do Dutch and German voters not mind their taxes being redistributed among the poorer Dutch or German folk they have never met, yet feel aggravated whenever they are asked to use those taxes to help out Greeks? Why do Islamist terrorist attacks receive 357% more press attention than white supremacist, neo-Nazi or racist terrorist attacks (Chalabi 2018)? Is the longstanding colonial stereotype of Europeans as mostly white and Christian preventing the EU from acknowledging that Europe, as a history, space, culture, people and overall civilisation could comprise its historical geographies in North of Africa, Anatolia and even Europe’s former colonies in America and Asia? Would EU societies be able to turn a blind eye to the systematic psychological destruction caused by the inhuman conditions at the refugee detention camps along the EU’s external borders were its inmates white, Christian Europeans? Would EU- rope’s bulging xenophobic fear of a Western culture being diluted by ceaseless influences from around the world be placated if Europeans were taught that the West is a historically recent geopolitical construct rather than a timeless essential civilisation? Would EU electorates re-calibrate their anger at bankers, transnational corporations, oil companies, the meat industry, gentrifying technological hubs, social media behemoths, real estate oligarchs, politicians and the militaries they so recklessly employ if socio-economic inequality, financial insecurity, violent crime

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and terrorism, social fragmentation and overall loss of prosperity were not persistently blamed on refugees, immigrants, foreigners or any other easily identifiable and vulnerable minorities with little political representation and no political power? It is my conviction that the ideologies promoting the detrimental geopolitical imaginations preventing the sensible answers to these questions from becoming either electorally bankable, realistic policy or even acceptable public speech cannot be challenged with anything other than a demolishing honesty to call out the hate, ignorance, violence, egotism, hypocrisy, immorality, corruption, dishonesty and other ruinous sentiments and interests that inspire them and which preclude the peaceful coexistence of societies and states.

Thus, this dissertation’s confrontational form of argumentation is a necessary rhetorical and stylistic device to confront the overwhelming machinery of language, thought, representation and geopolitical practice that wilfully distorts notions of what Europe is—as a history, people, culture and overall geography—not to advance “the humanist inheritance of Europe” but rather the bigoted geopolitical interests of unscrupulous political actors. The very purpose behind the gigantic effort to rationalise the intolerable and intellectualise savagery is to make any attempt to confront them look irrational, excessive, exaggerated, marginal, out of place and, ultimately, unworthy of being taken seriously (Foucault 1970). The people who promote wars, racism, inequality, violence and hate in the pursuit of their own narcissistic interests—either material or ideological—are unscrupulously willing to inflame EUropean electorates against those who are easy to blame yet lack the means to defend themselves—even if society becomes more violent, less solidary and less well-off in the process. The borders that are increasingly dividing the EU along class, race, ethnicity, culture and civilisation are being persistently demarcated by those who could not care less about setting society aflame as long as they are able to guarantee their comfort and wealth or make their worldview prevail—even if this comes at the expense of society at large.

With these caveats in mind, I have tried to write every single sentence of this text as carefully as my humble wit has allowed me to (ultimately, it will be up to the reader to assess whether I have succeeded). Thus, what at times might appear to be blatantly partial is probably so. However, rather than prejudicial, the reader should be well-advised to deem such statements as rather post-judicial: a conscious decision stemming from a scientific conviction based on the evidence, interpretations and conclusions of my own research. The same goes for moral judgements that may seem sometimes bold: when one reads about the dismal conditions in the EU’s detention camps along its external border or about the structural marginalisation of ethnic minorities in the EU, no one adhering to the precepts of EU fundamental legislation, human rights, refugee or humanitarian law, or to the most basic humanist ethics could remain true to themselves while simultaneously remaining timorous to express their absolute opposition, utter disgust and righteous condemnation. One does not need to be a sanctimonious moralist to

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expect everybody, regardless of credence or provenance, to feel rightly and utterly appalled by such policies. One only needs to be a humanist.

For example, no individual—least social scientists—possessing a moderate historical knowledge of the 20th century or a notion of the kind of practices inspired by colonial and imperial racism can pretend that the EU’s detention camps along its external border today do not strike an immediate historical resonance with either a segregationist apprehension for people of a particular ethnic background or the death camps of the Holocaust. In spite of the evident historical differences between Nazi death camps and the EU’s detention camps, the squalor of today’s detention camps, the foreseeable doom of many of their inmates, the political context that inspired their creation and the ideology from which such policy derives share ever increasing similarities with the racially segregated societies and concentration camps of the past—which predate the Holocaust (Minca 2005, 2015). Moreover, any denial that the EU’s “detention camps” stoke the memory of concentration camps can be easily rebutted by a historical comparison between camps from the past and today’s camps’ justification, aesthetics, social and political function, mechanisms, expected outcomes, foundational ideology, politics and people that have inspired their creation and keep them in place. Sometimes reality can only be objectively described in shrieking terms and any vacillation to do so should not be applauded as a laudable effort in objectivity but as a shameful betrayal of the most basic intellectual honesty.

It is neither moral nor scientifically objective to refrain from making brazen comparisons when our research shows that our object of study—which often hap- pens to be, as in my case, the society in which we live—might be bound to follow the footsteps of some of the most reviled political projects in our recent history. It is hard to pretend one is not part of the society one is researching when one actually is, especially when one is writing something about the policies that, to one’s best judgement, might be responsible for taking us down a path of destruction. Social scientists are often part of their research as much as the gonzo journalist is part of the topic he investigates. It is hard to look at refugee detention camps’ cold- blooded material conditions—conducing to all sorts of violence and fatal psychological deterioration—without thinking of these policies’ relation to a political debate characterised by rising xenophobia, outright racism and, overall, the sort of ever more violently exclusionary ethno-religious authoritarianism that has been gaining track not only in the EU but around the world over the past years. It is hard to be an objective scientist and not take either a firm moral stand in debates where people’s dignity, life or integrity is at stake as a result of their nationality, race, ethnicity—or other morally untenable reason. It is impossible to be objective without resorting to the harshest recriminatory adjectives for those who either promote, condone or turn a blind eye to such policies and their calamitous consequences.

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I, for one, find it outright maddening to see blatant racists expressing themselves and behaving in ways that are downright racist and yet being given the benefit of the doubt time and again by fainthearted scientists, journalists, intellectuals and politicians who fret at the thought that their scientific objectivity, intellectual status or political position might be compromised whenever they make unequivocal statements about what they, relying on their own expertise and most basic morality, consider to be the truth. To be sure, I am not talking about the need to cultivate scientists’ fearlessness to exaggerate; or to incentivize them to incur in poetic adventurism by resorting to carefree hyperbole. I am rather talking about some scientific courage to talk truth to power and state, plainly and without hyphens, eu- phemisms or an endless assortment of alternative explanations, that things should be called by the name that rigorous research warrants. Rather than a risky manoeu- vre that might imperil objectivity, this, I believe, is the only meaningful effort to preserve it.

Critical Social Theory

Which brings me to my second reason for the candid character of this work: my object of study. The mutually constitutive relation between form and content is particularly important given the inaccessibility of my object of study (i.e., a global, vague and abstract “idea of EUrope” and its influence over the obscure geopolitical designs of a variety of political actors), the interpretative character of the evidence I use to examine it (all sorts of narrative and practical discourses, but mainly images) and the singularity of the methodology (i.e., geopolitical semiotics and iconology). Since this work (i.e., an exploration of European geopolitics through the iconography and geopolitical semiotics of European identity) is mostly of an interpretative nature, it is also fundamentally and inevitably idiosyncratic. Thus, in order to keep as safe a distance as possible between my bias and whatever scientific objectivity I might be able to muster for the interpretation of geopolitical discourses that configure the idea of EUrope, I have tried to be as explicit as possible about my assumptions and ideology—instead of pretending that I can distance myself from my own mind and body.

This honesty includes my criticism for the kind of knowledge that avoids asking hard questions about the power behind geopolitics on the flimsy excuse that this would corrupt their “scientific objectivity”. Just like Edward Said,

What I am interested in doing now is suggesting how the general liberal consensus that ‘true’ knowledge is fundamentally non-political (and con- versely, that overtly political knowledge is not ‘true’ knowledge) obscures the highly if obscurely organized political circumstances obtaining when knowledge is produced. No one is helped in understanding this today when

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the adjective ‘political’ is used as a label to discredit any work for daring to violate the protocol of pretended suprapolitical objectivity (Said 1978: 10).

Thus, this is a work that is very aware of the political limitations of knowledge, i.e., how the production of ideas is constrained by the political interests propelling or obstructing its proliferation—in political speech as well as in academia, media, art and other public fora. This presents two problems. The first is epistemological: how to avoid the pitfalls of interpretation—in particular, the charge of personal bias—in the objective study of something as individual, immaterial and flexible as identity? Surely, the rough homogenising methodologies of large-scale surveys, intimidating data bases and sophisticated statistical analyses would create the aesthetics of a neatly objective research. However, I am more interested in offering a persuasive explanation than an illusion of objectivity. The second problem is political: how to conduct meaningful interviews with EUropean political actors that are able to get past the “public-relations/official truth” quandary faced by perennially word-cautious public personas?

My interpretation-based methodology relies on methods like discourse analyses, historical genealogies or iconological explorations, which make for messier but ultimately, I believe, more convincing and accurate explanations of social phenomena. I will be the first to admit that humanist methods relying on evidence-based interpretations are liable to be biased. But I do not think that anyone familiar with the limitations of making representative samples, conducting interviews about sensible issues, operationalising abstract variables, standardising incomplete or incongruent data bases, interpreting the significance of statistical re- gressions or imagining how to thread their findings into a scholarly narrative should suffer the absolutist assertion that positivistic methodologies are a superior approach to study social matters which, given their very social nature, are intrinsically dependant on the aggregation of individual interpretations—including those of the researchers studying them (Said 2004).

The amount of overlooked connections that a more culturalist and humanist approach to geopolitics—and, in this specific case, European geopolitics—that I attempt to trace is, unfortunately, a direly unkempt field of science that has much to offer to the study and conduction of geopolitics. Unfortunately, the techniques of the modern state as well as the funding mechanisms impelling science do not favour the questions, methodologies and philosophical approaches promoted by the in-depth cultural and heavily interpretative studies favoured by the humanities. The “liberal consensus” Said referred to is a way of thinking about what is true that is promoted by the capitalism-based liberal state, which has led to the marginalisation and concealment of the sciences and knowledge that shy away neither from their deep political embedment nor from their subjective interpretative approach. In liberal political systems, the kind of scientific truth that influences the administration of state resources is closely related to the production of

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mathematical, statistical and, overall, measurable truth (Scott 1998). Although the very aesthetics of this measurable truth (numbers and formulas, surveys, statistics, satellite maps, tables and graphics, mathematical and computer models, etc.) make it seem impartial, intellectual and rational—principles that squarely fit with the ethos of fairness advocated by liberal democracies—, on closer inspection they often do not create knowledge but rather the illusion of knowledge by subordinating reality to the needs of their approach.

From this liberal perspective (note: I am aware that this is a broad and un- polished generalisation of the liberal ethos yet I believe it is analytically valuable for this argument), the quality of truth is directly proportional to the extent to which it can be expressed in discrete numbers, formal calculations and concrete predictions. Roughly put, economists, neuro-scientists, psychologists, political scientists and all other scientists whose academic fields have either an inclination or a tradition to formulate their research in (more) positivistic terms and thus often produce what could be called a mathematized knowledge of society—what Michel Foucault called mathesis (1966: 71)—, are closer to the ear of power than social scientists and humanists. Social scientists experienced with writing research grants will surely recognise the advantages of relying on positivistic rather than on humanist methodologies to garner the favour of the public officials in charge of allo- cating public funds for research.

This liberal approach to science’s disparagement of both the interpretative sciences and the humanities tends to disregard and conceal what I consider some of the most valuable scientific knowledge for society. In spite of its reliance on interpretations—and the flaws that all interpretative research inescapably entails—, in my humble experience, what I have come to cherish as some of the most valuable scientific knowledge for society has been produced by scientists with an affinity for the humanities. The philosophical underpinnings, theoretical depth, erudition, explanatory potential and prediction-related ability of humanities-influenced social science are at least as good as those of purely mathematized methodologies. Moreover, interpretative social sciences and the humanities are very aware of these politics of knowledge creation and the non-scientific rationales wielded to justify the embargo of their methodologies, including perhaps the most decisive one: the tendency of interpretative sciences to speak truth to power. As Said put it in his exploration of humanities’ fundamental role to construct democratic criticism (2004): “What concerns me is humanism as a usable praxis for intellectuals and academics who want to know what they are doing, what they are committed to as scholars, and who want also to connect these principles to the world in which they live as citizens” (Said 2004: 6).

What attracts me about this humanist approach is its conception of the social scientist not as a hermit technician who stays confined to the technical role of their research, leaving the social, political, economic and ethical implications of it

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to “the competent authorities” above them. As if scientific experts who spend more time than most other people in society specialising in a topic should defer to the “appropriate authorities”. As if scientific explanations needed to be neat, their cau- sation relations straightforward and the certainty of their predictions and recommendations beyond doubt for them to be either scientific or valuable; as if complex explanations, convoluted causal relations and perennial uncertainty did not better reflect society’s overwhelming dynamism and volatility. The humanist-influenced interpretative approach of social sciences has the advantage of researchers considering themselves an inevitable part of the research and thus tend to position themselves in a way that bridges their role as honest scientists with their role as citizens—which makes them aware of the inseparable symbiosis between social sciences and the social scientists that makes them.

Thus, as a Mexican and a relative outsider (not necessarily in my eyes but in the eyes of those reading my research) to the European identity that represents a central question of my scientific inquiry, I find my positionality—e.g., prejudices, moral stand, etc.—to be a crucial aspect of my research. The mutually reinforcing relation that I am interested in studying with regards to the idea of Europe and the geopolitics that construct it is inspired by Edward Said’s justification for his humanist study of Orientalism (roughly: European imperialism’s cultural construction of the Orient as an exotic geographical imagination). The same as Orientalism, I argue that Europe is:

A distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philosophical texts; it is an elaboration not only of a base geographical distinction (the world is made of two unequal halves, Orient and Occident) but also of a whole series of “interests” which, by such means as scholarly discovery, philological reconstruction, psychological analysis, landscape and sociological description, it not only creates but also maintains; it is, rather than expresses, a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a manifestly different (or alternative and novel) world; it is, above all, a discourse that is by no means in direct, corresponding relationship with political power in the raw, but rather is produced and exists in an uneven exchange with various kinds of power, shaped to a degree by the exchange with power political (as with a colonial or imperial establishment), power intellectual (as with reigning sciences like comparative linguistics or anatomy, or any modern policy sciences), power cultural (as with orthodoxies and canons of taste, texts, values), power moral (as with ideas about what “we” do and what “they” cannot do or understand as “we” do (Said 1978: 12).

Given its deep political embeddedness, this dissertation splices into a body of work that is known as critical social theory: a blend of practical philosophy and

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explanatory social science. While practical philosophy is concerned with the actions that must be undertaken to lead a good life; explanatory social science is concerned with the causes of social action. Thus, critical social theory is particularly concerned with the inconsistencies and distortions in the actions that prevent us from achieving a good life. Given its normative orientation, critical social theory is necessarily ideological, unavoidably moral and thus eminently political as well as fundamentally opposed to any concern for an objectivity it regards as a philosophical mirage.

Critical social theory intends to counter the power of ideology to breed false consciousness and thus its goal is to stimulate emancipation: the freedom to be able to think about one’s own interests as well as the freedom to pursue them—as opposed to the enslavement of being manipulated to advocate an ideology deceptively beneficial for ourselves for, in truth, it only persuades us to act against our own material interests. The ideologies traditionally lambasted for breeding false consciousness—i.e., the misleading paths conducing to the indefatigable jaws of exploitation—and thus those typically assailed by critical social theory are religion, nationalism and what I would term restrictive traditional morality.

The power of such ideologies to derail people’s actions in detriment of their very own interests goes beyond simple coercion. More worrying ways of instigat- ing false consciousness include more subtle, surreptitious and unnoticed forms of power. As I have explained in the previous section, this work is particularly concerned with the false consciousness bred by misleading geopolitical imaginations of EUrope. Since this strain of social science is mainly concerned with serving as an antidote to the deceptions of power—i.e., unscrupulous interests advanced by people with the resources to bend the will of others to their own (e.g., the state)— , the style of writing is characterised by its boisterousness and boldness. No other style, I am convinced, is fit for studying the constraints that power imposes on both truth and the epistemologies adept to search for it.

In this regard, I share Paul Feyerabend’s belief that the purpose of critical social science is to emancipate people, which means elucidating false consciousness: the self-enslaving contradiction between one’s own material interests and the ideology that they favour. I am also a firm advocate of the conclusion Feyerabend drew at his famed lecture “How to Defend Society Against Science”, in which he controversially asserted that emancipation (i.e., the goal of critical social theory) should be the ultimate goal of scientific enquiry less science becomes socially use- less by stagnating in dogmatic complacency or being abducted by tyrannical powers. “Why would anyone want to liberate anyone else? Surely not because of some abstract advantage of liberty but because liberty is the best way to free development and thus to happiness. We want to liberate people so that they can smile (Feyerabend, 1975)”. In other words, science should be defended from the

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overreach of society as much as society should be defended from the overreach of scientific orthodoxy.

To be sure, I do not claim to know why people study social sciences but, just as Feyerabend, I dare to venture that the goal is not merely to understand how society works but also to improve it. On the basis of these premises, how could there be any scientific justification to defend the detention camps along the external borders of the EU when they are inspired by racism, white supremacy, greed and exert the effect of physically and psychologically demolishing people merely on grounds of their ethnicity or provenance? How can any researcher, in good consciousness, conduct an “objective study” of these phenomena without addressing their morality and partaking in the political debate that produces them? I believe that to refrain from roundly condemning these policies and those who favour them is to pursue the kind of knowledge that history has shown to be humanity’s darkest pitfall (Bauman 1989).

I believe that the aversion to state plain truths stems from what is perhaps one of the most widespread misconceptions about science: the false equivalence between scientific objectivity and moral neutrality. One can, for example, be scientifically objective and say that Thierry Baudet—the Netherlands’ increasingly powerful white supremacist politician—is an outright racist or that the main pro- moters of Brexit shamelessly lied to the British public because there is an overa- bundance of evidence, in their words and actions, for everybody to see and thus it should be unremarkable for a social scientist to lambaste them in such harsh terms—in plain English and without any ambiguity.

I have never understood the fascination some social scientists have with on- the-fence diplomatic language when they are precisely among the few people whose careers not only demand honesty but might greatly benefit from telling it like it is. When the evidence is so loud that the conclusion cannot hide, we would have to be mad to pretend that we are doing a disservice to science by speaking out such glaring platitudes. Scientists should be paid—or at least pretend they are—for what they think is the truth on the basis of their research; not for pleasing everybody and certainly not for pleasing those who finance their careers or might have the power to stagnate them. I realise, incidentally, how naive this standpoint sounds for, ultimately, the pay cheques of social scientists many times depend on their tact not to offend the people who might have a say in their career development. However, there are still certain places like the Nijmegen Centre for Border Research (NCBR)—where I sit—where someone like me still has the ever-more uncommon privilege to undertake interpretative research even if this means running the risk of trying to tell what I truly think on the basis of what I believe is justified by my scientific research. Diplomats rely on formality, ambiguity and overall caution because an error could cost their governments and states dramatic losses of reputation, money, life or power. However, whenever scientists sit on the

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fence by relying on the same non-confrontational techniques as diplomats, they serve power rather than the truth and thus they betray their purpose and the society they are supposed to serve.

Engineers might be able to objectively assess the aerodynamic calculations that could allow a plane to fly or the physical conditions needed by a skyscraper to withstand the beleaguerment of a city’s mighty winds. Unfortunately, such deterministic truths do not exist in society. The unambiguous answers to the predict- able dynamics of the natural world cannot be extrapolated to the social world. Questions like “What is the most efficient way to build a bridge?” accept an answer that cannot be expected from social questions such as “What is the best way to live?” (unless, I believe, we are talking from a dictator’s point of view). What is the best way to govern a country? What are the acceptable limitations that a liberal democracy might impose on individual freedom? Is a country better off allowing immigrants or preventing their movement? What are humanely acceptable ways of treating undocumented immigrants? What are acceptable measurements for prosperity, happiness, economic development or the democratic health of a political community? How can any social scientist evaluate any of these questions without being ambushed at every turn by their own unavoidable subjectivity—a predicament that such questions relentlessly demand them to confront. How could a society agree entirely on responses to these questions when it depends on so many unique individuals whose biographical accidents, historical context, political ideology, psychological state, desires and fears are as varied as their numbers?

My point is that the truth in social sciences is not merely a matter of evidence but of interpretation—which is evidence in itself (Southgate 2014)—and thus of persuasion. Social truths are not immutable but dynamic and they, together with the morality or worldview of their members, might change. How can social scientists, as some of the most engaged experts in the study of the phenomena that affect society, bullet-proof their research from accusations of politicisation when the very topics they research are eminently political? In other words, how to research and write about things like racism or inequality without making a political commentary? The very choice of topic already reveals a great deal of personal, institutional, social and political bias. Moreover, why would society at large fend itself off from the insights of those whom it itself pays to understand social complexity, especially whenever they might believe that it is the public interest to make an intervention with political consequences on the basis of their scientific investigation? This is axiomatically absurd. Today, we may take comfort in the thought that, as soon as the threat of another totalitarian moment in European history emerges, it will face immediate abhorrence, summon up nightmares of socio-political collapse across EUrope and be roundly defeated. Yet, EUropean electorates today are showing that they are not immune to the seductive geographical imaginations of the demagogues that, conceivably, might lead them there.

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Since the following work confers so much importance to representations, it repeatedly alludes to René Magritte’s famous paradoxical metaphor, The Treachery of Im- ages (1928-29) or touches on the work of semioticians and iconologists like Jean Baudrillard, Roland Barthes, Aby Warburg and other social scientists concerned with the different levels of representations and their power to assemble what is mundanely referred to as “reality”. However, this work does not theorize as much on the power of representations as it could have. This theoretical timidity is related to the previous point about the importance of scientists and their texts to be aware of their own constraints. In the case of this dissertation, there were constraints related to the unpredictability of academic publishing that ended up filtering out many theoretical sections on the power of representations.

As a dissertation almost entirely composed of scientific articles published in academic journals by Henk van Houtum and me, much of its content had to be insistently redacted in order to overcome the publication-related exigencies of academic journals. Although each article initially included a cornucopia of refined theoretical reflections on the fascinating ways in which representations construct reality, these had to be cruelly axed to make room for our main argument: the connection between what I would colloquially call little images and big geopolitics. In order to make this connection, we wanted to show how deceptively insignificant images, narratives, metaphors and practices with a geopolitical component (i.e., an evocation of space, people and culture accompanied by moral judgments and political implications) are the very fuel behind some the most spectacular global geopolitics. However, making these connections required ambitious scientific essays that demanded not only a complex theoretical framework and a methodology that synthetized insights from many different fields (e.g., critical and classical geopolitics, border studies, iconography and iconology, political myth and identity formation, simulacra and simulations, radical and nautical cartography, etc.) but also the manufacture of new concepts that were both appealing and accurate; as well as lengthy explanations about the long and convoluted path that links, say, an obscure Renaissance map to the rise of contemporary EUroscepticism. Ultimately, the final version of each chapter—and of this dissertation as a whole—reflects an arduous process of reading and re-reading, writing and re-writing and accommo- dating the space-related restrictions of scientific publications as well as the extensive remarks of their reviewers. This dissertation, as probably any other, is thus a compromise and, unfortunately, many things that could have enriched it did not make the final cut. However, I am confident that this compromise has fulfilled its purpose by keeping the integrity of this research’s main argument: the inextricable collaboration between little images and big geopolitics to. Shape our everyday world.

Besides the constraints of academic publishing, there is another unescapa- ble limitation that has prevented this work from discussing the complex world- making power of representations as much as it could have: my own development

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as a researcher. A case in point are Chapter 8 and the Epilogue: in comparison to the rest of the dissertation, they include what I deem to be a more extensively fleshed out reflection and a more refined argument on how representations construct reality as well as a research agenda for further stands of research that I, for one, would be thrilled to explore. Thus, the evolution of iconological, iconographic and semiotic refinement that readers might notice as they advance through the chapters of this work reflect is my learning process as a social scientist—or, in other words, the monumental stature of my own ignorance hopefully casting an ever- shorter shadow with the pass of every chapter.

Regrettably, the theory and methodology of geopolitical semiotics and geopolitical iconology that I have developed in this work was handicapped by the little interaction between the fields of semiotics and iconology, on the one hand, and the fields of political geography, political science and international relations on the other. In order to articulate this novel theory and methodology around the central concept of cartopolitics—the main analytical tool of this work—I needed to build much of my own theory and methodology. This took me through a tortuous and unsystematised path: as I worked on a new chapter, I became progressively knowledgeable of concepts, methodologies and theoretical insights of which I had been unaware during the gestation of the article that preceded it. So, even though I would like to boast about the consistent conceptual, theoretical, methodological and interpretational refinement throughout this work, this would amount to scientific dishonesty. Crucial theories like Chiara Bottici’s on “Political Myth”; Aby Warburg’s inestimably valuable concept of Bilderfahrzeuge (i.e., image vehicles) as well as his idiosyncratically brilliant iconological theory; or the theoretical synthesis between these schools and Michel Foucault’s notions of power, discourse, genealogy and biopolitics constitute knowledge that I luckily bumped into at an unfortunately advanced stage of my doctoral research.

I also would like to address possible concerns about the evidence on which I rely. On this I would first like to state that there is neither a “golden end” for evidence—how much evidence is enough?—nor should the perennially facile criticism about this work’s “lack of omniscience” (i.e., “why did you not include this or that researcher, theory, book, etc.?”) debilitate social science’s most important contribution: its explanatory power (Feyerabend 1975). My focus throughout this collection of chapters has been to provide as much theoretical and methodological support as well as argumentative and interpretational refinement to make the case for the mostly unacknowledged, under-theorised and under-researched connection between little everyday images and big dramatic geopolitics. I wish I had read many more authors and included many more of their concerns, approaches, methods and findings but I am confident that what I have included is enough to give sufficient scientific credibility to my explanation and its predictive power.

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My methodology has been fundamentally inspired by Paul Feyerabend’s epistemological anarchism:

Science is an essentially anarchic enterprise: theoretical anarchism is more humanitarian and more likely to encourage progress than its law-and-order alternatives […] 1. This is shown both by an examination of historical epi- sodes and by an abstract analysis of the relation between idea and action. The only principle that does not inhibit progress is: anything goes (Feyera- bend 1975: 5).

I believe that this epistemological anarchism is particularly appropriate given the topic and evidence of this work. Many iconographic, textual or practical discourses analysed here as well as my interpretations of them could be substituted for other images, texts, geopolitical practices. Likewise, the network of signs that I identify to interpret the meaning of Europeanness in contemporary geopolitics could be replaced for other network of signs without changing its ultimate meaning. Thus, the point of relying on this epistemological anarchism is not to go through a pains- taking exhaustion of every single piece of evidence available—who could even know the boundaries of the complete set of evidence one has to examine in order to explain the iconological construction of EUropean identity?—but rather to assemble a story that is more compelling than its alternatives to explain the geopolitical phenomenon with which this work is concerned. To put it differently, many roads could have been taken to make this interpretative argument (e.g., philosophical approaches, authors, theories, empirical evidence, methods and methodologies, etc.). Yet, I believe than the road that I have chosen is at least as good as analogous alternatives and that my argument should be evaluated on the merits of its explanatory and predictive power—particularly when measured against antagonistic arguments—rather than on its ability to squeeze in everyone and everything that it could have conceivably included.

Thus, although the evidence might sometimes seem anecdotal, I would like to forestall this admonition, for its collection does indeed follow a method. I depart from a geopolitical irony: an embryonic political myth of EUrope that keeps stum- bling upon the EU’s fundamental principles. To do this I persistently try— throughout the following chapters—to find the mismatch between the EU’s discourses that support an idea of EUrope as a humanist project and those that deny it. No single map, image or discourse referred to in what follows is presented as either alone-standing evidence of an argument nor as sufficient proof of it. None of these pieces of evidence proves anything on their own: they are only part of a larger collection of signs whose recurrent repetition contributes to establish widely shared beliefs about the idea of EUrope. My interpretations, although undoubtedly subjective, are always based in as much evidence as I thought necessary to com- pellingly make a point. Thus, the forcefulness of my argument is proportional to the amount of evidence that I provide in order to support such a tone.

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Chapters’ Overview

The following chapters identify the EU’s construction of a political myth as well as its geopolitical implications for the project of European integration. As a different case study, each chapter scrutinizes the connection between certain imaginary geographies of Europe and the geopolitics pursued by the EU. My main insight throughout these chapters is that what has come to increasingly characterize the EU’s geopolitical discourse over the last decades is its self-defeating character—it aims at strengthening the EU yet ends up bolstering EUrosceptics focused on dismantle it. In other words, the main warning of this dissertation is that EUropean identity has become one of the most formidable threats to the very EUropean polity it is intended to bring together.

All chapters are connected by a common thread: an exploration of how a political myth of EUrope is being constructed through visual and imaginary political cartographies as well as an analysis of the geopolitical implications—for people, space and culture—that this image of Europe exerts upon the European Un- ion’s supranational project.

The dissertation is divided in three thematic blocks. The first, “Building Eu- rope”, comprises three chapters (1 to 3) that explore the construction of the idea of Europe through iconography as well as its geopolitical implications for the EU. The second block, “Autoimmunity”, comprises four chapters (4 to 7) that delve into how this image of Europe promotes a counterproductive political myth of Eu- rope that, instead of breeding political affiliation for the project of European integration represented by the EU—as is the goal of any political myth—, is tearing it apart. The third block, “Other Europes”, comprises two chapters (8 and the Epi- logue) that analyse new ways of looking at Europe and researching it that might be able to free its image from the straitjacket to which its current hegemonic discourse has confined it. My conclusion and recommendation is that, in order to inspire more open Europes that are able to fend off the major threats and pursue the goals that are enshrined in the historical ethos and foundational principles of the post-war project of European integration and the EU, this supranational project needs to pay more attention to the vision of Europe it inspires.

…

Chapter 1 explains the methodology of this dissertation: how to study the power of images in general and, in particular, their historical power to construct grand geopolitical myths like the idea of Europe through visual representations, geographical imaginations and geopolitical practice.

Chapter 2 explores the iconological construction of European identity through an iconographic analysis of the 5 Euro bill: its architecture and symbols, the suggested geography and heritage it attributes to Europe.

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Chapter 3 is concerned with the construction of the Cypriot conflict through imported imperial discourses and thus the puppeteering that different empires have made of the island and its inhabitants with the unscrupulous objective of asserting their own power and serving their own interests.

Chapter 4 identifies the EU’s autoimmune disorder: a geopolitical affliction that leads the EU to solve problems in a way that not only creates more but which also magnifies the ones that already exist.

Chapter 5 suggests that, contrary to common knowledge, establishment parties have laid the ground for the radical ethno-exclusionary and EUrosceptic parties that are finding increasing success across the EU’s ballot boxes. The thesis of this chapter is that such counterproductive politics are partially but unambiguously influenced by a problematic idea of EUrope that, unknowingly, establishment parties share with such radicals and which they promote through their geopolitical practices.

Chapter 6 conducts an iconological analysis of a map of Frontex to who how its lines, arrows, symbols, colours and overall visual frame and composition reveal a discourse on European borders that contradicts the lofty rhetoric that the EU strives to promote about its commitment to the protection of asylum seekers and their universal rights.

Chapter 7 serves as reflection on the scientific potential of the overall findings of this dissertation. It offers a longue durée overview of the idea of Europe and how reminiscences of its primitive Renaissance construction as well as of its colonial and imperial uses keep exerting a major influence on the geopolitics of the EU.

The Epilogue explores an agenda for future research based on today’s explosion of representations propelled by the advancements in ICTs and the way they are changing politics. Their relevance for the study of geopolitics as a collection of signs whose makers, channels, audiences and the ways in which the message is framed, transmitted and perceived affects those messages.

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Bueno Lacy R (2011) The Unexpected Embrace of Europa: Conflict Resolution and the Unintended Conse- quences of the European Neighbourhood Policy. Nijmegen: Radboud Universiteit (master’s thesis): https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265068729_THE_UNEXPECTED_EMBRACE_ OF_EUROPA_CONFLICT_RESOLUTION_AND_THE_UNINTENDED_CONSEQUENC ES_OF_THE_EUROPEAN_NEIGHBOURHOOD_POLICY

Camus R (2012) Le Grand Remplacement. Paris: Renaud Camus.

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Mignolo W (2009) Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and Decolonial Freedom. Theory, Culture & Society 26(7–8): 159–181.

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FIRST SECTION Building Europe

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Chapter 1

CHAPTER 1

Cartopolitics

The Power of Images and Geographical Imaginations

Geopolitical Semiotics or how inconspicuous images shape world politics

This chapter explores the theories and methodologies to study the power of images as well as the meaning of images themselves, which in this dissertation are considered not only visual representations with a physical and tangible existence but also immaterial visual evocations such as metaphors, rhetorical figures. Overall, the idea of this is to provide an overview of the tools on which I have relied to explore images and the ways in which they splice into the geopolitics of the EU.

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CHAPTER 1

The Power of Images and Geographical Imaginations: Geopolitical Semiotics or How Inconspicuous Images shape World Politics

Cartopolitics and Geopolitical Scepticism

eopolitical classifications like nationality—or analogous forms of political identification—function as the particular brand of a territory and thus the people, space and culture within its borders. Like brands, such territorially-demarcated identities construct prejudices that evoke de- G sire or anxiety (Maheswaran 1994; Quillian 1995). These associations are not inconsequential: they affect official assessments of who might enter a territory and who might not, thus endowing passports with their specific cross-border power or impotence (Salter 2006).

Nationality matters because it promotes an idea of solidarity delimited by the borders of an imagined community (Anderson 1983). Membership to this community confers legal entitlements (e.g., enjoyment to the welfare state) while simultaneously inculcating national vices like nationalism: the anti-humanist conviction that one’s solidarity is first due to one’s compatriots before anybody else. Thus, the national solidarity that makes possible territorially-limited privileges like due process, non-discrimination, mass education, universal healthcare, retire- ment pensions, unemployment benefits, rent subsidies and, overall, publicly funded national services and constitutional rights, is dependent on a state-sponsored indoctrination aimed at raising entire national populations to believe themselves, their “fellow citizens” and their state to be autochthonous (Elden 2013: 21- 26)—i.e., the belief that a particular group stems from a distinct strain of the world’s history and geography (McEwen 2006; Keskinen 2016). However, this “manufactured solidarity” hides more complexity than meets the eye, for the perceptions of national commonality that underlie a country’s expressions of internal solidarity are not exclusively the product of indoctrination.

States do produce particular populations by reason of the common social life that they regulate (Newman 1998: 196-201; Scott 1998). Entire nations are raised in markedly different ways as they are nurtured in specific mother tongues and

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folklore (Kroskrity 2007); their bodies are differently shaped by dissimilar diets, by different access to more or less comprehensive healthcare systems as well as by more or less stringent food regulations specific to their country (e.g., Bingham and Riboli 2004; De Filippo et al 2010); their perceptions of space are moulded by disparate urban planning traditions, architectural styles and the psychogeographic associations that they evoke (e.g., safety, pride, danger, nostalgia, faith, etc.) (e.g., Sidaway and Mayell 2007); their predisposition to get acquainted with people of other national backgrounds is encouraged or discouraged by the selective perme- ability allowed by the specific border regime of their country; they are taught the same common history throughout years of shared public education (Billig 2000); they are exposed to the same media ecosystems, the debates that take place in them and the geopolitical borders than they establish (e.g., Ogan, Willnat, Pennington and Bashir 2014); and, ultimately, the aggregation of these common forms of so- cialisation shapes the general political views that each nation espouses about their position in the world and the relation to the rest of its peoples (Gellner 1983; Hobsbawm 1990).

There is a cascade of epistemic ramifications that derive from these perceptions of national difference: science, public administration, foreign policy, media, politics, arts and other innumerable formal and informal fields of everyday life are defined by notions of national particularity as much as they define them. The relational collection of national notions engenders geopolitical classifications that order and border our world by compartmentalising it into convenient but scientifically spurious essential categories. For example, universities establish departments of “Latin American Studies” or organize entire library sections on the “History of Western thought”, teach courses on “European art” or carry out analyses of genetic descent to inform people about their “German”, “Jewish”, “Native American” or any other geo-cultural category that they employ to label the geographic provenance of their gene pool (Simpson 2000). By making anachronistic use of geocultural categories that have only become widespread designations of specific territorially-bound peoples in recent times—e.g., “Western civilization” (Said 2001)—, the seemingly inconsequent scientific malpractice of taking nationalities as though they were self-evident blurs the boundaries between nationality and biology, thus laying the grounds for xenophobic forms of political identification and legitimising the myth of autochthony (Chase 1977; Rose and Rose 2001).

By producing culture that relies on nationalist conceptions of people, history and politics, intellectuals, scientists, artists and all sorts of public commentators give credence to these identities. Often, the hegemony of such identitary notions reaches such unchallengeable summits that even the most critical works are forced to reproduce them as part of their critique. How to talk about “Orientalism”, for example, without reproducing the notion that the Orient—the geopolitical category Orientalism tries to demystify—exists as a concept? The hegemony of categories like “Western values”, “the Muslim world”, “European society”, etc., and

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the cartography of the world they force us to imagine relies on the lack of conceptual alternatives to them. In order to challenge the imaginary world of very real— and often terrible—geopolitical consequences that these categories engender, it is necessary to destabilise, demolish and replace its conceptual foundations. How to mean what we mean without referring to these trite and scientifically inaccurate categories? New concepts are necessary, new geo-cultural, geopolitical concepts to talk about the world and its politics.

Media is crucial to understand and change these imaginary political geographies, for it reproduces and disseminates these geopolitical concepts as the appropriate and common way to talk about the world. Through the formalisation and quotidian character that they acquire through media, geopolitical stereotypes become powerful and, given the lack of alternatives, hegemonic. Overall, the geopolitical stereotypes that derive from this imaginary political cartography are car- toonish: oversimplified and exaggerated versions of national types. Yet, this car- toonish political cartography—i.e., a world we imagine neatly divided by exotic nationalities—constitutes the primitive raw material on which the most violent geopolitics of the world rely to build a facade of solemnity around geopolitics that otherwise would appear flaringly immoral, shamelessly predatory and evidently self-harming—or otherwise illegitimate, wrong and absurd.

My contention in this dissertation is that there is a convoluted but powerful connection of an eminently visual nature between apparently harmless geopolitical caricatures of nations, cultures and civilisations and the devastating geopolitics that they inspire. In other words, the national prejudices people in the world may have about one another (which are recurrently exploited by comedians, sports’ commentators, videogames, all sorts of cartoons, history and geography primers, national film industries and overall cultural and intellectual productions, etc.) per- suade them to support state policies whose geopolitical description of the world falls in line with their prejudices. Juvenile, simplistic, naive imaginations of the world’s geographies are the tacit advisors informing some of the most momentous geopolitical decisions (e.g., declaring war, invading a country, deporting otherwise legitimate refugees, incarcerating entire ethnic groups in detention camps, etc.). In other words, our geopolitics are childlike because the representations that put together the image of the world that we use for all sorts of purposes are imma- ture too (see Figure 1.1).

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Figure 1.1. Raw geopolitical imaginations. “The perfect European should be…”. Source: https://tinyurl.com/y6njzbyb

In this work, I focus my attention on Europe and, specifically, on the cultural hegemony of a specific idea of Europe—of the many that have existed and the ones that could be created (Wintle 2009). In order to study why this particular idea of Europe has become hegemonic—i.e., why certain artistic expressions, philosophical heritages, historical periods, cultural productions have become widely accepted as stereotypically European—, I depart from Antonio Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony for the analysis of mass culture (Gramsci 1929-35). According to Gramsci, culture is a fundamental instrument of power that the ruling capitalist class uses to shape the minds of the working class in order to make them believe that, by thinking and acting in ways that preserve the status quo, they actually pursue their own interests—even though, in truth, they only preserve the bour- geoisie’s power and thus their own oppression. This concerted attempt to breed “false consciousness” among the working class involves the persistent fine-tuning of the pervasive ideological institutional apparatuses that mediate social relations across all dimensions of everyday life (e.g., schools, churches, the state, the legal system, mass and social media, universities, etc).

However, Gramsci’s theory of how cultural hegemony takes shape should be amended by an understanding of hegemony not only as the product of the ruling classes’ unchecked unscrupulousness but, rather, as the result of a ceaseless dialectic antagonism in which their attempts at manipulation are continuously pushed back by different forms of cultural resistance, forced to regroup, and once reworked recirculated among society (Gottdiener 1985). Yet, capitalism—which exerts social control through the inculcation of a consumerist ethics—is able to get

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the better of this resistance thanks to its uncanny ability to continuously find ways to assimilate its critique and repackage it in consumable ways (Marcuse 1964).

Capitalism transforms all that it embraces into a liberal-seeming but actually repressive/conservative politics by permitting and co-opting everything simultaneously. According to this view, the apparently liberal pluralism that exists in the West is mostly a deception, since the multitude of per- mitted ideas is ultimately self-cancelling, resulting in a playpen for intellectuals that quite literally keeps them off the streets (where they might otherwise start throwing Molotov cocktails). Even worse, defused radical ideas are quickly absorbed into the matrix of general culture, where they generate manufactured goods that help to drive the capitalist economy. According to this view, pluralism and diversity are tolerated, even encouraged, by capitalism because they help to feed the planned obsolescence that spurs the economy (Fromm 1988).

The cultural hegemony of the idea of Europe that I put under examination is one that has currency today both in the EU and beyond. Perhaps one of the most relatable example of this idea’s cultural hegemony are the national stereotypes it comprises (see Figure 1.2). They are expressed as such mundane—even well-natured—and, crucially, generally valid popular prejudice that they are commonly expressed in all forms of social, economic and political relations. Europeans’ specific approaches to cuisine, social gatherings, small talk, relationships, entertain- ment, flirting, language, partying and other abundance of culturally divergent social behaviour is are found in the sweeping geo-cultural assumptions often driving geopolitics—such as a lazy southern and thrifty northern Europeans (Hasan 2013).

Through repetition and either dominance or hegemony (Foucault 1981), these caricatures may turn into geopolitical tropes: significant or recurrent motifs of political and national identity. Such tropes—i.e., images or figures of speech that are passed rapidly from one individual to another with little variation; something akin to an internet meme—, particularly those that either have a visual existence or evoke a visual imagery, are the concern of this investigation. My claim is that these recurrent images play a crucial role in the reification of both “our” imagined communities and the imagined communities of other countries or what we would consider cultures or civilisations (Anderson 1981). As one of the most common and often only approaches people have to other countries, and cultures, these persistent images contribute to naturalise political communities like the nation state, thus reinforcing the territorial trap (Agnew 1994)—the grossly misleading assumption that the nation state is a congruent and legitimate unit of analysis in science, law and politics—and its political myth—a narrative that gives a social group meaning and drives it to action (Bottici and Chalkland 2006).

These visual tropes do not stay confined to the boundaries of either the particular channel through which they are transmitted—a cartoon, a text book, a poster, a

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map, a television screen, a tweet, a Facebook post, a newspaper, a website, etc.— or the particular meaning they were intended to convey. Driven by power, an edited selection of their visual elements travel through the numberless vehicles that feed us representations and thus the meaning and power of this edited selection mutates while it migrates (Warburg 1932: 463, 2003: 5). These evolving tropes substitute geographical ignorance for an illusion of worldly knowledge that finds an imaginary expression in the form of mental maps (Pocock 1979). I claim that these mental maps engender imaginary cartographies which need not be geometrically accurate or topographically flawless but merely relationally significant, i.e., they need to create an emotional and geopolitically meaningful relation among cultures, peoples and territories that is able to inspire policy both domestic—e.g., immigration—and foreign—e.g., war (Henriksen 1980).

What endows these representation-based imaginary cartographies with geopolitical significance is their ability to tell us our spatial, historical, cultural and ideological location: not only where we are but where we come from and how that heritage makes us something different; who is with us and who is against us, who should we have empathy for and who should we fear, who should we express solidarity towards and who should we treat harshly. For example, many EUropean citizens might not have any direct, first-had experience with either their local Mus- lim community in their own country nor with traditionally Muslim countries overseas and yet have their prejudices about The Roots of Muslim Rage (Lewis 1990) daily confirmed by the vilifying representations of Muslims in American television series and movies (Ramji 2003; Aguayo 2009; Kozlov 2007; Sardar and Davies 2010; Yin 2010). Europeans do not need to cross the Atlantic once or explore the Mexican territory at all to have a firmly ingrained stereotype of, say, Mexicans provided by South Park (an animated TV series) promoted on a regular basis. The same is true for many other ethnic stereotypes abundantly reproduced by media (e.g., the Ital- ian American mafioso, the generic Asian naturally inclined to martial arts, the heavily-accented Indian proprietor or a convenience store, the affected British character with a stiff upper lip, and so on).

On the basis of the misguided pictures that this relational geopolitical cartography paints of other countries, cultures and civilisations, we may learn to associate some complex cultures only with the most salient representations that we get about them. This is crucial: we ought to be permanently aware of the power behind the edited selection of images about the world we get exposed to. Yet, this permanent vigilance would require a combination of semiotic, iconological and political awareness that, understandably, is the intellectual repository of a small group of specialists. The most salient representations we get about exotic geographies and the most distinct aspects they highlight say more about those responsible for bringing those representations to us than about the peoples, cultures or places they show. In this regard it is also important to keep in mind (as I do throughout this dissertation) that exoticism (etymologically: the foreign, that lying

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outside) and thus geographical distance might be psychological as well as spatial. Exotic and distant locations might refer to, say, both an often-avoided immigrant neighbourhood next to our homes or a remote corner on the other side of the planet. We may associate some geographies with terrorism and violence, others with efficiency and respect for rules; others with dances, drinking and fun. This exoticisation—for good or bad—reduces the geographical complexity of particular geographies, thus turning them into caricatures that audiences, unaware of the complex assembly line responsible for displaying them on screens before our eyes, might mistake for reality itself.

Few other industries play with geographical imaginations and geopolitical distortions while profiting as much from them as tourism. There is perhaps no better place to gather the mosaic of national stereotypes than the collection of items sold in souvenir shops at either airports or the main touristic streets of many capitals. The Irish sell all sorts of paraphernalia related to Guinness beer, shamrocks and leprechauns; the Belgians take advantage of their rich ecology of beers, chocolate and comic strips; the Dutch offer clogs, their varied assortment of cheese and stoppages; the French miniature replicas of their typical, impressive architecture like the arc de triomphe and la tour Eiffel. The collection of these geographical markers of national difference weave networks of imaginary political cartographies. These imaginary cartographies, in turn, establish hierarchical relations among countries one has never seen other than through the lens of stereotyping geopolitical tropes: their food, handcrafts, architecture, landscapes, public services, fashion, lifestyle, history, literature, etc. might be desired, looked down upon or simply entirely unacknowledged.

Beyond their leisure-related aspect, these imaginary geographies and cartographies are also eminently political too: the very friendly stereotypes that are exploited by the touristic industry to sell holidays is most unscrupulously exploited by foreign policy establishments and military industrial complexes that profit the most from the devastation of entire nations—e.g., Afghanistan and Iraq. These geopolitical imaginations lay down borders along differences of phenotype, language, religion, trustworthiness, sexual desirability, cultural proximity, criminal proclivity, artistic taste, philosophical inclination, gastronomic exoticism, etc. These borders are operationalised as endless variations of the formula: “We are like this. They are like that”. These borders are often the basic intuition inspiring not only popular everyday knowledge—a.k.a. common sense, popular knowledge, general culture, etc.—but also a great deal of scientific enquiry, political language and geopolitical action. Through the inertia of intellectual refinement as well as through political promotion and enforcement, the prejudice inherent to these visual tropes might become science, law and political action of all kinds. Together, these tropes and the mechanisms through which geopolitical imaginations travel, assemble a formidable representational machinery on which politics is based. The EU’s border regime, for example, is fed by self-perpetuating geopolitical

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imaginations: systems to regulate a difference that only exist in their heads create the very difference that they are supposed to regulate. Perhaps the most epitomical examples of this self-fulfilling prophecies are the war on terror and the terrorism it engenders (Bottici and Challand 2006; Bueno Lacy, Van Houtum and Raaphorst 2016). Some of the most epitomical examples of cartographically organised geopolitical imaginaries driving global geopolitics today are treatises on civilisational difference that have been extensively and persistently referred to justify the war on terror (e.g., Mackinder 1905; Kennan 1946; Huntington 1993, 1996; Kaplan 2012).

Figures 1.2 & 1.3. Above: Map of prejudice by Yanko Tsvetkov. Below: The Clash of Ignorance: Map based on Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations. Sources: Yanko Tsvetkov: https://tinyurl.com/y4cchfdv

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The geopolitical caricature of a world marred by a civilisational clash is a deeply worrying example of how a skilful writer and influential geopolitical commenta- tor’s sleight of hand might turn pure unsubstantiated bigotry into the basis of one of the most influential geopolitical analyses in the past 30 years (Said 2001) (see Figure 1.3). For comparison, look at the prejudice map by Yanko Tsvetkov (see Figure 1.2). Although the coarse stereotypes on Tsvetkov’s map betray appalling prejudice, his subjective authorship as well as his intention are palpable. The partiality on Tsvetkov’s map comes across as caustic geopolitical critique of what he sees as Americans’ boorish worldview. By laying bare his political stance, Tsvet- kov allows us to see the intention behind his ironic cartography: surely not a serious map but rather an ironic cartographic critique of American geopolitics. In contrast, the world sketched out by Huntington (this map, although not by Hunting- ton himself, closely follows the narrative cartographic taxonomy he made about the world’s civilisations) conceals its bias behind a smokescreen of academic rigor. Regardless of Tsvetkov’s discourteous irony or Huntington’s learned gravitas, both maps seem compatible once one takes the context of their production into account. When checked against the geopolitical context of Palestinian peace process, the attacks of New York on the 11th of September 2001 and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq that followed, Tsvetkov’s looks like an acerbic yet spot-on critique of intellectuals like Huntington and the statesmen that heed his advice.

How do we know this? Because, how could even the most travelled and knowledgeable polyglot scholar in the world claim to know the civilisational affiliation of the entire world’s population? “These include”—Huntington tells us— “Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American and possibly African civilization” (1996). Anyone who is so unaware of the kami- kaze boldness of lumping together the overwhelming complexity of the African or most of the American continent’s as coherent civilisations deserves no credibility. Not only is civilisation an unavoidably subjective category but the belonging to such category is relational and thus dependant on where, to whom and how it is confessed and cannot be captured by a single colour in a single map. Succinctly put, there is both a gross commonsensical and a gross methodological flaw in Hun- tington’s political cartography of the world. As this dissertation makes abundantly clear, world maps are, as consequence of their scale, a snapshot of a scene that has already changed as soon as its picture has been captured and they are, at best, gross descriptions of their mapmakers’ worldview. Anyone with some awareness of the complexity of political identities knows that civilisational belonging cannot be operationalised as a discrete an independent variable—neither in a statistical data set nor in a world map.

However, Samuel S. Huntington was able to cloak his narrow-minded prejudice behind the thick smokescreen of scholarship because his reputation as a political scientist and the respectable academic publishers through which he disseminated his theory showered his nonsense with the aura of intellectual gravitas.

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Although Huntington’s political cartography tries to pass prejudice as objective science, there is a noticeable overlap between his cavalier book-colouring of all of the world’s civilisations and Tsvetkov’s cynical cartographic exposé of the prejudices lying behind. This overlap suggests that Tsvetkov’s irony might not be such a far-fetched mockery of the uncultured geopolitical prejudices harboured by grandees of the American foreign policy establishment like Huntington.

And yet, Huntington’s political cartography is full of recurrent geopolitical tropes that, although nonsensical, are reality for the mere fact that they are widely believed to be so. “Western” civilisation is a case in point. We frequently hear about a “Western World” that comprises Australia and Japan yet excludes geographies in Africa or Latin America located along the very same latitude as the US and Europe. We hear national socialists and white supremacists beating the drum about protecting Western civilisation’s Judeo-Christian heritage while seeming either fully uninformed about Europe’s Islamo-Christian heritage or determinedly against it (Bulliet 2006). Geopolitical tropes like this evoke a political-cartographic or, as Henk and I term it, a cartopolitical organisation of the world that exerts a great influence on global politics. For example, imagining the Spaniards as arrogant, the Greeks as chaotic, the Italians as uncontrolled, the Portuguese as ham-fisted and, overall, Mediterranean Europeans as arrogant and incompetent is not as harmless as it seems. As consequence of the financial crisis of 2008, a geopolitical narrative based on these harmless geographical stereotypes started to unfold. The crisis was framed as a dispute of cynically arrogant southern Europeans’ asking thrifty northern Europeans for bail-outs to solve their incompetence-fuelled profligacy. This cartopolitical narrative was reproduced by no other than the Dutch politician Jeroen Dijsselbloem, then president of the Eurogroup (a group of financial minsters of the Eurozone), when he commented on southern European requests for solidarity: “I can’t spend all my money on women and drink and then at the end ask for your help […] This principle holds at personal, local, national and also at European level” (Tadeo 2017). Since tropes—significant and recurrent motifs—are widely known, their lack of scientific rigor is not an impediment for them to be considered true, not even among the highest circles of power. Although the ontological consistency of these geopolitical assumptions is easy to dismantle by subjecting them to meticulous scientific examination, their overwhelming recurrence and the geopolitical imaginations that they engender gives them credence to the degree that they are widely assumed to be self-evident and thus are rarely challenged. This is by no means a natural process.

Edited and distributed by power, geopolitical notions are hammered into people’s eyes and brains through the socialization that takes place in one’s own family and immediate environment since the earliest childhood. There is also a systematic indoctrination stemming from the homogenizing institutions of the state. Examples are the educational system and its textbooks, religious institutions together with their influence on society and its politics (particularly when there is

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no separation between state and church), governmental and state propaganda, a national media as well as a country’s intellectual landscape and cultural scene. All these sources demarcate the boundaries between what can be said, represented and done in a society and what cannot (Foucault 1981).

Through power and repetition, these piecemeal geopolitical imaginations gradually put together a complex mosaic that people think of as “the world”: a distorted image of the world edited by those with the power to represent it. The hegemony of this world—a collection of geopolitical notions edited by power— discredits, conceals or silences alternatives, thus acquiring hegemony and becoming taken-for-granted realities that are used to describe, analyse and shape world politics. These “realities” classify political communities which, in turn, assume these political classifications to describe themselves as different from others and to take political decisions on their basis—a step that turns abstract notions into concrete reality by shaping geography through policy. The resulting cartopolitics— cartographically organised geopolitical imaginations—allow people to place themselves and others in the world, not only spatially but also ideologically, emotionally and thus politically.

Cartopolitics allow states to move in a realm of vast politics: national, regional or world politics that are too complex and broad to be understood by most people are easier to manipulate because most people cannot see them, least understand them. In this realm of vast politics, representations that the state makes take precedence over reality. After all, how many Africanists can be counted among those who describe—and often dismiss—Africa, one of the largest continents swarming with an abundance of complex cultures, as a homogeneous block, culture or people? How many Europeans fretting about the threat of Islam have either knowledge of Islamic precepts, the Hadith or the Koran? How many people that claim Europe’s Judeo-Christian heritage have read the Torah or harbour any idea of the historical length and scope of pogroms in Europe (Bulliet 2004)? How many politicians stoking fear for threats to “the West” could tell us the history of Gothic cathedrals, human rights, Renaissance painting, Mediterranean cuisine and their geographical provenance from sources to the East, West and South of the continent? Cartopolitics refers to the power of representations to conceal ignorance about the world and make it pass as expertise by providing vague but politically meaningful geographical imaginations that allow people to act politically upon it (Said 2001). The power of cartopolitics is that it allows us to talk about the world and devise policies to shape it without going into the rouble of actually knowing it.

My notion of cartopolitics assumes a conception of power—e.g., relations of force—inspired by Michel Foucault, i.e., as diffused to the degree of being omnipresent and unavoidable. This is a conception of power different than, say, Gram- sci’s, who conceptualised power as absolute hierarchical dichotomies of power

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relations (e.g., the masses and their ruler). Power’s ubiquitous capillarity is particularly important to understand the configuration of power through images and thus the withdrawn nature of our reality today. Cartopolitics deals with the potential of a deeply meaningful idea of EUrope that hides in a collection of symbols (although they are referred as “signs” in proper semiotic jargon, this is a semiotically insensitive to the fact that “symbol” is the colloquial word that most people actually associate with what semioticians identify as “signs”. Thus, for semioticians to call symbols “signs” is not only gratuitous pedantry but also, ironically, a semiotically insensitive distinction. although essentially imaginary, through particular symbols evokes a comprehensive geography of Europe (e.g., its history, populations, culture and space), manages to actualise itself in the EU’s territory through geopolitical decisions (e.g., border policies).

At the basis of the geographical imaginations that constitute these cartopolitics and which we are used to employ to make sense of the world lies the geographical assumption that they are unique cultural productions differentiated by the geography—i.e., territory, people and culture—that produced them. However, beyond being a convenient way to talk about the world, these geographical compartmentalisations oversimplify it to such an extent that, rather than describing or representing it, they invent it: a copy without an original (Baudrillard 1981: 9). What might seem like nothing more than a convenient geographical compartmen- talisation to make sense of an otherwise overwhelming reality may end up usurping reality itself, taking its place and becoming a spurious basis that future attempts to shape reality take as point of departure (Baudrillard 1981).

Among these geographical imaginations, I will focus on grand geopolitical constructs, specifically Europe. These large civilisational categories are associated with geopolitical myths (Bottici 2006, 2007): a collection of elements particular to a territorially-based identity such as specific histories, heroes, enemies, symbols, narratives, folklore, artistic productions, political legacies, genetic pools, philosophical heritage, neatly delimited cultures and a myriad other markers of cultural specificity. These geo-historical constructions fall into the trap of reading their current borders backwards, i.e., assuming that current borders are history’s natural outcome (Agnew 1994). In the case of the EU, this territorial trap assumes that Eu- rope has always been where the EU is or where the borders of the European continent lie, as if Europeans had self-produced themselves at the margins of world history and geography (Quijano 2000: 221). As if the EU and Europe were synon- ymous and the first could reclaim, appropriate and adjudicate the heritage of the latter. This a distorted image of Europe.

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The power of images

As a reaction to this self-contained idea of Europe, in this dissertation I defend the thesis that Europe is a geopolitical illusion of a glocal nature, i.e., the product of the interaction between global influences on local sensibilities and vice versa. These global and local interactions, in particular those that can be expressed as a visual or imaginary notion of cartographically organised left a visual manifestation, are the concern of this research.

Why? Because there is an anthropological necessity to trust what our eyes see. No other ape features so much contrast between pupils and sclera (the white of the eye) as humans, which seems to be an adaptive feature that allows us to give away and understand eye signals more accurately—a highly useful ability for physically unintimidating primates whose preservation depends on the cooperation with others (De Waal 2000, 2008; Kobayashi and Kohshima 2011). Moreover, it takes 13 milliseconds for the brain to process an image (Potter et al 2014), which makes images an enormous advantage as communication devices when compared to text. People’s attention increases 94% whenever there a website features an image (Gonsalbes 2011). What if this website is a newspaper and what if it contains a map, a caricature, an illustration or a photograph intended to characterise a specific culture, country or civilisation? What if these characterisations are accompanied by a text that demands political action, like supporting an invasion or the hardening of controls at our borders or the incarceration of certain in detention centres? What if these pictures consistently misrepresent a culture or a geopolitical phenomenon? Jihadist terror attacks, for example, receive 357% more press attention than any other headlines even though “ethno-nationalist and separatist terrorist attacks continue to far outnumber attacks carried out by violent extremists inspired by any other ideologies or motivations” (Chalabi 2018; Europol 2018).

The representations through which cartopolitics travel work as “image vehicles” (Bilderfahrzeuge) (Warburg 1932: 463, 2003: 5). Maps, television, radio, architecture, painting, dance, music, film, the endless blogs that have mushroomed in the digital age, rhetorical devices that evoke images—metaphors, particularly— , political speeches and demonstrations, university lectures, textbooks, children’s books, popular jokes, anything with the power to chisel an image before our eyes and imprint in our memories. Aboard of these vehicles, images travel through time. They might be lost for a long time and then recovered; their message might be intended to convey a message at one time, yet inspire an entirely different interpretation the next century and yet an entirely new understanding many a century afterwards. Cartopolitical images are comments: variations of discourse that mutate over time (Foucault 1981). Europe is such an image and its vehicles are maps of Europe, paintings of the ancient Greek myth of Europa, EU bills featuring the symbolic paraphernalia of contemporary European unity, official speeches by EU commissioners but also white-supremacist anxieties about the demise Europe’s

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Judeo-Christian heritage at of non-European immigration. This dissertation explores how the image of Europe has travelled until today to inspire the struggle over representations of Europe that are defining both Europe and the EU politics today. My contention is that these images, these territorially-based identities they promote, these cartopolitical notions are not innocent, inconsequential images but crucial border makers that slowly but surely define what Europe is and what Eu- rope is not, thus carrying the image of Europe as they shape in on space and politics.

Europe is not necessarily where its representations locate it. Europe cannot be discovered through patient and meticulous scholarly research because its meanings have been constantly re-crafted by power (Delanty 1996; Bialasiewicz 2012). My intuition is that there are a thousand Europes buried under countless maps whose borders no one has charted and which no one has been taught to see. The purpose of this research is to dislocate the frames around the deceitfully stable picture of Europe in order to discover the Europes that refuse to stop moving and whose cultures are more unstable than the juridical and political notions of borders and the fables of nationalism would allow us to believe. On the whole, this research seeks to produce some geopolitical disorientation in order to stumble upon new geographical imaginations of Europe (Said 1993; Gregory 1995).

Case study: The idea of Europe in the EU

Concretely, this research analyses the construction of European identity—as a culture, a civilisation and a political organisation—and its geopolitical implications in the past as well as for the EU. This Europeanisation—if you will—is a geopolitical strategy that, roughly since the Renaissance, has heavily relied on visual means (maps and all sorts of art) to create a spatial and cultural idea of Europe for political gain (Bueno Lacy and Van Houtum 2015). Of these visual artefacts, maps provide a synopsis of the signs that in each historical epoch have been the ideas of Europe. Through their colours, symbols, lines, borders, orientation, legend, manufacturer, site of production. The value of this iconological repertoire is of inestimable importance to understand how people looked at Europe in the past and how they look at it today: what did they think its borders and “others” looked like back then? What have been the transformation of notions of Europe and its borders? Although Europeanisation is by no means exclusively put together by the EU—what other countries and geographies say about Europe and the EU also shape the notion of what Europe is—, it is a strategy greatly influenced by the narratives, images and policies pursued by the EU and its member states.

Among the tools of Europeanisation, visually evocative language has always occupied a privileged role. The collection of these visual expressions has created visual discourse on Europe, ocularcentric assemblages that we could call scopic

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regimes (Metz 1975)—i.e., systems of images, either visual or metaphorical—which, fuelled by our desire to see, mislead us into believing that what we see is not a representation of the world but the world itself. This ocularcentrism relegates the word to a second plane, thus giving us the false expectation that we can understand and manage the world (Jay 1988). Scopic regimes create worlds in our heads, i.e., imaginary geographies or scopic geopolitics, whose order and meaning we learn not so much from direct personal experience as from the eyes of others (Baudrillard 1981; Gregory 1995). Since geography concerns itself with a world whose enormity and diversity are impossible to know through direct sensorial experience, it is self-evident that transmitted rather than direct experience constitutes most of the geographical knowledge of most people most of the time. Thus, scopic regimes play a crucial role in the way geography is transmitted and their study is fundamental for the understanding of how world politics are shaped.

The commonly-held misperception that representations of geography are “real” has the potential to lead entire scientific, intellectual, artistic, diplomatic, military and political communities to either dishonestly manipulate geographical representations or to unsuspectingly internalize prejudices that the makers of these representations have embedded in them. Maps are the epitomical example of this representational trickery. Political maps—the main but not exclusive evidence that I use in this dissertation—draw on widely shared scopic regimes to craft worlds in our heads on which political forces then rely to suggest “sensible” domestic and foreign policies (Ó Tuathail and Agnew 1992). TV series, for example, suggest a cartography of emotions and justify a wealth of geopolitics like Islamophobia and thus both Jihadist terrorism and military adventurism in the Middle East depending on the emotions they arouse on particular audiences that receive them (Moïsi 2009, 2016). The crucial aspect of the geography at a distance that such scopic geopolitics allow is that the absence of that which the observer experiences may incline them to feel less responsibility for their feelings towards what their eyes observe (Metz 1975: 44). A moral danger of such detachment is the observer’s inclination towards sadism (Storr 1978), which in geopolitical terms might translate into policies that in the worst cases promote despise for certain geographies (e.g., xenophobia and racist migratory regimes) and justify the utter disregard for the lives of entire nations (e.g., imperialism, colonialism and wars of aggression). This violence is all the more worrying for it is rooted within ourselves: in our conviction that violence is a reasonable response to the real world, even though this might be a “reality” we know only through anecdotic prejudice, newspapers’ photographs, maps on history books or videos on news broadcasts. The belief in a reality manufactured by others makes it harder to fight both the oppression that is imposed upon us and that we are led to impose on others.

Our desire to see as well as our inclination to believe what we see keep us trapped in the cage of our optic numbness. We believe too easily what we think we see. This research seeks ways to free the idea of Europe in order to reveal that

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behind the innocent, indisputable, disinterested and ultimately real appearance of its representations there are interests, machinations, prejudices, violence and mis- understandings. Yet exposing the violence is not the only goal. This research will also try to identify—whenever possible—alternative ways to rethink Europe and rethink its cartography or, better, its mapmaking (Wood 2003). The practical ambition of this research is to free Europe’s borders through the narration and design of other possibilities for Europe’s historical and cartographical conceptualization. Representations of Europe exert a powerful steering influence on the direction of the EU and thus the idea they promote about Europe is of crucial geopolitical importance.

Theory: The geoaesthetics of Europe’s scopic regimes

Among the many means that give birth to grand geopolitical entities like Europe, signs play a privileged role—not only visual artefacts but also visually evocative language and practices. In this dissertation I take a broad and mutually constitutive understanding of both language and visuality: I understand language not only as a form of spoken and written communication but as any form of communication, be it visual or performative (e.g., maps, paintings, photographs, buildings, films). This understanding is supported by three theoretical frameworks. The first is the neurocognitive theory of metaphorical abstraction which posits that the human conceptual system is fundamentally metaphorical—and thus eminently visual (Lakoff and Johnson 1980a, 1980b). The second is the linguistic theory of language as a “reef of dead metaphors” (Deutscher 2006: 115-143), which sustains that “metaphors are everywhere, not only in language, but also in our mind” (Deutscher 2006: 117). The third is a wealth of literature on visual culture that postulates that images form a crucial role in world making (Rose 2012: 1-18).

Theories on visuality are complemented by others that add the dimension of power. The first is the school of Critical Geopolitics, which posits that a critical examination of issues of “representations, authority, power and knowledge” is needed to expose “the plays of power involved in grand geopolitical schemes” (Ó Tuathail 1992: 439) with the aim at “rethinking and reconstructing geopolitics” (Dodds & Sidaway 1994: 521). The second is the field of Critical Cartography which holds that maps create rather than represent the world (e.g., Harley 1985, 1989; Woodward 1985; Wood 1992). Thus, this research pays particular—though not exclusive—attention to cartography.

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Methodology: Adjustable Lens of Multifocal Scale

The overarching methodology on which this dissertation relies is iconology: the analysis of an image’s subject matter, or iconology (i.e., the collection and arrangement of its visual elements), in relation to the culture that produced it—in this case the EU. I have attempted to enrichen the insights provided by the schools of Criti- cal Geopolitics, Border Studies and Critical Cartography by taking inspiration from the work of art historian Erwin Panofsky and cultural theorist Aby Warburg. The purpose of this methodology is to travel what I consider a crucial yet rarely taken bridge between art history and geopolitics.

My focus is on the nexus between representations and power in general and political maps of the EU and discourses of securitization regarding EU borders in particular. My main goal is to identify how specific visual techniques have been used on political maps of the EU to either reproduce or create certain notions of European geography—history, culture and borders—and thus its opposite: notions of the ‘non-European’. By identifying the opposite of what in the EU’s public debate has become associated with European, I aim at identifying how certain notions of ‘others’ (e.g., the Muslim, the refugee or even the lesser European) have become not only markers of difference but also of antagonism, hostility and threat. These threats have been used across Europe to justify a realignment of the EU’s borders along increasingly securitized principles and mechanisms of biopolitical control. I focus specifically on the re-configuration of European borders that has been rippling through European space and politics since the attacks on New York in 2001 and the colossal discursive and geopolitical shift that this has been causing. This shift has brought an increased military involvement of the EU in conflicts in both Africa and the Middle East; a growing number of terrorist attacks in the EU (both Islamist and xenophobic) (Europol 2018); and growing migration as well as migration-related anxieties. This shift has opened an ideological space for Euro- scepticism: an umbrella term that comprises a series of multifarious movements characterized by their common aversion to immigration and their shared praise for more closed communities, cultures and EU borders.

One of the objectives of this research is to design a methodological approach that casts light upon the plasticity of geopolitical constructs like Europe by undermining the aura of necessity that surrounds them. In order to do this, I have designed an analytical lens of adjustable geographical scale for the study of critical geopolitics: cartopolitics. Such magnifying glass should allow to discern the mechanisms through which local subjects are constituted by the strings of a power that is neither global nor local but mutually glocal—i.e., an intricate perception shaped by the time- and space-compressing abilities of technology and the geographical imagination that can is captured by concepts such as heterotopias (Foucault 1986) and chronotopes (Bakhtin 1937). This methodology aims at developing an

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innovative approach to understand the influence of the local on the global and vice versa (i.e., the glocal) through an analysis of European geoaesthetics.

The complexity of perceptual geopolitics can be grasped by conceptualizing them as a spider’s web. In this metaphor, the spiders are those with the power to weave meaning and order upon geography—broadly understood as the space, the people and culture it encloses. The threads of the web are the discursive means they use to spread their message and demarcate their borders through representations. Their prey are those who fall into the representations and get trapped in them without realising that they are mere propositions, that they can be challenged and that the seemingly unchallengeable order and power they appear to command is but “built on sand” (Luxemburg 1919). The web refers to the geographical and ideological reach of the threads in their entirety as well as the actors they connect. The crucial discourse maker is the EU, not only the supranational institution but also the Member States that compose it as well as the political parties and movements that oppose it. The threads are the visual representations they create to promote their own ideas of Europe. The prey are those affected by the violence of such representations. The web is both the network of geopolitical centres from which the threads are extruded as well as the relation of spatial perceptions that make such ideas of Europe politically meaningful.

The question this research attempts to answer regards how global representations influence local geopolitics and vice versa. Often, geopolitical phenomena represented as be global are of a local nature whereas geopolitical dramas assumed to originate in typically local conditions are represented as having a rather global manufacture. In other words, representations of the world (i.e., geoaesthetics) hide unexplored faraway proximities as well as nearby distances—i.e., misperceptions. Thus, world politics are driven and misled, at times purposefully and at times un- intentionally, by a web of connected representations which distort notions of material and emotional space, making what is close seem distant and what is distant appear close. Since the inherently visual language of such systems commands a powerful influence, world politics heavily rely on representations to capitalize on the yet unawaken or purposefully suppressed awarenesses about the proximity of certain cultures, territories, people and politics, thus making them appear as either closer or farther than what people imagine them to be. The Greek bailout and the EU financial crisis of 2008 is a good example of the power of these geoaesthetics.

Conceptual framework

The following 5 diagrams present, in the form of visual metaphors, a conceptual framework that explores how the scopic regime of the idea of Europe is constructed.

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Unknowable world Representations Scopic regime

The endless geo- These small parts are turned into representations and transmitted Assemblages of graphical complexity through all kinds of channels. representations become of the world is bro- substitues of a world too ken down into parts. vast for us to directly experience.

Shipping Scopic Geopolitics European Union

Scopic regimes are Centres of geopolitical power are among the world’s biggest This research focuses on how shipped all around the wholesale buyers of scopic regimes, which they use to manu- the EU uses the scopic re- world for global con- facture the ideas on which they thrive, such as nationalism gime as raw material to cre- sumption. and their domestic and foreign policies. ate its own idea of Europe.

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World Cartopolitics: Border Linearity, Distortion & Stretching Cartopolitical representation Geopolitical manufacture relies on tools to represent the world as a set of units neatly bordered by artificial lines which, supported by power, law and tradition, make up the basis A cartographical sugges- upon which world politics are conducted. The compartmentalised world is flattened in order tion of Europe that to make it manageable and then re-sized, re-oriented and re-centred at the mapmaker’s con- matches the borders of the venience. Geopolitical scopic regimes—geoaesthetic regimes—pursue political gain. EU is promoted as normal and self-evident.

Geoaesthetics EU Cartopolitics The idea of Europe Europeanisation

Europe’s global The EU couples its idea of The selected elements are assembled in a A geopolitical strategy scopic regime is Europe with a selection of historical narrative and a cartopolitical com- to create a political mixed with the European history and cul- position that are given an appearance of community by EU’s idea of Eu- ture, discarding whatever harmony. promoting an idea of rope. does not fit its vision. Europe.

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Multifocality The treachery of images

To escape the territorial trap in world politics, this research This research relies on critical theory to unearth the power develops a bidirectional perspective that takes into account underlying political practices that rely on the manufacture the simultaneous construction of European geopolitics and of a certain idea of Europe to gain control over populations the idea of Europe from both local and global perspectives. and geography.

Figures 1.4, 1.5, 1.6 & 1.7. The cartopolitical construction of Europe.

Geoaesthetics and political affiliation

Why are German taxpayers unconcerned about having their taxes redistributed among a German population they do not know but feel outraged at the idea of redistributing this wealth among Greeks they do not know either? Of course, there is much difference between the health of the German and Greek economies as well as between the accountability of their political systems and thus reasons to be concerned about the use of funds (Kirschbaum 2012). But it was clear that the geoaesthetics of stereotypes play a decisive role too when it comes to explain the colossal difference between European populations’ reception of either European or national solidarity. Jeroen Dijsselbloem, former president of the Eurogroup, gave a hint of the influence of these cartopolitical stereotypes in the formulation of the most sensitive EU politics when he stated that: “As a social democrat, for me solidarity is extremely important […] But those who call for it (solidarity) also have duties. I cannot spend all my money on liquor and women and plead for your support afterwards. This principle applies on the personal, local, national and also

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European level” (De La Baume 2017). The evocation of a geoaesthetics of thrifty northern Europeans and profligate southerners.

Since a research into glocal geoaesthetics demands too broad an answer, I will narrow down my research to focus on the case study of glocally constructed EU cartopolitics and thus on how representations of Europe create a geoaesthetic regime that influences the boundaries of the EU’s imagined political community and ultimately its geopolitical possibilities (e.g., enlargement, neighbourhood policy, containment of anti-European political movements, free trade, immigration, foreign policy and diplomacy). This is a multidisciplinary research in political geography that relies on cultural studies and critical social theory to explore how the geographical aesthetics of Europe favoured by actors within and outside the EU promote a variety of ideas of Europe that end of configuring an idea of Europe. This idea of Europe, this geoaesthetic regime, this European cartopolitics configure a political myth that defines the boundaries of Europe as an idea and as a geopolitical possibility.

The ultimate goal of this research is to bring about the dislocation of that pervasive idea that there can be only one Europe and thus that there is a “European essence”. The main insight that this research intends to advance is that the notion that there is a typical European history, art, geography, demographic, etc., is always a political construction: “Europe can only be unified in spite of its history and that to speak of the unity of Europe is to pursue an ideological strategy by which the core can make territorial claims on the periphery while asserting its cultural superiority” (Delanty 1996: 101). Rather than one, there are many Europes the existence of which is a matter of political will. In order to discover these many Eu- ropes I propose a method of multifocal cartopolitics.

Multifocality refers to a set of analytical lenses that allow to switch the geographical level of analysis during the study of geopolitics. The objective of this multifocal lens is to discover the representations, large and small (from world maps to everyday national stereotypes), that put together political myths in the form of cartographically organised geopolitical imaginations. This cartopolitics refers to the decorative strategies and visual discourses that power uses to assert control over territory, legitimize political affiliations, biopolitical practices and spatial policies— i.e., visual geopolitics. With the use of this lens, this research departs from examining what kind of European geography and history can be inferred from the symbolism promoted by the EU. Then this research explores how the EU’s symbolism about Europe interacts with other systems of signs that make Europe meaningful— e.g., Eurosceptic political movements and post-colonial discourses. The idea is to see how many scopic regimes of Europe play relevant roles in world politics and which geopolitics they inspire. Throughout all the research I resort to radical cartography to suggest how another variety of Europes could be drawn on the basis of the different historical, geographical and cultural notions on Europe that I am

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able to find. Ultimately, the idea of this analysis is to go beyond a critique and assemble a new synthesis of Europe that can serve as the basis to reimagine Europe and the EU as an open-ended possibility rather than a necessity (Boedeltje and Van Houtum 2008; Van Houtum 2015).

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CHAPTER 2

EUropeanisation

Lies, Damned Lies and Maps

The EU’s Cartopolitical Invention of Europe

As a first attempt to analyse the cartopolitics of the EU, this chapter explores how the EU lies with maps by anachronistically defining Europe’s borders and appropriating a cherry-picked selection of its historical legacy in a way that neatly coincides with its political project. Through an analysis of the 5 Euro banknote’s visual composition, I identify the imaginary history and geography (i.e., culture and space and people) that the EU tries to evoke in an attempt to turn its edited version of Europe’s heritage into a meaningful political myth that can resonate among its citizens. However, I identify a fundamental aberration: these political geographies resonate with an imperial European historiography that contradicts the ethos of the EU. As this chapter explains, symbols like Europa, Charle- magne, a 19th century convention of Europe’s borders and the architectural styles on the back of Euro banknotes neatly align with discourses, symbolism, geographical imaginations and a political myth of Europe (i.e., an idea of Europe) that contradict the fundamental principles of the EU.

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Bueno Lacy and Van Houtum (2015). Lies, Damned Lies & Maps: The EU's Carto- political Invention of Europe. Journal of Contemporary European Studies 23(4): 477–499. DOI: 10.1080/14782804.2015.105672.

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CHAPTER 2

Lies, Damned Lies & Maps: The EU’s

Cartopolitical Invention of Europe

ABSTRACT

Ever since the 15th century, empires have invented Europe as a meaningful political space to legitimize territorial ambitions and establish hierarchies between Europeans and professedly lesser geo-cultural entities. Maps have played a crucial role in nat- uralizing the geopolitical arbitrariness—what I term cartopolitics—that has un- derlain such Europeanization. In this chapter, I draw on historical maps to expose the cartopolitical cleansing done by the EU—today’s grand Europeanizing power—and free Europe from its hegemonic cartopolitical inscription. Heavy on symbolism yet light on mathematical accuracy, old maps of Europe readily earn our mistrust. Meanwhile, EU cartography, foreseeing that strident symbolism could an- tagonize its members’ national iconography and hamper enlargement, offers a plain technicality divested of political allegory that demands indifference. However, the seemingly unobjectionable Europe portrayed by EU maps relies on decorative strategies analogous to those of ancient maps and should arouse similar suspicion. Ironi- cally, for all their subtlety to cultivate an affiliation with Brussels, EU maps inad- vertently prop up Eurosceptical discourses chewing at the EU’s external appeal and internal cohesion. My conviction is that dislocating Europe’s borders to show Eu- ropes that were and could be may inspire refreshing imaginations about the meaning and boundaries of Europe and the EU.

The Cartopolitical Scramble for Europe

he idea of Europe has never existed beyond the political will to make it meaningful. Ever since Europe started to take hold as an evocative political idea during the Renaissance—i.e., as a designation not only of a certain space but also of a particular civilization inhabiting it—(Hale 1994; Wintle T 1999: 138), cartographers have been persistently redrawing Europe’s borders at the request of competing geopolitical projects (Tilly 1992: 38-66; Delanty 1996; Wintle 1999, 2009). This cartographical strategy has intended to dif- fuse a tale on Europeanness that justifies particular quests for power. Through the promotion of a binding cultural consciousness, empires and nation-states have attempted to either bring under their control territories they ambition—as well as the people and resources within them—, rally support against a common enemy or re-

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border themselves into what they deem to be a more prestigious geopolitical space—like Russia under Peter the Great (Bassin 1991: 4-5).

Historically, maps have promoted a decisive discourse underlying the configuration of a modern political authority based on strict territorial boundaries (Branch 2014). Ever since the 15th century—when Europeanization first appeared as the imperial geopolitical strategy we know today—maps have persistently occupied a privileged position in the storytelling about European civilization. The cartographical boundaries of a continent held together by mere convention have been erected as the showcase where an invented European civilization can be located: European peoples, European culture and thus European heritage have been contrived by turning topographical features along otherwise seamless space into venerable markers of geocultural difference. This cartopolitical despotism has been the basis to create hierarchies between Europeans and non-Europeans as well as among higher and lesser breeds of Europeans.

The EU, defined here as the post-WW2 supranational project that advocates the idea of European integration, is the most recent imperial project to take upon a time- honoured narrative that can be traced back to the birth of Europe as a meaningful political space. This geopolitical strategy of ‘Europe-making’—which is often called Europeanization—is hard to be decoupled from a classic geopolitical ped- igree that has typically produced a hierarchical geographical dichotomy between a core—i.e., the geopolitical centre where narratives on Europeanness are produced—and its subordinate periphery—the geographies over which the geopolitical centre has tried to assert claims of superiority—(Delanty 1996: 101). A multitude of geopolitical taxonomies have derived from this dichotomy (Quijano 2000): by assigning itself the highest degree of a Europeanness it itself has crafted, the centre has promoted the idea that European identity—defined through a diverse spectrum that may include phenotype, culture, artistic productions, philosophical ideals, political ideology, religion, cuisine, traditions and folklore, industrial technique, ways of dressing and living, historical heritage, etc.— gradually degrades as one moves away into the boundaries of what it itself has demarcated as Europe (Bi- alasiewicz 2012a).

In this chapter, I explore the conceptual shifts of the specific kind of Europe- anization promoted by the EU with the intention of reconstructing major discursive arguments regarding the reconfiguration of EU borders that has taken place over the last decades. I rely on maps because I suspect them to be particularly plainspo- ken spokesmen of what could be termed EUropeanization: the EU’s geopolitical strategy to create a paradoxical ethos that simultaneously supports the EU’s ambivalent border dynamics of deeper internal integration within continuous external enlargement. Its perplexing task is to create an identity strong enough to allow for the EU’s further intrusion in ever more sensitive turfs of its Member States yet weak enough to provide scope for the incorporation of new national identities. Through

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an interpretation of EU maps, I address how EUropeanization has redrawn Eu- rope’s borders as well as the conceptualizations and imaginaries such strategy is based upon.

Power and geography have strolled hand-in-hand all throughout history (Kristof 1960; Dalby 1991; Padro´n 2004; Jacob 2006). Cartography has been a highly technical and expensive endeavour whose development has required the resources that only political administrations have been equipped to provide. Measuring, sur- veying and compiling statistics of lands, their resources and populations have been primary concerns of state-like apparatuses that have found in maps invaluable scale models to manage their territory as well as a legitimation for their existence and expansion (Scott 1998). Since mapmaking and the desire to control territory have always been intimate bed fellows, comparing the historical dresses that cartographers have tailored around the political body of Europe allows us to explore the dimension of power—central to any geopolitical strategy—behind EUropeani- zation. I conduct a representational analysis that compares the images of Europe on EU-made and ancient maps to unearth the historical and social structures of power that have charted different meaningful Europes. The purpose of such comparison is to find out what the narrative on EUropeanization is trying to hide and what it is trying to highlight.

EUropeanization and its mapmaking are young. Euros, some of the most cartographically powerful symbol-carriers of the EU and its most widespread cartopolitical proposition (Raento et al. 2004), did not begin their circulation until 2002. The earliest foundational moment of the EU can be traced not further than a couple of generations ago to the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1951. Yet, the an- cestry flaunted by EU maps as well as the history and myth evoked by such iconography goes much further back. For this reason, to analyse the discourse on which EU symbolism is based it is necessary to go beyond the temporary boundaries of the EU’s institutional history.

In this chapter, I pay attention to the ways in which EUrocartography enables a discourse on the borders of European identity that exacerbates the drama of migration by turning it into a frightful security concern. The securitized anti-immigration rebordering that has taken place around the Mediterranean over the last two decades cuts to the very core of a club of privilege—i.e., the EU—whose overall meaningfulness is simultaneously inspired and threatened by outside influences. On the one hand, the EU’s wealth derives from inclusive welfare states and a border openness that underpins its internal market. Problematically, however, both of these systems are compelled by their own economic logics to be closed and restrict rights and benefits to their members (Freeman 1986; Schierup, Hansen and Castles 2006), which not only facilitate but also require the ‘pathologization’, dehumanization and criminalization of migrants (Van Houtum and Pijpers 2007; Van Hou- tum 2010a).

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The commonplace typification of able-bodied young migrants who have risked and abandoned much to enter the EU as mere low-skilled fortune seekers who have naively idealized the EU’s wealth can draw much inspiration and support from an EUrocartography that reclaims the idea of Europe for EU Member States alone. Such anti-migration narrative is an old colonialist package wrapped in politically correct velvet. Not only does it delegitimize the suffering that underpins migrants’ ambitions but it also makes it easier to criminalize them. Following this narrative, it is not hard to see how migrants who cannot be located as culturally European— within the space of European culture that the EU has mapped—may be depicted as having a hard time finding their place in Europe and the EU. How could such immigrants possibly contribute to the creation of EU’s wealth and prosperity when their ambitions, bodies and cultural baggage are so misplaced? Rather—so this kind of narrative seems to suggest—exploiting, threatening and undermining the civilization that underpins this wealth and prosperity may come easier to people so out of place. It is not hard to imagine the political relevance of such ideas and their volatility in times of crisis.

Our aim is not merely to state that the idea of Europe promoted by the EU is a lie. What I aim to say is that, even though the EU might be creating a questionable or false narrative on Europe—what would be a true narrative, anyway?—its consequences in terms of life- altering policies are very real. Perhaps the most troubling consequence of the discourse about Europe which EUrocartography legitimizes is its paradoxical political effect (Bueno Lacy and Van Houtum 2013). EU maps are a two-edged sword: even though they try to pin down Europe to justify policies of inclusion, they are being recycled by populist EUrosceptic political parties interested in pushing their own national-bound policies of exclusion. The imagination of an essential Europe threatened by unfamiliar influences is being stoked to curb immigration all across the EU and marginalize, oppress and assail immigrant populations in EU member countries. The impression that immigration from outside the EU and its problems are phenomena to be dealt with in a militaristic fashion is legitimizing a similar discourse against the EU’s Schengen space. Although the EU Commission has already noticed the intestinal siege that the EU is suffering in national discourses across its Member States (ICF GHK & Milieu Ltd. 2013), what it has not seem to have grasped yet is that the border management along its external borders is directly related to the border management across its internal borders. The EU’s attitudes towards external migration echo on its internal mobility and political cohesion.

Our intuition is that the EU’s exclusionary border doctrine with regard to migration and security is not safeguarding its wealth and prosperity but corroding the EU’s very foundations (Bueno Lacy and Van Houtum 2013). I am driven by the conviction that, in order to open the boundaries of EU border policy, it is first indis- pensable to challenge the limits of the rhetoric that allows current migratory and security practices to be acceptable and even desirable. What is thought of as

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‘European history’ and ‘European geography’ play a crucial role in shaping the geopolitical language leading the EU to border itself in such a self-defeating way in- and out-wards. In order to dislocate and destabilize the paradigmatic idea of Europe on which the EU’s vision relies, I hope to further the discussion on a what could be termed cartographic genealogy of EUropeanization—i.e., the geopolitical strategy of Europe-making conducted by the EU—with the intention of finding contradictions in the discourse that supports it (Foucault 1971). Laughing at the solemnities of the Europeanness promoted by EUrocartography may be the first step in creating less anxious narratives that conduct to less anxious border practices. With this objective in mind I resort to historical maps of Europe, not out of a sheer cartographic passion for the gorgeous beauty of ancient maps, but because contrasting EU maps with historical maps of Europe is crucial in a wider geopolitical sense: past Europes provide the EU with a sense of location and direction.

EUropeanization is an overambitious geopolitical strategy of an imperial system of conflict resolution different from traditional international organizations, a super state or modern empires. What the EU most closely resembles are medieval empires characterized by their flexibility to accommodate different peoples, cultures and legal codes within the same governance framework of constantly shifting borders (Zielonka 2006: 170). The EU’s neo-medieval empire heavily relies on history to render its complex political project meaningful to 500 million disparate souls. The geopolitical significance of exploring alternative definitions and expressions of European culture has a heavy bearing on expanding the scope of geographical sources from which European heritage has arisen and thus broadening the range of backgrounds that can identify with the EU. By giving a place to their forefathers’ historical deeds and contributions in the European history that it is trying to create, the EU might be able to give a space to citizens who find in their opposition to the EU and European culture the place that the mainstream conception of European culture denies them.

The EU is certainly not solely responsible for the paradigmatic borders of Europe— neither spatial nor ideological. The USA through its influence in the reconstruction of post-war Europe, and through the military support it has given it through NATO has been a crucial factor in the EU’s development—e.g., the Amer- icans have loudly and openly advocated the eventual membership of Turkey despite its stalled negotiations with the EU. Russia through its persistence in differen- tiating itself from the EU’s socio-political aspirations and its insistence to compete militarily rather than economically for what it considers its sphere of influence have made clear that, at least for now, Russia constitutes a hard boundary to the EU’s eastern ambitions. Today’s violent expression of political Islam, the complexity of its grievances and its convoluted relationship with the interpretation that the EU’s Muslim population gives to it as a response to their complex integration in the EU constitutes a very tangible identitary boundary. It goes without saying that there are more of such external influences not identified here that contribute to establish

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the boundaries around the discourse on Europe.

Yet, one of the most important manufacturers of Europe’s identitary boundaries is not the EU itself but its Member States. I vigorously refrain from giving the impression that EUropeanization is a geopolitical strategy reached through consensus by a homogeneous block. If anything, the financial crisis of 2008 and the political predicament it has stoked—epitomized by the Greek crisis—have taken care to highlight, more plainly than ever, that EU identity has formidable opponents in each of its Member States’ national identities and in the multitude of versions they inspire within their domestic political spectrums. Addressing all the variants of Europeanization as well as the specific contradictions between specific Member States goes far beyond the scope of this piece. In this chapter, I highlight the elements that we deem to be common to the joint EU project for all or at least most EU members and, when I consider an exception worth mentioning, I have made an effort to elaborate on such frictions.

The answers the EU finds for questions of values and identity as well as compatibility and belonging will greatly influence the perception of what European culture is and where it may be located. The foundations for present political action in both the wider EU—especially regarding enlargement and the European Neigh- bourhood Policy—and each of its Member States—particularly concerning immigration, asylum and integration—are supported by a particular European historiography. This chapter finds its socio-political justification in the conviction that the collective memories aroused by telling the history of Europe in the world and vice versa is an essential endeavour to release Europe from the straitjacket to which the EU confines it (Boedeltje and Van Houtum 2008). The answers of such an effort may reverberate around the most crucial political controversies faced by the EU and its members, from immigration to enlargement.

The misappropriation that the EU makes of the idea of Europe is reinforced by the widely accepted equivalence between Europe and the EU (Boedeltje and Van Houtum 2008), as if both were but interchangeable synonyms. The consequence of this synonymousness is that all historical epochs and their productions associated with the idea of Europe are appropriated by the EU and forced into the historically inadequate space of EU territory by the violence of misleading language and surreptitious symbolism.

Our emphasis on the past is due to history being a fairly simple and straightforward method of theory and policy evaluation: the soundness or inconsistency of a historical narrative tells much about the validity and reliability of the ideas and policies it underpins. In this analysis, I test the historical congruence of the storyline on European identity as told by the EU’s symbolism and policies. The spatial demarcation of the EU as a political community and the narratives supporting it has geopolitical consequences for its identity.

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To distinguish where Europe begins and where it ends amounts to more than a mere cartographical convention: it is an act of cartopolitical manipulation that entails crucial political implications for both domestic and foreign policy (O´ Tuathail and Agnew 1992:194). By contrasting ancient maps of Europe with today’s EU maps, I aim at comparing the different political projects that have made Europe- anization the ethos of their geopolitical ambitions. While dusting the ‘Europes’ that were yet cannot be found anymore on EUrocartography I discuss the consequences of selecting certain symbols and championing certain practices for the future of the EU.

EU’s Cartopolitics

Maps have been some of the most disputed battlefields over which competing geopolitical struggles have taken place (Wood 1992; Brotton 2012). These two-dimensional scale models of the Earth provide a window into their makers’ perceptions of the world’s human geographies—i.e., lands and their inhabitants as well as their cultural productions (Van Houtum 2012, 2013). Maps’ highly visual appeal has made them a favoured vessel of geopolitical discourse throughout history (Harley 1985; Wintle 1999)—i.e., the hierarchical spectacles through which people learn to know and make sense of a world they cannot possibly fully experience or understand. Moreover, maps’ specialized technical complexity and detailed information about remote places and peoples neither their makers nor their viewers will ever directly experience have always endowed these visual artefacts with an air of objectivity and authority men ‘have not yet learned to distrust’ (Kristof 1960: 45), and a sense of power and control it is hard to overstate (Brotton 2012; Wintle 1999: 137). This is what makes maps so appealing to those interested in promoting geopolitical ideologies to support their self-seeking political projects and also what renders them so dangerous for the unsuspecting spectators exposed to their subtle messages. On- lookers, unaware of the bias fed into their geographical imaginations by these sneaky cartographic puppeteers may unwittingly take mapmakers’ interpretations of the world as their very own.

The contrast between the five Euro bills (see Figure 2.1) and a map showing the full extent of the EU’s administrative borders (see Figure 2.2) is an illustrative example of the kind of cartographic manipulation that I want to call into question. Maps acquire a crucial political relevance once they are printed on money that is daily traded and looked at (Raento et al. 2004: 932). Its numismatic cartography and its symbolism give away how technocrats in Brussels conceive the project they are steering and the boundaries—both material and ideological—of the political community they strive to shape.

A striking feature of EU banknotes is the almost imperceptible yet remarkable contradiction between the boundaries of the Europe they portray and those of

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the Europe suggested by the symbolism that adorns them. Their apparently objective representation of Europe is revealed apocryphal by realizing that the cultures and influences to which the territories, alphabets, architectural styles, em- blems and foundational myths make reference to, lie beyond the borders of the European space rendered on EU bills and coins.

Figure 2.1. Misleading objectivity: EU banknotes offer a geopolitically charged Europe presented as a dispassionate representation. Source: Wikimedia Commons: https://tinyurl.com/tpk7fd9

Figure 2.2. Unspoken Europe: The boundaries of the EU go far beyond what EU banknotes are willing to admit. Source: Wikimedia Commons: https://tinyurl.com/y6z8v7fj

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Cartographic artefacts such as these are core components of the political language underlying EUropeanization and perhaps its most revealing aspect because they are implacably frank. Maps’ blunt rhetoric speaks louder about the vision of Eu- rope guiding Brussels’ policy than any official speeches and statements or academic papers and surveys. In the Euro bills, the heritage of ancient Greece and Rome— evoked by the alternative spelling of the currency in Greek and Cyrillic letters as well as by the Roman aqueduct, respectively—is coupled with a cartographic suggestion of a Europe that vaguely ends somewhere near the Don River and which is purposefully cut off from Anatolia, North Africa, Russia and, strikingly, even half of the Mediterranean—despite this sea’s paramount significance throughout Euro- pean history.

Although one could be inclined to argue that this is merely the most obvious way to represent either Europe or the EU, one can begin to recognize the extent of its cartographic cleansing (Van Houtum 2012, 2013) by looking at the map of the EU featuring its Overseas Countries and Territories and Outermost Regions, some of which are integral part of the Union’s Member States (as French Guiana is of France). Even though EU territory extends beyond the European continent into the Americas (see Figure 2.2) through its Outermost Regions—all of which are constit- uent parts of the EU that must apply its laws and obligations—the EU’s geographical imagination relegates them to inconsequential contexts of ‘remoteness’ and ‘in- sularity’ (European Union 2007: 195). Yet, the importance of these regions for the EU’s larger geopolitical role in the Americas—or any other continent where the EU has territorial enclaves—remains as inconspicuous as these regions’ nearly invisible representation on European numismatics (Kramsch 2012: 128). Contrastingly, the conscious mistake of granting non-EU countries—e.g., Norway, Switzerland, Bela- rus and Serbia—a prominent and unquestioned belonging to Europe on the maps of EU banknotes reveals much about the idea of Europe held by Brussels. The maps on EU banknotes are not innocent images. Crucial EU-wide policies such as the Eu- ropean Neighbourhood Policy (ENP), the European Monetary Union and EU- wide territorial policymaking strategies rely on similarly misguided cartographic representations (e.g., ESPON 2014; European Commission 2014, 2015).

We refer to the cartographic strategies designed to assert control over a territory as cartopolitics—a term coined and elaborated upon in two earlier publications (Van Houtum 2012, 2013). This neologism aims at evoking the close historical alliance between politics and maps and thus makes plain the inescapable territoriality behind the search for power. Cartopolitics refers to the visual imposition of control and meaning over space as well as over its inhabitants, their behaviour and ideologies (see Figure 2.3). It is a political technology that consists in cartographically defining political territories and empowering them with meaning. Cartographic symbolism legitimizes territorial policy by surrounding it with an iconography that makes it look worthy of defence and hence of protection. It is through this logic that cartopolitics, geopolitics and biopolitics become intertwined, producing and

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validating policy that persuades populations to either suffer and die or tolerate, accept and even promote the pain and death of others.

Figure 2.3. The cartopolitical cleansing of Europe. Source: Authors.

European cartopolitics teaches emotions about Europe as a political body. The symbolism than accompanies EU maps instructs us about who the Europeans are, where they live and which places and peoples they should find either similar and compatible or different and threatening. This symbolic invocation is both based on crucial EU-wide policies—e.g., immigration, citizenship, legal residence, border management, the compatibility of legal codes, democratic decision-making, political constitutional principles, etc.—and of paramount mental importance for their reproduction. If monopolized and printed on monetary paper of daily exchange—as in the case of the maps on Euro currency—maps lay bare a fundamental discourse about inclusion and exclusion and hence nurture a division between insiders and outsiders hard to shake off. Cartopolitical discourse pervades our assumptions, expectations and prejudices about Europe and thus helps to constrain the range of what I consider historically, politically and morally acceptable to state about Europe, consequently erecting ideological boundaries around the EU’s political community.

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Europes That Were and Could Be

It is particularly enlightening to compare EU-made maps with historical maps of Europe because it makes one wonder whether Europe is truly where we have been taught it is and whether Europeans could not be where we haven’t thought they could. The comparison reveals geographies that used to lie indisputably outside Europe yet now would be unquestionably considered to be inside and vice versa. The dialogue between cartographies from different times unmasks the historical plasticity of Europe’s borders and reveals the mutability of the notion of Europe.

We contend that today’s dominant definition of Europe is framed by epistemological stands suggesting that Europe can be clearly located not only as a purely geographical space but also as a distinct civilization (e.g., Mackinder 1904; Hun- tington 1993, 1996; Mendras 1997). In this chapter, I react against such deterministic attempts to dissect the world into essential units and lay down geocultural categories that are later used to frame and justify crucial life-altering policies. I counter that historically, politically and culturally, Europe has never existed outside an invention largely—although not exclusively—promoted by geopolitical disfigure- ments that have butchered elemental features without which traits considered to be quintessentially European cannot be explained. I am of the conviction that, beyond the political endeavours to create it, an unobjectionable definition of Europe is altogether unattainable.

When conducting a cartographic genealogy of the idea of Europe—or of any other such broad geocultural label such as ‘Latin America’, ‘Asia’ or ‘Africa’—it is hard not to become progressively persuaded that, behind the motley collection of historical ‘Europes’ that have sculpted people’s geographical imaginations throughout the epochs up until our day, there is ‘not a timeless and essential secret, but the secret that they have no essence or that their essence was fabricated in a piecemeal fashion from alien forms’ (Foucault 1971:78). Europe has been persistently created and re-created on the canvas of each historical period’s power con- figurations (Wintle 2009; Bialasiewicz 2012a).

Where Is Europe?

In the following selection of maps of Europe I was guided by a simple criterion: their depictions of Europe ought to appear odd, misshaped, even misinformed when compared with today’s paradigmatic conception of “Europe” and “the West”; not only because of the rare places their versions of Europe embrace but also because the messages they convey about Europe contradict what we know or expect about Europe today. Through the interpretation of these maps I have tried to”‘seek in the most unpromising places, in what we tend to feel is without history— in sentiments, love, conscience, instincts” (Foucault 1971:76). These maps show

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bygone worlds inhabited by now extinct species of European civilizations. The cartographic selection shown in this chapter is far from comprehensive. But these maps are mere stepping stones in a cartographical genealogy of Europe and the EU.

Our cartopolitical excavation resorts to maps that dislocate the boundaries delimited by a manipulated geopolitical discourse on Europe to show that Euro- pean civilization and culture are highly malleable concepts. I take the cartographic evolution of Europe seriously because I want to raise more irreverence for the forged gravity of a European geography and history that inhibit the EU’s potential to imagine itself beyond what is commonly assumed to be plausible or desirable. Xenophobic political narratives across the EU as well the history promoted by EU symbolism recurrently parade ancient Greece, the Roman and Carolingian empires, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment as the periods during which Europe’s cultural essence fermented to acquire a unique flavour (Pieterse 1991). By “DRAWING INSPIRATION from the cultural, religious and humanist inheritance of Eu- rope’”(European Union 2007), the EU suggests a deceitfully embellished European history oblivious to the fanaticism of Charlemagne, the Crusades and the Inquisi- tion (Strmiska 2003:64); a Renaissance humanism edited out of its entanglement with the mass enslavement and murder brought by colonial oppression (Mignolo 2003); and a rule of law that forgets that the modern repressive state was invented in Europe (Zamoyski 2014). By asserting that from this European inheritance ‘have developed the universal values of the inviolable and inalienable rights of the human person, freedom, democracy, equality and the rule of law’ the EU varnishes the dark sides of a cherry- picked arrangement of historical periods and cultural productions which it turns into the zealously guarded heritage of its Member States.

By cutting off European civilization from any territories outside today’s physiographical convention of Europe, the EU grants itself the prerogative to decide on countries’ Europeanness to its advantage, subordinating Europeanness to the boundaries—current or expected—of the EU. This abduction of European culture is further promoted by cartographic designs that sever Europe—delimited by the external borders of the EU— from the rest of the world (Boedeltje and Van Hou- tum 2008): a practice that could be called a cartopolitical cleansing of Europe (Van Houtum 2012, 2013). Geography, like politics, is never dispassionate and it would be both naive and dangerous to believe it is. Although the cartopolitical cleansing might seem like a concept ailing from hysterical hyperbole, it is not. Cartopolitical cleansing is the visual expression of a much wider political discourse and thus may be the prelude of political cleansing. This is what we are seeing all across the EU with the rise of ever bolder xenophobic, racist and intransigent political movements.

Through the intricacies of these discursive cogwheels, the geographically complex influences of peoples and places outside today’s physiographical

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convention of Europe are excluded from a Europeanness that, ironically, cannot be explained without reference to them. Since the location of such connections is ir- reconcilably dislocated from both the territorial boundaries under EU jurisdiction and the borders to which the Union could be admissibly enlarged—which shift according to the Union’s changing interests—, their legacies are omitted from the EU’s narrative about Europe’s heritage.

Thus, Egypt’s massive influence on ancient Greek art and science is neglected as well as the fact that some of the most important coasts and cities for ancient Greece, the Roman Empire and Christianity lay in Anatolia, North Africa and the Middle East. The enormity of contributions from an Arab-Muslim world that en- compassed a good share of southern Europe for over a millennium—without which the Enlightenment and the Renaissance would be inexplicable (Haskins 1927; Said 1978; Brotton 2002; Bulliet 2004)—is completely absent from the EU’s symbolic discourse on European civilization. More worryingly still is the assumption, every time more politically profitable across EU Member States, that Arab- Muslim culture is incompatible with European values (e.g., Lewis 1990, 1993). Latin America, which for three centuries was considered Europe’s extreme and not its alterity (Dussel 1993; Mignolo 2000:53) and whose culture carries a bulk of undeni- ably European baggage seems to have been covered again with the veil of exoticism that it possessed when it was first detected by the caravels of Columbus. Former European colonies in Africa and Asia are the victims of the same arbitrary concealment from European history even though their cross-bred cultural heritage entitles them to claim tight bonds to Europeanness.

The cultural links woven by the interaction between Europe and trans-Med- iterranean and trans-Atlantic regions has been so intimate, pervasive and sustained that EU territories in both Asia, Africa and the American continent evoke a parallel history of Europe that remains largely untold. The transculturation that took place between Europe and these geographies remains hidden not only in cartographic representations of the EU—where the EU’s Outermost Regions in the Caribbean are assigned insignificant and geographically decontextualized places with respect to Europe and the world—but also in society and thus in policy.

Fortunately, history is not set in stone (Southgate 2006) and efforts to destabilize the misplaced geographic certainty of ontologically unstable categories such as ‘Europe’ and ‘the West’ have been undertaken (e.g., Said 1978). Disastrously, however, the EU seems to believe that its position towards the rest of the world as well as its relations with it can be conducted on the basis of civilizational taxonomies that take the convention of the European continent’s boundaries as a well- defined entity in historical, cultural and political terms (e.g., Huntington 1993, 1996; Mendras 1997).

The troublesome discourse on European common heritage is revealed by the bellicose drumbeat of 20th century’s cartographic caricatures, which make plain

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that, for all the weight of its ‘cultural, religious and humanist inheritance’, the ‘united-in-diversity’ Europe of today was, not long ago, a tense standoff of nations ready to tear each other apart (see Figure 2.4). Yet, the tensions in the definition of Europe’s boundaries can be traced much further back to the time when the idea of Europe as a significant identity delimited by certain boundaries started to emerge as a way to homogenize the subjugated territories ambitioned by the epoch’s hegemonic empire (Hale 1993, 1994; Wintle 1999). Such imperial blurring of differences not only affected colonies in the Americas, Asia and Africa but also within Europe itself, such as the Seventeen Provinces. Europeanization as an imperial geopolitical strategy has not only been suffered outside the European continent but also within.

Figure 2.4. Not long ago, European diversity was a source of violence rather than unity. Source: Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin–Preußischer Kulturbesitz 2015. Reproduced with permission.

Already in the maps from the 16th century, the tension between this idea of Europe and more local politico-territorial-identities is noticeable. The crafting of a common ground among the peoples inhabiting the European continent rendered not a smooth outfit but a patchwork of uneasily harmonious identities held together by the forceful stitches of Habsburg imperialism (Wintle 1999). The contrast between two 16th century maps evokes the strains along the troubled seam between

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European empires and their intra-European colonies. Europe as Queen (Europa Re- gina, see Figure 2.5), an anthropomorphic allegory glorifying the empire of Charles V in a composition extolling the harmony among all the Habsburgs domains (Meurer 2008), stands in overt antagonism with the Belgian Lion (Leo Belgicus), a visual metaphor of the Seventeen Provinces of the Low Countries roaring in confrontation against Habsburg dominance during the Eighty Years War (see Figures 2.5 and 2.6).

Figure 2.5. Europa Regina, published in Sebastian Mu¨nster’s Cosmographia (1570). The first anthropomorphic maps of ‘Europe as Queen’ were published in 1537 by Johannes Putsch. Source: Wikimedia Commons: https://tinyurl.com/y65yb6lm

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Figure 2.6. Leo Belgicus, Nicolo Iohannis Visscher (1648). The first depictions of the ‘Belgian Lion’ were made by Michael von Eitzinger in 1587. Source: Universiteits Bibliotheek van Amsterdam: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1648_Leo_Visscher.jpg

The Cleansing of the Mediterranean

The symbolic map depicting the ‘World as a clover leaf’ (see Figure 2.7), published by the Hanoverian theologian Heinrich Bu¨nting in his Itinerarium Sacrae Scriptura from 1581 is a fascinating relic showing the historical mutability of the idea of Eu- rope. Its clear continental division reveals its creator’s notion of where Europe’s boundaries lay, whereas the ‘geohierarchy’ of its architectural embellishment dis- closes where he thought the civilized world was located. In comparison with the other continents, here Europe is represented as an inconspicuous arrange of vaguely defined territories: France, Greece, Hungary, Poland, Germany and, in an interesting contrast to today’s conception of Europe, Turkey is also included— which should not be surprising since Turkey was one of the mightiest European

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states in the 16th century (Brotton 2002). Diverging from Europe, northern Africa and Asia display not empty broad land demarcations but richly built individual cities that make Europe a comparatively uninteresting place. With the exception of mighty Rome, Europe appears devoid of cities worth being drawn while North Africa and Asia feature several cities whose wealth is evoked by an urbanization that the cartographer suggested to be visually outstanding. I believe that the key to the interpretation of this map is the unequivocal superiority of Jerusalem as revealed not only by its central position on the map—the centre of the world in medieval cosmography—but also mainly by its unambiguously exceptional architecture. The cartographer’s association between splendour of architecture and a city’s grandeur is unequivocal. This map also stresses another important feature custom- ary in ancient and medieval cartographic thinking: the importance of the Mediter- ranean: ‘The largest sea of the world’ (das Gro¨ßte Meer der Welt) around which the most striking cities on the map flourished.

Figure 2.7. The world as a clover leaf. Published in Heinrich Bu¨nting’s Itinerarium Sacrae Scrip- tura (1581). Source: Wikimedia Commons: https://tinyurl.com/yx68jfw5

Medieval maps are tributes to the importance that the Mediterranean held since ancient times—which should not be surprising considering that Medieval

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cartography derives from antiquity’s Mediterranean-centred Greek and Roman traditions. The significance of this sea as a bridge of the cultures around its basin— which stands in sharp contrast to the EU’s representation of the Mediterranean as a void background, a sterile cut-off line, an external border—is revealed by the uniformity with which the cultures around its coasts are depicted as well as by the oversized islands crowding its waters. Two excellent displays of such features are the Ebstorf—destroyed in World War II (Woodward 1985: 516)—and Hereford maps, two 13th century mappaemundi whose emphasis on the civilization around the Mediterranean as well as on the islands in its centre strike the spectator not with the sensation of continents or cultures divided by a sea but of a deeply intercon- nected world brought together by a boisterously transited water mass (see Figures 2.8 and 2.9).

Peculiar aspects of these two maps are the detailed description, adornment and oversized dimensions they grant to the islands in the Mediterranean. I hazard to speculate that, given the emotional nature of these mappaemundi—based on tradition, allegory and spirituality—and their inclination to overstate places to which their makers conferred symbolic importance (Barber 2006), the hyperboli- cal depiction of Mediterranean islands hints at the ancient and medieval conception of the Mediterranean as an integrated borderland of relentless mobility. The exaggerated size of Sicily—drawn as the heart of the Mediterranean in the Ebstorf and Hereford maps—as well as the rich portrayal of its architecture seems to be an allusion to the meaningfulness of this island as a point from which the practical sciences developed by the Muslims—especially medicine—poured into the Italian mainland through the influence of merchants.

As a result of the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates’ efforts to amass, translate and improve as much of the Greco-Latin knowledge—especially of science, mathematics, logic and medicine—as they could acquire from the Byzantine Em- pire, the time many consider the Dark Ages for the people inhabiting the ruins of the Western Roman Empire was an Enlightenment for the Muslims, heirs to the Eastern Roman Empire. The philosophical texts of the Persian philosopher Ibn Sina (Avicenna) were studied all throughout the Muslim world, especially in Spain, which together with Sicily, were the main intellectual pitchers from which the most advanced medieval knowledge spilled into the northern Mediterranean, inebriat- ing with knowledge the European thinkers that would later spark the Renaissance (Runciman 1959: 3-22).

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Figure 2.8. Ebstorf map. Composed ca. 1239 and destroyed during the bombing of Hannover during World War II. Source: Wikimedia Commons: https://tinyurl.com/ry2qd5c

Besides these maps’ emphasis on Muslim Sicily, another noteworthy pattern reveals the importance of Muslim-Arabic influences on Europe at the time. On both the Ebstorf and Hereford maps, mythical and monstrous zoomorphic and anthropomorphic beings seem to appear and increase in number and exoticism as the view moves away from the Mediterranean basin. Although in Asia we find many fantastic beings, the degraded forms of life—as suggested by their nudity, de- formed appearance as well as rudimentary dresses and tools—are mostly found along the unknown north-eastern borderlands of feared Scandinavia—whose Vi- king geographies were not considered part of Europe or even represented on cartography until the 14th century (Winter 1955)—and sub-Saharan Africa (Crone 1965: 454). In bold contrast, the coasts around the Mediterranean—i.e., Mediterra- nean Afroeurasia—share a uniformity of architectural ornamentation only

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disrupted by the lavish wealth of prominent cities and by the usual medieval references to Jesus and Christianity in the eastern regions of the ‘Sea of the Philistines,’ Samaria and Galilee. This divergent composition between the regions surrounding the Mediterranean and the rest of the known world as well as the cartographical centrality of ‘The Great Sea’ gives away the predominantly Mediterranean identity that both Muslims and Christians shared during the Middle Ages—which stands in striking contrast to the unflattering prejudices against peoples from extreme weathers to the north and south they both espoused. The racial preconceptions about people living in faraway regions were rooted in Hellenistic antiquity as well as in Iranian and Semitic cultures according to which only Mediterranean lati- tudes provided the proper degree of heating needed by a woman’s womb to cook a person’s appearance and character in a harmonious way (Al-Azmeh 1992: 4-6).

Figure 2.9. Hereford map. Designed by Richard de Bello ca. 1290 and today located in the Her- eford Cathedral in Hereford, England. Source: https://tinyurl.com/uro2q63

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The Inexistent Objective Map

Today, these maps of the past are usually seen with intense scepticism, in any case seen as uncovered colonialist maps with evident unscientific imaginaries, inaccuracies and unabashed subjectivity. We see bestiaries of monsters and anthropomorphic paraphernalia inhabiting the remote climatic regions; dragons sticking out their heads as they plough through the seas; island-sized galleons and caravels crossing imperial trade routes between metropoles and their colonies; self-righteous as well as what today would be regarded as troublingly racist portrayals of cultures subjugated by violence; and the unapologetic exaltation of imperial supremacy (Wintle 1999, 2009; Garfield 2012).

Yet, I would argue that current maps of Europe should deserve a similar if not greater scepticism on my part. It is important to underline again that maps are models and as such they must leave out information in order to make sense of the world they are trying to explain. However, the scale of human complexity that maps cannot but fail to capture—how could they possibly engulf the deep intricacies of uninterruptedly moving, unceasingly changing, unavoidably multi-lay- ered human interactions that are relentlessly shaping and re-shaping all of the world’s societies?—make them thought-provoking suggestions at best and bigoted opinions at worst (Van Houtum 2012, 2013). Thus, maps tell us as much about a place as what they hide about it. This inescapable fallibility along with the more or less conscious decisions taken by their cartographers to label, classify and ossify peoples and places as well as histories and cultures make them inevitably political. When it comes to geopolitical manipulation, the only difference between past cartographies and modern ways of mapping the world is that, if anything, previous cartographies were more honest about their prejudices and assumptions while today’s are sneakier. EU maps take advantage of people’s loss of geographical scepticism. We are fooled into believing that the high mathematical complexity of current digital cartographies fed with images provided by sophisticated satellite lenses is as objective as it gets—even though it takes the imperial Mercator projection as its basis (Wintle 1999: 143). We are misled to believe that the geography, cartography and history of Europe EU maps tell and reproduce is not liable to interpretation anymore. Our geographical scepticism has been domesticated by the widely held misperception that there is nothing left to map, that there’s nothing left to explore or discover because everything has already been found, studied and classified. This is a pernicious error with the most serious political implications for the EU as I explain in what follows.

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The Emotions of Cartopolitical Exclusion

The cartopolitical cleansing I denounce refers to the civilizations that have been cleansed in spite of their contribution to the idea of Europe. This also refers to the migrants in the EU whose background—e.g., Muslim, Asian, African and Latin American—is not given credit for its contributions to the development of Europe. Incorporating this recognition to history and geography textbooks could give them a place in a society from which they might feel otherwise excluded. Politico-territorial identities are important because they provide people with a sense of belonging. I am not trying to say that the EU could defuse tensions between the glamorous city centres and the banlieues or see less ‘home-grown’ jihadists in Member States merely by drawing different maps. That would be a simplistic understanding of maps’ geopolitical importance.

Maps are significant not only because of the ideas they convey but also because they are the crystallization of a discourse. The study of EU maps often reveals naked prejudices that otherwise are hard to prove. The examination of the discourse that underlies the many subtle traces EU maps are littered with is relevant because, by finding the narrative elements that constitute it and that allow certain thoughts while repressing others (as any discourse does), we may find out that some among them deserve not ostracism but celebration while others that are glorified should be lambasted. Not recognizing the colossal contributions of Latin Americans, Mus- lims, Asians and Africans in the national discourses of each EU Member State as well as in the EU’s proto-nationalistic discourse makes it easier to perceive and treat certain immigrants as outsiders and make them behave as such. It makes more difficult to convince voters about the need for more decent ways to handle immigration and more open and circulatory ways to conceive borders.

If the EU market of identities does not offer anything to certain sectors of its population then they will find it somewhere else and this has a great bearing on both EU domestic and foreign policy. Of the roughly 30,000 troops of ISIS that are wreaking havoc in Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, around 3000 of them hold EU passports. Violent political Islam offers Muslim EU populations an identity to hold on to that is particularly threatening for an EU whose Member States—former colo- nizing powers—are easily related to the traditional enemies of political Islam. The grave voice of European colonialism can still be heard in our post-colonial times, especially in Africa, where France keeps being very active in its former colonies and where the EU has been and will find itself in the need to remain involved as consequence of the convulsions unleashed by a transforming Arab- Muslim periphery that surrounds and affects it.

Certainly, influences from the rest of the world that have influenced the development of European culture have shaped it for better and worse. It could be argued that the ecstatic architecture that took its inspiration from the enlightened

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Muslim-Arab world of the Middle Ages and is now preserved in the magnificent European cathedrals and Moorish buildings of Italy and Spain is being balanced out by the import of today’s violent political Islam. It could be said that the literary, philosophical and political influences from the Americas that allowed the development of the modern idea of universal and human rights were counterbalanced by the import of colonial and racial hierarchizations that justified the oppression of Europeans considered to be of a lesser breed. These critiques would miss the point. The recognition that Europe belongs to the world and that the world belongs to Europe is not the score that results from subtracting the bad from the good things that other geographies have contributed to the development of Europe. The point is that Europe possesses an inherent ontological instability: from the interpretation of its historical and cultural borders countless Europes could arise and thus the Europe that the EU decides to promote carries with it the intrinsic morality of de- ciding what to highlight and what to occlude. Another crucial insight deriving from Europe’s mongrel origins is the awareness that Europe is part of a world from which it cannot isolate itself. The EU has to deal with immigration and foreign influences and the changes they will produce knowing that good and bad things will result from it. The creation of an EU based on a reading of European history would suggest that the EU polity is a problem of conflict resolution that will have to be weathered at every turn rather than something that can ever be finished. The creation of an open Europe and an open EU is an everyday political problem that requires continuous political engagement.

To be sure, my intention is not to say that there is an ‘essential’ Europe and thus fall into the same trap as those who have tried to pin it down. I know neither what Europe is nor exactly where it lies because Europe—as any other such cartopolitical tag such as the ‘Middle East’ or the ‘Far East’—can be only an interpretation. The very nature of the disciplines required to give birth to abstract concepts of its kind—geography and history, particularly (Brauer 1995; Akerman 2009; Economist 2012)—is so inextricably political that Europe cannot avoid being a geopolitical discourse and thus depend on the power struggles that shape it (O´ Tu- athail and Agnew 1992; Wintle 1999, 2009). The problem with the particular discourses on Europe that I criticize is not their subjectivity, which is altogether inescapable. What I take issue with are both the foundations of the definitions of Europe such discourses provide as well as their pretension to make their subjectivity pass for impersonal and objective descriptions—mere dispassionate statements—of something that is there to be seen and therefore impervious to contestation. The problem with this pretence is its avoidance to take responsibility for the political and moral implications of the domestic and foreign policies it implicitly or explicitly promotes (O´ Tuathail and Agnew 1992:194).

Thus, what I disagree with are the moral and political assumptions inspiring such geopolitical taxonomies. Although what I offer cannot but be an alternative

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geopolitical account, I believe that the honesty about our assumptions and unavoidable bias confer it a higher epistemological quality to explore the potential boundaries of Europe. By assuming the anthropogenic inescapability of borders, I understand them in their most essential expression—and thus the foundation of any other borders—as people themselves (Paasi 2012:2303): a necessity and desire for self-recognition and esteem. I believe that confronting the discrimination borders cause cannot turn a blind eye to the luring desire for difference they also engen- derer. Approaching borders as expressions of a human tendency whose morality depends on the way we use them—i.e., borders are what we make of them (Wendt 1992; Van Houtum 2010b)—may be more theoretically sound. Such understanding would in turn allow us to propose politically feasible ways to imagine the emancipation of those today oppressed by the EU’s border regime without stoking the anxieties among EU citizens troubled about the loss of wealth, comfort or identity that would imply for them.

We are not oblivious to the possibility that an open interpretation of Europe that looks for itself in the rest of the world might be criticized for sharing the same ethos of expansionism resisted by anti-colonialists and nationalists of all stripes: from authoritarian to democratic regimes. Certainly, the EU is an empire whose policies may neither carry the authority of morality nor serve the best interests of the countries whose compliance it requests in exchange for the benefits it can provide. Crucially, however, the EU does not impose itself through coercion. This does not mean that the EU is the best empire it could be. Although the EU is more benevolent that previous imperial experiments, it could be argued that a colonial reminiscence of the mission civilisatrice still runs through its veins. The EU’s exaltation of human rights is however a critical safeguard. Although the EU’s border management has been known to contravene human rights (Van Houtum 2010a; Bi- alasiewicz 2012b) and the very egalitarian liberalism on which the Union prides itself (Kimlicka 2001:249), the moral grounds and legal means to resist human rights abuses and seek legislative change and legal redress for such violations are in place.

The persuasion inspiring this chapter is that what is dominantly seen as Eu- ropean culture does not fit within the cartographic production of the European continent. The peril that I want to denounce is that, in their ambition to create a Euro- pean identity—for purposes ranging from the laudable aspiration to create a political community to the despicable penchant to breed xenophobia and racism—political and intellectual figures within the EU are trying to hammer European identity to the borders of EU territory. As a consequence of these efforts, the emerging EU identity is at risk of losing the imprecision that has endowed it with a flexible attitude to accommodate ever more dissimilar borders—unlike national identities, whose tendency to ossification is a daunting obstacle when they are faced with the challenge to incorporate new complexities to the discourses that shape them. The EU’s constant incompleteness may constitute its most robust bulwark to keep at bay

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the worst expressions of nationalism. By coating its polity with an identity less bound to territory, the EU may be making it easier for its borders—both physical and mental—to deal with unavoidable difference—e.g., migrants and their cultures and the enduring change of society. This territorial uncertainty may be a source of less anxiety towards a change and foreign influences that are, in any case, unavoidable, and thus a more truthful recognition of the unavoidable human interaction and change that all borders must inexorably sustain (Van Houtum 2012).

Dislocating and destabilizing the EU’s imagined boundaries may allow us to re-imagine Europe and inspire refreshing ways of thinking about its borders. The financial crisis that started in 2008 has laid bare the urgent need for political reform in the EU and shown that beyond the spectrum spanning different forms of either federalism or break-up, EU reform is lacking imagination as well as understanding about how Europe could be made meaningful against a backdrop of rising re-na- tionalization, EUroscepticism and economic decline. There’s a pressing need for critical perspectives that may allow us to go beyond what has been imagined so far. I propose that a way of engaging this challenge is, first, by understanding the shortcomings of Europe from what its cartographic discourse reveals and, second, by exciting fruitful imaginations of the Europes that once were and now lay hidden under deceiving geopolitical categories.

In a world where political authority is drawn on maps before it is created on territory, liberating cartography might be the first step in a journey to change the bases upon which such authority relies. Cartography and history can never be used as criteria to define a civilization, nor provide just legitimation for immoral political action. I need to root out the essentialized conceptualization of Europe promoted by Brussels and use cartography as a democratic space to make proposals for Europes we would like to see. Although the EU takes the old Greek fable about the abduction of Europa as foundational myth—which unsuspecting EU citizens symbolically perform through everyday money exchanges—, it is the very EU who abducts Europe (see also Boedeltje and Van Houtum 2008). And so, we carry not only in our heads, but also quite literally in our pockets, a distorted idea of Europe that a geopolitical project promotes without perhaps even being aware of the relevance behind the discursive symbolism it evokes. The caging and closure of Europe in cartography is part of a self-fulfilling prophecy that might end up in the demise of the EU. I make a plea to unimagine the EU’s dominant cartopolitical community and emancipate our cartographic mind by drawing and proposing other imaginations of Eu- rope.

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CHAPTER 3

Puppeteering

The Glocal Green Line

The Imperial Cartopolitical Puppeteering of Cyprus

Cyprus exemplifies the colossal impact that the EU’s political myth exerts upon the demarcation of its external borders and thus on its wider political project. In 2004, the EU enlarged to the Greek south of Cyprus while excluding its Turkish north—, thus petrify- ing the partition and conflict that had divided the island since 1974. However, this chapter suggests that this hardened border should not be regarded as a mere geopolitical blun- der by the EU but rather as a distinct element of a bigger picture: a civilisational demarcation that coincides with the borders prescribed by the EU’s political myth. As one can see on 2 Euro coins, this EUropeanization went to the lengths of “kidnapping” the island by taking it away from its un-European geography and placing it safely within the proximity of EUrope. However, Cyprus’ imaginary and political location is the result of a ruthless puppeteering by different imperial powers that has consistently driven Turkish and Greek Cypriots apart.

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Bueno Lacy R and Van Houtum H (2019) The Glocal Green Line: The Imperial Cartopolitical Puppeteering of Cyprus. Geopolitics 24(3): 1–39. DOI: 10.1080/14650045.2018.1508014.

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CHAPTER 3

The Glocal Green Line: The Imperial Cartopolitical Puppeteering of Cyprus

ABSTRACT

Cyprus has been divided for more than four decades by a cease fire line known as ‘the Green Line’. This long-standing partition has made the island infamous for the seemingly unsolvable antagonism between its ‘Turkish’ and ‘Greek’ inhabitants. In this chapter I argue that, in order to better understand why this division has remained obstinately meaningful for Cypriots, we need to ‘delocalise’ the Green Line that separates them. I contend that the foundation upon which the conflict between Greek and Turkish Cypriots has been built—and consequently also the location of the Green Line keeping them apart—does not lie in an indigenous hostility between the Greek-speaking and Turkish-speaking communities of Cyprus. Instead, I argue that this is the result of imperial puppeteering: Cyprus’ Greco-Turkish enmity is largely based on perceptions of space, heritage and identification that were first introduced during the British colonisation and have been persistently—if not always deliber- ately—reinforced by chronic external intrusions and counter-productive conflict- resolution initiatives. I claim that a succession of British imperialism, Hellenic irredentism, Turkish nationalism, Cold-War geopolitics, UN conflict resolution and EU expansion have created, inculcated and reinforced cartographically organized perceptions of space, history and culture—a cartopolitics—that have invented the Turk- ish Cypriots and Greek Cypriots as identitary categories and perpetuated their antagonism. Thus, rather than an essentially local and binary play, the Cypriot conflict should be regarded as a glocal drama in which outside actors have been pulling the strings of the island’s politics. The readjustment of the historiographical and geographical limitations to which the Cypriot conflict has been confined so far has decisive implications for the island’s reunification: merely to zoom in on the hostile dichotomy at work is insufficient. Rather, to understand the persistence of the Green Line fracturing the island we need to zoom out from Cyprus.

A Glocal Genealogy of Cypriot Segregation

o walk alongside Nicosia’s Green Line today implies walking along a lin- gering past that uncannily refuses to fade away. A succession of sandbags, dilapidated façades pockmarked with bullet holes and a scatter of slouching soldiers cut through Cyprus’ capital as unassuming reminis- T cences of the murderous conflict that started to unfold between the island’s Turkish-speaking and Greek-speaking communities back in the 1950’s. The peak of their interethnic violence, in 1974, led to Cyprus’ partition

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along the ‘Green Line’: the UN-guarded buffer zone that has separated the island in two halves and largely severed the interaction between Greek and Turkish Cyp- riots ever since (see Figure 3.1).

Figure 3.1. Celle-ci n’est pas la Ligne Verte. Modified from: https://tinyurl.com/yxk667t4

This territorial partition has been replicated in many everyday borders that divide the lives of Cypriots—from political identity to collective memory—and, most recently, in the Turkish North’s exclusion from the Greek South’s membership to the EU. I claim that by conceptualizing the Green Line as part of the bigger picture of EU border making, we can better understand it: not as a stand-alone exception but as a fragment of a larger cartographical imagination with geopolitical implications for the wider European context. The Green line can be seen as a scale replica of the physiographical convention that invents discontinuity between ‘Europe’ and a vaguely defined ‘East’ along the Bosporus, the Ural Mountains or even, oddly, the Mediterranean (Dunn 2010: 15; Bueno Lacy 2011: 64). These borders are the expression of the widely held misconception of almost essential incompatibility between ‘East’ and ‘West’ and the long-standing and recurrent prejudice that it begets: the portrayal of Semitic people in general—and Muslims, Arabs and Turks in today’s political context—as Europeans’ most antagonistic others (Vaughan and Vaughan 1997; Khaf 1999; Al-Azmeh 2003; Allen 2004; Bulliet 2006; Born et al. 2015).

However, neither the Green Line nor Europe’s physiographical borders are self- evident testaments of spatial, ethnic and civilisational splits between Europe and

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the Orient but rather proof that power can rupture otherwise seamless communities, cultures and geographies (Said 1978). Cyprus offers an inestimable scale model to study how the borders of Europe have been made by concealing the sustained historical contact between East and West that has left profuse traces of cross- fertilization in what today is considered as quintessentially European heritage— from the gothic cathedrals and Renaissance art to cuisine, science and philosophy (Raquejo 1986; Brotton 2002; Goody 2004; Bulliet 2006; Al-Azmeh 2007). Thus, studying the Green Line might provide as many insights into the interethnic conflict between Greek and Turkish Cypriots as into the growing anxiety towards Muslims across the EU (Goodwin and Raines 2017).

The very Greekness or Turkishness that nationalists on both sides of the Cyp- riot Green Line persist to represent as a threat to one another, just like the very Europeanness that mushrooming demagogues purport to defend from Islam in the rest of the EU, betray a fundamental historical ignorance about the very identity that they are anxious to shield. The consanguinity between Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots as well as between Europeans on the one hand and Arabs/Mus- lims on the other runs much deeper than Cypriot ethno-nationalists and Eurocen- trists would like to admit. Therefore, in this paper I want to focus on the stubborn- ness of the Cypriot Green Line not only because its persistence is more counterintuitive than it has often been granted but because the imperial aloofness that has shaped the conflict that sustains it echoes a much larger dispute about European borders, history and future.

Even though Cypriots’ ethno-national identification might remain mostly Turkish or Greek, their three hundred years of convivencia under Ottoman rule offer hints of a long-lived shared heritage—however rebutted by the pervasive evocations of deep and ancient differences embedded in the inescapable Green Line (Cassia 1986: 3-28; Kitromilides 1977: 35-70; Brambilla 2009: 121-138).1 Thus, the specific question that drives this paper is: Why would people who have shared so much for so long keep eschewing reconciliation even though the violence that caused their separation has faded away? The inter-communitarian distress and geopolitical tension one would expect from a militarized buffer zone guarded by the longest-serving UN peacekeeping mission is simultaneously offset by an atmosphere of sheer uneventfulness. Today, a casual border-crosser can experience the Green Line as a superfluous inconvenience that seems more suited to enforce the inertia of tradition rather than as a border keeping at bay any impending security concerns. What then has kept the island’s communities apart and the approaches to the resolution of its conflict going amiss for over forty years now?

1 Convivencia (a word for ‘living together’ in Spanish) is a historiographical term used to refer to the peaceful coexistence among Jews, Muslims and Christians during the Moorish rule of the Iberian peninsula (Al-Andalus), from its conquest by the Umayyad caliphate in 711 to the Reconquista by the Castillian Catholic kings in 1492.

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By way of an answer to this question, a great deal of the literature on the Cypriot conflict has conceptualized it as a ‘protracted conflict’ stemming from longue durée incompatibilities between Cyprus’ culturally discordant Greek and Turkish communities—an animosity often postulated to be rooted in a mutual ethnic animosity dating back hundreds or even thousands of years (e.g., Azar 1985, 68; Fisher 2001; Coleman 2003, 4; for a notable exception see: Kontos et al. 2014).2 Although I do not dispute that Cypriots’ own agency has played a role in stoking and perpetuating their conflict, I am wary to assume that ethnic bad blood between Turkish-speaking and Greek-speaking Cypriots has caused a spatial, social and political fracture for as long as Turks and Greeks have inhabited the island.

Moreover, the very assumption that Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots have always thought of themselves as such is anachronistic. For most of Cypriot history, Greek and Turk have been inexistent or unstable categories of either ethnic self-identification or division (on the historical instability of words see: Foucault 1971: 152). Accordingly, I explore how these very categories of ethnic identification have acquired their meaning and how they have persistently precluded the formation of a Cypriot nation state with its own identitary mythology (Foucault 1982; Hobsbawm 1990: 20-22).3

In what follows I contend that imperial intrusions have largely determined Cypriots’ inimical politics through either strategic or cavalier impositions that have been persistently puppeteering their identities and digging an entrenched cartopolitical fracture across the island. As I will make clear, the very meaning of ‘Turkish Cypriot’ or ‘Greek Cypriot’, by association to the nation states that they refer to, evoke a cartography of antagonistic Greek and Turkish political myths. This geopolitical cartography, in turn, is associated to an entire system of thought that has constructed the history, culture, space, politics and even people from East and West, Europe and Turkey, Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots as inherently different. However, the Bosporus is as questionable a civilisational split between Europe and the Orient as the Green Line is between Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots (Said 1978).

2 European anti-Semitism has been characterized by an aversion to Jews as well as to a loose group of people who have been (derogatorily, more often than not) lumped together as Muhammadans’, ‘Turks’, ‘Ottomans’ or ‘Moors’ without much regard for the ethnic accuracy of these misnomers. 3 According to Hobsbawm, nationalism is the principle that holds that the political and national unit should be congruent. This principle implies a duty that individuals of the same nation owe to one another. In turn, this duty overrides all other public obligations and, in case of war, all public obligations of whatever kind. On the basis of this definition, Cyprus cannot be a congruent political unit because it is not a congruent national unit. Although nationalism has earned a deserved disre- pute on the pages of 20th century history, in the 19th century it was considered a revolutionary idea capable of bringing people together by smoothening out their differences.

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Imperial cartopolitics

The imperial impositions in Cyprus that I aim at identifying in this chapter follows a broad understanding of empire derived from its classical etymological root in the Latin imperare: to command. In this chapter, I understand this imperial command as a centre’s pre-eminence to rule over a subordinated periphery (Hobsbawm 1987; Hardt and Negri 2000; Münkler 2005; Kumar 2017). Thus, the empires and imperial attitudes whose influence on Cyprus I discuss belong to an imperial political technology that, historically, has been characterized by the hierarchical duality between a metropole that rules and colonies that obey.4 I pay attention to the political organizations (i.e., states as well as international and supranational organizations) whose relations with Cyprus can be captured by what Edward Said described as the “high-handed executive attitude of nineteenth-century and early twentieth- century European colonialism” (Said 1978: 2).

Our angle to study the imperial imprints on the island is what I have called cartopolitics (Van Houtum 2012: 412).5 With cartopolitics I mean “the visual imposition of control and meaning over space as well as over its inhabitants, their behaviour and ideologies […] It is a political technology that consists in cartographically defining political territories and empowering them with meaning” (Bueno Lacy and Van Houtum 2015: 485; Strandsbjerg 2012: 827). Although cartopolitics are often related to maps and visualized by them, they are by no means limited to them: they are geopolitical imaginations that evoke a map, like ‘the Orient’, ‘The Mus- lim World’, ‘the West’, ‘the Global South’, etc. I am interested in how Cyprus has been bordered and ordered within a structure of geopolitically meaningful hierarchies. Geopolitical metaphors that e.g., as ancient Greece and thus a gateway to the cradle of European civilisation for British imperialists in the 19th century or a threatening Mediterranean Cuba for the US during the Cold War. Contrary to their ambition to provide an objective representation of the world, cartopolitical notions predominantly derive from neither dispassionate history nor first-hand experience (Gregory 1994: 70; Derrida 1982: 307-330; Critchley 1999: 31–44; Ó Tuathail 1996: 58-86) but rather from a piecemeal of geographical signs edited and promoted by power and reproduced by the inertia of ‘common sense’ (Eco 1976). These manipulated signs create a ‘cartography of identities’ (Gregory 1995: 447). an imagined geographical distribution and historical belonging that tell us where we are, who we are and, in consequence, who are like us and who are different from us. These

4 Empires and nation states operate according to completely different operatives and follow entirely different action logics. Although imperialism is hard to define, expansionism as well as the establishment and ruling of colonies seem to be their defining characteristics—especially in comparison to nation states. 5 Cartopolitics is a term that has been coined recently in the fields of critical geopolitics and critical border studies. I use this concept’s definition as a sort of ‘drawing-table politics’.

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notions of space and history and the borders they engender form the basis of grand geopolitical strategies and imperialist interventions.

The cartopolitical b/ordering of spaces as well as the coinciding process of othering is often done via heterotopias and chronotopes (Foucault, 1986; Bakhtin, 2004.). Heterotopias are ‘places within places’: notions of spatial connection or transmission between a here and an elsewhere, such as ideas of cultural connection between a colony and a motherland.6 Chronotopes—which literally mean ‘temporal locations’—are time-space distortions which national identities typically configure to celebrate, ritualize and invent the spurious longevity of a political myth (Renan, 1882). Through both these spatio-temporal imaginary mechanisms, members of a political community mutually construct notions of themselves as part of anachronic and thus fictitious groups bound by a common geography and a shared history (Basso 1984: 44-45). Nation states have traditionally tapped into these representational techniques to craft a mythology of their polity as pre-existent and even essential (Anderson 1983; Bottici 2007).

In what follows, I will analyse the imperial cartopolitics—or what could be termed cartocolonialism—that various imperial meddlers have shipped into Cy- prus. I will pay particular attention to the heterotopias and chronotopes that have configured Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot identities. My aim is to explore how politically meaningful and cartographically organized imaginations of Cy- prus, both within the island and beyond, have woven a dense web of local and worldwide interests which, I argue, have constructed and protracted the divide among Cypriots. Chronologically, I focus on the British Empire’s pursue of its colonial interests in the Middle East; the post-colonial antagonism between Greek and Turkish national myths; the US concerns about a latent strife between crucial NATO allies in the Cold War context; the Greek-supported coup followed by the Turkish invasion; and lastly the failed reunification plans brokered by the EU and the UN.

Brutish British Sophistication

As the sluggish collapse of the Ottoman Empire threatened to splinter the Balkans into many nationalisms and endanger the delicate balance of power in the region, the British Empire occupied Cyprus in 1878 to safeguard its endangered commercial and military interests in the Near East (Hopkirk 1990: 328-329). Cyprus came into the British radar as a convenient location from which their empire could ward off the expansionist ambitions of the Russian Empire in the eastern Mediterranean,

6 Such as La Hispanidad or La Francophonie, which, respectively, join Spain and France with their former colonies.

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watch over Egypt and protect the Suez Canal as well as the passage to India—the ‘pearl’ of the empire’s colonies (Varnava 2005).

Although a mix of imperial wantonness and strategic geopolitical interests drove the British to colonize Cyprus, the fortuitousness of their colonisation eventually acquired the more calculated character of a civilising mission (a mission civilisatrice). The British government’s ignorance about Cyprus together with its dis- tinctively Anglocentric understanding of history and civilisation heavily influenced the colonial policies with which they transformed the island (Pollis 1973; Varnava 2005: 175).

As the British settled in Cyprus, they found in their new and exotic Medi- terranean colony two heterotopias that would guide their colonial administration and lay the grounds of today’s Cypriot conflict. The first was the glory of ancient Greece that their philhellenic imperial upbringing had taught them to idealize. The second was an orientalist vision of Ottoman Turks that had been taking shape in Britain since the times of Shakespeare (Vitkus 1999: 224; Ross 2012: 7). It is worth emphasizing that, although the British set foot in Cyprus at a time when every corner of Europe seemed to belong—and was certainly being reclaimed—by a Ro- mantic project of nation-building, Cyprus was isolated from this nationalist trend sweeping the European continent. In the absence of a Cypriot national project that no one had yet cared to invent, the British cavalier identification of Cyprus’ inhabitants as an extension of already existing nationalities flourished unimpeded: they saw Greeks and Turks instead of Cypriots and their misperception went unchallenged (Pollis 1973; Varnava 2005: 175).

The British philhellenic imagination imprinted an ironic duality on Cypri- ots: it invested them with the grandeur of yore yet simultaneously justified their colonisation. The first impressions of Robert Hamilton Lang—a leading British diplomat at the time—articulated the ambiguity of this colonial gaze: “There are no modern wonders in the Cyprus Court [...] but things of which you read in ancient Greek literature [...] which seems to tell us how little has been the progress in such arts in Cyprus during the past two thousand years [...] But the clouds are breaking, and British rule will soon dispel them altogether” (Lang 1887). As these lines reveal, as far as the Victorian colonial elite was concerned, nothing had changed in Cyprus since the times of Aristotle. Paradoxically, the very patina of ancient venerability that made Cypriots part of Antiquity’s unsurpassed pinnacle of intellectual sophistication also made them primitive people in need of enlightenment. The British felt uniquely qualified to civilise Cyprus and by extension ancient Greece—of which they thought it was a relic—, the cradle of the European civilisation which they fancied themselves leading in the 19th century (Byron 1823; Mikhail 1979: 107-108; Ross 2012).

The ambiguous philhellenic yet orientalist overtones of this British imperial gaze were also captured by an old image published in the Illustrated London News of

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1895 (see Figure 3.2). The British are depicted as sophisticated surveyors and aloof guards who scrutinize their Cypriot subjects from positions of authority. In contrast, Cypriots are portrayed as an arrange of stereotypical mannequins inhabiting a museum's showcase. Their dress, actions and artefacts suggest some sort of primitive rural eccentricity set against a background strewn with exotic minarets and oriental decorative elements. Cypriots are exposed to the dissecting stare of British colonial officers—and, by extrapolation, to the eyes of the British public to which this publication was addressed. Overall, this representation makes Cypriots seem ‘quaint’ and less modern, perhaps even less refined than their British masters: they are rendered as colourful but simple people from a remote island’s countryside.

This picture’s composition condenses the main interpretation that the Brit- ish made of Cypriots at the time: rural, corporate people with an uncivilized loy- alty for their kind—a character that the British assumed was a hindrance to their development (Bryant 2003: 247). Stemming from their “popular anthropology of Cypriots’ nature”, the British enshrined in law what they saw as Cypriots’ tribal barbarism by introducing a legal system that made the Turkish and Greek ethnic groups the basis of public administration and legal redress. They ‘civilized’ Cyp- riots by replacing what they dismissed as a cumbersome system of Ottoman village authorities with a clear-cut system of island-wide ethnic leaders (Bryant 2003: 261). This modernization ripped apart multi-ethnic and multi-confessional village politics, thus provoking an island-wide political reconfiguration that is still felt today: in their ambition to simplify Ottoman complexity, the British bordered and ordered Cypriots according to the mainly Turkish and mainly Greek populations that they thought to ‘recognize’ in the island (Van Houtum and Van Naerssen 2002). The British colonial administration broke down a Cypriot society that had been slowly brewing over centuries of intermingling and replaced it with a new mana- gerial reality of spatial, political and legal order (Scott 1998).

Before the British reorganized Cypriots along Greek and Turkish ethnic lines, Christian Orthodox and Muslim Cypriots inhabited the same neighbourhoods and homes without the intercommunal hatred later found during the 20th century (Brambilla 2009: 123; Pollis 1979: 49-50; Nevzat 2005: 69-72). However, the British re-oriented Cypriots’ local allegiances and placed them in the hands of their ethnic representatives (the ‘ethnarcs’). Everyday problems that in Ottoman Cyprus had been solved by non-ethnic village politics became matters to be treated by mono-ethnic, island-wide representatives. Muslim-Christian syncretism gradually unstitched as the administrative—and later territorial—border imposed by the British started to pull apart newly invented groups of ‘Turkish Cypriots’ and ‘Greek Cypriots’. Ironically, rather than breaking down corporatism, the British manufactured it (Bryant 2003: 263).

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Figure 3.2. Cypriots through imperial eyes: ‘Native Types of Cyprus’, image of Cyprus from the Illustrated London News of 1895. Source: Illustrated London News Historical Archive: https://tinyurl.com/t82734y

Language was another crucially divisive border carved by British imposition. A common set of languages was already spoken by both Muslim and Christian Or- thodox Cypriots when the British arrived (Pollis 1973: 586-587; Hobsbawm 1990:

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110-111). However, the rapid proliferation of newspapers and schools that followed the British occupation dealt a fatal blow not only to the common Cypriot languages—for multilingualism was a common feature of Cypriot life for most of its history (Hadjioannou, Tsiplakou and Kappler 2011)— but also to other symbolic commonalities that could have served as the foundation of a proto-national and unhyphenated Cypriot identity (Pollis 1973: 586-587).

The national identities of Greece and Turkey were inculcated into Cypriots’ minds through an educational system set up by the British who “began to encourage the importation of teaching personnel from Greece and Turkey” (Pollis 1973: 589). As consequence of these policies, the print cultures of mainland Greece and Turkey became the print cultures of Cypriots, who began to acquire a collective consciousness of themselves as either Orthodox Christian, Greek-speaking Greeks or Muslim, Turkish-speaking Turks. By extension, they learned to see Cyprus not as the land of Cypriots but as the incomplete, adulterated, even contaminated version of an unfulfilled M/Otherland corrupted by the presence of either Greek or Turkish neighbours, who they learned to regard not as compatriots but as a misplaced national community.

These caveats about the emergence of modern Cypriot consciousness are critical for the analysis and resolution of the Cypriot conflict. Contrary to what often has been claimed, the Cypriot conflict did not acquire “significant international dimensions” after the Turkish invasion of 1974 (Nugent 1997). Although Cy- prus was an isolated province of the Ottoman Empire, international politics has shaped today’s Cypriot conflict ever since the British occupied it in 1878. Their colonial policies dug a trench between Christian Orthodox and Muslim Cypriots with the import of foreign sensibilities. A telling imperial cartopolitical artefact evoking the ideology that percolated all spheres of life in the island as a result is the British colonial map of Cyprus (see Figure 3.3).

This was the first detailed modern map of the island—made by Herbert Kitchener, a senior British army officer. The scrupulous mapping of a new colony belonged to the standard procedure that the British colonial administration used to turn the unknown complexity of faraway colonies into manageable subjects (Given 2002). The British imperial obsession with the demarcation of space (maps, surveys and censuses) created a colonial knowledge that not only cast light on topographical details but which also invented socio-political realities that were later taken as incontrovertible facts by the bureaucracies who relied on them to govern the island. British governmentality surveyed, drew, codified and ultimately invented a Cyprus where ethnicity and religion were the main politico-territorial divisions (Constantinou 2007). Maps and their borders took power away from communities and deposited it in a state that had little knowledge of the population it set itself to manage (Bryant 2003).

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Figure 3.3. Herbert Kitchener’s map of Cyprus, 1885. Source: Bank of Cyprus Cultural Foundation: https://tinyurl.com/v44sud8

This cartocolonialism laid the basis for the future understanding of Cyprus’ internal borders, which were replicated until they found their most dramatic expression in the establishment of the Green Line—the product of crude British military conflict resolution after Cyprus became an ‘independent’ country. The process that led to the conflict that remains unsolvable today has recurrently relied on the British colonial presupposition that the island is naturally divided in two ethnic groups. This simplistic assumption—whose continuity can be traced from the British colonisation of Cyprus in the 19th century to today—persuaded Major General Peter Young, a British military officer leading the peace forces deployed to appease the inter-communal clashes of 1963, to draw a line with a green chinagraph pencil on a map as a sensible measure to quench the interethnic strife between Greek and Turkish Cypriots. Although intended as a temporary cordon sanitaire, this cartographic sketch would prosaically become known as ‘the Green Line’, the border that still separates Turkish and Greek Cypriots today (Harbottle 1970: 67; Grundy- Warr 1994: 74-75). The imperial intrusions that have followed the British colonisation of Cyprus, from the end of the 19th to well into the 21st century, have relied on the invented ethnic infrastructure that the British laid down. To this I turn now.

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Imperial Clash: Hellenic and Ottoman Antagonism

Encouraged by the British Hellenization of Cyprus—which squarely fit within their increasingly ambitious nationalism—Greek political leaders seized the opportunity to culturally dominate the island. Through the British unedited import of Greece’s educational system, the idea of ‘the Ottoman’—and by extension of ‘the Turk’—as an intruder found a firm anchorage in Cyprus. Greek Cypriots learned to find their place within a national narrative that extolled the liberation from Ot- toman-Turk domination as the Greek nation’s date of emancipation (today, Greek Independence Day is still celebrated as a national holiday in Greek Cyprus too). Orthodox Cypriots began to be pulled towards a national community beyond their borders (Bryan 2003: 263). the distant dream of 19th-century Greek irredentism.

Greek irredentism was a rare symbiosis of territorial expansionism inspired by a Romantic historiography, a sort of ‘imperial nationalism’ (Kumar 2017: 15- 24).7 it ambitioned to restore the territorial glories of classical Greece and Byzan- tium by encompassing within Greece’s national borders all the Greek-speaking populations along the eastern Mediterranean (Kitromilides 1990: 6; Peckham 2000: 77). Such yearning to create a ‘Greater Greece’—i.e., “a new Hellenic Empire that would encircle the Aegean Sea”—came to be known as ‘the Megali Idea’ (or ‘the Great Idea’) (see Figure 3.4) (Finefrock 1980; Walker 1984: 477-478; Kitromilides 1990: 3-17; Stouraiti and Kazamias 2010: 11-34).

This grand geopolitical ambition found a favourable breeding ecosystem in the prevalent imperial ideology of late 19th and early 20th century geopolitics. Shaped by the lens of evolutionary racism (Hobsbawm 1990: 2). the eye driven by such imperial mindset perceived a landscape fractured by frontiers, which in the parlance of the time referred to places of natural confrontation between savagery and civilisation that justified the imposition of a colonising enterprise (Kristof 1959; Van Houtum and Bueno Lacy 2016). These were times when imperialists mixed the “political principle, which holds that that the political and the national unit should be congruent” (Gellner 1983: 1)—i.e., nationalism—, with an idea of the state that, drawing on evolutionary metaphors taken from biogeography (Bassin 1987: 474; Craw 1992). justified the violent expansion of the nation state as the natural necessity of a “geographical-biological organism” (Kristof 1960: 21-22). When- ever such organic notion of the state met the self-righteousness of the civilising mission, violent imperial expansionism and colonisation were justified as the inexorable fate of ‘better and lesser races’ (Turner 1920: 85). In a similar vein, Greek

7 Although ‘imperial nationalism’ might sound as a contradictio in terminis, it “is not as contradictory as it sounds”, for not only “many early modern states—those which later evolved into nation states—saw themselves as empires” but “most nation-states, or what became nation-states, are, like most empires, the result of conquest and colonization”.

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irredentism created a powerful narrative of ultimately tragic consequences. Through a series of powerful geopolitical and historical metaphors carried by cartopolitical heterotopias and chronotopes—i.e., politically and territorially meaningful distortions of time and space—, the independent Greek nation state came to combine “the appetite of Russia with the dimensions of Switzerland” (Peckham 2000: 85).

Figure 3.4. Map of Greater Greece, circa 1919. Source: National Historical Museum of Athens.

Greece’s political elites found in the Romantic Hellenic nostalgia the geopolitical force to turn scattered Greek-speaking populations throughout the eastern Medi- terranean into the possible borders of their grandiose imperialism (Kitromilides 1977: 3-17). As for Greek Cypriots, this Hellenist utopia—a cartopolitical imagination that placed them within the Greek state and its Hellenic and ‘turkophobic’ historiography—exerted a seductive appeal. It created a path for a self-righteous identity-politics. As far as 19th century Greek Cypriots were concerned, the Megali Idea turned the characteristics that for centuries had made the Christian Orthodox majority of Cyprus subservient to the Ottomans into a legitimization to exercise their dominance over Turkish Cypriots—i.e., the Ottomans’ successors.

Through chronotopes that anchored them to classical Greece and Byzan- tium, Greek Cypriots nurtured geographical imaginations of a greatness injured

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by Turkish affronts. They learned to recognize themselves as a group different from Turkish-speaking Muslims in comparison to which they made up a sizeable majority. It was thus, at the end of the 19th century, that Greek Cypriots acquired not only a sense of self-identification as an ethno-political collective but also the hazardous moral superiority that chauvinism draws between friends and foes and right and wrong (on the friend/foe dichotomy see: Schmitt, 1932). In congruence with the imperial nationalism of their contemporary irredentist Hellenic discourse (Kumar 2017: 23-36; 2000; 2003: 30-35). Greek Cypriots learned to feel that their Ottoman and British rulers owed them a redress that should be delivered in the shape of political union with Greece (aka enosis), the ‘fatherland’ that the Greek Orthodox church and Cypriot schools modelled on Greece’s had taught Greek Cypriots to ‘remember’ and ‘long for’ (Walker 1984).

Greek Cypriots’ yearning for a ‘return’ to the Hellenic world intensified as consequence of the war that broke out between Greece and the Ottoman Empire in 1897. In its aftermath Crete gained its independence and in 1913 succeeded in annexing to the Greek nation state. The Cretan experience gave Greek Cypriots a cartopolitical blueprint for enosis: a Mediterranean island with a Greek-identifying majority showed them that it was possible to vanquish the Ottomans, expel the entire Turkish minority and join Greece. Crete’s enosis turned the Greek Cypriot dream—and Turkish Cypriots’ anxiety—into a very real possibility (Dimitrakis 2008: 377).

Textbook nationalism

One could say that when Greek Cypriots first approached the national myth of Greece through its schoolbooks and publications, they read in Greek nationalism and prints an archaeology into their own selves where they found ancient sensibilities that previously had been largely unimportant to them. Since then, the textbooks used by Greek Cypriots have followed what in Cypriot historiography is known as the ‘Hellenization thesis’. This posits that, in spite of the many conquests that the island has experienced over the centuries, its inhabitants have recurrently managed to preserve its ‘original’ Hellenic character until today—ever since the Mycenaean culture settled Cyprus in the 12 century BC. It is a discursive strategy that turns Turkish Cypriots into an artificial ethnic group while simultaneously denying them whatever belonging they might claim to the Turkish national history and state (Papadakis 2008).

Before their reform in 2004, the textbooks used by Turkish Cypriots used to be no better. According to them, the history of Cyprus began with the Ottoman conquest in 1571, which ushered a period of progress only interrupted by ungrateful revolts against Ottoman tolerance. These textbooks used in Turkish Cyprus made reference to ‘Our Motherland Turkey’ and Turkish Cypriots were referred to as ‘Turks

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of Cyprus’, thus making them a mere extension of the larger Turkish nation. At the same time, Greek Cypriots were belittled as rum, a nomenclature used during Ot- toman times to refer to the Greek Orthodox subjects within the empire, different from Greeks, and thus a term intended to deny Greek Cypriots the connection to continental Greeks that inspired their push for enosis (Papadakis 2008: 134-137).

Until 2004, when Northern Cyprus reformed its textbooks to tell a more rec- onciliatory history of Cyprus, Cypriots to both sides of the Green Line grew up reading textbooks that promoted some of the most powerful heterotopias and chronotopes through which the antagonism between Greek and Turkish Cypriots infiltrated entire generations (Vural and Özuyanık 2008). The textbooks worked as cartopolitical artefacts that taught Cypriots to find their geo-historical location not in the common past and fate of a Cypriot political community but rather in the histories and fates of either Greece or Turkey while portraying ‘the other’ as a cruel adversary (Christou 2006).

Religious antagonism

The Hellenization of Cyprus also brought about religious tensions. The religious freedom allowed by the British Empire after 1878—which overlapped an older Ot- toman tradition of religious tolerance (Dietzel and Makrides 2009)— gave way to a multiplication of voluntary associations dedicated to the ‘Hellenization’ of Cy- prus. This development would later promote intolerance towards Turkish Cypri- ots as the Orthodox Church—a pillar of modern Hellenism—politicized throughout the 20th century (Dietzel and Makrides 2009: 80-81). The relatively easy religious coexistence that had prevailed since 1606—when the Ottoman Empire forcibly settled a small Turkish minority in Cyprus—up to the end of Ottoman rule in 1878 (Brambilla 2009: 121)—collapsed when the multi-confessional Ottoman empire was replaced with the bi-nationalist colony manufactured by a British imperialism that, unsuspectingly, became a vessel for Greek ethno-religious irredentism.

Competing imperial cartopolitics

A powerful testimony to the growing Hellenic and Ottoman antagonism amidst which Cyprus got entangled at the beginning of the 20th century can be found in the iconological comparison of competing Greek and Turkish cartopolitical discourses from the time (see figures 3.4 and 3.6). These maps can be seen as illustrations of the larger cartopolitical discourses that shaped the ethnic antagonism of the island in the early 20th century. Their cartopolitical significance lies in the extent to which they splice into the political, cultural, social, historical context in which they were made. Their visual composition condenses geopolitical

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imaginations of Cyprus that organize it as an extension of either the Greek or the Turkish national myth (Van Straten 1991: 11; Collini 1992).8

Let’s first focus on the Greek poster (see Figure 3.4). This is an illustration of the dominant geopolitical discourse that circulated in Greece after the signing of the Treaty of Sèvres in 1919. It is perhaps the most popular version of the Megali Idea ever to have circulated. The borders of Greater Greece depicted on this cartopolitical artefact represent neither the only nor even the main vision of Greater Greece—a flexible notion of which different versions existed at the time—but merely the borders that Greece was able to agree upon by diplomatic compromise after World War I (Stouraiti and Kazamias 2010: 30). On the upper left corner appears Elefterios Venizelos, the respected Greek statesman who took the Megali Idea as close as it would ever get to its consummation. His dignified expression looks over the territorial ambitions that he held to ‘restore’ the Greek nation’s greatness. His face is surrounded by the laurel wreath that ancient Greeks awarded their victors. On the right flank of the map stands a black-maned Athena reminiscent of the one imagined by Eugène Delacroix in his Greece on the Ruins of Misso- longhi (1826) (see Figure 3.5): the personification of the Greek nation. She is defi- antly coming to the fore brandishing a Greek banner crowned with the cross of Christian Orthodox faith. On her other hand she holds a parchment with the legend “Greece is destined to live and shall live”. Although Cyprus is not coloured as part of the territories ambitioned by Greece, it is alienated from its proximity to Anatolia and displaced to a location closer to the core of the Greek state. There is a reason for this. Although Greeks considered Cyprus to be indisputably theirs, they were also aware that they could not realistically claim it yet as part of their expansionist ambitions, for the British were unwilling to give it away during the Paris negotiations of 1919 (Helmreich 1974: 40). Perhaps as a recognition of this international reticence, this map is careful about appropriating Cyprus by blatantly colouring it as part of Greater Greece. Instead, the territorial claim is surreptitiously made by detaching Cyprus from its Anatolian context and placing it to the left of the Balkan peninsula: safely within the space of the Greek state.

8 To be sure, I do not intend to argue claim that the following maps I present influenced the whole colonisation and resulting ethnic antagonism between Greek and Turkish Cypriots. Instead, I argue that these maps are the crystallization of the larger cartopolitical discourses that have shaped the ethnic politics of the island in the early 20th century and still exert an impact. Although there is always the possibility of reading too much into iconography—its eternal pitfall as an essentially interpretive endeavour—our iconological analysis can be evaluated by the extent to which it splices into the political, cultural, social, historical context in which it was made.

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Figure 3.5. The Romantic embodiment of the Greek nation. Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi, by Eugène Delacroix (1826). Musée des Beaux Arts de Bordeaux

The counterpart to the previous map is a Turkish map by Kitaphane-yi Sûdî dating from 1927 (see Figure 3.6). A fascinating aspect of this map is that it shows both how closely Turkish nationalism came to mirror Greek nationalism and in which important aspects it differed. Its center top depicts Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, whose military and political leadership to defend and found the modern Turkish state is lauded by a wreath of laurels surrounding him. This emblem is granted to him by the Turkish nation which, mirroring the Greek map, is embodied by a woman. She is crowned with the golden crescent of Islam and stands on a pedestal; her body draped in an Ottoman/Turkish flag stamped with the star and crescent, symbols reminiscent of the Ottomans’ Byzantine heritage—curiously, the same heritage claimed by Hellenic irredentists (Ridgeway 1908). This Turkish map prominently portrays an explicit military component which the Greek map only indirectly suggests through the colouring of the lands Greece ambitioned to conquer. The Turk- ish territory is chaperoned by a soldier holding his rifle ready across his chest

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(perhaps a nod to the central role played by the army in fending off the Greek invaders that allowed Atatürk to rally the Turkish nation around his leadership). The cartopolitical claim upon Cyprus is unambiguous: the island is represented as an integral part of the Turkish territory even though the Ottomans had definitely relinquished Cyprus over to the British in 1922, five years before this map was drawn.

Figure 3.6. The other side of the Megali Idea. Map of the Turkish Republic (1927), by Ki- taphane-yi Sûdî. Source: Library of Congress: https://tinyurl.com/wuunnok

A significant aspect shared by the Greek and Turkish maps alike is that they reproduce the mutually constitutive struggle between the Greek and Turkish nation states at the beginning of the 20th century (Özkırımlı and Sofos 2008). The year of the Greek map’s production, 1919, represents the peak of Greece’s enthusiasm for the Megali Idea. It was in this year that, spurred by the nationalist hubris that followed World War I, modern Greece carried out its most “inopportune, ill-advised, and suicidal” expansionist attempt. Under the excuse of protecting local Greek minorities in Anatolia, the pan-Hellenist government of prime minister Eleftherios Venizelos—one of Crete’s enosis main architects—found support among the van- quishing powers of World War I to invade the Anatolian town of Smyrna (now called Izmir). However, rather than expanding the Greek nation’s borders, the incursion of the Greek army in Smyrna “fanned to flames the smouldering fires of Turkish nationalism and gave Mustafa Kemal his chance” to rally the Turkish army behind his command (Penn 1938; Buzanski 1963; Finefrock 1980: 48-49;

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Helmreich 1974: 44; Millas 1991: 22). In a historical paradox, modern Turkey came to find its foundational drama in Greek post-colonial imperialism—one century after the Greeks had found theirs in their struggle against the predecessor of the Turkish state, i.e., the Ottoman Empire. Ironically for Greek imperialists, the dis- astrous attempt to resurrect a glorious Byzantine past through force backfired pro- digiously. The mutually agreed Greek-Turkish population exchange that followed the Greek invasion of Smyrna amounted to a reciprocal ethnic cleansing that rooted out three millennia of continuous Hellenic existence in Asia Minor (Petropulos 1976: 135).

The tragic fate of Greek irredentism is crucial to understand the Cypriot conflict. The adversities of the 400,000 Turks that were expelled from Greece as well as the plight of the 1,100,000 Greeks that were forced out of Turkey during the population exchange of 1923 remain latent memories for Greeks and Turks alike, both in the mainland and in Cyprus. Their recollections of mutual animosity produced a resounding echo in 1974, when Cyprus’ own Greek and Turkish populations underwent a similar odyssey and both the Greek and Turkish states saw a renewed threat posed by their foundational foe. The slow identification with the national identity of either Turkey or Greece that Cypriots had been cultivating since the 19th century made them part of the memories of Smyrna, a conflict they had never experienced yet an international trauma that their ethnic clashes repeatedly evoked.

The reciprocal Greek/Turkish ethnic cleansing that followed the disaster of Smyrna reverberated beyond the borders of Greece and Turkey: it foreshadowed the collapse of one of the most influential multinational European empires and its dissipation from a territory it had controlled for over four centuries. Today, the Ottomans’ geopolitical losses in the Balkans still give credit to the anachronic cartopolitical fantasy that the Bosporus constitutes a civilizational gap separating East from West, Turkey from Europe and Islam from Christianity. And yet, much of the current instability in the Middle East can be interpreted as a prolonged aftermath of the Ottoman Empire’s collapse, which has been characterized by relentless Eu- ropean and American attempts to seize what the Ottomans lost (Fromkin 2009). In what follows, I will further zoom into the process that led to the war in 1974, a conflict that has stood fossilized in the Green Line that still stands today.

Decolonisation and further glocalisation of the conflict

After World War II, the cause of self-determination movements was propelled by the wave of anti-imperialism that washed away whatever was left of colonial legitimacy. Encouraged by this international atmosphere, in 1950 the Cypriot Ortho- dox Church organised a referendum on enosis in which 95% of Greek Cypriot voters favoured union with Greece (Emilianides 2014: 11-13). This result alarmed

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Turkish Cypriots who, suspecting the revival of enosis, lobbied Turkey to officially state that, should Cyprus head towards independence, Turkey would safeguard Turkish Cypriot interests by partaking in any such settlement (Stefanidis 1999: 211).

Turkish Cypriots’ apprehension was not unfounded. The politico-cartographic imagination that bound Greek and Greek Cypriot nationalists was surreptitiously resuscitated in 1953, when their political and military elites secretly gath- ered in Athens to set up an underground Liberation Committee tasked with enosis. The Greek Cypriots’ ethnarch, the archbishop Makarios III, was designated as the movement’s political leader (Emilianides 2014: 20); and Georgios Grivas, a retired Greek colonel, became his military counterpart (French 2015: 46).

Once a diplomatic solution to the Cypriot conflict was summarily discarded by the UK and the UN (UN 1954: 11; Xidis 1968; Newson 2001: 84). Georgios Gri- vas, “a fanatical supporter of Enosis” funded and organised by the Greek government and Makarios disembarked in Cyprus at the end of 1954 to organise an armed rebel group (French 2015: 88-89; Dimitrakis 2008: 386): the National Organisation of Cypriot Fighters (EOKA) (Dimitrakis 2008: 377). While EOKA yearned to emancipate a nation, it ambitioned no Cypriot nation. Rather, its glorification of Hellen- ism envisioned a Greek Cyprus that would join Greece and thus conjured the Greek irredentism that seemed to have perished at Smyrna more than two decades earlier.

A fervent Hellenist and former Nazi collaborator (Katsourides 2013: 570; Markides 1977: 19; von Kogelfranz 1985), Grivas modelled EOKA after the fashion of right-wing ultranationalist parties and made the sanctity of EOKA’s mission justification enough to trample upon whomever might get in its way (Gunther and Diamond 2003, 181). In a replication of the historical irony that befell Greek nationalism in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the Greek Cypriot struggle for independence became an anti-imperialist yet colonising enterprise. While EOKA rebelled against British rule, it simultaneously aimed at imposing enosis upon the Turkish Cypriot population (Walker 1984; Pollis 1996: 77; Loizides 2007: 176; Dimitrakis, 2008: 377-378). Faced with this prospect, Turkish Cypriots became ever more en- gulfed in the fear that they would undergo the same fate as Cretan Turks—i.e., deportation—should Cyprus become part of a Greek nation that would make no place for them (Bolukbasi 1993: 507).

The barrier between Greek and Turkish Cypriots grew taller when EOKA started targeting Turkish Cypriots. As EOKA infiltrated the island’s security personnel, Greek Cypriots’ collusion with the organisation—out of either sympathy for EOKA or fear of its ruthlessness—turned them into unreliable elements of colonial law enforcement (Grivas 1964: 149). To solve the Greek Cypriot infiltration, the British colonial government “started hiring Turkish constables en masse” and relying more heavily on Turkish Cypriots for the running of the island’s everyday

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colonial administration (Dimitrakis 2008: 92). This drove a wedge between Greek Cypriots who fought for independence and Turkish Cypriots who supported the colonial government. More divisively still: in order to counterbalance Greek Cyp- riots’ growing power, the British started to promote a divide-et-impera strategy that consisted in stressing the Muslim and Turkish identities of Turkish Cypriots in the hope that their preoccupation with enosis would build a bulwark against EOKA’s liberation struggle.

In response to the incorporation of larger numbers of Turkish Cypriots into the colonial ranks, EOKA started to provoke clashes with Turkish Cypriots (Novo 2012: 416). As a result, the tension between Turkish and Greek Cypriots acquired an ever more violent dimension. Although Turkish and Greek Cypriots could have fought together against British rule for their own Cypriot nation, they fought one another instead. After decades of imagining themselves as part of nations beyond their borders, the intimate everyday familiarity of living together in the same island turned out to be less powerful than the imagination of belonging to distant nation states beyond their coasts.

Confronted with the growing chaos on the island and burdened with its own imperial decline after the Suez crisis of 1956, the British Empire finally accepted to let go of Cyprus (Wesseling 1996; Sutton 2017: 1-14). The imminent dis- solution of British rule from Cyprus unsettled sentiments among Turkish Cypriots and Anatolian Turks alike. Turkey feared that the UK’s disposition to grant Cyprus self-determination would open the path for enosis, resurrect the Megali Idea and expose Turkish Cypriots to the brutality of another Smyrna (Bahceli and Rizopou- los 1996/1997: 27). Protecting Turkish Cypriots in the 1960s and 1970s acquired the same urgency as defending Turks in Smyrna had in 1919. Meanwhile, Turkish Cypriots responded to the threat of enosis with the ambition of taksim (partition)— a project that received the official backing of Turkey in 1956 (Loizides 2007: 175; Attalides 1977; Bahceli 1972: 60)—and EOKA’s escalating violence with the creation of the Turkish Resistance Organisation (TMT), a counter paramilitary group founded in 1957 (French 2015: 258-259).

In 1958 violence between Greek and Turkish Cypriots broke out in earnest and by 1959 Greece, Turkey and Britain hurried to negotiate Cyprus independence in what became known as the London-Zürich Agreements. In 1960, diplomats of these three countries drafted a constitution for Cyprus that de facto divided its people in two communities on the basis of ‘ethnic origin’, while safeguarding its sovereignty by granting themselves a right to unilateral intervention as guarantor powers. These paternalistic provisions not only perpetuated the colonial division between Greek and Turkish Cypriots but they brought the rivalry between Greece and Turkey closer to an armed conflict by granting them a legal entitlement to in- tervene in the island’s affairs (Adams 1966: 475-476). Paradoxically, Cypriot independence planted the seed of renewed imperial subjugation by giving the

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‘motherlands’—which were supposed to safeguard Cyprus’ independence—the very justification to undermine it.

To make it worse, the Cypriot constitution satisfied neither of the island’s communities. In the eyes of Greek Cypriots, it granted disproportionate rights to a minority that represented 18% of the island (Theophanous 2004: 26); while Turkish Cypriots thought that the rights of which it deprived them turned them into de facto second-class citizens. In any case, the London-Zürich agreements and the constitution of the newly independent Cypriot state formalized the cartopolitical imagination of separateness that had been promoted by British rule and which had driven Greek and Turkish Cypriots apart, thus not only perpetuating the island’s ethnic division but making it part of a broader Greco-Turkish geopolitical antagonism.

The Imperial logic of the US

Making Greece and Turkey guarantor powers of a Cypriot polity divided along Greek and Turkish ethnic lines did not make Cyprus more stable but precisely the opposite. It gave Greece and Turkey an excuse to keep meddling in the internal affairs of an island whose communities sought their active support to advance their geopolitical goals of hegemony or partition. Moreover, the Cypriot constitution formalized an international dispute between countries that considered each other the most significant national rivals in a history of postcolonial antagonism. Pulled to the island by communities who saw them as champions of their geopolitical objectives—i.e., either enosis or taksim—, Cyprus became a heterotopic bat- tlefield for Greece and Turkey to revive chronotopes of old rivalries and a chance to settle past grievances: an assemblage of antagonist memories and perceptions that arguably still constitutes the most solid foundation of the Green Line dividing Cyprus today.

In 1963, three years after independence, a combination of Greek hardliners and members of the Greek Cypriot leadership secretly devised the infamous Akritas Plan, which envisaged that a provocation by Turkish Cypriots would provide Greek Cypriots with the best excuse to subdue them into accepting enosis (Boyd 1966: 4; Sertoglu and Ozturk 2003: 58; Constandinos 2011: 18-19).9 In order to trigger this plan, Makarios made a 13-point proposal to Turkish Cypriots on the assumption that they would reject it and this would give his government domestic and international legitimacy to “[reduce] Turkish Cypriots to minority status by force if necessary and [achieve] union with Greece at a later stage” (Faustmann

9 Although there is no proof that Makarios was involved in such a scheme, in 1963 he proposed a thirteen-point constitutional reform that would have drastically curtailed the prerogatives enjoyed by Turkish Cypriots. After the Turkish Cypriot leadership refused to accept Makarios’ amend- ments, Greek Cypriot EOKA members started killing Turkish Cypriots in Nicosia.

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2004: 154-159). Inter-ethnic warfare ensued across the island (Adams 1976, 475), and Turkish Cypriots retreated into ethnically Turkish enclaves acting on Ankara’s advice (King and Ladbury 1982: 3). As the rumour of war between Greece and Turkey grew—two strategic NATO allies whose confrontation the US deemed “literally unthinkable”—their dispute over Cyprus became Washington’s concern (Johnson and Inonu 1966: 391). The US feared that, should Cyprus consummate enosis, Greece’s flirtation with the Soviet Union or its incapability to defend Cy- prus from Soviet influence would put a strategic Mediterranean island at the brink of communism and thus turn it into a geopolitical liability for Turkey, the US and NATO (Dimitras 1985; Stefanidis 1999: 210). That fear was bolstered by a powerful cartopolitical allegory in the Turkish military that survives until today and which imagines Cyprus as a dagger threatening Turkey’s ‘soft belly’ with the sharp blade of its pointy Karpass peninsula (Boroewiec 2000: 114).

Although Makarios pursued enosis as leader of EOKA in the 1950s, the convulsions of the 1960s persuaded him that union with Greece had become unfeasi- ble and he finally renounced enosis in 1968. As a consequence, he became a traitor in the eyes of Greek and Greek Cypriot irredentists who had supported him in previous years. Under the auspices of the Greek junta that had seized power in 1967 and revived the Hellenic irredentist goal of enosis (Pedaliu 2011), Georgios Grivas, Makarios’ former ally, returned to the island in 1971 as his enemy. He founded EOKA B—“the most extreme right-wing organisation Cyprus has ever seen”—to help Greece’s “extreme right-nationalist military dictator” overthrow Makarios (Katsourides 2013: 571; Loizos 1988: 640).

With the help of EOKA B, Greece invaded the island in 1974 and, as fore- seen, this move triggered Turkey’s invasion. The role of the US cannot be considered a mere footnote in this process. In the cartopolitical worries of the US foreign policy establishment, Makarios’ communist inclinations risked turning Cyprus into a ‘Mediterranean Cuba’ that the Soviets could exploit to threaten American interests like they had done in the Caribbean during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 (Kennan 1947: 575; Hitchens 1997; Constandinos 2011: 21-24). Since the US State Department had long favoured a partition of Cyprus to satisfy both Greece and Turkey with a piece of the island, some commentators have speculated that this is why Henry Kissinger, then the US Secretary of State, let Ioannides, the Greek dictator, go ahead with the coup in 1974—a hypothesis that seems supported by confidential documents from the US State Department published by WikiLeaks. Fully aware that Turkey would tolerate neither a Greek-led putsch nor enosis, Kis- singer seems to have misled the Greek dictator Ioannides when he enquired about the US position regarding a possible Greek intervention in Cyprus. Instead of his explicit support, Kissinger seems to have given Ioannides an ambiguous silence only to give Turkey green light to invade Cyprus immediately after the Greek-led putsch had taken place (Hitchens 1997: 146; 2001: 77-89; US Department of State 1974). And so, it seems that for a big empire like the US, the little island of Cyprus

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in the middle of the Mediterranean was a mere bargaining chip in a much larger play on the world map, which is exactly the kind of imperial logic that continued to haunt Cyprus after 1974.

The Green Line after 1974

In the aftermath of the Greek and Turkish invasions of 1974, “an artificial line cut through the island like a cheese-wire” (Grundy-Warr 1994: 79). Tourism, the island’s main industry, was severely curtailed and cooperation between the Greek and Turkish communities was brutally severed by the Green Line (Dikomitis 2005: 7-12; Webster and Timothy 2006: 168). In 1975 an independent Turkish Federated State of Cyprus was established and in 1983 the Turkish Republic of Northern Cy- prus (TRNC) declared its independence—to this day recognized only by Turkey (Nugent 1997: 55-56). Since the partition of Cyprus, each side started to demonize the other through governmental propaganda (Spyrou 2002; Zembylas and Kara- hasan 2006). The nationalist indoctrination that has taken place in both Turkish and Greek Cyprus since 1974 is, quite literally, a ‘textbook’ case of ethno-nationalist cartopolitics (Papadakis 2008: 135).

The textbooks used by Turkish Cypriots have told the story of Cyprus as an extension of Turkish history while depicting the Ottoman rule as a time of prosperity and freedom that was disturbed by the ungrateful Greek Cypriots’ struggle for enosis and then made right by the ‘Happy Peace Operation’ carried out by the ‘Heroic Turkish Army’ in 1974 (Papadakis 2008: 136). For their part, Greek Cypriot schoolbooks have lumped together Turkish Cypriots with Turks not only as the aggressors of 1974 but also as the ones responsible for the interethnic violence of the 1960’s. Since 1974, subsequent generations of Greek and Turkish Cypriots have been socialized by an educational system that already at an early age instils a cartopolitical grievance: to remember their lost homes in the other side, thus inheriting the affront of murder and occupation as well as a politics of vengeance against the other Cypriots (Christou 2006: 286). One of the most striking illustrations of this self-victimizing approach is the popular cartographic politicisation of the conflict that has been consistently imprinted on Greek Cypriot history books since 1974: the ‘bleeding island’ (see Figure 3.7).

The long-standing cartopolitical conditioning that has taken root in Greek Cyprus—epitomized by its bloody iconography—can be discerned in the student maps produced a few years ago for an artistic competition organized by the Cyp- riot Embassy in Greece in collaboration with the Greek Ministry of Education. The title of the competition, “Cyprus 40 years. I don’t forget. I struggle. I create”, en- capsulates the Greek Cypriot exclusionary ethno-nationalism: an unforgettable grievance and a heroic endurance to remember in a commendably peaceful manner. On this map (see Figure 3.8)—which is but one among many showing a similar

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cartopolitical composition—a Greek student has reproduced the most emblematic cartopolitical account of the conflict made by the Greek Cypriot side.

Figure 3.7. Example of Greek Cypriot history books with a cover reproducing the ‘bleeding island’ motif. The Cypriot Tragedy, by Panayiotis Nastros (2017). Source: https://tinyurl.com/up37y8c

Cyprus stands in the middle of a sea inscribed with legends speaking of the persistence of the imperial ethno-nationalist bond linking Greece and Cyprus: “We will never forget this betrayal. Black pages were written with this story. As time keeps passing by the memory keeps growing stronger. We tell you loudly: CY- PRUS YOU ARE NOT ALONE”. In this cartopolitical rendition of the Cypriot conflict, Northern Cyprus, occupied by Turkey since 1974, is bleeding into the Greek Cypriot side: an allegory of the Greek Cypriot blood spilled during the Turkish intervention of 1974 and a very graphic reminder of the Turkish North’s violence towards the Greek South. The tenacity of this geopolitical image is encoded in the movement inherent to the visual motif of dripping blood as well as in a legend right below it: “I don’t forget”.

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Figure 3.8. A bloody cartopolitical imagination. Source: https://tinyurl.com/y55vkfbh

The EU’s imperial conflict resolution

Recently, yet another imperial power made its entrance into the Cypriot stage. In spite of Cyprus’ unresolved division, in 1990 the European Community (EC) accepted the Greek Cypriot application for membership in representation of the whole island. Aware of the exclusion of the TRNC that this implied, the EC originally conditioned Cypriot membership to the island’s reunification. However, in 1995 Greece threatened to veto the entire EU’s eastern enlargement should such condition be imposed on the Greek Cypriot government. Pressured by Greece’s blackmail (Bryant 2003; Boedeltje, Kramsch and Van Houtum 2007: 132; Bourne 2003: 394), the EU dropped the condition and accepted the Greek Cypriot membership application. Since the TRNC and Turkey had been the most adamant opponents of reunification since 1974 anyway (Çarkoğlu and Sözen 2004: 130), the EU tried to lure Turkish Cypriots into a peace settlement with the prospect of prosperity that has characterized much of the EU’s power of attraction during its suc- cessive enlargements (Christou 2002; Sahin 2011: 586). This coincided with the arrival to power of the Justice and Development Party (JDP) in Turkey which, led by prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, saw the partition of Cyprus as a major hurdle in the way to its craved EU membership and speedily repudiated a decades- long stance of obstruction regarding Cyprus’ reunification and replaced it for a pro-EU course instead.

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With the support of the EU and Turkey, the UN took over the peace process and aimed at securing the island’s reunification before it was granted EU membership. Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary-General at the time, orchestrated what became known as ‘the Annan Plan’, which provided a blueprint for the reunification of Cyprus and was put to a referendum right before Cyprus accession to the EU (Thompson 2004: 283). The result of this concerted action to change the minds of Turkish Cypriots paid off and, in 2004, 65% of them voted for reunification. Alt- hough the peace process seemed to have gained an unstoppable momentum, Tas- sos Papadopoulos, the Greek Cypriot leader, took the EU and UN by surprise when, a couple of days ahead of the referendum, he advised Greek Cypriots against supporting the Annan Plan—which they opposed by an overwhelming 75%. This abrupt change of mind came unexpectedly to the EU and the UN, who saw the Greek Cypriot last-minute turnaround as a betrayal of the entire peace process (Spiteri 2004).

And yet, when one reads about how the Annan Plan was negotiated and what it stipulated, it is hard to understand how its failure could have come as a surprise to either the EU or the UN (Boedeltje, Kramsch and Van Houtum 2007: 130-135). The plan proposed concessions long regarded with suspicion by many Greek Cypriots and its unwieldy 9,000 pages were inexplicably drafted mainly by Annan and his foreign consultants without taking into account Cypriot leaders and their communities (Yilmaz 2005). This made Greek Cypriots deeply uneasy. Considering the depth to which the Cypriot conflict had already been studied by 2004, it is staggering that neither the UN nor the EU suspected that Greek Cypriots would find the procedure, content and haste of the Annan Plan unacceptable (Kyr- iakides 2004).

Tellingly, the EU and the UN expressed outrage after the referendum (Wright 2004). They blamed the fiasco on what EU officials characterised as the deceitfulness of Greek Cypriots instead of taking a hard look at their own inepti- tude. Their impatience to push a plan that had been so scantily negotiated with the local population betrayed a patronizing imperial attitude: the expectation that Greek Cypriots would be satisfied with whatever the EU and the UN thought was best for them. This colonial infantilization of Cypriots has been the recurrent cartopolitical attitude towards Cypriots since the times of the British occupation and it goes to the core of the failed attempts brokered by imperial meddlers to solve the island’s inter-communal conflict, from the London-Zürich agreements to the referendum of 2004.

The biggest misjudgement should perhaps be attributed to the EU, who held all the cards in the negotiation of Cyprus EU accession and thus in its reunification. By granting membership to the Greek Cypriot side without conditioning it to a settlement with the Turkish Cypriot northern half, the EU froze both the Cypriot conflict and, indirectly, also Turkey’s EU membership (Tocci 2007: 2-3).

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Although the EU Council and Turkey agreed to start accession negotiations even after the controversial incorporation of a divided Cyprus to the EU,10 by the time the negotiations were set to begin, Turkey’s incentive to extend the Ankara Agree- ments—the customs and trade agreements between the EU and Turkey—to Cy- prus had been offset by a German change of heart towards Turkey. The election of Angela Merkel to the German chancellorship in September 2005 represented an inflection point in both the EU’s mood towards Turkey’s accession and, consequently, also in Turkey’s negotiation strategy regarding EU membership (Ugur 2010: 981). Already as a candidate in 2004, Merkel had proposed to downscale the EU’s offer to Turkey: from the long-standing prospect of membership to a mere ‘privileged partnership (Deutsche Welle 2004). An unsolvable Cypriot conflict turned into a conveniently unworkable hurdle for an EU that was no longer interested in offering Turkey a prospect of EU membership.

The EU’s insistence on Turkey to extend the Ankara Agreements to Cy- prus—notwithstanding the unresolved partition of the island that the EU itself had aggravated—became a handsome excuse to justify the growing opposition to Turkish membership across the EU (Ugur 2010: 979). The EU’s hostility towards Turkey (particularly from France, Germany, Greece, Cyprus and Austria) was further aggravated by the EU Commission’s recommendation to block the opening of eight crucial chapters in the accession negotiations with Turkey in 2006 (Schim- melfennig 2009: 419), and later by the election of Nicolas Sarkozy to the French presidency in 2007 (Idiz 2010). The foreseeable refusal of Turkey to extend the An- kara Agreements to a divided Cyprus gave the EU a dignified justification to replace Turkey’s prospect of EU membership for a privileged partnership—in open contravention to the EU’s longstanding international commitment to eventually admit Turkey as a Member State. By insisting on Turkey to extend the Ankara Agreements to Cyprus, the EU was demanding Turkey to fulfil its commitments to the EU even as the EU was increasingly suggesting that it would honour its commitments towards neither Turkish Cypriots nor Turkey. What can hardly be described as anything other than the EU’s poorly concealed bad faith towards Tur- key’s accession left a void in what had been both one of Erdoğan’s most successful electoral promises and Turkey’s biggest geopolitical ambition since 1963—when the Ankara Agreement between the European Economic Community and Turkey was signed. In the absence of a prospect for EU membership, Erdoğan saw an electoral opportunity to dramatically change the geopolitical strategy of Turkey and ever since he has drifted to an increasingly Islamist-based authoritarianism to ce- ment his base and power (Özbudun 2014).

10 Cyprus became an EU Member State on the 1st May of 2004. Afterwards, in December 2004, “the European Council decided that Turkey sufficiently fulfil[ed] the criteria to open accession negotiations.”. See: http://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/policies/enlargement/turkey/#

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Seen from the broader perspective of the Cypriot conflict, the EU’s admission of a divided Cyprus and its partiality towards the Greek Cypriot government amounted to an oblivious backing of Hellenist irredentism: Cyprus membership to the EU with the exception of its Turkish north constituted an enosis of sorts. EU numismatics tell this story in small but telling visual allegories. On the 1- and 2- euro coins that were minted after the accession of Cyprus to the EU (Bueno Lacy 2011: 57-58), the EU has emulated the geographical prestidigitation that was contrived by the cartopolitics of Hellenist irredentism (see Figure 3.9 and compare it to Figure 3.4). Cyprus has been moved away from Anatolia and placed near Greece as a statement of the island's ‘proper’ civilisational belonging (Hymans 2004; Kael- baerer 2004; Raento et al. 2004). The European Commission, the self-acclaimed ‘soft empire’, moved the position of the island “hundreds of miles West” and erased Turkey from the map (Walters 2002). Times and forms may have changed, but the EU’s approach to the Cypriot conflict shows that the blunt imperialist high-handedness that has fuelled it still exerts a powerful grip on the island.

Figure 3.9. Snatching Cyprus away from Anatolia. Source: Bank of Lithuania: https://tinyurl.com/uvuumcr

Today, we see once again the imperial cartopolitical puppeteering of Cyprus; this time with the EU and Turkey pulling the most powerful strings. While the EU may have made an unsuspecting alliance with Hellenist irredentism by granting Greek Cypriots EU membership without requiring reunification, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan,

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Turkey’s prime minister, has been using Turkish Cyprus to his advantage. Having found in religious authoritarianism an abundant source of political support (Kaja 2014). Erdoğan has been extending the Islamisation of Turkish society into North- ern Cyprus. Today, Koran lessons are being forced upon school pupils in Turkish Cyprus while massive mosques like the Hala Sultan are being erected: the colonial imposition of a politico-spatial piousness that stands in stark contrast with otherwise remarkably secular Turkish Cypriots (Yeşilada 2009; Smith 2015, 2018). Ulti- mately, more than a century after British colonizers split Cypriots into Greek and Turkish national identities, their puppeteering by centres of power beyond their country’s boundaries endures.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I have studied the persistence of the Cypriot Green Line through an analysis of the geographical imaginations that have framed the conflict between Greek and Turkish Cypriots since the end of the 19th century. My analysis shows that geopolitical (mis)representations of history and heritage, culture and identity, geography and borders construct cartographically organized notions of territory (i.e., people as well as ‘their’ space and culture) and that these notions can have the most dramatic political impact (Elden 2014). Perceptions of geographical closeness and distance organized within a material or imaginary cartographical framework create b/orders and thereby others. These notions have the power to (re)shape the interaction among large population groups. Cultural anxiety, apprehension about migrants and war are just some of the geopolitical phenomena steered by cartopolitical representations which may have no other basis than the representation that gives them credence (Baudrillard 1981). Yet, regardless how unstable or unfounded these ideas might be, they become real once they are accepted to be real by large numbers of people—in particular by political organizations like states that wield the power to turn these representations into a material reality (Branch 2014; Bueno Lacy and Van Houtum 2015).

In the case of Cyprus, a varied collection of centres of imperial power—from the British Empire to Greece, Turkey, the US, the Soviet Union, the EU and the UN—have modelled places and heritages in Cyprus after geographies and legacies that never existed as they were imagined by those who promoted them. They have created imperial perceptions of distant closeness—what was in fact far and unre- lated, such as the colonial motherland, is constructed as close and familiar—and adjacent remoteness—what was historically close and familiar, such as the Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot neighbours, is constructed as distant and alien. Thus, rather than a fracture dug by ancient ethnic incompatibility between Greek and Turkish Cypriots, the Cypriot Green Line should be seen not only as a UN buffer zone or as a territorial division but mainly as a set of borders built over the past

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two centuries by discursive bricks of global and local provenance. The divisive narratives, practices and representations have entrenched a perception of the Cyp- riot Self that can be either Turkish of Greek, but never both.

Spanning Ottoman and British empires to the modern states of Greece and Turkey and to international and supranational organisations like the UN and the EU, these imperial meddlers have imported, defined and reinforced the meaning of Turkish and Greek ethnicities in Cyprus. Moulded by the patient hands of ceaseless imperial intrusions, Cypriots have largely internalized otherwise external notions of their own identity and turned them into the chief dimensions of their geopolitical calculations. Thus, rather than an exotic local play, Cypriot politics and ethno-political identities should be regarded as a much larger, global geopolitical drama. The scenario may be Cypriot but neither all the characters nor the play- wright are native to the island—many of the puppeteers remain concealed behind the dark curtains of surreptitious international politics and the neglect of historical accounts suffering from methodological nationalism (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002). Ultimately, a strict local framing of the Cypriot conflict should be considered misleading—i.e., a cartopolitical idée fixe, a territorial entrapment (Agnew 1994). The Cypriot buffer zone made of dusty sandbags and abandoned houses dating from 1974 is in fact the result of imperial cartopolitical overstretch. The Green Line dividing the island of Cyprus may be real, but so are its international dimensions and unscrupulous imperial puppeteers. The Green Line is not a local division between two essentially and naturally antagonistic parties, a closer scrutiny makes clear that the line is made of a glocal web of imperial strings.

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SECOND SECTION Autoimmunity

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CHAPTER 4 Autoimmunity

On the Autoimmunity of EU’s Deadly B/Ordering Regime

Analysing its paper, iron and camp borders

There is an orientalism running through the veins of the project of EUro- pean integration. This chapter explores the latent orientalism that is constantly suggested by the identitary iconography of the EU and the way in which it has spliced the marginalisation of immigrant populations across the EU and in the military violence to which EU Member States have been accomplice in the Middle East. Since 9/11, this orientalism has become an increasingly self-fulfilling prophecy whose effects have been magnified by the financial crisis of 2008 and the subsequent rise that this gave to xenophobic parties across the EU.

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Van Houtum H and Bueno Lacy R (2020) The EU’s autoimmune b/ordering of Europe: How the myth of Europe has become an existential threat to the project of EUropean integration. Geopolitics 25(3): 706–733. DOI: 10.1080/14650045.2020.1728743

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CHAPTER 4 On the Autoimmunity of the EU’s Deadly B/Ordering Regime: Analysing its Paper, Iron and Camp Borders

ABSTRACT

In this article I argue that the EU suffers from autoimmunity: a self-harming protection strategy. Drawing on Derrida’s political understanding of autoimmunity, I contend that the root of this malfunction lies in the EU’s own b/ordering and othering policies, which are intended to immunise the foundational ethos of the EU. For this purpose, I dissect the EU border regime into three linked b/ordering mechanisms: the pre-borders of paper documents that regulate from afar the mobility of the people from visa-obliged countries; the actual land borders often consisting of iron gates and fences regulating mobility on the spot; and the post-border in the form of waiting/detention camps that segregate and enclose the undocumented migrants after entry. I make clear how this discriminatory b/ordering and othering regime has led to a recurrent drawing of ever less porous, inhumane and deadlier borders. Such thanatopolitics finds itself at odds with the humanist values that the EU is supposed to uphold, particularly cross-border solidarity, openness, non-discrimination and human rights. I argue that the EU b/ordering regime has turned fear of the non-EUropean into an increasingly unquestioned – even ‘commonsensical’ – anxiety that has become politically profitable to exploit by extreme nationalistic and EUrosceptic parties. The core of the EU’s autoimmunity that I want to expose lies within this irony: in its attempt to protect what it considers meaningful, the EU has unleashed an autoimmune disorder that has turned the EU into its own most formidable threat.

DRAWING INSPIRATION from the cultural, religious and humanist inheritance of Europe, from which have developed the universal values of the inviolable and inalienable rights of the human person, freedom, democracy, equality and the rule of law.

—Lisbon Treaty, 2009 Introduction

e write this article as concerns about the rising suicide attempts in the Moria refugee camp of Lesbos, Greece, have been worsening to the point that children are now taking their own lives (BBC 2019; MSF 2018; Tondo 2018). Recently, a teenager tried to hang himself W from a pole and earlier, a 10-year-old boy tried to take his own life. It is hard to imagine the levels of anxiety and utter helplessness that would push a child to these extremes. Yet, the ways in which the EU has decided to make these people suffer are contributing to the catalogue of horrors that asylum seekers keep reluctantly thickening by trying to reach the EU: abandoned,

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dehydrated and famished amidst the desert (Laurent and O’Grady 2018); suffo- cated while smuggled in poorly ventilated lorries (AiK 2018); and detained, tortured, raped and enslaved by human traffickers and slave traders along their perilous odysseys (AP 2018; Kemp 2017; Malik 2019; van Houtum and Boedeltje 2009). As if their plight was not harrowing enough, instead of receiving them with the humanism promised by the preamble to its constitution, the EU’s atrocious refugee centres now leave undocumented migrants at the mercy of their own despair; crip- pled by the hopelessness and mental breakdown that results from languishing in the unfathomable squalor and brutality of these camps. A wide network of NGOs has documented how the “sweeping human rights violations” taking place in Greek detention camps have aggravated both gender-based violence against women and girls at “an alarming rate” as well as mental health problems among adults and children alike (Lucas, Ramsay, and Keen 2019). The constant violence and death among undocumented migrants trying to make their way to the EU has become so normal that they hardly make any headlines anymore: the only epitaphs that many of their irrecoverable bodies will ever be honoured with are either the unsentimental numbers or threatening red arrows with which undocumented migrants are represented in Frontex’s “risk analyses” (van Houtum and Bueno Lacy 2019).

Shamefully, the EU’s external border has become the deadliest border on the planet today (van Houtum 2015). Although estimates differ, there is some agreement that around 37,000 human beings have died in their attempt to reach the EU since the early ‘90’s – when Schengen was progressively incorporated into EU law (UNITED 2019). Yet, those who have scraped this number together realise that it will never be complete, for it is impossible to tell how many migrants have been lost to the perilous migration routes in North Africa or further afield. A crucial development of late that has aggravated this deadliness is the EU-wide trend to criminalise humanitarianism (Hockenos 2018; Nabert et al. 2019; Provera 2015). NGOs attempting to save lives at sea are now being harassed and charged with human smuggling and trafficking: a cynically hypocritical policy that will probably lead to higher casualties in the Mediterranean – turning it, as the UNHCR has put it, into a “sea of blood” (BBC 2018; Tondo 2019).

This overt callousness poses the conundrum that I analyse in this article: how did the EU, which only in 2012 was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for its six- decade long contribution to the advancement of peace, dignity, freedom, equality, the rule of law and human rights in Europe – which are, according to the EU, the values of “the European way of life” – backslide so precipitously (Plenel 2019)? What happened to the “force for good” that the EU once prided itself on embody- ing (EC 2017)?

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In this paper, I contend that, far from a new or unexpected phenomenon, the convergence of violent migration policies along the external borders of the EU as well as the increasingly ethno-exclusionary politics that characterise the current public debate within the EU are the exacerbation of a longstanding b/ordering and othering trend in the policies of the EU (Jones 2017; Kriesi and Pappas 2015; van Houtum and van Naerssen 2002). Although I recognise that the EU is not a homogeneous political entity but a complex supranational organisation composed of diverse political institutions, culturally specific member states, antagonistic political parties of all ideological stripes and, overall, a wide range of interests, for the purpose of this article, I aim at evaluating the overall justice and self-harming reciprocity that the EU’s border regime exerts on its political community as a whole. To this end, I will analyse the b/ordering and othering regime of the EU through the lens of Jacques Derrida’s powerful notion of political autoimmunity, which he defined as the strange behaviour by which an organisation, “in quasi-suicidal fashion, ‘itself’ works to destroy its own protection, to immunise itself against its ‘own’ immun- ity” (Derrida 2003, 94). So, in contrast to the employment of the metaphor of “autoimmunity” by far-right politicians like Thierry Baudet to denounce “massive immigration” as the cause of the West’s “weakening body”, I resort to Derrida’s notion of autoimmunity to argue exactly the opposite: the EU’s autoimmunity is not rooted in its openness to the world but in the counterproductive effects of its current closed, discriminatory border regime. I argue that that the EU over time has developed a regime that consciously discriminates, endangers and criminalises the mobility of specific migrants on nativist grounds, alienates the EU from its self- professed values of rule of law and human rights, and thereby legitimises and nor- malises nativist authoritarian populists like Baudet and others (Boedeltje and Van Houtum 2008; van Houtum and Bueno Lacy 2017). Thus, the autoimmunity that I recognise has its roots inside EUrope and not beyond its borders. To structure my argument, I break down the EU’s border regime into three kinds of borders: (1) the pre-border of the visa control or, as we term it, the paper border; (2) physical border controls or what I refer to as “the iron border” and; (3) the post-border articulated in the reception and detention camps that keep migrants ostracised even after they have entered the EU. I analyse how these three cogwheels of the EU’s b/ordering and othering machinery have developed over time and, employing Der- rida’s concept of autoimmunity, we will explain how they have become increasingly self-reinforcing engines propelling a self-destructive policy, and we will suggest three alternative directions that could take the EU out of this suicidal paradox (van Houtum 2010).

We conclude by stressing the ominous political implication of this EUro- pean border disorder: that the harrowing fate of immigrants is inextricably linked to the fate of the EU; their suffering and deaths are both symptoms and consequences of an autoimmune reaction that might ultimately lead to the EU’s demise. Succinctly put, by driving migrants and their children to commit suicide, the EU

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is opening a black hole that might swallow whole the ethos, values and laws on which much of its peace and prosperity have been built. In other words, we may be witnessing a dangerous authoritarian turn or even a sEUcide: the unnecessary self-destruction of the post-war project of the European integration with humanist ambitions.

Derrida’s Autoimmunity

Autoimmunity as an approach to the critical analysis of politics is most notably associated to the deconstructive method developed by Jacques Derrida. For him, autoimmunity evoked the mechanism by which a political hegemon flexes its “techno-socio-political machine” in order to consolidate its power yet unleashes a reaction that ends up undermining its power and perhaps even its survival. Der- rida identified a series of symptoms typical of this autoimmune disorder: (1) a reflex of power and the reflection it produces; (2) a trauma that envisions an inaus- picious future should nothing be done to prevent its repetition; (3) invisible and anonymous enemy forces that can hardly be pinned down to a particular state, cartographical location or physical entity; (4) apocalyptic descriptions of geopolitical events carrying religious undertones and, perhaps more decisively, (5) a double incomprehension: a power’s inability to comprehend the traumatic events to which it responds and to realise that what it deems its understanding of them – and on which it relies to devise reasonable responses to them (Derrida 2003, 90, 97–98). Ultimately, for Derrida, this autoimmunity sets in motion a dauntingly counterproductive machinery of self-fulfiling prophecies that are fuelled not by a “clash of civilisations” but rather by what Edward Said called “a clash of ignorance” (2001).

In a famous and lengthy interview with the philosopher Giovanna Bor- radori, Derrida resorted to a deconstructive analysis of 9/11 to dissect the autoimmune syndrome that, according to him, afflicts the US’ global hegemony (Derrida 2003). He pointed out the asymmetry of how, on the one hand, 9/11 is remembered as an unparalleled historical tragedy yet, on the other, it is clear that certain events of similar or far more atrocious violence – not least orchestrated by the US – have happened many times before and will happen many times afterwards without arousing a comparable amount of media attention or political urgency. For example, whereas 9/11 enjoys the privilege of arousing pathos in Europe and the United States, quantitatively comparable or much worse killings beyond their their territories do not cause such an intense upheaval in their media and public opinion (e.g., Cambodia, Rwanda, Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan and so on) (Derrida 2003, 92).

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Unsurprisingly, by exposing the inconsistencies of the violent discourse on which the power of the world’s hegemon rests, humanists like Derrida and Edward Said have made themselves targets of a discourse which has sought to delegitimise their critiques by lambasting them as “philosophers of terror” – particularly in the US (Mitchell 2005, 913). Ironically, such ad hominem dismissal of critical philosophy is a symptom of the very autoimmune syndrome that Derrida intended to highlight. Even when philosophers as concerned with the subtleties of language as Der- rida make sure to distance their critique of US hegemony from any apology of terrorism (Derrida 2003, 107), they are nonetheless rebutted not by counterarguments of comparable equanimity but by an alleged inability of self-reflection – which is the very target of their critique on geopolitical autoimmunity.

For Derrida, the catastrophic connotations of 9/11 should be understood as a reflex and reflection of both the magnitude of American power as well as of the significance of its contestation through terrorism. The autoimmunity of the military reflex and response that the US gives to Islamist terrorism lies, according to Derrida, in the mismatch between the crime that it tries to redress and the counterproductive nature of what such response achieves: rather than bringing the individuals responsible for such attacks to justice, the traumatic attacks of 9/11 have been used to justify a colossal global fight (“war on terror”) whose camps, defined in binary terms (“you’re either with us or against us”), have set an imaginary “West” against invisible and anonymous enemy forces – which have been apoca- lyptically lumped together in the geographical abstraction of “the axis of evil” – bent on the irrational mission to destroy. Arguably, such a reflex is a variation of what Étienne Balibar has called “racism as universalism” (Balibar 1989), i.e., a power system that cultivates a hierarchy of better and lesser races not through the coarse discourse of racial superiority and inferiority but, rather, through a more “sophisticated” discourse that acknowledges human diversity in order to justify an essentialist cultural incompatibility among its components. The proponents of this racist universalism misrepresent culture as though it were confined to homogenous and hermetic racial groups that are fundamentally incompatible and thus inherently antagonistic – the most infamous example being Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilisations” (1993, 1996).

The political discourse inspired by this clash-of-civilisations logic has characterised terrorism as an irrational threat rooted in allegedly “essential” civilisational antagonism: this baseless assumption (Brotton 2003; Bulliet 2006), together with its usually accompanying Islamophobia, has breathed new life into “the essential terrorist” (Said 2006): an all-purpose geopolitical scapegoat that the US – and the EU, to a less hysterical extent (Ernst 2013; Grosfoguel and Mielants 2006) – have been employing to justify state-led violence (Said 1997). Only the wars that the US has waged in response to the 4,000 deaths caused by 9/11 have killed more than 500,000 people counting the military and civilian deaths in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan; and over 1,000,000 million people if one adds the US interventions

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in Syria and Yemen (Crawford 2018). Obama’s administration was dropping an average of three bombs per day and Trump’s war machine has been dropping one bomb every twelve minutes in one of the dozens of wars that the US has waged somewhere around the globe at any given point (Benjamin 2017; Turse 2017).

What Derrida elucidates is that the Islamist terrorism that has become a scourge across Europe is carried out and promoted by sectors of the European and global populations whose grievances are intimately related to the military devastation of large swathes of the world by US, NATO or EUropean armies. Since such disaffected groups lack the firepower to oppose much superior state armies through conventional warfare, they resort to asymmetrical warfare in the form of terrorism. Although such understanding does not make Islamist terrorism less horrifying or condemnable, it does make it seem like a much more rational and expected political response to the state terrorism that fuels it than the dominant political discourse would have us believe. Therefore, Derrida clarifies, the distinction between what is classified as either ‘war’ or ‘terrorism’ does not aim at establishing an ontological difference but rather a power difference: when you do to us what we do to you, you are not evaluated under the same benevolent light as we are but instead immediately denounced as an irrational criminal and thus as a legitimate target of ever more brutal retaliation. The US’ response is thus fuelled by incomprehension and hypocrisy: in order to protect its ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’, its own penchant for violence has constructed an enduring global war that is leading to openly racist and Islamophobic policies, laying the rationale of an increasingly authoritarian surveillance society in the US (Lieblich and Shinar 2018) and, overall, to the autoimmune weakening of its democracy (Faludi 2007).

The Autoimmune Borders of the EU

In what follows, I will deploy Derrida’s notion of autoimmunity to analyse the architecture and ideology of the EU’s b/ordering and othering policies as a response to migration (van Houtum and van Naerssen 2002). To this end, I will dissect the EU’s b/ordering response into what I see as three core immunising borders of the EU which consist of different materialities and architecture: the pre-border (paper), the territorial border (iron) and the post-border (camp).

The Paper Border

Arguably, one of the most significant landmarks in the recent history of EU’s b/ordering policy has been the creation of a common external visa border – what I call “the paper border”. The common paper b/ordering of the EU dates back to the Schengen Agreement of 1985, which envisioned the gradual abolition of internal borders in exchange for the establishment of strict border controls along the EU’s

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external borders – which implied merging Member States’ border controls under a joint command. This agreement was further refined in the Dublin Convention of 1990 through the harmonisation of the EU’s common asylum procedures later enshrined in the Maastricht Treaty of 1992 (EC 2018). The effective establishment of the Schengen area in 1995 was incorporated into EU law by the Amsterdam Treaty that came into effect in 1999. Ushered by the Schengen Information System (SIS) and Visa Information System (VIS) that resulted from these agreements – implemented in 2006 and 2011, respectively – the EU established common external border surveillance systems aimed at filtering out global border crossers lacking the travelling papers required by the Schengen Agreement.

In effect, the EU as a whole started mimicking the nation-state with this paper b/ordering: it legalised and thereby normalised the hegemonic distinction between native and non-native EUropean citizens (Slootweg, Van Reekum, and Schinkel 2019; van Houtum and Bueno Lacy 2019). This territorial entrapment of EUrope marked a watershed in European history: it started to carve up not only a paper border between EUrope and “non-EUrope” but also an imaginary split between an anachronistically defined EUrope and the rest of the world. In this regard, it is crucial to emphasise that Europe has always been geographically unde- termined and that it has never been either a congruent political organisation nor a demos (Delanty 1996); nor has the European continent ever been severed from its contiguous Mediterranean geographies by such sharp borders (Boedeltje and Van Houtum 2008; Braudel 1995, 2002). Yet, since the introduction of the Schengen Agreement, the EU has increasingly been fortifying itself and turning the Mediter- ranean into its common defensive moat.

This EU’s abduction of the idea of Europe – on which it does not have a monopoly – has been progressively reified through a conscious ordering brought about by the distinct process of EUropeanisation. This EU strategy to create an cultural attachment to its political project by identifying it with the heritage of Eu- rope has been characterised by the creation of maps, coins, symbols, narratives and geopolitical practices that have attempted to shoehorn European history and culture into the current borders of the EU (Boedeltje and Van Houtum 2008; Bueno Lacy and Van Houtum 2015). Membership to the EU started to become associated with a historical belonging to Europe and, in contrast, neighbouring countries started to be imagined as lacking an intrinsic Europeanness—the othering process.

Tellingly, in 1987, the European Economic Community (ECC)—the immediate predecessor of the EU – received a request from Morocco to join its political community. Almost immediately, however, the Council rejected its application on the basis of Morocco not being a European country and thus not meeting the basic eligibility criteria for EU membership. It is worth noticing that the EU Council’s reasoning amounted to more than an innocent incursion into basic physical geography: its decision implicitly asserted that, not only was the Council the

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institutionalised version of Europe but also that, as such, it enjoyed the prerogative of legally defining and conferring, in a discretionary way, the arbitrary acknowl- edgement of Europeanness. Subsequently, the EU demarcated the Bosporus as yet another boundary of Europe with the creeping disqualification of Turkey (the only country to which EU membership has been promised yet never granted). Through these practices, the EU suggested that it regarded the borders of European culture as roughly coinciding with the idea of a Christian – or, at least, of an essentially non-Muslim – European civilisation. In other words, the present started to invent the past by b/ordering EUropeanness in a way that consciously left out large swathes of land whose people, cultures and heritage have played a crucial role in the history of Europe: North Africa, Asia Minor, Russia and, arguably, also the worldwide former colonies with which Europeans share so much transculturation. I argue that a troubling consequence of carving this hard external border – on which the EU’s invention of Europe has been predicated – has been the resurrection of traumatic prejudices about Europe’s others: the non-Europeans who have been traditionally imagined as backward and violence-prone intruders (Vitkus 1997). Although the existence of this civilisational threat is mostly confined to sensationalised accounts or downright fabrications magnified by murkily manipulated digital media (Callawadr 2017; Juhász and Szicherle 2017), the invisibility and anonymity inherent to such non-existent boogeymen has made their signifiers – i.e., the flesh-and-bone human beings immigrating to the EU – legitimate targets of ever more vicious state surveillance and repression.

The striking culmination of this veritable paper b/ordering regime was the common Schengen list of visa-required countries introduced in 2001. This significant – yet still remarkably under-researched – “black and white list” (later re- branded as the “negative and positive list”) made a sharp discriminatory distinction between countries whose citizens require a visa paper to enter the EU—largely Muslim, African and overall less affluent countries – and those exempted from it— largely OECD members as well as a few countries in South America and Asia (Mau et al. 2012, 2015; Neumayer 2006; Salter 2003, 2006; van Houtum 2010; van Houtum and Lucassen 2016, see Figure 4.1).

This list is based on the principle of nativist discrimination – a principle that is forbidden by law in all Member States of the EU and which runs against the EU’s own Copenhagen criteria and Lisbon Treaty – and has, in effect, almost entirely closed off legal migration channels to the EU for the large majority of the world (van Houtum 2010). This paper border is thus dividing EUropeans from non-EU- ropeans on the basis of arbitrary geographical discrimination even before the actual fences, border guards and detention camps are able to exert their own b/ordering effects. This, what could be termed, pre-border has outsourced the EU’s border control to government offices far away from the EU’s actual border. So, the paper border should not be conceived as a line on a map dividing one country from another but rather as a global techno-political mechanism meant to b/order

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the EU at remote control (Zaiotti 2016). Rather than guards with guns, this first border of the EU is watched over by bureaucrats armed with paper and entrenched in faraway embassies. Through this political technology that could be termed tele- bordering, all citizens of a large group of nations – barred few exceptions – are blacklisted. This means that, in practice, most of the citizens of these blacklisted countries cannot acquire the visas they require to legally travel to the EU. The implication is that the paper border of the EU remotely and invisibly cage people in the inequitable lottery of birth (see Rawls 1999, 118–123).

Figure 4.1. The paper fortress of the EU. Source: https://tinyurl.com/y4cah26l

The result of this tele-bordering has been as counterproductive as it has been dramatic (Miller 2019). The first suicidal paradox inherent to the creation of the EU’s ‘paper fortress’ is that even if someone is fleeing from life-threatening situations in their country, they cannot get a visa because of the country they are fleeing from. By refusing them regular entry, the EU’s paper fortress paradoxically punishes people for being born in the wrong place and for trying to escape an oppressive regime, violence, economic despair or natural disaster. This constitutes not only a violation of international refugee law but a factual rejection of both the humanist ethos and legal custom on which the internationally-recognised right to ask for another country’s protection has been built. Such custom includes an express ex- hortation to governments for the “issue and recognition of travel documents”, which “is necessary to facilitate the movement of refugees, and in particular their resettlement” (UN 1951). The result of the EU’s wilful non-compliance with such international obligations is that – and this is the second paradox of this paper border regime – access to the EU’s regular asylum system can only be gained irregularly – through smugglers and other illicit ways. The safe alternative of air travel is also excluded because, since 2001, air carriers can be fined for taking on board migrants lacking the required visa (Directive 2001/51/EC), a policy that amounts

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to the erection of an effective b/ordering dome over the EU’s airspace (FitzGerald 2019).

This paradoxical policy of legally welcoming refugees yet illegalising the channels that would allow them to legally and safely travel to the EU is what Fitz- Gerald has recently described as “the Catch-22” of the rich world’s asylum policies (FitzGerald 2019). By forcing asylum seekers to undertake a reckless odyssey – which also criminalises the travel of both a large portion of the world as well as those who assist undocumented migrants in their journeys – the EU has boosted a large-scale smuggling industry that profits from the legal void that the EU itself has made sure to enforce. Rather than the humanitarian philanthropy with which the EU so duplicitously pretends to characterise its border regime (Lavenex 2018), its anti-smuggling – and, at its core, anti-refugee – policies have become the legal framework on which a billion-dollar industry of refugee smugglers and border enforcers (e.g., Frontex) has thrived (Lyman and Smale 2015; Spijkerboer 2018). This is the third paradox of the paper border regime: the EU has decided – against its own principles and international obligations – to voluntarily create a border system that ensures only more “illegality”, corruption and human insecurity. Thus, this paper border should be credited with turning the routes to seek asylum in the EU – a supposedly safe destination – into a grim and perilous survival of the fittest. Since this is precisely the kind of distress that refugee law is intended to prevent, the so-called “migration crisis” of 2015 in the EU would be better described as a “refugee-protection crisis”. By erecting such an insurmountable paper border, the EU has advocated a politics of death, a necropolitics (Mbembé 2003). Below, Figure 4.2 provides a chronology that shows the rise of the deadly EU’s external border discussed so far.

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the , 2016, author. The rise of the rise of The Figure 4.2. deadly EU border. Source: Source: deadly EU border. https://visionscarto.net translated from French by from French by translated

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Translated into Derrida’s conceptualisation of autoimmunity, I argue that the reflex of power that has manifested itself as the common paper b/ordering—intended to protect the EU from unwanted foreigners—has been predicated on an inexistent apocalyptic threat of invisible and anonymous non-EUropeans. Moreo- ver, the development of the EU Commission’s paper-border regime has gone hand in hand with the promotion of a global “war against undocumented migrants and their smugglers” – who much of the EUropean press and opportunistic politicians wantonly associate with all sorts of crime and moral decay (Albahari 2018; Burrell and Hörschelmann 2019; Trilling 2019). The consequences of this rhetoric, which imitates the versatile vagueness of the global “war on terror”, have been considerable: it has strengthened and legitimised cultural prejudices against exceptional- ised migrants; it has simultaneously helped to normalise and popularise a stream of EUrosceptic illiberal political movements that are trying to erect themselves into the preservers of Europe’s nativist culture and it has led to a politics of death that, shamefully, is presented as the regrettable but unavoidable collateral damage that EUrope has to accept in order to preserve the “enlightened” European civilisation that the EU has essentialised. The incomprehension lies in the EU’s inability to comprehend the suicidal paradox in which it has trapped itself: in a short period – since the Schengen Agreement was signed in 1985—the EU’s has triggered a border politics of autoimmunisation that, in an inexorably self-defeating manner, aims at shielding EUrope’s humanist heritage by surrounding it with an ever more anti- humanist border regime.

The Iron Border

The second b/ordering—or immunisation—strategy of the EU that I wish to address is the construction of all kinds of material deterrences that have been erected over time along the external borders of the EU and which I metonymically classify as “the iron border”. This border complements the ‘gate at a distance’ of the paper border, it encompasses all land border fences, walls and barbed wire; typically guarded by stern-looking men and women in uniform who are equipped with guns, handcuffs, surveillance vehicles and sophisticated techno-military gear, on- the-spot passport controls at airports, trains and highways; as well as surveillance patrols along the EU’s maritime borders tasked with stopping refugees from either reaching the EU or remaining in it (Gualda and Rebollo 2016; Minca and De Rijke 2017; van Houtum 2010). In contrast to the remote-controlled legal procedures of the largely invisible paper border, an important aspect of the iron border around and within the EU’s territory is its purposeful visibility to the public eye. It suffices to google “fences” and “EU” (or anything akin) to come across thousands of pictures featuring the heterogenous materiality of the iron border – such as the iconic fences separating the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla from Africa; as well as the recently built fences along the Hungarian-Serbian border. To a large extent, the

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iron borders should be understood as a conscious performative power play, a geopolitical spectacle conceived as a public-relations’ strategy intended to project safety and security for domestic electoral consumption by manufacturing a potent infrastructure that portray the government as being “tough on unwanted outsiders”. The straightforward message of such political theatre is that, the government is protecting its people by keeping a close eye and a clenched fist on anyone trying to enter the country by irregular means. More than a line of control alone, it has also proved itself as a camera-happy and televised spectacle, a performative mise en scène, that employs an unwritten but foreseeable script where the barbed wire epitomizes the division between EUrope and a threatening world of incompatible and undesirable strangers and that implicitly casts unsuspecting migrants into the threatening stereotypes on which xenophobic EUrosceptics feed.

This intended visibility and attention-grabbing character of the iron border only intensified with the outbreak of the refugee-protection crisis in the summer of 2015. This included the sensationalised arrivals of undocumented immigrants disembarking from their fragile dinghies, trying to climb fences or cutting their way through barbed wire. Although governments and migration scholars estimate that the number of the largely invisible visa-overstayers – who entered regularly – is at least as large as the number of undocumented migrants, migrants trespassing the EU’s physical outer borders have received much more media as well as political attention. Undoubtedly, what has triggered this sense of crisis is that populist politicians have relied on these images to frame undocumented migration as an invasion and a threat to sovereignty. Ultimately, this narrative constitutes the rationale of the EUropean far-right’s core ethno-exclusionary demand: to call for harder borders (Metz 1982; Trilling 2019). The political sway of these border aesthetics should not be underestimated: as a response to this ‘spectacular’ theatre of trespassing undocumented migrants, the EU has only expanded its iron border control (DeGenova 2017). It is estimated that the EU has constructed almost 1,000 km of iron borders in the last two decades: more than six times the total length of the Berlin Wall (Ruiz Benedicto and Brunet 2018) – to which the digital surveillance systems at sea and on land should be added. Not surprisingly perhaps, though still ironically, the costs of physical border controls have gone up at about the same speed and in a similar proportion as the turnover in the smuggling industry (The Migrants’ Files 2014). Since its foundation in 2004, Frontex’s budget has exponen- tially increased – from 6.2 million in 2004 to 281 million in 2017 – and it is still expected to rise up to 322 million in 2020, making it one of the best funded agencies in the EU (Grün 2018). Between 2000 and 2014 (one year before the refugee-protection crisis), the EU had already spent almost 13 billion euros on border control. This has conferred the EU the dishonourable distinction of having one of the cost- liest border regimes on the planet. And as long as the EU’s visa-based paper border keeps working as the main manufacturer of irregular migrants, one should expect the iron border and its costs to keep rising too.

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In the meantime, the EU has struck a growing number of bilateral deals with neighbouring countries in order to stop undocumented migrants. The EU is b/ordering contiguous non-EU autocracies as its immigration enforcers in exchange for large sums of money – raising the costs of external border controls and boosting the border security industry even further (see Figure 4.3). This neo-colonial outsourcing of migration control to poorer countries, warlords and dictators is factu- ally stretching the EU’s own iron border far beyond its EU’s actual physical border (Lahav 1998; Nye 2004; Lavenex 2006; Rijpma and Cremona 2007; Levy 2010; Fer- rer-Gallardo and Van Houtum 2014; Zaiotti 2016; Carrera et al. 2018). This amounts to the same kind of “dictator-empowering policy” that the EU not so long ago decried as dirty and shameful when Berlusconi and Gaddafi struck a deal in 2010 that committed Libya to stop migrants in return for money (Bialasiewicz 2012). Today, the EU pact with Libya has given rise to a full-fledged slave market run by cold- blooded human traffickers who, incentivated by the EU’s crackdown on irregular migration and the resulting business downturn of would-be profitable passengers, are now auctioning economic migrants and refugees as slaves (Asongu and Ko- dila-Tedika 2018).

How times have changed. Only one self-manufactured “crisis” later, the EU is hiring neighbouring autocratic regimes through incentives that amount to outright bribes (Malik 2019; Verhofstadt 2018). Today the EU supports autocratic regimes even though they have no qualms about violating the rights of asylum seekers by violating the legal prohibition of non-refoulement – a touchstone of refugee law – in order to keep undocumented migrants at bay (DW 2019). The infamous deal between the EU and Erdogan’s despotic administration is a case in point: Tur- key is cutting short the journeys of asylum seekers’ travelling towards the EU in return for 6 billion euros and the (conditional) promise of visa-free access to the EU for its citizens.

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ing Fortress Europe. ing Fortress Figure 4.3. Source: Akkerman (2018).

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The autoimmunisation of this ‘iron’ b/ordering strategy lies in the incongruence between the EU’s desire to gain more control over its borders in order to safeguard its democracy, human rights, the rule of law and diplomatic power of attraction; and its choice to accomplish this by employing the military force of autocratic and unsafe neighbouring countries whose lack of respect for the EU’s fundamental principles allows them to conduct the kind of politics antithetical to EU values. By outsourcing its border policies to smugglers and repressive regimes with the aim of tightening its grip on migration, the EU is, incomprehensibly: (1) increasingly losing sight and control over its ever expanding, ever more shadowy and ever more distant physical border, thus undermining its own sovereignty and making itself liable to blackmail and, at least, morally complicit in the mistreatment of refugees by autocratic regimes elsewhere; (2) widening the global mobility divide between those who can travel and those who cannot while creating more human misery, criminal economic activities and political instability in these countries – therefore paradoxically feeding their populations’ desire to migrate (Malik 2019); (3) hollowing out the EU’s core values and contributing to legitimise the discourse on which illiberal Eurosceptic populists draw their strength (van Houtum and Bueno Lacy 2017). The result is a tunnel vision which keeps the EU obsessed with stopping undocumented migrants, literally at all costs, even though the sensationalised chaos and manufactured ‘insecurisation’ at its borders is undermining solidarity with refugees while strengthening the hand of populist EUrosceptics, who exploit the threat inherent to the aesthetics of the iron border to push their demands for even higher walls—an ever more vicious border regime (see Figure 4.4).

Figure 4.4. The vicious cycle of EU’s autoimmune b/ordering regime. Source: author.

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The Border Camp

The third immunising b/ordering pillar of the EU’s border architecture that I identify here is the post-border or what I refer to here as “the border camp”. Undocu- mented migrants who have the fortune to make it across the paper and iron borders must endure yet another procedure of exclusion upon arrival to the EU’s territory in the form of the concentrated segregation of the migrant camp (see Figure 4.5 for an inventory of camps in Europe and further afield by Migeurop). This se- cluded reception, in which migrants have to wait until their case is ‘processed’, coincides with what Derrida called “hostipitality” (2000): a portmanteau of hostility and hospitality. Like the iron border, this policy aims to exceptionalise migrants in space and its political significance and implications have attracted vast and growing critical attention from political philosophers, political geographers and scholars from akin disciplines (Agamben 1997, 2002, 2005; McElvaney 2018; Minca 2005; Vaughan-Williams 2009).

In the case of the spatially segregated border camp, the Derridean reflex of power aims at the ‘abnormalisation’, invisibilisation and exceptionalisation of undocumented migrants from visa-obliged countries. These waiting camps corre- spond to what Vaughan-Williams (2015) described as “zoo-like spaces”: refugees are caged yet exposed to the camera at all times, a spatial confirmation of their social undesirability and an animal-like representation that, I argue, contributes to consolidate the already abundant disdain or plain fear for refugees in the EU. The segregation and maltreatment of people who share a bodily resemblance or cultural affinity with already-discriminated ethnic minorities in EUropean societies send a toxic message to the EU’s own citizens: it tells them that the fundamental rights to which the EU adheres do not fully apply to undocumented migrants (Virdee and McGeever 2018). By legitimising such discrimination, the immunisation tactic of the border camp fails to ensure the protection of law and order that it was designed to safeguard and, instead, emboldens populist leaders and political movements in the EU who would like to rely on the same discriminating discourse and excluding practices not only against increasingly vilified migrants but also against migrant-looking citizens and antagonistic political minorities (Bueno Lacy and Van Houtum 2013; van Houtum and Bueno Lacy 2017; Vasilopoulou 2009).

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) : ) : The The (2016 abroad. y3hmyhsg Migreurop Migreurop Figure 4.5. Figure encampment in EUrope and near Source: https://tinyurl.com/

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Certainly, there is a considerable number of people willing to rescue refugees from the claws of the sea or help them find their way into EUropean societies. However, their humanitarian deeds are by and large offset by the calculated tactics of separating specific people from blacklisted countries and warehousing them under marginalised conditions while making them dependent on the government – for both their livelihood and freedom. This amounts, in Derrida’s terms, to an incom- prehensible deterrence politics that is counterproductive for both the (mental) health and integration of migrants as well as for solidarity across the EU (Borg- Barthet and Lyons 2016; Fernández 2014; HRW 2012; Kingsley 2018; Leape 2018; Mountz and Kempin 2014; Smith 2018; van Houtum 2010). To make things worse, some states like Hungary, Poland and Slovakia have even expressly stated that they are willing to host only Christian refugees (Bastide 1968; Bonnett 1998; Cienski 2017; Reuters 2015). Moreover, asking a country like Greece to be solidary with the rest of the EU – by accepting what is perceived as “the burden” of man- aging the arrival of asylum seekers given its position at the EU’s external border – when the EU’s lack of solidarity turned Greece into the epitome of devastating austerity is bound to nurture resentment against the EU and undocumented migrants alike (Howden and Fotiadis 2017; Smith 2018; Theodossopoulos 2016). Given the cold shoulder that other EU Member States showed it when it needed their solidarity the most, Greece does not seem very receptive to the EU’s calls to improve the inhumane conditions of detained migrants languishing on its Medi- terranean islands. What is more, Greece has been accused of misusing EU funds meant for the critically overcrowded and underfunded refugee camps in its Ae- gean islands and its new government is now busy with both the senseless destruction of refugee-support networks like Exarcheia as well as with the introduction of laws that allow it to deport thousands of asylum seekers without concern for their rights under international refugee law (King and Manoussaki-Adamopoulou 2019; Smith 2018, 2019). This aggravating animosity of the Greek state towards the EU and undocumented migrants is critical to understand how the EU’s vicious autoimmune cycle is being thrown into ceaseless spins by both its internal austerity policies and its external border regime.

In this regard, it is worthwhile to reflect on the question that Derrida posed in his deconstruction of geopolitical autoimmunity: “Can’t ‘letting die,’ ‘not want- ing to know that one is letting others die’[…] also be part of a ‘more or less’ conscious and deliberate terrorist strategy?” (Derrida 2003, 108). Derrida’s reflection poses a harrowing question when applied to the EU’s border management: is it less cruel because it repels potential refugees at a distance by preventing them from even legally applying to migrate to the EU? Is it less violent because it premeditat- edly builds obstacles that preclude asylum seekers from safely entering the EU and purposefully creates ever more inhumane hosting conditions once they have reached what they imagined would be a safe territory? Perhaps, by pushing (in- voluntary) migrants – many of whom have sought the EU’s protection – into a

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hopelessness so intolerable that they prefer to find comfort in their own deaths, the suicidal autoimmunity of the EU’s b/ordering strategy is coming to an abhorrent full circle.

Towards a Responsible and Sustainable Border Policy

“For the first time in 30 years, I really believe that the European project can fail” (Lefranc 2016). This alarming message came from no less than the vice-president of the European Commission, Frans Timmermans. The way he sees it, the recent “refugee crisis” has strained solidarity across the EU to the brink of rupture. The continuation of this crisis, Timmermans frets, poses an existential threat to the project of European integration.

Employing Derrida’s notion of autoimmunity, I have argued that to a large extent the EU has been entrenching itself into this dead end. Not only has the EU been unable to find support for a comprehensive and responsible migration and asylum system across its supranational community but the EU is increasingly taking the self-destructive road towards dirty deals, multiplying its human rights violations and pushing back legitimate asylum seekers to countries where they might die or suffer severe harm. The politicisation of migration and the coinciding adoption of extreme policies by establishment parties under the pretence of “normality” as a strategy to stop the rise of extreme far-right anti-immigrant parties has by now – one would think – proven to be severely counterproductive (Mudde 2019a, 2019b; van Houtum and Bueno Lacy 2017). What is more, since the structural causes that keep pushing people away from their countries – e.g., inequality and poverty, armed conflict and widespread violence, droughts and agricultural collapse, overfishing and the depletion of ancestral fisheries, and overall livelihood-destroying global ecocide – are unlikely to be addressed anytime soon and the worsening effects of climate change are surely going to keep magnifying them (Franzen 2019; Nordås and Gleditsch 2007), the question the EU should be asking is not whether the next crisis of solidarity and its liberal democratic spirit will come, but rather when.

To break this self-defeating political path, the EU urgently needs a drastic revision of both its violent b/ordering regime and the essentialist EUropean discourses that support it (Jones 2017). To this end—and as a conclusion—I offer three different paths that the EU could take: normalisation, legalisation and equalisation (van Houtum 2015; van Houtum and Lucassen 2016). To begin with, the reforms would require, at the very least, a normalisation of people migrating in today’s globalizing world. At the same time, normalisation also implies to make informed policy decisions based on scientific assessments rather than imaginaries and narratives. The dominant pattern of world migration shows that migration is still very much the exception rather than the rule: 97% of the world’s population is not a

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migrant. Refugees represent less than 1% of the world’s population and more than 85% of all refugees on the planet are hosted outside the EU – mostly in less affluent countries (De Haas 2016; UNHCR 2019). Moreover, the EU’s neighbouring countries are hosting a higher number of refugees than the EU – in absolute and relative terms. Although this does not mean that hosting an increasing number of refugees is not difficult for EUropean societies, what it does mean, however, is that such a challenge does not warrant either a transfer of responsibility to dictatorships or the buffer-politics of “dirty deals” that the EU has been undertaking. Rather, this geopolitical challenge requires cooperation among EU Member States. The panic- stricken depiction of an “invasion” of migrants coming to the EU is not only scientifically unfounded, but also dehumanising and contemptible. It is a worrying sign of our times to realise that all kinds of phobic metaphors to refer to undocumented migrants have become normalised in the EU over the last decade. Think of the threatening descriptions and (cartographic) imaginaries of undocumented migrants conjured up by hydraulic metaphors such as flows, streams, floods and waves; zoological metaphors evoking swarms, flocks, cockroaches and insects; as well as bellicose and criminalising metaphors that bring to mind invasions, armies, illegal and criminal activities, hordes and fighting (see Mamadouh 2012; van Hou- tum 2010; van Houtum and Bueno Lacy 2019). When dehumanisation is normalised and unchallenged, physical violence and untamed extremism become ever more likely.

Apart from normalisation, meaningful reform would also require legalisation: the creation of more legal channels for migrants to safely travel to EU and which would allow for the circularity of migration (Clemens, Dempster, and Gough 2019). This specific path also requires the EU to crack down on the boogey- man represented by “the economic migrant”. The fear of economic migrants reveals perhaps one of the biggest flaws of Schengen: the criminalisation of people whose biggest threat to the prosperity of the EU polity seems to be their ambition to work in order to earn the kind of living standards that their countries of origin cannot offer them. It is a testament to the extreme nature of our times that such unremarkably liberal ideas as respect for those who seek fairness of opportunities as well as the right to work are today seen as extreme proposals for a project, like the EU, that prides itself on its universal rights, rule of law and market economies (Holmes 1993, 3–4). Not only is creating more legal channels morally just but it would be in the interest of everyone: migrants themselves, their countries of origin – where they send much of the money they earn – and, finally, also in the interest of the EU’s economy, particularly regarding the preservation of its welfare states. The legalisation of migratory movements could not only drastically disrupt the illicit chaos and high death rates at the gates of the EU but it would also protect the EU’s own rule of law by disrupting the supply-and-demand chains on which smugglers, slave traders and even violent extremists depend. Such legalisation would also buttress the welfare state by tapering off the informal sector in the

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economy and allowing migrants to stand again on their own feet; and by setting clear rules for migrants to acquire citizenship and social security rights, depending on their years of participation. With legalisation I also mean abiding by the EU’s own rule of law: although all EU Member States have signed the Refugee Conven- tion and its protocols – which means that their pledge to aid people escaping their countries is a commitment of their own volition – their increasingly vicious border regime is vigorously hollowing out the protections that these international agreements afford to asylum seekers. Trampling upon such international obligations stands in direct contradiction with the EU’s own rule of law and is weakening its diplomatic power while legitimising xenophobia and the arbitrary abuse of power.

Finally, a comprehensive reform of the EU’s border regime should encom- pass an equalisation – i.e., an equal distribution of refugees across the EU and among the neighbouring regions on the basis of shared responsibility and resettlement; as well as an immediate end to the concentrated-segregation politics of the EU’s current refugee camps. In the longer run, an equalisation agenda would imply a wider series of tasks that would bring the EU outside its perceptual isolation by assuming itself as the significant global actor it is. This would imply the EU’s pursuit of fair trade, a global green deal and the peaceful resolution of conflicts – at least around its immediate neighbourhood or, at the very least, in the regions and countries that are the sources of its largest refugee populations. Furthermore, the EU should rely on international institutions to support global agreements like the Global Compact for Migration. Ultimately, such equalisation agenda would also need to take into account what is perhaps the most important measure: a drastic revision of the discriminatory visa regime in order to root out the nativist principle built into the design of the EU’s political community. Of the three borders discussed in this article, this paper border is arguably the most resilient root of the EU’s refugee-protection crisis: the autoimmune policies devised to address this form of human mobility have not only magnified the challenge posed by an increased number of asylum seekers in the EU but they have also exacerbated other geopolitical problems to the point that this self-made migration crisis has become the most threatening existential EU has ever faced. As I have argued, the visa regime of which the EU is a chief advocate has created a global caste system of elite travellers whose mobility is welcomed and people born in the wrong place whose mobility is banned, criminalised and deterred to the extent that they could die not only trying but also even after they have arrived. The deliberate intention to keep the less affluent and religiously different trapped at a distance simply because they were born there is an act of discrimination that is at odds with the equal moral worth of human beings that the EU is supposed to exalt and defend. Surely, the EU’s discriminatory visa system, in spite of being hardly a hundred years old, may today seem normal and unbreakable, but so did once the trans-Atlantlic slave trade, South Africa’s apartheid and the divine right of kings.

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The discussion on how to achieve a responsible, sustainable and just border policy surely does not end here. What is worrying, however, is that, for now, the EU seems poised to keep medicating itself with its increasingly auto-toxic reme- dies. This policy, I argue, should not be regarded as either a momentary lapsus but, rather, as a train wreck happening in slow motion. Since the EU closed its external closure of the borders with the introduction of Schengen, its political community has followed an ever-deadlier path of discriminatory global self-enclosure that excludes a large portion of the world. Today, the EU is experiencing the limits of this border model: the current politicisation of migration and the measures to curtail the movement of immigrants is shaking the EU to its foundations, endan- gering the openness of Schengen, the non-discrimination principle, the protection of human rights, solidarity and the rule of law, the liberal-democratic principles of the Copenhagen criteria and, ultimately, the very ethos of the EU. Barring a drastic change in the EU’s course, the death and suicide of undocumented migrants and their children—which I denounced at the outset of this article—will not stop. What is more foreboding, perhaps, is that the EU—at least as we know it—might share their fate. Perhaps Frans Timmermans is right: for the first time, the project of Eu- ropean integration that has brought historically unseen prosperity and peace to Europe seems like it might fail. Ironically, it might fail because the European Union has become its own most formidable threat.

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CHAPTER 5 Radicalisation

The Political Extreme as the New Normal The cases of Brexit, the French state of emergency and Dutch Islamophobia

This chapter explores how the EU’s autoimmune affliction has brought the scourge of the EU’s increasingly violent geopolitics beyond and along its borders into the EU’s domestic politics. Growing xenophobia, Islamist and white-supremacist terrorism, rising inequality and the overall normalisation of extreme politics have come to the fore not in spite of the EU’s geopolitics but as their consequence. In their desperate attempts to either cling to power or put a break to the rise of extreme political parties, establishment parties across Europe have been mimicking their politics. However, instead of putting a halt to their popularity, this strategy has increasingly legitimised the very political forces they have tried to hamper. In order to preserve ‘normality’, the EU and its establishment parties have increasingly normalised it.

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Van Houtum H and Bueno Lacy R (2017) The political extreme as the new normal: the cases of Brexit, the French state of emergency and Dutch Islamophobia. Fennia 195(1): 85–101. DOI: 10.11143/fennia.64568

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CHAPTER 5

The Political Extreme as the New Normal: the cases of Brexit, the French State of Emergency

and Dutch Islamophobia

ABSTRACT

In this chapter I carry out a geopolitical analysis of the turbulent breeze driving the EU into uncharted extremes. To do this I zoom in on three cases that I deem both a response to political extremism and a source of political extremism in themselves: France’s state of emergency, Brexit and the pyrrhic victory over the far-right in the Dutch elections of 2017. My analysis suggests that even though the political forces behind these events have praised their policies or electoral victories as bulwarks to keep extremism in check, the sort of extremism that they try to keep at bay is not as worrying as the counter-productive realpolitik of the traditional establishment they represent. By surreptitiously adopting precisely the kind of extremist political preferences that they claim to set themselves against, these politics show how the establishment in the EU is normalising the extreme geopolitics of exclusion that are structurally undermining the very principles of rule of law, liberal democracy and overall openness on which the EU is based. The result: what used to be easily dismissed as irrational or evil has become the everyday normal. The extremism we so much fear has become the new normality.

Never react to an evil in such a way as to augment it.

–Simone Weil

Introduction

spectre that seemed buried under the ruins of the Second World War has returned to haunt Europe once again: the spectre of fear itself. Across the EU, a bulging concert of political forces is normalising a politics of fear while ever more assertively promoting an es- A sentially monocultural, unapologetically dominant and nationally homogeneous community which they imagine Europe once was. They find their inspiration in the purity of a Europe they construct with cherry- picked distortions of an idealized past–whose troubling chapters have been

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erased or simply omitted. These purified imaginations are then contrasted with the threatening representations of besiegement, infiltration, pollution and extermination on which their message draws its political force: doctored images, exaggerated statistics and panic-striking narratives portraying the EU as being overrun by ‘terrorist fighters’, ‘fortune seekers’ and other unassimilable immigrants. Call it ‘great-again politics’: this anachronic glorification of a racially homogenous past traces a more or less implicit connection between Eu- rope’s recent multicultural societies and whatever challenges the EU is facing today–immigration, terrorism, asylum, climate change, economic and political instability, military threats and a reorganization of power around the world. Great-again politics is wishing a painful past away while focusing on its good things, the equivalent of narrative morphine injected into history: ‘We used to be great. Never mind the blemishes. Focus on the big picture: we were great, let’s focus on that.’ The implications of these evocations are of course grim: they conjure up a lost glory that was predicated on the subjugation of what were considered lesser races and which not only led to the brutality of imperialism, colonization and slavery but whose culmination was the self-inflicted civilisational suicide of the Second World War and its Holocaust (Bauman 1989). Although on this paper I focus on the EU, this great-again politics is shaping politics not only here but also in places like Trump’s US, Putin’s Russia and Erdogan’s Turkey. Overtones of imperial high-handedness, racialized colonial hierarchization and nationalist hubris that seemed confined to the safe boundaries of history books are being tootled again by European politicians, not to warn us from the past but as nostalgia for a future worth striving for.

Unthinkable some years ago, the policies and rhetoric of great-again political parties have become ever more extreme across the EU: the dog-whistle anti-Semitism of the French National Front;1 the police harassment of Muslims normalised by France’s prolonged state of emergency (Safdar 2016); the virulent Islamophobia of the Dutch Freedom Party of Wilders (Darroch 2016); the stark racism behind eastern European Member States’ refusals to admit non- Christian asylum seekers (BBC 2015; Cienski 2017); the fanatic isolationism and delusional imperial nostalgia evoked by the rhetoric and policies favoured by British Eurosceptics—who want to cut ties with the EU against the wishes of half their population and defying the judgement of an army of experts warning against it (Olusonga 2017); the immoral bordering regime of the EU, dependant on refugee deals that outsource EU’s international responsibilities to regimes known for their poor record on human rights (Van Houtum 2010). Examples of extreme and isolationist politics abound and are quickly multiplying.

1 Although formally the National Front has renounced the overt anti-Semitism of Jean-Marie Le Pen, telling disclosures by Marine Le Pen suggest that this is a mere electoral convenience and politically-correct formality (McAuley 2017).

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Even as they keep failing to get hold of public office in most EU Member States, these phobic voices have been gaining influence in the political debate and policymaking across the EU for over a decade. A crucial component of their success—and this is the central argument of my paper—is that the establishment of traditional political parties and coalitions that has been preventing xenophobes from seizing power, either through strategic electoral alliances or by refusing to enter into coalitions with them, has unwittingly become a valuable convenience in their political strategy and propaganda. First, by increasingly normalising and co-opting their phobic policies, a significant portion of establishment parties have not only allowed populists to effectively set the agenda but they have also shielded them from the accountability of its implementation and consequences. Second, the xenophobes’ detachment from government has allowed them to keep branding themselves as political outsiders challenging the establishment.2 The populists’ consistent underdog status has rendered credibility to the conspiratorial nature of their rhetoric: they fancy themselves as champions of a free speech stifled by political correctness, speaking out for an aggravated ‘silent majority’—‘the people’—whose political preferences the so-called establishment keeps betraying. Ironically, the establishment that is considered the best hope against their radical politics has been able to keep xenophobes at bay not by opposing but by mimicking their rhetoric and by implementing their preferred policies.3

And so, I argue that the most extreme political geographies threatening the EU are not found in the menacing openness denounced by phobic Eu- rosceptics or in the lands and cultures beyond the borders of either the EU or its Member States. Rather, I locate the most extreme geographies threatening the EU within Europe itself and, particularly, within the politicians who, having the power to counter the imaginations fuelling Euroscepticism, nationalism and xenophobia, have been normalising, internalising and hence further enabling them instead. They do not reduce the fear in society, but cap- italise on it and further legitimise it under the pretence of ‘normality’.4

2 Geert Wilders has been a representative in the Dutch Lower Chamber since 1998 and Marine Le Pen grew up involved in the politics of her father’s party (of which she has been an active member since 1986). 3 For an insight into this phenomenon, which can been categorized under the umbrella term of Euroscepticism, see Brack and Startin (2015). 4 To illustrate, the prime-minister of the Netherlands, Mark Rutte, gave an interview in which he stated that normality should be the new norm. Later, in the election campaign of 2017, his party VVD, focused its entire campaign on normality. Their main slogan was: Doe. Nor- mal. VVD (‘’Act. Normal. VVD’’). Likewise, in his plea for a Brexit, Nigel Farage repeatedly argued that Britain should be a normal, independent country again. Similarly, in France, after the terror attacks in 2016, the state of emergency, which is an exceptional measure, has become the new normal.

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This is what Hannah Arendt referred to as ‘the banality of evil’: humanity’s greatest tragedies are patiently shaped neither mainly nor mostly by grandiose displays of monstrosity but by a thousand everyday rituals of mundane acqui- escence with evil (Arendt 1963). Although the recent victories of seemingly moderate parties in the Netherlands and France have been hailed for putting a stop to the ominous romanticism of Eurosceptic nationalists, it would not be prudent to get too complacent. If their victories have sparked so much relief is only because they have averted a relapse into the catastrophical politics from whose catharsis today’s European prosperity first arose. Hence, it would not be good judgement to take lightly the foreboding sight of the French National Front—an anti-Semitic, Holocaust-denialist political party with links to the Nazi collaborationist Vichy regime—and the Dutch Freedom Party—which has called for the indiscriminate expulsion of a racially-defined social group— competing on equal footing with centrist parties. There is little to celebrate in seeing the politics of racial authoritarianism and nationalist bigotry competing as acceptable contenders against the politics of liberal democracy and openness. It is worth keeping in mind that even though the French National Front and the Dutch Freedom party lost the elections, their respective electoral shares have never been bulkier and, most disturbingly, their formerly ostracised message has been rehabilitated: previously relegated to the fringes of the political spectrum, today it has become an acceptable political alternative.

In what follows, I will first provide a discussion on the meaning of “extreme political geographies”. And I will discuss the tensions between normality and liberal democracy. Then I will offer an analysis of three case studies in three western European countries that show how the European establishment’s policies and normalisation responses reinforce the very extreme politics they attempt to tame. My first case is France. The Paris attacks of November 2015 heightened the fear of insecurity in France and the EU, yet the French state responded with a state of emergency that has opened the door to a more systematic and widespread insecurity perpetrated not by terrorist attacks but by abuses of the state. My second case is Brexit. Even though the UK’s departure from the EU was motivated by both an anxiety over loss of prosperity and by a nostalgia for former imperial greatness, the prospect of Brexit now threatens to leave the UK poorer, perhaps disintegrated, more isolated and geopolitically less relevant. My last case is the ‘normality politics’ in the Netherlands. The recent victory of the Dutch People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) over the Eurosceptic and Islamophobic Freedom Party (PVV) in the Dutch general elections of March 2017 was praised as timely obstruction to the rise of xenophobic Eurosceptics. And yet, the VVD’s victory was a pyrrhic one: it was achieved by promoting a platform that embraces the xenophobia of the party it succeeded in keeping away from power.

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The autocratic construction of normality

Who defines what is ‘normal’, on which grounds and with which legitimacy? In a democracy, this is and should be an open question. For, unlike laws, which are enforced by the state, the enforcement of norms derives from an (inter)subjective internalisation of their inherent value. What is considered to be the norm and thus ‘normal’ is crucially dependent on the notion of normality and thus on the incompatibility against which normality necessarily defines itself. Making pleas for normality presupposes an assumption about the opposites that define it: the extremes of abnormality. To be sure, there are very basic, commonsensical, perhaps universal norms whose intrinsic value could hardly be disputed regardless of context, such as those promoting good will or preventing harm among people. Yet, we should hear some alarms ringing whenever governments of liberal democracies start to advocate normality. Unlike liberal laws, which derive from principles that assume universal preference— or example, murder is illegal because presumably pretty much everyone de- tests getting killed and freedom of speech is enshrined as a sacrosanct principle because presumably everyone enjoys speaking up their mind—, norms stem not from an assumption of universal individual preference—the main referent of liberal philosophies—but are the expression of collective convention: the tyranny of the majority that liberal democracies try to prevent. This is where the tension between pleas for normality and liberal values lies: collective conventions of what is normal have been traditionally used to oppress rather than to emancipate the individual. Accusations of abnormality have been the basis to discriminate against minorities, disadvantaged groups and political opponents. Hence, whenever the government of a liberal democracy starts making appeals to normality, it might be subverting the very principles of its political regime by asking people to conform not to laws drafted through mechanisms that ensure the respect for minorities and political liberties and which ultimately have an abstract best interest in mind but to the subjective social expectations of either an oppressive majority or an authoritarian minority. Such a government might be dismissing legality in favour of the tyranny of tradition such as religion or Romantic political myths like nationalism. For a society to define and enforce ‘normality’ is hence principally illiberal. Taken to its extreme consequence, absolute normality presupposes absolute subjugation: only totalitarian dictatorships can enforce a complete homogenization of preferences, thoughts and actions or, in other words: a total normality.5

One could anticipate this claim (i.e., that total normality leads to totali- tarianism) to be dismissed as a paranoid exaggeration. Surely, a critical mind could plausibly counter, the appeals to normality from today’s moderate

5 Arrow’s impossibility theorem postulates that individual preferences can be all the same only when they are enforced by a dictator to be so

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political parties across the EU need to be contextualized as a reaction against the resurrection of national socialism across the EU.6 Thus, appeals to normality within the EU’s current geopolitical context are not aimed at a homogenization of preferences or at the promotion of an illiberal autocracy but rather the opposite: a return to the moderation and liberal values that national socialist parties shun. This counterargument would be persuasive if the rhetoric and policy-making did not contradict it so blatantly. Although establishment parties across the EU are making appeals to normality while seemingly rejecting populist rhetoric, a closer look into their words and policies reveals that they are not rejecting the national socialist approach but merely sugar-coating it, making it politically acceptable, morally digestible or, in other words: normal. Against this deceitfully reassuring aspiration for normality, it is however worth remembering that throughout most of history those who have been considered abnormal are precisely those whose protection liberal democracies consider their most ennobling historical triumphs: the formerly stigmatized as ‘sexually deviant’, ‘racially corrupted’, ‘morally aberrant’ (Foucault 1965). That is why it should awaken some suspicion to see self-styled moderate and liberal political parties across the EU making pleas for normality, when it is precisely in the defence of diversity—and what is diversity if not a collection of abnor- malities?—that liberal democracies have philosophically and historically cut their teeth (e.g. Mill 1859: 89). This is one of the most defining characteristics of the post-war project of European integration: a cautiousness about the slippery slope of allowing power to define what is normal and what is not on the basis of phenotypical and cultural ideals. Hence, the ‘normalisation-of-the-extreme’ agenda that we are seeing in today’s EU politics is arguably no less than perhaps the most self-harming political movement since the Second World War. To illustrate my argument, in the following sections I will show the hidden radicalisation behind three cases that exemplify “the normalisation of the extreme”—in France, the UK and the Netherlands. The French state of emergency as the new normal

The EU’s political centre has shifted so sharply to an illiberal right that seeing a socialist president, Francois Hollande, implementing policies otherwise evocative of far-right right political inclinations, was considered an appropriate response to the terrorist attacks on Paris in November of 2015. The French president ordered the bombing of Raqqa, a city four thousand kilometres away, a state of emergency to justify searches without warrants, and a

6 Although the nomenclature for national socialist parties across the EU has preferred the term ‘populist’, ‘Eurosceptic’ or ‘nationalist’, calling them national socialist is far from a hysteria. To- day’s insurgent parties across the EU are reviving the nationalist symbols of ethnic and racial homogeneity while promoting socialist policies as the privileges of ‘the people’ contained within their racialized boundaries.

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reinstatement of France’s border controls. All this to avenge crimes committed by mostly French and Belgian gunmen. We should be alarmed to see such illogical measures finding widespread support and unquestioned imitation across the EU (Der Spiegel 2015; Sparrow 2015), for the geopolitical reasoning that justifies them is morally nefarious: the policies it advocates are dislocated from the geography that caused the problems they are intended to address.

The significance of the French response is that it was by no means atypi- cal. Like France, the EU as a whole has been basically following France in its response to terrorist crimes. The mechanism of this response typically follows the following faulty yet recurrent reasoning. First, the attack is grounded on an essential ideological and cultural incompatibility: as an assault on ‘our values’ and ‘us’, which in turn leads to the perception of terrorists not merely as individual criminals or as militants of a terrorist network but rather as the undifferentiated members of a civilisational clash (Huntington 1996). The hardening of the borders between ‘us’ and ‘the terrorists’, who are assumed to be ‘Muslims’ in terms of both identity and motivations, in turn justifies the scapegoating and harassment of the already stigmatized Muslim minority in the EU (Roy 2006, 2017). Second, although most terrorists are the EU’s own citizens, the response aims at avenging victims at home by carrying out military attacks that inevitably end murdering more innocent people in the Middle East—for there is no such thing as “surgical bombings” —and sow- ing the suffering that legitimises the grievances fuelling Islamist terrorist attacks against the EU (Bueno Lacy et al. 2016). Third, the biopolitical response of the EU implies tightening its borders through a harder border management. This border reconfiguration is premised upon the structural breach of the EU’s international obligations to protect refugees and thus threatens the very foundations of the EU by promoting policies that run against both the humanism that the EU is supposed to take its inspiration from and the liberal principles it is supposed to champion. In the discourse about the causes of Islamist terrorism in France or the EU, there is an absolute lack of awareness about France or the EU’s own responsibility. To the contrary: EU Member States together with the US are targeting Muslims, closing their borders to refugees and bombing ISIS in Syria as if that would put an end to what is at least partially a secular home-grown threat.

A telling contrast is found in the way the EU deals with extreme-nationalist terrorists, whose crimes are not only treated as individual crimes rather than as structural threats but whose ideologies find in the xenophobic and autocratic discourses and policies of the EU increasing legitimisation and motivation (EUROPOL 2016: 5). In the case of extreme-nationalist terrorism, often no ideology is exposed and problematised. In order to grasp the absurdity of the different approaches to Islamist and extreme-nationalist

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terrorism, it is useful to imagine, as a counterfactual exercise, the EU implementing the same policies to address nationalist extremism as it uses to address islamist terrorism. Imagine EU Member States dropping bombs on the terrorists’ ‘hometowns’ and afterwards dismissing the many murdered civilians as mere ‘collateral casualties.’ Imagine media outlets and political leaders across the EU demanding Christians, their churches and religious communities to expressly distance themselves from the right-wing extremists that claim Christianity as a source of either inspiration or concern. Imag- ine police forces across the EU breaking into the homes of Christian families without warrants to harass and intimidate them on grounds of national security. Imagine EU Member States demanding that the borders be selectively closed to all Christian refugees. It sounds as sensible as using a butcher’s knife to heal a broken bone.

As argued above, the absurdity of the EU’s geopolitical narrative about Islamic terrorism also lies exposed in the striking mismatch between the geography of the crimes carried out in Paris and the geography charted by the French president’s response. “La France est en guerre”, François Hol- lande ventured in the aftermath of the attacks. Yet, the perpetrators were by no stretch of the definition an “army” but a handful of mostly EU citizens. By framing these attacks as threats stemming from outside of France and from outside of Europe, Hollande—like George W. Bush before him—justified the unjustifiable to give support for airstrikes bound to kill innocent people outside their own country in order to avenge compatriots killed by other compatriots.

Hollande further speculated that the attacks were directed “against the values we defend”. This is questionable. The ‘against-our-values’ rhetoric implies that Muslims, for ISIS pretends to embody the purest version of Islam and the French and Belgian gunmen of Paris claimed to be acting in its name, in general rather than ISIS in particular endorse such violence. Plus, what I see happening is the targeting of places where the highest number of French people can be killed. The idea seems to be to kill random numbers of people in order to spread fear, not attack values per se. To turn this into a conflict between antagonistic value systems, which in the debate on Islamic terrorism are always assumed but never specified, is only fuelling the unnecessary fear that justifies Islamophobia and hence the dividing of EU societies along ethno-religious lines, which is precisely the aim of the psycho- political strategy of Islamic terrorists.

What is more, the terrorist attacks, Hollande advanced, were directed “against who we are”. This is even more unsound: as far as I know, the terrorists were all EU citizens; people who grew up in France or Belgium and spoke fluent French or Flemish. We should be aware that Islamic terrorism in the EU

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is not a foreign import but a homemade recipe. Contrary to what the mainstream narrative suggests, Islamic terrorism is not set against “the West” but it is by and large a product of the West itself. The terrorists that carried out the Paris attacks should not be seen as either a product of Islam or as isolated inci- dents, but rather as the most violent manifestation of a structural problem: the kind of Westernisation that takes place through the spatial, economic and socio- political marginalisation of entire ethnic groups with a migratory background in the EU and through the European-assisted bombing that has fashioned the relentlessly violent tragedy of the Middle East over the past decades. In this vein, the terrorist attacks on Paris can also be seen as part of a longstanding tit- for-tat: ISIS’ response to France’s Opération Chammal, the French government’s military operation against ISIS (Graham 2015). It is understandable that Hol- lande was wary to admit such a link and thus that the terrorist attacks in Paris were the price France paid for his government’s foreign policy in the Middle East, which could confront him with the critique that he may have used military intervention in the past less to foster French strategic interests than to boost his plummeting popularity. The “against- our-values and against who we are” rationale seems to imply not merely a troubling prejudice but a convenient excuse for the fallout of failed imperial recklessness. EU Member States’ military adventurism in Africa and the Middle East is thus coming back to the EU in the form of Islamist terrorism. And this in turn is tapping on the resentment that some EU citizens with a migratory background have for a longstanding orientalist segregation in Europe’s neighbourhoods as well as in its educational and labour markets—a discrimination worsened by memories of colonialism and the islamophobia unleashed since ‘the war on terror’ was declared in 2001. ISIS is targeting European Muslims’ resentment by inserting their personal struggles into a greater epic of Muslim martyrdom.

What is more, we need to reflect upon the role that the memories of colonialism might play in the contexts of stigmatisation experienced by the French of Maghrebi descent and how Islamic terrorism offers them a tool to express their dissatisfaction. After all, terrorism was a tool of national liberation in Algeria and the marginalisation faced by French of Algerian descent in the land of their parents’ former colonial oppressor could beguile some of them —the most frustrated, the most unstable, the most aggravated—to compare their situation with their parents’ and dignify terrorism as a time- honoured roar of defiance against their own oppression. It is not a mere coincidence that the Front National, a political family clan founded by Jean-Marie Le Pen—a blatant anti-Semite, Holocaust-denier and former torturer during the war of Alge- ria (Beaugé 2012)—has gained so much in popularity in a time when France is threatened by the Islamic terrorism committed by its youth of Maghrebi descent. So rather than a civilisational clash (à la Huntington) between “the West” and “the Islamic World”, what seems to be more helpful in explaining the

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conflict is a longstanding and unresolved clash between France and its former Maghrebi colonies as well as within France itself.

All this means that neither continuous military operations in the Middle East nor more soldiers patrolling the streets of Europe will address any of Is- lamist terrorism’s structural causes. Indeed, militarization might only create a bigger problem, for whenever the next terrorist attack strikes among soldier- patrolled streets, both people and politicians might call for ever stronger measures: more militarization, more profiling and more repression, which will lead to a more closed, more fearful, more authoritarian and less free society. To prevent this from unfolding it is urgent to question the geography that Hol- lande and the EU are making accountable for Islamist terrorist attacks. The people they point to as culprits as well as the places they want to bomb and the culture they frame as threatening have the goal to convince their electorates about the wisdom of their policies against terrorism. Yet, there is no wisdom but petty recklessness behind them. The debate has turned into a well-re- hearsed circus of banal representations of a civilizational war between Islam and the West. Misrepresentations have taken most of the political foreground and pushed alternative, more truthful representations, to the background. It is the same foolish response as the “war on terror” that was conceived by George W. Bush’s administration. George Bush’s “war on terror” was supposed to make ‘us’ safer. Instead, this geopolitical rhetoric and the devastation it has inspired over the last 16 years has been intimately linked to the worst 16 years of Islamic terrorism that Europe has ever seen.

The new normality is creating a Ban-opticon: the disciplining of normality and the expelling or banishment of what is seen as ‘deviant’. It is the kind of governmentality that has been dominating geopolitical thinking around big swathes of the world, particularly the US and Europe, since the attacks on New York in 2001 (Bigo 2006a). The policies related to this new normality share two main characteristics: normalisation of a permanent state of emergency and violence on the one hand and practices of exceptionalism (Agamben 2003), profiling practices and containing foreigners on the other. The concern is that there is “an Orwellian society in the making, through a ‘liberal’ agenda” (Bigo 2006b: 46). Although a literary work of political fiction, Or- well’s 1984 prescient description of the function that permanent war served to preserve the power of the dystopian totalitarian government he imagined is a useful analysis of how today’s violent normality operates (Orwell 1949: 243): “It does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that is needed is that a state of war should exist.” Migrants, asylum seekers, and political dissidents have been conflated with terrorists while the ceaseless outcries denouncing the erosion of the rights of marginalized and vulnerable groups as well as of the institutions intended to uphold them have been

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drowned in a sea of hysteria about terrorism. Political speech and policies which long ago would have been immediately lambasted as inconceivably authoritarian are leading to the securitization and militarization of life across the EU. Procedures of exclusion that seemed to have been relegated to the darkest and ever faintest memories of the European psyche are making a grand return to the fore of European politics and allowing us to envision the advent of a dystopian future.

We should not be shy to ask: how is bombing the Middle East a sensible answer to Islamic terrorism when military intervention is responsible for the creation of ISIS in the first place? How are EU citizens becoming safer by states of emergency that allow the further stigmatisation of Muslim minorities in Eu- rope while legitimising fears against Syrian refugees and intra-communitarian EU migrants? How is killing indiscriminate numbers of Muslims going to quench the hatred and determination that keeps fuelling Islamist terrorism in the EU and beyond? How would stricter border controls have helped prevent French and Belgian citizens from entering their own countries and causing the mayhem they did?

Brexit and the extreme geographies of imperial nostalgia

Our second case in point here regarding the normalisation of the extreme is Brexit: the process spanning the decision to hold a referendum on Britain’s membership to the EU to the UK’s formal notification to leave the EU until today. So far, Brexit is perhaps the most dramatic consequence of the nostalgia for normality that Europe is experiencing. Like France, where the new normal is a state of emergency and a state increasingly alienated from parts of its own citizenry, the case of Brexit constitutes an enlightening case study to cast light upon the extreme imaginary geographies being charted by the establishment. The same as France’s course, the British is leading to equally dramatic destinations. At the core of the Brexit narrative we can find the same extraordinary rarity that has been fuelling populist insurgencies all across liberal democracies: a curious blend of post-colonial grievance and imperial nostalgia.

The post-colonial grievance was recurrently evoked through the repetitive discourse of political emancipation. Nigel Farage—perhaps the UK’s most famous exponent of xenophobia and Euroscepticism—and Boris Johnson—London’s previous major turned prominent Eurosceptic—referred to the referendum’s date as ‘our independence day’ (BBC 2016; Stone 2016). This is an unexpected metaphor. Narratives of unjust oppression redressed through independence constitute the central trope of former colonies’ national mythologies as well as the historical outrage fuelling decolonial theories (e.g. Fanon 1961; Mignolo 1992). Hence, it is surprising to find the same postcolonial grievances in the

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mainstream discourse of a country that is perhaps the epitome of European imperialism.7

The British discourse of emancipation from the EU’s ‘oppression’ is, in turn, based on the two accusations most recurrently denounced by the figure- heads of the UK’s campaign to leave the EU: freeing the UK from Brussels’ dictates and “taking back control of our borders” (Ross 2016). Although it goes without saying that the UK joined and can leave the EU voluntarily, what gives this discourse—and any other —its strength to shape people’s minds and actions is its repetition and thus its ability to contest or silence alternatives. Alt- hough misguided—for neither is the EU a dictatorship nor is the UK by any stretch of the definition its colony—the domination that these discourses acquired through their sustained replication endowed them with the status of plausible claims to truth: they portrayed the project of European integration that has achieved the most opulent prosperity Europe has ever seen as a dictatorship and the open borders that have allowed such prosperity as its main threat.

The deleterious effects of the EU’s open borders were evoked by Theresa May’s insistence on the UK leaving both The European Convention on Human Rights and the European Court of Justice (Ashtana and Mason 2016). She denounced the European Convention on Human Rights as a threat to British security because it prevented the deportation of terrorists. These denunciations not only exaggerated the Islamist threat (for they did not prevent the UK from punishing terrorists) but they conflated islamist terrorism with migration from Muslim countries. Overall, the anxieties about the ECHR and the ECJ uttered by May suggest that the particular kind of immigrant that Brexiteers have as their concern is, more than any abstract immigrant, “the Muslim immigrant”.

This cuts to the core of Brexit: not only has it been a process obsessed with immigration but particularly preoccupied with Muslim immigration in particular (Jeory 2016; Wadsworth 2017). The famous UKIP poster reading “BREAKING POINT” showed this strikingly: in its visual composition, the main slogan championed by the campaign for the UK to leave the EU, “To take back control of our borders”, is reinforced by an image picturing a thick long line of dark-skinned refugees (see Figure 5.1; Stewart and Mason 2016).

Several media outlets pointed out that the image of this poster is a reminiscent of Nazi propaganda film warning about the Jewish threat (see Figure 5.2; Stewart and Mason 2016). The poster of Farage’s party UKIP promotes

7 See Stuart Laycock (2012) All the countries we've ever invaded: and the few we never got round to. Alt- hough a rather sensationalist account based on a liberal definition of invasion (it claims Britain has invaded the territories of 171 out of 193 UN member states), its larger point is revealing: an overwhelming proportion of the world has been touched by British imperialism in one way or another.

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anxiety not only about immigrants but, by contextual association with the refugee crisis that has been grabbing headlines since the summer of 2015, also for the many asylum seekers from Muslim-majority countries that have been seeking refuge in the EU ever since.

Figure 5.1. Breaking Point: Nigel Farage, one of the main advocates for the UK to leave the EU, posing in front of a poster whose visual composition conflates high numbers of refugees from Muslim countries with the EU’s failure to its Member States. This poster was part of the campaign aimed at persuading British voters to cast their ballots in favour of the proposal for the UK to renounce its EU membership ahead of the referendum that decided this question

The discursive thread of subjugation to a project of self-destructive miscegena- tion unscrupulously imposed by a treacherous elite is a common trope traditionally found in the discourses of the European and American far right (Fer- ber and Kimmel 2000). For example, Anders Breivik’s manifesto, 2083: A Eu- ropean declaration of independence, espouses the emancipation from this yoke as its title and motivation: “More than 90% of the EU and national parlia- mentarians and more than 95% of journalists are supporters of European multiculturalism and therefore supporters of the ongoing Islamic colonisation of Europe; yet, they DO NOT have the permission of the European peoples to implement these doctrines” (Breivik 2011: 4). Through this narrative wizardry, the project of political integration that has created unseen prosperity in Europe is turned into betrayal, while Muslim immigrants and refugees are turned into colonizers. This is not only historically nonsensical

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but morally devious: by turning the vulnerable into the powerful and the powerful into the vulnerable, this misrepresentation of power relations legitimizes the exploitation of the weak by the strong. Brexiteers have adopted this very apocryphal narrative, an affinity that has revealed yet another thing (Williams and Law 2012): it is not so much immigration Brexiteers are against, but rather a certain kind of immigration; theirs is a selective xenophobia, an Islamophobic and illiberal phobia, a fear of a Muslim geography that cannot be fended off using the tools of liberal legal frameworks, for it is the liberal principles of the rule of law, equality before the law, non-discrimination and respect for human rights that prevents taking the necessary measures to exclude ‘the Muslim’’.

Figure 5.2. Brexit and Nazi propaganda: Comparison of the poster ‘Breaking Point’, used by the campaign aimed at persuading the British electorate to vote in favour of the UK to leave the EU, and a Nazi propaganda film picturing large streams of Jewish refugees as a threat. Source: https://tinyurl.com/y4cgz4hy

“We are back to being a normal country, in charge of our own laws and able to start making our own relationships with the rest of the world. Maybe even reengaging with the Commonwealth”, was the statement uttered by Nigel Far- age the day after the referendum on Brexit. Although much of the enthusiasm for the UK’s drive to leave the EU was the desire to curb immigration, Brex- iteers have consistently expressed an odd enthusiasm for an open-borders agreement with the Commonwealth after leaving the EU. This project is known as the Canzuk Union (Bennett 2016): a confederation of Commonwealth countries—Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Britain—allowing free trade, the free movement of people and mutual defence. The rough brushstroke of this

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grand scheme paints not so much an aversion for open borders as an aversion for the kind of open borders that the EU stands for. In contrast to the EU, this ‘Empire 2.0’ envisions a mostly white union of English-speaking peoples based on the symbolic legacy of the British Empire, a structure in which the UK ac- quires the privileged association with ‘the motherland’. What the discourses and allusions surrounding the references to the Commonwealth suggest is that it might not have been open borders and immigration what angered British voters as much as an anxiety over a notion of diluting English-speaking whiteness, which reminded them of homogeneity and dominance they had lost. The anxiety over open borders expressed by the proponents of Brexit might be understood as a fear to be mixed with the very subjects that the British empire colonized mixed with a desire to recover the British empire’s unapologetic domination over its former subjects in order to overcome the burthensome constraints of the rule of law and simply get rid of them. It is imperialism coated with the politically correct nuance of anti- colonialism. It is a perver- sion of history, geography and language. It is newspeak. Under this light, Brexit may appear to be a quixotic attempt to revive British imperialism. And yet, like we have seen in the case of France, it is not the extremists of UKIP or the English Defence League who are carrying out Brexit but the elites of the British conservative establishment. Theresa May’s government approach to Brexit as business as usual and a normal political course disguises an uncomfortable truth: the establishment Tories are not only the true radicals but very efficient ones, for they are able to take traditional politics by assault while sailing under the flag of normality. They are the Trojan horse that a certain kind of mild authoritarianism is employing to infiltrate liberal democracies, whose gullible electorates are receiving it as the gift it purports to be rather than as the threat it may turn out to be.

The nostalgia for the ‘normality’ associated to the Commonwealth constitutes a fascinating geographical imagination revolving around the debate on Brexit. Mentions of the Commonwealth have been plentiful in the debate surrounding Brexit, as if this reminiscence of the British Empire hid the key for its resurgence (Tomlinson and Dorling 2016). So much of this geopolitical imagination points to a desire to go back to the unequal power relation of empire, where the UK got “to have its cake and eat it” (Elgot and Rankin 2016). As Theresa May put it (Batchelor 2017), “We want to make sure that we are ending the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice and that we are able to control movement of people coming from the EU,” a desire that taken together with the nostalgia for the Commonwealth suggests that the loss of empire may have misled the British to soften and refrain from dealing with the non-native with the force or violence they would otherwise deserve; as if the EU was emasculating for repressing the British Empire’s virtuous sense of righteous violence.

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Moreover, it is important to remember that it was not fringe politicians like UKIP’s Nigel Farage who set in motion the process that has led to Britain’s exit from the EU. The referendum was started by David Cameron, a liberal pro- EU prime minister who, by his own choice, decided to put the UK’s EU membership to a referendum whose validity he did not even take the care of condition to either a representative voter turnout or a qualified majority. Cameron’s promises to reduce immigration and to hold a referendum on the UK’s perma- nence in the EU were his ways of appeasing populist xenophobes as well as Eurosceptics within his own party.

David Cameron should have known—as well as May must know—that that the promise of more border controls and a better future is at best dubious. Brexit is like a “leap of faith” attempting to bridge an abyss of warnings so wide that no rational government would be expected to have even considered it. Not only does the economic outlook loom devastating but the integrity and even the peace of the country are at peril. Spain has acquired a veto over Brexit negotiations due to the British enclave of Gibraltar; the conflict in Northern Ireland could break out again or Northern Ireland could break away and join Ireland; and Scotland seems in course to push for a new referendum of independence. Whatever this normality might bring, it seems that it will be anything but the easiness and comfort it that its proponents promised. Instead, it looks as if a rather extreme path littered with perils and uncertainties lied ahead. How is that taking back control? And at what price for the UK and the EU? The disconnection between policy and interests in the strategy pursued by the British governments that have led to Brexit and are in charge of its negotiation with the EU should make us rethink the way we speak about traditional European parties. Perhaps, rather than conceptualising them as establishment parties, it would be more analytically useful to regard them as not so different from the radical, deeply ideological and irrational political parties of the fringes or perhaps even as dangerous extremists.

“Act normal or go away”: Extreme Dutch normality

Perhaps no other political discourse condenses the hypocrisy of the political centre’s pleas for normality as roundly as that of the biggest party in the recent Dutch election, the Dutch VVD (the People’s Party for Freedom and Democ- racy) (Wittenberg 2017). Ahead of the elections of 2017, the VVD’s political programme charted a geographical imagination of a threatening ‘outside’ that matched the tone of the populist rhetoric of the stridently xenophobe and Islamophobic party of Wilders, the PVV (Wijnberg 2016). In short, the VVD´s programme depicts the Dutch as a peace-loving people “who simply want to get along with everyone”; helpful people “who will give each other a hand

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in case of need”. The contrast are the destitute immigrants taking away the comfort of the well-natured, hard- working Dutch, threatening the prosperity of “Dutchmen who worry about the international misery they see replicated in their own neighbourhood”, migrants who are also insinuated to be irrationally unfriendly and violent, unlike the people which the VVD stands for: “people who want to live a comfortable life. People who find it logical that you have to do your best to achieve it”.8

In a letter printed in the national newspapers that openly flirted with the Islamophobic right,9 Mark Rutte, the Dutch Prime Minister, in a thinly veiled attempt at political opportunism, crafted the slogan “Normaal. Doen.” (Act.Normal.) His message was “Doe normaal of ga weg” (Act normal or go away). The subtext is clear: those who do not behave according to what he assumes as the norm. Those deviating from the norm clearly did not pre- suppose misbehaved white, unhyphenated Dutch, but rather Muslims and immigrants overall: those with an insecure footing on Dutch society, the ones holding two nationalities or the naturalized Dutch, the immigrants and their ‘half-Dutch’ children, the refugees. This subtext becomes evident if one is familiar with the Dutch context, where criminality has long been wrongly associated with Moroccan immigrants and their offspring (Driessen et al. 2014), and thus where the formulation ‘act normal or go away’ carries the unambiguous prejudice about Moroccans’ overrepresentation in criminality as well as a veiled threat of expulsion from Dutch society predicated on their implicit second-class citizenship: ‘act normal or go away’ within the Dutch political context is equivalent to ‘Act Dutch or go back to your country’. Neither a very reassuringly liberal message nor a policy that could reason- ably be applied without breaking the Dutch rule of law. How would it be possible to expel Dutch-Moroccan citizens otherwise?

These few words ‘Act normal or go away’ perhaps best capture the political strategy that not only the VVD but all the centre political parties in Eu- rope have been following over the past years. The ‘act normal’ politics has become the new extreme. It is the conservative and centre parties who have shifted to the right: a right that not so long ago would most definitely have been considered extreme, yet is now seen as the new normal. Illustratively, a wave of international relief flooded international news outlets after the VVD—

8 The quote in the original reads: “We weten voor wie we het doen: optimistische en nuchtere Nederlanders die van aanpakken weten en waarde hechten aan onze typisch Nederlandse manier van leven. Nederlanders die zich zorgen maken over de internationale ellende die ze terugzien in hun eigen buurt. Nederlanders die gewoon goed contact willen hebben met iedereen, maar de Nederlandse gewoonten niet willen inleveren. Wij staan voor al die mensen die een prettig leven willen leiden. Mensen die het logisch vinden dat je daar zelf je best voor moet doen. Mensen die dat ook van anderen verwachten. En mensen die elkaar een handje helpen als het niet lukt” (VVD 2017, 7). 9 https://www.vvd.nl/nieuws/lees-hier-de-brief-van-mark/

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and not the PVV—came out as the biggest party in the Dutch elections of March 2017 (Henley 2017). The headlines the next day were a parade of renewed con- fidence in normality. In his victory speech, Rutte declared that the Netherlands had put a stop to the rise of populism (e.g. Henley 2017; Wildman 2017). Most of the press closely followed his enthusiasm. After Trump’s victory, Brexit and a year of looming populist victories in the Dutch and French elections, these were good news.

However, the enthusiasm seems to be unjustified. An analysis made by the “Nederlandse Orde van Advocaten’’ (Dutch Order of Barristers) published before the Dutch elections of March of 2017 assessed how the different political programmes of the Dutch political parties might fall into three categories: 1) improve the rule of law; 2) be potentially in conflict with the rule of law or; 3) endanger the rule of law. According to this classification, after the PVV—the Dutch far-right party of the Islamophobic Geert Wilders—the VVD, which declared itself as defender of normality and the party of law and order, was evaluated as the party whose programme most endangered the Dutch rule of law as well as international treaties and human rights. This reveals the gravity that the autoimmune disorder in the EU has reached: one of the most egalitarian and liberal countries in the EU has adopted the rhetoric and policies of the very far- right party it is now been praised for having kept at bay. The new freedom across the EU is being framed in narrow, exclusionary terms: the freedom to close borders and put locks to keep away those we irrationally dislike.

Conclusion

Over the last years, political discourse in the EU has painted a picture of openness ever more defaced by increasing outside threats. Yet, what this painting fails to show is that the reality inside the EU is more threatening to the EU than the outside threat we are supposed to fear. The EU is suffering from a politics of autoimmunity. The EU’s policies to address Islamic terrorism are doing more harm than terrorism itself. States of exception are encroaching on the liberties of the EU’s vulnerable Muslim minority. The bombing of ISIS is causing the murder of innocent people and thus breeding further Islamist radicalisation (Roberts 2017). Letting military forces patrol European metropoles and thus paving the way for the militarization of civilian life and the establishment of ever more permanent states of emergency is doing more to undermine EU citizens’ rights than the threat of terrorism. The ever more paranoid bor- derism (Van Houtum and Bueno Lacy 2015) and inhumane biopolitical practices to keep refugees from trespassing the EU’s borders is legitimising the overall closing of internal EU borders and thus threatening Schengen and the openness on which the EU fundamentally depends. The cooperation with

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authoritarian countries characterised by a disregard for life in order to keep terrorists and refugees at bay is doing more to radicalise Islamist and right- wing extremists than any ideologue could. Yet, instead of addressing the prosaic roots of the problem, the EU has made it normal to address the perceptions of the problem. In consequence, the EU’s responses are not capable of solving the problem which they are supposed to mend; rather, they are merely intended to assuage people’s fears by giving them the impression they address their concerns.

Our thesis here is that, by increasingly allying themselves with the forces of xenophobic national socialism, the centre parties that used to dominate the EU’s political landscape have sold out their liberal and social democratic principles—principles which have led every single EU Member State to top the Human Development Index’s rankings and to experience the longest, most prosperous lapse of peace Europeans have ever seen. The depth of radicalisation among traditional EU political parties is of such magnitude that the problem is not even an ideological contest between the merits of either socialism or liberalism or between conservative and progressive ideologies.

We tend to focus on the most inflaming speeches, the most impressive acts and the most entertaining circus through which media and politicians keep mutually constituting one another and making each other mutually relevant. People like Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders, Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage in Europe—and further afield autocratic and narcissistic leaders like Putin, Erdogan and Trump—are nothing but the most recent refinement, the grotesque excess of a political theatre put in place and normalised by the establishment itself. We are too focused on all their theatrical grandilo- quent gestures, apocalyptical depictions, impressive military operations, handshakes and overacting. The unmeasured amount of attention that both media and the political debate overall give to the antics of our political parties is precisely what makes them relevant regardless of the senselessness of either their statements or policies. The irrationality of their policies is be- side the point, what counts is the aesthetic appeal of their words and policies and the ability that these give them to reach the news and remain a constant topic of discussion in social media. The banality of irrational repetition creates purely discursive, non-existent realities that nonetheless exist by the mere act of being ceaselessly repeated and thus normalised. Politics thus becomes a daily reality show of aesthetically impressive dramas, in which politicians themselves are the key scriptwriters as well as their main acts and performers (Wijnberg 2017). Furthermore, our obsession with the most mel- odramatic extremists might be clouding our sight, preventing us to see that the main threat to freedom and liberal democracy are not necessarily them, but us, who sustain them by either supporting the political parties that surreptitiously imitate them or by resisting too little the small but cumulative

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and thus significant steps leading towards more surveillance, fear and exclusion. A society that not only allows this normality to be acceptable but successful and which encumbers their advocates to the leading positions of its political apparatuses has no one else to blame for its problems but itself.

The low-key banality of evil is at work: it is the moderate middle classes voting for self-fashioned centrist parties what is dismantling the system on which the prosperity of these very middle classes depends. In spite of all their theatrically impressive spectacles, it is not the neo-Nazis or the Islamic terrorists who we should be most concerned about. They are terrible symptoms of a much larger, much more structural problem. They are the excuses. The ones with the power to change the system and the ones indeed steering the system to the right are the middle classes; the voters so obsessed with luxury, celebrity and so unconcerned with inequality, climate change, and the violence promoted by massive military apparatuses which operate with impunity and un- accountability at the border and all around them. Perhaps the epitome of the moral hypocrisy upon which this extreme normality has been built is manifested in the deals between Turkey, Libya and other autocratic states that the EU has been reaching out to in order to contain refugees. As if there was no other way for the richest countries, some of the most efficient bureaucracies and some of the most educated liberal democracies in the world to deal with refugees and migration than to act like thugs, abetting torture, death, rape, mass graves and the worst kind of racism (Dearden 2017).

The sophistication of the EU’s border system lies in its ability to endow all the abuses that it directly or indirectly causes (rape, torture, kidnapping, murder, robbery, enslavement, etc.) with the appearance of morality. We want to believe it is others who abuse them or cause their demise. We want to believe it is them who are reckless or stupid enough to cross the Medi- terranean and kill themselves. We want to believe that the EU exists in a geopolitical void where its historical and contemporary responsibility in the dramas of Africa and the Middle East in no way affect politics and life in Eu- rope.

This is the banality of evil of our time: those who define themselves as the normal legitimise the manufacturing of an abundance of geographical imaginations that present the outside, the beyond Europe as a threatening geopolitical geography—terrorists, hordes of destitute and culturally incompatible migrants—to promote what ultimately are their egoistic interests. The problem with these extreme geographies is not only that they hide the true people, places and cultures that are responsible for the threats that afflict Eu- ropean societies, but by blaming the wrong geographies this inaccurate ‘cartography’ keeps in place policies that sustain these threats through a vicious circle, always blaming the consequences without ever being aware of the

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causes. It is the establishment, the EU institutions and the centre political parties who are yielding ground to all those who threaten the EU, its peace and its prosperity. At least populists are either honest or obvious about their dislike for liberalism, human rights, equality and open borders. That is what makes the deception of mainstream parties the most troubling: they present themselves as the standard bearers of morality, common sense, practicality, level headed- ness and yet they are the ones cunningly undermining the system. Their political programmes make pleas to return to normality, and yet, once one examines what this normality implies, one notices that it is perhaps them who constitute the biggest threat to the very normality they claim to want to preserve.

After the respite provided by the results of the French and Dutch elections of 2017, Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel are being urged to take the staff of liberal democracy and preserve what is left of a ‘free world’ and an EU that seem to be crumbling (The Economist 2017a). However, if they are to be successful their efforts will demand more than cosmetic changes or a different tune of gestures and speech (The Economist 2017b). It will require addressing the structural causes that are increasingly and relentlessly legitimizing the circular violence that keeps turning both the EU’s territory and its surrounding neighbourhood into ever more insecure geographies. This includes stopping the shameful deaths in the Mediterranean once and for all (Bueno Lacy and Van Houtum 2013; Ferrer-Gallardo and Van Houtum 2014; Van Houtum and Bueno Lacy 2016; UNHCR 2016), which in turn requires legal pathways to the EU and a comprehensive EU-wide asylum system. And it requires the EU’s taking responsibility for its commitments not only to international refugee law but also to the very ethos enshrined in its foundational documents and thus no more deals with authoritarian states to outsource the asylum procedures and the EU’s border controls (EC 2006; Bialasiewicz 2012). These extreme measures sold under the pretence of normality are creating dangers far bigger than the extremism they are trying to mend.

We need self-reflection. We cannot fall into the easy anthropocentric trap of believing that those who attack us hate “our values and who we are” even though they grow up in the same countries as we do and live among us. It is EU Member States and EU societies which are producing people that feel alienated from society and discriminated to such a degree that they can be persuaded to kill in order to exact their vengeance or let out their frustration.

This episode in the history of the EU is perhaps the most serious threat the EU has ever faced, not because of terrorism but because EU leaders seem readier to deface the very ethos upon which the EU has been built than confront how EU member states’ bigotry towards its Muslims as well as their unscrupulous foreign policies in the Middle East are as responsible for terrorism

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as ISIS. Surely, criminal and terrorist acts need to be properly addressed by the police, but that will not be enough.

Europe can only defeat ISIS with an equally appealing counter-narrative. The EU needs to provide its citizens of Arab-Muslim heritage with a narrative that allows them to simultaneously identify as both Muslims and Eu- ropeans. Such narrative should allow them to claim a proud historical place in European history that they can use to claim the space that xenophobic ethno-nationalists try to deny them whenever they talk about a Europe that is essentially Christian, white or an anti-Muslim. As long as western values keep including the indiscriminate marginalisation and stigmatisation of Eu- ropean Muslims and the indiscriminate bombing of civilians in the Middle East, the EU should not be surprised to find some of that hate knocking at its door at some point or another. Moreover, the EU should also address terrorism by avoiding taking part in military invasions in Africa and the Middle East; by dismantling their ethnically segregated neighbourhoods, educational systems and labour markets; by creating a historiography of Europe and a symbolism of the EU that gives both a geographical, historical, political and emotional recognition to an almost entire millennium of Arab- Muslim influences that paved the way for Europe’s Renaissance (Brotton 2002); and by promoting more compassionate, rational and sustainable policies for the reception and integration of Muslim migrants and asylum seekers through the creation of a border management adapted to the unavoidable mobility of today’s globalized world.

A spectre is haunting Europe, the ghost of Europe’s own shadow, leading to panicked reactions that are seriously self-inflicting. There is nothing normal about that.

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CHAPTER 6

Phobiocartography

The Migration Map Trap

On the invasion arrows in the cartography of migration

This chapter offers an iconological analysis of a map made by Frontex in which the EU’s border agency claims to depict the main threats at the borders of the EU. Through an analysis of its visual composition, I show that this Frontex map is the visual condensation of the larger discourse on immigration in the EU. Moreover, by contrasting my interpretation of this map with the phenomena that it purports to represent, my analysis shows that the design choices on the Frontex map run against scientific evidence. The description and recommendations that derive from it show that the EU’s geopolitics and border regime constitute a betrayal of the EU’s own foundational principles and thus depictions like this should be a cause for concern. The Frontex map thus can be interpreted as the cartographic manifestation of the autoimmunity from which the EU suffers.

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Van Houtum H and Bueno Lacy R (2019) The Map Trap: On the invasion arrows in the cartography of migration. Mobilities 15(2): 196–219. DOI: 10.1080/17450101.2019.1676031

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CHAPTER 6

The Migration Map Trap: On the Invasion Arrows in the Cartography on Migration

ABSTRACT

How is undocumented migration typically mapped in contemporary cartography? To answer this question, I conduct an iconological dis- section of what could be seen as the epitome of the cartography on undocumented migration, the map made by Frontex—the EU’s border agency. I find that, rather than a scientific depiction of a migratory phenomenon, its cartography peddles a crude distortion of undocumented migration that smoothly splices into the xenophobic tradition of propaganda cartography—and stands in full confrontation with contemporary geographical scholarship. I conclude with an urgent appeal for more scientifically robust, critical and decidedly more creative cartographies of migration.

The world’s cartographic straitjacket

ver the last decades, the ‘territorial trap’ (Agnew 1994) – an excoriation of the theoretical assumption of ‘the state’ as the fundamental unit of analysis in international relations – has fuelled some of the most fruitful research in social studies – perhaps most notably in the fields of critical O geopolitics (Ó Tuathail 1996, vi, 9), mobility studies (e.g. Lorimer 2005; Sheller and Urry 2006; Cresswell 2011) and border studies (e.g. van Houtum and van Naerssen 2002; Newman 2010). However, I argue that, although the concept of the territorial trap entails an implicit allusion to maps (Agnew 1999), the self-reinforcing way in which this trap influences political cartography and derives from it – by informing foreign policy and shaping international politics – remains underexposed and undertheorized (van Houtum 2012; Walters 2010).

This is all the more remarkable given that maps are perhaps the most alluring artefacts of geography and the most persuasive descriptions of world politics (Kwan 2004). They are not merely a reflection of power but power itself: visual statements and narratives about the political topics they picture or, in other words,

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visual discourses. Their production is ‘controlled, selected, organised, and redistributed’ by procedures of exclusion that establish what is reasonable, true and acceptable to say – or depict – and what is not (Foucault 1981, 52–53). In cartography, these procedures of exclusion have adopted the form of a repertoire of signs which serve to simplify, categorize and narrate political phenomena to the effect of luring the reader with a tempting promise of immediate access to expert knowledge. The map’s godlike overview of seemingly inscrutable global dramas make war and conflict, migration, terrorism and other perplexing political issues appear intelligible to non-specialists (Henrikson 1999, 95–96). Although this expertise at a glance is a mirage, it is hard to overstate its usefulness to educators, politicians, advertisers, journalists, social media users and anyone tempted to com- municate overwhelmingly complex politics in a neat depiction. Such beguiling in- telligibility is enhanced by maps’ illusory lack of authorship and deceptive iconographic simplicity – which pass for objectivity and common sense. Maps’ snapshot-from-nowhere character endows them with the ability to be regarded as trust- worthy synopses of global geopolitics, which makes them a daunting propaganda tool to shape the phenomena that they depict (Harley 1989; Monmonier 1991).

In this article, I critically analyse the maps that we use to represent the people moving across the world’s borders without the official visa documents (‘visas’ for short) or, as they are perhaps more widely known, ‘undocumented migrants’ (van Houtum and Pijpers 2007, 292). To exemplify how a specific cartographic iconography persistently promotes the territorial trap, thus translating ethnocentric worldviews onto a political map, I zoom in on a highly influential map which typ- ifies the cartographic representation that Frontex—the EU’s border agency— makes of undocumented migration to the EU. I use this single map as an epitomical illustration of my general argument about the cartography of undocumented migration.

In order to examine this map, I rely on an iconological method (Warburg 1932; Panofsky 1955; Gombrich 1972; Müller 2011), i.e. the assumption that the map’s visual composition – signs such as arrows, colours, borders, legend and in- scriptions, projection, orientation, etc. – and subject matter – the map’s topic, which in this case is undocumented migration to the EU – can be interpreted both as a discourse in itself as well as a broader cultural manifestation (Kitchin, Perkins, and Dodge 2009). I distinguish three fundamental flaws on the Frontex map: the grid, the arrows and the framing effect of encirclement. I discuss how these distortions reflect the general perception of undocumented migration across the EU – its myths, if you will – and how they influence the political debate on the EU’s borders and identity. In the last part of the paper I discuss the decisive influence of this sort of cartography and reflect on alternative maps of migration and their potential.

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The migration map and its discontents

The map below (Figure 6.1) shows the dominant cartographic depiction of undocumented migration used by the European Border and Coast Guard Agency – better known as Frontex – in what they suggestively call their ‘quarterly risk analysis’, i.e., an overview of the alleged ‘threats’ that the EU faces along its external borders. Curiously, even though the map is updated every three months, its visual composition remains roughly the same, see, for example, Figure 6.2, which maps the height of the refugee-protection crisis.

In isolation, this migration map might look insignificant: an aleatory image confined to one among numerous technical analyses by a murky border-control agency (Cetti 2014). However, seen as part of the assemblage of narratives, practices and images that render its visualization meaningful—i.e., its iconological dimension—I argue that this cartography puts together a peculiarly telling discursive mosaic. Rather than mere decorative illustrations, political maps of this sort are of unparalleled import: they stand as cultural testimonies that allow us to peek into the naked worldview of their makers like few other documents do (Kristof 1960, 45; Harley 1988a, 1988b, 1989; Wood 1992; Agnew 1998, 15–34; Wintle 1999, 2009; Pickles 2004, 25–72; Kitchin and Dodge 2007; Monmonier 2018; Brotton 2013; Branch 2014; Moore and Perdue 2014; Bueno-Lacy and van Houtum 2015).

Figure 6.1. The Frontex map of 2017. Source: Frontex: https://frontex.europa.eu/assets/Publica- tions/Risk_Analysis/FRAN_Q2_2017.pdf

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The striking power wielded by this map – hereafter ‘the Frontex map’ – becomes vividly manifest once one realizes that it is by no means a stand-alone exception but rather the canonical variation of a much larger and persistently recurrent discourse (Foucault 1981, 56–58). This map has become the ‘normal’ and ultimately hegemonic cartographic representation of its subject matter: the geopolitics of undocumented migration to the EU. Variations of this map – which largely preserve the characteristic elements of its visual arrangement – or the political geography it narrates – have found their way into European societies through education (Wigen 2005), academia (van Reekum and Schinkel 2016; De Haas 2008), NGO’s (Canadian Red Cross 2015) and media. Concerning the latter, regardless of their ideological bent, all types of mass-communication channels – from the most reliable journal- istic platforms to the most disreputable tabloids – have reproduced a similar cartographic proposition to ‘explain’ the misleadingly labelled ‘refugee crisis’ in Eu- rope, thus turning the cartographic layout chosen by Frontex into the predominant template of most maps on undocumented migration across the EU (e.g., Welt 2011; Daily Mail 2013; Steininger 2013; Pabst 2013; Adams, 2014; Adams 2015; Cieschinger 2015; Constantini 2015; Heck and Leijendekker 2015; Lyman 2015; Maxwill 2015; Neefs 2015; Schmidt 2015; Reimann 2015; Typosthes 2015; Alameda and Gutiérrez Garrido 2016; Booth 2016; Hasselbach 2016; Khakshouri 2016; The Economist 2016; Beauchamp 2017; Gutiérrez and Jara 2017; Hauswedell 2017; AEDH 2018; Kingsley 2018). Yet, I argue, this is a template with severe flaws. To this I will turn now.

Figure 6.2. The Frontex map of 2015. Source: https://frontex.europa.eu/assets/Publica- tions/Risk_Analysis/FRAN_Q3_2015.pdf

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1. The Grid

The first inadequacy of this kind of mapping refers to the uncritical use and nor- malization of the underlying grid of nation states, which the migration map under discussion here regrettably shares with the overwhelming majority of our political maps—from school primers to Google Maps (Farman 2010, 877–878) —even though this grid's geographical foundations have been sustaining mounting scholarly critique (e.g., Harley 2001). In fact, some of the most exceptional geographical research in recent times has been inspired by an opposition to the nationalistically essentialist epistemologies that make the grid look natural. Today, the understanding of borders as social constructs has encouraged theorization on how space is produced (e.g., Lefebvre 1974, 1992; Massey 1995, 2005, 2012, 2013), historized (e.g., Agnew 1998, 35–50; Klinke 2012), imagined (Said 1978; Gregory 1995), and how the resulting geo-chronological imaginations exert a colossal geopolitical influence on some of the most dramatic turns in history (Ó Tuathail 1996).

As a result, borders are today dominantly theorized as ceaselessly mutating socio-political dynamics liable to multiple interpretations rather than as immova- ble grid lines (e.g., Paasi 1998; van Houtum and van Naerssen 2002; Wastl-Walter 2011): hence the shift from talking about borders – as a noun – to talking about b/ordering – as a continuous verb (van Houtum and van Naerssen 2002; van Hou- tum 2005; Newman 2006). This discursive shift in border studies has coincided with a revolution in migration and mobility studies that has become known as the ‘mobility turn’ (Lorimer 2005; Sheller and Urry 2006, 2011; Cresswell 2011). A core critique of this turn counters the prevailing cartographic assumption that people are largely static entities and instead theorizes how all manifestations of human mobility – far from natural phenomena caused by ungovernable forces – are shaped instead by “constellations of power” that exert a great deal of influence over “the creation of identities and the microgeographies of everyday life” (Cress- well 2011, 551).

These discursive trends have also percolated theoretical cartography since the 1970s (Pickles 2004, 25–72; Monmonier 2007; Kitchin 2014). The poststructural- ist reflections on imaginative geographies (e.g., Said 1978; Harvey 1990; Gregory 1994, 1995, 2004; Castree 2001; Kitchin and Kneal 2001; Springer 2011), as well as the schools of critical and radical cartography (e.g., Harley and Woodward 1987; Harley 1988a, 1989; Wood 1992; Wintle 1999, 2009; Branch 2014), critical geopolitics (e.g., Ó Tuathail 1994; Dalby and Ó Tuathail 1998) and critical border studies (e.g., Agnew 1999; van Houtum 2012; Sidaway 2015) have exposed the many ways in which maps simultaneously reveal and exert surreptitious yet forceful manifestations of power – most conspicuously in the rapacious conduction of statecraft (Pickles 1992; Unger 2002; Gregory 2011a, 2011b; Campos-Delgado 2018). How- ever, an unfortunate offshoot of this bulging body of cartographic critique – in spite of its doubtless merits – has been the conflation of political cartography with

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propaganda cartography to such an extent that it has engendered a sort of ‘mapphobia’ – an aversion to mapmaking – among academic geographers (Wheeler 1998). Alas, the most knowledgeable experts in mapmaking have been discouraged to create better maps and this has held back the production of alternative, non-essentialist cartographies (Perkins 2003, 341; Moore and Perdue 2014, 896) – which could help explain why grid-thinking still reigns unchallenged in political cartography.

The Frontex Map emphasizes the flawed logic of the national grid by visualising Europe devoid of human beings. We see boxes of static nation states without (the movements of) their populations while a mass of gigantic red lines sym- bolizing undocumented migrants cross their borders, seemingly disrupting the grid’s natural order. This conscious deletion of human beings is what I have earlier described as a form of “cartographic cleansing” (van Houtum 2012). In this world without humans, their overwhelming diversity is dissolved into homogeneous nation states whose borders are supposed to confine the movement of the populations they contain (Hall 1992). This visual layout reinforces the fictitious notion of the state as either the legitimate representative of its people or as the effective ruler of its territory (Risse 2011, 1–35) – an exaggeration of most states’ legitimacy and power as well as a visual chicanery to conceal inter- and intra-state blends and divisions (De Genova 2013; LiveLeak 2012; Agnew 1994; Wimmer and Glick Schil- ler 2002; Harley 1989; Ó Tuathail 1994; Walby 2003; Parker and Vaughan-Williams 2009, 586; Brotton 2013, 289–326; Branch 2014).

Moreover, by relying on this ‘classic grid’, the Frontex map de facto reproduces and validates a national biopolitics that, by design, creates regimes of political control over foreign bodies – following the anxious rationale that their infiltration across the state’s boundaries may destabilize its imagined community (Fou- cault 1978-79; Anderson 1983). By normalizing nativity’s ‘myth of origins’ (Elden 2013, 21–52), the national grid’s visual logic has an implicit predisposition to breed anxiety for the non-native. The map’s grid seems to suggest that, if people are ‘natural’ inhabitants of the country where they were born, then it follows that migrants – a politically constructed category – are unnatural intruders in countries other than their own. This logic is a propitious breeding ground for all sorts of xenophobic prejudices (Pupavac 2008; Esses, Medianu, and Lawson 2013; Gorodzeisky and Semyonov 2015; De Genova 2017). Tellingly, the only people shown on the Frontex map are represented by menacing arrows, i.e., those who throw into disarray the ‘natural b/order’ of the national grid – making them by default an exceptional abnormality (van Houtum and van Naerssen 2002; van Houtum 2010). This fear of foreigners is further aggravated by the Frontex map’s sole emphasis on undocumented migrants under the header ‘Quarterly detections of illegal border-crossing, 2015–2017’, which conflates undocumented migration with a criminal offense to the ‘organic’ unity of the state – i.e., the natural ‘purity’ of a country’s own history and people (Kristof 1960, 21–8; Foucault 1978-79; Bashford 2004).

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What is conveniently ignored by the Frontex map is the paradox that, more often than not, asylum seekers can legally apply for refugee status only by ‘irregularly’ entering the EU - whose protection they seek (Black 2003; Nyers 2010; van Houtum and Lucassen 2016; Manby 2017). The illegalization of undocumented migrants is a conscious political construct that begins with the denial of legal travelling documents – i.e., a visa – to potential asylum seekers in their home countries, thus leaving them no alternative other than entering the EU without the unobtainable visa. Such discrimination is officially codified in the EU’s positive and negative Schengen list: a ranking of nationalities that assesses the desirability of the migrants it allows into its borders. Individuals holding passports identifying them as what the EU considers to be the ‘wrong place of birth’ – a total of 135 countries out of 195 – face near-zero chances of being granted a visa for the EU (van Houtum 2010; Schuster 2011; Jansen 2016). This constitutes a clear discrimination on the basis of the accident of birth and thus a contravention of Articles 1, 2 and 21 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU as well as of Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states that ‘all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights’ (UN 1948). In other words, the EU is trying to convince us that it needs to violate its core humanistic principles in order to defend them (Dubernet 2018; Cusumano 2019). In contrast to what one could more fairly call undocumentalised migrants, those born in countries on the positive Schengen list – predominantly rich countries – can travel without much effort to the EU in the comfort of a plane and without a visa. In contrast, the near deprivation of legal migration channels for those born in countries on the Schengen blacklist has created a smuggling industry worth over 1 billion euros a year – roughly as big as the border industry trying to stop it (The Migrants’ Files 2015). Thus, refugees’ smugglers are a consequence of the discriminatory EU border regime and not the other way around (van Liempt and Sersli 2012; Ehrkamp 2016, 4).

Yet, instead of recognizing that this industry is a product of its own deficient border policy (Neal 2009) – and hence has created an auto-immune reaction in the EU’s border regime – the EU keeps peddling an official rhetoric that tries to invent its own reality by pretending that undocumented migrants are a problem caused by human smugglers and traffickers. Frontex’s and the EU’s rhetoric of cracking down on ‘trafficking’ and ‘smuggling’ as well as their advocacy of ‘voluntary re- patriation’ is an attempt to shift the blame over to far less decisive geopolitical players than themselves. The implicit dependance between the EU and the smugglers has led to a shocking fatality rate among undocumented migrants travelling to the EU – over 30 thousand since 1993 (The Migrants’ Files 2015) –, making the EU’s external border the deadliest on the planet (van Houtum 2010; van Houtum and Bueno-Lacy 2017). Hence, the toughest border is not barbed wire or concrete walls but the oxymoronic paper border of the EU’s visa regime, which has turned the EU into a de facto ‘paper fortress’ (van Houtum and Lucassen 2016). What is at stake here is thus not the absence of a border that protects the EU from the arrival

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of unwanted “illegals’’ – as extreme nationalists and populists often suggest – but precisely the opposite. We are witnessing the effective closure of EU’s paper border, i.e., the absence of legal channels that is creating this miscalled ‘illegal’ migration – while those who help them, including the NGOs that rescue them from drowning, are criminalised – only aggravates undocumented migration, trafficking, smuggling, suffering and death.

It is worrying to realize that the reasons of migration, the causes of its irreg- ularity, and the own repelling policies are entirely missing from Frontex's cartographic representation of undocumented migration. Instead, through its simplistic, dehumanised and static grid, the Frontex’s map offers a visual normalisation and essentialisation of a self-made EUropean b/order in which those who cross it are pictured as unforeseen and abnormal lawbreakers and a danger for the ‘natural’ order of the EU.

2. The Arrows

The binary antagonism between desired normal fixity and unwanted abnormal mobility that the Frontex map promotes is brought to a climax by what is arguably its most striking feature: its converging crimson arrows. To be sure, in the semiotics of maps, the arrow has long been the favoured and unchallenged symbol to represent movement because of its undisputed navigational practicality: it depicts information about the initiation, route and destination of movement; a path that is followed in order to get from A to B. However, an arrow has also another, more clandestine and less scrutinized existence: it can turn into one of the most forceful symbolical devices when its use is extrapolated from the purely navigational to the political; when instead of a directional device it takes the role of a frightening metaphor (Boria 2008, 281). It takes but a rapid glance at the Frontex map to realize that the colour, direction and shape of its arrows constitute an allegory alerting the viewer about multitudes of “unwanted bodies” invading the EU and bringing with them unspecified threats - a connotation that splices into the prevalent xenophobic discourse that portrays asylum seekers as a “security, economic and hygiene threat” for European populations (El Refaie 2001, 2003; Abid, Manan, and Abdul Rahman 2017).

The significance of this Frontex map for European policymaking and the European discourse on immigration can be better grasped by comparing it to maps that rely on a similar iconography to depict ‘incoming risks’. From a cartographic perspective, what makes the arrows on the Frontex map particularly eye-catching is that such alarm-raising arrows have traditionally appeared in propagandistic and military maps. A straightforward example is a Dutch map of the invasion of the Netherlands and Belgium by Nazi Germany (see Figure 6.3).

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Figure 6.3. ‘Invasion map’ (1940). Source: https://tinyurl.com/y4qerpaf

This invasion map – randomly chosen from a vast collection of invasion maps – elucidates how propaganda and military cartography rely on a plain and eye- catching visual composition to represent either the strength of a country’s military actions or its vulnerability at the hands of a powerful threat. This visual design does not pursue scientific accuracy but rather the schematic efficiency of an

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oversimplified diagram to deliver a simple message: an existential confrontation between friends and foes.

One would expect the Frontex map – given its avowed civilian and humanist mission – to rely on more nuanced, evidence-based and sophisticated iconographic techniques to represent the complexity of undocumented mobilities as accurately as possible in order to serve as the cartographic basis for the kind of humanitarian policymaking it is supposed to foster in matters related to the EU’s external borders. It is disquieting to realize that this is far from being the case: the Frontex map shows the same penchant for the friend-vs-foe visual composition typical to invasion cartography. Unlike scientific maps, the Frontex map does not aim at representing a body of scholarship; rather, its design serves as justification of its aggressive purpose: to exaggerate the threat posed by undocumented migrants in order to cultivate political support for even tougher borders.

In other words, one can recognize in the Frontex map a propagandistic use of arrows – analogous to that of military invasion cartography – to symbolize an imagined, gigantic, imminent and violent conquest of Europe by global masses of undocumented migrants. Furthermore, the continuity of the arrows on the Frontex map wrongly assumes that all migrant journeys have the bull’s eye fixed on the EU from start to finish and that all border crossings along the apocryphal migrant routes invented by the arrows can be lumped together under the same category of ‘illegal’ or ‘irregular’ migration. The map ignores the fact that a good number of countries in the arrows’ way – and thus in the migrants’ way – are actually legally crossed; that certain countries in the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) exercise very little border control on migration; that not all migration routes are geared towards the EU and that, those which are, not always end up there. In other words, the cartographic iconography is deeply ideological: it amounts to the imposition of a Eurocentric vision of undocumented migration and its concomitant spatial imagination.

What is more, undocumented migration is often anything but a straight line. The information that a straight, unidirectional arrow may convey about, say, a tourist’s place of origin, traveling route, destination as well as motivations, emotions, intentions and overall ease of mobility cannot be extrapolated to the distress- ing experience of undocumented migration. Straight lines capture neither the distress of sleeping rough in makeshift tents and unknown cities as part of unavoidable stops that might last months or years; nor the perpetual anguish at the prospect of being found and either imprisoned or deported; nor the anxiety of life- threatening journeys across deserts and seas; nor the languishment in overcrowded detention centres where the endurance of rape, slavery and overall cor- poreal abuse is an all-too real possibility (Amnesty International 2016). The smooth continuity and straightness of the arrows on the Frontex Map promote geographical and temporal distortions that misrepresent the harrowing experience of

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undocumented migrants, making it look as if they would make the choice to go from a point of departure to a point of destination with the same nonchalance as any middle-class tourist. This, as we know from all disciplines researching this phenomenon of human mobility, is a downright contradiction of the prolonged and serpentine zigzag journeys that undocumented migrants undertake (van Hou- tum 2012; Schapendonk 2012; Schapendonk and Steel 2014). The unidirectionality, homogeneity and ‘illegality’ of undocumented migration represented by these converging arrows encircling Europe is thus flawed on a very basic scientific level.

Admittedly, yet arguably not less worryingly, the use of invasion cartography to represent (undocumented) migration has a more widespread political impact that extends far beyond whatever audience Frontex's risk analyses might reach, for it is also widely reproduced by official school atlases. An unambiguous example is the Dutch ‘Big Bos Atlas’ (De Grote Bosatlas), which is the unchallenged reference for geography courses all throughout the Dutch educational system (see Figure 6.4).

Figure.6.4. ‘Dutch School Map’: ‘Origin’ of asylum seekers in Europe. Source: De grote Bosatlas, 2015

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Part of an obligatory study material in Dutch primary and high schools, this map of the refugee crisis reproduces the political cartography of the Frontex map together with its propagandistic invasion arrows and the effect of civilisational encirclement that they produce. Although the convergence of such visual language may appear inconsequential, textbooks’ specialists – like the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research – well know that these educational artefacts are most people’s first and only approach to their national identities and thus to prejudices about other nationalities of the world: they are the basis of most people’s geopolitical imaginations (Gregory 1994, 1995; The Economist 2012). The Frontex map, widely used in policy and media circles, splices into this tradition of representing undocumented migration through the iconography of invasion, which pushes the latter's use to new extremes. A telling illustration of the latter is the Manichaean colour coding of its arrows: blue for one’s own side and red for 'enemy' forces. Colour is one of cartographers’ most powerful tools to convey a message and it would be naïve to assume that Frontex cartographers are unaware of this. Colour has been shown to ‘activate different motivations and consequently enhance performances on different types of cognitive tasks’ – i.e., tasks that require a great deal of conscious mental activity such as decision- and policy-making. The blue/red opposition is a common trope used in cartography to signify antagonism: red is a colour associated across cultures with abnormality, danger, warning, sexual promiscuity, anger and fear (e.g., Elliot et al. 2007; Feltman and Elliot 2011; Hupka et al. 1997, 166; Gerend and Sias 2009) while blue is a colour ‘often associated with openness, peace, and tranquillity (e.g., ocean and sky)’ (Mehta and Zhu 2009, 1226). Contrastingly, the baby blue with which the EU represents itself com- municates an innocence, peacefulness and vulnerability that masks its own powerful policies – such as its military interventions in Afghanistan and Libya as well as its exacerbation of conflicts through enormous exports of arms and military technology to repressive regimes in Africa, the Middle East and Asia; its agricultural protectionism and discriminatory visa policy, all of which significantly contribute to push people out of their devastated or impoverished countries to seek refuge in the EU (Walters 2010).

Although the arrows’ unidirectionality, straightness and colour already make the baseless suggestion of an invasion, their hugeness is possibly even more troubling. We know that undocumented migrants coming to the EU represent only a minority of global migrants. According to the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), only 3.3% of the world’s population lives outside their country of birth, which means that more than 96% of humanity is not a migrant. Of these roughly 250 million migrants, there are approximately 20 million from non-EU countries who re- side in the EU (about 3.7% of the EU’s total population). Of these immigrants living in the EU, between 335,000 (Sabbati and Poptcheva 2015, 3) and 3.8 million are ‘irregular migrants’ (IOM 2015, 12) – a disputed figure given the stealthy sort of migration that it tries to measure. Be that as it may, it means that undocumented

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migrants make up only between 0.1 and 0.7% of the EU’s total population. Hardly the numbers of an invasion.

Moreover, there are around 70.8 million forcibly displaced people worldwide – many of which are undocumented migrants (UNHCR 2019). This means that even if one assumes the highest estimate of undocumented migrants for the EU, it would still be hosting only around 5.5% of the world’s total. The implication is that, unlike the Frontex map so boldly suggests, almost 95% of all undocumented travellers in the world do not go to the EU at all but to countries close to their own instead. Although this utilitarian logic should not be a reason for the EU to default on its foundational principles, these numbers paint a remarkably different picture than the one offered by the Frontex map: not only does the EU receive a small fraction of the total global population of undocumented migrants – and thus asylum seekers – but their numbers do not amount to a considerable demographic pressure for the EU by any measurement.

Yet, even though the arrows on the Frontex map stand for thousands of undocumented migrants – which bulged to over a million in 2015 – their size is as large as Spain, France, Germany or Britain. In other words, the number of migrants is depicted as such an exaggeration that the arrows make them look as if they could take over the EU. Compare, for instance, the numbers of undocumented migrants represented by the Frontex map with those of yearly tourists visiting Europe (van Houtum and Boedeltje 2009; Coldwell 2017; Burgen 2018). France alone receives over 80 million tourists a year (UNWTO 2017, 6). What kind of gargantuan arrow- heads would that number warrant using the scale employed by the Frontex map? Should the daily traffic of consumers, tourists, politicians, soldiers, civil servants, traders, investors, business people, rich migrants (aka expats) and other migrants travelling to the EU – or within it – be also visualised, the Frontex map would render a less selective and deceitful representation of our mobile and relational world. Such relatively simple visual comparisons could prevent undocumented migration from being decontextualized as a unique phenomenon and, instead, they could paint a fuller picture of a world where far more people other than refugees are also on the move.

3. The Frame

The third and final fallacious element that I wish to draw attention to is the frame of the map. The choice to highlight the EU on a Frontex map is of course not illogical. Yet, as it is often the case with models – such as maps – what is left out is as important as what is represented. The Frontex map fails to deliver any kind of global – let alone historical – comparative perspective that may allow us to see that undocumented migrants coming to the EU represent a small fraction of overall global migration. On the contrary, the intimidating arrows demand the onlooker

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to believe that the EU – one of the richest regions in the world commanding an increasingly militarized border system – is at the mercy of destitute armies pouring from all around the world. From the very bottom of Africa and the farthest corners of Asia, the Frontex map shows a multitude of colossal arrows travelling unimpeded across the Afro-Asian landmasses to reach the EU. Their sheer length and profusion suggest that vast populations of entire continents are coordinately moving into the EU in one single motion that converges at three bottlenecks along its external borders. Although most arrows seem to have specific countries as their point of origin, it is not very clear how rigorous this might be. The source of some arrows is lost beyond the margins of the map, leaving the onlooker to assume that some of these migratory routes might stem from ‘somewhere in the far east’, thus implying that what matters about this map is not the specificity of its details but its broader message: the migratory movements that its arrows represent might as well come from everywhere around the world – especially the world of less affluent Muslims and Africans – with the EU as their sole destination. This framing technique is known as encirclement: a rhetorical and visual trope intended to exaggerate the threat posed by unwanted foreigners and thus justify more aggressive policies towards them which is, unsurprisingly, an all-time favourite of the xenophobic movements in both Europe and the US (Jaret 1999).

Although all cartography is political (Harley 1988a), this kind of propaganda cartography – especially in opposition to scientific cartography – arose during the first half of the 20th century and ripened in the US as well as in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany between the 1920’s and 1940’s (Herb 1997; Schulten 1998; Boria 2008). This tradition peaked in Germany nurtured by a public discourse that persistently constructed the geopolitical imagination of a German state surrounded by imminent military threats and a German people that, scattered beyond its borders and oppressed by unfriendly European states, longed for its protection (Ma- zower 1997). This fear of encirclement (Einkreisung) was purposefully used as a propaganda strategy to justify the pursuit of a space of security for the Europe- wide German diaspora (i.e., Lebensraum) through the mobilisation of the German state into total war (Sywottek 1976, 140–141, 194–201).

The subject matter of encirclement is characterized by a cartographic layout that, I argue, at its most basic follows three b/ordering and othering techniques (van Houtum and van Naerssen 2002): 1) it borders an ‘endangered’ political project and places it at the centre, thus suggesting an urgent and inescapable focus as well as a need to protect its vulnerability (Henrikson 1999, 102–103); 2) it orders its own territory by demarcating its borders and by inscribing details on it that differ- entiate it from others with the aim of nurturing self-identification and co-opting allegiance to a political project, thereby silencing internal differences and suggesting a spurious territorial homogeneity and cohesiveness; 3) it ‘others’ its periphery as a nameless and seemingly endless zone consisting of threatening symbolic

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devices – such as arrows, troops, planes, or tanks – that have no precise source and thus seem to come from everywhere to encroach upon their target.

Figure 6.5. ‘White Supremacist Map’. Source: Miles (n.d.) The Birth of a Nation: Declaration of the Existence of a Racial Nation within Confines of Hostile Political State. Cohoctah, MI: Mountain Church

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To give another example, below, the ‘White Supremacist Map’ (see Figure 6.5) – authored by a leading right-wing terrorist in the US – shows the American white- supremacist narrative about an invasion by ‘primitive peoples’ (Miles, n.d.; Ferber and Kimmel 2000; van Houtum and Bueno-Lacy 2017, 92–93). What I see is an imminent encirclement of the US by an invasion of immigrants who, symbolized by elephantine arrows stemming from all around the world, are made to look inexorably poised to change its virtuous racial configuration for the worse.

It is disturbing to see that the Frontex map is an heir to this tradition of threatening encirclement. It should be considered an extremist cartographic composition, for a visual argument that presents a set of invading arrows surrounding a defenceless EU paints a hopeless situation that calls upon viewers to support any measure – regardless of how extreme – to shield them from this existential threat. Unsurprisingly, a visual arrangement that promotes the narrative of ‘civilisational survival’ within the context of undocumented migration squarely reproduces one of the core tropes of the xenophobic politics of today: ‘white genocide’ or ‘race suicide’ (Perry 2004). These white-supremacist conspiracy theories have coalesced into ‘the grand replacement theory’ (Camus 2012), which postulates that white populations in Europe and the US are being purposefully replaced by non-white immigrants with antagonistic cultures and high birth rates who have been allowed in by political elites whose openness to the world amounts to treachery. Such su- perstition has reached the mainstream with the publication of books that rail against the cultural degradation of Europe, the US or the West as a consequence of immigration (e.g., Buchanan 2002, 2011; Sarrazin 2010). Eurosceptic neo-nationalists – the ‘alt-right’ – are using the unfortunate contemporary resonance that this message has among EU populations to bring back their brand of ethno-exclusionary politics (van Houtum and Bueno-Lacy 2017). Brexit is the most patent success of such Euroscepticism: it was promoted by a campaign that relied on a variation of the same invasion cartography and the same iconography evoking white supremacist tropes (Kent 2016) (see Figure 6.6).

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Figure 6.6. ‘Brexit Map’. Source: Kent, 2016

A last and pristine example of the hegemony enjoyed by the fallacious cartographic layout of undocumented migration epitomized by the Frontex map is a propaganda video made by Geert Wilders – a Dutch EUrosceptic and Islamopho- bic politician. In this video, he lambastes Muslim and African immigration while promoting the classical racist tropes of overpopulation by dark, culturally threatening and impoverished immigrants, a discourse that he crystallizes in a map of Europe that reproduces the same cartographic design of the Frontex map (see Fig- ure 6.7).

Figure 6.7. The migration map of Geert Wilders. Source: https://tinyurl.com/yyc3ur4r

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I would say, to say the least, that the harmony between official EUropean cartography and anti-EU cartography should raise a thousand red flags among EU policymakers and geographers responsible for visualizations of undocumented migration like the one seen on the Frontex Map.

Alternative maps

Until now, alternative maps that deviate from the Frontex iconography are still scarce, and their use is largely confined to small circles where ‘radical’ cartography has broken some ground (see Casas et al. 2017). Nevertheless, there is a slowly growing collection of brave and inspiring attempts to come up with different cartographic visualisations of undocumented migration. It would be beyond the scope of this article to mention and analyse each and all of them. However, I will briefly discuss three trends that I see as very promising—namely, counter-mapping, deep mapping and mobile mapping.

First, there is a growing body of what is called counter-mapping. Counter- maps are checks on power whose aim is to contest the oppressive message, application and implications of hegemonic cartographic depictions. Counter-maps point to the crucial importance of cultivating an iconological expertise among political cartographers. Countering the economic, social and political misstatements of traditional cartography requires a new cartographic canon as well as a moral compass to guide it. Interesting cases in point are atlases made by largely non- academic collectives such as the Atlas of Radical Cartography (Mogel and Bhagat 2008), the Manual of Collective Mapping by the Buenos-Aires-based “Iconocla- sistas” (2016), This is not an Atlas by the “Kollektiv Orangotango” (2018) and “The Decolonial Atlas” (2014). What these works share is that they include collectively made maps that sacrifice the spatial precision and pretended objectivity of traditional cartography for the creative distortion, strident authorship and critical statements of a visual design intended to expose either the false assumptions or dis- honest motivations pervasive in hegemonic maps. Their counter-maps aim at emancipating the map by radically humanising it, which implies consciously bringing to light the geographical information that matters to the people whose existence and interests traditional cartography usually invisibilizes. Such maps depict, for example, asymmetric power struggles (e.g., silenced indigenous land claims or the incidence of sexual harassment in a city) and unspoken routes (e.g., the secret detention centres and unlawful kidnapping routes used by the US as part of its endless ‘war on terrorism’; walking routes designed to avoid surveillance cameras when moving through a city; safe immigration passages for undocumented immigrants, etc.). Despite their powerful narratives and new cartographic designs, these maps have so far gained relatively little academic – let alone political – attention.

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Similarly, in the field of undocumented migration there is also some inspiring work, like the superb counter-map made by Heller and Pezzani (2017), who made an impressive video of a boat with 72 migrants on board that, at the height of the war on Libya in 2011, was left to drift for 14 days even though it was within NATO’s maritime surveillance area. Another collective worth mentioning is Mi- greurop, a collection of migration scholars who periodically publish an Atlas of migration in Europe whose most recent version contains a brief critique of the Frontex map—much in line with my analysis.

Furthermore, the French cartographer Philippe Rekacewicz (a collaborator of Migreurop) has published compelling critical and radical maps on migration – many of them in Le Monde diplomatique (see figures 6.8 and 6.9). Unlike the Fron- tex map, his maps depict the power relations of undocumented migration to the EU in a manner that better reflects the state-of-the-art scientific research on it. The first map offers a global synopsis of how the EU’s visa regime limits most of the rest of the world’s population from legally travelling to the EU. The second map displays the deadly aftermath of this paper border regime along the EU’s external borders and within Schengen. Rather than a vulnerable EU being ‘overrun’ by undocumented migrants, these ‘counter Frontex maps’ show that the EU is part of a system of visas, detention centres and biopolitical border controls that discriminates, dehumanises, illegalises and willingly endangers undocumented migrants (see also van Houtum 2010; Cobarrubias 2019).

Figure 6.8. Counter Frontex Maps: ‘The geography of an unwanted humanity’, by Rekacewicz (2014)

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Another interesting example of counter-cartography is the map by Arnold Platon, an independent mapmaker (see Figure 6.10). Platon’s map is intended as a geopolitical statement on undocumented migration. He shows the often-unrepresented connection between the wars supported by (eastern) EU Member States and the provenance of refugees which those same states now refuse to accept. It shows how those states that today refuse to accept refugees coming to the EU from Iraq, Syria and Libya are the same that supported the geopolitical actions that led to these countries’ instability, collapse and the flight of their population. His map is thus a critique of the hypocrisy behind those EU Member States’ opposition to the creation of a comprehensive asylum system across the EU (Karolewski and Ben- edikter 2018), especially since they supported the very war that has led scores of undocumented migrants to seek asylum in the EU. Showing such unacknowledged geopolitical relations is one of the most forceful ways in which counter- maps speak truth to power. It is an example of how a cartographer can make a dent in the dominant visualization of a pressing geopolitical issue by crafting a mordant political message with the use of radical cartographic techniques.

Figure 6.9. Counter Frontex map: ‘The forbidden world’, by Rekacewicz (2014)

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Figure 6.10. ‘Radical Map’: Make war, expect migration, by Platon (2016)

A second promising trend that I identify is deep-mapping, which is concerned with the humanisation of space to give a rich, situational, consciously relational and subjective account of place-related emotions in order to counter the ‘cartographic cleansing’ of human beings shown on hegemonic maps (van Houtum 2012) – such as the dehumanising cartography used to represent mobility and migration (Dodge 2016, 2–3; Mekdjian 2015; Campos-Delgado 2018).

A powerful example of this kind of mapping is the deep-map made by Mus- tafa, a Syrian refugee, who retraced his journey from Syria to France (see Figure 6.11). Unlike traditional cartography, Mustafa’s cartographic composition provides a telling personal account of the physical and mental hardship that an undocumented migrant must endure during a typical journey. Depicted by the Fron- tex map, Mustafa’s individual story – as well as the plight of the millions of

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undocumented migrants to which his story could be extrapolated – would become a faceless pixel in a big threatening arrow moving towards the EU. Against this narrative, Mustafa has pictured a world in which it is him – not the EU – who faces uncertainty and fear, hardship and hostility.

Figure 6.11. The journey of Mustafa, by Migreurop (2017)

The third trend I distinguish is mobile mapping, which stresses the dynamic, relational and convoluted paths of human interaction by geo-positioning data har- vested through mobile means, such as mobile phones, social media, cameras, sat- ellites, open source mappings and film (Mekdjian 2015; Caquard 2011, 2013, 2014). Rather than a priori departing from the nation-state template, mobile maps tend to focus on representing unfixed mobilities, networks and connections. A good illustration in the case of undocumented migration is the ‘Migration Trail Project’, a map that retraces the journeys of undocumented migrants to the EU with help of interactive visualisations and podcasts.

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There is also a growing number of documentaries and movies that have taken migrants and their plights as their subject matter. The dynamism of these ‘motion pictures’ is increasingly blurring the distinction between two-dimensional cartographic ‘still lives’ and cinematic road-trip movies. A good example is Human Flow, by the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, which ‘maps’ the profoundly personal human impact and desperate search for safety, shelter and justice that plagues the experience of undocumented migrants. The mobile maps that undocumented migrants show in this film reveal that, rather than a straight and unbroken line, their movement is of a highly uncertain, contextual and trial-and-error nature haunted by jarring anxiety and waiting periods (see Cobarrubias 2019).

This short overview of encouraging cartographic strands can of course only be a rough description of the most promising alternative mappings of undocumented migration. But it shows that there are multiple opportunities for bold new visual designs beyond what within mainstream cartography is traditionally un- derrepresented or even misrepresented when it comes to visualising undocumented mobilities.

Conclusion

Political maps confront us with the fundamental paradox of cartography: although they are perhaps the most immediate evocation of geography, they are also some of its most anti-geographical artefacts, for they conceal at least as much as they reveal – and often much more (Wood 2003; Monmonier 2018). The implication is that every single political map should be acknowledged as a political statement.

The Frontex map of undocumented migration I have analysed in detail is a case in point: it presents itself as an objective truth on the basis of which border policies along the EU’s external borders can be formulated. Yet, its arrangement of iconographic choices creates an image of undocumented migration that bears little resemblance with this geopolitical phenomenon. Its science is wrong and its politics are perverse: the overall message of the Frontex map is a nativist diagnosis about the perils of ‘non-native’ immigration and a subtle yet violent recommendation to fix it. This is not a trivial matter. For, the relevance of this particular map is that, unfortunately, it does not represent a rarity but the norm, not only in cartography but in the larger discourse and ‘spectacle industry’ that undocumented migration has become (De Genova 2011; Jones 2016).

Whether the Frontex map shows purposeful ideology or subconscious prejudice is something I cannot unequivocally assert. Either way, the viewer is ultimately exposed to a visual composition in which a threatening invasion of migrants is taking over a defenceless EU. This reproduces a disreputable trope of evil against innocence: red versus blue. This is the classical dichotomy of ‘friend vs foe’

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on which the worst kind of ethnocentric violence is usually constructed (Schmitt 1932). Although this is not a new discourse, it echoes a biopolitical discourse whose presence is troubling to recognize in the official cartography of the EU. Regardless of how unintentional the Frontex map’s iconography might be or how unaware onlookers might be about its discursive heritage, these accidents do not make the map’s potentially unintended message less striking nor its geopolitical implications less meaningful (Harley 2001). The Frontex map is namely part of the discursive mechanisms through which the EU is trying to justify the outsourcing of its refugee-protection responsibilities to unscrupulous authoritarian regimes in Tur- key and North Africa (Bialasiewicz 2012; Zoeteweij and Turhan 2017), thus contributing to the creation of slave markets and the bulging graveyard at the bottom of the Mediterranean. The Frontex map is thus yet another attempt to normalize the spaces of exception multiplying across the EU and eroding its liberal-democratic principles (Agamben 2005; De Genova and Peutz 2010; van Houtum and Bueno-Lacy 2017). The EU and its Member States are trying to conceal their humanitarian irresponsibility and overall mismanagement of EUrope’s borders behind the travesty of a patronizing high ground: that it would better for undocumented migrants if they would not take the dangerous journey to begin with; and that human traffickers and smugglers are to blame for undocumented migration. As if the flight undertaken by undocumented migrants was much of a choice or less of a right and as if the trafficking and smuggling of migrants was not an industry propelled by the very border regime that the EU has put in place. I have earlier referred to this intertwining of cartography and geopolitics as cartopolitics (van Houtum 2012, 2013; Bueno-Lacy and van Houtum 2015): a political discourse that relies on cartography to b/order geography and thus to b/order history, culture and people through the geographical imaginations that maps arouse. By manufacturing perceptions of all-encompassing geographical scale, cartographic artefacts implant in people’s heads a mediated reality – ideas of the world people acquire not through first-hand experience but through representations that other people have made of it.

Most migration maps seem to remain stuck in a mindset that sets the idealized native against the menacing non-native and which, for the most part, ‘shows a persistent disconnect between the mainstream academic-applied cartographic research and the contemporary concerns of most human geographers’ (see also: Dodge and Perkins 2008; Hennig 2015; Dodge 2016, 1). What the iconography of the invasion-like cartography of migration seems to shamelessly proclaim are discourses that we assume many policymakers, news anchors, intellectuals, academics, school teachers and other public commentators would find uncomfortable or impossible to admit in spoken or written words – either because it would endanger their positions or because they are entirely unaware of them. Perhaps this ignorance is where maps derive their power from and what makes their study an in- dispensable yet underdeveloped endeavour. Not only might they alter our

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perception of the world but they might puppeteer us into reproducing the scenes of a theatre play in which powerful interests want to make us act a part without us even being aware of our ability to change the script.

We have shown how the current mapping of undocumented migration amounts to blatant cartographic malpractice, tendentious science and ruinous policymaking for the EU. In other words, this is the kind of ‘science’ society needs to be defended against (Feyerabend 1975). So, I would argue that it is time for us geographers and cartographers to emancipate the map of undocumented migration from its own territorial trap. There is a need for a post-representational political cartography that takes into account the map’s cognitive dimension: why do our political maps look like they do, what do they say about the politics of the phenomena they represent and how do they influence them? (Dodge 2016, 7). I make a plea for more radical mapmaking (Wood 2003; Crampton and Krygier 2006; van Houtum 2013), and for a more philosophically, morally and iconograph- ically sophisticated conception of the cartography of (undocumented) migration.

Even though in the short run we might be unable to create a better border management regime for undocumented migrants due to stubborness and political constraints, at least the cartography of migration could avoid taking the side of unscrupulous politicians. To accomplish this, we need to understand the cognitive and political effects of cartographic design choices (Robinson 1952; Caquard 2013, 2014). As Ladis Kristof already said in 1960, ‘Men have already learned to distrust words and figures, but they have not yet learned to distrust maps’ (1960, 45). For, the geography we visualise is more than a set of technical cartesian coordinates on a paper or a screen: it can be a cartopolitical trap with very real consequences.

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THIRD SECTION Other Europes

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CHAPTER 7 Emancipation

Freeing Europe’s Image The EU’s unwitting alliance against itself

Although Border Studies has experienced a reaction against the naive cosmopolitan commonplace of a “world without borders” in theorizations about the transformation and proliferation of borders rather than their disappearance, the jump from these new borders’ theoretical conceptualisation to its empirical exploration is yet lacking. This chapter aims at filling this lacuna by articulating a critique against essentialist notions of Euro- pean civilisation that neglect its geographies beyond the borders of the Eu- ropean continent’s physiographical convention. I suggest that, in the recognition of this open Europeanness lie some of the most fruitful visions for a more open EUrope. It is outside the traditional borders of Europe where we can find the “more Europe” the EU envisions to create.

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Working paper:

Bueno Lacy R (2018) Freeing Europe’s Image: EUrope’s unwitting alliance against itself.

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CHAPTER 7

Freeing Europe’s Image: EUrope’s Unwitting Al- liance Against Itself

ABSTRACT

This chapter traces a genealogy of the relationship between discourses that have persistently shaped notions of Europeanness while simultaneously supporting evolving geopolitical designs: from colonialism to contemporary EUropean geopolitics. The significance of such discourses resides in the ethnocentric geopolitical hierarchization that they promote: a glorification of Europeanness that has typically relied on the systematic representation of non-European geographies as less valuable—i.e., climates and landscapes, cultural productions and human beings. In order to explore the mutation, migration and tenacity of such representations, I rely on Aby Warburg’s iconological theory and, particularly, on his concept of “image vehicles” (Bilderfahr- zeuge). The theoretical and social import of this case study consists in illustrating the process through which representations construct political cartographies as well as in showing how this “cartopolitics” sways geopolitical action and ultimately shapes geography. Acknowl- edging the influence of such discourses in contemporary EUropean geopolitics could hardly be more urgent: their revival by ethno-nationalist authoritarian movements is bringing back past Europes that EU- ropeans today seem to mistakenly believe safely behind them.

A Cannibalising Political Project

urope needs to be freed from the shackles to which the EU has confined it or risk relapsing into the violence and misery that have scarred a great deal of its existence. To be sure, the post-war project of European integration that began with the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) has E brought about some of the most prosperous societies humanity has ever experienced (Stewart 2010; Harari 2014: 377-414). This is no small feat for a continent whose history, until recently, has drawn on endless bloodshed to

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delineate its borders (Tilly 1985, 1990, 1995; Schulze 1994). Today, EU Member States are over-represented in all sorts of indexes among the most affluent, egalitarian, free and happy countries in the world (Helliwell, Layard and Sachs 2018; McMahon 2017; UNDP 2018). For whatever such measurements of prosperity might be worth, it is beyond doubt that Europeans today are not only extraordi- narily better off than their forefathers but also far detached from the pains that afflict most of their contemporaries around the world (SPI 2018). And yet, the EU, the political project that should be praised for this colossal achievement, seems to have, simultaneously, sown the seeds of its own demise.

This chapter argues that the collection of geographical imaginations that the EU promotes through its proto-national symbolism, political narratives and geopolitical practices—particularly along its external borders—creates a meaningful political myth of EUrope unaware of its self-destructive potential. In spite of the EU’s ethos being a repudiation of past Europes (Bialasiewicz 2012b), some of the elements of this image as well as the EUrocentric rendition of the world it invents are infected with a typical Eurocentric historical baggage that, in the past, has be- guiled Europeans with promises of civilisational redemption (e.g., ambitions to either bring about a mission civilisatrice or engineer a “superior race”) and instead led them to their worst raptures of self-destruction—e.g., colonisation and slavery on a global scale, nationalist wars of aggression and the Holocaust. However, the refusal to acknowledge the self-harming power inherent to these discourses is not only allowing them to come back from their ostracism but also making them in- vulnerable, for how can one criticize a discourse whose existence is not even acknowledged?

One of the gloomiest examples of this wilful blindness can be found in the victory speech of Thierry Baudet, the leader of the Forum for Democracy (FvD)— a neo-fascist political party in the Netherlands—held after his party became the largest political force in the Dutch Senate. His rhetoric tells the all too familiar story of a white Europe whose superior civilisation should be protected, by violent means if necessary, from the threats of both non-white immigrants and the domestic traitors who allow them in (Quekel 2019; Ieven 2019; De Jong 2019). Besides his unmistakeable allusions to what I could term “Europe’s imperial political myth”, Baudet’s close ties to brazen white supremacists in EUrope and the US signal (Tok- metzis, L’Ami & Van Biezen 2017), beyond doubt, an ideological affinity not only with fascist 20th-century Europe but also to colonial and imperial Europe. And yet, the journalists, historians and intellectuals who have called out this plainly fascist rhetoric for what it openly is have been widely lambasted as unnuanced demonis- ers who trade lightly in cavalier comparisons to nazis and fascists (e.g., Van Duin 2019; Giesen 2019). This dogged refusal to see what seems self-evident needs to be analysed in light of what Foucault identified as the mechanisms through which certain discourses are silenced: “In every society, the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organised and redistributed by a certain number of

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procedures whose role is to ward off its powers and dangers, to gain mastery over its chance of events, to evade its ponderous, formidable materiality” (Foucault 1981: 52). When the self-evident is dismissed as unreasonable or, worse, as madness—one of the most powerful procedures of discursive suppression (Foucault 1981: 52-56)—, reality is ripe for mystification.

Today, ethno-exclusionary visions of Europe are gradually creeping into EUropean geopolitics with a new mystified face: they have learned to cover the stench of their unabashed racism with the politically acceptable perfume of a “white cultural anxiety”. The particular bouquet that has eased their return to acceptable political debate is concocted by a distortion of identity politics originally intended for the emancipation of structurally underprivileged minorities (Kelly 2017). Yet, the illiberal, tyrannical, vicious and fundamentally anti-humanist essentialism of such neo-fascist discourses remains unchanged and our inability to recognize it might allow them to strike back with a vengeance. In other words, I propose that, like the paradox of Cronus eating its children to preserve his power— and the allegory it inspires of time devouring everything it begets—, EUrope seems trapped in the tragically ironical effort to safeguard its political community by devouring much of what makes it worth protecting. This chapter retraces what I recognize as EUrope’s suicidal future.

To explore Europe’s chronic relapse into its former self-destructive self, I conduct a Foucauldian genealogy of the chauvinist discourses that have a tendency to reappear in the different ideas of Europe that have inspired diverse geopolitical projects since the Renaissance. Such “Genealogy does not pretend to go back in time to restore an unbroken continuity that operates beyond the dispersion of forgotten things; its duty is not to demonstrate that the past actively exists in the present, that it continues secretly to animate the present, having imposed a prede- termined form on all its vicissitudes” (Foucault 1971: 81). Genealogy represents an important approach to counter the deterministic histories that inform the most dramatic geopolitical decisions. History matters because, “whether they like it or not, professional historians produce the raw material for the non-professionals’ use or misuse” (Hobsbawm 1997). Those who misuse it more often are those who attempt to wield history as a rhetorical weapon to demarcate politically meaningful but historically and otherwise spurious borders between political subjects (nations, ethnic groups, social classes, political movements, etc). After all the passport, the document that entitles to live and travel with the protections to which he is entitled as a member of the nation who issues it. nationalists, those justifying on a passport, a document the basis of a national history to which they do not belong. Not a natural of the land, not a native and therefore not entitled to rights (Elden). By priv- ileging often-overlooked aspects of history, the genealogical approach attempts to lift the veil over what has been artificially constructed as self-evident truth. In other words, history teaches us how to laugh at the solemnities of ‘the origin’.

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To be sure, my intention is neither to say that EUrope today is equivalent to the Europe of the 15th century nor to advance the notion that there has been no moral evolution between the Europe of slavery and colonisation and the EU of today. Rather, my purpose is to make a more convoluted and nuanced argument that takes into account the accidents of history to establish that this creating discourse on Europe later mutated in content, migrated from one political ideology to another, then disappeared, dispersed, reappeared again with meteoric force and then was buried under the ruins of World War 2. Yet, some of this discourse’s elements seem to have managed to come back from this underground existence to occupy a central role in today’s representation of EUrope and the geopolitics such image inspires.

To tell this story, I rely on Aby Warburg’s concept of “image vehicles” (Bilderfahrzeuge). My intention is to bring home the discussions elaborated in the preceding chapters by arguing that the self-harming EUropean geopolitics that I identify throughout this work—i.e., the proto-nationalist symbolism, inhumane border policies, exclusionary identitary narratives, violent political cartography and overall essentialist borders of the EU—have heavier and more profound historical and ideological anchors than today’s geopolitical situation. I suggest that the autoimmune geopolitics that this dissertation ascribes to the EU are deeply rooted in representations of non-Europeans dating back to the emergence of “the idea of Europe” in the 1500s. I claim that this idea of Europe constitutes what Fou- cault called a fundamental or creating discourse and that its variations throughout the centuries constitute commentaries (Foucault 1970): representations of Europe’s creating discourse that, in spite of their divergences with it, have preserved its politically meaningful evocation of a global political cartography subordinated to a Eurocentric hierarchy. The organizing principle of this political cartography— roughly but plainly put—is the assumption that European imperial metropoles, their geographies, histories and cultural productions are essentially more valuable than anything falling outside the borders of whatever has been defined as Eu- rope—itself an unstable idea of changing borders (Quijano 2000, 2007).

The discovery of the world through European eyes engendered a system of discourses about this world that went hand in hand with a cornucopia of geographical and cartographic representations. In spite of the mutation that these representations or some of their elements experienced throughout time—in terms of their influence, process and means of manufacture, ideological associations, power of their exponents, channels of dissemination, political context, main audiences among whom it resonated, etc.—, I claim that their meaning travelled through the vehicles afforded by certain images as well as by the discourses to which they make explicit or implicit reference. The significance of studying the discourses that these representations promote lies in their current impact on EU geopolitics: they are reminiscences of ideologies and practices which today we would find morally, practically and legally abhorrent, for they run against the foundational ethos and

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legal principles of the European Union. By encouraging these representations, however, the EU has been, ironically, promoting discourses that are detrimental to the post-war project of European integration it embodies. More worryingly still is that the anti-humanist semiotics of such representations and discourses are largely unacknowledged. This main reflection on the historical migration and transmuta- tion of images and the discourses they carry with them builds upon Edward Said’s ontology of grand geopolitical constructs such as “the Orient”—or, in this case, “Europe”—which, rather than natural entities are rather the result of a formidable “body of theory and practice” in which many generations of Europeans have made a colossal material investment (Said 1978: 6). These discourses have not remained stable but rather they have continuously mutated to adapt to the changing discursive demands and geopolitical interests of their times.

Throughout the previous chapters I have consistently posited that, in its attempt to deepen political cohesion through the construction of a European political myth (Bottici and Challand 2006), the EU has been pulled into a downward spiral of self-defeating representations and counterproductive geopolitics whose mutually constitutive interaction has progressively assembled a cannibalising idea of Eu- rope. I have argued that the EU has assembled an image of Europe (Wintle 1999, 2009)—i.e., a “big picture” that gives meaning to what Europe is as an economic, demographic, historical, geographical, cultural and political community—that has progressively rehabilitated the Old Europe that the post-war project of European integration was set up to keep at bay (Bialasiewicz 2012b). The EU’s continuous work on a common European narrative to make EUrope meaningful for the unwieldy diversity of its Member States has backfired. Tragically, instead of resem- bling the humanist inheritance of universal values that its constitution purports to promote (EU 2007), the EU has become a threat to the very prosperity it has built.

This is not a diatribe against the EU: it is not inspired by the conspirational EUrosceptic arguments espoused by either sensationalist journalists or opportunistic politicians (e.g., Ross 2016; Booker and North 2003). However, even though this work shares neither the diagnosis nor the recommendations of conspicuous EU detractors, it does share the magnitude of their disillusionment. The jaw-dropping success that the EU represents—a much more astounding achievement than whatever Robert Schuman or Jean Monnet could have bargained for 68 years ago— only starts to sink in after taking a look back at the scepticism and opposition that characterised the project of European integration from its beginnings until well into the 1980s (Pierson 2002; Bueno Lacy 2011: 103-104).

These days, the story of European political integration is often regurgitated as a facile cliché of Europe’s catharsis which, unleashed by the horrors of World War 2 (WW2), triggered the continent to rediscover its “humanist inheritance”. Nonetheless, a closer look into the experience of European integration reveals a more complicated and less noble path, particularly once one:

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recalls France’s rejection of a European Defence Community in 1954—a major set-back for the nascent project of political integration in Europe—or its opposition to Great Britain’s accession to the EEC twice during the 1960s (Hansen, 2002: 492). Moreover, Greece—the portentous cradle of democracy and European civilisation—was considered a danger for the West during the Cold War because of its inclination towards the Soviet Union and hostility towards the US and NATO (Dimitras 1985). Not to speak of today’s calls for kicking Greece out of the EU be-cause of its reckless use of the Un- ion’s money (Conway 2010; Economist 2010a).

Spain and Portugal are other examples of current EU members formerly looked upon with disdain (Haas 1961: 375). Both of them, with their dictatorial pasts, poor economic performances (Etzioni 1963: 34; Redston 1983) and ambiguous European identities, were considered a liability for the EEC and thus their attempts to join the Community were blocked several times before they were successful (Carothers 1981)—even then it took 9 years for Spain to be admitted (Economist 2010b). In the 1980s the French attempted to prevent or at least slow down Spain’s accession to the EEC while the Spanish socialists argued that “Spain’s ties to Latin America and the Arab world [had] an equal claim upon its national identity as those to Western Europe” and thus Spain should not precipitate into joining NATO or the EEC (Ibid: 298) (Bueno Lacy 2012: 104).

Contrary to the bromide of Europe’s post-war epiphany, in its inception not only was the idea of European cooperation fanciful within the boundaries of the Euro- pean continent but, beyond its borders, the idea of Europe’s post-war moral bet- terment is stridently belied by the dying spasms of its empires and dictatorships.

In the Netherlands, the ruins of Rotterdam were not yet cleared when, in 1947, the Dutch government was already dispatching its army to brutally squash the independence of Indonesia, its East Indian colony (Groen 1986). In 1954, not a decade had gone by since France’s liberation from German occupation when the French army was already terrorising Algeria, resorting to widespread torture to forestall its independence (Branche 2016). In 1961, Belgium—a country that today enjoys an affable national reputation associated with chocolate, comic strips and beer—conspired to murder the first democratically elected prime minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo, thus doubling down on the misery that its colonial rule had already inflicted on a population it had enslaved and mutilated by throwing their newly independent country into a turmoil that rages until today (De Witte 1999; Ewans 2002). In Germany, the denazification that followed its surrender in 1945 was soon cut short by the governments of Konrad Adenauer and Willy Brandt, whose diplomatic travails and widespread amnesty allowed many Na- zis—including convicted criminals—to return to power and all walks of life soon after the war (Tetens 1961; Frei 2002; Bohr 2018). Eastern Germany itself was ruled

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by a police state that employed state terror and military psychology against scores of its own civilian population until its collapse in 1989 (Naimark 1994; Epstein 2004; Fulbrook 2008). Portugal’s protracted imperialism spans its command of the biggest share of the African slave trade since the colonisation of America to the hopeless counterinsurgency wars that it waged in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau between 1961 and 1974 to prevent their independence (Cann 1997). In 1974, the Greek junta together with Greek Cypriot nationalists orchestrated a military coup in Cyprus whose aftermath led to the Turkish invasion and subsequent partition of the island that scars its territory and divides its populations until today (Bueno Lacy and Van Houtum 2018: 5). In Spain, the ruthless dictatorship of Franco—which allowed the Nazis to bomb Guernica in 1937 to stifle Basque nationalism and give Hitler a testing ground for the Blitzkrieg (Diehl 2007)—relied on medieval methods of execution like the garrotte until 1974 (Giniger 1974).

Against this background of intra-European antagonism, gratuitous colonial ruthlessness and authoritarian violence, the EU seems like a sobering success. And yet, an expanding brand of EUroscepticism rooted in a longing for the authoritarian and chauvinistic mentality of yore has been stoking division and gaining track across the EU over the last decades. Whereas in 2002 Dutch prime minister Jan Peter Balkenende earned a sound round of critique and ridicule after appealing for a return to the “dynamic” and “far-sighted” mentality of the Dutch East India Company (Groenendijk 2016), today the same wistfulness for the Dutch Empire is recalcitrantly extolled by a growing number of Dutch politicians (Drieënhuizen 2017). Likewise, the UK’s departure from the EU (i.e., Brexit) has been glorified as a return to Britain’s lost greatness through a series of allusions to the British Em- pire: a trope that has been adopted and reproduced by the highest ranks of the British government (Tharoor 2017; Younge 2018).

The problem with this imperial nostalgia goes beyond its cavalier attitude towards imperial and colonial barbarity. What it also overlooks is that the shine that today we can admire in the all sorts of art, architecture and stories about world-travelling exploits of, say, the Dutch Golden Age, offer an imperfect testament to judge the times that produced them. Even though some Europeans might be able to compromise their moral integrity by brushing aside the crimes that their countries and ancestors perpetrated beyond their borders in the name of empire, the magnificence of the enduring imperial reminiscences that they cherish belies an imperial grandeur that was unevenly distributed among populations that, compared to contemporary EUropean societies, fared abysmally worse regarding all kinds of living standards. At its peak, European imperialism was a time when war and political oppression, filth and sickness, misery and scarcity, forced and child labour, religious and sexual intolerance, appalling violence and enslaving serfdom tinted the toil of everyday subsistence (Parker 2008; Bijman et al 2012; White 2013). Even the Netherlands—a place that five centuries ago was already praised for its cleanliness as well as for is wealthy and well-fed population (Schama 1987)—

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featured, well into the 20th century, pockets of a dismaying slum-like poverty that would be unfathomable in the Netherlands of today (Source 1 Media 2013). Alt- hough by the 19th century Europe (and parts of the US) had grown spectacularly wealthy by comparison to the rest of the world (Pomeranz 2009), such prosperity pales in comparison to the wealth that EU societies enjoy today.

In what follows I examine how this recurrent European fascination for a civilisational grandeur attained by the violent subjugation and arbitrarily unequal hierarchies reminiscent of imperial Europe can be more appealing for EUropeans today than the prosperity of the EU, built on a conviction in humanism and egali- tarianism? In other words, why is the political myth of imperial Europe more appealing than the political myth of humanist Europe championed by the EU? More- over, why would one substitute the imperial for the humanist when the imperial has not only necessitated the subjugation of the non-European but, eventually, also of the European? This historical inclination is what I call “the colonial boomerang”.

The revenge of the colonial image

The most eerie aspect of the newfound authoritarian craving feeding the EU’s political debate is the frailty of its historical romanticism: Europeans do not need to conduct expert archival research but rather merely reminisce with their grandpar- ents to find out about the suicidal excesses that this ideology can reach (Helwig 2017). European imperialism did not limit itself to the brutalisation of the subjugated African, American and Asian populations exploited in Europe’s colonies but, the normalisation of this cruelty as an acceptable tool of governmental control eventually justified and demanded the extension of such savagery to the European metropoles where it was devised.

The nexus colony/Holocaust is of crucial political importance today. There is a link between the making of the idea of Europe through imperialism, colonialism and slavery, on the one hand, and European fascism, on the other. Both could be seen as similar political technologies relying on a similar principle: a racial hierarchy kept in place through a state-sanctioned violence that, given its arbitrariness and cruelty, amounts to state terrorism. Imperialism and fascism offer a similar organisation of geography—people, space and culture—inspired by Mani- chean allegories that reinforce the dichotomy master/serf (JanMohamed 1985). The imagery they beget configures black-and-white borderscapes (Brambilla 2015): representational, physical and imagined landscapes defined by a specific collection of borders that cut through space, neighbourhoods and phenotypes; languages, dia- lects and accents; philosophies, political allegiances and religions to configure distinctions between the refined and the unrefined (Bourdieu 1979), the civilised and the uncivilised, the European and the non-European, the rightful master and the acquiescent servant (Fanon 1961: 48).

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Although the oppression and enslavement of people by people can be traced back to Antiquity (Walvin 1983), there is something historically specific about the connection between European world travel, the fantastically profitable global trade that it set in motion and the fabulously malicious exploitation that the demand-and-supply chains of this global network engendered (Quijano 2000; Gib- son 2014). Whereas slavery was pervasive in Antiquity, the volumes of global trade that global European imperialism brought about unleashed the mass exploitation of slaves required for global volumes of production and global patterns of consumption (Beckert and Rockman 2016). Although intra-African slavery, for example, was a common institution before Europeans established the transatlantic slave trade, slaves under this regime were a marker of power and wealth limited mostly to domestic purposes. In contrast, the sugar plantations of the Caribbean or the cotton plantations of the South of the United States (US) turned the African slave into a touchstone of their commercial profit: a raw material as impersonalized as the global networks of exchange to which their exploited labour gave rise (Sheri- dan 1994; Gibson 2014).

The depersonalisation of slaves through their commodification nurtured their dehumanisation at all ends of the slave-based global markets. This process was as true for the destinations where slaves were brought to as for the sources from which they were taken: just as European slaveholders profited from their Af- rican slaves, African slave traders exchanged other Africans for goods, guns, rum, tobacco and textiles manufactured in European colonies (Metcalf 1987). Crucially, this commodification of humanity required a double dehumanisation—of slaves and slave-based societies—so thorough that the European societies that benefitted from a subjugation so abhorrent) had to continuously contrive a full-fledged system of thought—in science, law, culture, space, education, labour, politics and society—to make it palatable (Said 1978: 6; Peet 1985; Weindling 1998; Whitman 2017).

Renaissance maps are remarkable artefacts where the imperial landscapes of racial and civilisational borders that emerged during the time of European expansionism have been immortalized. The discourse that first bordered European- ness as a space roughly demarcated by the borders of the European continent containing a civilisation distinct from the rest of the world started to be assembled during the age of European world travel (Hale 1993, 1994). As a multiplying number of European countries embarked upon the imperial and colonial exploits pio- neered by Iberian sailors in the 15th and 16th centuries, their confrontation with previously unseen civilisations awakened Europe’s consciousness as a separate political entity. Perhaps no other artefacts articulate the discourse of the white, Christian and proud colonial Europe that arose in these times—a political myth that, today, seems once again poised to reassert its command—as explicitly as the geopolitical iconography of imperial European cartography.

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In this dissertation I have paid particular attention to European maps because they are rich discourses that articulate both an idea and a concrete image of Europe through the interaction of the topographic, iconographic, symbolic and textual elements that they display. Their cartouches—framed pictures at the margins of maps common to Renaissance cartography—, for example, house some of the most evocative spaces where the modern idea of European superiority was invented (Bueno Lacy and Van Houtum 2015: 484-485). The imperial cartouches of Renais- sance cartography typically represented mythological, anthropomorphic and zoomorphic figures as well as landscapes, architecture and people that served as allegories of European civilisational supremacy (Wintle 1999: 153-154).

Blaeuw’s maps

Two maps by the Dutch cartographer Guiljelmo Blaeuw exemplify this construction. The first is Europa recens descripta—i.e., “Europe as recently described”— (1617) (see Figure 7.1). Its cartouches not only exemplify how Europeanness started to be constructed in opposition to the worlds that European empires colonised but this map was, curiously but tellingly, chosen to accompany the cover page of the Maastricht Treaty (EU 1992). The endurance of its image, drifting though the vast oceans of history like a castaway helm of a shipwrecked galleon, suggests that the grandeur of imperial Europe that it carries is still seen with starry eyes by contemporary Europeans. In simpler words, someone thought that a map like this was a suitable symbol to adorn the treaty on European Union. Why was the imperial image of Europe so tempting, if only symbolically, for a project like the EU, which was a self-aware fundamental rejection of exactly the past this map represents? I do not believe this is an idle question. Why do images of imperial Europe, with all its elitist and bigoted connotations, keep finding their way into representations of Europe today? Why is the past of constant war, predatory aristocracies, overseas slavery, decimating plagues, workers’ exploitation, religious fanaticism, urban squalor, rampant inequality and other such adversities that contrast so shriekingly to what I define as EUropean prosperity today so alluring for both anti-humanist projects of European integration from the past as well as for and their contemporary humanist version? Why not resort to the cornucopia of philosophers, artists, statesmen, scientists, journalists, intellectuals—especially those who by reason of their gender, provenance, phenotype or religion have been relegated to anonymity—and overall Europeans whose contributions may allow members of the supranational EU polity to keep “DRAWING INSPIRATION from the cultural, religious and humanist inheritance of Europe, from which have developed the universal values of the inviolable and inalienable rights of the human person, freedom, democracy, equality and the rule of law” (European Union 2007)?

The striking downside of relying on imperial rather than humanist

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images—particularly for a project like the EU—is that, by keeping them alive, one also runs the risk of nurturing their anti-humanist associations and thus of inad- vertently promoting a meaning antithetical to the EU’s values. Thus, I argue that the resurrection of such European imperial connotations by the EU’s proto-national symbolism in the 1990s should be regarded neither as a simple curiosity nor as an inconsequential design choice. First, I suggest that—following Foucault’s discursive classification (1981)— the adoption of classical European imperial symbolism epitomized by the map of Blaeuw on the Maastricht Treaty should be considered as a commentary, a variation of the creating discourse on Europe that started to be assembled during the boom of European world travel. Second, in order to ponder the full force of this commentary, we should refrain from regarding it as a stand-alone element and, instead, zoom out from it in order to envisage the larger semiotic landscape of which it is part: a colossal network of signs that, together, have kept in place the imperial connotations of Europe’s creating discourse up until our days.

This larger collection of signs includes—prominently among many others— a Eurocentric cartographic infrastructure that ceaselessly represents Europe as a self-evident and self-contained civilisation of the world; as well as an accompanying Eurocentric historiography characterised by the glorification of white geographies (e.g., ancient Greek and Romans) to the exclusion of black geographies (i.e., non- Europeans defined by their particular lack of whiteness, particularly the Moors, Arabs, Africans and Muslims in general). It is no coincidence to see the EU encouraging, since the 1990s, rhetoric, geopolitical practices and symbolism that resurrect such imperial tropes of Europe—as the previous chapters have expounded—and now, some decades later, distinguish the same symbolism re-emerge brandished by mushrooming ethno-nationalist movements across EUrope who endlessly trade in tropes of civilisational superiority anchored in the myth of imperial Eu- rope. In what follows, I would like to provide a sketch of how this creating discourse on Europe was formed and how it gave way to some of the very imperial tropes we recognize today in ethno-nationalist European politics. I intend to do this through an iconological comparison of two maps by the Dutch cartographer Guiljelmo Blaeuw: his map of Europe that we can see on the Maastricht Treaty and his map of America to the extent that it was known by the mid-17th century (See Figure 7.1)

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. Source: (1617), by Europa recens recens Europa iljelmo Blaeuw. Blaeuw. iljelmo descripta descripta Gu Commons Source: Wikimedia Source: Wikimedia Figure 7.1.

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Europa recens descripta provides an overview of the European nations that were worthy of mention and portrayal in the eyes of its mapmaker at the time (from top to bottom on the left and then on the right): Anglos/English (Angli), Gauls/French (Galli), Belgians (Belgi), Castilians/Spanish (Castiliani), Venetians (Venetiam), Ger- mani/Germans (Germani), Hungarians (Hungari), Bohemians/Czechs (Bohemi) Polish (Poloni), Greeks (Graeci) (Keuning 1959: 74-75). Almost every single cartouche features a couple: possibly a marriage and thus a nod to proper Christian mores; or perhaps a reproduction of the taxonomic hubris popular in the Nether- lands at the time and thus an abstraction of the prototypical male and female “specimens” of each nation (Margócsy 2014). Relations are also patriarchally gendered: Men invariably eclipse their women by reclaiming the foreground while exerting their authority through imperious gestures. They give women a commanding look, address them with admonishing gesticulations or firmly grab their arms. The only exception are the Venetians, who are represented by two men—one wearing the scarlet ferraiolo of Catholic cardinals. Unlike the male/female couples, both Ve- netian men share the foreground and neither is being subjugated by the other’s look, gestures or bodily dominance. All couples flaunt the diverse fashions of their respective countries—which emphasizes the variety of Europeans and, perhaps, also their individuality. Overall, these cartouches sing the praises of righteous pa- triarchy, marriage and the church as well as of European nations’ uniqueness and wealth.

A semiotic analysis of the men in the cartouches conjures a cornucopia of meaningful details that, interpreted together with the context of their cartographer weave a narrative about what “European civilisation” meant in the 17th century among Europe’s imperial elites. Some men hold swords, signs of their power, while others hold scrolls that exert the effect of nuancing the violence of their weapons: Europeans might be powerful—we seem to be told—but they are also knowledgeable.

Notoriously, while women stand in passive, unremarkable poses, several men strike what today would evoke the affected posture of catwalk models: a bent knee complements a stylishly twisted waist; a tall chin beautified by modish facial hair. Overall, the description is unmistakably complimentary: Europeans are richly attired people with an appreciation for beauty and they are rightly proud of it. The luxury of their apparel together with the pleasant aesthetics of their bodies suggest that they are refined. Europeans might be violent, but they are also cultured and sophisticated.

Blaeuw’s is not merely a very favourable construction of Europeanness. As a cartographer of the Dutch Empire and its main colonising arm, the Dutch East India Company, Blaeuw’s map glorified the government and enterprise of his patrons. Thus, his depiction of Europeans is not merely a flattering projection of his own ethnocentrism but also a comment with political implications: it is an

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exaltation of empire. The enlightenment with which Blaeuw portrays Europeans is simultaneously a legitimization of the brutality upon which such enlightenment was built.

On the basis of these interpretations, I believe that a sensible reading of Eu- ropa recens descripta could be as follows: in their search for riches and territorial expansion, Europeans might have been engaged in the extermination, dispossession and enslavement of entire populations, but such cruel abuse was made right by their civilisational superiority. Intriguingly yet fittingly, not a single hint to such unsavoury imperial activities is found on the map.

The European cities that Blaeuw singles out were, presumably, the most impressive in beauty or the most important in terms of historical heritage, trade and might at the time of the map’s production. The ports of Amsterdam and Lis- bon, for example, are crowded with arriving vessels, perhaps an allusion to their empires’ trading and seafaring prowess. The addition of Constantinople—and An- atolia—to the map of Europe would perhaps strike our cartographic sensibilities as odd; yet, at the time of this map’s manufacture, the Ottomans were uncontro- versially counted among the great European empires (Brotton 2003: 13). Overall, the inclusion of cities adds another tile to the mosaic of Europe that this map puts together: not only refinement but also a notion of civilisational development associated to architectural, commercial and industrial size. For contrast: the northern portion of Africa depicted on the map serves only as a magnifier of European grandeur. European individuality, wealth, might and sophistication stand in stark contrast with Africa’s detail-empty territory. Africa’s most worthy emblem are two fighting lions, possibly a comment on what at the time Europeans saw as its wil- derness and exoticism but also a revealing disinterest for a trans-Mediterranean connection that—as Chapter 2 explains—used to feature so prominently in medieval European cartography.

Although Europa recens descripta is telling on its own, an intertextual comparison to its American counterpart creates a rounder picture of the global interactions that bit by bit constructed the image of Europe in the age of European imperialism (Keuning 1959: 74-89). Americae nova tabula—i.e., “A new map of Amer- ica”—(1630) (see Figure 7.2), also by Guiljelmo Blaeuw, follows the same visual organisation as Europa recens descripta. The cartouches across the top feature the colonial settlements and representation-worthy cities either founded or conquered by European empires. Havana, St Domingo, Cartagena, Mexico, Cusco, Potosi, Island of La Moche in Chile, Rio de Janeiro and Pernambuco. All of them are important colonial settlements, either because of their closeness to ports and thus connections to the imperial metropoles; or because of their importance as former capitals of the Aztec and Inca empires that the Spanish vanquished (e.g., Mexico and Cusco); or because of their extractive importance, like Potosí—the mint of the Spanish Empire and one of the world’s largest silver deposits. In other words, the

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American cities shown on the map only have representational value because of their attractiveness for the European imperial gaze (Kaplan 1997; Beardsell 2000): European settlements in America stand out either as trophies taken from the cultures Europeans colonized or sites of commercial importance for the imperial metropoles—a connection suggested by the ships perambulating their coasts. This selection of American cities and cultures neatly shows how Europeans discovered the world to their image.

Moreover, whereas Blaeuw made sure to endow his drawings of European cities like Amsterdam, Prague, Venice and Lisbon with sketches of their architectural richness, the cartouches of Americae nova tabula lack equivalent allusions— even though some, like Mexico Tenochtitlan, would merit them. The exceptional richness of the Aztec Empire was extensively described by Hernán Cortés, the conqueror of the Aztec Empire, in letters that, published together with the Nürnberg map in 1524, stirred furore in Europe (Mundy 1998). Yet, the glory of the Aztec capital is nowhere to be inferred merely by glimpsing at Blaeuw’s cartouche of “Mexico”. The contrast with Blaeuw’s depiction of Europe is revealing: when compared to Europe’s magnificent capitals, America’s most remarkable cities are but a primitive attempt at civilisation.

The comparative civilisational backwardness of America is also constructed at the margins of Blaeuw’s map. The cartouches adorning Americae nova tabula along the right and left sides feature what the cartographer must have thought were the American continent’s most representative peoples. Greenlanders (Groen- landi), Virginians (Virginiani), King and Queen of the Florida (Rex et Regina Flori- dae), New England’s King (Novae Albionis Rex), Mexicans (Mexicani), Peruvians (Pe- ruviani), Brasilians (Brasiliani), Brasilian soldiers (Brasiliani milites), islanders of Moche in Chile (Insulani de la Moche in Chili), neighbours of the Strait of Magellan (Freti Magellanici accolae). As with American cities, Blaeuw’s American peoples offer a protruding contrast with his representations on the map of Europe. First, the demonyms given to Amerindian peoples do not reflect how the they called themselves but rather how European colonisers decided to call them (e.g., ‘Virginians’ in honour of “the Virgin Queen” Elizabeth I). On this map, the individuality of Amerindian cultures is subjected to a European taxonomy and cosmology in which their existence is subordinated to them being “discovered” and classified by European conquerors, settlers, historians and, in the case of Blaeuw, cartographers. Blaeuw’s representation of Amerindian peoples is a cartographic version of a rariteitkamer (a chamber of rarities) (Rumphius 1705; Kistemaker and Bergvelt 1992), a collection of exotic exemplars typical to imperial botanical treatises (see Figure 7.3), and a typical manifestation of the civilisational split that Eric Wolf evocatively framed as Europe and the people without history (1982).

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nova nova (1630),

Source: wcp6u Blaeuw. https://ti- Figure 7.2. Commons: Commons: Wikimedia tabula by Guiljelmo by Guiljelmo Americae nyurl.com/tg

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Whereas Blaeuw’s map of Europe shows empires, his American map represents the people they subjugated: Dutch galleons surround the American continent as a remark on the Dutchmen’s—and, in the bigger picture, Europeans’—command of the seas but also as an allusion to their sizeable commercial interests in the Amer- ican continent (Gibson 2015: 86). Unlike the powerful yet cultured Europeans, the indigenous peoples of the American continent feature elements that accentuate their comparative weakness and unsophistication. Europeans have rich, varied clothes that they display with arrogance; cultural artefacts that point to their intellectual depth; cities whose abundance of detail captivates the eye; swords and mighty ships that go around the world as signs of their commercial and military prowess. American natives, on the other hand, are depicted as colourful savages: their clothes—if any—are exotic yet plain; they have no cultural productions to show and their military prowess is limited to the unimpressive repertoire of bows and war maces.

Figure 7.3. Visual layout of a Rariteitkamer of crabs. In: Rumphius GE (1705) D’Ambonische Rariteitkamer, of eene beschryvinge van allerhande schaalvisschen; benevens de voornaamste hoorntjes en schulpen, als ook zommige, mineraalen, gesteenten, enz. Amsterdam: François Halma, p. 18.

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Nudity is a key marker of difference in Blaeuw’s depiction of Americans. To be sure, although the scarcity of clothes among Amerindians certainly disconcerted European eyes accustomed to less revealing fashions, the European interpretation of nudity was not limited to mere anthropological difference but also recognized in it a sign of distance from reason and civilisation (White 1992; Levine 2017). This border between clad civilisation and nude savagery was captured in a common visual trope that proliferated during the age of European imperialism. It employed nudity, particularly of colonial subjects and mythological women, to idealize and eroticise absolutism through visual metaphors that extolled force over vulnerability. In Renaissance paintings, representations of mythological rapes—particularly of Europa, the mythical Phoenician princess—served as allegories to praise both patriarchal structures of gender and sexuality as well as tyrannical regimes of power (Caroll 1989; Wintle 1999: 154, 159; Buri 2007: 4; FitzRoy 2015). Idealised visual allusions to sexual violence portrayed an appealing justification for the aggressive imposition of commercial, military, religious and political supremacy in a time when brute imperial force was legitimised by a sense of racial and cultural superiority.

One could perhaps protest that, at first sight, even though all American women have their breasts exposed and some of the men their genitals, their nudity is seemingly depicted in a rather dignified way. However, the limits of this apparent dignity are circumscribed by iconographic elements that render their sparsity of clothes not merely descriptive but also evocative of undesirable associations. Children, in particular, point to a remarkable difference between Americans and Europeans. In Blaeuw’s map of Europe there are no children to be seen, only un- accompanied adults. Meanwhile, the map of America features, in two cartouches, parents and their offspring in a domestic scene. Why is domesticity represented as part of American but not of European societies? The way in which children interact with their parents offers some clues. The baby dangling from the neck of the “Vir- ginian” woman, for example, represents a peculiar and dangerous way of carrying a human baby—who lacks the prehensile strength required for such acrobatics. It appears to be rather an allusion to the way monkeys or apes carry their infants and thus a degrading zoomorphic exoticisation of American natives (Jahoda 2015). Or take the scene with the naked men and the toddler on the cartouche representing the “Neighbours of the Strait of Magellan”: although there is no comparable scene in Blaeuw’s map of Europe, its representation of family life offers a strident contrast with the visualisation of familiar interaction between children and adults as seen on Dutch paintings of the time. Renditions of everyday life in the Netherlands of the 17th century, like Jan Steen’s “The Merry Family”, do not offer an analogue representation of such liberal nudity: even babies in atmospheres of joyful familiar intimacy are wrapped in the neck-to-toe garments of puritan Calvinists (see Figure 7.4). In other words, the presence of children in Blaeuw’s map of America seems to accentuate the primitiveness of its inhabitants and thus also the superiority of

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European civilisation.

Figure 7.4. “The Merry Family”, by Jan Steen (1668).

The very dignity with which Americans are represented by Blaeuw—in spite of the subtle nuances signaling their inferior mores—seems oddly candid when one thinks of the sheer brutality involved in the colonisation of the American continent (Portilla 1959; Mignolo 1995). The absence thereof might be due to the artifice that, consciously or otherwise, power typically contrives to praise its benevolence while downplaying its dark side (Southgate 2014): since Europeans adduced Christiani- sation and enlightenment as justifications for their mission civilisatrice and thus as the legitimization of their power, they were naturally uninclined to represent or even talk about the persistently unchristian and unenlightened violence that they employed against American natives and African slaves in their colonies (DuBois 1970: 309, 1985: 84; Forbes 2008). The nascent Dutch Republic/Empire is a paramount example of this imperial hypocrisy: an empire that played a crucial role in the development of the transatlantic slave trade beyond its borders became, at the same time, known as a beacon of tolerance within its borders—which included a ban on the entry of slaves to its metropolis (Blackburn 1997: 66). Enlightenment at home, darkness abroad: a geopolitical dichotomy that prevails until today in the

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colossal geopolitical differentiation created by the EU’s external borders, which divide one of the most prosperous polities of the world from the horrendous slave markets in Libya.

On Americae nova tabula, the double standard at work in the contrasting representation of American and European natives is highlighted by the cartouche depicting the “Brazilians”. At first sight, this scene might seem to represent a woman taking a hot bath in a cauldron—since the face is not contorted in any expression of either pain or horror. However, a scrutiny of this image’s inspiration points to a more sinister trope popular in Europe at the time: the can- nibalistic practices of the Tupi people in Brazil (Del Val 2010: 173). The remarkable aspect of this American savagery is the absence of its European counterpart: there is no suggestion of, say, the horrors of the inquisition or the bloodshed of the Thirty Years War that was ravaging Europe in the times of Blaeuw (Sabatini 1913; Mortimer 2002). What is left out from Blaeuw’s gaze of America is self- reflection. Although it is understandable that practices like cannibalism, nudity and an altogether different world ought to have fascinated Europeans who regarded such unusual sights as worthy of representation, their visualisations fail to convey a humanist awareness of cultural resemblance. For all the extrava- ganza Europeans identified in America, they failed to recognize their European equivalent. The result was an image of the world defined not by cultural variance but by borders emphasizing Europe’s civilisational superiority. This hierarchical principle was replicated in the many variations of the idea of Europe that images like Blaeuw’s map helped to assemble: Europeans passed a great deal of judgement yet were incapable to point their piercing perception at themselves.

Overall, these contrasting maps of Europe and America put together a picture of civilisational hierarchies. In this image of Europe, the violence of its empires is suggested to be reasonable and sophisticated by representations that lion- ise their power while cleansing it from its cruelty. The torture, enslavement and genocide of European colonisation is not only concealed but aggravated by the subtle insinuation that the savagery and moral depravity of American natives justifies their subjugation. My suspicion is that, today, this same mechanism is at work in the representation and treatment of African and Middle Eastern refugees languishing in the appalling detention camps along the EU’s borders or in the Lib- yan slave markets (which operate as a subsidiary of the EU’s outsourced border regime). As chapters 6 and 7 have argued, not only are racial prejudices against these people responsible for the dehumanising representations that in turn justify their inhuman treatment but, I claim, the mechanism of their exploitation follows the same tortured morality that justified slavery during the times of European imperialism. What has changed, however, is the sophistication of the violence exerted upon them: instead of exploiting them, torturing and murdering them, the EU “limits” itself to create the conditions that lead them to their exploitation (the second-class citizenry to which Schengen condemns them), torture (outsourcing

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the EU’s border regime to Libya) and kill themselves (5-year olds are in Lesbos’ Moria camp) (). The ultimate sophistication of this “refined” system are perhaps the images that their exploitation, torture and murder create: destitute, filthy, mad, demented, suicidal and violent, images of their unenviable existence channelled through media might end up doing more to strengthen the imperial racist prejudice that they are less than Europeans instead of fostering support to alleviate their plight.

Whether the iconographic construction of this duality colony/metropole was due to Blaeuw’s ignorance or prejudice is irrelevant; what matters is that cultural artefacts like his maps epitomize an idea of Europe that can be found in an entire system of thought that remains alive today. The long arm of imperial Europe seems to be present in the border geopolitics of the EU and the ponderous wealth of cultural productions consciously or subconsciously edited by a similar imperial gaze, with European supremacy in mind, can be found since then until today in an endless set of realms—science, art, law, politics, education, media, migration regimes, etc.

Although, in themselves, Blaeuw’s maps could be seen as obscure cartographic curiosities like many of their kind, what is significant about them is the image of Europe that they put together. The contrast between Europa recens descripta and Americae nova tabula amounts to the iconological condensation of pervasive imperial and colonial borders that were established on space, culture and territory between colonies and their European metropoles. The ethnic distinctions imprinted on Blaeuw’s maps were the same racial distinctions that defined entire colonial administrations and shaped a global understanding of civilisation that placed Europeans at the top (Quijano 2000). As this dissertation has demonstrated through different case studies, images like Blaeuw’s still have much to tell about today’s image of Europe and the geopolitics that it contributes to inspire.

Casta paintings

The images seen on Blaeuw’s cartography are part of a larger system of thought and representation. The everyday political implications of the ethnic hierarchy seen in his maps were also captured by the cuadros de castas (i.e., caste paintings). These visual artefacts were common to the Spanish colonies in America and their purpose was to illustrate the racial classification of individuals according to their racial mixture (see Figure 7.5). Their typical layout involves a man, a woman and their child, each with the name of their matching caste, e.g., “Spanish and Indian: Mestizo”, “Spanish and Black: Mulatto”, etc.—tellingly, terms derived from horse breeding. Their depiction includes the dress, scenery and everyday activities associated with the socio-economic position typical to each caste (Castro Morales 1983).

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Figure 7.5. Casta painting (ca. 18th century) depicting the classification of racial combinations in the American Spanish colonies. Museo Nacional del Virreinato, Tepoxotlán, Mexico.

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Casta paintings depicted the intricate racial nomenclature Spaniards introduced to their American colonies. Belonging to any specific caste denoted entitlement to either a higher or lower status—in terms of social desirability and access to coveted economic sectors and political positions—and thus to more or less privileges according to their position on the racial scale. Although America’s sexual enthusiasm for inter-caste blending rendered castes increasingly unclassifiable—and thus casta paintings obsolete—for any practical purposes, it did not dismantle the power of physical appearance to shape prejudices, expectations and notions of status. To this day, this pigmentocracy—a gradation of socio-economic status closely correlated to the quantity of skin melanin—is still firmly established and remains easily recognizable in societies all along the American continent that have remained obsessed with colonial prejudices of race until today (Diggs 1953; Lynn 2008; Telles and Flores 2013).

In colonial pigmentocracies, the social desirability of people and their cultural productions decreased as they moved away from “pure” peninsular-born Spanish provenance. The ensuing colony/metropole dichotomy gave rise to a particular sort of cultural recognition that, until today, works as a sort of European baptism: the phenomenon where cultural productions made in Europe’s (former) American colonies (spanning art to science, fashion to cuisine, etc.) did not acquire much praise—either at home or abroad—until they were acknowledged as valuable in Europe. The assumed biological inferiority of Americans as a “miscege- nated” and thus inferior race was extrapolated to contempt for their cultural productions (Castro Morales 1983: 680; Deans-Smith 2005: 169). A socially constructed idea of racial inadequacy brought about by the sheer power of colonisation—that put the conquerors at the top and the vanquished at the bottom of the social pyra- mid—was thus anachronically assumed to be the natural result of objective biological deficiency or virtue. Although such colonial hierarchy was first established by brute power, with time it was rationalised as sheer scientific inevitability and thus became more difficult to deny, contest and subvert. By subjugating history, geography, biology and science in general to its arbitrary designs, colonial power gradually erected an increasingly harder border between Europeans and either less- Europeans or non-Europeans (Bueno Hernández, Juárez Barrera, Pérez Malváez 2013).

This assumed biological inferiority—i.e., physical and intellectual—was further legitimised by a system of thought and representation that gradually developed as consequence of European global exploration. The world’s newfound diversity bred a grandiose ambition to classify and represent it all. This ambition was shared by naturalists and scientists, sailors and merchants, states, their imperial bureaucracies and colossal colonial corporations alike—e.g., the Dutch East In- dia Company (VOC). Ever more topographically accurate and complete maps of the world could not only make for safer and faster navigation but also for better overviews of routes, cities, ports, spices, raw materials and other strategic

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geographical information coveted by political, military and commercial interests. Propelled by the popularisation of mass print in Europe (Eisenstein 2005), maps and treatises of the world’s novelties triggered a cascade of geographically evocative representations of all aspects of life: everything from cookbooks that taught the use of exotic spices to travelogues with descriptions of never-seen places and all sorts of literature inspired on the cultural exoticism of faraway worlds.

Such printed materials fulfilled the aesthetic and cultural needs of a public that derived pleasure not only from the intellectual worth of their contents but also from their ornamental value as well as from the socio-economic glow that they shone on them—the mere possession of artefacts like world maps or beautifully illustrated natural treatises was a sign of culture, worldliness, wealth and good taste (Schilder 1979; Harley and Zandvliet 1992). Since these representations that invaded all the layers of society were based on the dichotomy colony/metropole and the Eurocentric hierarchy intrinsic to it, their multiplication created a distorted idea of American civilisations—and all European colonies in general. This distorted geographical imagination of the world amounted to “something more formidable than a mere collection of lies”: it detonated an explosion of representations that, filtered through the lens of the European coloniser, gave rise to entire fields of thought that reproduced such geographical misrepresentations in all sorts of aspects of life, from tall tales and jokes about faraway exotic lands and customs to entire scientific treatises and libraries (Said 1978: 6). The more these distorted representations were reproduced, the more they supplanted the realities they either poorly represented or entirely invented. In other words, the age ushered by Euro- pean world travel, imperialism and colonisation concocted an intimidating representational machinery of global scope that churned out, disseminated and legitimised imaginations of the world’s geographies (i.e., territories, peoples and cultures) as seen through a Eurocentric lens (Gregory 1993).

Chambers of curiosities and psychopathic geopolitics

The visual expression of these Eurocentric geographical imaginations are not only the colonial caste paintings of Spain’s American colonies but also their scientific extrapolations, such as botanical and zoological “chambers of curiosities”. These visual artefacts found their inspiration in the naturalist effort to devise “totalizing classificatory schemas” that reached its peak with Carl Linnaeus’ taxonomy—a system of organisation that cuts to the core of what is considered modern rational thought. By substituting subjectivity for standardised principles of classification, Linnaeus created order out of chaos through a systematisation of such simplicity, elegance and universal application that it “launched a European knowledge-building enterprise of unprecedented scale and appeal […] that would have a deep and lasting impact not just on travel and travel writing, but on the overall ways

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European citizenries made, and made sense of, their place on the planet” (Pratt 2003: 24-37).

Linnaeus innovation went beyond botany: it replaced heuristic erudite expertise for homogenised principles of organised knowledge that facilitated teaching and learning in all fields. This epistemic uniformity suited the needs of empires for which distance became a burgeoning challenge as they expanded. In an age of sluggish long-distance communication, loosely coordinated groups of imperial officials—as well as all the trades that benefited from imperial expansion and colonial domination—separated by oceanic or continental distances were able to remain aligned to the same corporate principles of organisation, classification and action. The standardised knowledge that Linnaean thought begot allowed indus- trialists and manufacturers, navigators and explorers, artists, intellectuals and men of letters, accountants, planners and architects, naturalists and geographers, cartographers, soldiers, lawyers and other imperial officials to describe and organise people, lands, laws and cultures they had never seen—and whose local complexity they could not possibly understand at once—in an automatic fashion. Statistics substituted the anthropological complexity of entire populations, laws dictated from far away substituted local knowledge, maps invented peoples and civilisations that had never before conceived themselves as such.

The Linnaean system of thought allowed members of all trades to believe that they could satisfy the desires of their shareholders, ministers, kings, patrons, epistemic societies, artistic scenes and other corporate communities without the need to ask for authorisation, instructions or approval—even though they often failed (Crooks and Parsons 2016). Ignorance was substituted for European empires’ reliance on what they convinced themselves to be their “superior” method of “universal” knowledge. They forged their colonised worlds to their image as they ran against the persistent challenge of classifying and ordering the increasing variety of global diversity brought about by imperial expansionism (Fitzpatrick 1992; Mignolo 2002). Local traditions of spatial, political and social organisation were steamrolled under the inexorable advent of two visions that characterise the modern world: bureaucratisation and professionalisation (Weber 1968). Inspired by this drive for rationalisation yet constrained by the historical circumstances of empire, a particular strain of science shot through with a surreptitious colonial prejudice percolated colonial epistemologies. This system of knowledge imposed and dominated by the colonizers—all American universities, for example, were founded in the 16th century following European colonisation (Pratt 1992: 136)— has promoted a particular strain of science that, by passing imperial arbitrariness and colonial partiality for objective knowledge, has harmed and destroyed much (Mignolo 2007; Quijano 2007).

Representations played a particular role in the construction of this imperial lens of Linnaean rationalisation in which visuality played such a prominent role.

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A defining feature of the Linnaean phylogenetic nomenclature was that it advocated the identification of distinct visual patterns for the classification of otherwise seemingly incongruent assemblages. Exotic features became the basis of representation and organisation. When applied to the understanding of societies, this proclivity for the representation of the exotic turned exceptional features—instead of commonalities—into the natural borders among cultures, races, peoples, languages, histories and geographies. By focusing on the most conspicuous cultural variations rather than on the extensive common ground that they betrayed, this Linnaean lens amplified undeniable human differences, thus defining human groups by their most unusual peculiarities. As previously unknown and newly exoticized peoples, languages and customs were coarsely incorporated to the of anthropological classifications of castes, races and civilisations that featured the ruling position of Europeans at their very top, the humanity of non-Europeans was consistently demoted.

As Linnaean taxonomical principles infiltrated all spheres of life—from the professionalisation of imperial bureaucracies to geopolitical practice—they simultaneously promoted an ethos to systematise the whole world through representation. This visual mathesis was the result of the self-reinforcing interaction among travel, trade, knowledge, power and, crucially, their pervasive accompanying representations (Foucault 1966: 148-149). With time, this system of classification and representation created its own realities based on taxonomic ontologies. Categories like “Europe” became more than a matter of classificatory or referential convenience and ended up creating their own compartmentalized realities of people, culture and space. Sustained representations of Europeans and their contrasting coun- terparts across the world turned “Europe” into more than a mere physiographical designation for an otherwise continuous extension of Asia or Africa: they made it a unique civilisation with a distinct “European thought”, “European cuisine”, “Eu- ropean history”, “European fashion”, “European philosophy”, and so forth. The invention of Europe as a civilisation and grand geopolitical construct in the 15th century is intrinsically related to its invention in the global representations—maps, pre-eminently—that were manufactured as by-product of European imperialism (Hay 1957; Wintle 1999, 2009).

In order to understand the making of Europe as a civilisation through its imperial images, it is key to understand the relation among distance—physical or ideological—, representation and truth: the longer the distance, the bigger the need for representation and, in turn, the more representations take the place of first- hand experience, the more representations take the place of what people perceive as reality. An unprecedented need for representations was magnified to historically unprecedented levels by the globalisation brought about by European imperialism. The oceanic distances that separated metropoles from their colonies turned representations into essential tools of imperial power: to exert remote control over faraway dominions, European empires turned to representations that allowed

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them to see what the overwhelming novelty and faraway distance of their dominions concealed from them (Scott 1998; Pratt 2003; Branch 2014: 100-119). Ever since, the multiplication of representations, their increasing refinement and the favour the have found—not least among states and governments all the world around— have allowed them to gradually usurp reality: as world exploration and the development of media expanded the world, representations have been increasingly taking the place of direct experience (Baudrillard 1981).

The growing contribution of representations to the construction of reality needs to be understood not only as a function of the development of distance but also of representational technologies—i.e., media—in the 15th century (Eisenstein 2005: 3-12). Fuelled by the popularisation of the printing press, the proliferation of representations that began to gain track during this age started to put together a contradictory cosmopolitanism: as Europeans’ knowledge of the world expanded, so did their insensibility to represent it. The more Europeans attempted to tame the world’s ponderous complexity through cartography, statistics, science and art, the more they shoehorned it into ever more oversimplified ideal types. Anthropo- logical richness was crunched into maps that invented political borders across otherwise continuous human interaction (Wood 2012); into statistics that either left out any variables that fell outside their measuring abilities or distorted them to make them fit into their categories; into scientific diagrams that privileged difference over commonalities and thus highlighted exoticism; and into artistic stereotypes that reduced cultural richness to caricature (Said 1978, 2001).

Although many of these representations created the mere illusion of knowledge—i.e., simulacra: realities that had no existence beyond their representation (Baudrillard 1981: 9)—they nonetheless served as the models to shape policymaking and thus the portions of humanity that they misrepresented (Branch 2014: 68-100). Through persistent distortions of distant realities from a position of unchallenged dominance, the faraway control of European empires easily slipped to the point of callousness. The distance opened up by a world exploration and conquest brought about an explosion of oversimplified representations that deprived the geographies they purported to represent from their complexity and thus from their humanity. It is easier to wage brutal wars on maps devoid of people than to exert the same kind of violence at a close range, where the other’s suffering can be seen and where one’s own humanity is put to the test of empathy. In order to understand the construction of the image of Europe, it is also crucial to understand the relation between representations and violence (Noys 2013). Since I have argued in the previous chapters, maps are perhaps the most paradigmatic example of this relation (Neocleous 2003).

As imperialism thrived and colonies proliferated, the control of faraway geographies posed an ever more daunting governmental challenge. To solve this challenge, colonies grew increasingly controlled from the distance of papers—i.e.,

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maps, statistics, reports—that could be scrutinised from the comfort of a king’s palace or a minister’s desk. As the complex geography of colonial dominions was simplified into ever more static, impersonal maps, tables and statistics, the wealth that these efforts at imperial administration yielded gave rise to unseen state power. As these impersonal techniques of control grew more profitable, so did their perverse sophistication. This phenomenon gave rise to self-reinforcing global chains of mass trade and mass exploitation. Totalizing, caricaturising, politically efficient and economically profitable representations extracted empathy from geography and promoted increasingly predatory and psychopathic geopolitics.

Even though appalling violence has been a feature of history for as long as humans have been roaming the Earth, the violence unleashed by European imperialism was new in scale—entire continents were subjugated—, brutality—entire populations were decimated either through contagious sickness or widespread slavery—, sophistication—cruelty was legitimized not only through force but also science—hegemony—power became less contestable as an entire set of languages, philosophies, art, science and thus perceptions of history and geography constructed a reality that did not allow alternative versions. The creation of Europe coincides with the emergence of globally shared representations of world civilisations whose centres of manufacture and power are in the European empires than manufactured them—in the mapmaking powerhouses of Flanders and the Dutch Republic, in the ateliers of Renaissance painters and in the Iberian kings’ palaces. As Blaeuw’s maps and e cuadros de casta attest, racial dichotomies invented during the Renaissance trickled down into laws and the organisation of society at large, both in European metropoles and their colonies, thus creating an idea of Europe made of a mosaic of representations of itself and its others.

The boomerang of colonial violence

The anthropological classification that blossomed in this European imperial tradition did not remain confined to the colonies but served to assert, both in Europe and abroad, a global hierarchy where Europeans—and some Europeans more than others—occupied the higher echelons. Although the techniques to exert control over territory, culture and life based on this hierarchy of civilisations were originally employed to subjugate, exploit, border, discipline, punish, torture and, if necessary, kill the “lesser colonial races” (Fanon 1961; Foucault 1978-1979), the long boomerang of history brought them back to Europe with a vengeance.

With the advent of evolutionary theory, the Eurocentrist geopolitical order—together with the arbitrary racial hierarchy it had created and on which it was based—was coated with the patina of scientific truth. This “scientific racism” made its way into prestigious universities such as Pennsylvania and Harvard through the teachings of prominent yet staunchly racist naturalists like Samuel

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George Morton and Louis Agassiz (Cartwright 1851; Nott and Gliddon 1854; Reyn- olds, Falger and Vine 1986; Drescher 1990; Menand 2001-2002). Their view justified slavery and created an image of the world divided into better and lesser races (Thomas and Sillen 1972). This geographical imagination fed an ever more clear- cut hierarchy of nations that progressively percolated not only the relations between Europeans and their colonial subjects but eventually also hierarchies among Europeans themselves (Jahoda 2009).

The hubris caused by the advancements in evolutionary biology during the 19th century inspired preposterous yet rhetorically captivating and thus politically powerful biological metaphors of the nation state that influenced much of the political imagery of the 20th century. Oversimplified and utterly flawed interpretations of human evolution were extrapolated to nation states. These images—for metaphors are images (Lakoff 1987)—were inspired by a particularly virulent interpretation of social Darwinism put the interest of the nation above that of individual citizens (Weindling 1998: 624), thus dissolving the individual into the “people’s body” (Volkskörper). Legal metaphors of the state related to its nature as an “organism” and to its “development” as such proliferated during the 19th century (Rottleuthner 1988). The idea that states were living entities served as the metaphorical platform on which the organic theory of the state developed (Ratzel 1896, 1899; Kjellen 1917). By turning the nation into a living thing, these theories imagined the state as an organism exposed to the perils and opportunities of a life sus- ceptible to the direst evolutionary duress: sickness through racial infection, death through conquest and growth through expansion. Organic metaphors of the state provided a life-or-death justification to either protect or seize a nation’s vital space (Lebensraum) by any means necessary and thus became a legitimation of brutal expansionist nationalism (Kristof 1960: 21-28; Kumar 2017: 15-24). Organic theories of the state together with an idea of a global racial hierarchy set the stage for the racialized expansionist nationalism that unleashed WW2.

WW2, I suggest, should be seen not as an isolated European atrocity but as the whip of European imperialism recoiling against Europe itself. Civilian car- nages of WW2 like the indiscriminate bombardment of Rotterdam or Dresden and, manifestly, the Holocaust and its concentration camps, were the exacerbation of thoroughly dehumanised, neatly divided and ruthlessly hierarchised ideas of nation and race. Differentiated to a desensitizing degree by a world of representations turned political propaganda (Herf 2006), Europe’s others—e.g., the non-Eu- ropean or the lesser European, the foreigner, the Jew, the Gypsy, the “sexual deviant” and even other European enemies—and their suffering became less than human and thus emotionally unrelatable (Bauman and Donskis 2013).

The degree of murderous intra-European dehumanisation during WW2 shows that there is continuity between the colonial violence of Europe’s imperial past and the horrors of its 20th century. The craniometric hierarchies and the social,

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political, economic and spatial marginalisation; the crippling and deadly medical experimentation, starvation, mutilation, torture and genocide that characterised the horrors of World War 2 were first practiced in Africa by the German and British empires before bouncing back to Europe in the form of concentration camps, the Holocaust and total war against Europe’s civilian populations. WW2 can thus be seen as the colony’s revenge upon the metropole through the replication—although this time at home—of the very same rapacious imperial techniques (Hochschild 1998; Elkins 2005; Olusoga and Erichsen 2010; Baer 2017). The same images of physical and spiritual degradation that European colonisers first applied to American natives were applied to what Germans considered the Untermensch: Jews, Slavs, Roma and so on. The exoticism of American natives on Blaeuw’s maps, the Linnaean system of taxonomic classification, the racial categories of the casta paintings, the scientific racism of American naturalists, the organic theory of the state: all of this body of knowledge accumulated over centuries created an image of the world that culminated in the Nürnberg laws (see Figure 7.6). Succcintly put, European imperialism and the Holocaust can be seen as two sides of the same coin: European dehumanisation of its others and Europe’s self-destruction are mutually constitutive manifestations of the same self-devouring phenomenon.

Figure 7.6. The “sophistication” of a racialised worldview: The Nürnberg Laws. Source: Wiki- media Commons: https://tinyurl.com/y3atoq48

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However, this lesson—unforgettable, one would believe, until not long ago— seems to be fading away as Europe’s freedoms, wealth and prosperity grow increasingly besieged by the threat of authoritarian populism. Even though it would seem as though Europeans had never had it better, a bulging proportion of electorates across the EU seems progressively persuaded to vote for parties that propose not only to abandon the EU but to return to a past of patriarchal, religious, ethno-nationalist authoritarianism. This right-wing populist discontent is being channelled through political movements that are thickening their ranks at the expense of migrants and asylum seekers; ethnic, religious and sexual minorities; and women’s emancipation (Mudde 2013; Van Houtum and Bueno Lacy 2017; Kimmel 2018). Since “all attempts to divide the world into clear-cut nations have so far resulted in war and genocide” (Harari 2018), the prospect of their electoral success casts an ever longer shadow over a continent that has seen the darkness of this moral eclipse not long ago.

A little over a decade ago, one could not go from Spain to Poland—from one extreme of the EU to the other—without stepping on territory governed by one or another form of liberal social democracy. Today, outspokenly illiberal, nationalist, xenophobic or outright racist parties have either taken power or, given the growing share of ballots that they are amassing, seem poised to do so in the near future. Meanwhile, formerly liberal, labour and social-democratic parties are staging a major political sell-out by increasingly embracing xenophobic authoritarian populism in a desperate and unscrupulous attempt to clinch to power, thus grooming their electorates for the eventual takeover by more extreme political forces (Van Houtum and Bueno Lacy 2017; The Economist 2018; Mudde 2018a, 2018b).

One of the most symbolic phenomena signalling the return of Europe’s colonial image and laying bare the colony/Holocaust nexus is the ascent of political parties with colonial, Nazi and fascist roots all across the EU. In France, the Na- tional Front/National Rally (Front National/Rassemblement National), rooted in the Vichy regime and founded by Jean-Marie Le Pen—a blatant anti-Semite and former torturer of the war in Algeria (Tremlett 2012)—, is being summoned to power precisely at a time when the French are feeling threatened by their much-vilified image of The Arab (Stockemer 2017). Feelings of fear and hate for recent Islamist terrorism have easily spliced into a deep-seated French orientalism that is kept alive in the spatial, economic, social and political marginalisation of former Ma- ghrebin colonial subjects (Khiari 2009). In Germany, the rise of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is bringing back Nazi terminology such as Lügenpresse (fake news) and Volksverräter (traitors to the people) (Scharloth 2017), Holocaust denial- ism (Augstein 2017), and open chases of migrants and dark-skinned people on its streets (Karon 2018). In Italy, there is now an interior minister that paraphrases Mussolini and refers to African immigrants as “slaves” (Clarke 2018; Giuffrida 2018). In Austria, a party founded by former Nazis is now in power implementing

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policies that strip asylum seekers of their phones, cash and medical confidentiality (Editorial Board 2017). At the external borders of the EU, Greece not only features the world’s most violent detention camp for asylum seekers (Smith 2018), but its economic abandonment stands as the most blatant betrayal of EUropean solidarity in the short history of the EU’s political integration (Krugman 2015; Alderman 2018; Economist 2018). Greece—“the cradle of European civilisation”—was the shore where xenophobic EUrosceptics sweeping EU politics today first set a foot- hold with the rise of Golden Dawn amidst biting austerity.

There is no disruption between the colonial violence of Europe’s imperial past and the horrors of its modern present. This continuity could hardly be more frighteningly evident today. Some years ago, I believe, few people (regardless of political inclination) would have thought that they would see the images that we are growing used to watch these days. Even in Germany—a country whose post- war nationalism has been forged through the relentless inculcation of guilt for the horrors WW2—there is a growing political movement openly displaying their affiliation to a Europe that appeared confined to a past with which Europe had burned its bridges. Unlike traditional nationalist projects, the geo-philosophy that inspired the project of European integration explicitly refrained from relying on an idealized construction of the past and instead relied on evocations of a civitas fu- tura, a communas in itinere: a polity looking to the future, a nomadic community. This “anti-narcissistic” project was neither set against foreign others nor obsessed with its own image but rather terrified by its own old self: the Europe of balances of power and war, racism and colonialism, bloodshed and the Holocaust (Morin 1990: 5; Bialasiewicz 2012b: 2-3). And yet, today the ugly face of that old Europe, which seemed relegated to black-and-white documentaries, is showing itself again. Violent mobs chasing after dark-skinned immigrants while stretching out their arms in the military spasm of the Hitler salute are being roused by politicians who have been relativizing the Holocaust to the brink of denial and publishing articles in national newspapers that paraphrase Hitler’s most rabidly anti-Semitic speeches to the point of plagiarism (Bennhold 2017; Benz 2018; Der Spiegel 2018). This would not seem as historically consequential was it not because, rather than condemnation, these political forces seem to have found support among the very state bodies charged with keeping at bay their very brand of violent xenophobic politics (Meaney and Schäfer 2018).

Not long ago it would have seem inconceivable to think that the project that has created the largest prosperity Europe has ever seen would sink to the moral lows of letting scores of immigrants drown in the Mediterranean (The Migrants’ Files 2014), have its ports refuse the boats that save their lives (Kirchgaessner, Tondo and Jones 2018), coordinate with the most appalling dictatorships to keep them at bay or leave them to rot in detention camps whose conditions mirror those of concentration camps (Bialasiewicz 2012a; Leape 2018). I claim that we have seen the symptoms of this Cronus-like affliction before: a Europe devouring its Others

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for fear of being polluted, overrun and transformed by the non-Europeans is a Eu- rope that will end up devouring its children and ultimately itself. The Shoa is a sobering precedent, for the genocide of Europe’s Jews began as a German attempt at self-destruction through the murder of their own Jewish compatriots, neighbours, friends and family. Extreme forms of nationalism catch the very fire they themselves set aflame and end up consuming the very nation they want to save. So, where does their power come from? I propose that it derives from their ability to dehumanise (Arendt 1963: 454-457): to destroy the self-evident bonds of proximity, friendship, family and, counterintuitively, even nationalism.

How long will it take before nationalist blades, sharpened by ever more callous rhetoric and tempered by the growing mistreatment of the world’s most vulnerable populations start carving borders of blood across Europe again? One cannot show entire populations insensitivity, breed cruelty for the weak and expect the humanist spirit of Europe to survive.

Freeing Europe’s image

How has it come to this? The thesis that I have defended in this dissertation is that, since its political integration, the EU has put together an assemblage of discourses—i.e., images, narratives and practices—that, by invoking the old imperial Europe, have incrementally aligned with the forces of EUroscepticism—xenophobes and racists, EU detractors and nationalists—that rely on them. In other words, in order to promote political cohesion, the EU has resorted to the same geopolitical imaginations on which EUrosceptics rely. Although by themselves none of these symbols of imperial Europe is meaningful, together—through repetition and hegemony—they have gradually put together a formidable idea of Europe whose overtones of white supremacy, Christian-inspired bigotry, patriarchal expectations, authoritarian politics and violent policies are emboldening ever more extreme EUrosceptic movements.

Images like Blaeuw’s map attest to the journey of a political myth that was configured in the Renaissance and which, in spite of the vicissitudes of time and politics, has managed to travel until today. The journey of Europe’s image offers a fascinating case to study how political myths—or parts of them—travel with the aid of different vehicles. Some of these are image vehicles (e.g., maps, paintings, political metaphors, architecture, literary tropes, etc.), which transport not only a visual composition with them but also part of its historical, political, geographical, social and cultural associations. Images might migrate from one time to another, from a political context to a different one and, in the process, adapt from one realm to another and mutate. A conqueror’s description on a book about, say, American cannibals, might make its way into a Flemish map and from here mutate into a

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social prejudice against the savagery of American natives among the people who see it.

EUropean symbolism matters because it puts together the political myth of Europe, the big picture of Europe that makes the EU meaningful for its citizens. Symbols are extolled by institutions and given power by people. The EU may speak the language of the Lisbon Treaty—Europe’s humanist inheritance—the ac- quis communautaire—the EU’s body of common law—and the Copenhagen criteria—democracy, rule of law, human rights, respect and protection of minorities, a market economy—and its humanist-inspired Lisbon treaty. Yet, its geopolitical practice tells otherwise. In this dissertation I have studied, through visual and visually evocative materials, how the EU has constructed a geopolitical idea of Europe that denies the very values it is supposed to espouse.

The EU has been using and evoking the kind of images that it was founded to keep at bay. This autoimmunity can be seen on the EU’s maps, political propaganda, rhetorical metaphors, iconography and both intra-EU and foreign policy. What began as an open-ended project of political integration has become ossified by the idea that Europe is complete (see: Prodi 2002). As if the idea of Europe was not a political manufacture concocted throughout centuries of power struggles. As if Europe did not owe much of what today are considered its quintessential features to a slow cultural weaving with the rest of the world. This is an insight I cannot stress enough: not only are EUrosceptic movements and xenophobic political parties an existential threat to European prosperity but so is the EU. After all, the resurgence of the neo-Nazi, neo-fascist right wing imperilling the EU is the direct political consequence of the EU’s lack of solidarity, lack of grand political vision, democratic deficit, elitist allocation of resources and increasing flirtation with authoritarianism in its attempt to halt the flow of asylum seekers. Europe has been kidnapped by forces that want to impose a closed Europe defined by its im- penetrability and increasing disrespect for universal values (Boedeltje and Van Houtum 2008). In the paranoid Europe that the EU has created, there seems to be no escape from a world that keeps attempting to interact with it: there seems to be no way to achieve a perfect European isolation from a world that refuses to stop doing what it has always done: cross borders and transform cultures. The only way forward—EU officials do not cease to tell us—is more Europe (Verhofstadt 2016). But if this means only more of the same Europe that they EU has made available until now, the project seems unpromising and uninspiring (Boedeltje and Van Houtum 2008). What about other Europes?

There are integral parts of Europe—as well as the other way around—located along scantly studied frontiers which have the capacity to dislocate paradigmatic cartographic borders and allow us to re-imagine Europe across hidden geographies. Borders have experienced a conceptual frenzy since the 1990s, going from being considered as mere dividing territorial lines and political institutions

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to discursive processes and sociocultural practices (Newman and Paasi 1998). In spite of this change of clothes, geopolitics keeps locating the majority of border dramas mainly along the juridico-political borders between nation states.

However, to accept that border are processes and verbs which are ceaselessly conjugated by different actors and thus of polymorphic ontology (Van Hou- tum 2005: 672; 2011: 50-51) is to accept that borders are dynamic social processes and practices of spatial differentiation (Paasi 1998; Van Houtum and Van Naerssen 2002; Newman 2006; Brambilla 2014: 2). In their most general definition, a border is a criterion of both spatial and ideological differentiation and, most importantly, “not a spatial fact with sociological consequences, but a sociological fact that forms itself spatially” (Simmel 1997: 142). In other words, borders are first perception and then matter and, in order to find their foundations, one must look in the depths of heads and the entire systems of power and knowledge production that shape their imaginations.

An excessive focus on the lines dividing states, border studies and particularly political geography run the risk of neglecting borders of foggier consistency and again fall in the territorial trap (Agnew 1994) and methodological nationalism (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002) that they consistently have decried in other disciplines (particularly International Relations). Without a doubt, the methodological complexity of conceptualizing borders as discursive and socio-cultural practices—or the methodological comfort of limiting the conceptualisation of borders to juridico-political lines—is partly guilty for this. The objective of this work is to make an incursion into borders of difficult exploration.

The European colonisation of the American continent, for example, particularly in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies, was so penetrating, intimate and sustained that it not only infused aboriginal American cultures with traits indelibly European but also changed Europe beyond recognition. Such transculturation made the American continent and Europe mutually constitutive and, thus, arguably, different components of the same civilisation insofar as neither of them can be explained without reference to the other—less by mutilation of the other.

I claim that these new Europes can only be found by demystifying the gross imprecisions of dominant geopolitical discourse that portray Latin America, for example, and other Europes hidden in plain sight as rare specimens, different from Europe and foreign to its civilisation. Although it now seems forgotten, what is now known as “Latin America” used to be a European frontier in European cartography and politics. Centuries of European colonisation endowed it with a dis- tinctively European character permanently engraved in cultural traits characteristic to its geography and societies. The interaction between Europeans, American aboriginals and African slaves created new fusions that are neither European nor native American nor African but something entirely unique. In spite of this diverse mélange, European tonalities are immediately discernible among the most salient

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nuances of the Latin American cultural palette—e.g., language, cuisine, phenotype, architecture. Reciprocally, America has exerted a colossal influence on Eu- rope, not least as the mirror on which Europe has reflected its own image. For over five centuries, the destinies of both regions have been so intimately intertwined that neither of them can be understood without reference to the other. Both Latin America and Europe participate in a conversation that has shaped the identity of the other to such a degree that it is more analytically sound to consider them as particular manifestations of the same civilisation than as separate ones. But isn’t this true for many other geographies? What is a civilisation, after all? I certainly would like to challenge the pervasive idea that Europe and the rest of the world constitute different civilisations. The infamously influential work of Samuel Hun- tington (1993, 1996) that proposes a whimsical geopolitical nomenclature is perhaps the epitome of the vision. Such civilisational taxonomies demarcate civilisations with a fearless cartographical blindness that amputates cultures with the arbitrariness of a pen’s stroke. Europe needs a different vision: European culture, history and geography is far too rich for its political future to be limited to either some sort of xenophobic, chauvinistic or neo-fascist rule, on the one hand, or by an unelected and elitist technocracy, on the other. In order to unearth these hidden Europes we need different visions of what Europe can be, different mappings of what its borders can comprise, different symbols of what its culture can inspire, different images of what its civilisation can mean. The image of Europe needs to be liberated.

A good way to start is by liberating its iconography: symbols, representations, maps, figures, historical and geographical and political metaphors. As this work has persistently argued, there is an inherent and powerful connection between representations and geopolitics. The very life of political projects depends on it. The imposing robustness of public buildings in the Roman Empire was meant as an architectural extension of the empire’s power commanding its subjects to “look and obey” (Sennett 1994: 87-123). The crowded iconography of medieval T-in-O maps displaying the origins and destiny of the world according to Christian cosmogony and eschatology were meant to fit the biblical scripture into a comprehensive description of the world and thus emphasise the power of the Christian Church over godly and earthly matters (Brotton 2013: 90-118). The relation between the power and representations is ancient. The immaterial imaginations of geography and history that these representations engender are as powerful as armies (Gregory 1993). Imaginations of geography inspire people to dramatic political mobilisation—for good or bad and for better or worse. Narrative notions of a shared heritage and emotional affiliations to places of dwelling and cultural productions underpin grand notions of civilisations (Said 1978; Anderson 1983; Hobsbawm 1990).

However, the image of Europe has become blurred and the lens to see it has become myopic. We need to craft a new lens. This might seem overambitious, but

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if we look into to the history of cartography, we realise that many modern territories were first created on a prince’s draft table and then on territory itself (Branch 2014: 142-164). Political communities need to be imagined; their vision needs to be appealing before they can be brought about. The aim of this dissertation is to paint landscapes of what Europe could aspire to be and, in order to show them, visual materials that catch the eye are crucial. I would like to crack open a little of scepticism in the notions of “European history” and “European geography” in order to envision new Europes. I have tried to do this here by offering a multiplicity of lenses that may allow us to image the potential of many Europes.

My ambition is to free Europe from the claws to which symbolic and geopolitical traditions have pinned it down in order to show that other Europes can be imagined and that another EU is possible. In order to start it is however important to question the imaginations that have led to this one, and these are either visual or evoke imaginations that can be easily represented in visual materials. As part of this effort, it is crucial to pay attention to perceptions of history, geography and culture because they exert a great deal of power on the conduction of everyday geopolitics. It is important to reimagine which history, geography and culture has not yet been imagined. This is a very visual and imaginative endeavour and this is why this critique of the political myth of Europe that the EU has constructed is very much based on an iconological critique of either the visual symbols of Europe used by the EU or the visually evocative symbols evoked by its geopolitical practice.

Edited and distributed by power, these notions are hammered into people’s eyes and brains through the ceaseless indoctrination of the family, the educational system, a national media, religion and other social forces. Through power and repetition, these geographical notions discredit, conceal or silence alternatives, thus acquiring hegemony and becoming taken-for-granted realities that are used to describe, analyse and shape the world. These “realities” not only classify political communities but they allow them to think about themselves as different from others and to make political decisions that turn these abstract notions into concrete reality by shaping geography through policy.

I want to show that the symbolic construction of European is constrained by a mutually reinforcing straitjacket of representations and geopolitical practices that have infected the EU with an autoimmune disorder that, like Cronus, are misleading it to cannibalise its own children and their future. Neither is European integration the problem nor are EUrosceptic nationalism or authoritarian xenophobic populism the solution. We all know what a disintegrated Europe of chauvinistic national identities leads to. A flawed EU project and a bureaucracy. It’s an ossification of the wealth and potential of Europe. An open project has been stolen and turned into something that is trapped by own limitations. There seems to be no escape or any other track possible. EU officials do not get tired to remind us that

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the only way forward is “more Europe”, but does this mean only more of the same Europe that they have made available so far? What about other Europes? Europe has much to be proud of but the Europes on offer by either the EU or its detractors seem more interested in evoking the Europes we should be ashamed of.

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EPILOGUE Research Agenda

Towards New Visualisations of Europe On the usurpation of history, the explosion of representations and the transformation of political identity

This final discussion sketches out a research agenda for the study of new Europes. The main concern is the explosion of representations and the usurpation of reality in a world of ubiquitous screens flooding us with bits and pieces of the world at a ceaseless pace. This research agenda identifies two challenges for research on European identity, not only to open itself to the world and embrace Europe’s cosmopolitan heritage but to do it in an age where the power to represent has shifted to more obscure sources and exploded in an unprecedented way. Ultimately, the task of freeing Europe from its image is not only a fascinating scientific challenge but also a worthy political endeavour for the tumbling post-war project of European integration.

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EPILOGUE

Towards New Visualisations of Europe: On the Usurpation of History, the Explosion of Representations and the Transformation of Political Identity

Towards a research agenda for more honest political visualisations

cannot offer a conclusion to this research because that would imply a contradiction of its very findings: identity is never a closed case and political identity is in perpetual transformation at the hands of ceaselessly evolving political forces. Moreover, I would not like to give myself the authority to say I what Europe is and what it is not; or what is more European and what is less. This kind of authority and the closed, increasingly violent political identities and policies it begets is one of the main criticisms that this dissertation makes against the kind of identity being heralded by either the EU or, to an extreme measure, by ethno-nationalist political movements in Europe. They both purport to have a monopoly on European identity and thus the authority to decide who belongs to Europe and who does not. However, as any other political identity, the idea of Europe is subject to change and transformation and thus, what that transformation will entail is a matter of political choice. The preservation of Europe in general—and of the project of post-war political integration embodied by the EU, in particular—is hence not the settled matter that some pretend it to be but rather an open question of political will. Whether the Member States of the European Union will remain willing to remain in a political union seems increasingly hard to tell.

Today, the political atmosphere in the EU does not seem to let us imagine the kind of prosperity that the project of European integration has created until now but, rather, the sort of misery that it was envisioned to keep at bay. Of all the aspects that one could say about the EU’s future, the one thing that I would confi- dently conclude from my research is that the territorially-based political identity

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that the EU has been constructing through its evocative discourses (i.e., its political myth) seems to be taking the EU in the same ruinous direction as the EUrosceptics trying to do away with the Union. I do not know whether it would be possible to nurture the kind of political will that would be necessary to transform the EU in ways that would solve its deficits of democracy, solidarity, identity and overall governance.

Overall, I am pessimistic about the EU’s ability to transform the discourses to which, throughout this work, I have ascribed responsibility for the creation of what I have diagnosed as the EU’s autoimmune political myth. I do not think that the dramatic change of course that would be necessary to usher a EUropean Re- naissance is feasible anymore. Above all, practical geopolitical discourses seem unlikely to reverse their self-harming course. These involve, among others, the creation of a common EU-wide migration and asylum system that honours both the EU’s international commitments as well as its foundational principles; the imposition of a system of automatic sanctions against Member States that purposefully and systematically undermine the EU’s fundamental principles; the formulation of a congruent foreign policy able to prevent unstable regimes like the US or Russia from undermining EUropean democracy, security and stability—or the political will to change the impractical consensus-based decision-making system of the EU that prevents it from adopting any of these urgent policies.

Among this discouraging list of urgent but ostensibly impossible tasks, there is at least one thing that still seems feasible: a change in the symbolic and narrative discourses that, in their current state, buttress the EU’s autoimmune geopolitical discourses. Instead of promoting the closed, paranoid Europe on which xenophobic political movements are feeding, the EU could promote a symbolic arrangement of evocative proto-national narratives and images that envisage an alternative EUrope. Unlike the symbolic, narrative and visual discourses of today, these discourses would at least align with the ethos and values the EU was established to promote and is morally, historically and legally supposed to uphold. EU- ropean unity will exist in its current form as long as the EU remains able to keep mustering the will of its Member States to keep it alive. Not a minute longer.

…

Instead of a conclusion, I wish to outline a question whose thundering political implications in today’s global politics increasingly suggest the need for an urgent historical investigation: How have representations contributed to the formation of distinct political paradigms like “Europe”, “the West”, “the Muslim world”, “Latin America”, “Africa”, etc.? And how has the channel of their transmission—e.g., art of all sorts, cartography, traditional and social media as well as the internet in general—affected their nature and content as well as the political paradigms that they have contributed to shape? Finding the answers to these questions might be the first step into a realm of possibilities for historians, sociologists,

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psychologists, anthropologists, ethnographers, geographers and ultimate politicians and intellectuals to imagine new Europes that are more open and thus might more accurately depict the global connections from which Europe has been made and which have made the world part of Europe.

This research agenda would need to cast light on the nexus among technology, representation, borders and “political paradigm”. By political paradigm I mean the geographically specific collection of “notions about the world” (e.g., religion and cosmogony, historical narratives and historiography, philosophy and science, sanity and madness, reality and fantasy, beauty and ugliness, etc.) that have justified distinct forms of political identity, political myth, and political rule throughout history.

The specific political paradigm that I believe requires further study is nationalism

in the sense defined by Gellner, namely to mean ‘primarily a principle which holds that the political and national unit should be congruent’. I would add that this principle also implies that the political duty of Rurita- nians to the polity which encompasses and represents the Ruritanian nation, overrides all other public obligations, and in extreme cases (such as wars) all other obligations of whatever kind) (Hobsbawm1990: 9).

For better or worse, nationalism remains today’s hegemonic principle of political organisation—and it has prevailed over others (e.g., extinct forms of multinational imperialisms) since the end of the 18th century.

The misleading inexplicability of geopolitical challenges

My concern with nationalism—or similar forms of nativism based on Romantic historiography—derives from its ever louder presence in today’s most momentous geopolitics: a resurgence of violent exclusionary chauvinism epitomised by Brexit and the election of Donald Trump in the US; terrorism of all denominations (i.e., Islamist, white-supremacist and state-sponsored); large migrations of asylum seekers intensified by renewed forms of post-colonial exploitation, dehumanising rhetoric, climate change and growing disparities in regional prosperity; the decom- position of international institutions as major powers turn their back on multilat- eral cooperation; the reorganisation of the world’s power polarity as new powers gain ground and older lose their grip on their former hegemony; and rising global inequality exacerbated by all the previous phenomena as well as by rapidly pro- gressing automation.

All of these destabilising phenomena are not only intimately linked but they also have structural causes that are not limited to the boundaries of either a

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particular nation state or region and consequently should be analysed from a global scope. And yet, the solutions that keep being devised to tackle these challenges have obstinately ignored their global dimensions; a flaw that has made the resulting policies not only ineffective but counterproductive. Perhaps the most strident example of this short-sightedness are the policies based on a “hardening-of- borders” approach that have been persistently implemented to deal with terrorism, migration, identity and globalisation in the European Union: instead of making the EU safer, wealthier, more cohesive and more prosperous, they have stoked the flames of the worst kind of exclusionary nativism that the Europe has experienced since the end of World War 2. The result has been a series of intimately linked crises that seem to get worse even as governments design ever more extreme policies to deal with them. The consequence is a larger crisis of political legitimacy that over the last years seems to be particularly acute precisely in the most counterintuitive of regimes: liberal democracies whose institutions are supposed to be designed to promote a more responsive and overall more satisfying government for their populations.

My hypothesis is that the novelty and speed with which these new and complex geopolitical phenomena have managed to impose themselves on the world’s politics have taken both politics and science by surprise. We do not have the tools (language, concepts, theories or historical understanding) to make sense of them and in consequence the policies being designed to address them keep running against a wall of failure. The dogged tendency of these geopolitical phenomena to worsen in spite of a wealth of policies being put in place to address them—including the ruinous emulation of chauvinist, racist discourses—has surrounded them with an aura of inexplicability. My suggestion is that in order to begin to explain them it is imperative to delve into their history while paying particular attention to their representations, their geoaesthetics, their cartopolitics and the ways in which these underpin certain forms of political myths and territorially-based identities.

The awareness of the apparent inexplicability and intractability of these destabilising phenomena is what makes me certain that the holistic historical enquiry that I propose is a rich though underexplored field of study that has yet much to say about some of the most relevant cross-border political phenomena taking place today. Although these phenomena have been separately studied, my ambition is to focus on their joint historical development, transformation, meaning and implications. I believe that an iconological exploration of these phenomena’s geopolitical semiotics would prove not only intellectually fascinating but politically very fruitful.

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The explosion of realities

The hypothesis for the research agenda that I propose is that these global challenges today are being largely—though not exclusively—shaped by the ubiqui- tousness of screens (e.g., smartphones and computers) and by the democratisation of the means to represent the world. Broadcasting platforms such as YouTube, Insta- gram, Twitter, WordPress, Facebook, Google—not to mention the millions of blogs and other analogous websites—and the internet in general have turned ‘the power of representation’—formerly an exclusive privilege of the state, the church and other corporate elites holding the exclusive right and means to create, propagate and sanction representations—into widely available means at the disposal of the general public. The recent investigative journalism into how the decisive machinations of immensely powerful non-state actors are manipulating liberal democracies might just be the definitive signal that we are being ushered into a new and ominous era for which neither our political institutions nor our understanding of these new politics are prepared. This period might be characterised by the simulation of democratic control by political elites who are in reality subjected to the obscure, uncheckable interests of unaccountable corporations, lobbies, oligarchs, think tanks, banks, financial institutions and other powerful transnational corporations whose unparalleled power and collusion allow them to bend entire nation states to the vicissitudes of their whim.

The increasingly ubiquitous representations disseminated through widely available platforms of media and communication are changing the nature of political debate and, specifically, the romantic representations of history that people associate with their political mythologies—e.g., nationalism but also affiliation to grand geo-cultural constructs such as “Europe”.

I would propose this research agenda to depart from the intuition that nationalism—the myth on which the nation state depends—is being increasingly usurped by representations beyond the control of the traditional state apparatuses and elites. Visual and narrative discourses that construct shared ideas about the identity, borders and political ideology of Europe or any other grand geopolitical construct of the sort—i.e., any national or regional geo-cultural identity—, constitute fascinating archaeological sites to study the configuration and transformation of political ideas throughout history. Overall, I am interested in how the many representations that construct an image and an imagination of a distinct political identity are created, promoted and sanctioned by those with the power to shape them as well as by the technological means, historiographical strategies and historical narratives they use.

Although today’s newfound freedom and accessibility of representation is in principle available to a great deal of people, this democratisation of representation is of course circumscribed by geography and power. On the one hand, not all

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countries allow the same freedom of speech and thus of representation—although, admittedly, even the most authoritarian regimes have trouble reining in the explosion of politically meaningful narratives, images, stories, videos, etc. that have mushroomed across the world wide web. On the other hand, there are powerful interest groups who have realised that, by acquiring and analysing (“crunching”) colossal amounts of individual and loosely protected data, they are able to push their self-serving and unpopular political agendas by tailoring representations tar- geted to particular individuals. Through social media, unscrupulous interest groups are able to create “enough reality” on the cyberspace of traditional and social media to engender the illusion of considerable political support without their representations, agenda and actions being checked by the constraints of traditional political institutions (e.g., courts, parliaments, bureaucracies, journalists), accountability or even truth.

This proliferation of realities has to be studied together with the marketisa- tion and personalisation of the representations on which they are based—we are fed the representations that we want to be fed—and thus to the progressive self- imprisonment into which we, half-purposefully yet half-obliviously, are putting ourselves. Even though we certainly know more and see much more thanks to the new informational and communicational technologies available to us, we believe to know much more and see much more than we actually know and actually see. Technology has advanced faster than the politics and science on how to better regulate this explosion of realities as well as the usurpation of reality conducted by political groups acting beyond traditional political constraints.

I would like to argue that much of our world has been substituted by the ubiquitous realities of omnipresent, ceaseless, real-time representations: an explosion of representations so present and so comprehensive, that it has progressively atrophied our need to experience the world first-hand or through slower means. An oversimplified, manipulated and simplistic image or video in our Facebook news feed might mislead us to believe that we can understand that phenomenon without the need for more time-consuming and more studious material such as rigorous historical studies (e.g., a specialised book). This is the final humiliation of the word by the image, of the reasoned argument by the doctored photograph, the edited video or the alarmist map.

Unsanctioned by the conventions of political acceptability, liberal democratic principles, and scientific rigor, new representational technologies offer all sorts of political groups and thus all sorts of political ideologies a megaphone to impose their tyranny on a majority by promoting the representational illusion that they have a large popular support. These representational worlds of unpopular realities that appear popular and representations that have no other basis than their own image of the world resonates with what Jean Baudrillard called simulacra: not “that which conceals the truth” but “the truth which conceals that there is

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none. The simulacrum is true.” We might be living in a world where representational realities have acquired so much power that they are usurping the place of tangible and falsifiable, verifiable realities. I argue that an increasing amount of the dramatic geopolitics of war, migration and overall political conflict that we are seeing in the EU and the world today derives from such fabricated realities.

My main concern is with the transformation of “the space of the political itself”, which for a large part has become a perception that exists in a world of manipulated representations beyond political accountability and truth. Even though representations of the world have always possessed the power to narrate, depict, photograph and record the scenes, landscapes and people of the world in an edited way, today, the world-creating power of representations today allows them to summon up worlds that do not exist beyond their representation and whose inaccuracies or utter falsehood have become hard to expose and discredit.

In these ocularcentric world, EUrope needs a clear vision of its principles and values and the future that it proposes to its 512 million inhabitants to keep working together as a political union. In order to accomplish this, I suggest that it is absolutely imperative to develop other visualisations, new images, new maps, new methodologies that are able to represent not only the space, people and culture of today’s EUrope but also those of the EUrope it aspires to become. The blue- prints to envision this future EUrope is already there: in the catharsis of WW2 that culminated in the establishment of the project of European integration to which the EU is heir; in the Lisbon Treaty’s mention of EUrope’s humanism as the EU’s philosophical foundation.

EUrope needs new ways to construct identities that are capable to offer a bulwark against the newfound and frightening geographies that are being ceaselessly advanced by this explosion of representations of obscure provenance and destabilising intentions. However, this endeavour seems hampered at every turn by what sometimes seems as the EU’s belief in it being “the end of history”—i.e., the Fukuyama trap—: a conviction in its own indestructibility suggested by an unwavering arrange of self-harming geopolitics that seem to stubbornly promote the worst possible solutions for the most crucial geopolitical crises. In other words, it increasingly seems more like the beginning of a past history, like a rehearsal for which EUurope is dusting off the same old clothes yet giving them a new design. What do we need to free Europe? What kind of symbols, narratives, speeches, images, maps and discourses can we depict to free Europe from its own past? We need to seriously ponder these questions in order to reflect on other images, other cartographies, other polities and other Europes before Europe’s past catches up with the EU to devour it as it has done so many times already in the past.

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