BORDERS AND DIFFERENCE THE POLITICS OF DELINEATING EUROPE

by Ira Bliatka

A Thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of International Politics

ABERYSTWYTH UNIVERSITY

2016

Thesis Summary

This thesis is about the making of the European Union (EU) as a political actor through the delineation of borders and border spaces. It speaks to one of the key questions of an ongoing scholarly and policy debate, regarding the dialectic nature of the EU’s borders; internal and external, present and absent, murderous and humanitarian are only some of the binaries that have been deployed to speak of these paradoxical hybrid constructs, which, as literature has argued, have long stopped acting and looking like simple lines on maps. As such, the project lies at the intersection of

EU studies, Border Studies and Political Geography, and engages themes that have been common in these fields; borders, biopolitics, and security logics of risk. The biopolitical border is found behind an ever-expanding range of border technologies that regulate global mobilities; biometric passports, databases, surveillance systems, and techniques of risk-profiling, outsourcing, and off-shoring the border.

My thesis seeks to add to these literatures, arguing for the need to embed the study of the

EU’s biopolitical borders within geographical and historical analytical frames. To this end, it makes a

Foucauldian contribution, by bringing in Foucault’s underdeveloped concept of a heterotopia, to study the spaces that these borders produce and re-articulate. Heterotopias are ‘loose’ space-times that unfold in multiple thresholds between inside and outside, mirroring and exaggerating the contradictions of the wider polities to which they belong, and enabling us to think in flexible ways about the physical and temporal boundaries of milieus of power. Through the heterotopic lens, mobility and immobility, inclusion and exclusion, emerge not only as acts that permit and forbid bodies from accessing an internal and prosperous subworld, but as performances of difference and otherness in the process of constituting the EU as such.

Acknowledgments

At first instance, would like to thank my supervisors, Jenny Edkins and Alistair Shepherd, for their mentorship, knowledge, sense of humour, and patient approach to tackling what felt at times like an unfinishable project. Also, many thanks go out to Felix Ciuta, for supervising the Master’s dissertation out of which my PhD questions emerged, and for his continuous support and friendship up until submission. My gratitude also goes to Elena Korosteleva, for supervision at the initial stages of the project, and to Ian Klinke for questions and comments on early drafts. I also wish to thank Javier Baluja, Thodoris Paraskevopoulos, and Antony Smith, for precious help with maps.

The support of my family was invaluable while working through the trickiest parts of the thesis. Gratitude goes to my mother Anna Mastoraki for courage, support, and for her memorable “there’s no problem without a solution”; my father Kostas Bliatkas for pointing me to the intricacies of the EU institutions; Hionia Vlachou for crisis-averting influence; my brother Dimitris for being an incredible person; Tania Mastoraki for calling me on the phone in 2010 to ask “why on earth would they build a fence?” thus starting everything; Youli Mastoraki for technical support and for blessing our family with two wonderful babies, putting things in perspective; Konstantina Mintzia for being infinitely more than a cousin; and my grandmother Eleni Mastoraki for patience, persistence, hospitality, and love to us all.

Special thanks go out to Nour Hawaa, for taking me to a border-crossing shopping trip and for grounding conversations; to Alexandros Koutsoukis for late-night departmental writing sessions, and for his inspiring determination; to Alexandros Chatzispyrou for being m