Relocating Europe Border Officials and their everyday attempts to stabilise borders Kristensen, Marlene Paulin Publication date: 2019 Document version Publisher's PDF, also known as Version of record Document license: CC BY-NC-ND Citation for published version (APA): Kristensen, M. P. (2019). Relocating Europe: Border Officials and their everyday attempts to stabilise borders. Det Humanistiske Fakultet, Københavns Universitet. Download date: 28. sep.. 2021 Relocating Europe Border officials and their everyday attempts to stabilise borders PhD thesis by Marlene Paulin Kristensen European Ethnology, the Saxo Institute Faculty of Humanities, University of Copenhagen Supervisor: Marie Sandberg Handed in February 2019 Front- and back-page photograph by the author. Danish-German border crossing Rønsdam After the introduction of temporary border control (2016, front cover) and before (2015, back cover) For my father and my grandfather 2 Acknowledgements Many people have helped me throughout the process of creating this dissertation, and I am grateful for all of the helpful comments, questions, ideas, and inspiration that they have contributed along the way. First and foremost, I wish to thank my interlocutors – the police officers and border experts working in the field – for engaging in discussions with me and making this research project possible. I am especially grateful for the help I received from Niels Henrik Bak, Thomas Prip, Brian Fussing and Kim Sverre Hansen from the Danish police as well as to Hartvig Schøn. I also wish to thank Cristina Turcan from EUBAM for her help over the years. I thank my colleagues at the Department of Ethnology at the Saxo Institute, University of Copenhagen for providing me with a supportive and friendly environment in which to present and develop ideas for both my fieldwork and analysis. I also wish to thank the helpful secretariat and PhD coordinators at the Saxo institute for supporting the process at all stages. It has been an absolute pleasure to work together with my supervisor, Marie Sandberg, who has always believed in the importance of this project and played an indispensable role in helping me get through this process safe and sound. Marie carefully read and commented on all drafts, always devoted to find ways to push the analyses further. I am very grateful for that, and I hope you enjoy reading the final version! I have been very privileged to share my research process with a group of fun, hardworking, and talented PhD Fellows, who have all inspired me with their insightful and original dissertation work. Thank you to Anders Møller for being my friend, and for guiding me safely through both happy and difficult beginnings and ends over the past 10 years (or more!). Thank you to Jonas Winther for always enthusiastically helping me improve everything from vague ideas to final drafts. Thank you, Nanna and Signe, for sharing the tricky combination of young children, deadlines, and everything in between. Thank you to Anne Katrine, Beate, Drew, Marie, Martin, and Sigrid for stimulating conversations, final writing heats, conference participation, and so much more. I am deeply grateful to Amy for providing excellent and attentive proofreading, and for cheering for me through the last part of the writing process. I also wish to thank Ioanna Tsoni for inspiring me with her motivation and dedication, and Kolar Aparna for sharp observations and invigorating discussions 3 during the final phase of my research. I am also indebted to Dace Dzenovska, who took the time to read and comment on very early drafts of chapters five and six. I also wish to thank my kind and supportive family and my patient friends; I cannot wait to see more of all of you! Thank you to Jacob Campbell for assisting me in finding the right translations for mundane yet obscure words. To Cecilie Bjerre, for being a friend and a most inspiring role model in academic life. Thank you to Jens for helping Ole and I take care of our son, while I was working long hours. Finally, thank you to my sister, my grandmother, my aunts, and to my mother Anne Marie Kristensen who, in every sense, provided me with a room with a view from where I could finish this dissertation. All my gratitude to Erik and Ole, who are so very loving and very lovely. 4 CONTENTS Preface ................................................................................................................... 8 Chapter 1: Introduction .................................................................................... 13 The problem of defining the purpose of Europe’s borders .............................. 14 The critical promise of studying the state and its institutions ......................... 17 Telling Europe through stories of ends and beginnings ................................... 19 Structure of the dissertation’s chapters ................................................................ 21 Chapter 2: Literature review and theoretical framework .......................... 25 Spatial and temporal frameworks of border and migration studies ............... 26 Practice as detail? Micro, macro, and vice versa. .............................................. 27 The connections and confines of the border regime ......................................... 29 Practice as performativity and border as multiple ............................................. 31 Practical encounters and where to study the global?........................................ 32 Eras and epochal shifts: “21st-century borders” and the need for new categories ................................................................................................................ 33 Tidemarks, palimpsests, and ruinations: the multiple layers of border ......... 35 Relative location: the disappearance and reappearance of places .................. 38 Critical events and the reconfiguration of interpretive categories .................. 39 ‘Inverting the telescope’: juxtapositions and comparisons .............................. 40 Conclusion: Europes and borders.......................................................................... 40 Chapter 3: An ‘Arbitrary Europe’, and how to study it .............................. 42 An imagined geography of Europe ....................................................................... 43 Defending the borderline: the Alien Control Unit at the Danish–German border ..................................................................................................................... 45 “I wonder what we would do”: the Border Control Unit, Danish National Police ....................................................................................................................... 48 Tidying up the “terrain naturally conducive to the unfettered movement of goods and people”: EUBAM ................................................................................ 52 An ‘arbitrary Europe’: from geographical field to analytical work ................. 56 The bounding of fieldworker and field sites ...................................................... 57 How to study the borderline in a borderless Europe? ...................................... 60 Knowledge loops and different kinds of knowledge work .............................. 62 A lesson in what it means to police the borderless Europe.............................. 64 Keeping the conversation going ............................................................................ 66 Revealing and critique: ‘it doesn’t look good’ ................................................... 68 5 Chapter 4: EU borders for peacetime only? Bridging gaps and making- same as border strategies ................................................................................. 72 Purpose and structure of chapter ........................................................................ 74 Part I: Erasing differences and bridging gaps ..................................................... 76 Seeing the same border: cooperation as a method of the border..................... 77 Predicting the future by knowing the past: documenting and analysing as methods of the border .......................................................................................... 79 Changing the mentality amongst border guards .............................................. 81 On the road to Europe: harmonising and standardising in the name of progress .................................................................................................................. 83 Gaps as the seams of universality ....................................................................... 84 Part II: Detecting gaps and relativizing the border ............................................ 85 Gaps as relations from elsewhere: the chicken-meat scandal and the forged bureaucracy of Transnistria ................................................................................. 88 Inside the gap: The past reappears as an alternative to the present ............... 91 Inverting the telescope: “EU borders are for peacetime only” ........................ 92 What Europe? What border? ................................................................................... 94 Conclusion: the jostle of past and present ........................................................... 97 Chapter 5: “In search of excellence”: holding together ‘the borders of Europe’................................................................................................................. 99 Everyday conceptualisations of the ‘good’ border .........................................