Suchergebnisse

AbstractThe concept of normative power Europe accurately captured the distinctiveness of EU's international practices. However, it fell victim to social constructivism, from which it derived an exclusionary ontology perpetuating the dualism between norms and interests. To conceive those notions as two faces of the same coin, one needs a thicker ontology. This is what Bourdieu provides for in anchoring norms and interests in social fields. Interest is simultaneously what ties actors to particular games (generic interest) and what makes them make particular moves in these games (specific interest). To illustrate how Bourdieu's sociology shapes a better understanding of normative power Europe, I explore the transmission of EU's integrated border management in Central Asia. In this case, EU power elites delegate the business of wielding this normative power of Europe to a Vienna‐based international street corner society.

AbstractOver the past 15 years, the European Commission has poured millions of euros into Research and Development in border security. This article looks at the devices that are funded under this scheme. To this end, it applies Multiple Correspondence Analysis to a database of 41 projects funded under 7th Framework Programme. This method of data visualisation unearths the deep patterns of opposition that run across the sociotechnical universe where European borders are designed and created. We identify three rationalities of power at play: territorial surveillance aimed at detecting rare events in remote areas, policing of dense human flows by sorting out the benign from the dangerous, and finally global dataveillance of cargo on the move. Instead of trends towards either the hardening of borders or their virtualisation, we, therefore, find multiple rationalities of power simultaneously redefining the modalities of control at EU borders. A second finding shows where precisely critical actors are located in this sociotechnical universe and indicates that the structure of European R&D in border security keeps irregularised migrants off their radars. This finding calls for more caution as to the possibility to effectively put critique to work within the context of EU R&D.