Unraveling the Myth: Tracing the Limits of Europe through Its Border Figurations

Abstract

Notions such as insularity, historical erasure and racial and cultural homogeneity all constitute the European myth and contribute to the idea of Europe as an exceptional place. This is further legitimized by discursive, institutional and symbolic processes of inclusion and exclusion as well as the instituting of borders in the name of Europe. Drawing on postcolonial and feminist theory, as well as border studies, cultural studies and postsocialist scholarship, I study Europe as a discursive formation that is operationalized through the instituting of material and symbolic borders. My highlighting of these bordering mechanisms is a simultaneous critique of their workings by showcasing their inherent fallibility, alongside which I offer different forms of critique, in the form of artistic interventions and individual narratives that open up the question of Europe to alternative significations. This dissertation represents a critical interrogation of the idea of Europe from two vantage points that I conceptualize as border figurations in a European context: the figure of the refugee-migrant, and the geopolitical space of the Balkans, with a specific focus on the former Yugoslavia. These figurations represent peripheral actors and phenomena that are relegated to Europe’s limits, but also potent discursive clusters that are operationalized together in light of the recent European migration ‘crisis’ and the European Union’s eastward expansion towards the Balkans. The two border figurations are foregrounded here analytically in order to glean insight into Europe’s historical self-definition vis-à-vis the (cultural) Other. The intervention I make in this dissertation is three-fold. First, I combine an analysis of institutionalized and enacted bordering practices and discourses in Europe with a foregrounding of critical knowledges, practices and articulations that interrogate those very same processes. Secondly, I critique the ‘exceptionality’ and anxieties surrounding the current European migration crisis by placing this phenomenon in a larger historical and sociopolitical context, through a postcolonial engagement with the postsocialist area and idea of the Balkans. Third, in order to study the heterogeneity of European borders in their personal, institutional and symbolic dimensions, I use a variety of research material, including interviews, visual art, political narratives, film and public spaces. The data set is complemented by an interdisciplinary methodological approach that most prominently features discourse analysis, while drawing further on ethnography, oral history, semiotics, psychoanalysis and visual studies. I use the concept of the border as a tool with which to expose and offer a critique of a dominant conceptualization of Europe, oftentimes predicated on colonialism, nationalism, whiteness, and a Western-coded understanding of civilizational progress. Furthermore, I use the border as a way to trace the conditions of existence of those (individuals, populations, domains) who are subjected to the workings of the border apparatus. Through the notion of the border, I look at the processes of inclusion and exclusion as they occur in the European domain, spatially and discursively. These processes are mediated and mobilized by certain understandings of belonging, nationhood and ‘proper’ Europeanness in 21st century Europe. Studied together, the refugee-migrant and the Balkans as border figurations complicate any simple or ‘easy’ idea of Europe or Europeanness, providing useful ground for interrogating bordering practices and erasures, spatial and symbolic, that are enacted in the name of Europe.