Europe’s New Territorial Politics or The Uneven Spaces of Living, Breathing, Moving, Dying by Niccolo Milanese Europe’s Futures Fellow 2019/2020
Europe’s political geography is famously uncertain and contested. The luxury and burden of being the only continent to have given itself its own name is that its borders are undefined, and European history as a whole – both “internally” and “externally” – can be narrated as an infamous series of actions claiming, rejecting, defending or dividing lands, roots, cultures, names and symbols which can all potentially be associated with it. To tell such a history we would certainly need at least two narrators, a “European” and a “non-European”, if only it were possible to identify a priori who is who. Riven through with this inescapable history, acting in Europe’s name always risks taking sides, but also risks the apparent fragility of irresolvable internal contradictions, the presence of apostates, renegades and rebels in the ranks. Is there some way of thinking territory beyond these military metaphors?
The preconditions for this integration were multiple: including at its beginning the devastation of post-war Europe and the imperative to rebuild; access to European colonies and their resources; ongoing relatively secure sources of energy and industrial materials and climate stability; overarching American military protection; privileged access to international financial markets and long periods of global economic growth.
Is there some way of thinking territory beyond these military metaphors?
As a peace-project, the European Union – that celebrated “unidentified political object” – makes a strong and justified claim to overcoming border conflicts and broader territorial conflicts, at least in its “heartlands”, and above all between France and Germany. Through various forms of integration (functional, energy-related, judicial, monetary, educational, etc.) it displaced and decentred the causes of these conflicts, turning what was a matter of foreign policy, military power and realpolitik into administrative and legal wrangling over competences in a stratified but convergent landscape of political authority. 58
If geopolitics was highly present in the first decades of European integration up until 1989, the collapse of the Soviet Empire and “reunification” enabled the European Union to narrate its teleology as one of “ever closer union” coupled with enlargement to the East. Those territorial conflicts that still persisted unresolved, notably at the retreating Eastern frontier, were to be dealt with “later”. The ferocity of the Yugoslav wars was quickly dissociated from the name “Europe” – the Balkan peninsula positioned once again as a place Europe had not yet reached, allowing Western European majorities to continue to endorse the unblemished narrative of the new Europe reborn pristine and unconflicted. The “hour of Europe” was in the future. The under-told history of these first decades of European integration is the displacement of Europe’s colonial concerns. The EEC included the founding member states and the colonial possessions of the member states, and a primary concern of many of those involved in promoting this was the unification and preser-
