Changing Borders and Challenging Belonging

Introduction

The term Zeitenwende has, in recent months, once again become a household trope referring to drastic political events which shape a multitude of countries and regions and have repercussions across the globe. The Russian invasion of Ukraine and the atrocities committed by Russian soldiers have popularized this concept of disruption and existential angst as well as major political and military upheaval that uproot an entire population and create havoc with the world order – to some extent comparable to 1914, 1939, 2001 and other shocks to the global system. Global political upheavals of this sort always result in human catastrophe – ordinary people trying to cope with the magnitude of disruption and accommodate their lives within the maelstrom of change. In particular – and among the consequences of Zeitenwenden – such dramatic events impact borders as well as their definition and affect people’s feelings of belonging and identities, posing both threats and/or opportunities for individuals and collectives alike.

Against this background, this volume has a two-fold focus: investigating the repercussions of major political events relating to changing borders and challenging belonging both ‘from above’ and ‘from below’. From above, it explores legal and policy measures, institutional mechanisms and theoretical approaches addressing issues of borders and belonging across the globe following the alterations of legal and cultural frameworks, such as new borders, regime change, (de)colonization and violent upheavals. From below, it explores personal views on and responses to significant changes in addition to repercussions of major political events on private lives and feelings of belonging, principally in border regions and/or colonial and post-colonial contexts.

Across academic disciplines, social research has tended to be divided between research on the macro-level, focusing on large-scale political and social processes and developments, and on micro-level analysis, highlighting small-scale actions and interactions among individuals. This volume bridges this divide, comprising legal analysis, political science research on institutions and political processes as well as theoretical reflections and historical approaches focusing on a history from below and personal responses to changing political landscapes and new boundaries.

Our starting assumption is that both borders and identities are social constructions. Indeed, borders do not exist as they appear on maps. Political borders are not drawn in nature; rather they are ‘imagined line(s)’,¹ created by humans by ‘connecting materiality and symbolic meaning’.² Performative discourses and practices transform geographical elements into borders.³ Thus borders are not fixed and static entities, but they can change, move and be redrawn, gaining and losing importance. Moreover, processes of de- and reterritorialization as well as externalization of borders might be in place. As human artefacts constructed though narratives and practices, political borders have the potential to be sites of contestation, conflicts and tensions. In this context, concepts such as ‘borderscape’ aim at capturing the politics, fluidity and fluctuation of borders and their surrounding areas,⁴ while Burridge et al. use the term ‘polymorphic borders’ to highlight their complexity and intersections with people, law, territory and institutions.⁵

Although artificially created, borders have real effects and consequences, moulding people’s lives, since they are ‘a manifestation of power that demarcates and organizes a space and articulates its limits, ordering as well the people that are located within’ it.⁶ In particular, they are markers of belonging that delimit people’s identities and define membership in the community, and thereby people’s rights and opportunities.⁷ Usually, the term border is used in relation to borders between states, but different types of borders exist – from political borders delimiting states to administrative borders between regions and provinces or cultural borders, like linguistic and religious ones. We can find such power dynamics and processes of inclusion and exclusion in all types of borders.

Like borders, identities are social constructions, though at times primordial understandings are put forward, where national and ethnic/cultural identities are considered as fixed givens based on affiliations that are ascriptive and difficult to change.⁸ The so-called instrumentalist approach highlights the strategic manipulation of identities by pointing out that people continually framed and reframed their identities for economic and political benefits. For example, in defining ethnic groups, Robert Bates emphasizes the fact that they ‘are organized about a set of common activities’, that their members ‘share a conviction that they have common interests and common fate’ and that they have ‘a cultural symbolism expressing their cohesiveness’.⁹ In his account, ethnic groups and identities are the fruit of rational efforts to create coalitions in order to secure material benefits created by social economic transformations. Identities are thus situational and ‘dynamic;’ their politicization is the result of rational decisions, made mostly by strategic political entrepreneurs.¹⁰

However, in this instrumentalist view, it is not clear why identities persist and why some identity groups mobilize while others do not. Furthermore, it does not address the contradiction of individuals considered rational calculators, who believe that their identity is a biological given. Addressing these issues, constructivist scholars of identity politics point out that social structures determine which social-cultural divisions become politicized. As pointed out by David Laitin, government activity ‘structures opportunities in such a way as to determine the nature of social cleavage’.¹¹ By legitimizing some group identities to the detriment of others and creating common-sense thinking about these collectives, governments forge these identities politically, which, once forged, ‘become common-sensically real’.¹² Such a constructivist perspective focuses on the source of the institutionalization of identities, emphasizing the importance of the structural context and the state in shaping identities and societal cleavages.

Within the constructivist tradition, this volume recognizes that any groupings of people are communities based on fictitious constructions and narratives. From this perspective, using Anderson’s definition, nations are ‘imagined communities’ resulting from the ‘social construction of reality’.¹³ Similarly, as pointed out by Brubaker, ethnic groups are ‘collective cultural representation […] that sustain the vision and division of the social world in racial, ethnic, or national terms’. However, two clarifications are necessary.¹⁴ First, as Joseph Marko clarifies, ‘whenever people define this situation as “real” the consequences following from their actions are no less “real” than the “existence” of things’.¹⁵ Thus, we cannot supersede the role that identities play in human society. Second, this volume builds on the notion that in processes of identity construction, people are not passive objects of broader social forces and dynamics; rather they are active subjects that interact with the social and institutional structures and negotiate and renegotiate their identities. In this regard, it is necessary to highlight the role that individuals’ emotions, such as hatred, fear and resentment, might play in shaping identities.¹⁶ Indeed, the concept of emotion can help explain why and how institutionally constructed identities become essentialized and crystallized and then become dominant. Thereby our aim is to combine and bring together top-down structural approaches and bottom-up analysis of personal experiences, with their weight of emotional baggage.

Within this constructivist framework, the volume explores issues surrounding changing boundaries and challenging belonging, addressing the tensions and contestations in the concepts of borders and identities. In this introduction, we start providing some in-depth reflections on the process of regionalization which has taken place within the European Union (EU) in the past decades. In the fallacy of Herderian understanding of nationalism, (state) borders and (national) identities are in symbiosis. However, in reality, the idea of a homogeneous nation-state is a myth. Human society is indeed based on the social facts of diversity and people’s multiple identities. Regionalization is used as a tool to go beyond a ‘nation-cum-state paradigm,’ based on the slogan ‘one nation, one culture, one state’,¹⁷ recognizing simultaneously sub-state entities and state borders. In this regard, following a symposium in February 2012 in Bozen where academics investigated the role of borders in modern Europe, the proceedings were published in a volume titled ‘Un mondo senza stati è un mondo senza guerre’ – Politically Motivated Violence in Regional Contexts,¹⁸ which dwelled on the somewhat naive notion that a limitless and timeless peace among people can be achieved through the rejection of the notion of statehood and its borders. At the time, the EU as a peace project appeared to many to be too reluctant to give up state boundaries in favour of a stronger role of the Unions’ regions which were striving for greater political participation within the conglomerate of European states.

In 1984, historian Hans Mommsen proclaimed ‘Die Nation ist tot, es lebe die Region’ (The Nation is dead, long live the Region),¹⁹ thus summarizing a widely felt notion that the nation, the decisive marker of collective belonging in Europe, had become an outdated model and was going to be replaced by regions, that is, sub-state geographic entities which were not associated with similar historic burdens. In 1998, Michael Keating published a comprehensive analysis of this new European order – The New Regionalism in Western Europe. Territorial Restructuring and Political Change²⁰ – which outlined both the major advantages of this regional focus for peacekeeping and the organization of collective identities and its potential threats to the existing order of Europe, the hollowing out of the competencies of the nation-states through super state European institutions and sub-state regionalization.

Regional reorganization and increased political participation of the regions seemed, at the time, to be a realistic option for the future of the EU; after all, the Union had invited the regions as early as 1980 – in the so-called Madrid Treaty – to embark on cross-border trade and political decision-making, thus following its own principle of subsidiarity. The introduction of the European Groupings of Territorial Cooperation (EGTCs) in the new millennium strengthened the role of regions once again, and this at a time when the regions had already taken quite a battering in their political standing within the EU.

Nowhere in Europe and among the European regions has the pacifying and prosperity-creating character of regionalization been more manifest than in South Tyrol, the so-called German-speaking part of Italy. In this province, which had, since its annexation by Italy in 1918, been a troublesome region in Europe for large parts of the twentieth century and a ‘messy’ borderland and ‘zone of confusion’, a far-reaching geographical, political and cultural autonomy for the German-speaking population (and a Ladin-speaking minority) and its Italian fellow citizens has been instrumental in creating a prosperous and peaceful area in the north of Italy.²¹

If the process of regionalization as a path to right historical wrongs and to create peace and stability in a minority conflict scenario needed any successful advocate, it was the case of South Tyrol. After achieving her autonomy in Italy in 1972, the province made full use of any instruments provided by the EU to emancipate from Italy – the one-time colonizer of the area – and, somewhat more surprisingly, also from the old fatherland Austria. South Tyrol, through the process of regionalization, has come as close as possible to the idea of internal self-determination in the era of classic nation-building processes of the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century period.²² The autonomy, however, manifests itself within the confines of the Italian state and within a European framework in which state borders are guaranteed by fellow union states. While, at the same time, it has been a clear policy within the EU to reduce the significance of national boundaries both for its citizens and for international decision-making in Brussels.

At the end of the 1990s, the region seemed to be the key to solving most problems of citizens’ political participation and the democratic deficits in the EU, which were rooted in the creation of its member states.

Designed to be a manifestation of collective identities on the sub-state level and thus well-equipped to solve regional trouble spots, created in the process of building the European nation-states, regions proved to be incapable, however, of responding to some of the major challenges of the new millennium. In fact, it was the reaction of the nation-states globally – and superstructures such as the EU – that defined the response to the terrorist attacks on the US in September 2001. Equally, regions had neither the tools nor the means to confront the fiscal and banking crisis in the EU from 2007–8 onwards, which required multinational responses.

The so-called migration crisis of 2015 saw regions as onlookers rather than actors, and the powerlessness of some of the UK’s constituent territories in light of the 2016 Brexit referendum was yet another brick in the wall highlighting the impotence of regions. A similar situation arose with the Covid-19 pandemic, which was particularly drastic for those regions that had embarked on cross-border co-operation and the founding of cross-border bodies, such as the EGTC comprising Italian South Tyrol, Trentino and Austrian Tyrol. National borders, re-erected to stem the spread of the virus, now prevented free access from one part of the EGTC to the other. The Ukraine war presented its specific challenges, and once again the EU regions were in no position to respond, quite the opposite: the Russian threat made EU regions take shelter behind the boundaries of the EU and its individual building blocks, the nation-states. If anything, rather than regionalization, these dramatic events proved the need in a globalized world for proper coordination among levels of governance, regions, nations, the EU and other supranational institutions.

All of a sudden, the EU’s core principle – whereby the EU guaranteed the existence of the national boundaries to all its member states – was no longer seen as a threat to the EU’s collective identities, both large and small, but turned into a peace-keeping and peace-protecting means on the European continent, which was experiencing a real and existential threat of a brutal invader from the East. It has, to date, been the EU’s strength that it confronts the external military, economic and political pressure created by Russia through its common and united stance and repeated declarations that its boundaries – that is, the individual state borders of its constituents – will be defended. This decisive stance also protects the European regions, and it is closely associated with the EU’s most essential quality: the EU is first and foremost a peace project built on the destruction of the Second World War.

Thus, the question may be asked: are we looking at this particular Zeitenwende as a revitalizer and a guarantor of the peace-creating and peace-maintaining idea which has been at the core of the EU since its inception in the late 1950s? And are we living in a time where we witness new dynamics changing established borders and challenging belonging?

To explore macro-political processes and their consequences on the micro-level is at the core of this volume. Long before war was hoisted on Ukraine by Russia, we had planned a symposium at Eurac Research in South Tyrol, which, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, had to be first postponed and then abandoned. However, this volume bundles some of the contributions which would have formed the symposium in 2020, in order to make them accessible to a wider academic community.

Changing Borders and Challenging Belonging is therefore a multi-disciplinary investigation into issues of borders and belonging in general and in particular – both yesterday and today. This volume comprises, therefore, a range of analyses into the creation of borders and identities, both within given territorial entities and between them, and the effects of border creation on ordinary people. We do not understand borders purely in the post-Second World War context but aim beyond the realities of post-war Europe. Thus, Changing Borders and Challenging Belonging investigates scenarios prior to 1945 as well. While paying attention to South Tyrol, it also moves its focus to other parts of Europe and the world, from the UK to Australia.

Borders, in this context, can be defined as traditional borders between states, but also the newly erected boundaries within states to include one group and exclude others; they can mean state policy and they can be societal exclusion. We are including internal and external boundaries, physical and psychological demarcations into groups of those who belong and those who are excluded. Yet, whatever the nature of border creation might be, they trigger responses by those affected, which is the other main focus of this volume. Boundary changes have had massive consequences for people everywhere and at any time. It did not need the Ukraine war to demonstrate to us how so-called ordinary people have been affected by administrative changes, by domestic and international power politics and by wars.

The contributions in this volume range from theoretical approaches towards the topic to historical analyses, comprising micro-historical approaches and system analysis, to contemporary scenarios such as Brexit, just shy of the Ukraine war. The volume is organized according to approaches both from above and from below. It starts with analyses from above, presenting theoretical contributions by first jussi p. laine and then roberta medda-windischer and karl kössler. laine provides theoretical insights that touch upon the core topic of the volume, highlighting the continuous misrepresentation of the real volume and value of migration and human mobility and the role of borders in processes of categorization. The author, furthermore, questions a nationalistic understanding of the concept of integration in light of multi-layered aspects of belonging that challenge the boundaries of nations and states. Connected to laine’s appeal to turn inclusive egalitarian principles into concrete actions, medda-windischer and kössler challenge the traditional understanding of citizenship, discussing the concept of regional citizenship and residence-based civic citizenship as a tool of social inclusion and participation at the sub-national level. Referring to a variety of examples mostly within the EU, the authors build theoretical arguments in favour of regional/residence-based practices of citizenship.

Moving from theory to empirical case studies, leah simmons wood explores the slogan of taking back control implicit in the Brexit leave campaign, pointing out its fallacies – since the UK has never lost control of its borders within the EU framework – and its links with a nostalgia for the British Empire, where British identity has been built on racial exclusion. UK policies towards migrants and especially asylum seekers expose this desire to reinforce external and internal bordering, which has dramatic humanitarian consequences. andrea carlà switches attention to the role of institutions for divided societies on the relationship between different communities and their identities. Using a securitization framework, the author compares Northern Ireland and South Tyrol, and analyses how their consociational power-sharing system affects the perception of others, fostering inclusive or exclusive understanding of the community.

Both alexandra tomaselli and tobias weger draw attention instead to the impact of the process of state formation. tomaselli highlights its consequences for the Sámi people in Northern Europe and Russia, focusing and comparing the limited political powers of Sámi communities across countries (Norway, Sweden, Finland and to a lesser extent Russian Federation), as well as issues of discrimination and cross-border co-operation. Her analysis reveals a persistent colonial structure vis-à-vis Indigenous Peoples. Bridging from-above and from-below approaches, weger looks at the case of the contested border area of Dobrudja, divided between Romania and Bulgaria. Adopting a top-down perspective, the author traces the reconfiguration of state borders and state policies affecting the region and its diverse communities since 1878 to today, while exploring with a bottom-up approach the everyday pragmatic choices made by Dobrudja’s inhabitants to face these political changes.

The remaining contributors apply the view from the bottom up as they investigate how government policies, national ideologies and state persecution affected individuals and groups inside and outside the defined frameworks. enikő dácz discusses the autobiographical challenges of the ideological turbulences associated with the Second World War faced by three South-Eastern European writers, and particularly how they reworked their autobiographical narratives in an effort to come to terms with their own experiences and contacts with dictatorial regimes in the war period, while winfried r. garscha outlines the devastating effects of the National Socialist racial ideology on a young liberal Jewish woman, who, originating from a modern liberal identity perspective, got trapped in the binary Jewish/non-Jewish scenario created by the Nazis and who eventually falls victim to this pseudo-ideology.

katie holmes focuses on a different aspect of policy enforcement in the Australian context, the ill-fated settlement scheme of war veterans and their individual plight in the Australian outback. This example demonstrates that a policy which originated in the idea that the state would create a kind of welfare system for its veteran soldiers while, at the same time, continue to colonize the Australian continent could nevertheless have severe consequences on these individuals due to the shortcomings of the plan.