‘Cosmopolitan Spaces’ has been reviewed by Olivier Kramsch in ‘Journal of Borderland Studies’, Volume 25 Number 1.
Something interesting is happening in the field of border studies. Once the somewhat marginal and dry obsession of geographers and political scientists bent on delimiting and managing fractious chunks of territory against the wider backdrop of Cold War geopolitical rivalries, since the 1990s and the fall of the Ur-border that was the Iron Curtain border studies have emerged as the sexy new kid on the academic block. A confluence of several important trends has propelled this so-called “renaissance”: a post-Maastricht focus on the development of the EU internal market, which in turn has facilitated the transfer of significant amounts of funding towards the development of European transboundary regions (or European integration”; the establishment of a EU-wide network of border research institutesapplying innovative theories and methods to the analysis of European border regions; and, closely shadowing the first two, mutations in the wider intellectual field, in which “the border” has assumed a central role in reconfiguring key domains of enquiry across the social sciences: state, citizenship, territory, identity, rights, politics. Regarding the latter, we may run the risk of stating that whereas in the 1990s social theory “discovered” space and situated the regional dimension of social life at the heart of “the reassertion of space in critical social theory” (Soja 1989), social theory in the early 2000s has “discovered” borders. What remains somewhat unclear at this juncture, however, is to what extent border studies has benefitted from the overtures of critical social theory.
It is in the context of the ambivalent embrace between the “new border studies” and critical social theory that we may locate Chris Rumford’s important volume, Europe, globalization, theory central argument is rooted in a critique of a contemporary globalization literature from the vantage point of what he labels “critical cosmopolitanism”. His primary contention is that the various strands of globalization theory that have predominated in the 1990s and the early part of the 2000s have relied on a perspective characterized by a vision of the world as “oneness and ‘unicity’”, as if viewed from an Archimedean “high point” that can order all objects before its omniscient gaze, thus making the world into a single place. Writing against the grain of this literature, Rumford argues that if cosmopolitanism is to retain any purchase as a concept in the social sciences it must train its attention on a multiplicity of perspectives, thus allowing for the “possibility of many worlds”.
For Rumford, two key observations come to the fore in the service of this recuperative enterprise. In the first instance he takes note that cosmopolitanism is “already a politics of space”. This is so, he avers, because cosmopolitanism problematizes rather than takes for granted the spaces with which it engages. His second observations flows from the claim that European spaces have become “disordered” as a result of globalization acting on European nation-state space. In this context, Rumford asserts, cosmopolitanism can offer a useful “toolbox” with which to understand the novel spaces emerging in Europe in ways that cannot be accounted for by the largely “aspatial” analytical frameworks currently driving research on European integration processes (ie, scalar and multi-level governance).
Rumford’s discussion of the transformation of Europe’s borders is informed by three levels of analysis. First, drawing heavily on the work of French philosopher Etienne Balibar, Rumford suggests that, rather than withering away under globalization, borders are proliferating and are becoming increasingly dispersed throughout society. Rather than take form primarily at the endpoint of nation-states, they now also exist in airports, migrant detention centers, on autobahns, and at supermarket checkout counters. In this perspective, the traditional function of borders has also changed, representing less points of passage between sovereign national space than as semi-permeable membranes charged with the biopolitical screening and differentiation of individuals seeking entry into EU space. Against this backdrop, Europe’s borders have purportedly become privileged sites for the secretion of new forms of political agency, as they operate as arenas crystallizing problems of “democratic deficit” plaguing the heart of Europe.
This leads to a second level of insight, proposing that in addition to acting as zones for the application of state-of-the-art forms of disciplinary surveillance and control, European borders are also increasingly being constructed (or dismantled) by ordinary people, a process Rumford terms “borderwork”. Borderwork is intriguingly revealed by Rumford to the degree that borders in Europe are captured in the public’s imagination as “spaces of wonder”, a term which denotes a scale producing a feeling of awe or disorientation in the viewer. The bordering processes generative of these “spaces of strangeness”, according to Rumford, offer a necessary corrective to the literature on “fear” and “risk society”, in that they point to the political energies that are mobilized in the attempt by actors to render the strange familiar. This is illustrated, among other examples, in the case of the changing face of the UK border under contemporary conditions of insecurity, whereby the UK’s approach to bordering is described as being “off-shored” beyond UK territory, in France as well as elsewhere in the world. These “offshore borders” are reinforced by way of “e-borders” technology, such as biometric visas and “remote control” passenger carriers, the upshot of which is to produce an “exemplary space of wonder” which “confounds the understanding of inside/outside or domestic/foreign, which borders traditionally provide” (Rumford 2008, 78).
Finally, the third element in Rumford’s reconstructive project is to rescue cosmopolitanism from its tainted Eurocentric legacy. This he sources most persuasively in what he labels a process of “post-Westernization”. By this he means to denote a process leading to the “de-unification of the West”, while simultaneously gesturing to a displacement of the very idea of “the West” in the global geopolitical imaginary. In claiming that “the West has ceased to exist as a meaningful entity, that it has been superseded, or at least that it is undergoing serious transformation”, Rumford seeks to undermine what he perceives to be a worrying “homology betweencosmopolitanism and Europe”. Cosmopolitanism, he argues, no longer belongs exclusively to the West (if it ever had).
This “divided West”, in Rumford’s account, is shadowed by a much more globalized “non-West”, exemplified by de-territorialized jihadi Islamist networks operating beyond the purview of nationally territorialized politics. In elaborating on current processes of post-Westernization, Rumford focuses on EU-Turkey relations. Viewed for much of its modern history through the lens of a classic East/West divide, Turkey can now be designated as an emergent post-western polity, Rumford argues, to the degree that its newly regnant AK Party has re-appropriated the modern project of traditional Kemalist elites, and in so doing remolded nominally “Western” values of democracy, human rights and individual freedoms in the service of a globally-oriented Islam no longer dependent on Europe as a primary point of reference.
There is a curious normative evasion at the heart of Rumford’s project which merits greater scrutiny. I would argue this is attributable in large part to the author’s puzzling reticence to engage with the work of human geographers who have done much to pioneer the “spatial turn” which he himself deems so vital for “re-thinking European space” (to cite a well-received conference Rumford organized in 2005). To be provocative, I would go so far as to say that if the book indeed has “space at the center of its concerns”, as a result of such an evasion we move from a desired “politics of space” to a “space without politics”, a space evacuated of the emancipatory energies which made the original spatial turn such a crucial intervention in fin de siecle social theoretical debates. Such geographical work, exemplified in the writings of Derek Gregory (Gregory and Urry 1985), Ed Soja (1989, 1996), Doreen Massey (1994) and many others, had an emancipatory kernel at their heart emerging from productive tensions with spatial scientific traditions within geography, historical-materialist reductionisms in political economy and Giddensian structuration theory. As envisaged in their work, and drawing heavily on heterodox spatial thinkers such as Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault and Edward Said, space was re-conceived as “medium and presupposition” of social action—or merely its container or backdrop—nd therefore as dynamic and saturated with political possibility as had been traditionally ascribed to the temporal dimension of social life (for an early, albeit relatively undeveloped, introduction of such an argument within the wider border studies literature, see Kramsch and Hooper 2004).
“Every cobbler his leather”, as the saying goes. Rumford is not a geographer, and cannot be expected to have mastered the critical geographical literature of the past three decades. Nevertheless, had he only dipped slightly into this pool he may have argued more cogently about the peculiar spatial specificity of borders within his wider cosmopolitan vision. This latter point remains frustratingly fuzzy and hard to pin down. Why indeed are borders so important for re-thinking the European integration project today? What characteristics do they feature that make them privileged arenas for thinking Europe in a “genuinely pluralist, multi-perspectival” manner? In short, why should space “make a difference” at the border in ways that align borders with a true cosmopolitics? In Rumford’s exploration of contemporary processes of “borderwork”, for instance, most of the empirical instances cited speak to a spatial agency bent on reinforcing territorial closure leading to more acute forms of socio-spatial exclusion, whether it be identified in the EU’s re-bordering of Russia, the UK Labour government’s introduction of repressive “dispersal zones” in many British cities, or the establishment of a security cordon around the London City in response to IRA bomb threats. All well and fine, but there is nothing here todistinguish such a spatial politics from the worst depredations of a neoliberalism all too eager to alter relationships between individuals and their communities, or serve the self-actualizing consumer needs of disoriented masses. Some degree of normativity would be needed to make these crucial, and ultimately political, distinctions.
Critical human geographers in the 1990s were often quick to point out that some of the most innovative spatial thinking emerged from outside the spatial disciplines (Soja 1996). Chris Rumford’s new book is further confirmation of this wry observation. Rumford poses issues in relation to Europe’s borders that scholars of European borders will have to seriously engage with in the coming years, particularly as the EU gropes for a new place “in the world”. The gauntlet has been thrown. The challenge remains to specify the properly political nature of European borderspace, within its internal heartlands as well as at its outer limes.
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Kramsch, O.T and B. Hooper. 2004. Cross-Border Governance in the European Union. London:
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Massey, D. 1994. Space, Place and Gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Soja, E.W. 1996. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places.
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Soja, E.W. 1989. Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory.
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