Culture and Cooperation in Europe's Borderlands

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EUROPEAN STUDIES

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EUROPEAN STUDIES AN INTERDISCIPLINARY SERIES IN EUROPEAN CULTURE, HISTORY AND POLITICS

Executive Editor Menno Spiering, University of Amsterdam [email protected]

Series Editors Robert Harmsen, The Queen’s University of Belfast Joep Leerssen, University of Amsterdam Menno Spiering, University of Amsterdam Thomas M. Wilson, Binghamton University, State University of New York

EUROPEAN STUDIES AN INTERDISCIPLINARY SERIES IN EUROPEAN CULTURE, HISTORY AND POLITICS

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CULTURE AND COOPERATION IN EUROPE’S BORDERLANDS

Edited by James Anderson Liam O’Dowd and Thomas M. Wilson

Amsterdam, New York, NY 2003

Le papier sur lequel le présent ouvrage est imprimé remplit les prescriptions de ‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information et documentation – Papier pour documents – Prescriptions pour la permanence’. The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of ‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information and documentation – Paper for documents – Requirements for permanence’. ISBN: 90-420-1085-1 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2003 Printed in The Netherlands

NOTE FOR CONTRIBUTORS European Studies is published several times a year. Each issue is dedicated to a specific theme falling within the broad scope of European Studies. Contributors approach the theme from a wide range of disciplinary and, particularly, interdisciplinary perspectives. Past issues have focused on such topics as Britain and Europe, France and Europe, National Identity, Middle and Eastern Europe, Nation Building and Literary History, and Europeanisation. The Editorial board welcomes suggestions for other future projects to be produced by guest editors. In particular, European Studies may provide a vehicle for the publication of thematically focused conference and colloquium proceedings. Editorial enquiries may be directed to the series executive editor. Subscription details and a list of back issues are available from the publisher’s web site: www.rodopi.nl.

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CONTENTS Authors in this volume

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JAMES ANDERSON, LIAM O’DOWD AND THOMAS M. WILSON Culture, Co-operation and Borders

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TOM O’DELL Øresund and the Regionauts

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GREGG BUCKEN-KNAPP Shaping Possible Integration in the Emerging Cross-Border Øresund Region

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CATHAL MCCALL Shifting Thresholds, Contested Meanings: Governance, Cross-border Co-operation and the Ulster Unionist Identity

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DOMINIC BRYAN Rituals of Irish Protestantism and Orangeism: The Transnational Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland

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BRIGITTA BUSCH Shifting Political and Cultural Borders: Language and Identity in the Border Region of Austria and Slovenia

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WARWICK ARMSTRONG Culture, Continuity and Identity in the Slovene-Italian Border Region 145

DUŠKA KNEŽEVIĆ HOČEVAR ‘We Were As One’: Local and National Narratives of a Border Regime Between Slovenia and Croatia

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JEFFREY E. COLE Borders Past and Present in Mazara Del Vallo, Sicily

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DAN RABINOWITZ Borders and their Discontents: Israel’s Green Line, Arabness and Unilateral Separation

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KEVIN ROBINS Peculiarities and Consequences of the Europe-Turkey Border

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AUTHORS IN THIS VOLUME JAMES ANDERSON is Co-Director of the Centre for International Borders Research (CIBR) at Queen’s University Belfast and Director of its MA Programme in Cross-Border Studies. Professor Anderson’s research interests include nationalism and territoriality, and he recently published Transnational Democracy: Political spaces and border crossings (2002, Routledge). WARWICK ARMSTRONG is Senior Research Associate at the School of Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford. He researched and practised international development with the United Nations, Canadian International Development Agency and McGill University for many years. More recently, he has turned to the study of international borderlines and borderlands, working specifically on the ItalianSlovenian border region. DOMINIC BRYAN is a lecturer in the School of Anthropological Studies and Director of the Institute of Irish Studies, Queens University, Belfast. His interests include the use of ritual and symbols in politics and his book Orange Parades: The Politics of Ritual , Tradition and Control was published by Pluto Press (2000). GREGG BUCKEN-KNAPP is a research affiliate at the Danish Institute of Border Region Studies and a researcher at the Department of Political Science, Göteborg University, Sweden. He is the coeditor (along with Michael Schack) of Borders Matter: Transboundary Regions in Contemporary Europe and the author of Elites, Language and the Politics of Identity: The Norwegian Case in Comparative Perspective (2003, State University of New York Press). In addition to his work on identity in the Öresund region, his current research deals with the stances of labour unions in Sweden and Germany towards the immigration of highly-skilled foreign workers. BRIGITTA BUSCH is Head of the Centre for Intercultural Studies at Klagenfurt University in the Carinthian region of Austria. Dr. Busch has a background in socio-linguistics, participated in a comparative EU research project on Border Identities, and has been working as an expert for the Council of Europe’s Confidence Building Measures Programme in South-Eastern Europe.

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EUROPEAN STUDIES

JEFFREY E. COLE is associate professor of anthropology at Dowling College, Oakdale, New York, USA. His book, The New Racism in Europe: A Sicilian Ethnography (1997, Cambridge University Press), examines the everyday and political responses of Italians to recent immigration. Together with Sally S. Booth, he is currently studying immigrant work and lives in Palermo. DUŠKA KNEŽEVIĆ HOČEVAR is an Assistant Professor of Social Anthropology and a Research Fellow employed at Institute of Medical Sciences at the Slovenian Academy of Sciences & Arts. She received a doctorate in Anthropology at the graduate Faculty of Humanities, the Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis (ISH), Ljubljana in 1998. She has carried out research on national belonging at the Slovenian-Croatian state border since 1993. CATHAL MCCALL is a Research Fellow in the Institute of Governance, Public Policy and Social Research, Queen’s University, Belfast. In 2002, he and Professor Liam O’Dowd (School of Sociology, Queen’s) were awarded a grant from the Royal Irish Academy’s Third Sector Research Programme to carry out research on the role of EU- funded Third (Voluntary) sector in the Irish Border Region. His book Identity in Northern Ireland: Communities, Politics and Change was published in 1999 by Macmillan Press. TOM O’DELL is Associate Professor of Ethnology in the Department of Service Management at Lund University, Campus Helsingborg. He is the author of Culture Unbound: Americanization and Everyday Life in Sweden (1997, Nordic Academic Press, Lund). He has also edited Nonstop! Turist i upplevelseindustrialismen, (1999, Historiska Media, Lund) and Upplevelsens Materialitet (2002, Studentlitteratur, Lund). LIAM O’DOWD is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Centre for International Borders Research at Queen’s University, Belfast. His research interests include the sociology of borders, European integration, intellectuals, and contemporary Irish society. Most recently he is co-editor with James Anderson and Thomas M. Wilson of New Borders for a Changing Europe: Cross-border Co-operation and Governance (2003, Frank Cass Publishers). DAN RABINOWITZ, an anthropologist, is a senior lecturer in sociology and anthropology at Tel-Aviv University. His books include: Overlooking

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Nazareth (1997, Cambridge University Press), Anthropology and the Palestinians (1998, Institute of Israeli Arab Sudies) and The Stand-Tall Generation (co-authored with Khawla Abu-Bakler, 2002, Keter Publishers). KEVIN ROBINS is Professor of Communications, Goldsmiths College, University of London. He is the author of Into the Image (1996, Routledge), and has recently edited (with Frank Webster) The Virtual University? (2002, Oxford University Press). THOMAS M. WILSON has conducted ethnographic field research on international borders and national identity in Ireland, the United Kingdom and Hungary. He is the co-author [with Hastings Donnan] of Borders: Frontiers of Identity, Nation and State (1999, Berg Publishers) and co-editor [with Irène Bellier] of An Anthropology of the European Union (2000, Berg Publishers). He is Professor of Anthropology at Binghamton University, State University of New York.


EUROPEAN STUDIES 19 (2003): 13-29

CULTURE, CO-OPERATION AND BORDERS1 James Anderson, Liam O’Dowd and Thomas M. Wilson Abstract Scholarly interest in the study of state borders and border regions is growing in Europe, keeping pace with the remarkable changes associated with the transformation of old borders and the creation of new ones in the European Union and beyond over the last fifteen years. Social scientists have increasingly examined cross-border co-operation in order to understand the changes which affect European borderlands. Ironically, given the recent turn to issues of culture and identity in the social sciences, one of the most neglected aspects of the critical and comparative analysis of cross-border co-operation has been culture. This essay presents three modes in the analysis of culture and cross-border co-operation as a tentative way forward to redress this imbalance. These overlapping perspectives, on cultures of co-operation, co-operation about culture, and the impact of culture on forms of co-operation, are offered as possible strategies in the comparative social science of European borderlands.

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This essay introduces a volume which is the third published collection of essays (along with Anderson et al. 2001b and 2002b) to emanate from various activities and events organised by the Centre for International Borders Research (CIBR) of the Queens University of Belfast, of which we, along with Hastings Donnan, are codirectors. These CIBR events have included: a conference held at Queens University, Belfast, on 29 September to 1 October 2000, on European Cross-Border Co-operation: Lessons for and from Ireland, jointly organised with the Centre for Cross-Border Studies (CCBS), in Armagh, Northern Ireland; a workshop on borders and minority languages held in Belfast in 2001; a CIBR seminar series; and participation in various border conferences and workshops in continental Europe over the last two years. We would like to thank all of our colleagues in CIBR and our other collaborators for their encouragement and support, and we are particularly grateful to the contributors to this volume for their efforts in bringing it to fruition.

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James Anderson, Liam O’Dowd and Thomas M. Wilson

There are now more reasons than ever before in the history of our social sciences to study the international borders of national states, the intrastate borders that frame regions and other ‘sub-national’ political entities, and those seemingly new ‘global’ borders that are perceived as bounding wider formations of civilizations, economic blocs, and zones of influence and control. Conventional wisdom, not least within the European Union (EU), suggests that the forces of globalisation and market integration have resulted in weaker borders, bringing down the barriers to co-operation, communication and understanding between different cultures. The reality is both more complex and more interesting. Yes, some borders have become weaker in some respects, but globalisation and ‘Europeanisation’ have also resulted in just the opposite - a multiplication of borders, and a proliferation of social boundaries and cultural frontiers associated with new geopolitical formations. The increased number and importance of borders has many causes. It is certainly due to the reestablishment of some state borders, which were long suppressed under imperial reign (in the old USSR for instance), or subsumed within federated structures (as in the former Yugoslavia). It is also due to initiatives to create new borders for new states (where old states have bifurcated, as in the case of Slovakia and the Czech Republic, and where new ones have emerged, as in the Caucuses for example), and to initiatives to redefine the nature of older more secure national borders, to either support or subvert efforts to make a ‘borderless’ world (for example, in the changing configuration of the EU’s internal and external borders). The resulting tensions in European borderlands - increasing co-operation on the one hand, more barriers on the other - help to explain the recent growth in the social scientific analysis of borders. We have reviewed elsewhere some of these developments in border studies, including the slow but steady expansion of border research centres and institutes in academic and policy institutions, and the rising interest in borders and borderlands in academic publishing and the classroom (Anderson et al. 2001a, 2002a; see also Bucken-Knapp and Schack 2001a; Kaplan and Häkli 2002). Over the last ‘long decade’ European and world events such as the end of the Cold War, the break-up of socialist states, and the drive towards a Single Market and a ‘Europe without frontiers’ have been complemented if not stimulated by the transnationalizing forces of globalisation. These events and processes have thrown into relief the changing nature of state borders, and have demonstrated that, far from being the static entities which once were perceived to bound ‘national

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societies’ and ‘national economies’, borders are dynamic and at times motive forces in the evolution of nations and states (Anderson et al. 2002b; Wilson and Donnan 1998a). Where once it was presumed – in social science, in the hallways of government, in the rhetoric of nation and state building, and in popular consciousness – that borders, frontiers and border regions were marginal and in every sense peripheral, today they are just as often seen to be areas in the forefront of political, economic and cultural development, where peoples and ideas first meet, and where transformative forces of neoliberal economics and international integration can easily be recognized and traced, if not also tested and subverted. In Europe, whose borderlands are the principal focus of this special issue, there has been a growing interest in how border regions and border peoples have developed their own reasons for redefining their relationships to their metropolitan centres within their own states, to communities across their borders, and to wider cosmopolitan populations and institutions of government and power. Scholarly analyses across the range of social sciences have highlighted how closely border populations have been tied to their counterpart border peoples and regions across borderlines which in the past often were generally assumed to be barriers to the flow of ideas, goods and people, but which in reality were often subverted much more than was officially recognised (for examples of these new border studies in social science, see Anderson and O’Dowd 1999, Newman 1999, van Houtum 2000, van der Velde and van Houtum 2000, Bucken-Knapp and Schack 2001b, Joenniemi and Viktorova 2001, Anderson 2002, Kaplan and Häkli 2002). The problems involved in establishing and sustaining various forms of co-operation between individuals, groups, and social and political bodies across borderlines are an important theme in these studies. This is in part because these problems have involved border peoples for as long as there have been borders between political systems, and for as long as there have been rules, laws, and decision makers fashioning these borders in ways which could not be controlled by border people themselves. But now cross-border co-operation has also become an important interest of policy-makers in the Europe of the EU, as witnessed in such funding programmes as INTERREG and PHARE, and it grows steadily both as an arena in which to foster a variety of political initiatives and as images linked to market and social integration in Europe (O’Dowd 2002a). In fact, cross-border co-operation increasingly serves as a trope in the narra-

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tives of regional and global interdependence in which all of our governments now engage. A review of the spectrum of cross-border co-operation in Europe is beyond the scope of this volume – indeed it would be beyond the scope of a dozen such volumes – but there is one area of cross-border co-operation which has in our view received scant attention in the social sciences, that of culture. We find this relative lack of concern with cross-border co-operation and culture to be surprising for two reasons: first, because of the changing nature of cross-border co-operation in Europe, and second, because of the changing interests of the scholarly disciplines, such as political science and geography, which have been at the forefront of border studies. In fact, the general turn in the social sciences to issues of culture and identity has had until recently little impact on analyses of border peoples and regions (for a critique of this situation, see Wilson and Donnan 1998a, 1998b). Even less scholarly attention is being paid to the intersections of culture and the policy and practice of cross-border co-operation between governments, NGOs, and local community bodies. This reticence on the part of some scholars to investigate culture and cross-border co-operation is to some extent understandable. Culture is a notoriously difficult concept to define and articulate. As Raymond Williams has suggested ‘culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language’ (Williams 1976, as quoted in Jenks 1993: 1). Nevertheless, it is also one of the most used words in the language, and it seems to be increasing in importance as a way to describe the intersections of ideas, values, actions and structures in society, polity and economy, in local, national and global contexts. As such, it also encompasses notions of high and low culture, elite and popular culture, and the cultures of the everyday, as well as the cultures which have framed the most important of our senses of self and community, including those of ethnicity, nation and state. In this essay we briefly review the reasons why scholars of border studies are now turning their attention to issues of cross-border co-operation in Europe, in line with EU programmes and associated organizations. We then examine some of the reasons which make clear why the study of culture and cross-border co-operation is needed now. We conclude by highlighting different analytical approaches to the cultural dimensions of cross-border co-operation, as indicated in the essays in this volume. We suggest that these point a tentative way forward in the com-


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parison of disparate borders and programmes, and in the analysis of more general trends in the evolution of European borders and borderlands. Borders, co-operation and spheres of contact An early landmark in the contemporary study of cross-border co-operation in Europe is a collection of essays published as a special issue of the journal West European Politics (Volume 5, Number 4), edited by Malcolm Anderson (1982), who has continued as a major scholar in the overall study of the politics of European borders (see, for example, Anderson 1996). While Anderson’s original intention in raising issues of cross-border co-operation, as delineated in the introduction to the volume (1982: 1), was couched in terms which are not our principal concern in this essay (they related more to the political problems of frontier regions, including boundary disputes, subversive activities in borderlands, and peripherality within the state, which in Anderson’s view all border regions suffered), he set out a firm basis on which to build the comparative study of formal and informal cross-border co-operation (in his words, ‘transfrontier’ co-operation). Particularly striking in our view was his description of the range and variety of types of cross-border co-operation, and the absence of ‘common legal or institutional form for this co-operation’ (Anderson 1982: 3). Over twenty years after Anderson’s volume, European cross-border co-operation still lacks an over-arching legal framework. Nevertheless, in Anderson’s view, and in that of many of the other contributors to his special issue, cross-border co-operation was thriving and expanding at and across Europe’s borders, and that had to be recognized and explained. As Raimondo Strassoldo (1982: 124-6) concluded, when noting that in the 1980s these types of co-operation had in some cases only been invented since the Second World War, there are three good reasons why border peoples tend to seek co-operation, rather than conflict, with their neighbours across the borderline. First, border and cross-border regions, where they are legally constituted, are by nature problem-solving entities which seek to attain broad goals of social and economic welfare for their people. Second, border peoples are only too aware of the devastation caused by nationalist conflicts in the twentieth century and have increasingly sought to avoid them (see also Tägil 1982). They thus are opening up ties of communication which once seemed closed, and are of course being supported in this through the Council of Europe, the EU and other

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agencies. Third, border peoples and regions see the potential for economic and political development through continued and increased crossborder contact. While these reasons might be debatable in terms of crossborder co-operation in Europe today, especially in the face of continued ethnic and nationalist violence throughout the continent, we agree that in the main, and certainly within the EU, these are still valid reasons for border regions and peoples to establish and expand cross-border cooperation, and ones which operate both within and outside of government programmes. We note, however, that very little attention was paid to issues of culture in this path-breaking collection of twenty years ago. There were a few exceptions, where culture for example was considered to be a factor when understanding the nature of the region (see Boos 1982, who mentions culture as the first feature which makes Alsace distinctive), or where culture was addressed as a variable to be examined when testing other hypotheses on the nature of co-operation (Strassoldo 1982: 128). Overall, however, co-operation on cultural matters, and the ways in which culture affects institutional and other forms of co-operation, were absent. This was characteristic of the mainstream perspective on borders which survived relatively unchanged until the end of the 1990s. This is not to say that scholars were unconcerned with the interrelations of culture, society and politics in border regions. In fact, a number of excellent scholarly studies of border regions emerged in this period which specifically set out the complexity of the interactions of culture, identity, policy and programme (see, for example, Sahlins 1989, Borneman 1992, Driessen 1992, Paasi 1998, Darian-Smith 1999, Berdahl 1999). But we do conclude that border studies made very few inroads into the comparative dimensions of the various ways in which culture inhibits, promotes, supports and subverts formal and informal aspects of cross-border cooperation. However, the importance of culture to the success of such co-operation in Europe has not been lost on its architects within the EU. As one recent guide to cross-border co-operation in the EU, which was designed for the practitioner and not the scholar, recently concluded, the ‘philosophy of cross-border co-operation’ needs to be re-emphasized today, as a result of the major changes which have swept the EU over the last decade (AEBR 1997: A2, 2). In the view of the Association of European Border Regions, the source of the report, this philosophy should bind border regions together, in order to adapt to the two processes which


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continue to have most effect on the development of such co-operation both within the EU and between EU member states and applicant countries and other neighbouring states. These processes are: first, the ‘continuing dismantling of the internal borders within the EU since 1 January 1993’, which has shifted the emphasis of national state borders towards the external borders of the EU, and, second, the efforts ‘to facilitate intellectual, political and economic exchanges’ with third countries, beyond the EU (AEBR 1997: A2, 2). Changes in philosophy are needed, to allow border regions and peoples within the EU to counter the ‘negative consequences of historical borders’, and to recognize that divergent histories, laws, administrative structures, authorities, and taxation and social systems have created spheres of action along borders which in many cases arbitrarily intersect much older spheres of co-operation, and constrain the creation of new ones. In this view the spheres of activity and influence along internal borders of the EU are only half-spheres, of education, training, markets, transport and communication, which are bisected by borders (Gabbe 1999: 5). ‘The aim of cross-border co-operation is thus to overcome these border-related barriers and divergent systems, in order to expand the spheres of contact and activity as far as possible beyond the national border, reducing its function to that of an administrative border’ (Gabbe 1999: 5). In the evolving programme to foster cross-border co-operation in Europe, culture has increasingly been moved centre-stage. This is because if cross-border co-operation is seen to be crucial to the success of European integration and unification, and a mountain of EU-inspired literature promotes this position, then cross-border socio-cultural co-operation in every area of life acts both as the ‘propeller’ and the ‘lubricant’ to drive forward and smooth the path for sustained co-operation in economic, environmental and infrastructural matters. It involves an ongoing process to break down mistrust and prejudice, and to build up confidence in neighbouring border regions (AEBR 1998: AV1).

In the perspective of the EU and its related semi-state bodies and associated NGOs, co-operation in social and cultural matters has major short and long-term positive effects. The EU has long used culture to promote its total package of integration and unification (for a review of this agenda, see Shore 1993, 2000). In their official publications the EU’s Commission, Parliament and other bodies frequently treat culture as both a policy goal, i.e., in their efforts to support regional, national and ‘Euro-

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pean’ culture (and thereby increasing their salience in battles over European identity; for a discussion of related ‘battlegrounds of European identity’ see Kohli 2000), and as a means to facilitate other policies. One recent publication of the European Commission (1998: 4) deftly combines these twin strategies: ‘Culture is not only a means of maintaining or strengthening a distinctive identity, it is also a source of economic activity and new jobs’. And culture has increasingly figured in the funding guidelines of such Community Initiatives as the INTERREG, PHARE, LEADER, Raphael, Ariane, and Kaleidoscope programmes (the first two of which specifically fund cross-border activities). The EU is not alone in linking culture, identity and economic development in cross-border co-operation. As one of the advisory and representative bodies whose lifeblood is supplied by the EU, the Association of European Border Regions, has portrayed it, cross-border social and cultural co-operation raises awareness of similarities and differences across borderlines, and provides a basis for more active participation on the part of all political and civic institutions and less formal groupings in the full range of border region and cross-border activities. Getting to know the ways of life of ‘others’ across a borderline not only builds confidence in people and institutions over time, it also facilitates processes of partnership, necessary for economic and political development, not least in terms of getting grants from the EU and national development agencies. And these processes of discovery, confidence-building, and networking are part of a co-operative spirit which ‘must be put into practice anew by each successive generation’ (AEBR 1998: AV1). Efforts at building forms of co-operation on culture may not go far enough if the spirit and philosophy of co-operation are to empower border regions and peoples through the processes mentioned above. The latter include bringing down barriers along internal frontiers, expanding the notion of frontiers by projecting them increasingly onto EU external borders, building confidence in near and more distant neighbours, and establishing new contacts with people and social and political formations beyond the EU’s external boundaries. In one important sense, this new philosophy of co-operation calls for a new culture of co-operation, a combination of ideas, values, practices and social and political structures which fosters new ways of dealing with issues of policy, organization and identity, within and outside the EU.


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Cross-border cooperation, if it is to be effective, needs to adopt broader means. First, it should include all aspects of daily life in the border region: business, work, leisure, culture, social facilities, housing, planning etc. Second, it should take place every day and should involve partners from all areas and social groups on both sides of the border. Third, it should take place on all levels of administration, ie national, regional and local (AEBR 1997: A2, 2).

But co-operation on culture, and cultures of co-operation, create new forms of shared memory and experience, new ways to communicate, new expectations of individuals and groups regarding their own behaviour as well as the needs and actions of political and social formations and institutions. Culture and co-operation between border peoples and border regions are of course significant for what happens and develops in the borderlands themselves, but they are also significant in terms of what goes on between states, and as we shall see in some of the cases explored in this volume, between the EU and its ‘others’. As we suggested in a review of new developments in cross-border co-operation in Ireland (Anderson et al. 2001a), such co-operation is now more multi-faceted and complex than it was even a decade ago. Not only does it involve national, regional, and local government, and trade unions, workers, and the business and voluntary sectors, increasingly it affects all other important organizations and spheres of political and social life, including churches and religion, the fine arts, the new technologies and their users, and other aspects of culture and identity which are part of the new fabric of a globalizing world. There are a number of causes of this expansion in the networks and influence of cross-border activities in Europe, in what some have called a process of ‘Europeanisation’ (Borneman and Fowler 1997; Harmsen and Wilson 2000). There are new and increasing sources of government and EU funding, linking people in new ways to each other and to institutions of society and politics. There are new notions of communication and integration, within variously expanding and contracting markets, and sustained efforts to remove barriers to the flow of (some) goods, people, ideas and capital. There are new global terrains which make the transnationalism of peoples, institutions, and identities a major force in the regional and European dimensions of globalisation. These new influences, among others, make the calls for a new philosophy of cross-border co-operation on culture both timely and a daunting prospect. In the next section we make some suggestions as to how to ap-

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proach the study of new forms of culture and co-operation, as represented and demonstrated through the various case studies in this volume. Borders and Culture As discussed above, culture has proved to be a mercurial object both in definition and in European cross-border co-operation. Rather than trying to find an agreed definition of culture to cover all of the articles in this volume, we follow Jenks (1993: 11-12) in discussing culture in terms of its four dimensions. These four dimensions of culture can be found in varying degrees at each of the borders which concerns our authors, and all of these aspects of culture affect co-operation as it is articulated and experienced in border regions and beyond. Culture is a cognitive category of group aspirations and achievements; it refers here to the general state of mind of a group of people. Culture is an embodied and collective category, which invokes a state of moral order and development. Culture is also a descriptive category of group identity and behaviour, wherein symbolically charged actions define notions of inclusion and exclusion. And finally culture can also be seen as a social category, as a catch-all understanding of the total way of life of a people, encompassing their belief systems, customs, and social institutions and less-formal organizations. Given our discussion of culture above, we repeat the oft-asserted conclusion that it does not neatly coincide with national borders, or nation and state-building processes. Thus discussions of ‘national’ and ‘regional’ culture, let alone ‘European’ culture, must always be conceptualised in terms relevant to the everyday practices of ‘culture’ among whomever we study, and these practices must be empirically discovered and analysed, and not simply deduced from the words and pages of grand national and other narratives. We see culture as the cement which holds together and links other aspects of local, national, European and global projects; at times culture may also be perceived as the acid which erodes such links. As Schöpflin (2000: 6) recently concluded in his persuasive analysis of the new politics of Europe, ‘the nature of the modern nationstate…should be understood as the dynamic interaction of ethnicity, citizenship and the state, all three being identity-forming processes and sources of power’. Each of these concepts involve sometimes overlapping and sometimes opposed notions of culture, and none of these are exclusively tied to the territory and institutions of the nation or the state, the lack of correspondence being generally seen most clearly in border-


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lands. Thus culture is a field of social and political action which often transcends boundaries of society and polity, but it may also be seen to define these boundaries and the symbolism which makes life meaningful both within and across territorial and other borders. The essays in this volume seek to correct, if only in modest and tentative ways, the recent conclusion that ‘culture is the least studied and least understood aspect of the structures and functions of international borders’ (Donnan and Wilson 1999: 11). As suggested by us above, and earlier by Donnan and Wilson (1999: 11-14), culture is a discursive terrain which ties border peoples and regions to other groups and institutions within their respective states, and links them to others across borderlines. Some political and civic structures only exist in border regions because of the border, and some activities of border peoples are not and cannot be found elsewhere. This is because borders constitute specific types of opportunities and threats, and because border regions and peoples are historically constructed and contingent, and their contemporary dimensions evolve. And while it is clear to us that borders frame cultures, the converse also holds, cultures frame borders. One of the processes which helps delineate continuity and disjuncture in border regions, and within and between national states, is cross-border co-operation, and in this volume we seek to investigate aspects of the intersection of co-operation and culture and, and co-operation and cultures. To this end we see some utility in viewing culture and cross-border co-operation in three overlapping and complementary ways, as demonstrated by the essays in this volume. Culture(s) of Co-operation The first mode within which to analyse the intersections of culture and cross-border co-operation is the culture of co-operation, i.e., ways in which co-operation across borders requires and creates new cultural codes, political practices, and social and political institutions. A culture of cooperation should more correctly be perceived in terms of the multiplicity of new forms of meaning and action which result from the terms and needs of co-operation. Thus we see that cultures of co-operation have already taken many forms in Europe. There are old and new Euro-regions, and other new forms of transnational government and governance, as well as new organizational cultures and transnational movements. Cathal McCall’s essay in this volume examines the relative success of the creation of

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new cross-border bodies, made possible for the first time under terms of a new agreement between antagonistic communities in Northern Ireland, and between the governments of the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. Their impact on Northern Ireland Unionist identity and culture is ongoing, but it is clear that Unionist culture also constrains these new forms of governance, thereby thwarting some of the perceived goals of the Peace Process in Northern Ireland. McCall’s analysis is a good example of ways in which new cultures of co-operation come up against the sometimes restricting and sometimes liberating notions of groups’ existing cultures and identities as they impinge on the creation of new forms of institutional culture. Some of these new cultures of co-operation actually reflect old institutions whose roles in society and polity have changed due to changes in the border. One such example is illustrated in Dominic Bryan’s depiction of the Orange Order in Ireland, which is in effect and in name a transnational body, but which, at least in Northern Ireland, cannot operate in any way except as a ‘national’ body. The fluidity of transnationalism is mirrored in the analyses of Duška Knežević Hočevar and Warwick Armstrong, who in their separate essays in this volume explore different borders of the new Slovenia and the old Yugoslavia. They demonstrate how changing imperial and state borders have confounded many aspects of local society and culture, and have through each permutation also created new forms of co-operation along with the symbolic and community dimensions to reproduce such co-operation. Co-operation on Culture The second mode of analysis of culture and co-operation is that of cooperation on culture, i.e., co-operation regarding issues of mutual and differential culture, at and across borders. This might also be seen to be cooperation through culture, i.e., through the agreed avenues and forms of music, song, dance, literature, poetry, drama, and sports, among other activities, and in ways which are perceived to support and reproduce notions of traditional, folk, popular, local or national cultures. Brigitta Busch’s essay in this collection takes us through the various roles which language has played historically in the construction and reconstruction of identity along the Austrian and Slovenian border, as well as the role of educational institutions in these cross-border perceptions and relations. Jeffrey Cole also focuses on education, in the form of a school supported both by an ethnic minority in Sicily and by the government in their for-


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mer land, Tunisia, as the means to explore how Tunisians and Sicilians, and to a lesser extent their city and regional governments, create new forms of local accommodation and international relations. And culture is in fact one of the areas of agreed co-operation in Ireland, but this agreement alone, as McCall makes clear, is not enough to see either co-operation in areas other than those formally agreed, or to see culture used in bridge-building between communities. Tom O’Dell’s contribution on the Øresund region strikes a similar chord. The regional and national governments of Sweden and Denmark have clear stakes in fostering a culture of co-operation across the newly ‘bridged’ sea border which bisects a new transnational region. Cultural events, such as the official opening ceremonies for the bridge, are symbolic of a new identity for the region’s people, of new forms of governmental and private sector co-operation, and of new forms of mutually constructed culture. But in the midst of such festivities and optimism, the cultures of consumption and political scepticism intrude, perhaps to subvert the wider official projects. As Gregg Bucken-Knapp demonstrates in his essay, the agreed recognition of an historical region, and its redefinition as an administrative region, do not easily lead to the Øresund region’s being equally supported on both sides of the Danish-Swedish border. In this part of Northern Europe, an intended culture of co-operation, even if the co-operation is to be done in part through the medium of culture, must deal with the diverse cultures of the region’s inhabitants, many of whom are immigrants who are perceived by some Swedes and Danes to possess ‘national’ cultures much different from their own. Co-operation and Culture It is the complexity of situations such as that of the Øresund region as analysed by O’Dell and Bucken-Knapp which leads us to suggest a third mode in the study of culture and cross-border relations, namely that of cooperation and culture, i.e., ways in which ‘culture’ enhances or hinders economic and political co-operation across state borders. This view seeks to relate co-operation to important issues of national, regional and local identity, cultural practices and values, and ethnic relations. It is about how culture and identity provide the spectacles through which to view borders, and through which borders become significant. But it is also about how border regions and forms of cross-border co-operation can act as prisms, through which to distinguish a spectrum of feelings of

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belonging associated with the many identities which are articulated because of and through the medium of borders (Wilson and Donnan 1998a, b). Two of our contributors examine in different ways the roles which borders can play in wider issues of culture and identity, both within changing national states, but also within changing European and wider cultural and political terrains. Dan Rabinowitz shows how certain parts of Israeli society, largely created by settlers from Europe, seek to use borders as the means to continue a process of diminishing the Palestinian and Arab presence and influence in Israel. As Rabinowitz makes clear, while the process of ‘othering’ is necessary in any notion of identity, it does not have to be, and should not be, a programme propagated by the state and its elites which almost inevitably results in inequity. Like Rabinowitz, Kevin Robins relates national identity to notions of a European identity, and to the creation of new borders of ‘Europe’. He explores Turkey’s relations with ‘Europe’ in the context of its planned integration into the EU, and how culture and identity produce and reproduce ‘border’ mentalities, but need not do so inevitably. In fact, his analysis provides an excellent synthesis of our three modes of culture and cooperation. In the negotiations over Turkey’s accession, both the EU and Turkey are constructing new organizations and attitudes of co-operation, at the least to dispel notions that their integration project cannot succeed. As part of this endeavour they are creating new forms of co-operation about culture. These efforts face formidable barriers, for centuries-long practices based on ignorance, jealousy, neglect, domination and subordination have created cultures of mistrust between Turkey and what is now Fortress Europe. Here the fault line of Europeanness illustrates very clearly the intersections of government programmes of co-operation with culture and identity as they exist at all of Europe’s borders, and it serves well as an example of the growing importance of issues of culture when examining any cross-border co-operation. Conclusion The full complexity of culture and its variety of roles in border changes in Europe will continue to pose problems to social scientists who seek to investigate cross-border co-operation. We can, however, make some tentative suggestions about how to begin to view the changing nature of culture and co-operation in European border regions, among border peoples, and between political and social institutions across borders.


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Borders have always played symbolic roles in relations between nations, along with their other functions as bridges, barriers and resources (O’Dowd 2002b). Borders are symbols, and are part of wider symbol systems, linked together through various types of culture. As symbols, and for many historical and contemporary reasons, borders are as concrete as any other aspect of our social and political systems, but they are also ambiguous and polysemic. This collection seeks to view this complexity as it exists, and as it is negotiated, projected, supported and subverted, at various European borders. It does so both within and beyond the EU, and it interrogates the limits of ‘Europe’ by including Turkey and Israel, whose populations are often perceived to be European in custom, historical experience, and current political aspirations, but whose territories may not be situated, at all or entirely, on the generally accepted land mass of ‘Europe’. This collection also brings together the perspectives of different social sciences, including anthropology, cultural studies, geography, history, sociology and political science. Like this introduction, the collection as a whole problematises culture and its many roles in the planning, implementation, representation and reception of cross-border co-operation. Cultures of co-operation, co-operation about culture, and the ways in which culture inhibits or enhances co-operation are our suggested first strategies in the comparative study of culture and cross-border co-operation. References Anderson, James, ed. 2002. Transnational Democracy: Political Spaces and Border Crossings. London: Routledge. Anderson, James and Liam O’Dowd, eds. 1999. State Borders and Border Regions, Special Issue, Regional Studies, Vol. 33, No. 7. Anderson, James, Liam O’Dowd and Thomas M. Wilson 2001a. Cross-Border Co-operation in Ireland: A New Era? Administration 49 (2): 6-14. Anderson, James, Liam O’Dowd and Thomas M. Wilson, eds. 2001b. CrossBorder Co-operation in Ireland, Special Issue. Administration 49 (2). Anderson, James, Liam O’Dowd and Thomas M. Wilson 2002a. Why Study Borders Now? Regional and Federal Studies 12 (4): 1-12. Anderson, James, Liam O’Dowd and Thomas M. Wilson, eds. 2002b. State Borders in a Changing Europe, Special Issue. Regional and Federal Studies 12 (4). Anderson, Malcolm 1982. The Political Problems of Frontier Regions. West European Politics 5 (4): 1-17.

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Anderson, Malcolm 1996. Frontiers: Territory and State Formation in the Modern World. Oxford: Polity. Association of European Border Regions (AEBR). 1997. Practical Guide to Crossborder Cooperation, 2nd ed. Gronau: AEBR. Association of European Border Regions (AEBR). 1998. Socio-cultural Cooperation. LACE Infosheets on Cross-border Co-operation. Gronau: AEBR. Berdahl, Daphne 1999.Where the World Ended: Re-unification and Identity in the German Borderland. Berkeley: University of California Press. Boos, Xavier 1982. Economic Aspects of a Frontier Situation: The Case of Alsace. West European Politics 5 (4): 81-97. Borneman, John 1992. Belonging in the Two Berlins: Kin, State, Nation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Borneman, John and Nick Fowler 1997. Europeanization. Annual Review of Anthropology 26: 487-514. Bucken-Knapp, Gregg and Michael Schack 2001a. Borders Matter, but How? In Bucken-Knapp, Gregg and Michael Schack, eds. Borders Matter: Transboundary Regions in Contemporary Europe. Aabenraa: Danish Institute of Border Region Studies. Bucken-Knapp, Gregg and Michael Schack, eds. 2001b. Borders Matter: Transboundary Regions in Contemporary Europe. Aabenraa: Danish Institute of Border Region Studies. Commission of the European Communities 1998. Investing in Culture: An Asset for All Regions. Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities. Darian-Smith, Eve 1999. Bridging divides: The Channel Tunnel and English Legal Identity in the New Europe. Berkeley: University of California Press. Donnan, Hastings and Thomas M. Wilson 1999. Borders: Frontiers of Identity, Nation and State. Oxford: Berg Publishers. Driessen, Henk 1992. On the Spanish-Moroccan Frontier: a Study in Ritual, Power and Ethnicity. Oxford: Berg. Gabbe, Jens 1999. Co-operation along Internal Borders of the European Union. Lace Magazine Number 4: 5-6. Harmsen, Robert and Thomas M. Wilson 2000. Introduction: Approaches to Europeanization. In Robert Harmsen and Thomas M. Wilson, eds. Europeanization: Institutions, Identities and Citizenship. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi B.V. Jenks, Chris 1993. Culture. London: Routledge. Joenniemi, Pertti. and Jevegnia Viktorova, eds. 2001. Regional Dimensions of Security in Border Areas of Northern and Eastern Europe, Tartu: Peipsi Centre for Transboundary Co-operation. Kaplan, David H. and Häkli, Jouni, eds. 2002 Boundaries and Place: European Borderlands in Geographical Context, Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers.


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Kohli, Martin 2000. The Battlegrounds of European Identity. European Societies 2 (2): 113-137. Newman, David, ed. 1999. Boundaries, Territory and Postmodernity, London: Frank Cass. O’Dowd, Liam 2002a. Transnational Integration and Cross-Border Regions in the European Union, in J. Anderson (ed.) Transnational Democracy: Political Spaces and Border Crossings. London: Routledge. O’Dowd, Liam 2002b. The Changing Significance of European Borders. Regional and Federal Studies 12 (4): 13-36. Paasi, Anssi 1998. Territories, Boundaries and Consciousness: The Changing Geographies of the Finnish-Russian Border. New York: John Wiley and Sons. Sahlins, Peter 1989. Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees. Berkeley: University of California Press. Schöpflin, George 2000. Nations, Identity, Power: The New Politics of Europe. London: Hurst and Company. Shore, Cris 1993. Inventing the ‘People’s Europe’: Critical Approaches to European Community ‘Cultural Policy’. Man 28: 779-800. Shore, Cris 2000. Building Europe. London: Routledge. Strassoldo, Raimondo. 1982. Frontier Regions: Future Collaboration or Conflict? West European Politics 5 (4): 123-135. Tägil, Sven 1982. The Question of Border Regions in Western Europe: An Historical Background. West European Politics 5 (4): 18-33. van der Velde, Martin and Henk van Houtum, eds. 2000. Border, Regions and People. London: Pion. van Houtum, Henk 2000. An Overview of European Geographical Research on Borders and Border Regions. Journal of Borderland Studies 15 (1): 57-83. Williams, Raymond 1976. Keywords. London: Fontana. Wilson, Thomas M. and Hastings Donnan 1998a. Nation, State and Identity at International Borders, in T. M. Wilson and H. Donnan (eds). Border Identities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wilson, Thomas M. and Hastings Donnan, eds. 1998b. Border Identities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.



ØRESUND AND THE REGIONAUTS1 Tom O’Dell Abstract The Øresund Bridge, located in the sound between Denmark and southern Sweden, was opened in the summer of 2000. The decade prior to the bridge’s completion came to be a period in which a great deal of public interest and mass media attention focused upon the plans to build the bridge as well as discussions concerning the significance the bridge would have in ongoing attempts to construct a new region: The Øresund Region. In this context, the bridge, and its construction, often worked in the public discourse as a metonym for the region and its development. This article analyses the cultural processes surrounding a biking event held on the bridge on the first day that the public was allowed physical access to the bridge. Using this event as a point of departure, the text considers the role that different but rather mundane forms of mobility around (and across) the bridged border played in capturing the imagination of the people of the region. It argues that if mobility is an increasingly important aspect of both modern life, and the phenomenon called globalisation, then there still exists a need to more closely examine the significance it plays in the course of people’s daily lives.

1

The research presented in this paper has received financial support from The Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation, The Swedish Research Council, and The Swedish Tourist Authority.

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Warming up ‘It would have been fun to bandage a foot or something.’ Red Cross worker at the bridge biking event (Ljung 2000a, A9). ‘The bridge is a highway and you cannot bike on a highway.’ An Øresund Bridge Consortium representative, explaining why people will not be allowed to bike on the bridge on a daily basis (Orrenius 2000, A10).

‘Do you think that you can all ring your bike bells together?’ a voice shouted enthusiastically at us through a series of amplifiers some hundred metres away. In a half-hearted compliance scattered members of the group around me started a feeble chorus of pling-a-linging, ringing the bells on their bikes to please the voice in the distance. The voice was not satisfied by the results, and urged us to try one more time, ‘altogether now!’ It was eight o’clock in the morning and we stood clustered together in four long lanes in a field by a road, a kilometre away from the Øresund Bridge. Long red and white carnival-style tents had been pitched beside us. Everyone had to file through the tents with their bikes in hand in order to pick-up their official ‘Øresund Bridge biking T-shirt’, and a small backpack stuffed with a towel (bearing a similar Øresund Bridge biking logo), an empty water bottle, and a second small plastic bottle of Ramlösa mineral water. The morning was crisp and clear and we all stood patiently waiting for our turn to begin our day’s biking trip over the bridge. Over the course of the day 42,000 cyclists would make the trip over the bridge, and in order to avoid complete chaos, the organisers were starting us in small clusters. As part of the attempt to get us all in the ‘biking mood’, music was played intermittently through the speaker system. As the J. Geil’s Band’s ‘Angel in the Centerfold’ came to an end, the Master of Ceremonies was about to let the first group begin, but first he endeavoured to establish the ground rules for the day, ‘Do not bike in the emergency lane,’ ‘Enjoy the view,’ ‘You are allowed to stop on the bridge, but only in the designated places,’ ‘It pleases me to see that everyone has a helmet.’ And as the first groups embarked, he continued to enthusiastically compliment us, ‘You are taking it nice and easy. VEEEERY GOOD!!!’, ‘OUTSTANDING!!! You’re taking it easy!’ As the rest of us stood and watched, waiting our turn, he continued to try to entertain us by enticing us to start a ‘wave’ which began in the front of the line, but did not have enough strength to make it all the way to the back.

ØRESUND AND THE REGIONAUTS

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Finding the motivation This article investigates the cultural organisation of mobility in and around a specific transnational event: the grand opening of the Øresund Bridge that now links Copenhagen, Denmark and Malmö, Sweden. In particular I am interested in the ‘bridge biking event’ that took place on 9 June 2000. In terms of event analysis there is a tendency to view events as ritualised phenomena defined in terms of their location in time and space. In the following text however, I shall underscore the manner in which the biking event worked as a multi-local phenomenon combining a series of partially linked orchestrated movements. This event is in some senses unique as an event, and might be described as a mega-event, attracting over 42,000 participants, who over the course of a day engaged in a collective festive activity which was itself stretched out over a 16 kilometre span of geography transcending the national space of two countries. However, despite its uniqueness, I believe it can tell us something about certain aspects of the cultural dynamics of national borders while simultaneously providing us with new insights into some of the workings of the global phenomenon called the experience economy. To this end, two primary questions will dominate the following: what types of mobilities and technologies went into the making of this transnational border-crossing event, and how were these movements themselves affected by the geography they transcended, as well as the public discourse in which they were embedded? As part of the background informing the work in hand, it can be noted that in the academic literature, mobility is increasingly being identified as a field of research in need of deeper study (Clifford 1997; Morley 2000; Urry 2001). Underscoring this we find in the literature of the past decade or so an abundance of references to cosmopolitans, tourists, vagabonds, and nomads, among other things (see, for example, Bauman 1998; Hannerz 1996; Harvey 2000b). These metaphors are often used as a means of drawing our attention to larger problems plaguing the world today. However, they also raise new questions concerning the specifics of the daily lives lived under the auspices of these labels, as well as the multitude of possible hybrid forms hidden between these appealing, if simple, categories. In addition to this, as others have pointed out (Jokinen and Veijola 1997), these metaphors are not gender neutral, and here it is important to bear in mind that travel has always been an activity organised around a masculine cultural dominant (Clifford 1997, 31ff.; Hacking 1998; O’Dell 2001; Rojek and Urry 1997, 16; Wolff 1995).

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In line with this work, I would argue that in order to understand daily life in Sweden (and other places) we now, more than ever, need to view travel and mobility as alternative but normative modes of identity production, and to consider the manner in which senses of identity are constructed on the move as well as betwixt and between national spaces (cf. Clifford 1997; O’Dell 2001). While the 1990s have seen an increased interest in the study of international migration (see, for example, Castles and Davidson 2000; Castles and Miller 1998; Hall 2000; Sassen 1998, 1999; Ålund 1997), our knowledge of the cultural dynamics surrounding other ambulatory forms of transnational movement is limited. In a time in which some claim that globalisation is facilitating the demise of the nation-state,2 it is more important than ever to understand what competing forms of transnational movement can mean for people in the course of their daily lives. This paper uses the Open Bridge biking event as an ethnographically anchored case study into one particular contextualised form of transnational mobility that entwined and transcended both national and transnational terrains. It demonstrates that, if mobility is an increasingly important aspect of both modern life and the phenomenon we call globalisation, then there is a need to turn to (and understand) some of its less grandiose forms while simultaneously endeavouring to link them to the larger processes in which they are enmeshed (Harvey 2000a, 97ff.). Abridged movements The Öresund Bridge was officially opened to automobile and train traffic on 1 July 2000. The bridge itself – nearly eight kilometres in length – is only a portion of the physical link between Denmark and Sweden. One end of the bridge starts in Malmö, Sweden, stretches half way across the sound and lands on Pepparholmen, a four kilometre long man-made island. From Pepparholmen traffic is led via a four kilometre long tunnel to the Danish mainland. As a result of this construction form, the bridge, with its four towering suspension pylons, is actually closer to the Swedish side of the sound than the Danish, although it does transgress the Danish/Swedish border.3

2

For an overview of these positions see Held et al. 1999 and Amin 1997. The actual border between Denmark and Sweden is marked by a small sign on a section of the bridge close to Pepparholmen. 3


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Over the course of the Whitsuntide weekend, from 9-12 June,4 the bridge was ‘unofficially’ opened to the public in a festival-like celebration called ‘The Open Bridge Event’. The day of biking described in this article occurred on Friday, the first day of the event; on the following day, 63,000 pedestrians walked out on to the bridge. On Sunday another 67,000 people did likewise, this time accompanied by 7,500 people travelling on in-line roller skates. Finally, on Monday, nearly 90,000 joggers ran a half marathon from Copenhagen, over the bridge, to Malmö. In total, nearly 300,000 people participated in this four day event. Throughout the weekend Pepparholmen functioned as a festival grounds in which people could buy beer, hotdogs, sandwiches, and small souvenirs while listening to popular Swedish and Danish rock groups who performed on a huge stage in the middle of the fairgrounds. Promoters of the Open Bridge Event claimed that this would be the first and last time that the bridge would be available to the public in this way. In the future this would be a border landscape exclusively reserved for automobile and train traffic. Although the physical link between Denmark and Sweden is composed of a bridge, an island, and a tunnel, it was the bridge which everyone spoke about, and which lay at the centre of everyone’s attention (cf. Berglund 2002). Accordingly, it should be noted that bridges, as sites of movement, are rather special. They can be understood as conduits of passage, points of support, facilitators of resonance,5 platforms of control, and neutral communicator of competing streams of influence. As we shall see, the Øresund Bridge was all of this and something much more: a symbol and physical manifestation of the entire Øresund Region which politicians and other actors have been struggling to construct and legitimate over the course of the past decade.6 Not surprisingly, in the context of the Open Bridge celebration, the bridge was invoked in very particular ways to elicit specific associations, which redefined the act of biking. For example, when described by the planners of the bridge biking event, the ‘Open Bridge’ was repeatedly 4 In Sweden Whitsuntide weekend is a three day weekend in which Monday is a holiday. 5 A bridge is the part of a guitar or other stringed instrument which holds the strings up above the soundboard allowing them to vibrate unhindered, a mechanism of resonance. 6 For a more complete discussion of the actors and processes involved in the development of the Öresund Region see Berg, Linde-Laursen and Löfgren 2000, 2002.

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highlighted as one small step in the making of a unified cross-border region. Along these lines, the Skånska cykelförbund 7 described the day’s events as a part of a ‘förbrödrings’ process (a process of fraternisation or one of becoming brothers, www.skanecykel.com/bro.htm 2000, 3). In contrast, sports journalists use a much more aggressive vocabulary in describing such events as the Tour de France in which they tend to describe the manner in which competitors ‘attack’ a mountain ascent or ‘plunge’ into a steep downhill descent. To a large extent these are the metaphors of sports journalism, but it is worth noting that the activities around the Øresund Bridge were described in very different ways. No one was ever described as ‘attacking’ the bridge. However, the first group of cyclists to leave the starting point at Bunkeflostrand, on the Swedish side of the Sound, gave every appearance of embarking on a high-speed race: pedalling furiously in a tight single file formation, on light-weight racing bikes, wearing streamlined helmets and tight-fitting elastic clothing. Judging by appearances this could have been deemed a competition as serious as the Tour de France, but Skånes cykelförbund explained that ‘their task was to meet a Danish delegation that started at the same time (www.skanecykel.com/bro.htm 2000, 1). Theirs was not a project to win, but one of forward movement and interaction. In this sense, the position of the bridge in this equation made impossible the racing rhetoric of sports journalism. It necessitated two starting points, and the movement of two groups towards each other. On the surface they may only have been two small groups of bikers, but through metonymic displacement and substitution the flow of their bodies over the bridge was intended to represent the political trajectory of their nations of origin, and the possibility of the bridge to bring them together. Via the bridge these two groups moved closer together. However, at the same time, it was the bridge’s presence in this event that converted potential competitors into delegates (on two sides of a divide) on their way to a meeting in which they were to exchange flags. Ironically, and contradictory to the regional hope that through this conversion the bridge would unify the people and geography of Øresund, it was the national and cultural differences between these regional actors which were accentuated the entire time that they physically approached one another.

7 Skånes Cykelförbund was the biking club of the southern most province of Sweden that sponsored and organised the Swedish portion of the biking event.


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It is worth reflecting upon this tension between union and separation, because to some extent it might be argued that this contradiction is an integral aspect of the cultural dynamics of bridges, as bridges affect and create very specific kinds of movement. Obviously, their first and primary purpose is to connect two separate physical localities, and to facilitate the flow of people, goods, and other objects between those two points. In so doing, they draw people into very specific trajectories, creating the illusion of peaceful unification. Not surprisingly bridges like the Øresund Bridge are repeatedly held up as aesthetic objects of beauty, openness, and freedom. In the eyes of photographers, they are thus played off against the glistening reflection of the water or the golden glow of the sun and provided with heavenly halos of their own (cf. Simmel 1997, 171ff.). Against this background, movement over the bridge becomes a participatory act of unification, following a trajectory into a harmonious sphere of peaceful and enlightened sanctimonious union. Accordingly, the bridge is repeatedly described as a place in which ‘different’ kinds of people meet, coexist, and are even able to pause for a minute to have ‘breakfast or lunch in the open outdoors, 70 metres up in the air’ (Taawo 2000, 9). As Simmel has pointed out, bridges are unique in the way they culturally organise movement. In making this point, he notes that doors mark boundaries of enclosure, and potential entry into the infinite space of the world; they allow for clearly demarcated movements back and forth between the ‘within’ and the ‘without’. Working slightly differently, windows tend to prioritise the realm of the ‘within’ and the controlled potential to move outwards via the framed gaze. Both the door and the window mark firm boundaries between that which is enclosed and that which is open; however, they facilitate our movement over these boundaries in different ways. Somewhat in contrast to this, ‘the bridge removes us from this firmness in the act of walking on it and, before we have become inured to it through daily habit, it must have provided the wonderful feeling of floating for a moment between heaven and earth’ (Simmel 1997, 172). Indeed, while Simmel’s words were written long ago, they could have been pulled directly from much of the euphoric mass media discourse which surrounded the Øresund Bridge’s first opening to the public. However, while bridges may provide us with the glorious sensation of ‘floating for a moment between heaven and earth,’ they also deceptively and treacherously steer us and limit our movement. While coaxing us to

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sing the praises of unification, they also paradoxically reinforce the perception of disjuncture in space, as though the two points we now see as being unified had once been separated – thus thrusting (in the case of Øresund) nautical juncture into the realm of the forgotten. Whereas the sound, or the banks of any shoreline, allow for a multitude of potential ports, the bridge tyrannically and exclusively prioritises only two points of connection; it offers the appearance of freedom, while simultaneously shackling our potential to free movement. Heidegger, among others, has noted the cultural capacity of bridges to work in this way, and he urges us to remember that the bridge, ‘does not just connect banks that are already there. The banks emerge as banks only as the bridge crosses the stream. The bridge expressly causes them to lie across from each other. One side is set off against the other by the bridge’ (1993 [1978], 354). Ultimately, it is the emergence of this cultural tension which transforms cyclists into delegates; however, it is not only Skånes cykelförbund’s first group of cyclists who are transmogrified by the bridge. All 42,000 participants in the event understand their role in much the same way. They are the heroes of the day, and the ‘regionauts’ of a new territory – the very first people to move into and explore the unknown potentials of the bridge (and the region). And here the fact that the biking event constituted the first day upon which the public was given permission to physically access the bridge sharply affected the framing of the biking experience. Movement through hierarchies of spatial scale A public discourse has developed in which the bridge is defined as a sort of diplomatic testing ground in which the regionauts are described as entering a new beyond. Newspaper headlines, such as ‘The entire Whitsuntide weekend is going to be the people’s opening of the Öresund connection’ (Frennstedt 2000, 8, my emphasis), implicitly worked to heighten people’s anticipation and underline the uniqueness of the event. On the days surrounding the event itself, the newspapers further underlined the diplomatic quality of the entire experience, reporting on how friendly greetings were shouted between Danes and Swedes, or how Swedes warned Danes biking in their direction to keep their mouths closed as they were about to head into an area inundated with flies (Ljung 2000b), or by describing how others mounted small Danish and Swedish flags in their helmets. And as the pedals spun, and the good will flowed, we find a rhetoric of family union that continually dominated the day.


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Now when these sister nations have been united with a bridge, the bicyclists from different organisations are meeting one another out there for the first (and only?) time. Out there, over Öresund (Sehlin 2000,12). This is a family celebration of friendliness and smiling (Peter Örn, General Secretary of the Red Cross, in Annell and Larsson 2000, 32).

And finally: Despite all the propaganda of fraternisation that we’ve been exposed to over the course of the past year, one has to be forgiven for feeling a little malicious pleasure. We have it better than the Danes. We’re the ones who have the bridge. They’re stuck with the bleak tunnel on their side (Thorsson 2000, A9).

One has to almost forcefully remind oneself that this is Øresund, and not Sarajevo or Jerusalem – these are people who have gotten along rather amicably for several hundred years. However, the cultural dynamics of the bridge (coupled with its transnational location between Denmark and Sweden) worked well to facilitate the somewhat contradictory rhetorics of national distinction and diplomatic unification. In light of this, it is perhaps not surprising to find that the entire biking event, intended as a celebration of the freedom of movement on the one hand, and the opening of a new regional frontier on the other, was fraught by a series of uneasy tensions between juncture and disjuncture, freedom and constraint, and harmony and discord. Rather than constituting a passage to unification, the 16 kilometres of bridge, island, and tunnel worked as an extended and elastic border layered in a complex hierarchy of spatial scales.8 At the transnational level, small blue European Union signs rather inconspicuously marked the border between Denmark and Sweden, but also claimed the bridge as part of a larger regional geopolitical project. More imposing than these small signs was the dominant presence of the nation, physically embodied in the national guard units on the Danish side 8 My argument here is that the organisation of space and its cultural ramifications are important elements in the construction of experience as it is related to the organisation of human activity and the understandings people have of their surroundings. In moving in this direction, my intention is to distance myself from social psychological explanations of the production of experience, and instead shift our attention to the competing political interests and technological linkages which are ever at work preparing the ground upon which our experiences and understandings of the world are built. See David Harvey (2000a, 75ff.) for a discussion of these processes as an important aspect of globalisation.

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of the border. Assigned to help keep order, these green garbed guardians contributed to the sensation that one was entering a militarised zone of a nation-state rather than a sphere of regional or transnational unification. The sensation was reinforced by the linguistic rift created through the shift in language of the road signs lining the bridge. These sensations of transnational disjuncture were further underscored by the temporary foreign exchange opened for the weekend on Pepparholmen, and the placement of a red Danish mailbox and a yellow Swedish mailbox not far from each other. On an even smaller scale these national tensions were tangible in the complete chaotic confusion surrounding the elderly hotdog vendors on Pepparholmen who struggled in vein to navigate two currencies, two price lists, two ways of counting (as opposed to the English and Swedish counting system which is based on units of ten, counting in Danish is based on a system of twenties), and (as usual) not enough change. Polar inertia/resisting hybridity The elongated elasticity of the Danish/Swedish border was repeatedly emphasised through the layering of these small symbolic encounters. Rather than working to unify two territorialities, the Øresund Bridge tended to reify the border between Sweden and Denmark. As a result, the Danes and Swedes, who were supposed to have met in a brotherly frenzy, actually did little more than glide by one another – exactly as they had done in their contact with each other throughout the 20th century. The coup de grâce of the regionauts’ mission, and their ultimate frustration, came as the Danish contingent reached the end of the bridge on the Swedish side of the sound, only to learn that they were not allowed to leave the bridge area and enter Sweden.9 The exercise of unification was at this point converted into an exercise in circular motion. In fact, at first glance it could be argued that it constituted a form of what Paul Virilio calls polar inertia – continuous movement which leads nowhere, and ultimately becomes little more than movement for movement’s sake (Virilio 2000a). Rounding the turn and heading home, the regionauts could report back on their findings: the region was an uninhabitable chimera. And thus, in the end, and perhaps not surprisingly, some might claim that 9

Those who opted to continue their trip all the way into Malmö were told that they would not be allowed to bike back to Denmark, and would be forced to take a boat home.


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the event succeeded in doing little more than underlining the feeble state of the region, and consequently reifying the strength of two national projects. However, such conclusions may in fact be drawn a bit too hastily. The biking was only one form of movement dominating the early morning Øresund’s atmosphere. Other movements linked to other senses were also a part of the physical forte of the day. For example, the taste of the region was the taste of red Danish hotdogs, cold beer, and even a new line of Øresund yogurt, while the sound was a mixture of Danish/Swedish babble, Anglo-American pop music, sputtering police motorcycles, and the faint swooshing of a warm spring breeze. Despite the influx of all of these sensations, it can be argued that their significance, and the experience of the biking itself, can only be understood when linked to the movement of sight. For years Danes, and particularly Swedes, had watched the bridge. They had studied it as it grew. They had read and learned its statistics, much as a teenager learns and cherishes to learn the intimate details of a favorite movie star’s life. Film crews and nightly news teams brought the bridge into the homes of the people of the region, who had consumed it visually throughout the period of its construction. In many cases these people could even guide strangers to the place from which they could get the best views of the bridge. Biking onto the bridge became a further extension of this ‘visual continuity’ (Virilio 2000b, 13), but was at the same time very different from most people’s normal experience of visual continuity.10 While most of us are accustomed to sliding along the surfaces of television images, we are rarely offered the opportunity to more concretely engage those images. The world may be at our fingertips, but as a cathode image it has proven to be extremely flat. Biking the bridge constituted a concrete and physical movement into a virtual reality (of real smells, sounds, and tastes), from which the public had been kept physically distant for years, and into which the public would never again be allowed to corporeally enter again on its own two feet (or so it was claimed).

10 In writing about ‘visual continuity’, Virilio notes that we are living in a time in which a growing portion of the world is increasingly on display and accessible via visual electronic media, and the continuity provided by these communication linkages is challenging the significance of the territorial contiguity once assigned to nations. For a larger discussion of the notion of visual continuity see Virilio (2000b, 13).

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Catalysts of movement: stasis, longing, and the tactics of fantasy The experience of the entire event was further heightened by a sense of yearning and anticipation which had been ritualised by a string of other movements, also entangled in the visual continuity offered by the mass media. Forty kilometres away, motorists speeding ninety kilometres an hour along the inland road between the Swedish towns of Veberöd and Skurup had found the perfect rest area, at the top of Stenberget – one of the highest ridge tops in the area – from which they could survey the progress of the bridge. In the mornings, despite the pressing deadline of a rapidly approaching new workday, motorists regularly stopped their onward rush to observe the completion of the first pylon, and then the second. Simultaneously, the foot of the bridge became the elliptical zenith of journeys of apparent polar inertia as folk made repeated pilgrimages to the very edge of the bridge’s extension into the region, and studied the construction progress that had been made on the bridge. Metres away, a museum was built and became itself an arena of circular movement as people circled small exhibits demonstrating the latest techniques in bridging technology. However, this was much more than a museum of technology or a temple of modernity. It was a sanctum sanctorum of anticipated movement. In contradiction to this fact, it could be argued that the museum did little more than offer static displays of inanimate objects and technologies. However, such an observation ignores the fetishistic quality of each model. More importantly, it neglects the fact that many of the displays (and definitely those which caused observers to pause the most) provided three-dimensional representations, in a variety of scales, of the cathode images everyone recognised so well. There was even a model of the bridge made by a class of small children on display - they too were drawn into the regionautic spirit of their elders. Together, these models enabled viewers to come one physical step, and an entire dimension (the third dimension) closer to the bridge and the region than had been previously possible merely through the hypnotic power of visual continuity. These movements were circular, but perhaps not entirely as inert as they first appeared. After all, they drove people’s fantasies a step further, while simultaneously transporting them an entire dimension deeper into the future – a point which Virillio’s observations do not fully appreciate. They all worked together to heighten the sense of anticipation which saturated the air that early morning as the first cyclists were released and allowed to begin pedalling towards the image of the forbidden territory


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which so many people had stopped to observe from their cars, or circled around in the museum. Mechanised movement It is here that the ringing of bicycle bells, and attempts to induce the waiting bicyclists to perform ‘the wave’ which I described in the beginning of this article, come back into play. All of us who stood there that June morning had been on our way for some time. We had inhabited a dense mediascape of images fed to us by local and national newspapers, radio programs, advertisements, museum exhibitions, and television specials whose frequency had continually escalated as the bridge’s opening neared.11 Together these constituted the raw material out of which numerous but partially related imagined scripts of the day’s coming events had been manufactured. These scripts were set in motion on the morning of 9 June via a series of modestly unassuming (even banal) ritualised exercises. For example, many people opted to warm up for the coming plunge into the new region by biking to the event, from towns such as Lund, Arlöv, or Staffanstorp, some of which were up to thirty kilometres away. Others spent the morning packing lunches, loading the car, or purchasing bottled water. Each of these movements was accompanied by a series of reflections, themselves linked to the mediascape we had lived in, which had been building up to this day. Indeed, thousands of people undoubtedly returned to this cathodised landscape one last time to check the weather conditions before heading out the door. A flick of the remote, a burst of infrared light streaking between the hand of the regionaut and the sensor located on her/his television, the opening of the communication channels by which the conditions of the beyond could be confirmed. And at last, we were on our way towards a new adventurous journey. Once at the starting point, however, we learned that we would have to subjugate our own fantasies to the efforts of the event organisers to corral our disparate projects into a unified flow over the bridge. It was here that we were herded through the tent in which we picked-up our competition numbers, backpacks, and water bottles. It was from here that 11 Arjun Appadurai describes mediascapes as landscapes of shared media images in which people partake and by which they are affected across and beyond local and national borders. They ‘tend to be image-centered, narrative-based accounts of strips of reality, and what they offer to those who experience and transform them is a series of elements (...) out of which scripts can be formed of imagined lives’ (1990, 9).

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we stumbled around a field, temporarily confused, trying to figure out what we should do so as to be allowed to finally start our voyage. And it was here, in an oddly dreamlike surrealistic moment, that we were urged to ring our bike bells in unison. But even this strange request could rapidly be integrated into the cultural frameworks with which we came equipped for the day. For those who enthusiastically rang their bicycle bells upon command, the entire event was laced with the perception of a folk festival. We were here together to participate in something unique, and collectively contribute to its establishment. These were people who laughed gleefully and screamed ‘wooooo!’ as they rang their bells. The carnival was about to begin, and they spoke excitedly, trying to verbalise their expectations of the coming hours. The bridge itself lay out of sight, just over the horizon, but it could hardly have been more tangible. It was about to become Ours. Others muttered sarcastically as the people around them rang their bells, or engaged in the wave. Was this really what the bridge was about? Just another public get together, like any other football game or sporting event in which people automatically engaged in things like the wave? Wasn’t this a little bit like a charter flight landing in which half the passengers applaud the pilot for bringing us down safely? Who was ringing their bell (or doing the wave) and why? The announcer’s intention was to help build a collective sense of excitement, but the consequences of his exhortations had the opposite effect on more than a few. The wave trivialised the event, and domesticated it. Threatening to convert this special occasion, which we had all spent so much time imagining, into something quite ordinary. Some of us, after all, were not here to engage in a folk festival. We were here for the adventure, and to explore a new geographical territory. This was a project embedded in a long-standing masculine narrative structure: that of discovery, conquest, and colonisation (cf. Clifford 1997, 31ff.; O’Dell 2000). Admittedly, these were even elements that were undoubtedly also an important part of the day’s activities for those who rang their bells. But the ringing of bells could be perceived by many as a cold shower, ultimately feminizing the event by taking the sting out of the day’s individualistic, explorative side, converting it into just another (safe and controlled) collective exercise under the leadership of a patriarchal figure. From this perspective, the ringing bells sounded hauntingly like a warning clock, warning us that we were not really going anywhere new. We had packed our lunches, dressed our selves up in special biking cloth-


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ing, or donned newly designed Swedish/Danish decorative apparel, preparing for a modern safari, only to discover, before we even reached the bridge, that the new region was just an asphalt street, like any other asphalt street. The motion involved here was nothing more than the ringing of bells, but the message was clear, this journey might not prove to be anything more than just another aspect of the everyday life to which we were so accustomed. The bell ringing, the laughing, the excited chatter, and the sarcasm were all spontaneous expressions, but they were precedent upon other experiences, such as the flick of a TV remote control, the folding of a newspaper page, the halting hesitant stroll around a museum, and the flood of expectations which were formed through these movements. We stood in the field that morning watching the first bicyclists embark on their expedition, but we were still tethered to the technologies that had brought us to this field. We were free to interpret the day as we pleased, unconditionally ‘eating it all up’, skeptically being ironic, or just simply enjoying ourselves, but we were also the conditioned products of a massive machinery. The complexity of the event and the plethora of contradictory emotions and movements that it inspired cannot be explained without an appreciation of the technological tether that linked us all to the bridge. These, together with the movements I have been trying to portray here allude to the fact that we regionauts were hybrids from the beginning, part human, part machine. Like the cyborgs of science fiction, the two halves of our being were intimately dependent upon one another for the success of the project.12 Indeed, I have chosen to invoke the metaphor of the ‘regionaut’ here in order to underscore the degree to which the entire event was saturated by the tension between human activity (and here I have been primarily interested in movement) and technological in(ter)vention. In the academic literature scholars have debated the degree to which movement shapes our understanding of the world, or is shaped by it (see, for example, Wolff 1995, 79ff. and Frykman 1992). What I want to point 12 The metaphor of the cyborg has been explored and developed by Donna Haraway (1991). She uses it as an ironic device in her project of feminist criticism. Working in her spirit my intention is to call attention to the manner in which something as banal and supposedly good-natured as the Open Bridge event can be entangled in a series of culturally bound presuppositions and gendered technological systems which affect us in ways of which we are often hardly aware.

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out is that our movements are inseparable from the technologies in which we participate. It is not a case of movement taking precedent over understandings of daily life, or the opposite, but the fact that these have been fused together as intertwined aspects of one another, through the trajectories of an assortment of new technological and cultural assemblages. At the same time, not all movements are assigned the same dignity. And the biking which occurred in connection with the Open Bridge celebration was enveloped in an aura of uniqueness, novelty, and exploration that cannot be understood without the acknowledgement of the manner in which a series of spatial scales continuously telescoped into and out of one another. Moving over the bridge the regionauts engaged in their own micro-projects, but they were enveloped in thick symbolic layers of signification which amplified the dignity of the movement itself by alternatively framing the day’s activities in relation to local, national, and transnational arenas. Theirs was not a movement into any one of these spheres, but into a new hybrid constellation of all of them; in this way it was a movement through both that which was familiar and that which was new. And the tension and ambivalence between these levels of experience was accentuated by the fact that the event took place on a bridge (a structure loaded with a dense series of symbolic meanings of its own) transgressing two national borders. Today, we are left with the haunting question of, ‘Where are the regionauts and their dreams now?’ Despite their absence from the public arena, the regionauts are not dead. They are still tethered to the mediascapes and technologies that produced them. And from their homes they continue to embark (unnoticed by the media) on new individual adventures, taking the train over the bridge, and strolling through the shops, cafés, and museums of the region. They remain potential actors, and while it may be tempting to interpret their withdrawal (as a collective) from the regional plane as a sign of regional failure – exasperated by all the mass media discussion as to the short-comings of the bridge and region which their absence has spurred – it could also be interpreted as a sign of health. They were not simply duped, steered, and controlled by politicians and the mass media as some theoreticians would have us believe. Their imaginations remain active, but are for the moment focussed once again upon their own individual projects. In this sense, the regionauts’ disappearance from the public scene is a testimony to the success of the Open Bridge organisers’ strategies that reached out, captured, and mobilised the imagination of so many people. However, it also says something of the limits


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of such a project. Our imaginations are not so easily captured and moulded into a collective force for longer periods of time. Looking back on the Open Bridge event from our position in the present, it becomes increasingly apparent that the regionauts were themselves in some ways a very homogeneous group, but in other ways quite heterogeneous. For immigrants living in the region, the Open Bridge event was by and large a non-event. This was a celebration for Swedes and Danes. The opening of the bridge was preceded and followed by a thick discourse on (cultural, economic, political, and structural) integration, which in contrast to all discussions of integration that otherwise take place in Sweden or Denmark, seldom included immigrants and refugees (Nilsson 2000; O’Dell 2000). The mediascape, constituted by all the discussions of region-building that occurred in conjunction with the bridge-opening, was (and largely remains) a segregated ethnoscape in which Swedishness and Danishness are played out, asserted, and implemented in contrast to one another. Others were implicitly defined out of the discourse on the region.13 As a result it could be argued that the regionauts were a rather homogeneous group – overwhelmingly Swedish and Danish in a region in which immigrants make up over 27% of the population. But beyond the issue of Swedishness and Danishness, we find that regionauts are a rather diverse group. To this day we find a slew of politicians, members of the Öresund Consortium, and local actors who continue to actively work to conjure forth and build a region. These are the regionauts with a mission, the believers, the people who actively tried to create a new breed of politicised citizen who identified with the region. In some sense one could understand these actors as the cosmopolitans of the region, the people who view(ed) it from above, but in another way, they were also the locals – the limited few who actually felt they had a stake in, and responsibility for, the territory they saw before them. In 13

As I have been arguing, issues of Swedishness and Danishness were constantly present in the discussions surrounding the building of the bridge and the region. With the December 2001 election of the conservative government in Denmark, and the central role currently being played be the right-wing, anti-immigrant Danish Folkepartiet, issues of Danishness are at the centre of public discussion in a way and with a vigor which was not as prevalent at the time of the Bridge Opening. In the discourse of the bridge and the region, immigrants were simply nonexistent, and they were never mentioned. Now in Denmark they find themselves at the center of a right-wing attack where Danishness is defined, not in contrast to Swedishness (as was the case with the region) but in contrast to other ethnified and culturalised groups of people.

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contrast, many of the people biking on 9 June 2000 may have been explorers, but they were also tourists, just passing through and heading home at the end of the day. Nonetheless, their exploratory activities were continuously enshrouded in a spirit of cosmopolitan diplomacy, in which it was hoped that new transnational bonds would be forged or strengthened. But complicating the picture further, we find a large pool of people like Anna, a woman whom I interviewed and who moved to Southern Sweden nearly ten years ago from South Africa. She spends three to five hours a day in front of her computer corresponding with friends in South Africa, colleagues in Sweden, and relatives in Canada as well as in several countries in Europe. This network is organised in three separate e-mail accounts, constituting three different communities. Beyond her computer though, she regularly visits friends in both Malmö and Copenhagen. But despite the bridge and the rhetoric of fraternisation, regional integration, and union, she remains acutely aware of the existence of a national border between Sweden and Denmark. Despite being a Swedish citizen, she must show her passport to the customs authority every time she makes the journey.14 Now, she explains, she has a special T-shirt she wears when she goes to Denmark. On the front she has printed a large photocopy of her Swedish passport and a statement in English: ‘Yes, I’m fucking Swedish’, and on the back, in Swedish, ‘Surprised you didn’t I?’ – reflecting the ‘friendly hostility’ she feels every time she makes her way through the region, over the border, and encounters these cordial and smiling authorities who question whether or not she actually belongs here. At present she is at least temporarily residing in Canada working on her Ph.D. and living with her Swedish husband and their children. To some extent she is a cosmopolitan, identifying the world as her home more than any single territory. But to some extent she was also a very different kind of regionaut – someone who simply ‘lived the region’, but never really felt included in it. She did not bike on the bridge, and she undoubtedly never contemplated doing so. However, her absence from the bridge also reminds us of the need to understand how the technologies of union can simultaneously work as gendered and racialised technologies of segregation. 14 By law, citizens of Nordic countries are allowed free passage over one another’s borders, and thus, they are not required to present their passports when crossing these national boundaries. Unfortunately, people who do not ‘look’ Scandinavian find that their reality is quite different from that of their blonde and blue-eyed peers.


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Against this background, the Open Bridge biking event could be dismissed as trivial, having little long-term impact on the people who participated in it. We all went home at the end of the day and resumed our lives – essentially as we had always done. The movements involved were equally mundane. In comparison, the subjects of the anthropological literature on globalisation might appear more dramatic, and in some way essentially different. Theirs is often the story of persecution, flight, and the search for refuge or employment – life altering events and border-crossings. Indeed, the Open Bridge event was in many ways a different kind of border crossing, and perhaps trivial in this sense. Among other things, all of us who participated in it did so of our own volition, and never doubted the fact that we would be returning safely to our homes in the evening. It might even be argued that the fact of ‘homeness,’ stability, and domesticity, issues which no one spoke about on 9 June, were the features which most thoroughly distinguished this event from other more studied and written about global movements. It is from these points of stasis that tensions of the imagination developed and ultimately enticed many regionauts into action. And it was the knowledge that they could return home again – to an arena of physical, cultural and social stability – that made the journey appealing. The experience economy’s need for open scripts Ultimately, the Open Bridge event remains interesting as a cultural phenomenon because whether or not it was trivial, through its linkage to the physical construction of the bridge, it captured and held the imagination of tens of thousands of people over a period of years. Here the bridge framed the event and channelled the public’s attention through a choreography of anticipation and movement that was not fully controlled by any one actor or actant. Actual movement onto the bridge was cathartic, but more importantly, it was imaginatively appealing due to the way the project was wrapped in an aura of pioneering and diplomatic exploration into a new frontier. This was itself a space often simply labelled as ‘the bridge’, but which was itself totemic of (and conflated with) the region or some Other alteric, unknown, but promising geography of the future. Enhancing this, the event became the one-day experience of active movement into and through the cathode barrier – we could only imagine what we would find in the realm located just behind the back surface of our television screens.

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In opening I asserted that this event could provide us with some interesting insights into the workings of the experience economy. In their book, The Experience Economy, Pine and Gilmore argue that, ‘staging experiences is not about entertaining customers, its about engaging them’ (1999, 30), and they explain that experiences are made up of four main components (or realms): entertainment, education, escape, and aestheticism. Here I do not want to directly engage their line of reasoning, but I do want to point out two lessons which we might learn from the bridge biking event which are of relevance in relation to the experience economy. First, the event succeeded because it did engage the imaginations of thousands of people; however, it did so in the form of a partially open script. Thus, it left ample room for the consumers of the event to work, to a rather large extent, as the producers of their own experience. Second, in contrast to Pine and Gilmore, I would argue for a need to resist cookbook-like recipes to the realm of experience. An experience oriented shopping mall in Minneapolis may be a huge success, but there is absolutely no guarantee that a faithful reproduction of it in the Swedish setting will be as successful. Rather than trying to copy successful recipes, we need to invest more in efforts to dissect and penetrate the semantics of experience, and tease out the very different ways in which experiences are culturally produced. We need to remember that experiences are not simply locally produced phenomena. They are generated from a multilocal network of cultural impulses, information, and understandings whose constitution we still know very little about. The cultural dynamics of fantasy and imagination are areas of scholarship direly in need of study. The role of longing, the channeling of anticipation, and their entanglement in a series of technologies (from the images transmitted in the mass media, to the grinding gears of a bike) are likewise relatively uncharted areas of scholarly knowledge which demand exploration. In the end the bridge biking was successful as an experience, not because it was educational, or wrapped in a particularly advanced esthetic package (the bridge was important, but it was not the bridge’s actual design or esthetic appearance which made the day), but because it remained sufficiently open to accommodate the needs of a multitude of private projects. These were projects which developed and matured in the realm of fantasy, but they did so under the promise of a potential realisation – and thus under the pressure of longing. Perhaps I am greatly exaggerating the significance of the Open Bridge biking event by aligning it with processes of globalisation. In many ways


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this was an extraordinarily local and provincial phenomenon. But as I have argued here, it did invoke issues of de-territiorialisation and reterritorialisation in interesting ways. It enticed a large number of people to at least temporarily rethink their identities in terms of new transnational allegiances, and it did lure tens of thousands of people to engage the images they had experienced through the media, and to physically confront and test them. To the extent that all of these processes are important aspects of globalisation, I would argue it is important to understand how people confront them in the course of their daily lives, and imagine their own lives within the context of these processes. ‘There are 42,000 of you. That’s it! Never again will anyone be allowed to bike on the bridge.’ The message blared repeatedly through the amplifiers and speakers strung out across the bridge over the course of the day. None of us could be one hundred percent certain of the validity of this statement. After all, box office hits inevitably lead to sequels. But then again, maybe the voice was right. Maybe we were the first and the last to make the journey through this particular technological space of the transnational. And to some extent, the case may be that it was this ambivalence and uncertainty that was the greatest asset and strength of the event. References Amin, Ash. 1997. Placing Globalization. Theory, Culture and Society 14(2), 123-137. Annell, Carl-Magnus and Larsson, Gertrud. 2000. Allt gick som en dans. Kvällsposten. Den 12 juni, 32. Appadurai, Arjun. 1990. Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy. Public Culture 2, 1-24. Bauman, Zygmunt. 1998. Globalization. Columbia: Columbia University Press. Berg, Per Olof, Linde-Laursen, Anders and Löfgren, Orvar. 2000. Invoking a Transnational Metropolis: The Making of the Øresund Region. Lund: Studentlitteratur. Berg, Per Olof, Linde-Laursen, Anders and Löfgren Orvar. 2002. Öresundsbron på uppmärksamhetens marknad: Regionbyggare i evenemangsbranschen. Lund: Studentlitteratur. Berglund, Sara. 2002. Gömd, glömd och fördömd. In P.O. Berg, A. LindeLaursen and O. Löfgren (eds.), Öresundsbron på uppmärksamhetens marknad: Regionbyggare i evenemangsbranschen. pp. 157-168. Lund: Studentlitteratur. Castles, Stephen and Davidson, Alastair. 2000. Citizenship and Migration: Globalization and the politics of belonging. London: Macmillan.

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Castles, Stephen and Miller, Mark. 1998. The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World. London: Macmillan. Clifford, James. 1997. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Frennstedt, Thorsten. 2000. Löp, Gå, cykla eller rulla! Arbetet Den 9 februari, 8. Frykman, Jonas. 1992. In Motion. Body and Modernity in Sweden between the World Wars. Ethnologia Scandinavica 36-51. Hacking, Ian. 1998. Mad Travelers: Reflections on the Reality of Transient Mental Illnesses. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Hall, Stuart. 2000. Cultural Identity and Diaspora. In N. Mirzoeff (ed.), Diaspora and Visual Culture: Representing Africans and Jews. pp. 21-34. London: Routledge. Hannerz, Ulf. 1996. Transnational Connections. London: Routledge. Haraway, Donna J. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge. Harvey, David. 2000a Spaces of Hope. Berkeley: University of California Press. Harvey, David. 2000b. Cosmopolitanism and the Banality of Geographical Evils. Public Culture 2, 529-564. Heidegger, Martin. 1993 [1978]. Building Dwelling Thinking. In Basic Writings. Pp. 343-364. London: Routledge. Held, David; McGrew, Anthony; Goldblatt, David and Perraton, Jonathan 1999. Global Transformations: Politics, Economics and Culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Jokinen, Eeva and Veijola, Soile. 1997. The Disoriented Tourist: The Figuration of the Tourist in Contemporary Cultural Critique. In C. Rojek and J. Urry (eds.), Touring Cultures: Transformations of Travel and Theory. pp. 23-51 London: Routledge. Ljung, Maja. 2000a. 330 redo med första hjälpen. Sydsvenska Dagbladetk Den 10 juni, A9. Ljung, Maja. 2000b. Brofesten. Sydsvenska Dagbladet. Den 10 juni, A8. Morely, David. 2000. Home Territories. Routledge: London. Nilsson, Fredrik. 2000. Insiders and Outsiders. in P.O. Berg, O. Löfgren, and A. Linde-Laursen (eds.), Invoking a Transnational Metropolis: The Making of the Øresund Region. pp. 191-210. Lund: Studentlitteratur. O’Dell, Tom. 2000. Traversing the Transnational, in P.O. Berg, O. Löfgren, and A. Linde-Laursen (eds.), Invoking a Transnational Metropolis: The Making of the Øresund Region. pp. 231-254. Lund: Studentlitteratur. O’Dell, Tom. 2001. Raggare and the Panic of Mobility: Modernity and Everyday Life in Sweden. In D. Miller (ed.), Driven Societies. pp. 105-130. Oxford: Berg. Orrenius, Niklas. 2000. Varför kan man inte cykla på Bron? Sydsvenska Dagbladet Den 10 juni, A10. Pine II, B. Joseph and Gilmore, James H. 1999. The Experience Economy: Work is Theatre and Every Business is a Stage. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.


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Rojek, Chris, and Urry, John. 1997. Transformations of Travel and Theory. In C. Rojek and J. Urry (eds), Touring Cultures: Transformations of Travel and Theory. pp. 1-22 London: Routledge. Sassen, Saskia. 1998. Globalization and its Discontents: Essays on the New Mobility of People and Money. New York: The New Press. Sassen, Saskia. 1999. Guests and Aliens. New York: The Free Press. Sehlin, Maria. 2000 Nej, än är vi inte en enda familj. Arbetet Den 10 juni, 12. Simmel, Georg. 1997. Bridge and Door. In D. Frisby and M. Featherstone (eds.), Simmel on Culture. Selected Writings. Pp. 170-174. London: Sage. Taawo, Amanda. 2000. Tusentals tog cykeln över bron. Svenska Dagbladet den 10 juni, 9. Thorsson, Håkan. 2000. På högbron plockar man fram mobilen. Sydsvenska Dagbladet Den 10 juni, A9. Urry, John. 1995. Consuming Places. London: Routledge. Urry, John. 2001. Sociology Beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty-first Century. London: Routledge. Virilio, Paul. 2000a. Polar Inertia. London: Sage. Virilio, Paul. 2000b. The Information Bomb. New York: Verso. Wolff, Janet. 1995. Resident Alien: Feminist Cultural Criticism. Cambridge: Polity Press. Ålund, Alexandra. 1997. Multikultiungdom: Kön, etnicitet, identitet. Lund: Studentlitteratur.



SHAPING POSSIBLE INTEGRATION IN THE EMERGING CROSS-BORDER ØRESUND REGION Gregg Bucken-Knapp Abstract In July 2000 the Danish-Swedish region of Øresund, including the Copenhagen area and the Swedish county of Skåne, was joined by a bridge, cutting the travel time between the two halves down to roughly one-half hour. While the bridge forms the main tangible element in an effort to increase the economic competitiveness of the region, elites recognise that less tangible forms of infrastructure must also be developed. Specifically, regional elites acknowledge that success for the Øresund project rests on their ability to convince regional inhabitants that they share common interests and values. This article shows that such efforts should be considered in light of three factors. First, drawing upon survey data collected in the year since the bridge opened, it shows that there are significant national differences in levels of support for the Øresund process. Second, these national differences are situated in the context of both economic and spatial structure, showing how recent economic crises and the peripheral location of Skåne have contributed to higher Swedish levels of support for development of the Øresund. Finally, it is argued that the election of the new centre-right Danish government, when coupled with the growth of a multi-ethnic Øresund population, has the ability to create tensions for forms of cross-border integration that move beyond consumerism and economic development.

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Roughly a year and a half after the opening of the Øresund bridge, which links the greater Copenhagen area of Denmark with the southern Swedish city of Malmö and the surrounding county of Skåne, it is possible to sense a growing concern among political, business and cultural elites as to the speed at which cross-border integration is proceeding. The organisers for the bridge’s opening ceremony, on 1 July 2000, trumpeted a vision for the Øresund as a cross-border region that would be ‘a major political, economic and cultural force’ (Financial Times, 1 July 2000). Yet, such hopefulness, while still the chief party line among the many organisations and associations with a responsibility and interest in developing and marketing the region, is no longer the sole message coming from those who seek to turn this cross-border area of roughly three and a half million inhabitants into one of the leading economic metropolitan areas in northern Europe. Rather, this message must now share the public spotlight with apprehension over the extent to which the vision of a seamlessly merged Øresund region is actually resonating among regional inhabitants. Most recently, this uncertainty has been witnessed in a public opinion survey commissioned by Region Skåne as part of an effort to determine why such a small number of Danes are willing to cross over the Øresund to Malmö and beyond. One of the chief findings was the general lack of knowledge among Danes of the comparative shopping advantage that existed in Sweden, both in terms of lower prices, as well as longer opening hours for retailers (Berlingske Tidende, 29 November 2001). Similarly, another recent study has shown that the per cent of Swedish Øresund inhabitants crossing into Denmark has decreased from 61% to 47% in just one year. Interest among Danish Øresund inhabitants in crossing over to Sweden remained notably lower and fell from 25% to 22% in the same period (Øresund Identity Network web-site, 2001). It is clear that regional elites on both sides of the Øresund face a challenge as they seek greater mass involvement in constructing a cross-border region where inhabitants both know of, and are ready to take advantage of, employment, housing and other opportunities on both sides of the border. The task at hand for those seeking to integrate the region is reminiscent of the challenge observed by Massimo d’Azeglio, the former prime minister of Piedmont. Upon the creation of modern Italy, d’Azeglio noted that, ‘We have made Italy; now we have to make Italians’ (Franck 1996, 373). But just how would one go about constructing Øresund-ers? This article argues that the elite desire to construct a cross-border

THE EMERGING CROSS-BORDER ØRESUND REGION

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Øresund region in which inhabitants are willing to relocate and re-orient themselves to life across the border on the basis of cheaper shopping, more affordable housing, or an overall more exciting way of life, requires an examination of three related factors. Most importantly are the current attitudes of regional inhabitants themselves. This article shows that mass attitudes, particularly in the case of Swedish Øresund inhabitants, are favourable towards the construction of an actively engaged Øresund-er. Yet, attitudes are generally conditioned within the broader structural contexts in which people live. Thus, this article also argues that an assessment of a successful future emergence of an Øresund-er must take into account the range of differences on either side of the Øresund in terms of economics and spatial location within the region. Finally, this article will show that the production of Øresund-ers, and more generally the region itself, could by complicated by differences in ideas at the national level of political discourse concerning the question of immigrants and their place in their ‘new’ homelands. Danes, Swedes and the Øresund Region Löfgren has noted that while the outsider may consider two Scandinavian states to be very similar to one another, ‘the nationalizing eye is scanning for the small differences.’ He provides an example of this ‘national moral geography’ of difference in the Øresund region by observing that for Swedes, Danes appear to hold the privileged position of living in a space that is a ‘tempting Otherness, easy-going and fun loving’ (Löfgren 1999, 13-14). Other scholars have made a similar point as to how the difference between Scandinavian peoples and cultures is seen as significant from within those societies. Linde-Laursen (1995) observes that there are distinct Swedish and Danish narratives of their mutual other, and that this other can be located in such diverse settings as dishwashing habits, haircut styles, or in governing regime types. Gundelach (2000) draws upon Billig’s concept of banal nationalism to explain how seemingly harmless stereotypical jokes that Scandinavians tell about one another actually serve to shore up constructs of national difference across Scandinavian societies. Thus, in looking at the Øresund region and assessing the significance of differences in ‘national’ culture and behaviour, it is important to recall that such differences should be judged not only from the outside, but also from the perspective of those that inhabit the region, including the masses who frequently see those differences as having great impor-

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tance, and the elites, who seek to overcome them in order to achieve their vision of cross-border cooperation. While there are a large number of associations that have sprung up in conjunction with the branding of the Øresund region, the chief group of elites attempting to guide the regionalisation process is the Øresund Committee. Established in 1993, the Øresund Committee is intended to ‘safeguard the integration process and to stimulate the emergence of a new cross-border identity in the Öresund region.’ The committee is made up of thirty-two members, half of which are Danish and half of which are Swedish. The membership largely comes from politicians and prominent officials at the local and regional levels within the Øresund. Additionally, the Danish and Swedish states contribute two of the representatives (Jerneck 2000a, 210). These Øresund elites are pursuing the cross-border Øresund regionalisation process along two related trajectories. On the one hand, many of the broader regionalisation efforts are designed for an external audience, intended to brand the region as a tourist destination (Lousdal and Sihm 1997), a continued attractive location for multi-national firms (Rendtorff personal communication), and ultimately, as a distinct region that will be able to move up in the rankings of dynamic European metropolitan areas (Wichmann Mathiessen 2000). On the other hand, the regionalisation process has an internal component that must also be successfully achieved. The focus of this internal component is the development of a consciousness among Øresund inhabitants that they not only occupy a common bounded space, but that they have some degree of commonly shared values and interests deriving from inhabiting the Øresund. Elites involved in the Øresund project are clear on this necessity, noting that ‘a credible marketing of the Øresund region requires that the region will also develop a stronger feeling of togetherness and common identity,’ and suggest that this challenge can be partially met by various activities that will: build mental bridges over the Øresund, functioning as meeting points and building the departure point for the exchange of ideas, experiences and opinions. By noting that ‘now, everything happens on both sides of the Øresund,’ the commonality can be established that is necessary for the region to become a reality (Danish Government 1999, 53).

Elites involved in the Øresund regionalisation process are, at least partially, cultural entrepreneurs who are pedalling the good of a common Øresund identity. The role of the Øresund Committee in this identitybuilding process can be seen by sampling some of the titles of programs


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that it has approved with INTERREG II co-financing during the 1990s: Language Understanding Across Øresund, The Birth of a Region, TV News in the Øresund Region, and Communication of Culture 2000 (Our New Region 1999, 151). Elite chances for success in this identity-building task depends in large measure on whether or not a large enough segment of the Øresund’s population chooses to internalise the new identity that is now on offer via these various initiatives, such that the region may become more than just an economic zone. Moreover, the difficulty of forging a ‘new’ identity to be adopted by the masses is compounded by the fact that Øresund identity is a shifting identity. The Øresund region, like many nation-states, is not a fixed geographic area with unchangeable boundaries. Rather, the formal area of what constitutes the Øresund has expanded rapidly during the 1990s (see Figure 1). Figure 1: The Øresund Region

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In 1993, the region consisted only of the Greater Copenhagen area and the (then) county of Malmöhus. Upon the consolidation of Region Skåne in 1998, the region expanded to incorporate what is now the northern and eastern parts of Skåne. Finally, in 1999, the Danish islands of Lolland, Falster and Bornholm were granted admission to the Øresund region. This rapid expansion underscores that the Øresund is an artificial construct. Yet, it is a construct in which elites are attempting to foster a genuine sense of belonging and commonality. Thus, it is useful to consider what some of the current mass attitudes are in the Øresund region, both with regards to the region and to Denmark and Sweden as a whole. The data presented in this section were collected by Statistics Denmark and Statistics Sweden in May 2001 as the first of three public opinion surveys on identity in the Øresund region in the timeframe 2001-2004. Telephone interviews were conducted with 1,949 inhabitants of Denmark and Sweden, of which 424 were interviewed in the Danish portion of the Øresund and 408 in the Swedish portion of the Øresund. The remaining 1, 117 respondents live outside the Øresund area, and as such, are not included in this analysis. Surveys were conducted in Danish or Swedish, depending on the nation-state in which they were carried out. One measure of whether the ‘stronger feeling of togetherness’ sought after by elites can be found is in the extent to which regional inhabitants read newspaper articles focusing on the Øresund region. Table 1 draws upon several different survey items to show the amount of news that respondents read with regards to the Øresund region, the nation and Europe as a whole. Table 1: Amounts of Øresund, National or European News Read by Øresund Region Inhabitants (in per cent) May, 2001

All A Lot Not much None

Øresund-Related News (N=793)

Frequency Reading National News (N=791)

Frequency Reading European News (N=793)

11.98 29.63 30.39 27.99

14.03 37.29 35.52 13.15

11.07 31.70 36.10 21.13


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There is little variation among the three categories when it comes to stating that one reads ‘all’ of the available news, with percentages hovering in the ten to fifteen per cent range. There are much more pronounced differences in the percentage of respondents that stated they read ‘none’ of the news across these three categories. Thirteen per cent claims to have read none of the news focusing on their respective nation-state, while twenty-one per cent of the respondents stated that they read no news dealing with Europe. In terms of the Øresund news, the percentage that claims to read none jumps to over a quarter of all the respondents. If one accepts Winn’s assertion that individuals ‘cling’ to regional and national identities like ‘an old pair of slippers – a dependable, worn but still comforting thing that is familiar to its owner’ (Winn 2001, 24), then these data might give cause for wonder. But, if individuals cling to the familiar, and the region is counted among that which is familiar, then why do respondents show a substantially lower level of interest in regional information? One way to shed light on this is to take the overall Øresund sample and to divide it into two ‘national’ halves. Viewed in this manner, a rather dramatic distinction emerges. Nearly half of the Danish respondents read none of the Øresund news, while only six and a half per cent of their Swedish counterparts fall into this category. Similarly, over sixty per cent of the Swedish respondents read either ‘all’ or ‘a lot’ of Øresund news, while less than a quarter of the Danes are such enthusiastic consumers of Øresund-related information. Thus, this sharp difference suggests the possibility that it is not Øresund inhabitants as a whole that have a lack of interest in the region, but rather the Danes. In the remainder of this section, I highlight this repeated distinction between Swedes and Danes when it comes to attitudes involving the Øresund, focusing largely on the lack of importance that the Øresund region holds for the Danes. In the subsequent section on structure, I will address possible determinants of why Swedes appear to hold greater enthusiasm for the Øresund. In addition to the extent to which regional inhabitants read newspaper articles focusing on the Øresund region, respondents were also asked whether they considered Øresund-related issues to be more important than those involving the nation-state and those involving Europe. The results in table 2 lend further credence to the initial idea that there is a national divide when it comes to the question of assigning significance to the Øresund.

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Table 2: Importance of Øresund Issues to Øresund Inhabitants when Compared to National and European Issues (in per cent) May, 2001

Øresund much more Øresund more

More Important: Øresund or national issues? (N=813)

More Important: Øresund or European issues? (N=803)

Danish side of Øresund

Swedish side of Øresund

Danish side of Øresund

Swedish side of Øresund

0.71

9.72

9.64

18.81

3.55

23.27

16.14

38.14

21,48

22,17

19,07

25,06

29,88

15,46

20,46

22,17

8,51

No difference 15,17 Nation (or Europe*) more 32,94 Nation (or Europe*) much more 47,63

*Europe only applies to the two right-hand columns in this table.

Over one-third of the Swedish respondents considered Øresund-related issues to either have ‘much more’ or ‘more’ importance than national issues. Less than five per cent of Danish respondents were willing to assign Øresund issues such a level of importance. Contrasted to that, nearly half of the Danish respondents ranked national issues as being ‘much more’ important than Øresund issues, while just over one-fifth of the Swedes did the same. Recalling Gundelach’s (2001) analysis of nationalism and chauvinism among Danes, the lop-sided significance afforded to the nation-state by Danes in this forced choice is perhaps not surprising. As Gundelach notes, Denmark ranks among the European Union’s most chauvinist member states, in that Danes surpass most other European inhabitants when it comes to strong support for the ideas of ‘living in one’s own nation as opposed to another,’ that ‘one’s nation is better than most others’ and that ‘people should support their own nation even when it does something wrong’ (Gundelach 2001, 71).1 1 The only question that Gundelach reports Danes as having coming in second place is in support for the idea that ‘the world would be better off if other nations were more similar to (the nation of the respondent).’ Here, Austrians came in first with 23% supporting the idea, while Danes came in second with 21%.


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Owing to the ‘staying power of nationalism’ (Cederman 2001, 150), it may be expected that the nation-state will win out over newer spatial constructs, such as cross-border regions, that have not yet had time to take on a specific institutional and governmental shape and thereby secure people’s loyalties or interest. But what of the idea of Europe? Many recent studies of European identity, such as that by Schild (2001), opt to test for the relative strength of European identity in a given state by comparing it to levels of national identity. Far less frequent is the effort to compare levels of regional and European identity. Table 2 also presents results from a question in which respondents were asked to compare whether Øresund or European issues were of greater importance to them. Again, the ‘national division’ in terms of support for the Øresund remains. More than half of the Danes, who are often portrayed as turning their back on Europe, both in the initial rejection of the Maastricht Treaty and the subsequent rejection of the Euro, consider European issues to be of ‘more’ or ‘much more’ importance when compared to issues involving the Øresund. On the other hand, nearly sixty per cent of the Swedes rank Øresund issues to be of greater importance than European issues. Certainly, it would be tempting to make the argument that a lack of support by Danes for the European project does not necessarily translate into considering Europe unimportant. In fact, one may suggest that the issue of Europe possesses such salience primarily because of the dominant position that Europe has held on the recent Danish political agenda. However, in Nielsen’s review of the 1998 Danish parliamentary election, he observes that the issue of Europe only ranked eighth among voter’s key concerns (Nielsen 1999, 72). The data presented in table 3 casts additional doubt on this type of intuitive interpretation, and once again, reinforces an emerging picture of Danes as being substantially less in step with the elite visions of the Øresund project than are their Swedish counterparts. Respondents were asked, in separate questions, the level of attachment that they held for the Øresund region, the nation-state and Europe. The Danish rankings for ‘a great deal’ of attachment placed Denmark first, Europe second, and the Øresund a very distant third. For Swedes, the placement of Europe and the Øresund region was reversed. A more telling comparison comes when considering whether respondents had ‘a great deal’/‘some’ attachment for either the Øresund region or Europe. Swedes expressed a small difference in positive attachment to these two regions, with nearly eighty per cent stating some degree of attachment to the Øresund and just over

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seventy per cent claiming attachment to Europe. For Danes though, just under a third expressed attachment to the Øresund, and slightly less than seventy per cent felt some attachment to Europe. On their own, the high levels of attachment to Europe are of interest. Darian-Smith (1999, 209) notes Denmark as one of the European publics with weakest levels of support for European integration, and Borre (2000) presents opposition to the European Union as one of the key issues triggering political alienation within Denmark. Table 3: Attachment of Øresund Inhabitants to Øresund region, Denmark/Sweden, and Europe (in per cent), May 2001. Attachment felt to Øresund region (N=814) Denmark Sweden side of side of Øresund Øresund Great deal Some Not very much None

Attachment felt to nation (Denmark or Sweden) (N=820) Denmark Sweden side of side of Øresund Øresund 78,49 63,73

Attachment felt to Europe (N=817) Denmark Sweden side of side of Øresund Øresund 26,37 17,68

11,99

34,51

19,9 28,78

44,08 17,38

17,26 2,84

28,72 5,54

42,52 22,09

53,03 22,47

39,33

4,03

1,42

2,02

9,03

6,82

However, the low levels of attachment for the Øresund on the part of Danes must give regional elites some degree of pause. While the current cross-border push towards integration only dates back to the late 1980s, the idea of an Øresund region is one that has surfaced throughout the past century in many different incarnations (Idvall 2000). Moreover, even this recent elite push for a cross-border region has been built very squarely on the idea of uniting two regions that have a historical bond. One of the many glossy books published (as a cross-border venture, naturally) on the ‘new region’ takes pains to stress, oddly, that it is nothing new at all. In the trilingual Our New Region (1999), the citizens of the ‘twin cities’ of Malmö and Copenhagen are presented as inhabitants that have no ‘other’, and are only ‘we’. Moreover, this ‘we’ is told that it shares a regional history: a region was divided in 1658, but the opening of the bridge link in 2000 re-unites the historical Øresund region. Why have these cumulative efforts to foster an Øresund identity had such little impact on Danes,


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while Swedes appear quite open to embracing the Øresund as a space that has relevance for their lives? In the following section, I address how different forms of structure may stand behind these varying sets of attitudes towards the Øresund regionalisation process. Moreover, I call attention to demographic patterns of difference that are a distinguishing feature of the Øresund region when compared to many other cross-border areas. Structure: shaping outlook, shaping possibilities As Gourevitch (1986, 21) has observed, ‘(i)n an economic crisis social actors, affected by their situation, evaluate alternative policies in relation to the likely benefits or costs.’ Broadly stated, this political economy approach argues (with varying degrees of subtlety) that actors’ choices and interests are either determined outright, or more generally influenced, by their specific placement in the economy. As part of what is commonly labelled a structural approach within political science, large-scale economic forces, along with ‘state-building, secularisation, political and scientific revolution, and (...) instruments for the communication and diffusion of ideas’ are thought to be generative of ‘a calculus of cognitive and behavioural probabilities by creating situational orders within which individuals think, interact, and choose’ (Katznelson 1997, 83). In this section, it is argued that various structural conditions have helped shape the Danish and Swedish disparity in attitudes towards Øresund regionalisation. However, in order to do so, the definition of structure, as advanced by scholars such as Gourevtich and Katznelson, needs to be expanded. In particular, while economic forces play a major role, different categorisations of space must also be considered. Specifically, as demonstrated in interview data, Swedish inhabitants of the Øresund see a unique opportunity in the regionalisation process. As a result of the bridge, they are no longer inhabitants of the third-largest Swedish city, on the very peripheral edge of Sweden. Rather, they are just across the water from the Danish capital, and Europe as a whole. However, an understanding of the contrasting levels of importance assigned to the Øresund region in Denmark and Sweden requires relating these attitudes to recent economic fortunes of the region. While Wichmann Mathiessen (2000, 176) alludes to the role of economics in the construction of the Øresund region, labelling it ‘an ambition to lift Copenhagen to a higher position in the European hierarchy by integrating the Danish and Swedish areas of the Öresund,’ most other scholars are

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far more explicit in accounting for how economic forces have played a determining role in the Øresund process. Jerneck (2000a, 201) paints an image of both Copenhagen and Malmö as experiencing sharp economic dislocation in the latter decades of the twentieth century. Copenhagen’s difficulties, far from the ‘simple’ urban decay being faced in many American and European cities, was compounded by a national government that preferred to allocate funds to outlying peripheral regions as opposed to the urban centre (Tangkjær 2000, 120). For its part, Malmö’s economic difficulties are captured in Billing’s account (2000) of the profound collective shock experienced by Malmö in the 1990s when, over a period of just two months, a number of well-known industries that had provided large numbers of stable jobs announced that they were closing down. The most prominent example of these was the SAAB automobile factory in Malmö, whose establishment in the late 1980s had been intended to offset the loss in jobs when shipbuilding declined in the mid-1980s (Billing 2000, 6). Thus, there is no question that both sides of the Øresund were faced with formidable economic challenges, and that the most recent Øresund regionalisation process is primarily an attempt at reversing the impact of these cumulative economic difficulties. Scholars are clear on this point, with Berg and Löfgren (2000, 10) describing the regionalisation process as having the potential to ‘invigorate the stagnating city of Malmö.’ Jerneck’s (2000a, 197) account of the drive towards regionalisation refers to ‘a collaborative effort (being) made to establish the two cities as attractive places to foreign investors.’ However, while this type of detail serves to document the role of economic context in shaping the drive towards a region, it does little to account for the varied ‘national’ mass attitudes towards the Øresund process. As noted above, both sides of the sound have recently faced economic hardship. On the Danish side of the Øresund, this hardship stemmed from both urban decline and national policies unfavourable to the capital region. On the Swedish side, these hardships had, at their core, the rapid and concentrated de-industrialisation that gripped Malmö in the early 1990s. However, despite the presence of economic hardship on both sides of the Øresund, one has to wonder why it is that Øresund inhabitants as a whole have not responded with equal enthusiasm to the ongoing development of the cross-border Øresund region. The answer to this lies in understanding, first, that while economic hardship was present on both sides of the sound, it had a relatively stron-


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ger and more concentrated character on the Swedish side of the Øresund. It is important to recall that the early 1990s saw a much more pronounced relative decline in Skåne. Second, economics is not the sole structural force. One’s spatial placement within the Øresund, as either an inhabitant of the greater Copenhagen area, or as an inhabitant of the peripheral outlying county of Skåne, further helps clarify the distinction among attitudes presented in the previous section. In what may be thought of as a bright lights, big city syndrome, residents of Skåne view the Øresund regionalisation process as a way to become integrated into what is perceived as an exciting and vibrant European capital.

Figure 2: Une mployme nt by pe rc e nt a ge in t he Øre sund re gion

20 18 16 14

Cope nha ge n Cit y

12

Fre de riksbe rg Cit y

10

Cope nha ge n Count y 8

Ma lmö

6 4 2 0 1990

1991

1992

1993

1994

1995

1996

1997

1998

1999

2000

The role of relative economic hardship is displayed in Figure 2, which presents unemployment figures for the 1990s in both halves of the Øresund metropolitan area. While the early 1990s saw upturns in the unemployment rates for the three areas comprising the Greater Copenhagen area (Copenhagen city, Frederiksberg city and Copenhagen county), these increases were largely gradual. In Malmö, however, the 1993 unemployment figures doubled to twelve per cent. Moreover, this doubled level remained constant throughout the middle years of the decade, and it was not until 1997 that the first one per cent decline occurred. Even today, whereas unemployment has nearly been cut in half in both Copenhagen city and Frederiksberg city, the level of unemployment in Malmö remains double that of its 1990 level. Thus, when we look to see how

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material factors may have shaped the different responses to, and interest in, the Øresund regionalisation process, a plausible culprit is the pronounced spike in unemployment that was sustained in the mid-1990s. Billing notes the extreme rhetorical flourishes that accompanied the demise of industry in Malmö, particularly upon SAAB’s announced departure, with public figures speaking of ‘a death blow for Malmö, worse than the closing of (shipyards)’ and ‘a catastrophe for Malmö’ (Billing 2000, 6). This, of course, does not deny the difficulties of Copenhagen’s own economic situation, but rather it suggests that Copenhagen did not experience a similar instantaneous shock produced by the concentrated flight in industry. The severity of job loss in industrial manufacturing on the Swedish side of the Øresund carries even greater weight when one considers that manufacturing jobs account for a larger proportional share of total jobs on the Swedish side of the Øresund than on the Danish side. According to a jointly issued report by Statistics Denmark and Statistics Sweden, manufacturing jobs accounted for a full fifth of all jobs on the Swedish side of the Øresund, while they made up only thirteen per cent of the Danish Øresund’s job base (Statistics Denmark & Statistics Sweden 1999). Thus, the concentrated loss of Swedish industrial manufacturing jobs, particularly when the loss of the jobs contributed played a larger role in the overall structure of employment, helps to explain the differing response between Swedes and Danes to the Øresund as a fix for the economic shock of the early 1990s. Lending credence to the view that economic structure has played some role in higher Swedish levels of support for the Øresund project is a recent private Swedish bank report on regional economic development. The authors note that while, in general, industry ‘has begun to exploit the possibilities of the Öresund’ with an across the board increase in investment, the changes brought on by the regionalisation process are ‘most notable in Skåne’ and can be seen in changes in Malmö’s appearance: Ten years after the SAAB car factory decided to close, Malmö has wiped out its trademark as an industrial and working class town, is now betting on luxury condos by the harbor, has become a student town, and once again assumed its roll as the sister city to Copenhagen. Its power of attraction has increased and a pronounced economic upturn is under way (Nelson Edberg and Olshov 2000, 14).

In assessing the impact of regionalisation on Copenhagen, the authors are far more guarded, noting only that Copenhagen has the potential to switch its status to that of Scandinavian metropole.


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However, while comparatively harder economic times may produce an incentive for seeing the Øresund project as a positive development, this is not to argue that macro-level material forces are the sole determinant in shaping attitudes and behaviour. When the sharp distinction between Danes and Swedes with regard to the Øresund region was revealed in the survey data, it became desirable to augment these quantitative surveys with semi-structured interviews. Thus, an initial round of interviews was conducted in late 2001 in the Swedish university town of Lund, ten minutes outside of Malmö. Forty-six inhabitants, primarily university students, were asked a number of set questions regarding the regionalisation process, but were given ample freedom to move the discussion in directions of their own choosing. One recurring theme in the interviews is the bright lights, big city syndrome, as found in frequent comments such as, ‘the Danes are better in the respect that they have a bigger city.’ When interviewees were asked to discuss who stood more to gain from the cross-border Øresund regionalisation process, the response was nearly unanimous that Swedes were the chief beneficiaries given the appeal of a major European capital just across the water. One twenty-five year old man offered the following explanation: The Danes aren’t really very keen on the integration process. The Swedes think, ‘God, this would be great,’ but you understand what I mean. Copenhagen is a big town, and Malmö is a pretty small town, so, of course, you always look towards what is bigger.

This comment brings to mind work done in psychology and geography on spatial stratification and hierarchy (Golledge 1993, 26). This avenue of research has generally been concerned with developing ranked lists of various spaces (i.e. neighbourhood, city, county, etc.), as well as how these hierarchies are used to make sense of one’s environment. Thus, it is obvious that once determined, such rankings can also assist in evaluating those spatial locations for their degree of desirability. One twenty-four year old male interviewee was adamant that the larger urban area, regardless of its location, would always be the preferable choice for regional inhabitants, stating that: I think it’s more interesting for people in Malmö to go to Copenhagen, a big city, than it is in reverse. If the Swedish side, or Malmö, was the biggest, then it would be more interesting for the Danes to come here. I think the matter is about size and importance.

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One twenty-three year old Swedish woman put herself in the place of her Danish peers just across the water and speculated as to why she thought the Øresund as a project held lower levels of interest for them: If I were to live in Copenhagen, I would think, ‘Okay, nice (...) we could get some ‘Øresund-exchange’ from Malmö, but we’re still a really big city (...)’ If you live in Malmö, in Skåne, you’re like, ‘Oh my God, it’s Copenhagen, it’s perfect,’ I mean it has so many options.

Finally, an eighteen year old female who had recently moved to Skåne from the Swedish capital of Stockholm, despite finding the Danish language a significant impediment in her own desire to take up work or an education in Copenhagen, saw the bridge as a means to an end in terms of providing those leisure activities she now misses: ‘I love Copenhagen. I go there from time to time, since I come from Stockholm. I get kind of sick of this small city and I go there just to be in the capital city.’ Thus, while the elite rhetoric of the Øresund regionalisation process is of two ‘twin cities’ about to be reunited, the perceptions held by these Swedish inhabitants suggests a sharply different reality. Swedes express greater levels of support for the regionalisation process, and they appear to do so not just because of the economic opportunities that the Øresund has thus far brought to them, but because of a perception that the bridge earns them membership in a more exciting, urban community. For Danes, the explanation as to their relative lack of interest is, at first glance, less apparent. However, building on the above discussion, it is possible to develop an understanding of the lukewarm Danish relationship to the Øresund. From the perspective of structure, the lack of a large-scale job loss in the industrial manufacturing sector on the Danish side of the Øresund suggests that there hasn’t been a similar need to latch onto the Øresund project as a sudden injection of economic growth. Economic decline, while present, hadn’t been sudden or concentrated. Similarly, it is plausible to think that the spatial argument of Swedish attraction to Copenhagen works in reverse. Quite simply, for residents of Copenhagen, whose hometown is the subject of big city dreams held by many Swedish Øresund inhabitants, there may be fewer advantages in actively embracing a cross-border linkage: Skåne is smaller, with comparatively less in the way of entertainment and consumer options, nor is it a national seat of power as Copenhagen is. Even in terms of attitudes, one can see why Danes may be less inclined to support the Øresund, with high levels of Danish nationalism serving as a barrier to the emergence of


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regional identity. Gundelach points to this trade-off of identities when he observes that the constellation of highly nationalist Danish attitudes forms a ‘mechanism of national exclusion’ that decreases the probability of strong regional identities emerging in Denmark (Gundelach 2001, 79). Finally, a contrast with Skåne is once again necessary. While levels of regional identity may be low in the Danish Øresund, the comparably higher levels in Sweden can also be attributed to the presence of a longstanding belief that Skåne is a region distinct from the rest of Sweden, particularly Stockholm. For advocates of Skåne’s ‘independence’, the evolution of the Øresund is not just about the emergence of a crossborder region, it is also represents the weakening of ties to the national centre (Linde-Laursen 2000, 157). Thus, understanding the comparably low levels of support for the Øresund among Danes also requires understanding the conditions that produce what is potentially an unusually high level of regional identity among inhabitants of Skåne. A recent Danish newspaper article has shown one possible bright spot in the general lack of interest among Danes in the Øresund project. Between 1999 and 2001, the number of Danes who moved across the Øresund to live in Skåne has doubled, from 900 to 1800 (Politiken 1 January 2002). Certainly, for elites who have been attempting to increase active Danish involvement in this Øresund region, such a shift must be regarded as a positive development. After all, the official web site for the Øresund bridge has recently featured, on its Danish home pages, the profile of a Danish couple that has saved a substantial amount of their monthly budget by moving from Denmark to the outskirts of Malmö. Not only are there real savings to be had, the website reports, but Swedish housing tends to be much more spacious when compared with the available options to be had at similar prices in Denmark. Yet, such an outcome is somewhat ironic when seen from the perspective of crossborder integration. Far from creating a region where Swedes and Danes move back and forth without regard for the national border, the primary motivation for the rather limited Danish interest appears to be a difference in price levels. As Schack (2000) has observed, it is common to make the mistake that there is only one border at play in borderlands, when, in reality, there are a variety, each with relevance to a different layer in society. Thus, it is possible that as certain structural forces combine to make Swedes more inclined to the idea of the Øresund, the only forces that may have a similar impact for the Danes are those that hinder integration on equal terms.

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Ideas: the next barrier for the Øresund? This final section briefly considers what may be an emerging obstacle for longer-term, deeper integration in the Øresund region. The Øresund project is popularly portrayed as an effort to (re)-unite Swedes and Danes inhabiting a shared spatial region, with much of the accompanying rhetoric emphasizing the proximity between these two national peoples: a shared culture, shared language, shared history, etc. However, this portrayal of inhabitants in the Øresund region as being predominantly Danish or Swedish ignores the shifting demographic realities of the metropolitan Øresund region. In fact, the Øresund is increasingly a highly diverse ethnic borderland, particularly on the Swedish side. In Malmö, nearly forty per cent of the city’s roughly 262,000 inhabitants are considered to be of immigrant background. Moreover, among inhabitants with a nonSwedish background in Malmö, the three largest groups are ‘non-Scandinavian’ in origin: Yugoslavs, Poles and Bosnians (Billing 2000, 15). In Copenhagen city, the percentage of immigrants is significantly less, at just over seventeen per cent of the city’s approximately half million inhabitants.2 However, it is by no means the demographic figures themselves, showing the strong presence of immigrants, that constitute a barrier to cross-border integration. Rather, I will argue that the Danish government’s view of immigrants as a threat to Danish culture is a potential barrier for constructing a regional identity that emphasises the value of the Øresund’s multicultural population. This assessment builds on insights from the ideational literature in political science, which has been used to explain a wide range of policy outcomes. Blyth (2001, 4) neatly summarises one of the main contributions of the ideational approach by stating that ideas can be ‘conceptualised as cognitive locks.’ That is, new political ideas, once adopted, have the ability to exert an independent influence on subsequent policy developments in a given issue area. While ideas can be conceived of in very broad terms, such as an overall political worldview, Berman faults this view as being too inclusive to have any explanatory power. Thus, she proposes a more narrow conception of ideas, which she labels ‘program2 Sweden defines immigrants as individuals residing in Sweden who were born outside of Sweden, or those who have at least one parent born outside of Sweden. Denmark defines immigrants as individuals residing in Denmark who were born outside of Denmark, or those who have both parents born outside of Denmark. Thus, if the Swedish standard for determining immigrant status is adopted, the Danish numbers should be somewhat higher.


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matic beliefs,’ and defines these as ‘guidelines for practical activity and for the formulation of solutions to everyday problems’ (Berman 1998, 2021). The significance of ideas, as they are increasingly understood in political science, is that in many instances they provide a type of constraint that will limit the paths chosen by actors involved in a certain sphere of policy-making. As Jerneck (2000b, 36) observes, ‘a chosen path excludes other alternatives: it is a situation of lock-in.’ What programmatic beliefs of the new Danish government may contribute to a ‘situation of lock-in’ and have a negative effect on integration in the Øresund region? The most telling remark of the new government’s orientation on immigrants and foreign culture occurred in a newspaper interview with Bertel Haarder, the minister for European questions and integration. When asked broadly about a multi-cultural Denmark, one of Haarder’s comments was that ‘In Denmark, it is the Danes who decide’ and that ‘it is absolute nonsense’ to assume that other cultures are equal to that of Denmark (Politiken 1 December 2001). In particular, these concerns over foreign cultures are directed at non-Western, non-European immigrants. In the months leading up to the official election period, the radical Liberal party interrogated party members with an Islamic background who sought positions as party candidates. Entirely reminiscent of the way in which many Americans were convinced in 1960 that John F. Kennedy’s Catholic faith implied he would be loyal to the Vatican and not to the U.S. Constitution were he elected President, these individuals were relentlessly questioned by the press as to whether they supported ‘Danish values’ of opposing arranged marriages, opposing the death penalty, and supporting other political and cultural freedoms. More recently, officials in the new government, while voicing support for the introduction of English as a school subject at an earlier age, have hinted that providing public funding for immigrant children to have nativelanguage schooling may soon cease. The justification for such a move is not only that the freed-up funds will be available for increased Danishlanguage learning, but also that there is no evidence that learning in a foreign language will increase the speed at which one is integrated into Danish society. The public debate and official tone regarding immigrants is sharply different in Sweden. Exemplifying the dismay that many in Sweden feel with the harsh tone used towards immigrants in Denmark, a leading Swedish daily newspaper concluded its post-election editorial dissection of the Danish government with two words of disgust: ‘Goodnight Den-

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mark’. Whereas Danish public officials are considering the possibilities of stripping immigrants of special privileges, in Sweden, key Social Democrats have been celebrating a recent study demonstrating that foreignborn Swedes have a higher level of educational ambition than do their Swedish-born peers, and have urged Swedish employers to head out to immigrant neighbourhoods and ‘recruit the engineers of the future!’ (Dagens Nyheter, 26 December 2001). These actions and rhetoric at the national level of the two states suggests diverging approaches towards an issue that is a challenge to many previously homogenous European societies. But, how could these ideas have an impact on cross-border integration and the evolution of the Øresund project? It is unlikely that such programmatic beliefs will have any noticeable impact on the more immediate questions of Øresund integration, such as increasing the flow of inhabitants in search of shops, housing and education on either side of the border. Yet, cross border cooperation does not exist solely along a consumer, or service-oriented dimension. Rather, all spheres of social activity are involved in efforts at integration, including those concerning rights, legitimacy and governance. Scott’s work on European transborder governance has pointed out the opportunities inherent in these more advanced efforts at cross-border cooperation, noting that in some cases, these efforts have resulted in genuine ‘empowerment of a new local and regional dynamism (...) developing within transborder regionalist projects’ (Scott 2000, 115). However, his overall assessment is pessimistic, as captured in the observation that efforts at governance across borders in Europe ‘have worked against informal integration by maintaining an administrative, top-down, and bureaucratic character that as yet has not sufficiently encouraged citizen action and public-sector participation’ (Scott 2000, 114-115). Sounding a similar, albeit more neutral tone, Kramsch (2001, 185) observes that ‘possibilities for localised governance within European cross-border settings are inevitably conditioned by the broader political and legal frameworks within which they are embedded at the national (...) scales.’ Taken jointly, these observations suggest some problems ahead for those in search of a more comprehensive style of cross-border Øresund integration, i.e. one that recognises the diverse background and multicultural background of a significant portion of the region’s inhabitants. Paasi (2001, 25) is correct when he observes that regions have been sites ‘where people have attacked immigrants and refugees in the name of local identity.’ However, in this case, local identity may not be either the


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culprit or the excuse. Rather, if we recall that cross-border cooperation efforts, however progressive an image they may connote, are embedded in national frameworks, then certain limitations must be acknowledged. If the current government of Denmark has profiled itself on the basis of a suspicion of immigrants and foreign cultures, then what are the prospects that continued binational cooperation on the development of the Øresund region will emphasise the prominence and potential of its immigrant population? Among regional elites involved in the Øresund project, there is already substantial concern. The vice-president of the Southern Swedish Chamber of Industry and Commerce has commented that in the Danish elections, ‘Danishness was central. This, unfortunately, goes against the image of increased openness, internationalisation and globalisation that are strong features of the Öresund’ (Sydsvesnka Dagbladet, 22 November 2001). Moreover, in the months since the election, the difference over immigration policy between the Danish and Swedish governments has moved from being an issue of potential conflict to one of open and sharp disagreement. The Swedish integration minister, Mona Sahlin, has joined forces with Belgian and French colleagues to issue a letter expressing concern over the new Danish approach to immigration and integration. For its part, the Danish government has tried to dismiss this criticism as the product of traditional left-right differences. Haarder recently stated on Swedish television that ‘Social Democrats just want to demonise a bourgeois government. Mona Sahlin just talks and talks. We know that.’ However, the rift appears to go far beyond the left-right spectrum. Folkpartiet, Sweden’s Liberal Party and sister party to the governing Danish governing Liberals, has stated that Haarder is untrustworthy and curtailed its relations with the Danish government (Politiken, 21 May 2002). Underlying Denmark’s dismissal of Swedish criticism is a sentiment that runs counter not just to the Øresund project, but to crossborder cooperation in general. Haarder has stated that Danish integration and immigration policy is strictly a matter of domestic Danish concern, adding tersely that while Swedes have the right to govern Sweden as they see fit, Danes must be able to do the same (DR’s TV-avisen 20 May 2002). Conclusion This article has argued that elite efforts to establish a ‘common identity’ among Øresund inhabitants, thereby producing both a potential Øresunder and an integrated cross-border region, depend on a variety of factors. First, survey data shows a consistent national divide within the Øresund

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when it comes to matters of support for the regionalisation process. Swedes are more inclined to offer support and interest in the process, while Danes are significantly less enthusiastic. By situating these findings within both economic and spatial forms of structure, they become more easily interpreted. Swedes consider the Øresund project of greater importance for their lives owing to both the pronounced economic decline from which Skåne is now emerging, as well as to their smaller size when compared to Copenhagen. Wilson and Donnan (1998, 21) observe that while a ‘boundary line itself may not shift (...) the relations across it as well as within it – between a border people and their political core – may be subject to repeated redefinition.’ This process is undoubtedly underway for Swedish inhabitants of the Øresund, who now have new physical infrastructure for crossing the sound, as well as supporting policies, institutions and investment to credit for a transformation from ‘a down at the heel blue-collar backwater to a vibrant metropolis’ (Financial Times, 12 December 2001). However, for the cultural entrepreneurs guiding the Øresund regionalisation process, the Danes remain the more formidable of the challenges. As noted earlier, there is significant elite concern over the lack of Danish engagement in the Øresund, and there is an increased effort to provide Danes with greater knowledge on those aspects of the region that are thought to hold appeal: specifically, that of favourable prices on the Swedish side of the sound. To that extent, this article offers support for those that lament that ‘(t)he political vision of an integrated Øresund region is one where people travel around consuming goods and services’ (Malmö University web-site 2001). While pessimistic, such an assessment captures the reality quite well. Assessments of successful integration on the Swedish side are offered largely in terms of increased investment and job opportunities, and the lack of success on the Danish side is cast in terms of an inability to convince Danes to cross the bridge and spend kroner. Yet, should the vision move beyond that, and should both elites and inhabitants seek to augment the region’s impressive economic gains with attention to matters of citizen involvement in cross-border governance, then the challenge becomes even more formidable. Certainly, the region can boast a number of concrete economic accomplishments, above and beyond unemployment having been reduced by at least half in many parts of the metropolitan Øresund area. The Øresund has been quickly transformed into Scandinavia’s Silicon Valley, and now has even more IT


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employees than in greater Stockholm. Furthermore, Malmö University has expanded its enrollment to 18,000 students in the four years since it opened in 1998. Yet, to focus on matters of cross-border governance is also to focus on the potential clash between a highly restrictive programmatic set of Danish beliefs towards immigrants and foreigners, and a multi-cultural Øresund population. If cross-border governance, and not just cross-border consumerism or economic development, is to find a place on the Øresund policy agenda, as Paasi (2001, 25) notes, it must be done in a way where new ‘non-state locations for citizenship can be organised (in a way) that do not ignore human diversity.’ To that extent, the story of cross-border cooperation in the Øresund is one marked by tension. While elites move actively forward with measurable success in producing a unified economic space, the demographic redefinition of the region has the latent ability to challenge the prevailing image of what it means to be an Øresund-er. How these two trends meet, and the extent to which they will be combined to expand the possibilities for cross-border cooperation, remains to be seen. References Berg, Per Olof and Orvar Löfgren. 2000. Studying the Birth of a Transnational Region. In Invoking a Transnational Metropolis: The Making of the Øresund Region, eds. Per Olof Berg, Anders Linde-Laursen and Orvar Löfgren, 7-26. Lund: Studentlitteratur. Berman, Sheri. 1998. The Social Democratic Moment: Ideas and Politics in the Making of Interwar Europe. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Billing, Peter. 2000. Skildra världar? Malmös 1990-tal i ett kort historiskt perspektiv. Malmö: Malmö Stad. Blyth, Mark. 2001. The Transformation of the Swedish Model: Economic Ideas, Distributional Conflict, and Institutional Change. World Politics 54(1): 1-26. Borre, Ole. 2000. Critical Issues and Political Alienation in Denmark. Scandinavian Political Studies 23(4): 285-309. Cederman, Lars-Erik. 2001. Nationalism and Bounded Integration: What it Would Take to Construct a European Demos. European Journal of International Relations 7(2): 139-174. Danish Government, 1999. Danmark som foregangsland: Øresundsregionen – nye, kreative vækstmiljøer. Copenhagen. Darian-Smith, Eve. 1999. Bridging Divides: The Channel Tunnel and English Legal Identity in the New Europe. Berkeley: University of California Press. Franck, Thomas M. 1996. Clan and Superclan: Loyalty, Identity and Community in Law and Practice. American Journal of International Law 90(3): 359-383.

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Golledge, Reginald G. 1993. Geographical Perspectives on Spatial Cognition. In Behavior and Environment: Psychological and Geographical Approaches, eds. Tommy Gärling and Reginald G. Golledge, 16-46, New York: Elsevier. Gourevitch, Peter. 1986. Politics in Hard Times: Comparative Responses to International Economic Crises. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Gundelach, Peter. 2000. Joking Relationships and National Identity in Scandinavia. Acta Sociologica Vol. 43: 113-122. Gundelach, Peter. 2001. National identitet i en globaliseringstid. Dansk Sociologi No 1: 63-80. Idvall, Markus. 2000. The Region as Sensuous Geography. In Invoking a Transnational Metropolis: The Making of the Øresund Region, eds. Per Olof Berg, Anders Linde-Laursen and Orvar Löfgren, 255-276. Lund: Studentlitteratur. Jerneck, Magnus. 2000a. East Meets West. Cross-border Co-operation in the Öresund – a Successful Case of Transnational Region-building? In Local and Regional Governance in Europe: Evidence from Nordic Regions, eds. Janerik Gidlund and Magnus Jerneck, 197-230. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Jerneck, Magnus. 2000b. Europeanization, Territoriality and Political Time. Yearbook of European Studies Vol. 14: 27-49. Katznelson, Ira. 1997. Structure and Configuration in Comparative Politics. In Comparative Politics: Rationality, Culture and Structure, eds. Mark Irving Lichbach and Alan S. Zuckerman, 81-112, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kramsch, Olivier. 2001. Towards Cosmopolitan Governance? Prospects and Possibilities for the Maas-Rhein Euregio. In Borders Matter: Transboundary Regions in Contemporary Europe, eds. Gregg Bucken-Knapp and Michael Shack, 173-192, Aabenraa: IFG Press Linde-Laursen, Anders. 1995. Small Differences – Large Issues: The Making and Remaking of a National Border. The South Atlantic Quarterly 94(4): 11231144. Linde-Laursen, Anders. 2000. Bordering Improvisations Centuries of Identity Politics. In Invoking a Transnational Metropolis: The Making of the Øresund Region, eds. Per Olof Berg, Anders Linde-Laursen and Orvar Löfgren, 137-164. Lund: Studentlitteratur. Lousdal, S. and K. Sihm. 1997. Branding the Øresund Region as a Tourist Destination. Copenhagen: SAMS Löfgren, Orvar. 1999. Crossing Borders: The Nationalization of Anxiety Ethnologica Scandinavica Vol. 29: 5-27. Nelson Edberg, Monica and Anders Olshov. 2000. Specialstudie: Regionernas ekonomi. Stockholm: MeritaNordbanken. Nielsen, Hans Jørgen. 1999. The Danish Election 1998. Scandinavian Political Studies 22(1): 67-81. Our New Region. 1999. City of Copenhagen and City of Malmö. Paasi, Anssi. 2001. Europe as a Social Process and Discourse: Considerations of Place, Boundaries and Identity. European Urban and Regional Studies 8(1): 7-28.


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Schack, Michael. 2000. On The Multicontextual Character of Border Regions. In Borders, Regions, and People, eds. Martin van der Velde and Henk van Houtum, 202-219, London: Pion. Schild, Joachim. 2001. National v. European Identities? French and Germans in the European Multi-Level System. Journal of Common Market Studies 39(2): 331-51. Scott, James W. 2000. Euroregions, Governance, and Transborder Cooperation. In Borders, Regions, and People, eds. Martin van der Velde and Henk van Houtum, 104-115, London: Pion. Statistics Denmark & Statistics Sweden. 1999. Øresund – Figures about the Region. Tangkjær, Christian. 2000. ‘Åbent Hus’ – Organiseringen omkring Øresundsregionen. Copenhagen: Copenhagen Business School. Wichmann Matthiessen, Christian. 2000. Bridging the Öresund: Potential Regional Dynamics, Integration of Copenhagen (Denmark) and Malmö-Lund (Sweden), A Cross-Border Project on the European Metropolitan Level. Journal of Transport Geography Vol. 8: 171-180. Wilson, Thomas M. and Hastings Donnan. 1998. Nation, State and Identity at International Borders. In Border Identities: Nation and State at International Frontiers, eds. Thomas M. Wilson and Hastings Donnan, 1-30, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Winn, Neil. 2001. In Search of Europe’s Internal and External Borders: Politics, Security, Identity and the European Union. Perspectives on European Politics and Society 1(1): 19-48.



SHIFTING THRESHOLDS, CONTESTED MEANINGS: GOVERNANCE, CROSS-BORDER CO-OPERATION AND THE ULSTER UNIONIST IDENTITY Cathal McCall Abstract Cross-border (North/South) co-operation between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland was an indelible feature of the form of governance provided by the Belfast Good Friday Agreement (1998). Previous efforts to establish North/South co-operation had all foundered but the establishment and initial operation of the Agreement’s cross-border institutions proved to be uncontroversial. However, during its implementation, other areas of the Agreement gave Ulster unionists more pressing cause for concern. These areas of concern included the release of paramilitary prisoners, police reform, the ‘decommissioning’ of Irish Republican Army (IRA) weaponry, and the unionist perception that the ‘Britishness of Northern Ireland’ was being actively eroded. These concerns served to emphasise and strengthen political and cultural borders between communities at a regional and local level within Northern Ireland. They also threatened the proAgreement unionists’ contestation of unionist ideological orthodoxy, a contestation that was undertaken in an attempt to adapt the Ulster unionist identity to the shifting thresholds of the state. The structure of state power in Europe has undergone fundamental change since 1945, not least because of the experience of globalisation/ internationalisation, the development of the European Union (EU), and

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their combined effect in rendering state borders permeable. Where once a European national/nation-state central government could claim to exercise legal, political and popular sovereignty within a specific territorial domain, increasingly a system of governance pertains whereby an amalgam of governmental and non-governmental organisations strive to attain collective purposes and goals. In the EU context, transterritorial co-operation across member states’ borders has begun to underscore a system of multilevel governance. While popular sovereignty remains the preserve of the nation-state, it has relinquished a measure of legal sovereignty to the ‘supranational’ EU level. Though the extent to which political sovereignty has been transferred from member states to the EU is disputed, the EU represents an extension of political space beyond the territorial border of the nation-state and, as such, is taking the form of a transterritorial, multilevel polity (Marks 1993). The Belfast Good Friday Agreement (1998) provided a regional form of governance for Northern Ireland that reflects the transterritorial, multilevel polity of the EU because it has structural implications for the whole of the British Isles. Ostensibly, the Agreement was a milestone in a concerted collective effort aimed at ending a violent conflict that had existed for three decades and involved Irish republicans, Ulster loyalists and United Kingdom (UK) state security forces. The multilevel Northern Ireland, North/South and British-Irish institutional infrastructure provided by the Agreement includes a territorial Northern Ireland Executive, Assembly and Civic Forum; a transterritorial, North/South [cross-border, island of Ireland] Ministerial Council and its Implementation Bodies; and a transterritorial British-Irish Council and British-Irish Intergovernmental Conference. John Hume, the former leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) in Northern Ireland, was the principal architect of this form of regional governance. He used his considerable influence with the Irish government, which, in turn, had developed a close co-operative relationship with the UK government regarding Northern Ireland conflict resolution, to ensure that his EU-inspired design for regional governance formed the basis of the institutional arrangements provided by the Agreement. In deciding upon the institutional infrastructure for regional governance, signatories to the Agreement1 observed three principles: 1 Signatories to the Belfast Good Friday Agreement (1998) included leading members of the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), the political representatives of the Irish

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transterritorialism, embodied in structures of governance that reach beyond the territorial border of the state; consent, whereby the constitutional position of Northern Ireland in the UK cannot be changed without the agreement of the majority community (currently the Ulster unionist community)2; and inclusivity, whereby previously marginalised groups, in this case Irish nationalists and republicans, as well as feminists, are brought into the system of governance, alongside Ulster unionists/loyalists. Provision for the nominal inclusion of non-governmental participants in this system of regional governance, by means of consultation, was also made through the establishment of a Civic Forum as part of the Agreement’s infrastructure. The founding principles of these new arrangements resonate with those of emergent EU multilevel governance. This essay considers changing forms of governance and cross-border co-operation in relation to the Ulster unionist communal identity. ‘Shifting thresholds’ examines the changing structural context for Northern Ireland and the Ulster unionist identity, a context shaped by a developing form of transterritorial, multilevel governance in the EU that prioritises cross-border co-operation, and transformed by the Agreement’s provision for a regional form of multilevel governance affecting institutional arrangements for Northern Ireland, the UK, the island of Ireland and the British Isles. ‘Contested meanings’ assesses the impact of these changes on the Ulster unionist identity by focusing particularly on the post-Agreement internal challenge to the traditional ideology of unionism. That ideology has prioritised exclusion with regard to Irish nationalists/republicans in government and territorialism with regard to state borders, especially the one between the UK and the Republic of Ireland. Changing power relations between the Ulster unionist/loyalist community and the Irish nationalist/republican community in Northern Ireland are considered in this context. nationalist/republican communities in Northern Ireland (the SDLP and Sinn Féin), those from more minor political groupings and the UK and Irish governments. 2 Article 1, paragraph (ii) of the Belfast Good Friday Agreement (1998) states that the two governments ‘recognise that it is for the people of the island of Ireland alone, by agreement between the two parts respectively and without external impediment, to exercise their right of self-determination on the basis of consent, freely and concurrently given, North and South, to bring about a united Ireland, if that is their wish, accepting that this right must be achieved and exercised with and subject to the agreement and consent of a majority of the people of Northern Ireland’. Ulster unionists/loyalists currently represent approximately 52 per cent of the Northern Ireland voting population and Irish nationalists/republicans approximately 45 per cent.

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The argument of the essay is that shifting thresholds of the state and a repositioning and strengthening Irish nationalist/republican ‘Other’ provided the impetus for pro-Agreement unionists to contest the traditional ideology of the Ulster unionist identity, albeit reluctantly. Territorialism and transterritorialism regarding the Irish border, and inclusion and exclusion regarding Irish nationalists and republicans in government, are the principles on which the meaning of the Ulster unionist identity has been contested, and which will determine the future direction of that communal identity and the governance of Northern Ireland. Ulster unionists of all hues have come to regard cultural politics as a key battleground for their identity, and the identity of Northern Ireland generally, because the traditional unionist position in terms of territory and political power has been compromised by the Agreement (1998). Therefore, culture is considered as a salient factor in determining the outcome of internal unionist contestation. Shifting thresholds The Ulster unionist identity has had a thirty-year experience of shifting thresholds of the state, changing power relations with its Irish nationalist ‘Other’, and a corresponding check on its political and cultural hegemony in Northern Ireland. Until the Agreement (1998), unionist leaders prioritised the territorial sovereignty of the UK state. Consequently, they resisted sharing power with Irish nationalists north of the border and opposed formalised political cross-border co-operation. However, with the Agreement, unionists were split between a pro-Agreement faction, represented mainly by leading members of the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), and an anti-Agreement faction, represented mainly by the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and dissident members of the UUP. The proAgreement faction hesitantly began sharing power with Irish nationalists/republicans in Northern Ireland and acquiesced in transterritorial, cross-border co-operation between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. To varying degrees, the anti-Agreement faction wishes to exclude Irish nationalists/republicans from governance and reassert Northern Ireland’s formal-legal sovereignty within the UK. Consequently, it is possible to claim that, in response to the shifting thresholds of the state, the meaning of the Ulster unionist identity has been contested fundamentally. The primary features of a modern state are commonly regarded to be the monopoly of effective violence and the maintenance of the territorial


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border (Tilly 1990, 1). State centralisation and hierarchical policy-making within the context of secure state borders have come to characterise modern government. The relationship between Ulster unionists and the Westminster centre is complicated by an insecurity resulting from the fear of sell-out to the Irish republic by perfide Albion. However, partly because of the insecurity that this threat helps generate, unionists have traditionally held secure state borders to be of paramount importance. In 1996, an influential unionist think-tank, the Cadogan Group, remained focused on the necessity of maintaining the UK territorial border, especially the one with the Republic of Ireland (1996, 24). In the fledging system of EU multilevel governance a member state’s territorial border is viewed as an obstacle to be overcome in the formation of a collegiate approach to problem-solving rather than a structural necessity for communal identity. Furthermore, multilevel governance is associated with inclusive attempts to draw into the policy-making process organisations, institutions, groups and actors from across and beyond the public sphere (Commission of the European Communities 2001). Therefore, under the auspices of an abiding ‘what works’ ideological approach, EU leaders have recognised that some challenges cannot be met exclusively by the legal authority and policy instruments available at the nationstate level or the European level (Bulmer and Wessels 1987, 10). It is this contemporary ‘anti-ideology’ ideological approach that is the drivingforce behind the shifting thresholds of the state in the EU. While the proposed European Rapid Reaction Force offers a potential challenge to the territorially defined monopoly of effective force, it is transterritorial networking by nations, regions, organisations, institutions, groups and actors in the EU that has substantively marked a concrete contravention of the modern state territorial principle. A key role of the member state governments in this emerging system is to co-ordinate interested parties and actors in the pursuit of policy goals, a pursuit that is conducted within the increasingly complex transterritorial EU policymaking arena (Le Galès 1998).3 Most modern European nation-states have traditionally been associated with a central seat of government from which public power is exercised democratically within a bounded terri3 EU leaders have recognised that the developing system of governance requires an overhaul of the EU infrastructure itself. The Lisbon European Council meeting of March 2000 announced the reform of the hierarchical structure of the EU in order to become a ‘new open coordinator’ that can benefit a flexible problem-solving approach (Commission of the European Communities 2000).

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tory. However, member states have either embraced or acquiesced in the operation of the emerging transterritorial EU polity. Their involvement is in response to the contemporary economic, political and social challenges of globalisation and in the expectation that the EU will, variously: improve European competitiveness in the global economy; strengthen democracy in a global age through the development of a multilevel infrastructure; and build on EU social provisions. The UUP has been opposed to EU developments because of the implications for UK state sovereignty (UUP 1992). However, in the Northern Ireland context, UK sovereignty has been diminished because the right to seek independence from the UK is now invested in a majority of the people of Northern Ireland rather in the state. Furthermore, the Anglo-Irish Agreement (1985) impinged on UK state sovereignty because it granted the Irish government a ‘more that consultative but less than executive’ role in Northern Ireland’s affairs (Anderson 1998, 134). UUP Euro-scepticism was made more acute by the enthusiasm of the SDLP for European integration. UUP élites believed that SDLP enthusiasm for European integration emanated from its threat to the sovereignty of the UK. Their antipathy to integration was strengthened by the fact that the Anglo-Irish Agreement, which brought an infringement of sovereignty directly to the Irish border, had traceable Euro-roots. While also concerned with potential infringements on UK sovereignty, the DUP appeared to be more animated by the fact that the UK’s membership of the EU meant belonging to a polity where Catholics outnumbered Protestants by a ratio of almost 4:1 (DUP 1992). Both unionist parties witnessed the explicit turn in the erosion of member states’ sovereignty which occurred at the beginning of January 2002 with the introduction of the European single currency in twelve of the fifteen EU member states. Unionist Eurosceptic élites could draw some comfort from the fact that the UK was not one of the twelve, and from an opinion poll, conducted at the time, which suggested that twothirds of the British public were not in favour of the UK joining the single currency (Scotland on Sunday, 6 January 2002). However, at the beginning of a campaign to change British attitudes towards the Euro, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair declared to the SPD conference in Nuremberg on 20 November 2001 that: ‘New Labour today has no hesitation in viewing the development of European cooperation and integration as having major political benefits’ (Guardian, 21 November 2001). Three days later, in a speech to the European Research Institute at the Univer-


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sity of Birmingham, he signalled his desire to see Britain at the centre of the European integration process when he claimed that, ‘the tragedy for Britain has been that [British] politicians (...) have consistently failed (...) to appreciate the emerging reality of European integration’ (Irish Times, 24 November 2001). The nature and timing of these remarks indicated that a UK referendum on joining the single currency would be within two or three years and that, despite the anticipated political manoeuvrings of the UK Chancellor, Gordon Brown, the Yes lobby would receive the full support of the Labour government. The UK political commentator Andrew Rawnsley (2001) suggested that, as the Euro was seen to operate successfully and in a non-threatening manner (as notes and coins were found not to be embossed with the image of Hitler or Napoleon), then the Euro-scepticism of the British public would wane. The transterritorial nature of EU multilevel governance was reflected in the system of regional governance provided by the Belfast Good Friday Agreement (1998). In the Northern Ireland regional context, the most important transterritorial institutional development has been the establishment and operation of the North/South [cross-border, island of Ireland] Ministerial Council and its Implementation Bodies. The importance of these North/South arrangements was highlighted by the mandatory nature of the Implementation Bodies. The Implementation Bodies have concentrated on the specifics of cross-border, all-island co-operation in the areas of food safety, minority languages, trade and business development, aquaculture, waterways, as well as EU Programmes. Meanwhile, the North/South Ministerial Council has met regularly to discuss wide-ranging cross-border co-operation. These meetings have involved ministers with sectoral responsibility for education, health, transport, agriculture, the environment and tourism. Moreover, the Agreement (1998) stipulated that the territorial Assembly could not survive indefinitely without the transterritorial North/South Ministerial Council. Irish Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, highlighted the developmental potential of this North/South axis during the inauguration of the North/South Ministerial Council on 13 December 1999, when he declared that ‘there is no area of our economic and social life without the potential for enhanced cooperation and common action’ (Irish Times, 14 December 1999). The North/South Ministerial Council has enjoyed a measure of autonomy in pursuit of these goals, providing agreement is reached among participants that include Ulster unionist representatives. However, decisions reached in the Council that are ‘beyond the authority of those attending’ must be

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consented to by both the Oireachtas (Irish Parliament) and the Northern Ireland Assembly (Agreement, 1998, strand 2, para. 6). A developing EU multilevel relationship for Northern Ireland may be possible under the auspices of the North/South Ministerial Council. The Agreement stated that there is to be ‘The [North/South Ministerial] Council to consider the European Union dimension of relevant matters, including the implementation of EU policies and programmes and proposals under consideration in the EU framework’ (strand 2, para. 17). Furthermore, the Agreement also stipulated that: ‘Arrangements to be made to ensure that the views of the [North/South Ministerial] Council are taken into account and represented appropriately at relevant EU meetings’ (strand 2, para. 17). In deference to the sensitivities of pro-Agreement unionist leaders, the language was necessarily vague but offered the North/South Ministerial Council the potential to become, among other things, a novel institutional medium between the southern Irish nationstate, the northern Irish devolved region and the EU. The Council has been supported by a Special EU Programmes Body (SEUPB), one of the six North/South Implementation Bodies, with a head office in Belfast and regional offices in Omagh and Monaghan. SEUPB has been given initial responsibility for the management of PEACE II (2000-4), which is an important EU structural fund programme, as well as monitoring, promoting and implementation responsibilities regarding the ‘Common Chapter’ on cross-border co-operation contained in both Northern Ireland’s Structural Funds Programme and the Republic of Ireland’s National Development Plan (www.pfgni.gov.uk/ dec2001pfg/ch6.htm).4 Previously, central administrations in Dublin and 4 PEACE II (2000-4) allocates approximately €425m (stg£274m) to Northern Ireland and the border counties of the Republic of Ireland for five priority areas including economic renewal, social inclusion, locally-based regeneration, the creation of an outward and forward-looking region, and cross-border co-operation. The crossborder co-operation priority has been allocated €39.72m (stg£24.45m) or 9.3% of the total package in Northern Ireland and €39.72m in the border region of the Republic of Ireland. PEACE II forms part of a ‘special package’ under the Northern Ireland Community Support Framework (CSF), which also includes the Northern Ireland Programme for Building Sustainable Prosperity 2000-2006 (Transitional Objective 1 Programme), of €890m (£575m) (www.cec.org.uk/ni/funding.pdf). EU Community Initiatives with a cross-border focus include INTERREG which is aimed at encouraging indigenous cross-border co-operation in an attempt to off-set the negative effects of EU economic integration for peripheral regions. Between 2001-6, €170m (approximately stg£104m) of INTERREG III funding is available for Northern Ireland and the border region of the Republic of Ireland. The EU’s LEADER, EQUAL and


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Belfast had substantial responsibility for the delivery of both the Structural Funds and Community Initiatives. In light of this major acquisition of management authority, and monitoring, promoting and implementation responsibilities, SEUPB could prove to be an essential support body for the establishment of the North/South Ministerial Council as a key transterritorial institutional medium in Ireland’s EU affairs. However, with its wide-ranging and complex mandate SEUPB faced a number of challenges regarding its ability to balance management and development, all-island and cross-border aspects, as well as its position in a multilevel network stretching from the local, grassroots level to the supranational level (Laffan and Payne 2001, 14-15). The workings of the North/South Ministerial Council and Implementation Bodies were hampered by major transitional, post-conflict difficulties experienced during the implementation of the Agreement. These difficulties resulted in periods of suspension for territorial and transterritorial institutions; a ban, imposed by David Trimble (First Minister of Northern Ireland and leader of the UUP), on the participation of Sinn Féin ministers in North/South Ministerial Council meetings; and a later refusal of UUP ministers to attend any North/South Ministerial Council meeting that includes Sinn Fein members. There were also teething problems involving staff and resource transfer, and the shift of responsibility from existing territorial bodies to the transterritorial Implementation Bodies. However, when operational, the North/South Ministerial Council proceeded in a business-like manner with both ministers and civil servants appearing keen to develop an effective and accountable North/South infrastructure. Consensual decision-making, on both the North/South axis and the unionist/nationalist axis is held to be key to success for this transterritorial venture. In this regard, every sectoral council meeting has involved a northern minister from each community, one with sectoral responsibility and a ‘shadow minister’ to ensure transparency and build confidence between nationalists and unionists (Pollak 2001, 16). Pro-Agreement unionists accepted the North/South Ministerial Council and Implementation Bodies on condition that an East-West, URBAN II programmes are also sources of financial assistance, totalling €182m (approximately stg£111m) between 2001-6, as is the International Fund for Ireland (IFI) which is associated with the Anglo-Irish Agreement (1985). The IFI continued to receive stg£12m per annum (approximately €20m) from the EU between 2000 and 2002.

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British-Irish institution was established. Unionists hoped that the BritishIrish Council would provide a vehicle for countervailing co-operation and common action on the East-West axis and so strengthen the economic, political and cultural ties between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK. However, two factors suggest that this may not transpire. Firstly, the absence of East-West Implementation Bodies and the failure to have the fate of the British-Irish Council tied to that of the Assembly has rendered the British-Irish Council weak relative to the North/South Ministerial Council. Secondly, representatives from the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly may not have UK interests at the top of their respective agendas for British-Irish Council meetings. Instead, it is likely that these politicians will seek to capitalise on any further leakage of power from the central seat of government at Westminster in any British-Irish transterritorial context that may evolve (Bogdanor 1999, 298). After his elevation to the position of First Minister for Scotland, Jack McConnell appeared to be particularly keen to set that region’s devolutionist course, a course he may seek to consolidate in the British-Irish Council. These factors suggest that the British-Irish Council may, in fact, have the effect of loosening UK ties rather than strengthening them. Citing the active engagement of Irish Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, with the newly devolved administrations in Scotland and Wales as evidence of this new direction, it has been claimed that Irish diplomats and politicians ‘are sponsoring separatist instincts in component parts of the UK’ (Luckhurst 2001, 22). Unionists may conclude that the British-Irish Council is a potentially dangerous breeding ground for such sponsorship. However, Jeffery Donaldson (UUP, MP), an equivocal critic of the Agreement (1998), dismissed the conspiracy theory as being ‘far too sophisticated’. He argued that, ‘Labour is far too unionist with regard to Scotland and Wales for that to happen, and it is Labour (and the Liberal Democrats) that he [Bertie Ahern] has to do business with, not the Scottish and Welsh nationalists (interview with author, 3 December 2001). Danny Kennedy, a pro-Agreement Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) and leading UUP spokesperson representing a border constituency, remained keen on the idea of the British-Irish Council (interview with author, 20 November 2001). The Agreement (1998) also provided for a transterritorial British-Irish Intergovernmental Conference (IGC) between the UK and Irish governments to co-operate on non-devolved matters including prisons, policing and criminal justice. This IGC appears to replicate, and even enhance, the


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‘more than consultative but less than executive’ role conferred upon the Irish government by the Anglo-Irish Agreement (1985). In the BritishIrish IGC, the Irish Minister for Foreign Affairs shares the chair with the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. In this IGC, an intensification of co-operation on non-devolved matters is envisaged by the Agreement (1998). Indeed, in the event of a prolonged period of suspension for the Assembly, it seems likely that the British-Irish IGC will extend its remit to devolved matters and become much more prominent as a result. As noted earlier, multilevel governance stresses the role of non-governmental agencies in governance. At the Northern Ireland level, a Civic Forum was provided by the Agreement (1998, strand 1, para. 34) to act as a consultative body for the devolved Assembly and Executive, so enhancing the prospects for the institutionalisation of participative democracy in Northern Ireland. The transterritorial context was also in mind in the proposal, contained in the Agreement, that a cross-border civic body should be considered (strand 2, para. 19). Civic fora in transterritorial institutional systems of governance provide a means of building on the successive enfranchisements of the modern era because they offer the potential to enable marginalised participants from civil society to have a voice in the system of governance. Civic fora also have the potential to help plug some of the democratic holes that have appeared as the EU polity develops. Furthermore, as the voting public at large displays increasing disaffection with the processes of representative democracy, civic fora offer a timely alternative democratic forum. However, Northern Ireland’s track record of communal antagonism and exclusivism, which paradoxically boosts electoral turnout, provides a difficult obstacle in the way of achieving the inclusivist goal inherent in a civic forum (Jay 1995, 69). With an annual budget in the area of stg£370,000 (the sum allocated for the first year of its operation), it appeared that the Civic Forum faced a difficult task in becoming an effective conduit between civic society and the new political administration. With varying degrees of success, the new transterritorial institutions began delivering on the transterritorial promise of the Agreement (1998). However, with an annual budget of approximately stg£7bn, the territorial Executive and Assembly remained the vital territorial structures of the new system of regional governance for Northern Ireland. While power was devolved to Northern Ireland on 1 December 1999, the Northern Ireland Executive and Assembly, like the other institutions of the Agreement, suffered periods of suspension because of the failure of the IRA to

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‘decommission’ its weaponry to the satisfaction of pro-Agreement unionists. Yet despite the devolution/decommissioning dilemma, as well as the disparate policy views held by the political parties in the coalition executive, the Assembly eventually agreed its first Programme for Government on 26 February 2001 under a ‘what works’ anti-ideology ideological banner. Contested meanings Some scholars contend that, with the development of the EU, there has been a ‘softening’ of modern nationalism in Western Europe generally and a corresponding nurturing of ‘liberal nationalism’ (Tamir 1993; Anderson 2000). To promote the economic and cultural well-being of the nation in these changing structural circumstances, liberal nationalists challenge the modern emphasis on territorial boundedness and proclaim the virtues of transterritorial interconnection in an emerging EU multilevel polity. In turn, these changing identities are shaping emerging forms of regional and multilevel forms of governance. Informed by the civil rights consciousness of the 1960s, leaders of the SDLP in Northern Ireland have articulated a liberal nationalist discourse since the early 1980s. Invariably, such a discourse eschews the emphasis of modern nationalism on territorial absolutism, secure borders and centralised power, in favour of a concentration on communal rights, a commitment to cross-border co-operation and a ‘pooling of sovereignty’ in the EU context. Through the 1980s and 1990s, the liberal Irish national narrative contested the traditionalist Irish republican national narrative, articulated by Sinn Féin.5 This contest provided a vivid demonstration of Homi Bhabaha’s articulation of the nation as a product of fluid narration that constructs meanings, influences actions and provides selfconceptions (Bhabha, 1990). The then leader of the SDLP, John Hume, was a major protagonist in contesting the meanings, actions and self-conceptions of the Irish national narrative. He actively engaged the ambivalence of language to promote the idea of transterritorialism and its implications for the reconstruction of the Irish national narrative and, consequently, for Northern Ireland conflict resolution. In 1995 Hume asserted that the Irish national5

To a greater or lesser extent, the liberal national narrative of the SDLP is shared by the main political parties in the Republic of Ireland including, Fianna Fail, Fine Gael, Labour and the Progressive Democrats.


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ist exclusive attachment to territory had changed: ‘The nation-state is based on two problematic concepts, territory and the feelings of superiority of one people over another. In Ireland, the nationalist mindset was a territorial mindset. But we have changed. Our position now is that people have been divided, not a territory’ (in The Independent, 28 April 1995). Hume’s argument was that the EU principles of transterritorialism, inclusion and consent had gradually seeped into the Irish nationalist identity represented by the SDLP, rendering it liberal nationalist. The contestation of the Irish national narrative between liberal nationalists and militant republicans had commenced in earnest during 1989 with a series of meetings between Hume and the Sinn Féin President, Gerry Adams. A decade later, Sinn Féin had abandoned whole swathes of militant republican ideology, had signed up to the Belfast Good Friday Agreement and, in the process, had rendered the Irish republican identity fluid, non-essential and mutable (McCall 2001). In this light, it appeared that the SDLP’s liberal national narrative had overcome the traditional or modern nationalism of Irish republicanism. However, an ironic outcome of this ideological setback for traditional nationalism/republicanism in Northern Ireland was the practical eclipse of the SDLP by Sinn Féin in the percentage share of the northern nationalist/republican vote in the 2001 UK General Election. By attempting to disassociate itself from the morally ambivalent mantle of militant republicanism, while continuing to articulate a traditional nationalist rhetorical vision, Sinn Féin increased its electoral appeal as a strong political opposition to the Irish nationalist ‘Other’ – Ulster unionists. Whatever the electoral position of the SDLP vis-à-vis Sinn Féin after the Agreement, the liberal Irish national narrative had been integral to a repositioning of Irish nationalist/republican ideology regarding sovereignty and the state, as well as the development of an institutional framework for regional multilevel governance. As such, it provided a clear demonstration of the impact of a liberal Irish national narrative on the Irish nationalist/republican identity and on the development of an innovative form of regional multilevel governance. The SDLP advocated the three-strand approach to the Northern Ireland problem during the early 1990s that encompassed the North/South [island of Ireland] relationship, the British-Irish relationship, as well as the relationship between the Irish nationalist and Ulster unionist ethno-national communities within Northern Ireland. The three-strand (Northern Ireland, North/South, BritishIrish) negotiation on the future of Northern Ireland provided the frame-

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work for regional governance manifested in the Northern Ireland, North/South and British-Irish institutions as detailed in the Agreement (1998).6 In contrast to the transterritorial liberal Irish nationalist identity, the Ulster unionist state-centric identity has determined a predilection for the status quo, that is, Northern Ireland as an integral part of the union of Great Britain and Northern Ireland expressed through secure state borders, especially the one with the Republic of Ireland. Indeed, until the end of the twentieth century, the Ulster unionist identity relied on a strict formal-legal interpretation of state sovereignty, which implies secure borders, to give it meaning. Such reliance rendered the Ulster unionist identity fixed, essential and immutable, characteristics which militated against its long-term survival in rapidly changing structural circumstances. Therefore, the contemporary processes of structural change in the EU, the British Isles, Northern Ireland, and on the island of Ireland had the potential to make the Ulster unionist identity vulnerable to increased insecurity, crisis and discontinuity because of their impact on sovereignty and borders. With the political process in Northern Ireland gathering apace in the 1990s, a response was initiated by leading UUP élites aimed at adapting the Ulster unionist identity to the three-strand framework for negotiation and post-Agreement structural reconfiguration. For pro-Agreement unionists, the Agreement (1998) created the opportunity for the alleviation of unionism’s political insecurity. In their quest for security, pro-Agreement unionists were required to contest the established unionist ideological orthodoxy based on exclusion and the territorial border with the Republic of Ireland. These unionists accepted the principle of inclusion regarding the participation of Irish nationalists and republicans in the governance of the region. Furthermore, they acquiesced to the establishment of cross-border institutions aimed at political, economic and cultural co-operation and co-ordination between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. In essence, this ideological shift was based on the assumption that, in order to maintain their identity, difference and culture, Ulster unionists needed to move closer to Irish nationalists through political accommodation, respect for cultural diversity and cross-border co-operation. However, this attempt at ideological shift has, in turn, been contested by significant sections of the Ulster unionist community. 6

The SDLP also wanted to include a European strand.


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In common with the Irish nationalist identity and other ethnonational identities, the Ulster unionist identity derives from an ‘imagined community’ in which individuals identify with other people whom they do not know personally (Anderson 1991). This ‘intimacy of strangers’ is socially, politically and culturally constructed, as well as internally (and externally) contested in terms of its constitution and political action. The Agreement (1998) provided a fundamental point of internal contestation for the narration of the Ulster unionist communal identity in terms of its constitution and political action. The attempt made at identity realignment by pro-Agreement unionists in response to structural change caused a significant schism within the unionist body politic and the broader unionist community, with exclusivist anti-Agreement traditionalists securing just under half of the unionist vote in the Northern Ireland referendum on the Agreement. Support for the anti-Agreement position strengthened as the implementation of the Agreement’s provisions proceeded. A number of factors were responsible for the strengthening hand of the anti-Agreement faction, including: the early release of paramilitary prisoners; police reform; the prolonged failure of the IRA to ‘decommission’ its weaponry; and the unionist perception that the implementation of the Agreement entailed an agenda for dismantling the British symbolism of Northern Ireland. The unionist sense of insecurity was not alleviated when the details of a first act of decommissioning by the IRA, which was announced on 23 October 2001, remained confidential. Indeed, these factors combined to maintain and even intensify the sense of threat for the Ulster unionist identity. They also undermined the pro-Agreement unionist ideological shift from exclusion to inclusion. With the Agreement (1998) signalling political and territorial compromise by pro-Agreement unionists, culture has gained in significance as a site for the interplay between inclusion and exclusion. Pro- and antiAgreement unionists have engaged in cultural politics to boost the cultural resource of their identity and also to pursue their ideological aims of inclusion and exclusion respectively. However, in this regard, it has not always been clear that ‘inclusivist unionists’ have pursued inclusivist cultural goals. Perhaps the slippage in overall unionist support for the Agreement, as its implementation has proceeded, has forced pro-Agreement unionists to adopt a more sceptical approach to cultural inclusion. This scepticism may also be part of a post-Agreement learning process regarding sovereignty, that is, that sovereignty is more than just the sum of its formal-legal parts, it also has important political and cultural dimen-

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sions. Unionist élites of all hues complain that the ‘Britishness of Northern Ireland’ is under threat – the ‘Britishness of Northern Ireland’ being a direct reference to the political and cultural substance of UK sovereignty. It became clear that unionists finally recognised the importance of culture for identity and politics in Northern Ireland when the UUP nominated Michael McGimpsey for the position of Minister for Culture, Arts and Leisure. This was one of the three Northern Ireland ministries that the party was entitled to in the share out of ministries among the major parties. During his tenure, McGimpsey has devoted considerable time to aspects of unionist culture such as Ulster-Scots, as well as the Act of Union commemoration (2001) and the Golden Jubilee celebration (2002). However, he has also made some inclusivist remarks. In his speech to the conference, ‘Partnership for Diversity - Forum 2000’, he said: For too long in Northern Ireland, active support for a lesser used language, whether it be Ulster-Scots, Irish, sign language or one of the many others which have arrived recently on our shores, has often tended to label an individual as belonging to one particular tradition. Similarly, there are some who believe that support for one language devalues another. This should not be the case. We are extremely fortunate to be able to boast such a diversity of language and I believe that it is an inheritance which everyone should share, treasure and preserve for the benefit of future generations (McGimpsey 2001).

Cultural politics in Northern Ireland, and the interplay between inclusion and exclusion, has centred increasingly on the relationship between the Irish language and culture and the Ulster-Scots language/dialect and culture. In the 1990s, the Irish language secured funding from the UK government to aid its revival as a medium of education and cultural enrichment. At the same time the cultural signifiers of Ulster unionism, particularly the British identity in the mould of Protestantism, empire, world war and remembrance, appeared to be in terminal decline. Devolution for Scotland in 1999 was also a potentially damaging development for UK unionism because it increased the possibility of the dissolution of the UK. The response of some Ulster unionists to these political and cultural developments was to revive the Ulster-Scots language/dialect and culture in order to compete with the Irish language for funding and to boost the cultural resource of the Ulster unionist identity. Attempts have been made to place Ulster-Scots in the inclusive mould of respect for diversity and the shared cultural heritage of Northern Ire-


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land. For example, at the opening of the first Institute of Ulster-Scots Studies in January 2001, the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ulster, Professor Gerry McKenna, maintained that: ‘its work will contribute to the culture of pluralism upon which our social and economic future depends’ (McKenna 2001). However, others appear hostile to the representation of an Irish cultural identity in Northern Ireland and the ideal of a shared cultural heritage. For them, Ulster-Scots presents a means of limiting the incursion of the Irish language and culture in Northern Ireland by offering an Ulster Protestant unionist/loyalist language that can compete with the Irish language for scarce resources. For Nelson McCausland (Director/Heid Yin, Ulster-Scots Heritage Council/UlsterScotch Heirskip Cooncil), Ulster-Scots provides unionists with a cultural identity that enables differentiation and separation from Irish culture, which he believes to be culturally imperialist in nature (interview with author, 26 June 2000). For such unionists, Ulster-Scots offers the Ulster unionist identity a distinctive culture that can challenge the cultural assertion of Irish nationalists in Northern Ireland. It may also be held to help compensate for a general decline in traditional Britishness and provide a secure identity for unionists (McCall 2002). Although it predates unionism, Orangeism has been the most prominent exclusivist territorial/cultural manifestation of the Ulster unionist identity throughout the twentieth century. After the signing of the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement, which emphasised ‘parity of esteem’ for the two traditions in Northern Ireland, Orangemen dramatically increased the number of their parades in an effort to reassert symbolically their territorial control of Northern Ireland, as well as their cultural dominance. In 1985 there were 1,897 ‘loyalist’ parades, rising to 2,582 parades by 1997 (cited in Bryan 2000, 182). Orangemen understood their culture and territorial control of Northern Ireland to be under threat. For them, the political and cultural ascent of the Irish nationalist community in Northern Ireland raised a series of questions similar to those raised by Jordan and Weedon (1995, 4) when commenting on the discipline of cultural politics, namely: ‘Whose culture shall be the official one and whose shall be subordinated? What culture shall be regarded as worthy of display and which shall be hidden? Whose history shall be remembered and whose forgotten? What images of social life shall be projected and which shall be marginalised? What voices shall be heard and which silenced?’ Orangemen concluded that it was their Ulster Protestant culture and

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Ulster British culture generally that was under threat of subordination, marginalisation and silence. With the implementation of the Agreement (1998), pro- and antiAgreement unionists have complained increasingly that a concerted effort is being made to undermine the Britishness of Northern Ireland and, consequently, that Northern Ireland is becoming a ‘cold place for unionists’ (for example, see the series ‘Northern Ireland: A Cold Place for Unionists’ in the Irish Times, 14-15 January 2002). This argument focuses principally on proposals to downgrade the symbols of Britishness associated with state institutions such as the police and the courts. Undoubtedly, this attempted downgrading, in order to recreate Northern Ireland, either as a neutral public space or as one that reflects equally the region’s ‘two traditions’, has a detrimental effect on unionist attitudes towards the Agreement and its implementation. New commissions to deal with parades, human rights and equality issues have intensified unionist disillusionment.7 For the anti-Agreement DUP MP Gregory Campbell, ‘the present political system is built on the implicit acceptance that nationalists get a raw deal when it is unionists who are left behind in the equality stakes’. In terms of culture, Campbell believes that lip service has been given to Ulster-Scots to airbrush the new political dispensation with the veneer of cultural equality (Campbell 2002). The pro-Agreement unionist leader David Trimble complained that: ‘Every symbolic recognition of Northern Ireland’s constitutional status has had to be extracted manfully rather than accorded as of right. It would be a tragedy if (...) support were to be squandered through inattention to the reasonable desire of unionists to have their heritage, culture and aspirations trampled on’ (Irish Times, 14 January 2002). Jeffery Donaldson (UUP, MP) argued cogently that the increasing recognition and support for Irish culture in Northern Ireland requires commensurate recognition and support for Britishness in Northern Ireland when he said: If bridges of co-operation are about recognising the Irish dimension (...) then equally it is important for unionists that there is the maintenance of, and respect for a vibrant British dimension. That’s why there is a concern that people have a sense that their Britishness is being diminished, whereas the Irish dimension is being promoted and enhanced. You see that in many and varied ways, especially through the promotion of the Irish language. 7 These new commissions were provided for by the Agreement (1998) and are assumed by many unionist politicians to be anti-unionist in nature.


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There has been a belated response with the development of Ulster-Scots language and culture, but that is not the essence of Britishness. Language is not a main feature of Britishness in Northern Ireland. It tends to be expressed much more in an affinity with the Crown and the symbols of the British state (interview with author, 3 December 2001).

Problematically, however, these manifestations of Britishness require expression as the state representation of Northern Ireland, reflecting the intimate connection between culture and territory that has been central to the Ulster unionist identity. Therefore, the recognition of Britishness in Northern Ireland necessarily entails the recognition of the Britishness of Northern Ireland; a position which conflicts with the UK and Irish governments’ quest to recreate Northern Ireland as a neutral public space or as one that reflects equally the ‘two traditions’. This position also serves as a potential cultural stumbling block for the transition of pro-Agreement unionists from territorialism and exclusion to transterritorialism and inclusion. While post-Agreement transterritorial, cross-border co-operation itself has largely evaded controversy,8 there is some evidence to suggest an increasing political and cultural definition of borders within Northern Ireland. The 1991 census revealed a sharp increase in Northern Ireland’s East-West demographic divide between Protestants and Catholics. The 2001 UK General Election resulted in Sinn Féin candidates unseating incumbent UUP MPs in two western constituencies, leaving unionists without Westminster representation west of the river Bann. Consequently, the Bann, which follows a course that runs roughly through the middle of Northern Ireland from north to south, became a heightened symbolic border between Ulster unionists and their Irish nationalist ‘Other’. Meanwhile, internal Northern Ireland North/South divisions between Catholics/nationalists and Protestants/unionists have also become apparent in counties Armagh and Down. Borders within Northern Ireland are particularly explicit in workingclass and under-class areas of Belfast. Prior to the 11 September 2001 Islamic fundamentalist attacks on New York and Washington, television 8 This despite the fact that Peter Robinson (DUP, Deputy Leader) has, on occasion, attempted to inject a note of controversy on the issue of institutionalised North/South co-operation. For example, in remarks to the 2002 annual conference of the Young Democrats, the DUP’s youth wing, he claimed that the North/South bodies posed the ‘greatest long-term threat’ to the Union (Irish Times, 18 February 2002).

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screens were filled with the images of distressed Catholic primary school children who were daily running a loyalist gauntlet in the Ardoyne area of north Belfast because their school was situated in a ‘loyalist area’. The underlying reason for the action of the loyalist protesters was that the Catholic (mainly nationalist/republican) population of the area was on the increase while Protestant (mainly unionist/loyalist) numbers were dwindling, leaving them insecure territorially. The situation was exacerbated by almost nightly ‘tit-for-tat’ violence between the communities.9 These nightly broadcasts helped to perpetuate the image of Northern Ireland as a conflict-ridden backwater rather than as a site for innovative forms of regional governance. Conclusion Together with the Agreement’s British-Irish Council and the British-Irish Intergovernmental Conference, the North/South Ministerial Council and its Implementation Bodies are representative of institutional innovation that transforms the modern notion of borders as barriers, into the EU multilevel governance ideal of borders as political, economic, social and cultural bridges. Working in tandem with the territorial Executive, Assembly and Civic Forum, the regional transterritorial institutions develop a complex nexus of multilevel governance for Northern Ireland that runs from Brussels through Westminster to Belfast, connects with Dublin, reaches out to the devolved institutions in Scotland and Wales, and nominally consults members of the voluntary, business and trade unions sectors in the process. There is no doubt that this regional system is fledgling, complex to the point of unwieldy, tentative and fragile.10 However, it resonates with the transterritorial, regional consciousness of the developing EU multilevel polity. After the Agreement was signed, reticent pro-Agreement unionists failed to articulate adequately the opportunities created for the Ulster unionist identity by this new form of governance. Their reticence was due to a number of factors, including: their radical departure from the union9

Within some ‘loyalist areas’ very real borders have also emerged because of periodic feuding among rival loyalist paramilitaries. 10 The unbridled enthusiasm of the Irish press, North and South, for this new system of governance contrasts starkly with wholly negative commentary by the Scottish press concerning the performance Scottish Parliament. Such enthusiasm in the Irish press for the Agreement and its institutions is probably a reflection of the amazement that they exist at all.


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ist ideological orthodoxy centred on the principles of territorialism and exclusion; general unionist unease with many of the Agreement’s provisions; the prolonged failure of the IRA to decommission to their satisfaction; and their perception that the Britishness of Northern Ireland was being eroded wilfully as the implementation of the Agreement proceeded. Consequently, the real advantages of stability and opportunity were overshadowed by apparent setbacks, many of them symbolic in nature. In contrast, the low profile nature of post-Agreement, cross-border cooperation downgraded the importance of the Irish border in the unionistnationalist conflict. The post-violent conflict era focused more clearly on the unionist-nationalist power relationship that was increasingly played out in the representation of culture in Northern Ireland. Consequently, it may be claimed that pro-Agreement unionists did make significant shifts in their politics and sense of identity through their acquiescence in transterritorial co-operation between Northern Ireland the Republic of Ireland. They also committed themselves to the principle and act of political inclusion through sharing power with Irish nationalists and republicans. However, their perception that the implementation of the Agreement has witnessed the erosion of the Britishness of Northern Ireland leads to difficulties in embracing the principle of cultural inclusion and has the potential to cause territorial recidivism. Culturally, Irish nationalists in Northern Ireland appear to be vibrant, dynamic and outward-looking, whereas, the primary cultural resources of the Ulster unionist identity – traditional Britishness, Ulster Protestantism and its corollary Orangeism, as well as Ulster-Scots – appear to be either in decline or parochial and meaningless outside (and even inside) the Ulster unionist community. Efforts to recreate Northern Ireland as a neutral political and cultural space, or one that reflects the ‘two traditions’ equally, are interpreted by unionists generally as part of a campaign to strip the region of the symbols of Britishness, compounding their sense of vulnerability and insecurity. Consequently, the unionist perception of a politically and culturally ascendant Irish nationalist ‘Other’, when combined with a dejected and demoralised sense of ‘Self’, threatens unionist efforts at identity realignment to the shifting thresholds of the state, and, thereafter, its security and continuity. However, it is only through involvement in post-Agreement (1998) structures of power (which involve a North/South element) that unionists can begin to realign their identity and adapt to contemporary structural conditions. In this regard, North/South structural nodes offer possibilities for unionists to re-estab-

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lish an island-wide Irish unionist cultural tradition. Such a revival could act as a potential buffer for the political and cultural insecurity of Ulster unionists, an insecurity that has been compounded by rapidly changing structural and cultural circumstances. References Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Anderson, James. 1998. Rethinking National Problems in a Transnational Context. Rethinking Northern Ireland: Culture, Ideology and Colonialism, ed. David Miller, 125-145. London: Longman. Anderson, Malcolm. 2000. States and Nationalism in Europe Since 1945. London: Routledge. Bhabha, Homi. 1990. Introduction. The Nation and Narration, ed. Homi Bhabha, 1-7. London: Routledge. Bognanor, Vernon. 1999. Devolution in the United Kingdom. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bryan, Dominic. 2000. Orange Parades: The Politics of Ritual, Tradition and Control. London: Pluto. Bulmer, Simon and Wolfgang Wessels. 1987. The European Council: Decision-Making in European Politics. London: Macmillan. Cadogan Group. 1996. Square Circles: Round Tables and the Path to Peace in Northern Ireland. Belfast: Cadogan Group. Campbell, Gregory. 2002. How Unionists Might View 2002. Belfast Telegraph, 8 January. Commission of the European Communities. 2000. Presidency Conclusions: Lisbon European Council, 23 and 24 March. Luxembourg: Office for the Official Publications of the European Communities. Commission of the European Communities. 2001. European Governance: A White Paper. http://europa.eu.int/eurp-lex/en/com/cnc/2001/com2001_0428en 01.pdf. Democratic Unionist Party. 1992. The Surrender of Maastricht - What it Means for Ulster. Belfast: DUP. Jay, Richard. 1995. Democratic Dilemmas. Social Exclusion, Social Inclusion, ed. Democratic Dialogue, 68-71. Belfast: Democratic Dialogue. Jordan, Glen and Chris Weedon. 1995. Cultural Politics: Class, Gender, Race and the Postmodern World. Oxford: Blackwell. Laffan, Brigid, Rory O’Donnell and Michael Smith. 2000. Europe’s Experimental Union: Rethinking Integration. London: Routledge. Laffan, Brigid and Diane Payne. 2001. Creating Living Institutions: EU Cross-Border Co-operation After the Good Friday Agreement. Armagh: Centre for Cross Border Studies.


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Le Galès, Patrick. 1998. Conclusion - Government and Governance of Regions: Structural Weaknesses and New Mobilisations. Regions in Europe, eds. Patrick Le Galès and Christian Lequesne. London: Routledge. Luckhurst, Tim. 2001. The Wit of the Irish. The Spectator 24:20-22. Marks, Gary. 1993. Structural Policy and Multilevel Governance in the EC. The State of The European Community - vol. 2 - The Maastricht Debates and Beyond, eds. Alan W. Cafruny and Glenda G. Rosenthal, 391-410. Harlow: Longman. McCall, Cathal. 2001. The Production of Space and the Realignment of Identity in Northern Ireland. Regional and Federal Studies 11, 2:1-24. McCall, Cathal. 2002. Political Transformation and the Reinvention of the Ulster-Scots Identity and Culture. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 9, 2: 197-218. McGimpsey, Michael. 2001. Breaking the Moulds - A New Future for Linguistic and cultural Diversity in Northern Ireland. www.dcalni.gov.uk/press_releases/2001. McKenna, Gerry. 2001. University of Ulster and Ulster-Scots Agency Launch Institute of Ulster Scots Studies at Magee College. www.ulst.ac.uk.news/ releases/2001/280.html. O’Dowd, Liam. 1994. Whither the Irish Border?: Sovereignty, Democracy and Economic Integration. Belfast: Centre for Research and Documentation. Pollak, Andy. 2001. The Policy Agenda for Cross-Border Co-operation: A View from the Centre for Cross-Border Studies. Administration 49, 2: 15-22. Rawnsley, Andrew. 2001. The Challenge He Dare Not Shirk. The Observer, 30 December. Tamir, Yael. 1993. Liberal Nationalism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Tilly, Charles. 1990. The Formation of National States in Western Europe. Princeton: London Princeton University. Ulster Unionist Party. 1992. Westminster General Election Manifesto. Belfast: UUP.



RITUALS OF IRISH PROTESTANTISM AND ORANGEISM: THE TRANSNATIONAL GRAND ORANGE LODGE OF IRELAND Dominic Bryan Abstract This article explores the influence the Irish border has had on the cultural expression of Orangeism north and south of the border. Utilising anthropological understandings of culture the article looks at the Orange Institution as a transnational organisation. It focuses on the contrasting problems created for a pro-British, pro-Empire Protestant organisation once the Grand Lodge of Ireland found itself with jurisdiction over Orange lodges and parades in two politically antagonistic countries. The symbols used in the parades on both sides of the border reveal the divergent relations of power within which the Orange Order has developed. The Orange Order in the Republic of Ireland has adapted the ideological content of their parades to allow them to hold regular events in County Donegal. However, the Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland effectively acts as if it is the Grand Lodge of Northern Ireland. Equally, the Irish state has struggled to know how to deal with Orange parades within the Republic. In its conclusions, this article suggests that studying culture allows us to map aspects of transnationalism by exploring both the effects that common cultural traits have on border regions and the effects that the border and changed power relations have on culture.

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On the Twelfth of July every year Orangemen take to the lanes, roads and streets of Northern Ireland to commemorate Protestant King William’s victory over Catholic King James at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. Near the front of the parade in Belfast members of the junior Orange Institution carry a set of national flags representing each of the countries in which Orange Associations exist. The flags of Northern Ireland, Scotland, England, Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Ghana and Togo are all carried, thereby reflecting the spread of Orangeism along with the British Empire. Yet one flag is always missing – the Irish Tricolour. In one sense it would be contradictory for the flag of the Irish Republic to be carried by Northern Ireland Orangemen presenting their loyalty to the Union and the British Crown. It would also probably start a riot amongst spectators. But there are fifty-three Orange lodges in the Republic of Ireland, the Orange Institution is the Grand Lodge of Ireland, the Tricolour contains the colour orange representing the Protestant religion, and the flag of the Republic of the United States which Orangemen carry can hardly be said to represent loyalty to the British Crown. So why not carry the Irish flag? Donnan and Wilson, following Klein (1997), describe borderland structures and organisations that recognise shared histories and traditions as transnationalism (1999, 80). When in 1921 the border divided Ireland into Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State many Protestant organisations, including the Orange Institution, the Church of Ireland, the Presbyterian and the Methodist Churches, all broadly supportive of the political union with the United Kingdom, found themselves unwitting transnational organisations. Their practices and identities were to be directly influenced by two states. This was awkward for the churches but they have been able, to a certain extent, to rise symbolically above the political fray, for after all, in principle, they represent a higher authority. The Orange Institution however is in a more complex position. Whilst members view it as a religious organisation it is also overtly political. Contemporary anthropological analysis of ethnicity and identity stemming from the work of Barth (1969) has highlighted the importance of the processes of social production and reproduction and of the transformation of culture in the maintenance of ethnic boundaries. The ‘cultural stuff’ with which groups identify themselves is not fixed but manipulated by people working as a collective and as individuals adapting both to pressures external and internal to the group (Jenkins 1997, 9-15; Donnan and Wilson 1999, 21-22). There is clear potential for social scientists in

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exploring the strategies used by people in the expression of particular cultural traits, strategies aimed in part at sustaining ethnic boundaries. In the nineteenth century Irish nationalism, drew heavily, though not exclusively, upon Roman Catholicism in developing an identity. Orangeism provided the ‘cultural stuff’ around which Protestants in Ireland, but particularly in Ulster, developed a more cohesive Unionist political identity, opposing the constructed ideas of Irish nationalism. The parades on the Twelfth of July were the popular manifestation of this, uniting social classes and diverse Protestant denominations. The Orange Institution, formed in 1795, provided a structure for both Unionist political organisation and forms of economic patronage to develop in Dublin and Ulster [the northernmost of the traditional four provinces of Ireland]. In most parts of Ireland, including Dublin, where the Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland was based, parades, the most popular manifestation of Orangeism, were made impossible after the 1820s because of growing Catholic political influence in an era of Catholic emancipation. As a result the organisation began to develop a firmer base throughout the nation through party politics and patronage. However, in the nine counties of Ulster, during the second half of the nineteenth century, parades continued to prosper in numbers and size. Whilst Ulster Unionism as such was still some years from coming into existence the public expression of Orangeism represented the different political, and potentially ethnic, dynamics that existed among Protestants in the northern part of Ireland. The border came into existence in 1920-1, dividing the nine counties of the Province of Ulster, leaving three counties in the south in the Irish Free State [later to become the Republic of Ireland], and six in the north, in Northern Ireland, which remained a constituent part of the country now called the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The Ulster counties on the southern side of the new border, Monaghan, Donegal and Cavan, along with counties Leitrim and Louth, had significant Protestant populations, who now in their eyes were left on the ‘wrong side’ of the international borderline. Many of these Protestants were Orangemen, loyal to the Crown, up-holders of law and order, and sworn to defend Protestantism. What was to be their relationship with the new Irish state? They were now in a minority in a state which politicians soon started to define as Catholic. While many Orangemen prided themselves on upholding law and order, which suggested they should show loyalty to the new state, they also had a sense that they had been

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deserted by Britain and their fellow Protestants now in the new entity of Northern Ireland. In contrast, north of the border, the Orange Order found itself effectively in power. An inbuilt Protestant and Unionist majority meant that the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) was always going to be in government. Very few members of the Party were not Orangemen. The Orange Order had 122 seats set aside on the ruling council of the party. Between 1921 and 1969 only three members of the Cabinet of the government of Northern Ireland were not Orangemen (Harbinson 1973, 90-93). Up until the mid-1960s the only significant political threat came from the Northern Ireland Labour Party and Unionist politicians constantly used the border as a reminder to Protestant voters of the danger if they did not vote for the UUP. The border therefore became central to the discourse of Unionist politicians and senior Orangemen. In this article I want to explore the effects the border has had on the expression of Orangeism. The rituals and symbols used in the parades on both sides of the border can reveal the contrasting relations of power in which the Orange Order has developed. I do not intend to present a detailed ethnography of Orangeism on both sides of the border, which is research which remains to be done. Rather, this essay provides a series of historical and ethnographic moments that tell us much about Orangeism as a cultural and political movement that has both fostered and inhibited forms of cross-border co-operation. It also examines the Orange Institution as a transnational organisation which has adapted to fundamental changes to the circumstances of its existence. Although I am interested in the border specifically, both as a 360 kilometre long physical, political entity and as a political symbol, it is not unreasonable, as Donnan and Wilson have argued, to see the whole of Northern Ireland as effectively a border zone, ‘a frontier zone of disputing nations and ethnic groups’ (Donnan and Wilson 1999, 74). Parades north and south It is worth noting that, soon after partition, the Orange Order moved its headquarters north, from Dublin to Belfast. The headquarters in Rutland Square in Dublin had been seized by the IRA during the civil war and was damaged, as were some of the lodge books stored there. Significantly, despite the move to Belfast, the Grand Lodge remained the Grand Lodge of Ireland. The political and public environment for the development of Orangeism had always been difficult in Dublin where no major


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parades had taken place after the 1820s. Whilst the Institution remained politically influential in the city its popular power base was to be in Ulster and specifically Belfast. In the 1920s, as the new Irish state began to settle, questions arose over the position of the Orange Order in those counties now south of the border. Dudley Edwards quotes the resolution passed by the County Monaghan Grand Lodge in 1922: ‘That we are bound to be loyal to the Government under which, against our will, we are placed, and are determined to do so, as resistance to the powers that be is forbidden under our religious teaching’ (1999, 264). In Clones, County Monaghan, forty lodges paraded in 1923 with the County Grand Master claiming, perhaps bitterly, that they owed nothing to the British and that as Orangemen in the Free State they would be good citizens and good neighbours (News Letter, 13 July 1923). There were also parades in Monaghan and Cavan up until 1931. Meanwhile in Northern Ireland in 1926 the Twelfth of July, the commemoration of King William’s victory at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, was made a Public and Bank Holiday, giving it the sort of official state recognition that it had not enjoyed since the demise of the Dublin commemorations over one hundred years earlier. In Northern Ireland the hegemony of Unionism in the public sphere was obvious. The Orange Order was in a powerful political position, and, during the 1930s, other loyal parading organisations grew in strength. The last Saturday in August was added to 12 and 13 July and 12 August as important parading occasions. The Royal Black Preceptories, a ‘sister’ organisation to the Orange Order, had grown in respectability and importance from the middle of the nineteenth century. The parade and Sham Fight at Scarva, County Down, on the thirteenth of July appears to have become an event specifically for the Blackmen of Down, Armagh and Belfast in the first quarter of the twentieth century. There were also Black parades in the middle of August to mark the Relief of Derry, another episode in the struggle between William of Orange and James II for the throne of England. During the 1930s the Apprentice Boys of Derry Belfast clubs started a new parade that took place on Easter Monday to counter the republican Easter parades that had developed. The Apprentice Boys of Derry as an organisation grew rapidly in size (Walker 2000, 12-18). It was in the 1930s, when the border began to look more permanent, that significant identity building on both sides of the border took place. Ritual and symbolic events in both states appeared to be linked. North of

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the border during The Twelfth of July in 1931 the Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland circulated a resolution warning of ‘the insidious propaganda of the Roman Catholic Church’. This was followed by conflict over Orange and Black parades in the south (Walker 1996, 96-97). The IRA stopped a parade in Newtowngore, County Leitrim, and there was trouble at parades in County Monaghan (Bardon 1992, 535-6). In Cootehill, County Cavan, the local IRA issued a proclamation to stop a Black parade in the town commemorating the Relief of Derry (12 August), describing the organisers as the ‘Imperialist agents of Great Britain’ (News Letter, 13 August 1931). Reaction in Northern Ireland was predictable with serious rioting taking place in Armagh and Lisburn. Disturbances continued over the next few days with the News Letter blaming republicans and the Ancient Order of Hibernians for provocatively parading through a loyalist area in Armagh. The newspaper editorial pointed to the superior way the police had dealt with these incidents compared to the actions of liberal administrations prior to the formation of the northern state (News Letter, 15 August 1931; 17 August 1931; 18 August 1931; 19 August 1931; 31 August 1931). Tension was further raised when the Fianna Fáil Party, led by the antitreaty Republican Eamon de Valera, came to power in the Free State in 1932. He immediately set about removing the oath of allegiance to the Crown and refused to pay to Britain the land annuities arising from the purchase of landed estates for peasant proprietors, as agreed under the Anglo-Irish Treaty (1921). In return Britain put duties on Irish imports, thus instituting an economic war (Bardon 1992, 436). Further, the political battle between parties in the south was often conducted with each trying to gain legitimacy from the Roman Catholic Church; it was not unusual for policies to be defended with reference to papal encyclicals (Lee 1989, 157-74). Such politics, however, reinforced the fears of northern Protestants and played into the hands of Unionist politicians. On St Patrick’s Day 1932 two people were injured when an Ancient Order of Hibernians parade in south Derry was fired on (Farrell 1980, 136). From 22 to 26 June the Roman Catholic Church held an International Eucharistic Congress in Dublin. Catholic areas in Northern Ireland prepared for the event by decorating the streets and many people travelled down to the event. Catholic members of the Northern Irish Parliament and the Belfast Corporation also took part in the Dublin ceremonies (McIntosh 1999, 41). On their return, however, many of the special trains and buses were attacked. Incidents took place in Banbridge,


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Kilkeel, Larne, Lisburn, Loughbrickland, Lurgan and Portadown (Farrell 1980, 136-7; Bardon 1992, 537-9). Arches appeared with ‘Ulster will not submit to De Valera’ written on them and the News Letter warned that dignitaries ‘of the Roman Catholic church have gone out of their way to attack Protestantism’ (12 July 1932). In speeches made at most of the Orange demonstrations there was criticism of the southern state and particularly of de Valera’s attempt to get rid of the oath of allegiance. During the Twelfth at Poyntzpass, Prime Minister Craig expressed a theme that was to be much repeated in later years: ‘Ours is a Protestant Government, and I am an Orangeman’ (News Letter , 13 July 1932). There were riots in west Belfast after a party of men had apparently attempted to bring down an Orange Arch and Catholic pubs in Dungannon were attacked (Farrell 1980, 136; News Letter, 14 July 1932). McIntosh (1999, 41) quotes the Belfast Weekly Newsletter from 14 July 1932 as saying ‘There are signs which it would be a profound mistake to ignore, that we may have to face criminal conspiracies from inside and outside our borders to stir up trouble, upon which to base a demand for another settlement of the Irish problem’. The year of 1932 that had started with the election of de Valera in the Free State, ended, rather aptly, with the opening of a splendid new Parliament building at Stormont to the east of the city (Officer 1996; McIntosh 1999, 37). McIntosh has argued that ‘The Eucharistic Congress, taken together with the 1929 celebrations of the centenary of emancipation, increased the identification of the Irish Free State with Catholicism, emphasised the widening gap between the two jurisdictions, and threw the Northern Irish state’s protestant identity into sharper relief’ (McIntosh 1999, 42). There have been suggestions that there was a very small Orange parade in Dublin as late as 1936 or 1937 (Irish Times, 2 April 2000) but there seems to be some disagreement over the date. One internet site describes how Dublin brethren were attacked in 1936 as they walked through the city to catch a train for the Twelfth in Belfast (http://www.orangenet. org/dublin.htm). What is very clear is that the changing political climate in which Orangeism north and south of the border was developing made it inevitable that Orangemen from the south had to go north to attend demonstrations. A major exception to this imperative has been the Rossnowlagh parade in Donegal, in the Irish Republic.

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Parading in Rossnowlagh and Portadown [The parade at] Rossnowlagh is every romantic Orangeman’s idea of a happy family day out. You have the countryside, you have the seaside and there are no protesting nationalists. The parade is policed by two or three amiable gardaí (...). Of all the parades I attended, it was the most redolent of a school outing in an innocent world: no khaki, no guns, no nasty graffiti, not a hint of violence and therefore, of course no television cameras (Dudley Edwards 1999, 35).

Ruth Dudley Edwards is not quite accurate in her depiction of the annual Orange Parade at Rossnowlagh since the BBC and Ulster Television send camera crews to cover the event for the Twelfth television round-up of programmes which is aired on the following weekend. Moreover, the parade occupies more than a few police officers (gardaí). However, her general depiction accords with my own experiences. To the best of my knowledge Rossnowlagh is the only place in the Republic of Ireland that has regularly hosted large Orange parades. Whilst small parades are sometimes held in a number of towns and villages in Donegal, such as Ballintra, Raphoe, Convoy, Manorcunningham and St Johnstown, Rossnowlagh on the coast of southern Donegal annually hosts a large parade the Saturday prior to the Twelfth of July. The Rossnowlagh parade seems to have been suspended in the 1930s but may have been held again from the 1950s (Patterson 1990, 65; Walker 1996, 97; Dudley Edwards 1999, 265). The Rossnowlagh parade increased in size during the 1990s and has hosted up to 50 lodges and 30 bands, maybe 5,000 or so people. There has never been any form of opposition to the parade, and members of the gardaí who were interviewed by Neil Jarman and me in 1997 suggested that the only problems that they have ever had was over traffic control in the tight country roads (Jarman et al. 1998, 55-60). They also check the area to make sure there are no explosive devices. On occasion the lodges have had to send a rowdy band home. Neil Jarman and I attended parades in 1992, 1993, 1994 and 1997. The type of bands at the parade tend to be accordion and pipe bands although there were a number of flute bands including, in 1993 and 1994, ‘rougher’ blood and thunder flute bands from Armagh and Londonderry. The gardaí set no rules on what flags might be displayed but it appears that by convention no Union flags are used. However, in 1994 some Northern Ireland flags, a Scottish flag and one Union flag were displayed by bands from Northern Ireland. In addition, there was a stall selling


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material supporting the Ulster Defence Association (UDA), the largest loyalist paramilitary organisation, including booklets calling for an independent Ulster and objects such ‘SAS Tour of Ulster’ key rings, which would suggest support for the ‘shoot to kill’ policy apparently being followed by sections of the security forces in Northern Ireland. In the late 1980s and early 1990s the UDA claimed to support an Independent Ulster, and their flags which symbolised this were flying high in loyalist parts of Belfast. I watched as gardai looked over the stall inquisitively. During Twelfth events north of the border Orange Resolutions to Loyalty, Faith and State are read at a meeting held in a field or park. These resolutions are passed by the Grand Lodge prior to the Twelfth. Broadly speaking the Resolutions to Loyalty and State are political whilst the one to Faith is religious. At Rossnowlagh in 1992 and 1993 only the Resolution to Faith was read. The Resolution on Faith which was read in 1993 contained the following words: We resolve God’s grace enabling us to do all we can to meet our obligations to those who passed on to us our Protestant heritage of faith and practice. We must insure that we hand it on as courageously and determinedly as they did [excerpt from my field notes].

The theme of all the speeches was Protestantism and its meaning. There were some comments that might be seen by many in Ireland as insensitive, such as the suggestion by the Reverend Taylor in the sermon that it would be a great day if Cromwell were to return to Ireland! But this was said probably in relationship to Protestantism not to Irishness or Britishness. Belfast County Grand Master, John McCrae, made a speech that did not mention the national question. In that sense then the border was ignored in favour of a sense of pan-Protestantism. In 1994, again, only the Resolution to Faith was read: ‘As Orangemen, our allegiance is (...) to the Lord Jesus Christ, the saviour of our souls, the Patent person of our humanity; and the strengtheners of our lives’ (News Letter, 12 July 1994). The other two resolutions, passed by the Grand Lodge, but, significantly, not read at Rossnowlagh, affirmed loyalty to the throne and that ‘the political philosophy of our Orange Institution is Unionist’ (News Letter, 12 July 1994). The Resolution on State argued that ‘We will not become citizens of a United Ireland’ apparently unaware that many Orangemen in lodges in the Republic already have that status. In other words, the Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland was producing resolu-

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tions that suggested it was only the Grand Orange Lodge of Northern Ireland. In one speech made by Rev. Dr Warren Porter, Grand Chaplain of Ireland (who is from the north), the national question was raised. But it serves to show how an ideological shift around what it is to be loyal can be made: It’s about seventy five years now since the state which is now referred to as the Republic of Ireland came into existence as a separate entity through the secession of the twenty six counties from the United Kingdom. I’m not giving any secrets away, nor am I making any statements that are the slightest bit embarrassing to anyone when I say that the Unionists in this county of Donegal in which we are presently standing and our fellow loyalists throughout the rest of what is now the Republic viewed with apprehension, deep apprehension, the changes that were to come as a result of self government being given to Dublin. But what did they do? Well I’ll tell you what they did. They turned out to be model citizens, they honoured the laws of the country in which they lived (...), they (...) upheld rectitude in every possible way and they set an example which sadly a great many of the minority in the six counties have badly failed as far as emulation is concerned. There is no King here now, but the loyalists, the Protestants, the Orangemen of this part of the world honour the King in the truest deepest sense, they are model citizens by and large, of this Republic. And all honour to them for it. Honour all men, love the brotherhood, fear God, honour the King. If every Orangeman honoured the truth of this text we would be a blessing and power in the land and a praise to our God [from field notes].

Other speeches focused on the position of the Orange Order in society and its relationship with Christianity. One local Orangeman described himself as a patriot not a nationalist. ‘There is no imperial rule down here now. The Orange Order is a religious organisation, not political, that’s where we are working from’ (The Guardian, 11 July 1994). When David Sharrock, a journalist for the Guardian newspaper, asked a woman from one of the few women’s lodges in Donegal if she was proud to be a citizen of the Republic she gave a guarded but sceptical reply: I don’t mind, I could live anywhere. But I can sympathise with the viewpoint of Protestants in Northern Ireland. This, today [the Rossnowlagh parade] is a bit of a whitewash operation. It’s good politics, so they can say to the Protestants in Northern Ireland that everything’s rosy in the garden in the south (The Guardian, 11 July 1994).

What is noticeable in this Donegal event is that there is no discussion about Britishness. It is possible that, after partition, Orangemen in the Republic could have constructed an ethnic identity around Britishness as


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much as Protestantism, but this has not taken place to any significant extent. Any symbolic displays introduced into the parades overtly reflecting Britishness are brought over the border from Northern Ireland. The key focus of identification is the Protestant faith and being a Protestant in Ireland, not being a unionist or being British. Dudley Edwards observes that the parade at Rossnowlagh challenges the idea that Orange marches are inherently territorial and triumphalist and that a United Ireland would stamp out the Protestant identity. Yet she argues its role is more complex. Northern Irish Orangemen love the Rossnowlagh parade because there is no trouble and nothing to prove: citizens of the Republic of Ireland – in so far as they are aware of the parade’s existence – are happy about it because they think it shows how tolerant they are. Yet the Orangemen of the Republic of Ireland are very aware that since the foundation of the Irish Free State, for a variety of reasons – including persecution by the IRA at local level – Orangemen are just down to one parade a year at the seaside and away from any towns (Dudley Edwards 1999, 34-5).

Dudley-Edwards made this observation in the light of dramatic change in Northern Ireland. In the context of both loyalist and republican paramilitary groups announcing cease-fires in 1994 and subsequent developments around a peace process, Orange parades became a high profile issue. Parades in Ireland have always been the site of conflict (Jarman and Bryan 1996; Jarman 1997; Farrell 2000; Fraser 2000; Bryan 2000). From around 1985 there were signs that significant changes in local relationships of power were leading to growing tensions over parades. The route of the Orange Order Drumcree church parade in Portadown County Armagh, which takes place on the Sunday before the Twelfth of July (therefore the day after the Rossnowlagh parade), came into question and was first changed in 1987 (Bryan, Fraser and Dunn 1995). More significantly in 1995, the police stopped the parade’s return route from the church service. The parade eventually went down the Garvaghy Road after a two day stand-off. That year there were also disputes over Orange parades in Belfast, in Pomeroy and Castlederg in County Tyrone, Bellaghy and the City of Derry in County Londonderry, Dunloy and Rasharkin in County Antrim and Downpatrick in County Down (Jarman and Bryan 1996, 90). The following year there were yet more areas of dispute including Newtownbutler and Rosslea in County Fermanagh close to the border with Monaghan. A Catholic taxi driver in Lurgan was murdered by Loyalist paramilitaries in the context of a five-day stand-off

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at the Drumcree parade. There were also minor protests at a number of the smaller Orange parades in Donegal. Concerns that this might spill over to Rossnowlagh proved unfounded. Disputes over the right to parade appeared to threaten the developing peace process, although I am not convinced they were quite as important as was routinely claimed by the press (Bryan 2001). In 1998 the return leg of the Drumcree parade was stopped because of a decision by the newly formed Parades Commission. Parades were also restricted in most of the areas mentioned above, and elsewhere. The parade disputes and the Orange Order itself became the focus for unionists opposing the Belfast Agreement that was signed in April 1998. A hard-line ginger group of Orangemen The Spirit of Drumcree was active amongst lodges across Northern Ireland. The group publicly criticised the Grand Lodge for not taking a tougher positions on parade disputes. Members of the group also called for reform of the Orange Institution and the resignation of the Grand Master, then UUP Member of Parliament Martin Smyth, to make the organisation more reflective of what they claimed were ‘grass-roots’ views. They saw the Orange Institution as the vehicle for unionists to oppose political changes and the dispute over parades as the issue around which cohesion could take place. The protection that they felt the Orange Order should be providing was for the Protestant community rather than for Protestantism as a generalised and to some a disparate religious belief system. In other words they wanted support for their ethnic or national group in Northern Ireland, and for the overall cause of unionism. There are Orangemen in the Institution, however, who support an approach that favours the organisation as a Protestant one over that of its political role within Unionism. That is not to say that these Orangemen do not consider themselves Unionist but they do view the Orange Institution as an Irish organisation. This approach to Orangeism heavily influences Dudley Edwards’ depiction of the Institution in The Faithful Tribe (1999) and was encouraged by Orangeman the Reverend Brian Kennaway who in the mid-1990s was Convenor of the Grand Lodge Education Committee. A sermon of Kennaway’s is quoted by Dudley Edwards: I believe in the principles of the loyal Orange institution, but I wonder do we all believe in these principles? (...) We have to believe that our principles and our practice run in parallel. (...) I cannot help but fear that will ultimately be our downfall. We will become political Protestants and we will abandon our biblical principles (Brian Kennaway quoted in Dudley Edwards 1999, 44; my italics).


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Kennaway considers himself to be British and Irish. He would share many of the same views about the Institution as Reverend Warren Porter, quoted above speaking at Rossnowlagh. But his view of Orangeism brought him not only into direct conflict with members of the Spirit of Drumcree Group but eventually with the Grand Lodge itself. He, and a number of other members of the Education Committee, resigned from their positions. The Reverend Kennaway is now a trenchant critic of the Grand Lodge (see Irish Times, 10 July 2002; Irish News, 26 July 2002). The Orange Order in Donegal has chosen to modify its role and necessarily, although not inevitably, lose its appeal as a political Unionist organisation. They do not carry Irish Tricolours in the parade but they view themselves as law abiding citizens of that state. Meanwhile, on the northern side of the border the Orange Order is torn between on the one hand maintaining a wide base amongst Protestants and thereby losing political influence, or on the other retaining its role within politics and thus alienating liberal and secular unionism and Irish Protestantism (Bryan 2000, 155-72). So whilst for some Orangemen north of the border embracing Orangeism in the south is unproblematic, for many Orangemen in Northern Ireland the idea that Orangemen can be Orange and loyal to the Republic of Ireland is an idea best hidden. As such, carrying the Irish Tricolour in the parade in Belfast would be unthinkable. No Orange parades in Dublin The orange colour on the Irish Tricolour is supposed to symbolise Protestantism in Ireland. So what position does Orangeism in the Republic have apart from organising an annual parade in a corner of Donegal? The signing of the Belfast Agreement in April 1998 changed the context of politics on both sides of the border. The Agreement demanded of all parties ‘reconciliation, tolerance, and mutual trust, and to the protection and vindication of human rights for all’. For the Republic this was manifest in the changing of Articles 2 and 3 of the constitution that previously had made direct claim to the six counties of Northern Ireland. The new articles made this more of an aspiration and make what Finlay (2003) has argued is an appeal to pluralism in Ireland. It is the firm will of the Irish nation, in harmony and friendship, to unite all the people who share in the territory of the island of Ireland, in all the diversity of their identities and traditions, recognising that a united Ireland shall only be brought about by peaceful means with the consent of the majority of the people democratically expressed, in both jurisdictions in the Ireland (Belfast Agreement, 4).

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Orangeism, rightly or wrongly, is interpreted as the most prominent expression of a British, Unionist and Protestant identity. It is interesting therefore that in 1998 President Mary McAleese, who is herself from Belfast, invited 130 Orangemen to a reception on 11 July to mark the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne (Irish Times, 16 June 1998). This is in spite of the ongoing conflict over parades in the north and the Grand Lodge of Ireland making it reasonably clear that it was opposed to the Agreement. Ian Cox, member of the Orange Order in Dublin and Wicklow, was later quoted in the Irish Times (22 March 2000) as suggesting that membership of lodges had picked up ‘especially after President McAleese met us on 12 July and showed we weren’t a shower of bigots’. In 2000 some more significant moves took place. First, there was a visit by the Grand Master of the Orange Order, Robert Saulters, to meet both President McAleese and Taoiseach Bertie Ahern in Dublin, and second there was an attempt to organise an Orange parade in Dublin. Saulters used his visit ‘to present the Orange case to an audience which would not normally have the opportunity to hear the views of unionists and Orangemen’ (Irish Times, 9 February 2000). The visit attracted relatively little attention, but this does not detract from the fact that the Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Ireland meeting with the political and constitutional leaders of the Republic of Ireland is highly unusual. Indeed, until recently, it would have been unthinkable and it is still divisive within the Order. More publicity surrounded an Orange parade that was planned for 28 May 2000. The parade was to go only a few hundred yards from St Stephens Green to the end of Dawson Street where a plaque was to be unveiled commemorating the site of the first Grand Lodge meeting in Dublin in 1798. The parade was backed by Dublin Corporation, who organised the plaque, and particularly the Lord Mayor, Mary Freehill (Irish Times, 22 March 2000). The idea for the plaque was originally suggested by Brian Kennaway who at this time was still Convenor of the Education Committee of the Grand Lodge (Mary Freehill, Irish Times, 23 May 2000). Mayor Freehill specifically took the suggestion forward because she believed it would make a contribution to ‘the commitment the Irish Government gave in the Downing Street Declaration [signed by British and Irish governments in 1993] that the Republic, would “seek ways in which agreement and trust between both traditions in Ireland can be promoted and established”’ (Irish Times, 23 May 2000). Finlay (2003) has shown that a broad argument of pluralism in a new political context was made by


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supporters of the parade. Criticism of the proposed parade came largely, but not exclusively, from a number of Sinn Féin councillors. Councillor Larry O’Toole was vociferous: ‘These are the same people who are laying siege on the Garvaghy Road, and to give them credence or credibility by having a march or holding a public ceremony in Dublin would be entirely wrong. It’s like inviting the Klu Klux Klan to march in Alabama’ (Irish Times, 22 March 2000). As Finlay has argued (2003), Sinn Féin also ‘sought to establish their pluralist credentials by advocating tolerance of cultural diversity, and, having done so, to show why it should not be extended such as to allow an Orange parade on the streets of Dublin’. Finlay notes the inherent contradiction that appears in the debate over the parade. Northern Protestants, as represented by the Orange Order, are seen, even by Republicans, as both inevitably part of the Irish nation, even if they may be unaware of their position, but also alien and outside to what is deemed Irish (Finlay 2003). The short parade was going to include Orangemen from the Republic, Scotland and England and, no doubt, some representatives from Northern Ireland. On 1 May the small Dublin and Wicklow District postponed the event after financial commitments increased and because of threatening letters which were sent to both the mayor and members of the District (Irish Times, 23 May 2000). There has been no attempt to repeat the exercise. Meanwhile, in Donegal, the Rossnowlagh Orange parade continues to pass without opposition. Finlay (2003) has argued that the proposed Dublin parade led to proponents and opponents of the parade making essentialist arguments. He shows that supporters of the proposed parade seemed to regard the Orange Order as the essential expression of the northern Protestant culture whilst opponents held an essentialist view of the Orange Order as an unchanging, inherently bigoted and triumphalist organisation. Finlay also points to the problem caused by the idea of an Orange parade in the heart of Ireland’s capital, which seems to beg the question as to what constitutes being Irish. In spite of the unproblematic nature of the annual Rossnowlagh Orange parade, Orangeism is viewed as something from the other side of the border, something a bit alien and not part of mainstream Irish culture and society. In a sense the same contradictions exist for the Orange Order. They are an Irish institution. Yet since the border and Northern Ireland came into existence Ulster Unionism has slowly moved away from defining itself as Irish within a British context. Particularly since the start of the

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troubles Protestants in the north have chosen to define themselves as from Ulster or Northern Ireland or simply British as opposed to Irish. The idea that one could, unproblematically, be Protestant, Irish and British has largely been consigned to the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, there are Unionists who do see themselves as Irish and British, and some are acutely aware of the importance of that designation given that the major Protestant churches and organisations on the island are Irelandwide. The Reverend Brian Kennaway is one of those people. For him the Orange Order is, first and foremost, a Protestant organisation in Ireland. As such, attempts to develop Orangeism within the context of an Irish Republic are still important. Conclusion Orange Associations exist in a number of countries around the world. There is an overarching Imperial Grand Orange Council of the World that meets every three years and in which all Orange Associations around the world are members. It carries no significant powers over member associations and indeed in each country Orangeism has adapted to changing political contexts. Orangeism spread as part of a pro-Empire, proProtestant movement and thus was transnational from its earliest days. But whilst retaining some very broad cultural aspects in common the Associations have developed in some markedly different ways. In Canada, for example, where Orangeism developed from as early as 1812 (http://www.orange.ca/history.htm), the Orange Order was once very powerful and had considerable influence in places like Toronto. Whilst it remains quite a large organisation it does not play a major political role any longer. It remains loyal to the monarchy and stands for a united Canada, but it has modified itself into a relatively successful credit union. The Loyal Orange Association of Canada describes itself as a ‘patriotic, benevolent and Protestant society’ (http://www.orange.ca/whatis.htm) and concentrates on the promotion of the Protestant faith. They even allow for lodges with mixed membership of men and women, which would be unthinkable in Ireland. In Scotland the Orange Order has also played a role in politics over the years and, whilst not being as significant as it is in Northern Ireland, sectarian identifications remain present. But the Orange Institution in Scotland also lacks significant power and makes the newspaper headlines mainly due to its rowdy parades. Needless to say if Scottish independence from the United Kingdom became likely the role of the Order as part of unionist politics might develop again.


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In Canada and Scotland and indeed in other countries where there are Orange Associations adaptation was possible under the broad national identification of being Canadian, Scottish, Australian, etc. The primary role of the Institutions can be built around the promotion of the Protestant reformed faith. In Ireland, north and south, there are many more contradictions and ongoing conflicts. Most Orangemen in Northern Ireland see Orangeism as part of their political identity as unionists. Events such as the Twelfth of July parades are highly political occasions where the Roman Catholic Church, the Republic of Ireland, Irish nationalism and republicanism are condemned as the enemy (Bryan 2000, 1623). And yet, at the top of the Institution is the Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland. The Grand Lodge is a transnational organisation incorporating brethren who are citizens of the Republic of Ireland. Orangemen in the Republic have attempted to adapt following the example of the Orange Associations in other parts of the world, and have concentrated on faith rather than the politics of state. But they do come under the Grand Lodge of Ireland and are thus tied to the politics of a divided Ireland. And, living by the border, they have to cope with the uncomfortable realities of the politics of Orangeism in Northern Ireland. A parade in Rossnowlagh survives uncomfortably within those realities, but, as yet, a parade in Dublin has been impossible. Ironically, similar problems exist for Irish nationhood. The colour orange appears on the national flag of the Republic of Ireland. Although it is interesting that some people name the colours of the national flag as green, white and gold, the signing of the Belfast Agreement has brought into stark relief questions about the need for pluralism within an Irish identity. The national flag suggests that Protestants, indeed Orangemen, are part of the nation. And yet they are seen by many as sectarian bigots still representing British occupation of Ireland. So the city and national authorities in Dublin seem to be undertaking a strange dance with the Orange Order hoping that they can be both welcomed as part of a plural Ireland, but perhaps also held at arms length. At present the Orange Order can parade in Rossnowlagh but not Dublin. All of this highlights the complexities of relationships that exist on the island of Ireland and the ramifications these have for the politics of ethnicity and nationalism. The ‘cultural stuff’ is not fixed but open to manipulation. Yet that manipulation also comes up against boundaries where the contradictions become too great. Studying culture allows us to map aspects of transnationalism by exploring both the effects that common

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cultural traits have across border regions and the effects of the border and changed power relations on culture. The colour orange on an Orange banner and an Irish Tricolour broadly symbolises the same thing – Protestantism. But the complex understandings of the use of that colour mean that the ability to display the banners and flags varies depending on whether you are in Belfast, Portadown, Rossnowlagh or Dublin. I wonder whether the day might come when, in Rossnowlagh, Dublin or Belfast an Irish Tricolour is carried in an Orange parade. References Bardon, Jonathan. 1992. A History of Ulster. Belfast: Blackstaff Press. Barth, Fredrick, ed. 1969. Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organisation of Cultural Difference. London: George Allen and Unwin. Belfast Agreement. 1998. see http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/events/peace/docs/agreement.htm. Bryan, Dominic. 2000. Orange Parades: The Politics of Ritual Tradition and Control. London: Pluto Press. Bryan, Dominic. 2001. ‘Parade Disputes and the Peace Process’. Peace Review 13(1), 43-9. Bryan, Dominic, T.G. Fraser and Seamus Dunn. 1995. Political Rituals: Loyalist Parades in Portadown. Coleraine: Centre for the Study of Conflict Donnan, Hastings and Thomas M. Wilson. 1999. Borders: Frontiers of Identity, Nation and State. Oxford: Berg. Dudley Edwards, Ruth. 1999. The Faithful Tribe: An Intimate Portrait of the Loyal Institutions. London: Harper Collins. Farrell, Michael. 1980. Northern Ireland: The Orange State. London: Pluto Press. Farrell, Sean. 2000. Rituals and Riots: Sectarian Violence and Political Culture in Ulster, 1784-1886. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky. Finlay, Andrew. 2003. Partition, Pluralism and the Response to a Proposed Orange Parade in Dublin. Irish Studies Review 11.1. Fraser, T.G. 2000. The Irish Parading Tradition: Following the Drum. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Harbinson, John F. 1973. The Ulster Unionist Party, 1882-1973: Its Development and Organisation. Belfast: Blackstaff Press. Jarman, Neil. 1997. Material Conflict: Parades and Visual Displays in Northern Ireland. Oxford: Berg. Jarman, Neil and Dominic Bryan. 1996. Parade and Protest: A Discussion of Parading Disputes in Northern Ireland. Coleraine: Centre for the Study of Conflict. Jarman, Neil, Dominic Bryan, Nathalie Caleyron and Ciro De Rosa. 1998. Politics in Public: Freedom of Assembly and the Right to Protest, a Comparative Analysis. Belfast: Democratic Dialogue.


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Jenkins, Richard. 1997. Rethinking Ethnicity: Arguments and Explorations. London: Sage. Klein, A.M. 1997. Baseball on the Border: A Tale of Two Laredos. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lee, J.J. 1989. Ireland 1912-1985: Politics and Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McIntosh, Gillian. 1999. The Force of Culture: Unionist Identities in Twentieth Century Ireland. Cork: Cork University Press. Officer, David. 1996. ‘In search of Order, Permanence and Stability: Building Stormont 1921-32.’ In Unionism in Modern Ireland: New Perspectives on Politics and Culture. eds. Richard English and Graham Walker. London: Macmillan Press. Patterson, W.J. 1990. Rossnowlagh Remembered. Ballyshannon: Donegal Democrat Ltd. Walker, Brian. 1996. Dancing to History’s Tune: History Myth and Politics in Ireland. Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies Walker, Brian. 2000. Past and Present: History, Identity and Politics in Ireland. Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies.



SHIFTING POLITICAL AND CULTURAL BORDERS: LANGUAGE AND IDENTITY IN THE BORDER REGION OF AUSTRIA AND SLOVENIA Brigitta Busch Abstract State borders and linguistic borders rarely coincide, and often minorities are ascribed a ‘bridging’ function in cross-border co-operation. However, whether or not they can fulfill such ideal expectations depends not only on bilateral relations between states but also on wider geopolitical constellations. Narratives about a common past and myths related to the foundation of national states play an important role in the construction of national identities, and language often serves as a key marker of identity. Although such narratives and myths are extremely persistent, transformations occur over time, and especially in periods of major geopolitical change. This article presents a case study of such transformations in the border region between Austria and Slovenia. It traces and analyses myths and narratives which have been constitutive of national identities in the two states and which have shaped perceptions of the ‘self’ and the ‘other’, and particularly attitudes towards the Slovene minority in Austria. It focuses on moments of transformation linked to geopolitical changes at the end of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, in the World War II period, and after the fall of the Iron Curtain. It provides a diachronic perspective necessary for understanding present shifts arising from the enlargement of the European Union. The article concludes that the Slovene minority will only fulfill a ‘bridging’ function if diversity within the European project is conceived in an open and inclusive way.

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The border between Slovenia and Austria became a state border in 1920 with the break up of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Up to 1990 it divided ‘the West’ from the ‘communist East’, and then it became an external border of the European Union (EU). Now the whole context and meaning of the current border between Austria and Slovenia is again set to change when it becomes an internal EU border after the next round of enlargement. The effects on this border between the two states of what Etienne Balibar (1997, 375) has called the geopolitical ‘supra-determination of borders’, referring to the geopolitical functions ascribed to borders in addition to their function in separating states, will once again be transformed. Depending on the changing political relations of Austria and its successive southern neighbouring states at different periods in history, this border has been perceived as being more or less permeable, but in some periods it was even hermetically sealed. However, as linguistic borders are very rarely sharp lines on the map, but rather zones of overlapping contact between different languages, the linguistic border between the German and the Slovenian languages does not coincide with the political borderline. This is politically important for language is considered to be one of the markers of identity, and language use interrelates with the basis and extent of webs of communication. In border issues involving the two neighbouring states, the Slovenian-speaking minority in Austria’s most southern province of Carinthia has frequently been in the uncomfortable position of being a political football for the ‘mother-nation’ and the ‘father-state’. It has been the object of political bargaining rather than being recognised as an active agent. It seems that in many cases of crossborder co-operation minorities here and elsewhere are ideally ascribed a ‘bridging’ function but they cannot really fulfil it unless they are acknowledged as acting subjects within civil society. In this article I highlight the periods in which geopolitical supra-denotations of the Austria-Slovenia border occurred, as these were also precisely the periods when minoritymajority relationships were modified substantially and when identity constructions and linguistic policies changed. I first discuss the link between language and identity and then how perceptions of the border oscillated between it being considered a major barrier or an almost nonexistent imaginary line.

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Borders, language and identity The reification of borders, the process in which borders have been ascribed natural qualities conditioned by biology, evolved over time. Up to the end of the 18th century borders defining political entities were permeable and highly variable; a mesh of borders, such as internal customs borders, tax borders, town borders, etc., was spread across the land. It was only at the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th, as the concept of the ‘nation state’ began to assert itself in Europe, that national borders became single, sealed, and efficient lines, like a moat between clearly separate nationalities (cf. Heindl and Saurer 1998). Ideas about borders originated with opposition of the ‘civilised world’ to the ‘barbarian’ wilderness on the other side. That which lies on the other side of the border became the construct of the fundamental ‘other’ recognised as that which is outside, intangible, ambivalent. What is left in the dark on the other side can thus act as a screen for the projection of fantasies, for the threatening and also the exotic and the desirable. From a Western Eurocentric perspective, this was extended to, on the one hand, the ‘dark continents’ which were open for discovery and colonisation, and on the other hand to the East and the Balkans (Todorova 1999). The implications of the rise of national borders for languages can be seen by looking at the two main concepts of nationhood at the time, as represented by France and Germany. In France the concept of the border as a separation line asserted itself with the defence of the revolution of 1789 and the affirmation of the nation. The Girondistes initially supported a multilingual administration, in that they had new laws translated into non-French idioms, as around half of the population of France did not understand French. In 1794, as France had to defend itself, Barère declared to the Convention that the French language must be the cement of a new national unity and he went on to say that federalism and superstition speak Breton, emigration and hate of the republic speak German, the counter-revolution speaks Italian and fanaticism speaks Basque (quoted by De Rougemont 1980, 98). In the same period in Germany language was also considered as being closely related to borders. In the late 18th century, the German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte asserted that: The first, fundamental and truly natural borders of states are without doubt their inner borders. Places where the same language is spoken are already bound together by nature, before all human artifice, with a collection of

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invisible bonds; there one is understood, and is always able to make oneself understood more clearly, they belong together and are naturally one and an inseparable whole. Such a place cannot take in people of another origin and language (as quoted in Heindl and Saurer 1998, 3).

Thus a paradigm of the nation state with its vision of internal linguistic homogeneity can be seen in the concept of the state language. This is represented on one hand by the French model of a state defined language, and the other hand by the concept of a shared language and destiny, as seen in the German model. Both the French model, often referred to as an ‘état-nation’, and the German model of ‘Kulturnation’ emphasise linguistic homogenisation within the state territory. The education and media systems were fundamental to the implementation of linguistic policies, and they inspired sentiments of national identification. It was only with general literacy and the spread of media that sentiments of affiliation to more abstract entities such as the nation and the state could be fully developed. States have successfully defended their monopoly over the system of education as a means of imposing social coherence and homogeneity, even in the contemporary process of European integration. Despite migration and zones of language contact, which resulted in school populations being multilingual in many border regions, school systems showed a monolingual character. Consequently education in minority languages has generally been aimed at achieving proficiency in the state language as soon as possible, rather than at enhancing literacy skills in the minority languages themselves. Personal advancement has often been primarily linked to achieving high proficiency in the state language. Social pressure exerted in this way resulted in low prestige for minority languages, and added impetus to processes of assimilation. Only very recently has any change in this situation emerged, as linguistic diversity is currently being proclaimed an important characteristic of European identity. Alongside education, the second major pillar in establishing the enhanced status of a state language was print media. Whereas in the beginning access to printing was controlled by censorship and licensing, later it was governed more by market forces. In actual fact the outcome of state regulations in this domain was the hierarchisation of languages in the public sphere. Similarly, so-called market-determined self-regulation resulted in the marginalisation of minority languages. In the Western European post-World War II media order, countries’ national radio and TV played a ‘dual role, serving as the political public sphere of the nation


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state, and as the focus for national cultural identification. Broadcasting has been one of the key institutions through which listeners and viewers have come to imagine themselves as members of the national community’ (Morley and Robins 1996, 10). In national broadcasting as in education systems, states have been rather reluctant to grant space for broadcasting in minority language, and have treated multilingual programmes as little more than ‘exotic’. Even if the concept of the (monolingual) national public sphere is now being challenged by the spread of satellite TV and the internet, it is not (yet?) withering away. These developments result in audience fragmentation along linguistic lines. It seems that the typically monolingual character of the key institutions of education and the media, which transport and transform the dominant national discourse, displaces constructions of ethnic identity in minority-majority contexts. This increasingly leads to a situation where speaking minority languages is confined to the private sphere (Busch 1999). Supranational, national and regional developments have an impact on cross-border relationships and activities. They determine the framework in which existing relationships, such as family ties and property rights, can be maintained and developed, and also whether such ties remain on a strictly personal level or become a point of crystallisation for other crossborder activities involving larger circles. It is obvious that whether or not linguistic/ethnic minorities are situated on both sides of the border, or only on one side of it, results in different levels of cross-border relationships. Faced with the still vigorous paradigm of linguistic homogeneity in the ‘nation-state’, minorities (with a neighbouring ‘mother-nation’) are in a precarious position, as they have to define their identities between the ‘mother-nation’ and the ‘father-state’ which both exert pressures for loyalty. In negotiating the complex balance of relations between two states, or larger geopolitical units, minorities often play an important role, but as an issue to be dealt with rather than as a political subject or a mediating entity. These general processes and tendencies are well illustrated by the historical succession of linguistic changes in the Austria-Slovenia border area. ‘Where the border was written in blood’ – the myth of a threatened border The border between Austria and the SHS State (Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes) was established in 1920, by which time the situation in Carinthia was already highly polarised. When political parties formed in the second half of the 19th century, it was according to linguistic/ethnic

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affiliations. Thus, a conservative Catholic Slovene party represented peasants and the clergy, while a liberal German nationalistic party represented the merchants, administrative personnel and civil servants. Here, ethnic, linguistic and social dividing lines coincided to a large extent, and indeed an imaginary frontier was already in place in public discourse in the 18th century long before the political border was drawn. Representatives of the German national party referred to the bilingual villages in the area as ‘the last threshold of Germaness’. After World War I when the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy collapsed, the frontier between the newly founded Republic Deutsch-Österreich (German-Austria) and the SHS Kingdom was disputed, and armed struggles broke out. This dispute was only settled at the peace talks in St. Germain by announcing a referendum in which the population of predominantly Slovenian speaking Carinthia should decide on the affiliation of the region. The majority voted for Austria, including a considerable number of Slovenian speakers who probably opted for the Austrian Republic out of class-consciousness. But, in public discourse the referendum was interpreted in ethnic terms. The 1920 plebiscite and the Abwehrkampf (defence struggles of the southern border) became part of a publicly cherished popular myth which is still kept alive today by annual commemorations (for example, the sub-heading of this section, which refers to the border being written in blood, is a line from the Carinthian national anthem). These follow a familiar repertoire: a march in traditional costumes and with flags, then the placing of wreaths and solemn speeches. The myth has two parts: the first a symbol of defence against the ‘(Slavic) threat from the south’, and the second a symbol of ‘Carinthia free and undivided’. Both parts refer to the border and both express an ambivalent attitude towards the Slovenian speaking population within the region. The ‘threat from the South’ refers to a vague ‘other’ and to imaginary, or in some periods of history effective, territorial claims, and also includes ‘potentially disloyal’ Slovenian speakers in the region who are referred to as ‘extremists’. Another term, which was coined by German extremists in relation to this myth, is that of the ‘Kärntner Urangst’ (Carinthian primordial fear). Nevertheless, room was left for Slovenian speakers to join the Carinthian national consensus either by means of total assimilation to the German language or by claiming not to speak Slovenian but ‘Windisch’, which, according to political rather than linguistic definition, was considered a dialect, supposedly closer to German than to Slovenian. In this setting writing and


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speaking standard Slovenian was seen as an avowal, a declaration of affiliation, to the Slovene ethnic group and was labelled as being ‘alien’ to the region. The second part of the myth of ‘Carinthia free and undivided’ refers to a discursively constructed ‘natural’ borderline running across the peaks of the Karavank Mountains which are seen as a ‘natural’ barrier against the Slavic threat. The Slovenian national myth on the other hand is mainly based on culture, culture being practically synonymous with literature and language. Culture is considered the bearer of Slovene national identity and a pillar of Sloveneness (Velikonja 1996, 174). After having been part of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and then of the SHS Kingdom (later renamed the Yugoslav Kingdom), Slovenia was divided between Nazi Germany, Mussolini’s fascist Italy and the Croatian Ustasha state. Then it became one of the federal republics within the socialist Yugoslav Federation, before finally becoming an independent state in 1991. The Slovenian concept of nation followed the model of the ‘Kulturnation’, encompassing all Slovenian speakers divided up among different states. Slovenian language and literature have served as a uniting symbol and as evidence of the right to self-determination and the right to build an independent state, because even when ‘the Slovenian people was subjugated politically, with its own culture in its own language it preserved and proved its national independence’ (Velikonja 1996, 178). Slovenian national heroes, who decorate bank notes, are not warlords but writers like France Presern and other figures from cultural life. The anniversary of France Presern’s death is one of the Slovene national holidays and is celebrated both within and outside Slovenia. Possibly because of the fact that Slovenian history is seen as a succession of periods of subjugation to other political units the myth of the ‘good old times’, associated with the ancient social order that reigned in a remote past, has played a significant role. The idealised Slovene peasant as an antipode to the ‘uprooted bourgeoisie’ and the ‘homeless proletariat’ is a central figure in this myth (Velikonja 1996, 180). Within the Slovene-speaking minority in Austria the agrarian sector dominated until the early 1990s. This allowed the Slovene minority in Austria to serve as a ‘screen’ for the projection of fantasies of the long lost heimat. This idea was coupled with a desire for protection for the discriminated and suppressed minority. In fact the construction of the image of the Slovene minority in Austria in terms of the ‘motherland’ resulted in a kind of ‘folklorisation’, which contradicts the position of being a political subject. The Yugoslav Kingdom and later

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socialist Yugoslavia in conjunction with the Slovenian state today have also played a formal role in the field of minority protection for the Slovenian minority in Austria. On both sides of the border the central national myths are very closely linked to language. On the Carinthian side the idea of matching the ‘natural boundary’ with the linguistic one by means of forcing a process of assimilation to German language has been a political constant over the years. On the Slovenian side the fantasy of uniting the divided nation, if not in one single state then at least culturally, has been equally cherished. At different moments in history, especially when geopolitical changes gave the border new connotations, the myth was revived on either side. The annual commemorations keep the myths alive. So the myth is constantly present and is simply waiting for its moment to appear (Cassirer 1967, 280). After 1920 the population in the region began to learn to live with the new border which suddenly cut through family ties, especially among Slovenian speaking families. As farmers and landlords on either side of the border were entitled to keep their property rights in both states, special licenses had to be issued to those living in the border areas to allow them to cross the border to work in their forests and fields. Smuggling on the one hand became a means of undermining the very existence of the boundary, and on the other hand could be used as a means of benefiting from the differences between the two economic systems. The border and its legal and illegal crossing became an aspect of daily life for the people living in the border region, and even when official cross-border contacts were practically frozen this kind of movement across the border never stopped. A superseded past – or a legacy hindering inter-ethnic and cross-border relations? In 1938 Austria became part of Nazi Germany and when Hitler attacked Yugoslavia in 1941 large parts of Slovenia were annexed by the Third Reich. Carinthia’s southern borders were moved further south. Teaching Slovenian in Carinthian schools was prohibited as early as 1938 with the aim of making ‘Carinthia entirely German’. The fascist regime persecuted the Slovene minority and in 1941 started a process of deporting the Slovenian speaking Carinthians to labour and concentration camps. Many Carinthian Slovenes supported and joined the resistance movement fighting with Tito’s partisan army. Until the end of World War II southern Carinthia was a region of so called low intensity warfare with frequent


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clashes between partisan units and German military forces. Throughout this period language and identity were very closely intertwined: speaking Slovenian was not only a stigma but could result in denial of civic rights and ultimately was life threatening. At the same time speaking Slovenian also became a symbol of resistance and was linked to self-confidence. With the emergence of a resistance movement a new political factor came into play for the Carinthian Slovenes and challenged the monopoly the church had held over them up to that point. In 1945 Yugoslav and British forces combined to drive the German troops out of Carinthia, but their initial co-operation soon disintegrated as the fight against communism became the top priority of British foreign politics and in this context Carinthia was considered of strategic importance. The British and Allied forces stationed in Carinthia until the signing of the Treaty of State in 1955 relied in their fight against communism on people who had fled from Yugoslav territory after it had become part of the socialist sphere of influence. This further deepened the divide among the representatives of the Slovene minority in Austria into two ideologically different camps: the traditional Catholics who were associated with the emigrants from Yugoslavia on the one hand, and the more secular populace on the other hand who were defined in terms of the resistance movement. This divide has remained and has determined the relationship of the minority to the ‘motherland’. The first group, when Slovenia was part of socialist Yugoslavia, felt the Slovenian Republic played a rather ‘step-motherly’ role towards them and upheld the concept of the ‘kulturnation’ which could only preserve itself by a strong ethnic conscience. The second group counted on the support of the ‘motherland’ in its struggle for recognition in Austria and often shaped its policy according to the raison d’etat of the ‘motherland’. After the end of World War II the Austrian borders were re-established along the same lines as before the annexation in 1938. Initially the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia upheld territorial claims on the southern parts of Carinthia. However, at the conference of Yalta where the division of Europe into Western and Eastern spheres of influence was agreed, it was decided that Austria should play the role of a buffer state between the two spheres and that the frontier of 1938 should be re-established. The borderline now took on a new meaning with another connotation; it became the dividing line between two political and ideological systems. It was precisely this geopolitical definition of the border between Austria and socialist Yugoslavia that came to dominate not only

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cross-border relations but also minority-majority relations within Austria. From 1945 to 1949 the border was hermetically closed and once again contested. Yugoslavia upheld territorial claims arguing that the Slovene minority in Carinthia along with the partisan army had decisively contributed to Austria’s liberation from the Hitler regime. The Austrian authorities were well aware that the Slovene contribution was an asset in the negotiations for the Austrian Treaty of State which restored Austria’s independence and granted Carinthian Slovenes a certain amount of linguistic rights in both education and in the media. When Yugoslavia had renounced its territorial claims and recognised the Austro-Yugoslav border following the Treaty of State in which Yugoslavia was accorded a protective role concerning the Slovene minority in Austria, official relations between the two countries were established. In these years Yugoslavia was in a precarious political and economic position, having broken with the Soviet bloc but not wanting to fully join the Western bloc. The fate of the Slovene minority in Austria was not high on the agenda as harmonious relations with the northern neighbour were of vital importance. In Austria in the post war years there was an unwillingness to come to terms with the past and discuss involvement in the fascist regime. A national consensus was fabricated based on ‘the myth of a new beginning, the Stunde Null (zero hour), coupled with a self-pitying attitude and collective denial of responsibility’ regarding Austria as a ‘victim of National socialism – and subsequently of the Allied occupying forces’ (Wodak et al. 1999, 59). This became a central element of the political culture in the Second Austrian Republic. A further element in the discourses of Austria’s self-definition was ‘the economic and social achievements of the Second Republic, in particular the welfare state, social and economic peace (in contrast to ex-Yugoslavia and eastern Europe and other states)’ (Wodak et al. 1999, 190). In this climate nationalistic organisations with an anti-minority orientation could combine the ‘communist threat’ with the ‘Slavic threat’ in their discursive constructions. Thus the myth of the threatened frontier was upheld on the Austrian side. The Slovene minority in Austria had to struggle to develop its own position between the ‘motherland’ and the ‘father-state’ and construct a cultural identity as Carinthian Slovenes loyal to the Austrian state. Although after 1949 Yugoslavia no longer belonged to the Eastern bloc but to the bloc of the non-aligned states, and despite the frontier between Austria and Yugoslavia being less hermetically sealed than the


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Iron Curtain, it was still not as permeable as borders between Western European states. In the beginning relations between Austria and Yugoslavia were predominantly cultural, as evidenced in guest performances of orchestras, choirs or theatre groups. Later economic exchanges developed and in the 1960s it became possible to cross the border without a visa. Harming good neighbourly relations or a stepping-stone for economic exchange? When social movements developed in Western European countries at the beginning of the 1970s, minority rights became one of the issues. In Carinthia members of such movements started to claim the minority rights granted by the Austrian Treaty of State from 1955. These include the right to bilingual road signs, minority language use in administration and other official situations, and broader access to media. The social movements underlined their claims by means of public actions, such as trying to buy train tickets using Slovenian or requesting official documents in Slovenian, and eventually also succeeded in raising interest among the German speaking population, both inside and outside Carinthia. While minority organisations moved from a position of minority protection to a position of fostering intercultural understanding and bilingualism on a higher social level, these organisations kept their original ethnic orientation on language protection. It was only in this phase that the public at large in Austria became aware of the fact that Austria was not simply a monolingual country. In 1972 when the Austrian government finally began to fulfil the obligations of the State Treaty, the reaction from German nationalistic circles in Carinthia was prompt. Overnight they destroyed the bilingual road signs that had been erected by the federal authorities on the previous day. Carinthia remained without any road signs for a decade, as the authorities declined to confront German nationalistic circles about the issue. Under pressure from these circles the three political parties represented in the regional government concluded a pact deciding that minority questions would only be treated on the basis of unanimity, and this essentially meant without consulting the Slovene minority itself. The intimate link between language and territory became obvious through the violent actions of German nationalistic circles. At the same time a difference in pace between national Austrian and regional Carinthian levels also became evident. The federal authorities had no choice but to give in. At the beginning of the 1970s diplomatic relations between Carinthia and Yugoslavia were frozen and Carin-

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thian authorities saw the Slovene minority, ‘as an obstacle to good neighbourly relations’. The head of government of the province warned Slovenia and Yugoslavia not to interfere in Austria’s internal affairs (Valentin 1997, 305). Within the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Slovenia was the most developed region; its gross national product (GNP) was much higher than the average in the rest of the state and was considered to be the highest in Central and Eastern Europe. Towards the beginning of the 1980s Yugoslav and especially Slovene enterprises were more and more interested in expanding into western markets. Carinthia proved to be a valuable stepping-stone to these markets. At the same time the implementation of Slovenian trading companies and even of production units was also considered as being a direct support to the Slovene minority in Carinthia as these enterprises allowed and encouraged Slovenian as a language in the work place. But this was only a temporary phenomenon; few of these enterprises still exist. The most influential factor in economic relations was certainly the shopping tourism that began to develop between Slovenia and Austria in the 1980s. Price differences in goods and services attracted visitors from Austria to neighbouring Slovenia and vice versa, as the availability of certain goods in Austria such as technological products and luxury goods interested people from Slovenia. It was in this period that language skills in Slovenian became an apparent advantage on the labour market in Carinthia. The end of bloc logic – another change in border connotations In 1990 the Slovene parliament in Ljubljana declared Slovenia’s independence. The Republic of Slovenia started a process of westward-oriented development and gained international recognition in 1991. The border between the two neighbouring countries lost its connotations of dividing two ideologically different systems. But for some time it was partially constructed as separating the community of stabilised democracies from the so-called new democracies struggling with nationalism, and separating a zone of long established peace from the war zone of former Yugoslavia. The Zagreb philosopher Žarko Puhovski (2000, 41f) concludes that the wave of nationalism in the post-communist countries was a consequence of the previously dominant ‘illiberal ideology that was a collectivist and antagonistic one’. In this situation all attempts to act politically or socially without the omnipresent control of the dominate ‘ideological


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apparatus of the state’ had to rely upon the constitution of a group of independent actors that was not subject to ideological mediation by such an apparatus. So just not any type of ideology could be chosen, but only a type which could identify the members belonging to the group more or less automatically. Such a belonging was indeed the ethnic one which could be demonstrated by simply speaking one’s language (or dialect) or by pronouncing one’s name (or family name), and this could not be easily mediated or stopped. Nationalistic tendencies also strongly affected Slovenia: language purism and restrictions in the use of the languages of southern neighbours were symptoms of this. During the process of inscribing postcommunist Slovenia on the political map, the dominant Slovene political discourse emphasised and described as tight the borders with southern neighbours, whereas the border in the north with Austria and in the west with Italy were conceptualised as permeable. In the initial euphoria after independence the role of the newly founded state as a motherland for all Slovenes, including those living beyond the territorial frontiers and throughout the world, was strongly emphasised. The Slovenian World Congress was founded and Slovenian politicians repeatedly claimed that the minorities in neighbouring countries and the Slovene Diaspora should play a role as ‘ambassadors’ of the new Slovenian state. Among the Slovene minority in Austria the response to this was ambivalent. Whereas more ethnically oriented circles responded positively to the appeal, others saw a conflict of loyalties being imposed on them. In Carinthia German nationalist circles revived the old fear that the change in the political situation might lead to new territorial claims from the Slovenian side. But neither Carinthia nor Slovenia wanted to question the economic relations from which both partners profited. Austria currently, along with Germany, Italy and France, is one of the most important trading partners for Slovenia. Austrian imports from Slovenia increased by more than 50 percent between 1993 and1995, while exports to Slovenia increased by over 40 percent. (Wastl-Walter and Kofler 1999, 220). Therefore the dispute surrounding the border took place more on a symbolic level. When the Slovenian state coined its new currency, the Slovenian national symbol, which they printed on bank notes, was a chiselled stone where the Slovenian sovereigns swore their oath of investiture in the Middle Ages. But as this stone is kept in the national museum in Carinthia, Slovenia was suspected of still cherishing territorial ambitions. Only when the Slovenian head of state Milan Kucan declared

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that the Carinthian borders were ‘perpetual’ was the affair settled (Valentin 1997, 319). When the right wing populist Jörg Haider became head of government in the province of Carinthia for the first time in 1990, he raised the question of the recognition of the German speaking minority in Slovenia and claimed that minority rights should be based on reciprocity. In 1991, when a short war was waged between the Yugoslav army and Slovenian defence forces, some fighting took place on the border with Austria, and the longer war in Croatia and Bosnia in the first half of the 1990s also influenced the political and economic development of both Carinthia and Slovenia. Slovenia experienced several years of economic recession and inflation in the early part of the decade, but an upward trend has been clearly evident since 1994. The war in former Yugoslavia also made the border region seem unsafe and there was a marked decline in tourism. Trans-border traffic of passengers and goods between Austria and Slovenia declined significantly as transport to the Balkan region was re-routed through Vienna and Budapest. Austria’s membership of the EU – border connotations change again As mentioned above, the fall of the Iron Curtain meant a change in what Balibar (1997, 375) has called the ‘supra-determination’ of borders. In this view, national borders can be reinforced, confirmed or relativised by additional geopolitical factors such as the separation into two blocs, or the membership of economic unions or defence alliances, and thereby gain added significance. This also raises the question as to how far national borders are compatible with other geopolitical borders and their military, economic, ideological and symbolic functions, and to what degree the latter allow or restrict national autonomy (cf. Balibar 1997, 377). With an end to the division into two ideological blocs, the supra-determination of the borders between east and west European states declined, but there were now concerns about new supra-determinations, such as the question of the borders of the European Union (EU). In view of its accession to the EU Austria had to fulfil the requirements of the Schengen Agreement. In fact it is this Agreement which strictly determines the functions of the EU borders. Whereas it provides for the EU’s internal borders to be crossed without identity checks, it implements a strong regime of control on the EU’s external borders. As a consequence of the Schengen Agreement, external borders have become much tighter,


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and is in some aspects reminiscent of the tightness of the former Iron Curtain. The process of the European Union’s expansion eastwards has begun, but it involves a process of increasing differentiation between territories and their associated borders – between core and periphery territories, between existing member countries of the EU, first round applicants for entry, second round applicants, and countries whose membership is not yet up for debate. Within the Union there are further differentiations between countries who are and are not members of the single currency, and between Schengen agreement countries and the others. The Schengen agreement on a common security policy within the Union lifts border controls on internal borders of the EU where barriers and checkpoints have been removed, but at the same time it has intensified controls at the external borders. In this way, the external EU borders are developing a new supra-determination laid down on national borders. The abolition of controls on the EU internal borders does not mean the de facto abolition of these borders themselves, but rather a dissociation of the borders from their actual location. Controls can now be carried out throughout the whole state. Controls take place occasionally, continuously or in the form of spot-checks on sensitive international routes (for example, on the Vienna-Italy night train), in which supposed identity markers such as appearance or language are picked out as a criterion for an intensive check. As permeable and flexible as the borders might be in one direction, in the other they are difficult to cross. The concern since the fall of the Iron Curtain has been to renegotiate the borders of Europe. According to the logic of blocs, a Fortress Europe striving to put up barricades now stands opposed to newly independent or in part newly formed nation states, and these increasingly define themselves not in terms of their relationship to their immediate neighbours but in terms of their proximity to or distance from the EU. The question of Europe’s borders therefore plays an important role in the identification models and identity blueprints being propagated. On the other hand the EU has installed a series of programmes aimed at fostering cross-border co-operation. INTERREG and PHARE-CBC are programmes relevant to co-operation between member and nonmember states. Responding to the first call for such programmes after Austria had joined the EU several local initiatives presented projects. As the immediate border regions in Slovenia and in Carinthia are predominantly agricultural, most of these projects are located in the primary sec-

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tor, in areas such as bee-keeping, sheep breeding or the direct commercialisation of farm products. In this context, already existing trans-border relationships between grass-root initiatives on either side of the border, or simply contacts on a personal level, play an important role, and the Slovenian speaking population in Carinthia acts as a ‘bridge’ in transborder relations. In the beginning there was a certain local euphoria as regards cross-border projects, but discouragement soon followed. On an administrative level such projects are difficult to deal with and as it turned out it was almost impossible for small organisations to run projects which were only financed once they were finished. Therefore INTERREG and PHARE have now moved into the sphere of bigger scale organisations and municipalities where personal contacts and relationships at grass-root levels play a lesser role. Project proposals are mainly being drafted by planning agencies, most of which do not have their offices in the immediate border region. In the cultural sector the situation is somewhat different. Minority associations and bilingual organisations are very creative in making use of opportunities provided by the EU within the framework of different programmes for cross-border initiatives with Slovenia. Examples of this can be seen in the local bilingual radio station AGORA, which runs several projects based on crossborder co-operation with radio stations in Slovenia and Italy, and in local cultural initiatives which organise guest performances and exchanges. Preparation for EU enlargement Slovenia was accepted in 2000 as a candidate for the first round of EU enlargement. The Schengen Agreement requires Slovenia to implement a strict border regime on those borders which will become the EU outside borders after enlargement. Consequently issues of ‘illegal’ immigration and refugees have become important topics in the agenda-setting media of Slovenia. This goes hand in hand with the ‘foe’ images which have been present in media discourses since the process of distancing Slovenia from the Yugoslav Federation began. The ‘other’, ‘the Yugobums’, ‘those from the south’, ‘the Balkan folk’, and the Roma (Erjavec et al. 2000) are excluded from the ‘we’ of ‘Europe’ or ‘Mitteleuropa’ and are depicted as the potential intruder threatening the borders. It seems that with the displacement of the EU external border southwards, existing ‘foe’ images are being brought to the surface and reasserted, and so-called ‘illegal’ immigration is becoming a dominant political topic. Slovenian discourses on such topics strikingly resemble discourses within the existing EU


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member states. In both Austria is depicted as a good neighbour and the idea that Slovenia is a ‘natural’ part of Mitteleuropa is repeatedly expressed. The discursive construction of Slovenia’s southern borders as tight and strong is contrasted to the construction of the northern border as quasi non-existent. And to avoid potential conflict here Slovenia has recently felt obliged to refrain from raising issues concerning the Slovene minority in Austria. Within the Slovene minority in Austria identity constructions have changed considerably. The younger generation has developed a clear sentiment of being Austrian Slovenes, and tends to express this identity through their German-Slovenian bilingualism. It seems that the questions of the exclusivity of ethnic/linguistic affiliation and of loyalty have been replaced by constructions which go beyond the notion of a homogenous, monolingual ethnic community. At the same time this does not seem to be in contradiction to the concern for maintenance of the Slovenian language. Being bilingual is seen very positively as an additional life quality and as an advantage on the labour market. Whereas up to the 1970s Slovenian speakers in Carinthia had been over-represented both in the agricultural sector and in the population with a relatively low level of education, since then a process of rapid ‘catching up’ has taken place. Today the Slovenian population has overcome its societal disadvantaged status in the sense that its educational level is higher than that of the German-speaking segment of the population (Reiterer 1996, 150). Apparently leaving behind social disadvantage has resulted in an increase in self-consciousness and confidence in affirming a position as an active political subject. From the Austrian side, consent to Slovenia’s joining the EU was linked to the recognition of the German-speaking minority in Slovenia, which in fact does not live at the border with Carinthia but partly in the border region with the Austrian province of Styria and partly in the southern part of Slovenia, in the so-called Gotschee region. According to official figures this German-speaking minority consists of about 1,500 persons and the bilateral agreement on the recognition of this minority in Slovenia was signed in April 2001. However, in the preparations for EU enlargement German nationalistic circles in Carinthia have revived the old myth of the ‘threatened border’, arguing that when Slovenia and Austria belong to the EU there is a danger that the south of Carinthia might undergo a process of ‘Slovenisation’. As the recent national census in Austria was being prepared, these

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circles started a propaganda campaign to prevent people from marking Slovenian as a language spoken in their households, warning that a rise in the number of Slovenian speakers might lead to a more extensive use of Slovenian in the public domain. The head of the Carinthian government, Jörg Haider, who has based his political career on playing to anti-minority and anti-migrant sentiments, confirmed at the central meeting of this campaign that ‘he will not agree to any form of insidious Slovenisation’ (Kleine Zeitung 26 April 2001, 5). But none of this questions EU enlargement as such, and the weakening of the border between the two states also gives rise to hopes that it might result in strengthening the weak economy of the south Carinthian region. So are minority-majority relations changing with EU enlargement? We have seen that in Carinthia these relations and consequently also crossborder relations have been strongly influenced by national myths. These myths have been revived at intervals, particularly in periods when the geopolitical supra-determination of the border changed. The construction of the border in dominant discourses at such moments shows that the legacy from the past tends to be reproduced even though in practice it is weakening. The advantage of language skills and existing personal bonds across the border has not yet been fully realised. There is still a long way to go. A comparative study of Austrian border regions carried out in 1998 shows that in most of them a dynamic of economic growth has begun since the fall of the Iron Curtain, and this, among other factors, is expressed by an increase in the number of employees in the different regions. Whereas these figures of growth are around 11% in the border region between Styria and Slovenia, and around 14% between Upper Austria and the Czech Republic, it is only 5.3% for the border region in Carinthia. The author of the study suggests that this might be due to the fact that ‘the borders’ in the minds of the people living there are still very much in existence (Krajasits 1998). While diversity is often lauded as one of the salient features of European unification, in reality the nation state continues to play an important role with its striving for linguistic homogeneity within ‘national’ borders: it holds regulatory power over the education and the media sectors, both of which have considerable impact in constructing, shaping and reproducing national identities. The example of the Austro-Slovenian border shows that myths woven around the foundation of states and therefore also linked to the drawing of borders are extremely persistent. When interstate relationships and geopolitical factors change, such myths un-


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dergo processes of transformation, but do not disappear entirely. These myths usually contain statements about the ‘self’ and the ‘other’, and define national identities as well as providing markers for these identities. Language can serve as a marker for identity in the discursive construction of national identities, as elaborated in the case of Austrian-Slovenian relationships. Linguistic, ethnic and other minorities cannot easily escape this defining logic, often expressed in terms of loyalties to one state or the other. Whether linguistic minorities can fulfil a ‘bridging’ function or not, their making use of the cross-border webs of communication depends on the nature of the European project. The crucial question is whether Europe’s diversity is understood as a diversity represented by the sum of the nation states composing it, or whether we can define European identity in a more open and inclusive way based on the diversity of people living in it. References Balibar, Etienne. 1997. La crainte des masses. Politique et philosophie avant et après Marx. Paris: Galilée. Busch, Brigitta. 1999. Der virtuelle Dorfplatz. Minderheitenmedien, Globalisierung und kulturelle Identität. Klagenfurt: Drava. Cassirer, Ernest 1967 The Myth of the State, New Haven: Yale University Press. de Rougemont, Denis. 1980. Die Zukunft ist unsere Sache. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. Erjavec, Karmen; Sandra B.Hrvatin; and Barbara Kelbl. 2000 We on the Roma: Discriminatory discourse in the media in Slovenia, Open Society Institute: Ljubljana. Heindl, Waltraud and Edith Saurer. 1998. Grenzen und Grenzüberschreitungen. In Relationen 19. Wien: BMWV. Krajasits, Cornelia. 1998. Zwischen Zentralraum und Grenze. Wirtschaftliche Entwicklungstendenzen in den österreichischen Grenzregionen. Wien: ÖIR. Morley, David and Kevin Robins. 1996. Spaces of identity. Global media, electronic landscapes and cultural boundaries. London, New York: Routledge. Puhovski, Ž arko. 2000. Hate silence. In Media & War. Nena Skopljanac Brunner, Stjepan Gredelj, Alija Hod žić and Branimir Kristofić. Zagreb: Centre for transition and civil society research, and Belgrade: Agency Argument. Reiterer, Albert F. 1996. Kärntner Slowenen: Minderheit oder Elite?. Klagenfurt: Drava. Todorova, Maria.1999. Die Erfindung des Balkans. Europas bequemes Vorurteil. Darmstadt: Primus Verlag. Valentin, Hellwig. 1997. Eine schwierige Nachbarschaft. Die Beziehungen zwischen Kärnten und Slowenien mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Jahre 1945 bis 1995. In Kärntner für Politik. Karl Anderwald, Peter Karpf and Hellwig Valentin. Klagenfurt: Kärntener Druck und Verlagsgesellschaft.

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Velikonja, Mitja.1996. Masade duha. Razpotja sodobnih mitologij. Ljubljana: Zbirka Sophia. Wastl-Walter, Doris and Andrea Kofler. 1999. The Dynamics of Economic Transborder Cooperation between Austria/Carinthia and Slovenia. In Journal of Borderlands Studies, Vol. XIV, No. 2. Wodak, Ruth, Rudolf de Cillia, Martin Reisigl and Karin Liebhart. 1999. The discursive construction of national identity. Edinburgh University Press.


CULTURE, CONTINUITY AND IDENTITY IN THE SLOVENE-ITALIAN BORDER REGION Warwick Armstrong Abstract The 1954 international border between Yugoslavia and Italy bisects a region in which various ethnic communities have long co-existed. Over the centuries, autochthonous and migrant groups evolved patterns of accommodation that maintained cultural distinctions while containing potential ethnic friction. This continuity among the region’s ethnic groups has periodically been disrupted by outside intervention. The Slovene-speaking community here has been discriminated against by both authoritarian and democratic governments yet many have resisted cultural assimilation into Italian civil society. The identity of Slovene-speakers on both sides of the border is related more to a sense of regional belonging; it is their ‘place’ and that of their forebears. Regional pressures for a more porous international border have led to concessions permitting residents access to more permeable border crossings. The current border regime is thus a practical and symbolic acknowledgement of regional realities co-existing alongside those of the nation-state. With the probable accession of Slovenia to the European Union in 2004, border barriers will disappear, so allowing the region the opportunity to function as a reintegrated entity. Diversity – physical, demographic and cultural – is the salient characteristic of the border region that runs south from the right-angle of the Alps where Austria, Slovenia and Italy meet to the Istrian peninsula on the

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Adriatic Sea. Over the centuries, its strategic importance arose from its position between Western, Central and Southern Europe; Catholic and Orthodox Christianity and Islam; and Slavic, Romance and Germanic culture. States and empires have fought to control the area and the borderline between adversaries has shifted many times. Yet, for its local inhabitants, the borderlands have also long been the setting for an unfolding continuity as successive groups of in-comers settled, adapted to the physical environment and established working relationships and connections with each other. In their daily lives, as a matter of necessity, the distinct ethnic communities have come to a practical accommodation with each other in a region that is the place they know, belong to and from which they gain their livelihood. They have managed to preserve their distinct (evolving) cultures, institutions, languages and dialects, yet many, too, have adjusted to the customs and cultures of one or more of the other groups; intermarriage, multilingualism and diglossia are common in the region. At the same time, they have had to come to terms, often painfully, with other realities. Their region has been one of Europe’s fought-over zones. It has been the casualty of inter-state conflict, cultural and ethnic repression, expropriation, enforced migration and even genocide. It has been claimed in the name of imperial conquest and nation-state expansion and irredentism. A history of (prolonged if cautious) co-existence among the different ethnic groups has thus been periodically disrupted by larger-scale forces answerable to remote authority. Concern by the intruders for the well-being and traditions of the mosaic of local people has usually been subordinated to wider geo-political interests. Local responses to external power have varied. While many have bowed to state assimilation strategies that have changed their languages and even their names, others stubbornly hold onto their sense of cultural difference and ethnic distinctiveness. In spite of outsider heavy-handedness, they have retained a tenacious sense of their own identity, place and belonging. In recent centuries, modernizing nation-states have tended toward civic uniformity and the attenuation of cultural and ethnic distinctiveness. In industrialized societies, especially, common language, education, social and political structures and relationships, organizational methods, urban living patterns, fashions and dress, popular culture, leisure pursuits and material wants tend towards standardized norms. And parallel mass markets for dependable, replicable and allegedly efficient systems of production, distribution and consumption (and waste) have emerged. But in the

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latest phase of globalization political structures have started to change as challenges to the dominion of the nation-state appear both from above and below. The nation-state has increasingly had to share the stage with other forms of governance as its international borders have become more permeable. In Europe, both the European Union (EU) and regions within nation-states are contesting the hegemony of the state. One example of this appears at the Slovene-Italian border. This paper examines what happens when an ethnic group – an autochthonous dialect-speaking population divided by the Slovene-Italian borderline – is subjected to the fragmenting discontinuities caused by outside intervention. Imposed borders have cut through communities, separated families and neighbourhoods, disrupted regional and ethnic cultures and severed commercial relations. The original region has been bisected into front line border zones in which state geo-political interests are played out. State real politik, contesting territory and promoting state interests, is particularly intensively applied at international border zones. Foreign-orientated strategies, though, are rarely in harmony with the wishes or the needs of local border populations. In fact, state efforts to assimilate border ‘minorities’ usually arouse local antipathies, resentment and opposition, however disguised or muted. The objectives and aspirations of centre and periphery too often stand mutually opposed, especially in the absence of understanding and a sense of respect by the powerful for the weaker. Where an autochthonous community such as the Slovene-speakers at the Italian border maintains a firm sense of cultural solidarity, resistance to assimilationist or divide-and-rule state strategies is especially assertive. And this is also true of their attitudes towards the international borderline, the symbol and material implement of subordination and division. This has been a theme running through Slovene-Italian border region life where pressure from the local community has helped change the character of an international border. Over the past half century, the state has come to heed regional demands and respond to personal, cultural and commercial needs for crossborder contact and interchange. Inhabitants of the divided region have gradually won concessions from state administrations on both sides of the border to their demands for freer cross-border passage. Moreover, an implicit recognition of the existence of the border region as the integral living space of earlier times is growing. The cultural persistence of the Slovene-speaking population around Trieste in particular has come to

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parallel the political will of the state. And it is likely that the cultural and economic reintegration of the region will be substantively realized after Slovenia accedes to the European Union in 2004.1 The borderland region The prime physical characteristic of this borderland is its diversity, the sharply-cut Julian Alps to the east contrasting with the broad farmland plains that stretch south to the Adriatic coast. It is also a region of diverse cultures, languages and dialects, providing a home for people of different origins who have occupied these lands for centuries. A variety of ethnic groups, speaking, among many others, Friulano, Triestino, Bisiaco, Lagunare as well as Germanic and Slavic – especially Slovene – dialects, has been long-established in Italy’s Friuli-Venezia-Giulia region. Venetians, Greeks, Ottoman Turks, Jewish and Germanic groups have also migrated here and established their own viable and enduring communities. Trieste, the region’s capital with over a quarter of a million people, is a city that has long been the focal point of one of Europe’s critical geopolitical and cultural flashpoints. It is the city which most clearly marks the divide between Western, Central and South-Eastern Europe. But it is also an urban crossroads in which people, commerce and cultures from all these areas have over the years met face to face. It is a multicultural and multilingual city, the point of contact and interchange for people of Slavic, Germanic and Romance descent. For centuries it has been a major seaport link, entrepot and transit corridor between Central Europe and the Mediterranean – and especially the Islamic world. The region is, then, the living space for a multiplicity of ethnic groups.2 Their roots and settlement, long-established on either side of the present-day international border, reach into a history that dates well be1

For more detailed discussions of the situation of the Slovene-dialect speaking communities of the southern part of the Friuli-Venezia-Giulia borderland region see Armstrong (1997, 1998), Bufon (1991, 1993/4), Gross (1978) and Sussi (1973). 2 The 1954-agreed international border runs from Austria to the Adriatic and occasional references are made to Slovene-speakers in the northern part of FriuliVenezia-Giulia; this paper, however, concentrates primarily on the southern SloveneItalian sector of the region around the city of Trieste. Here, the historic region of Istria, shadowy to outsiders, perhaps, features as an entity which continues to kindle the loyalties and sense of belonging of many on either side of the border who are legally defined as Italian or Slovenian citizens. For many, the legal realities of state citizenship are overshadowed by the cultural and historical allegiances to an Istrian identity.


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yond the twentieth century international conflicts and treaties dividing it. Historical patterns of intervention and division were repeated as the postwar Anglo-American Administration, in their 1954 triage of the territory, drew a black-and-white political divide between Italy and Yugoslavia. The new borderline led to yet another separation of families (and properties), neighbourhoods and communities as decisions taken in distant centres of power had done throughout the centuries. Over the long years of human habitation, a form of mutual interethnic accommodation has been gradually worked out within and among farming and village communities as well as in the larger towns and cities such as Trieste, Gorizia, Cividale and Udine. This is, no doubt, the outcome more of pragmatism than idealism; for the most part it has been based on the need for human communities to maintain a degree of continuity and stability, so ensuring as viable a pattern of everyday life as possible. People engaged in earning their daily living are concerned about their economic, political and cultural security. To ensure their own survival and that of their community, not surprisingly they have negotiated economic arrangements (for instance, a division of labour between those engaged in farming and fishing) and cultural – religious and educational – compromises with other ethnic groups for mutual benefit. Larger-scale events, originating beyond the compass of local life have, however, periodically undermined these patterns of co-existence by stirring up inter-ethnic tensions and racial antipathy. The region, always strategically significant, has been fought over by Franks and Lombards, subjected by Venice and incorporated into Austria’s land-based empire with Trieste acting as the principal imperial port and outlet to the sea. In its more recent history, Trieste was the city from which thousands, escaping poverty and/or hated authority in Italy, Austria-Hungary and the Balkans, migrated to the Americas, Australia and New Zealand. Italy won part of the ex-imperial territory after World War I, leaving the newlycreated Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later the state of Yugoslavia) to take over a share of the Slovene-speaking hinterland. After World War II, Italy, in its turn, paid for choosing the losing side and further territorial surgery in 1954 saw Italy ceding Istria and other lands to Yugoslavia. This partition sliced the city of Gorizia in half and left Trieste without its traditional hinterland. What the Anglo-American settlement did, in the ideological atmosphere of the Cold War, was to define, contain and exclude. The new line sliced through a viable, functioning region with its ethnic groups, long-established cultural relation-

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ships and economic activity. The new international border was the Manichean outcome of a dualistic post-war mind-set; people, once neighbours, sharing a language and customs in common, trading and exchanging, working and meeting, were now to be cut off from one another. But the Cold War border not only separated them into two citizenships; it far more deeply divided the ‘we’ and ‘they’ into the inhabitants of two opposed ideological blocs. Differences between national governments and their border peripheries can be deep and close to unbridgeable. Even in times of peace, misunderstandings arise between state objectives to maintain territorial integrity, guarantee security of frontiers and standardize civil status and border community aspirations concerning their economic viability, cultural identity(ies), traditions and sense of national belonging. When an international border, such as that between Italy and Yugoslavia in the early post-war years, runs along an ideological fault line between ‘the Free World’ and ‘the Soviet Bloc’, differences intensify. Malgorzata Irek (2001) concludes from her research on the Polish-German border, another ideological dividing line, that: the respective central governments can do little to solve the problems of the local populations, simply because they are too far away to understand them and to react quickly enough. On the other hand, they can greatly aggravate any difficulties by insisting on strict adherence to regulations that often are sadly out of date, by imposing red tape on the simplest activities, and by neglecting the local communities’ needs and ambitions – all under the pretext of ‘reasons of state’ – a concept used as freely as that of a symbol in literature (Irek 2001, 219).

War immeasurably worsens the situation as both conflict and subsequent international ‘arrangements’ are forced upon civilian populations. Imposed formal treaties disrupt local continuities and daily routines as well as the practices of co-existence necessary for well-being – or survival. Border lines between nation-states are forced into new geo-political shapes while unfamiliar civic, political and ideological allegiances are required of local populations. Impermeable political divisions and obstacles are raised to prevent movement and exchange in the border regions. In the interests of the state – security and the maintenance of territorial sovereignty – local communities pay an often heavy price. Familial and group connections are weakened or broken, employment, commerce and livings disrupted, community institutions closed down, cultural affiliations interrupted and the lives of the residents thrown into turmoil.


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The history of this particular border region is one where foreign intervention, officially-decreed boundaries and proscriptive state policies on language and culture have periodically engendered an atmosphere of instability and insecurity. The situation greatly worsened during World War II when earlier official insensitivity or indifference was replaced by conflict, racism and oppression. During the years of conflict, the battles among Italian Fascists and German Nazis on the one side and Yugoslav Partisans on the other generated a climate of fear, intolerance and racism among different ethnic groups. Yet, here too, an underlying determination to survive using whatever means the weak can find to deal with those in power – whether by acceptance, negotiation or open resistance – never ceased. The struggles to control such a strategic region have, then, been critical components of its history. Yet, for all the efforts by nation-states to create a more uniform sense of citizenship, the region remains a more layered and varied place than the dualistic border regime would suggest. Of course, the international border maintains its prominent barriers, Alevel crossing points that denote black and white differences of nationstate citizenship: Slovenians on one side, Italians on the other. These are the most visible obstacles to outsiders – officials, tourists, trans-European commercial truck drivers, long-distance commuters and would-be migrants. For these, the border crossings are salient signposts in the landscape. The A cross-border posts define the international barrier between Italy and Slovenia; but they also demarcate the South-Eastern flank of the European Union. Security concerns here assume high priority as the first line of EU defence against the outside world. The fence exists to control/prevent flows of trafficked drugs, ‘illegal’ immigrants, criminals, terrorists and other threats to European stability. Contrasts in movement and access between two international borderlines in the Italian region of Friuli-Venezia-Giulia are sharp. The northern internal border through the Alps between Austria and Italy – both members of the EU – is open and allows free passage to travellers. It is the principal cross-border pass between two EU Schengen Agreement neighbours, so flows of traffic through this inner border are as free and unimpeded as speed limits will allow. But, further south, between an EU member (Italy) and an external state (Slovenia), the controls and checking procedures are strictly enforced. At Trieste’s Rabuise-Skofije barred crossing point between Italy and Slovenia, an external border, lines of

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commuters, truckers and visitors, often impatient and frustrated, frequently tail back hundreds of metres. Yet this image of an impermeable ‘reasons of state’ barrier is misleading. The high-profile international crossing points make up just one class of border control points. Adjustments made over the years to the Cold War border for the convenience of local residents have eased the rigid 1954 controls imposed when this was a critical segment of Europe’s ‘iron curtain’. During the decades that followed, regional realities reasserted themselves; people were anxious to keep familial, community and cultural connections as well as commercial exchange alive. As a result, pressure exerted by communities on both sides – especially Slovene-speaking ethnic groups – together with the relaxing of post-war tensions between Yugoslavia and Italy, gradually led to concessions from state authorities in both countries. A prime example is that made to local residents living within a fringe on either side of the border who gained permits to use Blevel crossings situated down side roads. These are often not officially supervised and the traffic moves largely unimpeded along narrow country roads and lanes. Apart from the evident practical advantages for commuters and shoppers such porous crossings help to reduce the sense of division and separation among the border region population. Earlier and even more informal crossings, rarely inspected by officialdom, allow farmers to move freely over their properties lying on either side of the border. The decision to allow this was taken at international level, but there has also been a local input – pressure from people consistently pushing for greater borderline flexibility (often exercised anyway, despite international protocol). The borderline has thus changed both in real and symbolic terms. The border’s more flexible character is an acknowledgement that it has ceased merely to represent state real politik. The region is no longer so starkly divided with two sets of state citizens separated from each other by an impermeable line. Now, the different levels of cross-border connections more closely reflect a region resuming its status as an integral entity. It is, once more, becoming a place of ethnic communities with shared or similar customs and language and with identities that transcend binary definitions of state citizenship. The graduated border crossings are, in turn, highly visible signifiers of a more nuanced social and cultural situation. Internationally-defined and agreed borders represent perhaps the most simplistic and generalized expressions of difference between na-


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tional societies; they are the least subtle and sophisticated signifiers of what actually goes on in the areas they bisect. Beyond the designs of politicians and the skills of cartographers there exists a multitude of unofficial and uncharted but meaningful borders that represents the mental maps of communities whose cultures, aspirations and vision are distant from the strategies of the central state. They are engendered by a sense of belonging, by feelings of shared identity and interest, by custom and constant daily association and interchange, by practical need and by the imaginations of those living in the border region. Such maps of the mind encompass and reflect spaces and places different in kind and objective from those constructed by inter-state negotiation or government legislation. They rarely conform to the goals of the nation-state. And they represent a challenge to social engineering policies aimed to produce a homogeneous citizenry within state boundaries. Ernest Gellner outlines the objectives of the industrial society state that privilege universal literacy, a high level of numerical, technical and general sophistication, impersonal context-free communication and an education that supersedes kinship group connections, replacing them with ‘a school-transmitted culture, not a folk-transmitted one [that] alone confers (...) usability and dignity and self-respect.’ (1983, 36). Local objectives and aspirations, in contrast, are founded upon the realities of nearat-hand relationships and associations – of neighbourhood and familial loyalties and of overlapping and interacting identities moulded by historical connections and ethnic, cultural and linguistic usage and custom. These form the symbolic and practical spaces and borders justified by long, continuous tradition and practical interaction. They tend to be idiosyncratic and personal when compared with Gellner’s description of industrial society’s norm of a more uniform set of educated goals distinct from ‘a diversified, locality-tied, illiterate little culture or tradition’ (Gellner 1983, 38). As a result, they very often constitute borders of loyalties only tangentially corresponding to the official version. Two contradistinctive rhythms stand out, then, in the unfolding history of this border region. The first is of periodic discontinuities caused by inter-state conflicts and territorial redistributions that have disrupted the lives of those living in the borderlands. The other is a register of local community resilience in the face of such upheavals and of a continuing effort to co-exist; it is a rhythm of practical accommodation and persistent self-awareness.

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Some of this is apparent in Robert Minnich’s (1998) biographical review of Darinka Kravanja-Pirc, born in 1910 in the Upper Soca valley within the borders of present-day Slovenia. She had been, at the time of writing, a citizen of five different states and had also lived in exile. But she remained intimately connected to her village which, over her lifetime, fell under the control of so many different regimes as international borders crossed and re-crossed the landscape. As Minnich writes: Her aspirations as a pupil and student, spouse, parent and provider, as well as her desire to assume responsibility in organizations promoting the welfare of her local community, have been continually confounded by the changing content of her status as a citizen of the various states controlling her native Bovec (Minnich 1998, 1).

Yet, despite the changes in her civil status within the Austro-Hungarian empire, the Italian monarchy, the Fascist Italian state, Nazi Germany, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and finally, in 1991, the Republic of Slovenia, in her own mind she has remained ethnically a Slovene-speaker in her own village. Minnich’s paper highlights ‘the persistence of this personal conviction in an environment where alternative national identities have been served to Darinka Kravanja-Pirc and her multilingual borderland compatriots like the ‘special of the decade’ on Europe’s 20th Century political menu’ (Minnich 1996, 3). The menu continues to change. At present, a Slovenian citizen in a non-EU state, soon she may find herself the citizen of an EU member state, almost as if she and others who have stayed in the Soca valley had never parted from earlier civil status. More broadly, with Slovenia’s accession to the EU and the further crumbling of the state borders as barriers, we can speculate on the likelihood of the region – once Trieste’s hinterland – reasserting itself as an integral unit. Is it possible, then, that traces of division and separation will slowly fade so that membership of a region is of equal or greater significance than state citizenship? Except, that is, for one segment of the region. The border dividing Slovenian and Croatian Istria, once an open administrative line between two sister republics in the same federal state, will now become a strictly-enforced border, part of the southern flank of the EU, and one that separates an EU member from non-member states to the South. Of course, if Croatia’s application to the EU succeeds, the Istrian peninsula, too, could become part of the reintegrated region. The next section deals with the way that a group of mainly Slovenespeakers I interviewed, mostly but not entirely from the eastern districts


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of Trieste, identify themselves and their place of living. As I listen, I hear the sense of commitment they have for the what I understand to be their Istrian cultural and territorial space. The international border that has legally given them a state citizenship and severed their juridical ties with the other side of the region has had its impact on their everyday lives. But, at a deeper level, it has not shorn them of the belief that they still belong to an entity (a homeland?) comprising Trieste and its Istrian hinterland whose historical integrity and meaning transcend the outside delineations. Istria is their place and has a hold on their consciousness ahead of their commitment to a nation-state. And it does so beyond the sharing of a common ethnicity or language; Italian and Slovene (and Croat) dialect speakers alike experience a sense of belonging to Istria, a region at present divided among Croatia, Slovenia and Italy. One practical piece of evidence that the bonds remain can be seen in the daily lines of traffic bringing people from Istria to work in Trieste. Local perceptions of identity and borders How do people in the border region – on both sides of the official line – view what has happened during their lifetimes? The aim of this section of the paper, based on interviews with people in the region in the latter years of the 1990s, is to highlight the ways in which their responses and opinions differ from what they perceive to be official intentions and stratagems. My interviews were mainly in Slovenia’s Primorska region (on the Adriatic and along the frontier with Italy) and in Friuli-Venezia-Giulia in Italy, especially in the eastern districts of Trieste. I also spoke with people from Cividale and Val Canale in the northern Three Border Region and with people in Rovinj in Croatian Istria. In each case I decided, in this first phase of the study, to meet people from what are conventionally called ‘minority’ groups – though how loaded this term is will be discussed later. Their responses dealt with three main themes: assimilation and exodus; identity; and issues specifically linked to the international border. I begin by presenting some of the adversities visited on the border region and its ethnic communities by outside intervention. During World War II, following two decades of Fascism’s concerted assimilation policy, ethnic cleansing and attempted obliteration of cultural memory, a Nazi reign of terror over the region culminated in the establishment of Italy’s only concentration camp. Slovene community centres were destroyed,

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families removed from their homes, non-Italian speaking schools were closed and even family names were Italianized (place names, needless to say, had been already). The memory of this is still sharp in the minds of many Slovene-speakers long decades after: Marija3, a Slovene/Italian professional from a smaller city north of Trieste was trenchant in her criticism of the policies of the Italian authorities: People have been assimilated here and their names rewritten in Italian orthography, often by themselves; this is a more subtle form of assimilation than the brutal methods of [interwar] fascism. Illiterate peasants were educated in Italian and this contributed to Italianization. In fact, fascist legislation still exists legally in many parts of [the state’s] minority policy. And religion has pushed this along, too; only in a few places is the mass conducted in Slovene, because the church has been very Italian nationalist (interview with author).

This history persists, she argues, because chauvinist attitudes among politicians, officials and clerics have changed little. But it was exacerbated by the post-war settlement that left Slovene (dialect)-speakers on the Italian side of the 1954 line and Italian (and dialect)-speakers in the Yugoslav republics of Slovenia and Croatia. In their thousands the esoli (asylum seekers) left their homes, farms and businesses in Yugoslav Istria, either migrating to Argentina, Australia and North America or, resentful and hostile, settling in the region around Trieste. The consequences for Slovene-speaking communities and the tradition of convivenza (ethnic coexistence) were, in turn, traumatic as Dejan, who lives in Trieste’s outskirts, explained to me: Most of the fascisti groups in Trieste were formed by the esoli after the exodus of 1954. Most were Italian, but some were of Slovene and Croatian origin. When they got to Italy, they became ‘italianissimo’ – strong Italian nationalists – to show their loyalist credentials: and to promote their own interests. They used the state to help them set up in traditionally Slovene ethnic villages [around Trieste] and take local jobs. As a result, many ethnic Slovenes emigrated, mainly to Australia (interview with author).

Once again, confrontation and the uprooting of local communities ensued as events over which those communities had little control unfolded. But the effect was to harden latent differences and set groups against each other as – despite Julian Minghi’s hopeful title, ‘From conflict to harmony in borderlandscapes’ (Minghi 1991) – still happens from time to time. 3

I have changed the names of the informants who spoke with me in all cases.


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Identity Given the kind of people I initially spoke with, the sense of self-understanding and identity was always bound to be acute and well-honed. In this first round of face-to-face interviews, I met a group of well-educated, generally middle-class men and women with a clear and particular knowledge of their communities. Each had an opinion about the meanings of the imposed international borders. Most saw them as political divisors which have split up territory, families, and ethnic, cultural and language communities; have converted long-established communities into ‘ethnic minorities’; have subjected them to states for which they often feel only marginal loyalty and little affection; and have foisted on them alien designations. Even so, the responses varied, largely according to the treatment they had experienced in their country of residence. One of the more positive replies came from the lips of Francesca, a native Italian-speaker living in a Slovene border region town: Where do I come from? is a really important question; we [the Italian minority] also need to maintain our rights within the Slovene state. We are Slovene citizens and proud to be; we live in symbiosis with our own and our state identities and feel enriched by the two cultures and languages. The future of the minority depends on its culture (interview with author).

The optimism of her response no doubt reflects Slovenia’s treatment of the Italian community with its own language schools, radio and television – and the fact that she holds a position of official responsibility in her town. But Jernej, a Slovene-speaker, Italian citizen, and teacher from the northern part of Friuli-Venezia-Giulia felt far less hopeful about his community’s cultural, educational and linguistic prospects within Italy: Our problem as a minority now is to establish and maintain our identity. Often parents are Slovene and speak in Slovene dialect, but they have to speak the official language (Italian) in public. Slovene is seen as the language of adults while the young speak Italian and some German at school (interview with author).

Concern about being a Slovene-speaker in Muggia/Milja, a coastal district east of Trieste (most of the discussions were held here and in similar districts with sizeable Slovene-speaking populations to the north and east of Trieste), was expressed vehemently by Branka, a Slovene-speaking retired farmer: Slovenes have never been treated equally [in Trieste] and we have kept together and married for the sake of unity. The Italians have used epithets

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against the Slovenes – schiavi or slaves. Why the hatred? Because we are an autochthonous people and the Italians feel their culture is superior. The Slovene minority was in the way. How do I see myself? An elderly lady who’s lucky to have a pension. But we are proud of being Slovene; we’re ‘Triestino Slovenes’ – and Italian citizens because Italy came here. We didn’t go looking for Italy. My grandparents were Austro-Hungarian (interview with author; emphasis added).

The italicised words express her fervent sense of place – her place. She sees herself not as a member of a ‘minority’ – that is an official state designation – but as someone from Trieste, whose family home is, and has long been, in the region, whose Slovene ancestors were members of the old Austro-Hungarian empire and belonged to this place long before it ever came into the hands of the Italian state. The surface designations of state citizenship can be set alongside the way in which local people perceive themselves. Ana is a Slovene-speaking housewife of Dalmatian descent also from the eastern districts of the Trieste region. She uses the Slovene and Triestino dialects with equal facility, but claims that her first choice of language would be German. Even though her children also speak the two dialects, she wanted them to speak literary Slovene. But she doesn’t want to be a Slovene citizen. Not that she dislikes Slovenia, but this, she insists is her place and this is where she will live come who may – ‘even the Turks!’ This viewpoint was reiterated at greater length by two teachers (one now retired) also from near Muggia/Milja. One clearly understood her own complex position – and that of others similar to herself: I am an Italian citizen and a Slovene national. Why is it important for me to sustain Slovenity? It stems from a sense of belonging – an intrinsic, inside sense. People who assimilate don’t have a strong character or ask questions about their origins and roots. I’d feel a traitor to myself and my origins. But it’s difficult to explain it and frame it in words. It’s both feeling and logic – it’s reality! (interview with author).

But she recognized that not everyone, or even close to a majority of ‘Slovene nationals’, shared her feelings; she attributes this to a lack of culture and awareness of cultural roots. The crumbling of community with all its occasions for sharing and solidarity had left people ignorant and narrowly individualistic and this undermines cohesion and a sense of authentic identity. But the state had not helped either: ‘If the Italians had been more open-minded, the people would not have assimilated so much here.’


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Resentment of the treatment meted out to ethnic communities by the Italian state, both pre-war and in the years following the Second World War, is evident among these Slovene-speakers. They remember the years of discrimination while they are sensitive to what they see as the decline of their communities and the weakening of their cultural bonds. Their pain is evident, too, in their disappointment as they observe the too-ready capitulation of fellow nationals to the assimilationist strategies of the state. Criticism of the Italian state does not necessarily imply a longing for another citizenship. The marginal significance of states and citizenship is evident in the response of the other teacher who, while living in Trieste, sees herself as a Slovene from Istria. But she feels as indifferent to the Slovenian state as to Yugoslavia earlier because her primary affinity is with Istria; ‘Being Croatian or Slovenian is an abstraction for people from Istria.’ The suburban district in which this teacher and her friends live, work, socialize, marry and bring up their families is central to them. Beyond that immediate place, though, is the sense of belonging to a wider entity from which they, their families and their forebears hail – in this case the Istrian region. And Istria is not, for them, bounded and bordered by the artificial lines drawn by cartographers at the behest of distant politicians and bureaucrats. They recognize the civil authority of the state they live in, of course. But, in so many aspects of life, other realities and meanings in their own personal and community frames of reference transcend official state boundaries. Istria at one and the same time derives its being from a sense of shared history, culture and everyday activity – and it extends in all these ways over, under and beyond the international borders that separate regional communities. For such people the misfortune is that their vision and sense of loyalty is too often not shared by those whose ethnic histories and traditions might have made them allies. A similar dilemma confronts people on the other side of the state border – the small remnant of the Italian-dialect speakers who once lived in the Istrian peninsular (in fact, two land borders now separate them from Italy.) These are people in Croatian Istria who either refused to join the 300,000 esoli in the post-1954 exodus from Yugoslavia to Italy or the very few who, having migrated, later returned. Pietro, an Italian-dialect speaking Istrian, a Croatian citizen and student of Istrian ethnology, posed the rhetorical questions: why did the few stay behind? why didn’t they join the majority fleeing to Italy? His answer: ‘Mainly because they

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were farming people whose fields were more important to them than the state or politics.’ Place has come first for this small community of people who stayed to face an uncertain future, but at least with the hope that their land would provide them with some sense of grounding. For Pietro, however, the real disaster occurred among this depleted ethnic group when people moved from the land into the towns of Istria and inter-married with the Croat-speaking majority. Their sense of place in which to work and bring up their families had initially been strong enough to resist both the attractions of a prospering post-war Italy and the apprehensions of living in the poorer Republic of Yugoslavia. But, living on the other side of the international border from the teacher in Muggia/Milje, this younger man similarly sees the effects of time and of modernization as younger generations quit traditional occupations and adopt new ways, new habits and a new language. He, too, is dismayed by what he sees as the too-ready assimilation of those from his own ethnic and language group, now urbanized and absorbed into new patterns of living. Who, then, are the Istrians in this complex mosaic of lives? Is language the unifying element? Is place of birth and upbringing, of shared customs and of local association? Those Italian dialect speakers of Rovinj, Pula and the other towns in Croatian Istria appear to share little with, for instance, the Slovene-dialect speakers two borders over in Italy; and dialects within the sweep of Istria vary within a few kilometers of each other. The many complexities preclude an easy answer to the question, but one thing is clear: that, however intricate definitions might be, however complicated the network of signs and definitions of identity, many of those questioned still find their primary self-identification to be Istrian rather than citizens of states that have divided up the region. Is ‘place’, then, the common denominator – place defined by territorial geography at its most general level, but a territory filled by usage, custom, shared memory and traditions, associations with those of similar culture (and co-existence with other traditions) – and aspirations for its future: so, a sense of belonging to this physical territory and its human inhabitants and their works? The international border How do borderland people see the border, that expression of nation-state identity, its primary marker and security fence against other states and potential external threats? In drawing a defensive line for the state it is


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also the divider of people and communities. What, then, would the significance of its lowering be for people in the border region? For local authority officials on either side of the frontier, Slovenia’s accession to the EU would reduce the border to an administrative division little more restrictive than between counties, states or provinces within the same country – or as uncontested as the border between the Netherlands and Belgium. This may be optimistic, given the contentious history of the region. Other examples, such as that of the Basque region separated by the Franco-Spanish border, suggest the possibility of other – and less harmonious – scenarios emerging (see Leizaola 1996, 1999, 2000). But officials are further attracted by economic benefits they see arising from a maritime complex serving Central Europe. The two presentlycompeting ports of Koper (Slovenia) and Trieste (Italy) could specialize in specific areas of international commerce, so benefiting both. And they would be linked by the motorways across Slovenia that complement the existing Italy to Austria autostrada by opening access to Austria, Germany and the Czech Republic in the north and to the Central European hinterland of Hungary, Slovakia and Poland. The vision is a beguiling one, transforming the economic prospects for the region; from its present peripheral and divided status, it could become an integrated commercial nexus. Francesca, the Italian-speaker on the Slovenian side of the border was cautiously optimistic: What will happen when the border no longer exists? It will depend on the individual, but perhaps the region will be more European than Slovenian or Italian – and that will be a positive change (interview with author).

Duska, a Slovene-speaking housewife from an eastern district of Trieste, responded in a similar vein to the question: what is likely to happen when the border and its checkpoints disappear? If the confine disappears with the EU will there be a big difference? Maybe people would cross over more, especially Italians, but it’s not a real obstacle now for us, although it is a psychological barrier and a nuisance. I use the ‘B’ border crossings. Triestini cross over for duty free goods, gasoline, eating, restaurants and they go to Dalmatia for fish (interview with author).

The barrier has already been crossed in daily activity as well as in the imaginations of those who live near it. For Duska, it represents a minor irritant that takes her slightly out of her way but little more. She thinks that Italian-speakers from Trieste will be tempted to use the newly-freed routes into Slovenia and Croatia more for everyday needs. In this way the

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re-integration of the borderland region will move a step forward; each side will come to resemble the other more as the division dissolves under the impact of people’s everyday movements and transactions. As this happens, the region may well come to resemble less and less the two nation-states which have governed it up to now. Ground-level viewpoints I have chosen to examine the vernacular and everyday here in an effort both to complement and question overarching and generalized discourses rooted in centres rather than peripheries: that is, analyses that are generated at distance rather than close at hand to the action; that are concerned more with general principles than examination of concrete situations; and that tend to arise more from academic and official sources than from locally-generated knowledge and experience. Complementarity of approach is needed but my aim here is to redress the balance in favour of the ground level: to study close to the source while remaining aware of the broader contexts in which local events take place. I have chosen to listen more to those voices that offer a deeper understanding of life’s realities in local communities – above all, in the hothouse environments of border regions. Only a part of those opinions are present in this paper and I offer them as the first approximation of a future wider study. There is a dilemma for those involved in on-the-ground work who feel professionally obliged to generalize the paradoxical experiences and events lived by individuals and communities. John Borneman says of ‘explanation’ in anthropology that for him it substitutes complex pictures for simple ones while striving somehow to retain the persuasive clarity that went with the simple ones (...). The question for me (...) is not whether certain experiences or events lend themselves to serve a particular model (...) but from what perspectives might one account for and do justice to particular experiences and events. In other words, social science is put less in the service of itself than of the object it seeks to constitute and explain (Borneman 1998, 187).

And, while the words differ, the meaning is similar in Robert Minnich’s observations on his research in Slovene-dialect villages in the Kanalska dolina/Valcanale region of north-eastern Italy. He writes of the predicament he – and others – face: All of us who have attempted to describe the complexity and contradiction innate to life in a multilingual borderland have been forced, sooner or later,


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to sacrifice a faithful representation of the world encountered in the field for generalizations which inevitably essentialize social and cultural categories. As a result our field logs are often filled with fascinating ‘exceptions to the rule’ – idiosyncratic manifestations of human experience – which seldom find their way into the published discourse but often highlight the conversation of our informal encounters. In this way field records and memories which are sensitive to individual variations are subsumed within normative wholes (1992, 159-160).

Minnich records in detail the responses of Slovene-speakers to their altered situation. Living in Italy after post-war border changes has not turned them into Italian citizens in their own minds and many (of the older generation, especially) continue to speak their own dialect and to associate with nearby Slovene-dialect villages in Slovenia and Austria. During a long conversation in relaxed social surroundings, Minnich, trying to understand the way a villager from Kanalska dolina saw himself in terms of his nationality, received a complex answer: ‘We speak our own language, are Carinthians at heart and our fate is to live in Italy’ (1996, 163). At no point does this man define his identity in terms of civic state nationality – Slovene, Austrian or Italian. His everyday language is in Slovenian dialect and not the standard or literary form; his forebears were all residents of the province of Carinthia, once part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, now divided by the fiat of international agreement between Austria and Italy; and as a result he and his community find themselves in a state whose official language is not his own and whose central government is a presence remote from his own known surroundings. Minnich bemoans the way theoretical generalization in academic studies so often bypasses the everyday realities in border region life. International borders are, above all, an obstruction or irrelevance in the lives of border region groups for whom state-building is low on their list of priorities. Minnich calls for a better understanding of such border realities and for more researchers to deal directly with local people. He also suggests that they read more than official and academic texts: Little or no room is left in the channels of public discourse on border regions for individually articulated collective self-representations, especially when they contradict hegemonic categories of representation (...). I suggest that literary accounts of borderland life in the form of novels, poetry and biographies represent for our enterprise an invaluable resource (1996, 165).

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Of course, general and over-arching frames of reference cannot and should not be ignored; the global, national, regional and local scales of human existence and interaction all contribute to the context in which we live. But, so often missing from the accounts of grand geo-political and economic strategies is the role of the local, the near-at-hand, the everyday that are crucial to people in their communities, at work and at leisure. It is these aspects of local living that need to be acknowledged. Place, identity and borders In adopting such an approach, the idea of place is critical as a setting in which to examine the notion of identity.4 It is vital, therefore, to know something at first hand about the local spaces where everyday activities, work, leisure, social associations and cultural affiliations take place; to study the ways in which attitudes and customs are formed; and to discover how individuals and communities relate to, and interact with, the state, its codes and laws. Ground-level fieldwork – conversations and informal meetings, as well as formal interviews – help to throw light on the paradoxes and contradictions of daily life as well as the many-sided viewpoints and relationships. For those accustomed to the notion of mobility on a global scale – working across a range of continents, flying to international symposia and communicating instantly and electronically – the sense of the local and immediate has, perhaps, faded a little. Yet, close-at-hand research reveals the importance of the sense of place in most lives and in the daily transactions it gives meaning to and by which it is reinforced. These include: daily contact with others at work, in the neighbourhood and in social and cultural settings; the underlying feelings of belonging connected with shared histories, beliefs and symbols, common customs and traditions, language and dialect, and religion; the sense of community arising from daily interaction and communication and from commonlyknown ways of performing practical activities; the life-long associations of families, friends and community. Social bonds and connections such as these are central to the life of communities around the world, but may be especially significant in bor4 For a more detailed coverage of the concept of place see Hooson (1994), who cites generations of writers from Vidal de la Blache in the nineteenth century, with his notion of a national genius loci, to Paul Claval, Doreen Massey, John Agnew, Edward Soja and others in our own day.


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der regions. Borderlands, as front lines between states, are places of high sensitivity and self-awareness, in which the sense of identity and belonging to a special place is heightened – especially where there is a variety of ethnic groups, each with its own linguistic, religious, and other cultural traditions. Tensions also arise in the process of self-identification because of fractious border region relationships with officialdom concerned about front-line security and the ‘sanctity’ of territorial integrity. Finally, ethnic groups, especially those that have been long-established in the border region, are likely to resent their designation by the state as ‘minorities’. The words of the elderly woman in Muggia/Mile are emphatic and historically perceptive – ‘Italy came here. We didn’t go looking for Italy’. Suspicions and anxiety about the consequences of such designations have been proven accurate in the past and it is always felt that the terminology could again be employed as a prelude to, and justification of, further nation-state assimilation. Irena Sumi, working in the three nations border zone in the northern part of this borderland region, makes a similar point: In itself, the status of minority is a legal instrument of [levelling and incorporation] (...) into the national body. Minorities do not exist outside the modern national state discourse, and it is the categorical and ideological nature of that discourse to ‘believe’ that (ethnic/national) minorities are bodies of people who are part and parcel of the body of nationals of the neighbouring state (Sumi, personal communication, 2000).

She argues that a border region forms a distinct social habitat. Within it, the international border works as a mirror or an enhancer of differences in understanding between two sets of divergent viewpoints: state ideology and its discourse on language, culture and ethnicity on the one hand and, on the other, border community self-understanding about language and culture. The effect of the international borderline is to further exacerbate ethnic differences – to widen cracks where they may not have previously existed, or at least have existed in minor form. By undermining the local continuities, state policies can foment difference, so disrupting hard-won practices of local co-existence. Conclusion The post-war history of the Slovene-Italian border regime poses the question: which border is the significant one and to whom? To the pass-

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ing observer, the answer has, up to recent years, been obvious: it is the official nation-state border, with its precise linear-territorial delineations of inclusion and exclusion. Erected to ensure the security of the nationstate, with its closely-guarded points of entry and exit, it makes a clear-cut statement of reality and intent. The borderline was the outcome of years of international negotiation and agreement. Local perceptions and needs were secondary to the real-politik of states and international arbiters, their attitudes reflecting the Cold War division of Europe. The autochthonous communities thus became designated ‘ethnic minorities’ in their own place. Mass trans-frontier migration of people under duress, or fearing future persecution, disrupted the patterns of co-existence worked out over the years. Expropriation and expulsion, draconian assimilationist policies and racist attitudes in the early post-war years perpetuated the sense of bitterness engendered during the interwar period. Yet, despite the antagonism stirred up by state policies, cultural continuities were gradually recreated in the decades following and a sense of tolerance – despite occasional outbreaks of bigotry – now better typifies relationships among ethnic groups. Slovene-speaking activists in and around Trieste have gradually re-built their own language institutes, library and radio stations and won the right to state-funded schools for their children (but this has not spread to the sparsely-populated north of Friuli-Venezia-Giulia). Even so, the Italian state has been less than openminded in its treatment of its ‘minority’ citizens – and this treatment contrasts negatively with that of Italian-speakers by the Slovenian state. Local insistence has succeeded in winning concessions from the state for greater border flexibility to meet the practical needs for work and cross-frontier contacts. In a series of steps the Italian-Slovene (and, before it, Italian-Yugoslav) border was opened up to the daily needs of local people. With this, the single, sharp demarcating borderline conceded ground to the idea of a more fluid, interactive and integral borderland region. Divisions and distinctions became more blurred and nuanced. The words of the Canadian writer Jane Urquhart in her novel The Underpainter, offer a succinct interpretation of the gulf between top-down and ground-level views of what really makes the world go around: ‘We believe that the whole planet rotates at once, but, in fact, it seems to me each entity in it turns on its own private axis, independent of the larger dawns and sunsets’ (1997, 48). Her ‘independent’ is probably too strong for most of us – except, perhaps, within the most personal innermost spaces. We follow paths


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through life moulded by overarching parameters. Global markets, multibillion dollar transnational corporations, (super) powerful nation-states and new forms of communications technology fashion and orchestrate our patterns of living. Work-places are restructured, consumer and leisure choices are reshaped and attitudes and values are manipulated. Millions, less fortunate, lose their lands, livelihoods and communities and are forced to migrate to overcrowded and life-threatening urban slums and shanty-towns. Life, at its best, is a matter of interdependence; at worst, severe dependence. Yet, within this framework, human beings still make their various ways within local and immediate circles and associations of space and time – or space-time – in their actions, decisions, reflections and affiliations. Local voices may appear to be unheard and unheeded in the discourses of remote authority, yet, as Peter Sahlins (1998) has shown in his historical study of the Catalan borderlands, they can and do make their wishes known to, and acted upon, by those in power. Turning on their own private axes, the borderland subjects of this paper have struggled to make their needs and aspirations felt. And in so doing, they have helped to answer the question: ‘which borders and whose borders are these?’ The answers are not as clear-cut as we might initially believe. The identification with a certain place/territory/homeland is evident among the various ethnic communities in the borderland region. But, within that general level of identification there is a further sense of identity that distinguishes Slovene-speakers from other ethnic groups with whom they share a common space. The consciousness of shared ethnic origins and history as well as continuing family and commercial connections transcend the official border to include ethnic group members on both sides. Family linkages and friendships remain, while commercial contacts have deepened over the years; people from the Italian side of the border shop for cheaper foodstuffs and petrol in Slovenia and those from Slovenia look to Trieste’s markets for a wider choice of consumer goods and services. Achievements, though, have not been evenly spread. Within the Slovene-speaking community, the larger, more concentrated populations around Trieste have won more concessions from the Italian state – especially in education – than have the sparsely-settled Slovene-speakers in the north. Moreover, the strong sense of identity expressed by some among the Slovene-speaking communities is often not shared by those who have given up their mother tongue and become Italianized. This

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course may be criticized by the articulate and clear-eyed minority for not resisting assimilation, but their decisions are influenced by what they see to be the benefits of Italian citizenship. How the various sections of the group (if, in fact, it still is an ethnic entity) – some keeping alive a sense of unity and difference, others accommodating to Italian civil society – will attune to post-international border conditions remains to be seen. When/if Slovenia enters the EU, in 2004, the process of regional reintegration will be close to realization – at least up to the border across the Istrian peninsula dividing Slovenia and Croatia. Here, for a time, the borderline will be more strictly policed. It will form the new southern flank of a European Union highly sensitive to the political need to create a ‘fortress Europe’ against ‘illegal’ migrants, drugs and people traffickers and threats to its security from global terrorism. And, with the raising of this new barrier, the Istrian Peninsula, the most southerly part of the historic region, will have to come to terms with yet another partition imposed from above and beyond. Even here, though, the re-connection of Croatian Istria with the rest of the border region will follow as Croatia, in the next tranche of applicant states, is accepted into the European Union. Then the reality of an integral – reintegrated – regional community may emerge as a viable entity within the European Union. With this, the political divisions, cultural conflicts and human lesions, products of a turbulent history of intervention, might be assuaged and consigned to the past. Then the underlying continuities that have historically given this region its identity will offer a template for redrawing its human map. References Armstrong, W. R. 1997. A question of identity: nationalism, civil society and daily life, Working Papers in Geography WPG 98-3, Oxford: School of Geography, University of Oxford. Armstrong, W. R. 1998. Belonging, ethnic diversity and everyday experience: coexisting identities on the Italo-Slovene frontier, ESRC Transnational Communities Programme Working Paper WPTC-98-05. Borneman, J. 1998. Grenzregime (border regime): the Wall and its aftermath, in Wilson, T. M. and H. Donnan (eds) Border Identities: Nation and State at International Frontiers, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 162-190. Bufon, M. 1991. Un caso di identita etnica e territoriale; gli Sloveni in Italia, Rivista Geografica Italiana 3, 437-455. Bufon, M. 1993/1994. Cultural and social dimensions of borderlands, Geo-Journal: Ethnicity and Geography, 30.3 (Reprint 1994) Ljubljana, 235-240.


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Gellner, E. 1983. Nations and Nationalism, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Gross, F. 1978. Ethnics in a Borderland: An Enquiry into the Nature of Ethnicity and the Reduction of Ethnic Tensions in a One-time Genocide Area, Westport, Conn./London: Greenwood Press Contributions in Sociology, No. 32. Hooson, D. (ed) 1994. Geography and National Identity, The Institute of Geographers Special Publications Series 29, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Irek, M. 2001. Made-to-measure strategy: Self-governance initiatives in the Dreilandereck, in Papademetriou D. G. and D. W. Meyers Caught in the Middle: Border Communities in an Era of Globalisation, Washington: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace/ Migration Policy Institute, .200-227. Leizaola, A. 1996. Muga: Border and boundaries in the Basque Country, in Europaea: Journal of the Europeanists, vol II no 1, 91-102. Leizaola, A. 1999. ‘Hacerse frances’. Nacionalidad y ciudadania en el area fronteriza en Euskal Herria, in Pujadas, J.J., E. Martin, J. Pais do Brito (eds) Globalizacion, Fronteras Culturales y Politicas y Ciudadania, Santiago de Compostela: FAAEE-AGA (VIII Congreso de Antroplogia), 111-117. Leizaola, A. 2000. Mugarik ez! Subverting the border in the Basque Country, in Ethnologia Europaea. Journal of European Ethnology, vol 30, no 2, 35-46. Minghi, J. V. 1991. From conflict to harmony in borderlandscapes in Minghi J. V. and D. Rumley, The Geography of Borderlandscapes, London: Routledge. Minnich, R. G. 1992. Homesteaders and citizens: an ecology of person and selfrealization among Slovene-speaking villagers on the Austro-Italian frontier, Bergen: Department of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen (Dr philos. dissertation). Published as Homesteaders and Citizens: Collective Identity Formation on the Austro-Italian-Slovene Frontier, Bergen: Norse Publications (Bergen Studies in Social Anthropology), 1998. Minnich, R. G. 1996. The individual as author of collective identities: reconsidering identity formations within a multilingual community, in Vecjezicnost na Evropskih Meja – Primer Kanalske Doline, Sedez Kanalska Dolina (Italia): Slori. Minnich, R. G. 1998. Under the linden tree: a Slovenian life on a contested state frontier, in D. A. Kideckel and J. M. Halpern (eds) Culture and Conflict: Anthropological Perspectives on Yugoslav Ethnicity, Culture and History, Pittsburgh: Pennsylvania State University Press. Sahlins, P. 1998. State formation and national identity in the Catalan borderlands during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in Wilson, T. M. and H. Donnan, Border identities: nation and state at international frontiers, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 31-6. Sumi, I. 2000. Personal communication, 27 March 2000. Sussi, E. 1973. L’emergenza della regione transfrontaliera Alpe-Adriatica, in Confini e Regioni, in Proceedings of the Conference on Problems and Perspectives of Border Regions, Gorizia 1972, Trieste: Lint, 135-146. Urquhart, J. 1997. The Underpainter, Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Wilson, T. M. and H. Donnan eds. 1998. Border Identities: Nation and State at International Frontiers, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.



‘WE WERE AS ONE’: LOCAL AND NATIONAL NARRATIVES OF A BORDER REGIME BETWEEN SLOVENIA AND CROATIA1 Duška Kneevi Hoevar Abstract This article discusses the differing notions of border identities and cross-border relations along the Slovenian-Croat international border after the declaration of Slovenian independence in 1991. Its principal focus is on the understandings of national (self)identifications of the people in the the Upper Kolpa valley, a southern section of the Slovenian-Croat state border, in contrast to the official discourse promulgated by the two nation-states. It is argued that the view of borderlanders is markedly distinct from the one that state nationalism and its promulgators imagine to be proper for the ideal borderlander; in part because their complex national identifications usually do not fit rigid formal state categorisations. However, it is also clear that various hegemonic images and identities, with origins in the state and other centres distant from border regions, are regularly built into border peoples’ understandings of their identities and social and political situation. Such understandings of belonging and differing identifications are influential in local and state explanations of the substantial withering away of cross-border contacts over the last decade.

1 This essay was first presented at the 6th Mediterranean Ethnological Summer School in Piran (Slovenia) in 1999.

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Cultures of conflict and co-operation at and across contemporary European borders are often products of varied historical forces of change. The political border between Slovenia and Croatia on the Kolpa river is by no means a new one. Minor revisions notwithstanding, the Kolpa river has been the site of a political border between the Holy Roman Empire and the Hungarian Hapsburg estates; between the Austrian and Hungarian parts of the Empire following the Dualism of the imperial constituent states of 1867; between various administrative entities in the first Yugoslav state; between the Italian state and the Fascist Independent state of Croatia during the World War II; between the Socialist Republics of Croatia and Slovenia within the second Yugoslav state; until finally, in 1991, it became the political border between sovereign nationstates Slovenia and Croatia. This article examines aspects of culture and identity in the border region along the Upper Kolpa river after the imposition of the international border between Slovenia and Croatia in 1991. It focuses on the question of whether and how the border regime from 1991 affects cross-border contacts, of co-operation and conflict, between local populations in the Upper Kolpa river valley. As has been suggested in regard to the study of border peoples elsewhere, ‘the border may be viewed in very different ways by those to whom it has relevance’ (Wilson and Donnan 1998, 21). This paper concludes that the border people of the Upper Kolpa do not interpret border changes in the same ways as do elites in cosmopolitan centres in their respective countries. For example, the borderlanders’ understanding of the new border situation after 1991 did not fit easily with the rhetoric justifying the new border regime as it was employed in both states’ daily political discourses in the period of the dissolution of ex-Yugoslavia. In fact, ethnographic research at this border shows that the border people’s explication of the emerging border situation is markedly distinct from the one that state nationalism and its promulgators imagine to be proper for the ideal borderlander. On the one hand, border people’s notions of identity and nation allow for many idiosyncratic deviations from categorical and exclusive conceptualisations of national loyalty or ideologically and legally defined categories of membership as defined by state nationalism. On the other hand, images of essentialist national identity as determined by state nationalism present to the borderlanders an important source for their actual manipulation of the identity repertoire in their everyday lives (Šumi 2000, 33ff). Reviewing the records on the Slovenian-Croat state border one may get the impression that some years earlier, and particularly after the proc-

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lamation of Slovenian independence, the public in Slovenia was bombarded with controversial standpoints on what form the new border should be.2 On the one hand, there were those who insisted on building ‘a wall towards the dangerous Balkans’ (i.e., against refugee waves, eventual military incidents at the frontier, criminality etc.). These people pleaded for the imposition of a ‘barrier’ on the southernmost borderline of the country.3 On the other hand, there were advocates of border permeability who endorsed the argument of the European Community builders who sought a ‘Europe without borders’ (cf. unec 1992, 12). Debates about the nature of the border had different dimensions in the border region. According to several journalist reports of the time certain forms of disapproval developed among the inhabitants of the border region. Soon after the imposition of the border regime, people who lived in different locations along the Slovenian-Croat state border complained about the new customs signposts which read: ‘Beware, state border!’ They expressed their irritation over the presence of mobile police units, who were either mounted patrols or equipped with field vehicles. They were greatly annoyed with sudden complications with crossing the border, let alone the problems concerning the unsettled proprietary situation on both sides of the boundary. Some official interpreters of the new border situation quickly reacted to such complaints. For instance, the then Slovenian Minister of Internal Affairs assured the Slovenian public that the paradox with reference to the nature of the new state border is a simple one: should Slovenia seek for a more liberal border policy with Croatia, the European Community itself might close the border with Slovenia (cf. Šuligoj 1992, 2). The instructions of the European Community on abandoning redundant control and formality over state borders; the conventions of the European Council on abolition of visas; and particularly the Schengen provisions were thoroughly considered in 1991 when legislation on Slo2

The Journalist Documentation Delo, Folder – Border in general, Ljubljana. In this respect the appearance of the badge bearing the inscription ‘When I grow up, I’m going to be a customs officer on the Kolpa’ is very telling. Although the present older generations living on the ‘Slovenian side’ of the border still remember the jokes about the Kolpa and the Sotla border rivers with pejorative connotations towards everyone from the opposite side of the river, the appearance of the badge in 1989 was at first treated as a political incident caused by illegal separatists. The alleged authors of the badge were from the editorial board of the then progressive student’s magazine Tribuna. According to a high ranking police officer, ‘None of us ever dreamed that it could become reality after two years’ (elik 1994, 20). 3

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venian state independence was being prepared (Burian 1999, 87). The new international border was taking shape somewhat simultaneously with the process of loosening of the border regime within the European Union (elik 1994, 8). Yet its status as a possible external border of the EU was fully recognised. According to the ex-Head of the People’s Militia,4 these considerations were implicitly included in the measures which eventually established the new border regime, as early as 1990. The concept, however, was burdened with considerable difficulties: The border between two neighbours, which has up to recently belonged to the same federal state, was established in specific circumstances. In Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, real war was underway. It was obvious that from the point of view of security, this border will turn out to be the most demanding. The gradual taking over of border control was associated with numerous difficulties: granting the financial resources, providing for sufficient police, and issues of land divisions. Conflicts with the Croat authorities were considered as well. Worth mentioning is also the resistance of the borderlanders who could not reconcile with, and accommodate to the new reality overnight. All this demanded great organisational efforts on the part of the Police, a new set of working conditions, which are much more demanding from those at ‘classical’ Slovenian borders, and finally they had to be highly susceptible for the views of the inhabitants, particularly those living at the border. Much attention was given especially to the latter (elik 1994, 7).5

Despite the assurances that the new concept of border surveillance is in many ways more liberal than the previous one, because it introduced both police surveillance of the borderline, in place of a military one, and the exercise of police control over the entire state territory, not merely over the state boundary (elik 1994, 25; Burian 1999, 87), the locals failed to perceive it as such. Compared to the locals along the already established state borders with Italy, Austria and Hungary who noticed certain facilities and minor personnel control, the inhabitants at the Slovenian-Croat state border found themselves in a completely new situation. They observed with considerable distrust the changing of what seemed to be an unsupervised administrative border between two federal units into an overtly supervised nation-state border. I was able to document such mutually exclusive understandings of the new border situation among local people in the Upper Kolpa valley in my first fieldwork investigation in 1993. Although the people on both 4 5

In the socialist times, this was the somewhat euphemistic name for the Police force. This and all subsequent translations are my own.

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Kolpa riverbanks were highly supportive of the creation of two national states, they at the same time ardently opposed the imposition of the new state border regime: a sentiment they expressed through constant complaining that ‘Before 1991, we were as one, and now we are divided’. Some characteristics of the border locality The flow of the Kolpa river (known as ‘Kupa’ in Croat) comprises 110 of the total of 546 kilometres of the former Yugoslavian administrative republican border and current international state border. From the Slovenian perspective, the Upper Kolpa valley is the southeastern Slovenian-Croat borderland. In the valley, there are many small villages between Osilnica/Hrvatsko and Petrina/Brod na Kupi, two pairs of cross-border settlements, which are officially recognised as the end points of the twenty-two-kilometres long valley. However, from the local as well as geographical points of view there are actually two valleys, abranska and Kolpska. The viewpoint of inhabitants in the valleys is grounded mostly in their various connections along and across the river, while geographers consider the valleys according to their natural characteristics. According to geographers (Melik 1959, 475; Cividini 1934, 43), the valley itself is a typical canyon; over its riverbed steep wooden slopes loom large. Thus, the two rivers share the same canyon. Immediate hinterlands of the valley are Koevsko on the Slovenian side and Gorski Kotar on the Croat side. Both hinterlands are overgrown with high thick woods, frequently marked as virgin forests. These woods have, in the past as well as today, provided the locals with the means for survival. It was the depth of the Upper Kolpa valley that made it impossible to use the river for transportation. In addition to this, poor roads and large patches of impassable woods presented real barriers for the inhabitants in their communication with the hinterlands. These characteristics of the Kolpa river have often been projected into social contexts. Most questionable, but quite typical for the various scholars at the beginning of the twentieth century (historians, geographers, linguists, folklorists, etc.), were ‘scientific’ arguments that the Kolpa river was not only a geographic but also a ‘natural’ social dividing line between Croats and Slovenians, and had been from time immemorial. An important source for suggesting such divisions was linguistics. Slovenian and Croat linguists usually did not deny the obvious similarities among various dialects on both riverbanks. On the contrary, these similarities are so clear that it is not an exaggeration to hold that the

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Kolpa valley was linguistically unified. What is perhaps unusual is the fact that the differences among mutually intelligible dialects were longitudinal, i.e. alongside the river, rather than crosscutting. The linguistic scholars of the day, in their nation-building projects that viewed nationality as a permanent and immutable social sign with an equally clear-cut history, fabricated a clear distinction between the local Croats and Slovenians. As a result it has been hypothesised that Croat and Slovenian belongings conformed to the delineation lines of the imperial Hungarian state in its Croat provinces on the one hand, and to the Austrian state on the other (Juni 1993, 287). Figure 1. The research locale

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Besides the many interpretations given to the Kolpa river as a border in geographic, geologic, linguistic and political terms, it is nowadays, in both popular and in more specialised contexts, most frequently interpreted as a barrier against the ‘dangerous Balkans’, a view which constructs it as the line between the ‘primitive Balkans’ and the ‘civilised Europe’. Such a perspective is able to draw on a long historical background that, somewhat indirectly, infers the ‘naturalness’ of the ‘border between civilisations’. As early as the fifteenth century, the advancing Ottoman army represented persistent danger to the Austrian Empire. At that time the Kolpa valley, with its natural canyon, served well as an effective barrier to the armies of the time. In addition, the Empire sought to repopulate the potential war zones in the vicinity of the valley and the valley itself with the Uskoki, refugees from the inner Balkans.6 They were Orthodox, mostly nomadic people, and predisposed to defend the Empire at any time. At that time they either remained in Kolpa valley and its surroundings, or they moved to the lower areas along the Kolpa river. Nowadays many locals still claim descent from these medieval immigrants. In the past, as mentioned above, the valley had only poor roads, and smuggling paths that lead out of the valley. Because of persistent Ottoman invasions from the fifteenth century onwards, the Austrian authorities kept the region inaccessible by cutting it off from both hinterlands. The first wheeled transport-worthy road was built only in the early eighteenth century (agar-Jagrov 1983, 116-23; Karaman 1981, 127-9, 138). It would seem that the first Yugoslav state (1919) also kept the valley isolated. Rare tarmac roads and bridges linked the settlements crossriver. Along the river, there was only one road which criss-crossed the river, alternately on the Slovenian and Croat riverbanks. Only three years after Slovenian independence were the roads along the riverbanks built, to connecting settlements. This was done first on the Slovenian side and soon afterwards on the Croat side. The very act of building these ‘national’ roads triggered the activation of certain stereotypes in the local community, and has drawn the attention of the Slovenian mass media as well. During World War II, the valley’s immediate vicinity was subjected to the Hitler-Mussolini policy that enforced ethnic cleansing along the 6

According to Simoni (1939, 83), it was precisely the ‘Turk invasions’ of Koevsko in the years 1522, 1528 and 1530 that caused depopulation and extensive emigration from the Kolpa river valley and its hinterlands.

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borders of the Italian state and the Third Reich, forcing the population to choose the citizenship of one or the other state.7 In April 1941, autochthonous German speakers of Koevje, then under Italian rule, chose to move to German territory.8 After the war, the Communist regime did not offer to repatriate the Koevski Germans. In 1952 and 1953 their home villages were instead turned into two top-secret military bases, the Koevska Reka and Gotenica. As a consequence, large parts of the area around them, together with the hinterland of the Slovenian riverbank of the Upper Kolpa valley, were closed and the public was officially banned from the ‘prohibited area’. The vicinity of the military bases and the burial sites of 20,000 Nazi collaborators in nearby Koevski Rog, as well as the nearby restricted area, added to the economic sterility of the valley.9 The Upper Kolpa valley was thus cut off from the region of Bela Krajina to the northwest, while the connections with the central Slovenian region remained poor. The relative isolation of the Upper Kolpa valley resulted in a specific local way of life because of poor communications and non-existent investments by successive rulers, whose power was based outside the region. Scattered patches of cultivable land, wood-works and sawmills secured only seasonal employment for the locals. In this regard peddling and seasonal labour outside the valley were indispensable sources of additional, or even basic, income for the people of the valley from both sides of the river, in practices which have been documented among the valley’s males since as early as the fifteenth century.10 From the eighteenth century onwards, emigration to the Austrian and Hungarian provinces, or to France and the Americas, was frequent. The data for the 7 At the time, the Slovenian riverbank of the upper Kolpa river was under Italian military regime, while the opposite, the Croat riverbank, was a part of the so-called Independent State of Croatia (Cuculi 1981, 110). 8 In the fourteenth century, the groups of Frank and Thüring in the then Carinthian estates of the Count Oton VI. Von Ortenburg, were removed from those estates to the area of the virgin forests of Koevsko. With that act the Count was able to increase his income out of woods exploitation substantially (Tomši and Ivanec 1887, 13). 9 In 1945, Koevski Rog became the site of the massacre and secret burials of approximately 20,000 anti-Communist, Nazi collaborators and civil and military refugees who were forcibly repatriated after World War II and executed, without trial, by the Communist regime. 10 Patent for peddling dated back in 1492. As a consequence of Ottoman invasions, the Austrian Emperor, Friderick III, vested the inhabitants of Koevsko region with the right of free trading of their own wooden ware, cattle and linen throughout his estates and the present Croatia (Ferenc 1993, 21).

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period between 1870 and 1970 show that the population on both riverbanks was nearly halved due to such emigration (agar 1981, 192; Crnkovi et al. 1981, 207; agar-Jagrov 1983, 35-8). To sum up, the political border on the Kolpa river was interpreted by the scholars from the beginning of the twentieth century as a ‘natural’ historical separator between the two local populations from the fifteenth century on. However, locals seem to ‘understand’ it as such only since 1991 when the establishment of the new border regime was underway. Accordingly, in my field research in 1993 I focused on the nature of this (1991) type of border, given that the locals seem to have perceived it as a dividing line only recently. The 1993 research In 1993 I first sought to test whether, and if so how, the newly imposed international border between Slovenia and Croatia affects the feelings of belonging in the people of the Upper Kolpa valley. In line with the explicit local perspective (‘Before we were as one, now we are divided’), which despite their insistence on the valley’s ‘unity’ simultaneously took for granted the two ‘national’ riverbanks, I concentrated the investigation on the perceived differences between the inhabitants of the two sides of the river. The chosen population sample included thirty residents from the Croat side and thirty residents from the Slovenian side, who were residents in villages directly across from each other.11 By employing quantitative techniques (e.g. questionnaires, uni- and multivariate methods of statistical analysis), I sought to determine the intensity of the contacts maintained by the inhabitants of the respective riversides both before and after the border imposition. The results showed that only formal business and economic contacts between the two cross border communities dropped perceivably, but not so the informal contacts. This result I interpreted as corroborating another finding concerning the hierarchy of identifications: only half of my respondents described themselves as first and foremost in accord with the national denominators (Slovenian/Croat), while the other half identified first with the name of their settlement.12 Nearly all (fifty-four out of sixty) saw their cross11

For more on my first research in 1993, see Kneevi 1998, 55-75. I verified the locals’ self-ascription through a series of questions to examine, how they name themselves and their neighbours; how they interpret differences and similarities either regarding their cross-border neighbours or by comparison with the other members of their ‘nation’ outside the valley; and finally, how they name their 12

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border neighbours as more similar to themselves then to the other members of his/her ‘nation’ outside the valley. Yet this ‘similarity’, consisting of a shared spoken language, way of life, religion, etc., was at the same time contested. The statement ‘(...) now we are divided’ was explained in detail by those locals (forty-eight out of sixty) who saw the newly imposed border as above all a troublesome element in their everyday lives. Aside from formal complications (regarding citizenship, properties held on the ‘other’ side, the differences in currency, etc.), they cited drastic changes in their informal relations. Statements like the following were often heard by me: ‘There is no friendship any longer as it used to be.’ ‘Before we were as one, now we are divided.’ ‘It is not as easy as it was.’ ‘We are becoming more and more self-contained.’ ‘The Croats became more and more jealous of us Slovenians, because their currency is worth less.’ ‘One can feel the spirit of nationalism setting in, like, “What are you (Croats/Slovenians) doing here”?’ ‘Our neighbours (Slovenians) are increasingly indifferent to us Croats; for them everything is cheaper and easier.’ ‘The border causes hatred among us.’

What was formerly either positively or negatively articulated as characteristics of the neighbours, had changed into national stereotypes of Slovenian-ness and Croat-ness. Thus, one of the most significant findings of the 1993 research was the apparent inconsistency in the statements of the respondents. On the one hand, people complained that ‘Before we were as one, and now we are divided’, yet on the other hand, people also communicated negative stereotypes (‘Slovenians/Croats have always been ...’). The latter type of opinion was particularly evident in the following expressions, uttered only two years after the border imposition: local spoken language and how, if so, they interpret similarity and difference of spoken languages in the valley.

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‘On the Croat side, there were always more houses made of wood than on the Slovenian side; to judge by appearances they are poorer.’ ‘On the Slovenian side, there always was a higher standard of living; the houses are better equipped.’ ‘Slovenians were always self-contained.’ ‘Croats were always less hard-working.’ ‘Slovenians prefer to keep company with themselves.’ ‘Croats are jealous of us Slovenians because of their lower standard of living.’ ‘On the Slovenian side one can find more communism.’ ‘Here on the Croat side there is more communism.’ ‘Slovenians are stricter Catholics.’

The main conclusion of this research was that in spite of the relatively short period since the new state border was established between Slovenia and Croatia, one could not find a significant drop in intensity in those contacts among cross-river neighbours that represented their essential and functional relations, particularly among kin. However, one could also see that the process of deepening of the locally defined differences between the two ‘nations’ on respective sides of the border was well underway. That observation instigated the ensuing research in 1996, which in turn was carried out after a significant reformulation of my research interests. The 1996 research In comparison with the 1993 research, in 1996 I shifted the research perspective from the assumed national dichotomy (two ‘national’ riverbanks) to the repertoire of self-understandings shared by the members of the extended ‘nationally-mixed’ cross-river families and kin. Such reorganisation of perspective purposely evaded the a priori identification of Croats and Slovenians respectively along the state borderline. Rather, I sought to find out the relative significance of the 1991 event in the selfunderstandings of the locals in many contexts of their life histories. Briefly, I sought to assess the effects of the imposition of the state bor-

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der in 1991, to place them in a comparative context along with other possible milestone events and processes which might, in the views of my informants, have triggered the differentiation of borderlanders in the past. My first step was to locate a representative cross-river family. I chose to look for them in the village Slovenski Kuelj, because it is the only settlement in the valley that has an immediate counterpart, the Hrvatski Kuelj; only the Kolpa river separates them from each other. It is a case of a unified settlement that was divided into ‘Slovenian’ and ‘Croat’ parts due to the republican, and since 1991, the international dividing line. And additionally, in close relation to the plan of investigation, I was able to find in Slovenski Kuelj a family whose chosen descent line had, in nearly every living generation, the bride or the bridegroom coming from the Croat riverbank. Thus the family can be said to be ‘nationally-mixed’. This family, which here I give the invented family name ‘Brelih’, was the closest thing to a perfect match to my criteria: the descent lines of the selected individuals, who had to be more or less permanent residents of the valley, had to be formed by marrying cross-river, which is now cross-border. The Brelihs are the offspring of the first and second generation of the selected parental couple, whose ancestors were born at the beginning of the century (see Figure 2 below). It must be immediately stressed that all the ‘S’ and ‘C’ marks as employed for each individual refer to self-proclaimed nationality as recorded in the official birth documents. This is of special importance as it is obvious that all the informants shared the same Yugoslav citizenship prior to 1991, but have had the option to declare their ‘national affiliation’ in terms of ‘ethnic’ belonging to either Croat or Slovenian identity. The entire first generation (six in all), three sons and three daughters of the selected parental couple, had declared themselves Slovenians but had adopted Croat republican citizenship if and when they chose to live across the river. Three brothers and two sisters thus entered ‘nationally mixed’ marriages; only the youngest daughter, B6, married a Slovenian. As it happens, their own parents, the parental couple from the beginning of the century, also lived in a ‘nationally-mixed’ marriage; the wife of B0 declared herself a Croat, and was originally from the Croat riverbank. This is similar to the case of her parents (her mother was a Slovenian, and father a Croat), and with the parents of B0 (his father was a Croat who came from the Croat riverbank to Slovenski Kuelj, where he married a Slovenian). At the time of my fieldwork in 1996, this couple was deceased.

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Figure 2. Brelih family

The identifications of these people were clear through the collection and analysis of their life histories. I assumed that only through life histories might one properly trace the very processes of differentiation, and determine the significance that they attach to various events or situations in the past. In order to gain as much data as possible that would enable the exposition of the reasoning behind their delineation, I decided to employ the technique of extensive, and in some cases repetitive, interviews. Firstly, I gathered as much information on valley life ‘from time immemorial’ as I could by means of interviewing some of the members of the Brelih family and their neighbours from the two riversides. According to the more elderly interviewees, in the period from the beginning of the century to the end of the World War II the inhabitants of the valley shared the same way of life. They were poor, cut off from both hinterlands, were marrying cross-river, and made a living mainly by breeding cattle, along with cultivation of the scarce fertile soil and seasonal employment. In this respect the Kolpa river did not present much of an obstacle at all. In the period from the World War II to the establishment of the international border on the Kolpa river in 1991, they still shared the

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same way of life. The only new development was an increase in off-farm employment. As ever before, they shared common social places: the church, the local inns, the groceries, and some common places of occupation on both riverbanks along the Kolpa. After the border came in 1991, however, it seems that the only thing the borderlanders still shared was a sort of ‘new pragmatism’. It is expressed by adopting various courses and strategies to ease their everyday lives. As they say themselves: ‘This is easier done here/there’; ‘Cops, customs officers and officials in general make more complication here/there’; ‘It is easier to earn some money here/there’; ‘Here/there one can buy supplies cheaper’. The villagers from both Kuelj and the nearby settlements also worried about life in the valley in the future. They complained that the valley is almost depopulated, that the young people are few, and finally, ‘Why should they stay in the valley, when they can barely make a living here’. They are all gravely concerned about the increasing unemployment and no chances for ‘safe jobs’ in the valley and its immediate vicinity. In this perspective the problems and complications resulting from the border imposition are secondary. For example, in those rare businesses in the valley and its surroundings where locals work they often found it difficult because of irregular wages. Even when pay was regular, the currency differences caused more and more dissatisfaction among the locals. It is not surprising then that the inhabitants of the Upper Kolpa valley developed new pragmatic strategies of getting by, and made them their central concern. Having thus gained an idea of current local priorities, I proceeded to develop the major themes I sought to investigate in the planned interviews with the selected members of the Brelih family. These were: 1) preferred relatives to the self in each members of the family; 2) recollections of the past ways of life; 3) assessment of the local space of social interaction; and 4) assessment of the valley’s prospects for the future. The following sections discuss some results of the 1996 research. Preferred relatives Regarding the first general topic all the eleven narrators singled out only those relatives who have been important to them in the context of life in the valley. All of them mentioned parents, brothers, sisters, brothers- and sisters-in-law; occasionally grandparents; rarely uncles and aunts and never cousins, nephews or nieces. When they sought to explain the origin of their ancestors, they just mentioned from which riverbank the

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person in question had arrived or had gone to live. For instance: ‘My grandfather married into a family of my grandmother in Slovenski Kuelj. He came from the other riverbank’. They would frequently tell me the proper name of a settlement or village from which someone originated or had moved to without any explicit statement whether they were declared Slovenians or Croats. They would use denominators Slovenian/Croat only when asked about the professed national affiliation. At the very beginning of conversations with each and every one of the Brelih brothers and sisters, I was told that their mother was a ‘Croat from Gue Selo’, the cross-river village very close to Hrvatski Kuelj. Yet during the interviews, some of them mentioned that she frequently stressed that she was a ‘Slovenian’. Some of them had never thought about her national affiliation at all. In this respect, the story of B3 on taking back Slovenian citizenship is very illustrative: After having married in 1956, B3 spent all his life in Skadar (a town in the Croat hinterland) taking Croat citizenship in exchange for his Slovenian one. Then he returned to Grbajel, a village in the valley very close to Hrvatski Kuelj. Soon after Slovenia became independent he realised he was living in a state that was seriously engaged in a war. As a result, he applied for a double, Slovenian-Croat, citizenship as soon as it was possible. As a Croat citizen, he at first met some difficulties with some Slovenian officials, but soon after he did not pay for acquiring Slovenian citizenship because, in his words, ‘Someone had to remind me that my mother was a Slovenian’.13 Past ways of life Assessing the past way of life in the valley, the majority of the Brelihs emphasised the poverty of villages and settlements in the border region and its surroundings in general. Before World War II, they witnessed frequent emigration to America, France and Germany. Moreover, up until the World War II, it was almost a rule to leave the valley after the conclusion of major season farming chores. Men were the traditional practitioners of peddling from house to house throughout Austrian, Hungarian and Czech lands. They also held seasonal jobs as forest workers in both hinterlands of the Kolpa valley. Finally, they were sometimes employed as farming hands in the remote region of Baranja. After World 13

When she married into Slovenski Kuelj, she took up Slovenian citizenship.

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War II, they also occasionally worked on the better-off farms downstream the Kolpa. However, it was obvious from their narratives that in the past the Kolpa river did not function as a border barrier. Irrespective of the riverbank, the borderlanders sought to find additional labour wherever the occasion presented itself. In this respect the differentiation among the locals appeared only along the rich-poor line that, according to the interviewees, was not linked to one or the other specific riverbank. Thus B2 stated that in the times of the first Yugoslavia, only the teacher was a real gentleman. He could survive on his salary, unlike all the others who made a living by tilling the land. The teacher’s salary of seven hundred dinars was then equal to the price of three or four oxen. The brother in law of B2, the husband of B4, even added that both teachers, in Slovenski and Hrvatski Kuelj, the local priest and the forester were at that time the most influential people, the special élite, that ‘Kept only each other’s company’. Finally, it was B3 who emphasised that back then, the most important thing in arranging marriages was the bulk of one’s property, not location on either side of the river. Yet it seems that some of the interviewees incorporated projections of the present situation to the past. The husband of B4, for instance, somewhat disproportionately stressed the fact that before World War I, Slovenians and Croats did not emigrate to America together but always in separate ‘national’ groups. He also stressed the memory of a schoolteacher in Hrvatski Kuelj who, as early as immediately after the World War II, educated his pupils as ‘nationally minded’ Croats; an educational attitude that was soon thereafter expressly banned from schools by the Socialist Yugoslav authorities. In a yet another instance, informant B3 explained why at that time in Slovenski Kuelj there was eight-years elementary schooling as opposed to the four-years in Hrvatski Kuelj. He simply concluded that even then the ‘Slovenian side was more advanced than the Croat side’. Local space of social interaction Local inns and taverns on both riverbanks were considered by the Brelihs in several different ways. In the past they were social places where were able to relax: after a hard working day they usually played cards, not for money but for fun, had lively discussions, etc. As the only public place of entertainment, nearly all of the Brelihs agreed that the inn in Slovenski Kuelj was about the ‘only fun’ in the valley. However, nowadays these spaces are mainly arenas for daily differentiating about

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culture, identity and policy. Or in the words of the son of B2: ‘When we drink a little, then we tease each other about Slovenian-Croat daily policy’. During fieldwork, one of the most frequent debates I witnessed was about the so-called Kuelj road, which was being built only along the Slovenian riverbank. This provoked opposing views. On the one hand, there were those who saw the road as the inevitable consequence of the new Slovenian statehood. On the other hand, there were those who above all saw many inconveniences resulting from that investment e.g. destroyed fields and wood. Among the Brelihs, the evaluations of the projected Kuelj road were quite interesting: B3 and the husband of B4, living on the Croat side, agreed that the new road is an inconsiderate act from the part of the inhabitants of ‘the other (Slovenian) riverbank’. In the present situation when both riverbanks have their own roads, which run along the river, people from both sides of the river no longer can persuade the police that they must use the local crossing-points instead of the international one. On the other hand, B2 was not indifferent to the ongoing teasing of the neighbours and relatives from the Croat side. Due to the fact that the new road ruined his farmyard, he cannot but care when the relatives were teasing him, saying, ‘You people on the Slovenian riverbank definitely have better masters who build your own border road for you. So they do take nice care of you, don’t they’? The Catholic church in Hrvatski Kuelj also functioned to some extent in the past as a shared public institution for the locals of both riversides; one could regard it as an expression of the valley’s ‘unity’. B2 never attempted to assess the couple of priests of the church in Hrvatski Kuelj in comparison with the ‘Slovenian priest’ from the nearby church down the river, except for their greater assiduity in keeping the church in good repair. Similarly the son of B2 stressed that in his childhood, children and youths from both riverbanks gathered daily at the priest’s in Hrvatski Kuelj because he had a television set. The husband of B4 pointed out that some people from the Slovenian riverbank had their own seat in the church pew for many years. However, some sequences of the Brelihs’ stories also indicate that after the border imposition in 1991, there exists also quite different, and much more controversial, interpretations. Most explicit was B5 who complained that after the border came, ‘Slovenians wished they could have everything by themselves; they set up the new crucifix in Slovenski Kuelj only so that they did not need to visit the church in Hrvatski Kuelj any more’. His younger sister, B6,

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admitted that it was only after the border imposition that she became conscious of the fact that the Mass in the church in Hrvatski Kuelj was conducted in Standard Croat. It never bothered her before. Similar stereotypes were part of informants’ assessments of common places of employment. Very illustrative was the general discussion of two firms, the Croat DIP and the Slovenian Itas. The former is a woodworks firm with a long tradition in the valley; the latter a small metal-works, which arose out of a previous firm of the same name, based in Koevje, which went bankrupt. In DIP, there are people employed from both sides of the river, while the Slovenian Itas employs mainly Croats from the near vicinity. The implicit suggestion as to why this is so is that the Croat labour force is cheaper than the Slovenian. In the discussion of common places of employment in the valley, the Brelihs disagreed among themselves. Thus B2, living in Slovenski Kuelj, retired as a former employee of DIP, stressed only the problems of the Slovenian Itas in relation to the valley in general. At the beginning, when Itas was doing well, it employed approximately forty or fifty workers from both riverbanks. At present, however, only a dozen Croats find employment in the firm. The son of B2 shares a similar view. He talked about ‘Croats and Slovenians’ only in the context of employment policy in Itas. Croats have to accept Slovenian standards of minimal wage in Itas, because they have worse employment opportunities than Slovenians. Thus the Croats ‘take away’ the wages from Slovenians who, given that daily expenses are that much higher in Slovenia, cannot accept employment under such miserable conditions. Yet his aunt, B4, made an opposing comment. She is convinced that the Slovenian nationalist policies are the main, indeed the only, culprit where it comes to dismissing the workers: ‘Only Slovenians have dismissed Croats from both firms, while Croats never dismissed Slovenians, for instance, from the Croat DIP’. The valley’s prospects for the future The Brelihs’ universally employed point of departure in forecasting the future, and for assessing the quality of life of the Upper Kolpa valley was the event of the border imposition in 1991. With the single exception of the husband of B1, all the Brelihs emphasised that future prospects for the borderlanders in the valley are poor. They only disagreed on the issue of when the circumstances which led to such a miserable situation were

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created, and who was responsible for it. Some pinpointed the main reasons as ‘misguided post-war investment policy’, which resulted in the present depopulated border zone in the Upper Kolpa valley.14 The others, however, stressed the systematic changes after the establishment of the state-border. For instance, B2, the husband of B4, and B5 agreed in their estimation that post World War II policies with their proletarian ideology (they cited the then launched motto, ‘All the people to the factories!’) were the main causes of the post-war mass emigrations to the cities. B3 is also convinced that the present-day circumstances in the valley stem from the inter-war period, when property in the valley was of no particular value. His wife even believes that the tax system never allowed farmers to become rich by mere land cultivation: ‘You can only eat as much as you produce’. Today, they say, the situation is quite similar. Border imposition has given even more weight to the fact that the land in the valley is worthless. Thus it does not pay much either to possess it or to sell it. Some of their musings were quite interesting and surprising. B2 told me time and again, ‘It is a piece of luck that there is Croatia over here, because otherwise I would certainly have failed’. Comparing situations on both sides of the river, he realised that, after Slovenian independence in 1991, nothing has gone well on the Slovenian side, even though Slovenia was spared the war. As he did not foresee any advantages in coming to the Slovenian side, he stressed each and every ‘Croat achievement’. He thinks the asphalting of the local road on the Croat side is a proof of ‘everything functions better on the Croat riverbank’. B3 and his wife, who frequently idealised the situation on the Slovenian riverbank, expressed quite an opposite point of view. Particularly telling was the husband’s un-reconciled attitude towards the fact that his brother (B2) receives a higher pension simply because he lives on the Slovenian side of the river. Both were employed for the best part of their lives on the Croat riverbank, even though B3 always had higher and more responsible jobs. However, the most salient differences in this regard among the members of the Brelih family can be extracted from their explicit estimates of

14

Today, locals are certain that the main reason for virtually empty villages in the region is the negative post-war anti-rural propaganda, which only spoke in favour of fast urbanisation in the country.

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the new Slovenian-Croat state-border. In the words of the husband of B4: Before the border, nobody in the valley felt the need to name the cross-river neighbour according to his official national status. But now, we are using those we-you distinctions even within our family. When we discuss some daily political events, who is who among us suddenly becomes very important.

Thus the husband of B4 and his wife explicitly mentioned the husband of B6, a ‘Slovenian’, who in such debates inevitably lets them know that on the one bank of the border river there live the Slovenians and on the other, Croats. To point out ‘the absurdity’ of such designations, B4 emphatically reminded me of the fact that all brothers and sisters, except the youngest one, have married cross-river. But at the same time, she did not herself refrain from employing a stereotype when she stated, ‘Croats in general are not as irritable as Slovenians are’. B5 from the Croat side shared that opinion, too. He notices that especially from the time of Slovenian independence, ‘His brother in law has been very intrigued by the question of who is who in the Brelih family’. Occasionally, the husband of B6 even warned him that, being a Slovenian, he (B5) should speak only Slovenian with him. B5 concluded that although the husband of B6 is a very hard-working householder, he is at the same time also a very ‘narrow minded, nationally conscious Slovenian’. Quite an opposite view of the husband of B6 was offered by the oldest of the Brelihs, the husband of B1. He restricted himself to pointing out only the good characteristics of his Slovenian brother in law, saying, ‘Nobody among Slovenians is as good as the husband of B6’. Moreover, he stated that ‘the youngest daughter of the Brelihs (B6) made a good match marrying him’. Finally, B6 very much looks up to the husband of B1; in her narration she stressed many times that in her childhood, it was precisely he who regularly visited them (the Brelihs) in Slovenski Kuelj. She will never forget that, as a salesman circulating in Slovenia, he always brought things to her family who was at that time very poor. Comparing the two ‘Croat’ brothers in law, she admitted that she still prefers the older, the husband of B1, while with the younger one, the husband of B4, she had just recently quarrelled a lot about politics, because ‘I hold I am a Slovenian and he, he is a Croat’. It would be erroneous to conclude that due to the transformations of the border after 1991 that the Brelihs no longer maintain close contacts. They all decided that the daily nuisances of the border notwithstanding,

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they will nevertheless maintain, especially ‘in our old age’, even closer contacts than before: B2: ‘Today all the Brelihs come back to the valley. Even B6 is going to buy a house in her home valley.’ B3: ‘Here we are all like one big family. We are all connected to each other.’ B6: ‘The older I get, the more contacts I have with the relatives in the valley.’ B4’s husband: ‘After all, there is but one nation in the valley.’

And one informant, the husband to B1, surprisingly denied that any changes at all took place in the valley after the 1991 international border was established! Conclusion The evidence from the valley supports Wilson and Donnan’s view that ‘Whether borders are old or new, their frontiers are volatile social and cultural spaces’ (Wilson and Donnan 1998, 24). When in certain contexts people hold that they are Slovenian after their parents, but have married a Croat, have children who are Croats by citizenship, and they ‘feel’ like Croats, even though at the same time they seek to acquire Slovenian citizenship, this does not imply such hypothetical persons have ‘confused identity’. From the 1996 material it is obvious that the (self)delineations between cross-river relatives in the Upper Kolpa valley did not happen ex nihilo, without any previous differentiations. However, although I employed a different analytical perspective in the 1996 research in comparison with the 1993 research, and have used different methods of collecting data on the process of self-differentiation by the locals, it is clear that the presumed trigger event – the establishment of the international border – indeed represents the main instigator of the activated ‘national’ self-identifications among the locals. To go back to initial speculations, I would like to conclude as follows. The officialdom responsible for the establishment of the new border regime at the Slovenian-Croat state border view police control of the border as an important progress in security terms, and one that is in accord with European Union policies. This contrasts with the ex-Yugoslav security concepts of guarding the external state borders. However, this argument is not persuasive in the eyes of the people at the border. Instead, the locals emphasise that on the other side of the state border

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there live only their relatives and neighbours, and that the imposition of the border regime more and more radically separates them from each other. According to the 1993 research where, for methodological reasons, I took the political division between Slovenia and Croatia as also the hypothetical division of the two ‘local nations’, I verified the intensity of cross-border local contacts before and after the establishment of the international border in 1991. I concluded that up to 1991, the valley as a whole represented a firmly bound social universe. The locals insisted that the spoken language on both sides of the river was the same, and that the valley’s ‘unity’ was maintained through kin, economic and other kind of cross-border relations. Borderland people felt that they were historically connected due to poor communications with respective hinterlands. It was obvious that the border river functioned more as a mode of communication rather than as a barrier. However, it seems that the redefined border regime on the Kolpa river in 1991 instigated a specific mismatch between the nation-states’ discourse, which in its rhetoric persisted with the imposition of two separate cross-border national cultures, and that of the border locality. The latter I explained with the observation in the 1993 research that the surveyed local feelings of belonging were actually equally strong with regard to the valley itself and the two nation-states. The inhabitants of the Upper Kolpa valley saw the border imposition in 1991 as a troublesome, albeit necessary, state measure. The 1996 analyses of life histories of selected members of a ‘nationally-mixed’, cross-border family were based on quite different expectations. At the very beginning of the 1996 study, I assumed that the 1991 border imposition would turn out to have been merely one among several events of the same order (e.g., World War I; World War II; the recurrent economic crises, which largely determined the migration in the valley; the Ten-Days war in Slovenia in 1991; etc.) that should have activated the ‘national’ differentiation among the locals. However, given the methods employed, a question remains whether this result – that the new border regime from 1991 activated the local national delineation – is a result of the method of research selected, or of the borderlanders’ actual social behaviour and collective memory. The latter is obviously dynamic and revisionist in nature, and gives the impression that the locals’ narrations of the past and the present situation in the valley inevitably tell more about how people today re-invent and justify their differentiations and identifications than about the very process of differentiation itself.

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Illustrative in this respect is the observation that in comparison with the 1993 research, the 1996 research demonstrated that the oft-communicated differences between Slovenians and Croats are present mostly in the guise of negative stereotypes among the locals on both riversides in general, and among the members of the cross-border family in particular. In other words, in the 1993 research the statements with pejorative connotations, like ‘Slovenians/Croats have always been ...’, did not interfere much with the frequently heard statements by the locals, ‘Before we were as one, now we are divided’. In fact, the locals only seldom made the former observations. A mere three years later, the statements referring to differences as both existing ‘from time immemorial’ and definitely now were much more frequent. It can therefore be said that the state perspective is invariably so organised that it supports the perception of clearly bounded, static cultural and national difference, between Slovenians and Croatians in this case. A closer, ethnographic perspective, however, shows a much more varied picture which, in turn, may be interpreted as a ‘uniform’, albeit complex process of shifting of national identifications. That which a state’s perspective registers as a permanent cross-border cooperation between two ‘local nations’, and the cessation of such cooperation after the imposition of the border, from the perspective of the locals’ reality remains a long term, non-conclusive, unpredictable process that is verified daily and anew. Finally, the ethnographic perspective is necessarily analogous to the natives’ views: both need repetitive, longterm research. References Burian, Dušan. 1999. Schengen v praksi (Schengen in Practice). Ljubljana: Ministrstvo za notranje zadeve Republike Slovenije. Cividini, Ante. 1934. Gorski Kotar. 1. Del (Gorski Kotar. Part 1). Zagreb: Tiskara Tipografija. Crnkovi, Emil, Ivan Gašparac, Viktor Horvat, Ivan Muvrin, Josip Pleše, Josip Pleše Cante, Marija Sedlar, Ivan Tomac An’kin, Kazimir Tomac. 1981. Opina Delnice (The Delnice County). In Gorski Kotar, ed. Ivan Kapelan Tomac, 205-237. Delnice: Fond knjige Gorski kotar. Cuculi, Ivan. 1981. Radniki pokret i narodnooslobodilaka borba 1891 – 1945 (Labour Movement and National Liberation War From 1891 to 1945). In Gorski Kotar, ed. Ivan Kapelan Tomac, 102-122. Delnice: Fond knjige Gorski kotar.

194 elik,


Pavle. 1994. Na juni strai. Kronika nastajanja dravne meje med Slovenijo in Hrvaško (At the Southern Frontier: The Establishing of the State Border Between Slovenia and Croatia. A Chronicle). Ljubljana: Enotnost. Ferenc, Mitja. 1993. Koevska. Izgubljena kulturna dedišina koevskih Nemcev (Koevsko: The Lost Cultural Heritage of the Koevje Germans). Ljubljana: Ministrstvo za kulturo – Zavod Republike Slovenije za varstvo naravne in kulturne dedišine. Juni, Stane. 1993. Identiteta (Identity). Ljubljana: Fakulteta za drubene vede. Karaman, Igor. 1981. Pregled gospodarske povijesti – od XV do XX stoljea (Economic History From the Fifteenth to the Twentieth Century: A Survey). In Gorski Kotar, ed. Ivan Kapelan Tomac, 123-145. Delnice: Fond knjige Gorski kotar. Kneevi, Duška. 1998. State vs. locality: the new Slovene–Croat state border in the Upper Kolpa valley. In Anthropological Perspectives on Local Development, eds. Simone Abram and Jacqueline Waldren, 55-74. London and New York: Routledge. Melik, Anton. 1959. Posavska Slovenija. Geografski opis. Opis slovenskih pokrajin (The Sava River Basin in Slovenia: A Geographic Description. Description of the Slovenian regions). Ljubljana: Slovenska matica. Simoni, Ivan. 1939. Zgodovina koevskega ozemlja (History of the Koevje Territory). In Koevski zbornik. Razprave o Koevski in njenih ljudeh, ed. Janko Makovšek, 45-130. Ljubljana: Druba Sv. Cirila in Metoda. Šuligoj, Boris. 1992. Bolj odprta meja med Slovenijo in Hrvaško (A More Open Border Between Slovenia And Croatia). Delo 20 February, p. 2. Šumi, Irena. 2000. Kultura, etninost, mejnost: konstrukcije razlinosti v antropološki perspektivi (Culture, Ethnicity, Boundaries: The Constructions of Diversity in Anthropological Perspective). Ljubljana: ZRC, ZRC SAZU. Tomši, Štefan and France Ivanec. 1887. Koevsko okrajno glavarstvo. Zemljepisno – zgodovinski opis (District Board of Koevsko: A Geographic and Historic Description), Ljubljana: Okrajna uiteljska knjinica v Koevji. Wilson, Thomas M. and Hastings Donnan. 1998. Nation, State and Identity at International Borders. In Border Identities. Nation and State at International Frontiers, eds. Thomas M. Wilson and Hastings Donnan, 1-30. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. agar, Ivan. 1981. Opina abar (The abar County). In Gorski Kotar, ed. Ivan Kapelan Tomac, 187-203. Delnice: Fond knjige Gorski kotar. agar-Jagrov, Joe. 1983. Kostel. Ljudje in zemlja ob Kolpi (Kostel: The People and the Land Along the Kolpa). Koevje: Kulturna skupnost obine Koevje. unec, Branko. 1992. Policijska meja na evropskem obrobju (A policed border at the European margin). 7D, 12 February, 11-13.


BORDERS PAST AND PRESENT IN MAZARA DEL VALLO, SICILY1 Jeffrey E. Cole Abstract This article examines Mazara del Vallo as a border city. As port to the Mediterranean’s largest fishing fleet, the city figures in an ongoing dispute with neighbouring Tunisia over fishing rights. Accelerating European integration has redefined Sicily’s southern shore as a European border. And Tunisian immigrants now make up five percent of the city’s population. In the 1970s, union anger, political mobilisations, and popular antipathy all worked to stamp Tunisians as undesirable and unwelcome. By the late 1990s, the lot of Tunisians in Mazara had improved with stable employment and family formation. While integrated economically, Tunisians remain socially and symbolically excluded. The actions and orientations of Sicilians, Tunisians, and their respective states perpetuate these multiple divisions. This study shows how the movement of people can involve states and their respective populations in the creation of complex divisions and interactions, in ways which can activate borders. The remarkable volume of migration in contemporary Sicily, southern Europe, and beyond makes the study of borders timely and challenging. 1 This paper draws on an ethnographic project conducted by Sally Booth and me over the summers of 1998, 1999, and 2001. The study was supported by the WennerGren Foundation for Anthropological Research and by Dowling College. Many in Sicily have assisted us. In particular I would like to acknowledge Vincenzo Ognibene and Ina Abbadessa, Pasquale Marchese, and Saro Lentini. In Mazara, Antonio Cusumano and Karim Hannachi gave generously of their time; I also thank Mario Fodera of CGIL and Eva Carlestål. The article benefited from the close readings of Sally Booth, Thomas Wilson, and two anonymous reviewers.

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Situated on the southwestern shore of the southern Italian region of Sicily, Mazara del Vallo faces Africa across 137 km of the Mediterranean Sea. The city is closer to Tunis, the capital of Tunisia, than to it is to the Italian mainland, let alone Rome to the north. For millennia armies, goods, diseases, settlers, religions, crops, and regimes have crossed the city’s watery threshold. Empires have expanded and contracted, dismantling and remaking borders, instigating new forms of accommodation and conflict in this ancient port city. Events of the past three decades have again refashioned Mazara’s border status. As port to the Mediterranean’s largest fishing fleet, the city is engaged in the ‘Fourth Punic War’, an ongoing dispute over fishing rights with neighbouring Tunisia. European integration since the 1950s, in the Common Market, the European Community, and now the European Union (EU), has redefined Sicily’s southern shore as a European border. The other fourteen member states of the EU now hold a formal interest in the flow of commodities and people across this common border. The presence of a large and stable Tunisian population especially qualifies Mazara as a border city. By 1999, Tunisians accounted for about five percent of the city’s nearly 52,000 residents (Cusumano 2000, 66-7), making Mazara the Sicilian city with the highest percentage of foreigners. Drawing on the ethnography of Antonio Cusumano and Karim Hannachi as well as research centered in Palermo conducted by Sally Booth and the author, this article analyses the development of the border in Mazara with special attention to the place of Tunisian immigrants. This case demonstrates Henk Driessen’s (1998, 97) contention that the ‘politics, economics and symbolism of inclusion and exclusion of newcomers’ constitute a central issue in border ethnography. In the 1960s and 1970s, fleet owners in the city and farmers in the province (Trapani) turned to undocumented Tunisian labour. Union anger, political mobilisations, and popular antipathy all worked to stamp Tunisians as undesirable and unwelcome. By the late 1990s, the lot of Tunisians in Mazara had improved with stable employment and family reunification. Sicilian-Tunisian interaction, however, remains limited by social and cultural borders. Most Mazarans regard Tunisians as economically useful but culturally backward and unsuitable mates for their own children. The division also stems from the migratory project of most Tunisians, a homeward orientation finding fullest expression in the separate elementary school run by the Tunisian government.

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Events in Mazara unfold in a broader context. The increasing movement of people and goods over the past twenty years has created important economic ties between Italy and Tunisia to the overwhelming benefit of the former. In recent years this unequal relationship has been recast as a many-sided threat to Italy. In line with trends elsewhere in Europe, the Italian state has imposed restrictions on further entries as even mainstream politicians voice concern over the unsettling presence of newcomers representing different traditions. This study shows how the movement of people can involve states and their respective populations in the creation of complex divisions and interactions, in ways which also activate borders. The remarkable volume of migration in contemporary Sicily, southern Europe, and beyond makes the study of borders timely and challenging. The anthropology of borders Anthropologists have become increasingly concerned with borders (e.g., Berdahl 1999; Wilson and Donnan 1998; Donnan and Wilson 1999). In On the Spanish-Moroccan Frontier, for example, Driessen (1992) charts the career of Melilla, a tiny Spanish port city on the Mediterranean coast of Morocco. Over five hundred years the site has gone from fortified outpost in lengthy religious wars, to trading post, to administrative center of Spanish Morocco, to anachronistic enclave within independent Morocco. Today, Spanish officials, armed forces and civilians co-exist, sometimes uneasily, with small numbers of Jewish and Hindu traders, gypsies, and a large Moroccan Berber population. Christianity remains central to Spanish identity and the exercise of political authority. The continuing significance of past conflict, the signal role of religion and ritual in claims to legitimacy and European identity, and the quiet forms of accommodation that exist under the banner of official differences all speak to the Mazara case. The Driessen study also indicates the key role played by agents of the state in border relations. In their review of the anthropology of borders, Hastings Donnan and Thomas Wilson (1999, 15-6) argue that the term ‘border’ be reserved for an international territorial boundary. Literal borders share important characteristics that distinguish them from social divisions described by metaphorical usages. Above all, states are concerned about borders because borders define states; in essence borders are a necessary condition of national existence. As the representatives of territories and populations, states seek to uphold the integrity of their borders. State action

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takes many forms, including defense and the regulation of people, capital, and goods. ‘Thus borders are both structures and symbols of a state’s security and sovereignty. They are historical and contemporary records of a state’s relation with other states, with its own people, and with its own image’ (Donnan and Wilson 1999, 15). As barrier and focal point of interaction, borders engender and accentuate a range of practices, as Donnan and Wilson note. Discrepancies in national economic conditions and regulations provide incentives for all manner of licit and illicit exchange. Political processes too can resonate along borders as force, symbolism, and ritual are employed in assertions of state authority. Border populations maintain complex, variable relations with states. They may share or reject a state’s authority; they may gain a livelihood from enforcing or breaking a state’s rules. The Mazara case shows the complex nature of borders. The city’s border culture describes the multifarious accommodations and tensions linking and separating resident Italian and Tunisian nationals. The actions and orientations of the Italian and Tunisian states as well as the EU inform the resultant territorial, cultural, economic, and political divides. The Sicily-Tunisia border A consideration of borders, past and present, speaks to central themes in the experience of Sicily in general and Mazara in particular. Situated astride the narrow straits, Sicily and Tunisia have been shaped by numerous cultural and demographic tides. At about 1000 B.C. the Phoenicians established trading posts along both shores. Later, both areas played leading or subsidiary roles in a succession of empires – including the Carthaginian, Roman, Byzantine, Arab, and Norman – stretching roughly from the 6th century B.C. to the 12th century A.D. The periods of Arab and Norman rule saw great prosperity and intense interaction between Muslims and Christians (Finley, Mack Smith, and Duggan 1987, 49-65). Muslim armies conquered Tunisia in the 7th century A.D. In 827 forces of the Aghlabid dynasty landed in Mazara. As capital of one of the three administrative divisions in Sicily, Mazara prospered. Sicily would remain in Arab hands for almost two hundred years, passing eventually to the Fatimids. The Arabs seized some choice lands, settling in great numbers in the west and southeast. They brought new irrigation techniques and crops (including sugarcane, mulberries, silk worms, and citrus trees) and encouraged production. As subordinate non-Muslims, both Jews and Christians wore distinctive signs and paid a


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special tax but they retained some autonomy; with time, many Christians converted to Islam. The Normans in the 11th and 12th centuries preserved a multi-ethnic polity while reversing the hierarchy of populations. Now Jews and Muslims rendered tribute as non-Christians while retaining a measure of autonomy. Norman administration utilised Arab models and initially relied heavily on Arab personnel. With time, Arab elites fled to Tunisia; mosques became churches and Muslims converted to Christianity. Norman control of the Tunisian and Libyan coasts and mounting violence against Muslims in Sicily in the late 12th century provoked further emigrations. In the following century, Frederick II drove out the remaining Muslims. The island now occupied part of a long religious frontier. On either side of this frontier, Christian and Muslim powers portrayed themselves as the agents of civilisation and true religion, and saw the other as barbarian and infidel (Driessen 1992, 9). This conflict reached a new pitch in the 16th century as Hapsburg Spain contested the arrival of the Ottomans in the western Mediterranean. For much of the century, Sicilians both financed attacks mounted by their Spanish masters and bore the brunt of Ottoman counter attacks. For two hundred years following the 1580 Turkish-Spanish truce, ‘Barbary pirates’ or ‘corsairs’ conducted an undeclared war, capturing commercial vessels and harassing the coasts of Sicily and other European lands. Ottoman officials in Tunisia, like their counterparts in Algerian and Libya, commissioned the privateering and drew important income from the sale of seized goods and the ransoming of captives (Finley, Mack Smith, and Duggan 1987, 95; Perkins 1986, 58-9). This lengthy period of conflict left residues in ritual, folklore, and language. Battles between Muslims and Christians, for example, occupy centre stage in traditional Sicilian puppet-theater and oral traditions. The ascendancy of British and French power in the early 19th century expanded commercial activity in the Mediterranean and underwrote colonial expansion. Sicilians resumed regular contacts with their neighbours across the straits. By mid-century many Sicilian sailors were well acquainted with Tunis but ignorant of Naples, capital of the Kingdom of Two Sicilies (Mack Smith 1968, 431) and fishermen from western Sicily had settled in Mahdia (Bonaffini 1991 cited in Cusumano 2000, 42). In 1860, Garibaldi’s army swept across western Sicily, initiating the formation of the modern Italian state and new borders. Later, grinding poverty and repression provoked an exodus; by World War I, over 1.5 million Sicilians had departed, many bound for the USA (Finley, Mack Smith,

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and Duggan 1987, 202). Many, however, settled in Tunisia where the French had established a Protectorate in 1881; indeed, Italians made up the largest foreign nationality there until 1930 (Perkins 1986, 89-94). Emigration slowed in the 1930s and 1940s with depression, war, and Fascist policy restricting population movement and redefining people as producers of the nation’s wealth. Emigration gained momentum again after World War II, with France, Germany, Switzerland, and the Italian north as principal destinations. Over one million Sicilians left home 195175 (Finley, Mack Smith, and Duggan 1987, 224) with particularly heavy emigration from the interior and west of the island (Cusumano 1976, 35). The national government again viewed emigration as social safety value and convenient source of remittances. Sicilian borders, particularly with Tunisia, have been erected and defended, defeated and dissolved, and rebuilt anew by a succession of states. Each new formulation has encouraged, or impeded, interaction including migration. With Tunisian independence in 1956 and Italy’s signing of the Treaty of Rome the following year, the Mediterranean again seemed to divide rather than unite. Italy would soon experience unprecedented growth, eventually becoming an importer of labour in its own right. Tunisia, in contrast, was to become ever more dependent on access to European markets. Tunisian immigration to Italy exemplifies the workings of this new border. ‘The unhappy return’ Tunisia’s early reluctance to encourage emigration ended in response to rising unemployment and the failure of collectivisation programs in agriculture and fishing in the 1960s (Collinson 1996, 11-2; Perkins 1986, 1347). Protectorate status had long facilitated the movement of people and goods to France, and cultural and economic ties continued to attract Tunisians after independence. But now proximity, high wages relative to home, and easy access all made Italy, especially Sicily, an attractive destination. Starting in the late 1960s, Tunisian men found employment on the ships of Mazara and in the fields of Trapani province. The Tunisian presence was undocumented and for the most part seasonal. By the mid1970s, perhaps one thousand Tunisians, almost all male, lived in Mazara (Cusumano 1976, 33). Then, as now, most hailed from Mahdia, and many were fishermen by trade. They settled in the decrepit old centre as it offered cheap rents and a short walk to the port. Mazarans promptly dubbed the area, whose narrow alleyways and courtyards date from the


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Arab period, the ‘casbah’. The neighbourhood assumed lurid tones in gossip and Sicilian women avoided it. Two events in the 1970s brought the border into plain view. Mazara figured prominently in both episodes, which fused the political and symbolic exclusion of the Tunisians to their economic subordination. By the early 1970s, agricultural labourers’ and fishermen’s unions objected to the unfettered use of undocumented foreigners. In the summer of 1972, provincial police responded by refusing entry (on the grounds of insufficient funds for tourist visas) to seventy-odd Tunisians who had arrived by ferry in the city of Trapani. Police then descended on the countryside, detaining and repatriating Tunisians. In Mazara, politicians circulated a petition demanding that Tunisians be subject to mandatory medical examinations on the grounds that they carried multiple maladies (Cusumano 1976, 25-7). This labeling process symbolised the perceived ‘undesirability of the alien’ (Donnan and Wilson 1999, 136) in no uncertain terms. The reputedly diseased Tunisians were of course seen to be a public health hazard. Claims about venereal disease further represented these men as threats to the health of Sicilian women and the honour of Sicilian men. Tunisians thus symbolically defiled the body politic. In fact, after the Tunisians were forcibly removed, city health officials disinfected their flats. As Cusumano (1976, 27) notes, this charade diverted attention from the Sicilians who profited from the rental of what should have been classified as uninhabitable apartments. Political mobilisations at the city level thus legitimated a view of Tunisians as dirty and diseased. Employers soon regained the upper hand, however. ‘Tourists’ from across the water again worked the olive and grape harvests. Mazara ship owners petitioned, and received, permission to allot up to one-third of a ship’s crew to foreigners (Cusumano 1976, 28). These workers were inexpensive and they knew Tunisian fishing grounds. Italy and Tunisia soon clashed over fishing rights when Italian (Mazara) ships continued to troll in Tunisian waters after the 1974 expiration of a bilateral accord. When diplomacy failed to gain the attention of the Italians, the Tunisian government began to sequester Italian vessels. Events reached a climax when Tunisian forces killed an Italian sailor. In Mazara, class tensions were once more displaced onto Tunisians. Ship owners adamantly refused to negotiate the old contract with the fishermen’s union, preferring instead to reduce costs with undocumented foreigners. On occasion, new crew were fetched from boats in Tunisian

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waters and transported directly back to Sicily abroad Mazara ships. (Though a large port, Mazara offers no ferry service.) In this tense atmosphere, the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement (MSI) instigated attacks against Tunisians and called for repatriation. Popular sentiment and unions again united in opposition to Tunisians. Isolated, exploited, and stigmatised, Tunisians endured rebukes in exchange for the opportunity to make money. It was indeed, in Cusumano’s words, an ‘unhappy return’. Employers won as the deployment of foreign workers in the lowest tiers of the labour market became accepted practice across Sicily. Local agents of the Italian state permitted the undocumented entry, residence, and employment of foreigners. This dealt blows to organised labour, encouraged tax evasion among employers, and abetted the development of an ethnically segmented labour market. The Tunisian population in Mazara hovered around one thousand into the early 1980s. Most men worked in the fishing industry, where relations improved as fewer Sicilians ventured to sea. On land, tensions over work and wages with native agricultural labourers declined but did not disappear as that form of employment too became less attractive to Sicilians. The early mobilisations against Tunisians were not repeated, even in the context of the well-publicised landings along the Sicilian coast of Tunisian boats bearing would-be immigrants in the late 1990s (Cusumano and Hannachi, personal communication 2002). They represent the only politicised attacks on foreigners ever conducted on the island; in contrast, the ensuing decade would witness a number of such efforts in the Italian center and north (Cole 1997). By the late 1990s, the Tunisian community had grown and stabilised; while still a subordinate population, Tunisians now maintain a civil if distant relationship with Mazarans, as described below. But first, a fuller perspective on both the earlier and the contemporary period in Mazara will be gained by a review of immigration trends in Italy and the varied concerns over border crossing voiced by Italy, EU partners, and Tunisia. Italy becomes a country of immigration The Tunisian ‘return’ represented an early stage in the transformation of Italy into a country of immigration. Inflows began in isolated areas in the late 1960s and early 1970s, then grew throughout the country in the 1980s, as Africans, Asians, and others were drawn by economic expansion and ease of entry relative to traditional western European destinations such as Germany and France. Despite tighter controls introduced


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by the Act #39 in 1990, immigration continued in the 1990s owing to family reunification and continued regular and irregular entries. By 1999, 1,251,994 foreigners held residency permits, a 352 percent increase over the 1982 figure of 355,431 (Caritas 2000, 293). Initially clustered in Rome and the south, immigrants today concentrate in Rome and the centernorth of the country. Over the past fifteen years, legislation and amnesties (in 1986-8, 1990, 1995-6, and 1998) have regularised the status of most resident foreigners and granted more rights and services to permit holders (Sciortino 1999, 238). Newcomers have settled in and increasing enrolments of their children in school indicate that immigrants have become a permanent part of Italian society. At the same time, however, debate and public opinion in 1990s Italy characterised immigration as trouble and called for greater restrictions. Two parties have been instrumental in this regard: the post-fascist National Alliance (previously the MSI) and the Northern League, both of which rose to prominence with the disintegration of the Italian political class in the scandals of the early 1990s. Continued illegal entries, particularly along the coasts of southwest Sicily and Apulia, garnered intensive media coverage as a ‘clandestine emergency’. EU member states to the north have called for stricter controls in Italy and noted that Italy’s frequent amnesties create increasing numbers of potential immigrants (Bonifazi 2000, 247). But Italy has quickly adopted and successfully applied restrictive external controls similar to those employed in member states to the north, as evidenced by low entry quotas and higher numbers of detentions and expulsions (Sciortino 1999). In the case of Italy-Tunisia relations, a 1999 bilateral accord established cooperation regarding coastline surveillance and repatriation. And under the provisions of the 1998 immigration law, the accord also netted additional visas for Tunisians (3000 for the year 2000) (Caritas 2000, 119-20, 246). On the whole the life of newcomers in Italy remains precarious. Housing is difficult to locate, especially in the north. The regular and unionised employment in large construction and industrial concerns that promoted the integration of (foreign) workers in the postwar period of ‘Fordist’ production has given way to temporary, non-unionised work in smaller firms in city and countryside (Pugliese 1993). Lacking the family and state supports enjoyed by Italians, desiring flexibility, and obligated to send remittances and repay loans, many foreigners accept sub-standard pay and undocumented employment. Called lavoro nero [‘black work’], undocumented employment may describe all or part of an employee’s

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work week and range from a mutually advantageous relationship between employer and employee to an exploitative one. Common throughout Italy, ‘lavoro nero’ is rampant in the south. Because the permit system is predicated on documented employment, recourse to work in the informal sector creates problems for foreigners. Immigrants did not create the informal sector, but they have made significant contributions to it. Weak internal controls on immigrant employment reflect the political importance of the informal economy. Observes Giuseppe Sciortino (1999: 257): ‘The existence of a significant population of undocumented immigrants and of many amnesty programmes may (...) be viewed as consequences not of failing immigration control but rather of the special, wellentrenched mode of relationship between the Italian state and Italian society’. In sum, foreigners today work in all economic sectors, rendering a ‘structural’ or indispensable service to Italian labour markets (Mingione and Quassoli 2000, 44). Increased immigration has created a population willing and in many cases compelled to work for less, in effect granting a competitive advantage to Italian producers in the context of increasing globalisation (King and Andall 1999). Long concentrated in services and agriculture, increasing numbers find employment in industry, particularly in the northeast. Italian workers have clashed with foreigners over jobs in some agricultural areas of the south where highly exploitative conditions obtain (Mingione and Quassoli 2000, 45). For the most part, though, native and foreign workers and immigrants do not compete directly because the latter perform the most undesirable tasks. Mazara today Over the last two decades the foreign population in Sicily has continued to grow, though not at the same rate as areas in the north. About the time that Tunisian men entered the primary sector in western Sicily, women from Cape Verde, the Philippines, and Mauritius were assuming roles in the tertiary sector of the island’s largest cities. The 1980s and 1990s saw increasing arrivals from Africa, Eastern Europe, and Asia. For decades immigrants have played a vital role in the Sicilian economy. That they have done so in a region characterised by high rates of unemployment is indicative of increasing segmentation in European labour markets. Despite recent gains, the rates of undocumented employment among immigrants remain very high relative to northern areas. Economic difficulties render many Sicilians vulnerable to the depredations of employers, but


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newcomers especially are compelled to accept low-paying, low-status, and often temporary employment. Exact enumeration of the foreign presence here, as elsewhere in Italy, is bedeviled by immigrant mobility, undetected entries, and visa overstayers. But the ease with which one can live ‘without papers’ in Sicily make counting all the more difficult on the island. By 1999, about 57,000 foreigners representing dozens of nationalities held residency permits in Sicily. With almost 12,000 permits, Tunisia leads the list, followed by Sri Lanka, Morocco, the former Yugoslavia, Mauritius, the USA, Albania, the Philippines, Bangladesh, and Senegal (Caritas 2000: 365). Trends in residence and employment are discernable. The Asians work as domestics, in other services, and as small business owners in large cities. Eastern Europeans find employment on the farms and dairies of the southeast. Moroccans and Senegalese circulate as street hawkers. Tunisians are present throughout the island but cluster in the southeast and the west where they work in agriculture and fishing. In Mazara, the foreign population began to grow in the late 1980s, reaching 3,295 in 1995 (Cusumano 2000, 66). Recently, prolonged economic crisis exacerbated by an entrenched mafia presence has compelled many local youth and Tunisians to leave for the north (Luca 2001). By 1999, 2803 registered foreigners made up 5.4 percent of the city’s 51,964 residents; they include 2521 Tunisians, 158 Slavs, 44 Moroccans, and 78 citizens from other countries (Cusumano 2000, 33). The Slavic population dates to the early 1990s; these ethnic Albanians from Kosovo inhabit the decrepit areas of the ‘casbah’ and are regarded by Mazarans as pests for their begging. Moroccan men, present since the mid-1980s and residentially dispersed, often work as street-hawkers. The dominant Tunisian community has grown and stabilised. Most maintain close ties to Mahdia and La Chebba, the result of three decades of chain migration. Yet more and more Tunisians call Mazara home. More than half have lived there over 20 years (Cusumano 2000, 44). And increasing numbers of women, the result of family reunification, have altered the nature of life in Sicily. Of the Tunisians resident, 738 were born in Mazara itself, 736 in Mahdia, and 243 in La Chebba (Cusumano 2000, 37). In the last decade, with increasing job security and family formation, most Tunisians have left the central district and dispersed in search of better accommodation. Many regard as the purpose of their stay the making of money for house and family in Tunisia, and they scrimp for eleven months a year in order to consume conspicuously on

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annual visits home. Others enjoy the consumer comforts afforded by Italian markets. Representative of this latter orientation is a man I met in 1999. A native of the coastal city of Sousa, he arrived in Italy in the mid-1980s. He worked in the north as a welder until the Gulf war, then settled in Mazara where he has worked for eight years as a cook on a fishing boat. His wife, a native of an area known for its former Sicilian settlement, also works. In response to my question about his situation in Sicily, he declared himself very satisfied, and proceeded to list his household’s possessions, including two cell phones, freezer, refrigerator, video cassette player, television, satellite dish, and articles of clothing. He worried not about Mazaran attitudes but rather about new arrivals from Tunisia who lacked papers, caused trouble, and made established immigrants look bad. In short, he voiced a concern shared by many established immigrants there and elsewhere. Tunisian labour market participation remains limited. Almost all Tunisian women are housewives; a small but increasing number clean houses. Some Tunisian men work in tufa stone operations, pastures, fields, orchards, and bars and restaurants where seasonal and undocumented employment is the norm. But most Tunisian men continue to work in the fishing industry. This arduous work entails weeks at sea punctuated by brief stays ashore. It is, however, the best paying and most stable of immigrant occupations in the area, as the inventory of the cook’s household suggests. Tunisians typically hold union membership and receive benefits. A union spokesman whom I interviewed in 1998 spoke glowingly of the early Tunisian fishermen, calling them ‘golden guys’, and observed that some had worked long enough to receive an Italian pension. A 1997 law increasing the allowable portion of foreign crew from 33% to 50% confirms the contribution of Tunisians to this vital local industry. Figures produced by ship owners for official consumption, however, mask the practice of Tunisians occupying virtually all crew positions. Curiously, this stable and proportionally large foreign presence scarcely makes itself felt in the city. Only two Tunisian-run shops exist, in contrast to dozens of Bangladeshi shops in Palermo. Tunisian and Sicilian adults rarely socialise. Tunisian fishermen report good relations with their co-workers while at sea but say interaction ceases at the dock. For instance, a Sicilian fisherman would not invite a Tunisian colleague to his son’s birthday party nor would the Tunisian extend a similar invitation to


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the Sicilian mate. In general, Tunisian men frequent social clubs operated by co-nationals and sit together in local bars, while women engage in rounds of home visits. Tunisian children interact with their Italian peers; they speak dialect and share leisure time pursuits. But interaction has produced few relationships and fewer inter-marriages. Hannachi (1998, 92) judges relations between the two populations as ‘formal, passive, and sterile’. The actions and attitudes of Sicilians, resident Tunisians, and their respective states conspire to separate the two populations. The Sicilian side of the border in Mazara Certainly, local power holders have worked to maintain this cold border between Sicily and Tunisia, principally through neglect. It is true that Mazara twinned itself with the city of Mahdia in 1973, and that local officials here as elsewhere on the island speak mellifluously of the Sicily’s many-stranded heritage and call for harmonious interaction in a resurgent Mediterranean region. Also, the anti-Tunisian mobilisations of the early 1970s now belong to the ancient, forgotten past (Cusumano, personal communication 2002). On the other hand, the municipal government has done nothing whatsoever for Tunisians (or other foreigners). After over thirty years of immigration, there exists no public office to process the paperwork required of foreigners, no city council representation, no Italian language courses, certainly no mosque. Considering the size and longevity of its immigrant population, the city’s neglect in these matters stands out even in a region with a very poor record on immigration issues. Sicily remains the only region in Italy that has yet to fulfill its legal obligation (dating to 1990) to pass immigration legislation. Into the breach have stepped secular associations and, above all, Catholic and Protestant institutions. In Mazara, Franciscan Sisters have long attended to the immediate needs of Tunisians while secular groups have promoted interaction. These efforts have failed to alter widespread paternalism and indifference towards Tunisians. Mazaran authorities also avoid acknowledging immigrants by refusing to recognise Tunisian religion and culture. Several Sicilian cities have mosques. In Palermo, the city rents an unused church building for the purpose, some immigrants organise their own places of worship, while a Tunisian imam presides over the lone official mosque. In Mazara, the local administration has countenanced no discussion of a Muslim place of worship. Mere mention of the subject by a leftist interim government in the mid-1990s occasioned vehement protests from politicians and church

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officials. In Hannachi’s (1998) estimation, Tunisians have yet to participate in any of the city’s annual summer festivals (the 1998 edition included almost three dozen separate events). Official neglect and ritual thus serve to erase the Tunisian presence. Driessen’s (1992) account of Melilla is relevant here. In this, one of Spain’s last colonial outposts, Spaniards retain political control over a population that includes growing numbers of foreigners, particularly Muslim Moroccans from the surrounding Rif area. Ritual lends a common identity to the disparate interests of Spaniards, defining them as Catholic and Western and so justifying Spanish dominance over the threatening Muslim Africa population. In Mazara too local authorities have striven to define the city by one religion and one nationality. Until 2001 the city lacked a ‘cultural mediator’, an officially recognised intermediary position established under immigration law and one used to advantage in many Italian cities. That the individual chosen speaks no Arabic and knows nothing about either Tunisia or immigration law may border on the criminal, but it is in keeping with local practise. Such dereliction of duty issues from a tradition of clientelistic politics that has little use for local poor and non-voting foreigners alike. It also grows from a widespread sense that Tunisians do not merit attention as equals. Sicilian views of immigrants, particularly Tunisians, tend to be unflattering and complex (Cole 1997; Booth and Cole 1999). Sicilians readily admit that the island prospered under the Arabs and that Arab blood courses through their veins. Some see this shared history as the foundation for a new multi-ethnic society. Others take a dimmer view, claiming that the immigrants have lost the genius of their ancestors and become dirty and dangerous. In his analysis of the Mediterranean frontier in southern Spain, Driessen (1996, 180) reports a similar dynamic. Spaniards and Andalusians in particular readily contrast their newfound prosperity and European status with the poverty and perceived backwardness of Morocco (from which many immigrants come) even as they aspire to forge new links between the southern and northern shores of the Mediterranean. In Sicily, the presumed deficiencies of outsiders can also be linked to fluid racial categorisations. In Palermo, dark-skinned Filipino and Mauritian women stand atop the hierarchy of domestic labourers; their education and Christianity accord them relatively high status and even designation as ‘white’ and ‘like us’. Muslim Tunisians, historical enemies par excellence, can appear indistinguishable from the native population but


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are seen by Sicilians as a distinct and different population. In a similar process Albanian Muslim women who work as domestics in urban Greece are singled out as ‘the enemy at the doorstep’ while their Filipina counterparts receive higher pay and are accepted as ‘nice Catholic girls’ (Lazardis 2000). The Tunisian side of the border For their part, Tunisians have sought to keep their engagement with Sicily and Sicilians to a minimum (for details, see Hannachi 1998). Few Tunisians polled actually judge Mazarans as ‘racist’ (Cusumano 2000, 77) but they are well aware that the native population is not eager for greater Tunisian participation in the city’s life. At the same time, most Tunisians view their sojourn in Sicily as temporary. During this ‘exile’ abroad they endure privations in order to secure a better situation for their eventual return to Tunisia. As in so many migrations, a sustaining myth of return informs the struggle of life abroad (Brettell 1979). Immigrant life in Sicily centres on family and friends. Associational activity is rare, the result among other things of indirect rule under the French followed by nearly fifty years of independent governments permitting little to no opposition. Tunisians may be the most secularised residents of the Muslim world. Many men smoke and drink, and most families do not insist on halal meat though they do avoid pork. Individuals practice their faith as they see fit, and many limit themselves to observance of festive occasions. As a result, Tunisians as Muslims do not present themselves as a visible bloc to others in the city. Proximity to Tunisia allows for the robust circulation of people, goods, and money, discouraging the adoption of Sicily as home. And both governments regard the numerous Tunisians born in Mazara as Tunisian. Citizenship practices thus reinforce the notion that residence in Sicily is a temporary phenomenon. Educational systems stand at the centre of the unequal and separate worlds inhabited by locals and Tunisians, as both Cusumano (2000) and Hannachi note (1998). Local schools have done little to facilitate Tunisian participation. Only recently have they begun to address the national mandate to create programmes facilitating the integration of foreign students. The Tunisian school, run by the state and endorsed by parents, also patrols the border. Ironically, the ‘school’ occupies a portion of a Sicilian middle school building – a fitting symbol for the division of the city’s populations.

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In 1981, at the request of the Palermo consulate, the Tunisian ministry of education established an elementary school in Mazara. Serving grades 1-6, the school offers the standard national curriculum. From one teacher and 20 students the school has grown to four teachers and 140 students in 1999-2000. This institution and another later established in Palermo represent a unique effort: they are the only schools operated by a foreign government in Italy (Cusumano 2000, 50) and the only ones operated abroad by the Tunisian government (Hannachi 1998, 74). Elsewhere in Europe, Tunisian children enrol in local schools. The government offers them after-school lessons several times weekly in an effort to preserve their ‘Tunisian-Arabic-Islamic identity’ (Hannachi 1998, 74). In a similar fashion the Moroccan government utilises cultural associations and mosques to monitor its citizens in Europe (Driessen 1996). The decision to establish an alternative school in Mazara was based on several factors. Such an institution would provide continuity in children’s education in a context where parents’ precarious employment and close proximity to Tunisia could spell frequent, unplanned moves. It would furnish the training in Arabic and French necessary for productive activity in Tunisia that the monolingual Italian system could not offer (Hannachi 1998, 75). In sum, the school was predicated on the notion that the migratory project in Mazara would be brief and that children would continue secondary studies in Tunisia. In fact, virtually all the graduates in early years returned home to pursue studies. But by the late 1990s, the figure had fallen to just 40 percent. The consulate, responsible for overseeing the school, has maintained until very recently an inflexible course dedicated to a statist project. Hannachi, the first teacher, recognised the need for immigrant kids to learn Italian as well as the desirability of interaction between Tunisian children and their Italian peers. Mornings, he taught his charges in Arabic; afternoons, he led them to Italian classrooms. For this experiment his contract was not renewed. Since that time, the school’s staff and curriculum have glorified Tunisia, fostered a myth of return, and stubbornly refused to address the Italian context. The Tunisian state thus attempts to inculcate a narrowly defined nationalism that ignores the complexities of the lives of it young citizens. Comments Cusumano (2000, 51): ‘(S)ite of the socialisation of nationalist sentiments of that homeland the children are beginning to know through maps, the flag, and the photograph of the president, the school (...) seems committed to counter any attempt at the construction of new forms of citizenship’.


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Overall, parents have supported the school’s effort. Early on, virtually all Tunisian children attended; today, most do. The school appeals to parents at any number of levels. It is familiar, a few comforting rooms of Tunisia in a foreign land. Theoretically, it permits easy transfer into and out Tunisian schools. The curriculum’s dual project – cultivating Tunisian identity and preparing students for continued schooling at home – addresses parental fears and aspirations. Most adult Tunisians harbor no interest in long-term integration into Sicilian society for themselves or their offspring. They see themselves as Arabic-speaking Muslims who will return to Tunisia at the completion of the migratory project. Their children, however, view Tunisia as the destination of annual visits and home of grandparents. Having been reared and probably born in Mazara, they regard the Sicilian city as home – a key generational divide. Conflict between the generations begins early. ‘The difficulties begin when the child learns to make the sign of the cross and recite prayers in kindergarten’ (Hannachi 1998, 80). With time, children’s gestures, food preferences, language, and leisure time pursuits bespeak a hybridity. Parents regard this biculturalism as a betrayal of their own identity which is so firmly situated in the Tunisian nation. As among other Muslim North Africans elsewhere in Europe (on France see Lacoste-Dujardin 2000), the most serious betrayal imaginable involves a daughter’s infidelity to her people. A parent gave Hannachi (1998, 79) an unimpeachable motive for sending a daughter back home: ‘I don’t want my daughter, when she grows up, to fall in love with an Italian. It’s a sin for a Muslim woman to marry a non-Muslim’. The Islamic Republic of Tunisia agrees, refusing to recognise the marriage of a Tunisian woman to a non-Muslim. Parents attempt to cope with what they regard as the dangers of the Sicilian environment for their children. They remind them of their roots, they fill the home with the sights and sounds of Tunisian television and radio, they adorn the table with homeland specialties. But exhortations to faith can ring hollow from non-practising parents, Italian popular culture beckons, and the smells of Tunisian food can excite the curiosity of Sicilian neighbours and lead to culinary exchanges and blends. Parents enrol children in the elementary school and plan to send them home after 6th grade. Reasoned one parent, ‘If my children remain in Italy to study and receive an Italian degree, they won’t be able to do anything with it in Tunisia’ (Hannachi 1998, 79). They do have a point, as Tunisia has yet to recognise Italian degrees (Cusumano 2000, 52).

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According to both Cusumano and Hannachi, the school fails both parents and children. Students transferring to schools in Tunisia experience many difficulties owing to their modest Arabic skills and poor French ones. Those who stay and enter the Italian secondary system in ever greater numbers face enormous problems given their limited knowledge of the language of instruction. In their first formal encounter with Italian peers, Tunisian kids often perform miserably. This deals a terrible blow to self-esteem and confirms Mazaran suspicions (or convictions) about Tunisian inferiority. Hannachi (1998, 76) writes: ‘The school that was to be their means to parity becomes a source of delusion and discrimination, the mirror reflecting classification, judgment, and self-exclusion’. Reactions include dropping out, downplaying Tunisian identity, and more rarely, trouble-making. The Consulate’s paternalistic program, parents’ devotion to the idea of return and their refusal to admit the school’s failure, as well as the unwillingness and inability of the Italian system to take to heart national mandates for the integration of foreign pupils, all account for the dismal performance of Tunisian children in Mazara’s schools. In recent years, some Tunisian parents have begun to enrol children directly into Italian elementary schools. This moves involves the recognition of problems inherent in the Tunisian school. It is also an admission that their children need preparation for life and work in Italy. As such it entails an expanded conception of their migratory project and citizenship. Long-resident fishing families commonly make this decision (the few kids of mixed parentage all attend Italian schools). Such a break with the past entails risks. Children thereby lose training in Arabic, and may face discrimination and the humiliation of failure. Academic success will inevitably increase the educational and linguistic distance between the generations. And exposure to the Italian system may well equip immigrant kids with a sense of individuality that make them less amenable to parental control. Conclusion In Mazara, most Sicilians, Tunisians, and representatives of their respective states have striven, for diverse reasons, to uphold divisions and limit interaction to the economic sphere. But can this divided border culture endure? The recent introduction of short-term work permits, the proximity of Tunisia, and close ties to two Tunisian cities may underwrite transnational commuting and sustain the myth of return among Tunisians. On


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the Sicilian side, a monopoly on resources may underwrite the continuing economic subordination and political and ideological exclusion of Tunisians. On the other hand, economic opportunity in Mazara, continuing family formation among immigrants, and increasing enrolments of Tunisian children in Italian schools all point to the long-term residence of Tunisians and suggest the potential for greater participation in local affairs. With the next generation, the question is not will the border change but when and to what extent. It is likely that these youth will continue to create a hybrid identity, one that offends and confounds their parents and challenges the mono-cultural vision supported by Tunisia, and to a lesser extent, Italy. It is harder to predict whether most will remain to enrich the social mosaic of Mazara or, disillusioned by the clientelist political system and stagnant economy, follow the northward path of so many other immigrant and Sicilian youth. The Mazara case speaks to several aspects of population movement and borders in contemporary Europe. Culture and ideology figure prominently in the maintenance of boundaries. The indifference, ambivalence, and outright disregard many Sicilians feel for Tunisians constitute the local and contemporary variant of a general European view contrasting civilized Christian Europe to backward Muslim North Africa. Tunisian self-definition as Muslim and the dread of intermarriage also recall the religious and cultural colorings of the historical animosity between the northern and southern shores of the Mediterranean. Recent developments have imparted now meanings to this old divide. For decades, the northward movement of people across the Mediterranean was regarded as a prosaic economic matter. Receiving states required extra and cheaper labour while senders sought through emigration to address mounting trade deficits and relieve the pressures of high rates of unemployment. Already by 1986, remittances had become Tunisia’s third largest source of foreign currency, behind energy and tourism. According to Sarah Collinson (1996: 39-67), this stance toward migration changed swiftly in the early 1990s. The fall of socialist regimes to the east, anxiety over impending EU enlargement, and economic downturn all rattled old certainties and shifted priorities. Suddenly the ‘south’ loomed as a security threat. North Africa in particular now represented Islamic fundamentalism, terrorism, overpopulation, and political instability. In theory the solution required stabilising the region through development. In reality Italy, Spain, and others have sought above all to restrict immigration through visa requirements, tighter border surveillance, and

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tougher expulsion procedures coupled with readmission agreements regarding illegal entries. Yet, as the Italian case shows, lax internal controls together with stricter external checks create the conditions for a flourishing trade in human smuggling, render many newcomers vulnerable, and channel them into the lowest levels of gendered, segmented labour markets. Across the Mediterranean, the stresses of economic dependency coupled with political powerlessness in relation to the EU have accentuated attitudes toward migration and Europe. In Morocco, for example, religious figures have condemned life in Europe as immoral and crime-ridden even as many youth seek opportunity and adventure in a Europe they know rejects them (Driessen 1998, 109-10). Ongoing EU integration has entailed greater attention to common borders and movements of people, capital, and goods across them. The influx of goods and capital changes people’s lives, sometimes provoking strong reactions as attacks on McDonalds eateries in France show. But the movement of people seems unparalleled in its ability to engage people’s anxieties. Immigrants are visible, quite possibly visibly different, and may establish permanent residence. Their presence engages constructions of nationhood and is mediated by the institutions of the state. The economic inclusion and social exclusion seen in Mazara points to an emergent regional pattern. Spain, Portugal, and Greece, like Italy, have undergone the recent transformation from labour exporter to importer. By the late 1990s, perhaps as many as 3.5 million foreigners resided and worked in southern Europe (King 2000, 11). Economically vulnerable, performing for the most part the worst jobs, marginalised by nationality and legal status as (un)documented foreigners, these people remain on the sidelines of European social life even as they render significant economic benefits. The lax labour standards, vibrant informal economies, weakened unions, and poor delivery of services characteristic of these states do not bode well for the meaningful integration of newcomers. References Berdahl, Daphne. 1999. Where the World Ends. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bonifazi, Corrado. 2000. European Migration Policy: Questions from Italy. In Eldorado or Fortress? Migration in Southern Europe, eds. Russell King, Gabriella Lazaridis and Charalambos, 235-52. London: Macmillan.


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Bonaffini, G. 1991. Sicilia e Maghreb tre Sette e Ottocento. Caltanisetta-Rome: Salvatore Sciascia Editore. Booth, Sally and Jeffrey Cole. 1999. An Unsettling Integration: Immigrant Work and Lives in Palermo. Modern Italy 4, no. 2:191-205. Brettell, Caroline. 1979. Emigrar Para Voltar: A Portuguese Ideology of Return Migration. Papers in Anthropology 20:1-20. Caritas di Roma. 2000. Immigrazione. Dossier statistico 2000. Rome: Anterem. Cole, Jeffrey. 1997. The New Racism in Europe: A Sicilian Ethnography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Collinson, Sarah. 1996. Shore to Shore: The Politics of Migration in Euro-Maghreb Relations. London: The Royal Institute of International Affairs. Cusumano, Antonio. 1976. Il ritorno infelice. Palermo: Sellerio. Cusumano, Antonio. 2000. Cittadini senza cittadinanza. Rapporto duemilla sulla presenza degli stranieri a Mazara del Vallo. Gibellina, Italy: CRESM. Donnan, Hastings, and Thomas M. Wilson. 1999. Borders: Frontiers of Identity, Nation and State. Oxford/New York: Berg. Driessen, Henk. 1992. On the Spanish-Moroccan Frontier. Oxford/New York: Berg. Driessen, Henk. 1996. At the Edge of Europe: Crossing and Marking he Mediterranean Divide. In Borders, Nations, and States, eds. Liam O’Dowd and Thomas M. Wilson, 179-198. Aldershot: Avebury. Driessen, Henk. 1998. The ‘new immigration’ and the transformation of the European-African frontier. In Border Identities: Nation and State at International Frontiers, eds. Thomas M. Wilson and Hastings Donnan, 96-116. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Finley, Moses, Denis Mack Smith, and Christopher Duggan. 1987. A History of Sicily. New York: Viking. Hannachi, Karim. 1998. Gli immigrati tunisini a Mazara del Vallo: inserimento o integrazione. CRESM: Gibellina, Italy. King, Russell. 2000. Southern Europe in the Changing Global Map of Migration. In Eldorado or Fortress? Migration in Southern Europe, eds. Russell King, Gabriella Lazaridis, and Charalambos Tsardanidis, 3-26. London: Macmillan. King, Russell and Jacqueline Andall. 1999. The Geography and Economic Sociology of Recent Immigration to Italy. Modern Italy 4, no. 2:135-148. Lacoste-Dujardin, Camille. 2000. Maghrebi Families in France. In Women, Immigration and Identities in France, eds. Jane Freedman and Carrie Tarr, 57-68. Oxford/New York: Berg. Lazaridis, Gabriella. 2000. Filipino and Albanian Women Migrant Workers in Greece. In Gender and Migration in Southern Europe, eds. Floya Anthias and Gabriella Lazaridis, 49-79. Oxford/New York: Berg. Luca, Lucio. 2001. Mazara, le reti si smagliano ora fuggono anche i tunisini. La Repubblica 4 April. Mack Smith, Denis. 1968. A History of Sicily: Modern Sicily After 1713. New York: Viking.

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Mingione, Enzo and Fabio Quassoli. 2000. The Participation of Immigrants in the Underground Economy in Italy. In Eldorado or Fortress? Migration in Southern Europe, eds. Russell King, Gabriella Lazaridis, and Charalambos Tsardanidis, 27-56. London: Macmillan. Perkins, Kenneth. 1986. Tunisia: Crossroads of the Islamic and European Worlds. Boulder: Westview Press. Pugliese, Enrico. 1993. Restructuring of the labour market and the role of Third World migrations in Europe. Society and Space 11:513-22. Sciortino, Guiseppe. 1999. Planning in the Dark: The Evolution of Italian Immigration Control. In Mechanisms of Immigration Control, eds. Grete Brochmann and Tomas Hammar, 233-59. Oxford/New York: Berg Wilson, Thomas M., and Hastings Donnan, eds. 1998. Border Identities: Nation and State at International Frontiers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.


BORDERS AND THEIR DISCONTENTS: ISRAEL’S GREEN LINE, ARABNESS AND UNILATERAL SEPARATION1 Dan Rabinowitz Abstract This essay looks at the central role played by the proximity of Arabs – as individuals, as an essentialised culture and as a political entity – in the formation and consolidation of an idealised Israeli identity. Informed by recent theoretical preoccupations with genealogies of Othering (Baumann 2002; Gingrich 2002), and by notions connecting national projects and emerging notions of identity (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983; Anderson 1991), I look at borders as loci in which identities are most intensively recognised, invented and contested. Israel’s borders, and in particular the recent fascination of many in the Israeli mainstream with the notion of unilateral separation from the Palestinians, is used as a case in point. Realities in Israel/Palestine since 1967 have consistently obscured and obfuscated the demarcation lines between Israelis and Palestinians – an ambiguity exacerbated with mutual transgression characterizing the violent events of 2000-2002. The quest of Israelis for the border, their obsession with psychological differentiation from the Arabs and their desire for a coherent Israeli identity emerge as aspects of one, ostensibly coherent national project, not unlike the sentiments that underwrite the ideological project Fortress Europe and the operational measures that accompany it.

1

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Annual meeting of the European Association of Sociology, Helsinki 2001, and in the Joint Israeli-Palestinian Conference held in Turin in February 2002.

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National identities are often presented by those who promulgate them as primordial, self explanatory entities, perfectly aligned with ‘the national project’. Social scientists, who tend to think of identity as contested, negotiated and constructed, have long been preoccupied with the real and imagined linkage between national projects and emerging notions of identity (for influential examples see Gellner 1983; Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983; Anderson 1991). Of particular significance here are works that have alluded to the relationship between consolidation of identity and the emergence of a stylised perception of the Other. Baumann (2002) has recently presented a typology of what he terms ‘grammars of othering’ in Western thought. His typology includes Orientalism (both revulsion and attraction to the oriental other), influential mainly in the European contexts; segmentation (whereby groups opposing each other can at other junctures merge to oppose third parties); and a hierarchical othering along the lines of Louis Dumont’s work on caste (Dumont 1980). Gingrich (2002) similarly suggests three genealogies of othering: a highly relativist philosophical one after Heidegger (1974), which fetishises the other as an insurmountable fact; a post-colonial genealogy of othering, premised on a Lacanian psychoanalytical logic (cf. Lacan 1968), whereby both colonised and coloniser owe their perception of self and other to the colonial encounter; and a genealogy identified with early anthropology’s construction of an object cut-off in time and place along the lines suggested by Fabian (Fabian 1983, 71-102). One of the issues thrown into relief by these theoretical preoccupations is the physical presence and proximity of others. The presence of the other has certain features when it comes to visitors, travellers and other strangers who find themselves in spaces otherwise dominated by the in-group, but who do not as a collective pose a threat to the host group. This syndrome of otherness was aptly characterised by Simmel (1950). Proximity and spaces inhabited by others take different significance when large numbers of strangers are involved, such as in large immigrant communities who now are an indispensable feature of most Western Metropolises. My preoccupation here is with a third variety of alien presence – that which takes place at the border. It is at the margins – geographic as well as metaphorical ones – that identity is often more intensively recognised, invented and contested (Wilson and Donnan 1998:11-17). This is what makes comparative historicised analyses of borders, and their meanings

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for national projects and the construction of identity, so suggestive analytically and so salient politically. This essay looks at the central role that the proximity of the essentialised category ‘Arabs’ – as individuals, as a culture and as a political entity – still plays in the formation and consolidation of an idealised Israeli identity. This identity owes much to the European origins of the Zionist project, and to the fact that for many Zionists the demarcation line between themselves and the Palestinians, which runs through the territory in which they live, is tantamount to the border between ‘Europe’ and ‘Asia’, civilisation and barbarism, good and evil. Physical, symbolic and metaphoric points of contact with and separation from Arabs, in particular Palestinians, are sites in which Israeli identity and solidarity have been acted out and reified for well over a century. Taking the theoretical perspectives indicated above as my point of departure, I look at the recent popularity within the Jewish Israeli mainstream of the concept of unilateral separation from the Palestinians. This fascination, I shall argue, has to be taken within the historical context of a young state which has yet to find borders acceptable to all its neighbours, and which runs a system of territorial control over densely populated Palestinian areas in the occupied territories which is increasingly unpopular with most governments and audiences abroad. These features of what might be termed ‘a multi-bordered society’ imbue issues associated with demarcation with immense social and political significance for most Israelis. One result is a highly charged atmosphere of anticipation of the process that will eventually determine the future borders of the state. This anxiety, and the reflections in it of various perceptions of othering and separation, begs for comparative analysis of the kind offered in this collection. The first part of the article sketches the recent attraction of many in the Israeli mainstream to the notion of ‘unilateral separation’ from the Palestinians. Present in Israeli politics in various forms and guises for decades, this new version of territorial separation became politically potent in the summer of 2001. Preaching for a withdrawal of Israel from its current positions in the West-Bank and Gaza even if it involves doing so without the prior agreement or approval of the Palestinians, this vision is far from promising in terms of progress toward a viable solution. Its popularity is better analysed as part of the internal debate within Jewish Israeli society regarding Israeli identity and destiny.

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To set an analysis of Israeli identity and its relationship to the essentialisation of Arabness in motion, the second part of the article looks at the ways in which realities in Israel/Palestine since 1967 consistently obscured and obfuscated the demarcation lines between Israelis and Palestinians. This ambiguity was exacerbated by the violent events of 2001, when Palestinian suicide bombers crossed into Israel almost with the same ease in which Israeli armour moved over Palestinian soil. This diffusion and transfusion further confused most Israelis, breeding a yearning for ‘real’, preferably impenetrable, borders that would shield Israel from Palestinians. This yearning is a clear case of how cultural and historical features shape political formulations of the border not only in terms of where the line eventually runs, but also in regard to the political, economic and social co-operation – or conflict – it will engender. The final section of the article returns to a more theoretical treatise of the issue. Using Appadurai’s (1996, 11-16) concept of culturalism, I show how Zionist discourse, like other national narratives, promotes a particular bundle of cultural traits as an exclusive representation of the national project. A central tenet of Israeli culturalism is the binary opposition between Jew and Arab, which stands for a series of ‘Us versus Them’ dichotomies: European versus Other, modern versus primitive, progressive versus stagnant. In such a context, the quest for the border, the need for psychological differentiation and the desire for a coherent Israeli identity emerge as different aspects of one, ostensibly uniform and coherent national project. Much of this has to do with Israel’s specific situation vis-a-vis the Arab world. In particular it has to be related to the presence within the state of what I elsewhere call a ‘trapped minority’ (Rabinowitz 2001) – an internal Palestinian community whose close affinity to the Arab world is threatening for many Israelis. But while this is specific, it is by no means singular. In fact the quest for an external border that would shield ‘us’ from the threat of ‘others’, coupled with the growing anxiety about the presence within of enclaves of otherness, are sentiments that are strongly present in contemporary Europe (Brubaker 1989; Morris 2001). They are reflected in a number of ways in the ideological project of Fortress Europe and in the operational measures that have recently been put in place to turn it into a reality (see Dent 1998; Morris 1997).


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‘Unilateral Separation’ and the border in contemporary Israeli discourse Recent surveys indicate that more than 60% of the Israeli public now support ‘unilateral separation’, even if it implies the removal of Israeli settlements from the West Bank and Gaza (Yaar and Herman 2002). This concept made an impressive entry into Israeli public discourse in the summer of 2001. Heralded by politicians, ex-generals, security experts, academics and influential members of the press, unilateral separation is premised on the logic of territorial division that has guided political initiatives in Israel/Palestine ever since the Peel Commission of the 1930s (see Shlaim 1990, 54-106). However, unlike earlier attempts to divide Mandatory Palestine, which were premised on a formal agreement between Zionism and the Arabs and later between Israel and a future Palestine, current Israeli thought on unilateral separation assumes that an agreement with the Palestinians is unattainable. This was clearly the stance of Ehud Barak, who as prime minister of Israel convinced most Israelis that the failure of the US sponsored Israeli-Palestinian negotiations at Camp David in July 2000 was a result of irrational, dishonest and intransigent Palestinian response to a reasonable and generous Israeli peace proposal. In Barak’s logic, the only choice left for Israel is to act alone: withdraw its armed forces and possibly some outlying settlements from the West Bank and the Gaza strip, regroup along lines of its own choosing, and hope for the best. Barak, incidentally, was in favour of such separation well before he took office in June 1999. Many of those advocating unilateral separation in 2001 are Labour politicians, including Shlomo Ben-Ami, Haim Ramon and a number of back-benchers. Significantly, the borderline they advocate will not necessarily run along the old green line (Israel’s internationally accepted border between 1949 and 1967). In fact the protagonists are yet to indicate their willingness to dismantle all settlements and relinquish the entire territory occupied by Israel since 1967. Generally in favour of a nominal Palestinian state, their plan for the immediate future is to achieve a partial Israeli re-deployment. The Palestinians, for their part, are likely to view such a move as a continuation of the occupation, possibly as an attempt to perpetuate and legitimise it. The arguments for unilateral separation tend to highlight two trajectories, both ostensibly congruent with fundamental Israeli interests. One is that separation, once consolidated by a physical barrier in the form of a well surveyed, controllable frontier zone, will curb Palestinian suicide

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attacks and bring security to Israel. An outspoken recent advocate of this option has been Martin Von Creveld, a military historian, who in a magazine interview in November 2002 said that he was for: Building a wall between us and the other side, so tall that even the birds cannot fly over it (...) so as to avoid any kind of friction for a long long time in the future. History proves that walls work. The Roman wall worked for hundreds of years (...) the Great Chinese Wall worked, not forever, but for hundreds of years (...) the wall in Korea has been working for fifty years (...) the wall between Turks and Greeks in Cyprus is working (...) the Berlin Wall worked beautifully (...). Unfortunately, the Israeli army insists against all military logic on being present on both sides of the wall. We could formally finish the problem at least in Gaza, in forty-eight hours, by getting out and building a proper wall. And then of course, if anybody tries to climb over the wall we kill him (Van Creveld and Byrne 2002).

The second argument is that separation is vital if Israel wishes to protect itself from the demographic threat posed to it by the rapid population growth of Palestinians in the occupied territories. Both claims, which reflect deep seated and genuine anxieties of many Israelis, are difficult to support. No credible security expert seriously maintains that walls and fences, however well surveyed, can effectively stop terrorists willing to be killed in action. The chance that such a barrier might work in the hilly terrain of Israel/Palestine, where Palestinian vigilantes in the West Bank see Israeli territory within the green line as their stolen homeland, are as slim as they are on the United States – Mexican border (see Kearney 1991, 52-62; Rouse 1991, 8-15), on Europe’s eastern and southern frontiers (Driessen 1998, 102-107), and along all other interfaces dividing a relatively strong economy such as Israel from a considerably poorer repository of cheap labour such as Palestine.2 In fact the economic interdependence between Israeli employers and Palestinian labourers is likely to ensure that the border, however well buttressed, will in the long run be as porous as it has been since 1967. As Friedman recently put it: ‘Israelis are now trying to protect themselves by building a real wall of concrete – but a wall without a border, accepted by both sides, will never protect’ (Friedman 2002). The demographic argument is equally indefensible. The Palestinians who are under Israel’s system of control, without citizenship and other basic human rights, will remain in more or less the same predicament 2 A good analogy here is Borneman’s account of the border regime that prevailed before the unification of Germany in 1989 (see Borneman 1998, 172-182).


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until they can establish a viable state of their own. Separating them from Israel without catering for such a state is no more than incarceration – in fact, an intensified state of occupation with tighter control. If anything, it reflects an impulse on the part of Israelis to consolidate an apartheid-like system of segregation while maintaining internal cohesion and external support. As such, it is unlikely to have a real effect on numbers. Some say the unilateral separation option is a device by frustrated Labour politicians to rekindle hope for a settlement that would be antithetical to prime minister Sharon’s hard line and pave their way back to power. They know, the argument goes, that the ploy will never work, but preach it anyway, assuming failure could later be attributed to incomplete execution, external interventions and unforeseen developments. In short, they cynically wave a trump card in a game they know full well is going nowhere. But let me put these aspects of the politics of the proposal aside and concentrate on what can be learnt from the widespread support Israelis lend to the notion of unilateral separation in terms of Israeli identity. The geography of occupation The summer of 2001 witnessed renewed preoccupation on the part of Israelis with the notion of the border. The backdrop was a phase of the conflict best described as chaotic. A well prepared Israeli army, capable of inflicting mortal damage on Palestinians in the occupied territories at will, was doing so incessantly, with or without immediate provocation. Ostensibly there to eradicate the infrastructure that helped finance, equip and send suicide bombers against Israel, the army however seemed to operate without a clear objective other than defending its own troops and the settlers and occasionally making punitive retaliatory hits on Palestinian leaders, activists and facilities. More than two and a half million Palestinians in the occupied territories became subject to unprecedented disruptions of their daily lives: road blocks and closures sealed off villages and towns for days and weeks, condemning many to thirst and hunger. Commerce was stifled, poverty and economic hardship became the order of the day. Health and education seemed to be the only elements of Palestinian public life which somehow functioned. By that time, the lives of Israeli settlers in the occupied territories had been transformed as well, as attacks by armed Palestinians on vehicles travelling to and from the settlements took toll on life and limb. Palestinian suicide bombers proved practically unstoppable, sowing death, dam-

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age and fear in Israeli town centres. No real long term political solution to the crisis was in sight. This crisis threw the territorial incoherence of the conflict into sharp relief. The war of 1967 signalled the imposition of Israeli military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, but did little to clarify the borders of the Israeli state. On the contrary, Israel established a policy of open bridges between the West Bank and Jordan to the east. The green line was opened, allowing tens of thousands of Palestinian labourers to commute and seek employment in the lower ranks of the Israeli labour market. The occupation became a canopy for wide scale expropriation of Palestinian land for Israeli settlements, triggering an ever growing wave of Palestinian guerrilla attacks against Israel and Israelis. Over the years, Israeli governments of all political persuasions consistently attempted to undo the green line. The result, which was further complicated by the practices that followed the Oslo agreement of 1993, is a geography of occupation on the West Bank that looks like a jigsaw of protrusions and incursions. Israeli settlements are isolated by large expanses of pre-existing Palestinian towns and villages. Israeli-built bypass roads traverse Palestinian spaces. Army posts and holy sites venerated by both sides add to the territorial incoherence. The maps allegedly prepared by Israel for the Camp David talks in July 2000, some of which show the partition acceptable to Israel, highlight the immense difficulty associated by now with turning the logic of territorial separation into an operational plan. The occupation transformed the ultimate demarcation line between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ that had been such a major component of Israeli and Arab realities until 1967. Its role in the daily lives of millions was largely suspended. For a while before the Oslo process of the 1990s it looked as though the territorial mass of Israel/Palestine was turning into one large borderzone in which a fateful historic competition over control, identity and destiny was being waged, similar perhaps to what Kearney argues is taking place in the western parts of the United States (see Kearney 1991, 65-70). This geographical reality, and the complexity of history and politics since 1967 go some way to explicate the desperate yearning of so many Israelis for separation. Clearly, they see the border as a replacement for a settlement, a panacea for a torn and restless world. The explanation is incomplete, however, without another look at the symbolic role of the border in Israeli identity.


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Culture, Zionist identity and the border Israelis have an inherent tendency, buttressed by Zionist ideology of modernisation and progress, to associate themselves and their collective project with a ‘cultured’ Europe. This tendency is often played out through disassociation from the ‘primitive’ and threatening Arab East – a trajectory the roots of which go back to early Zionist thought. Tom Segev (1999, 125-6) demonstrates the deep-seated fear and alienation which early Zionist leaders felt and perpetuated vis-a-vis the Arab east. Herzl believed Zionism to be an outpost of European culture in an otherwise barbaric East. Nordau equated the Zionist project’s mission in Western Asia to that of the British in India, imbuing it with a moral calling, in the service of a modernizing European thrust Eastwards (Segev 1995, 125). Writers such as Mordechay Hacohen and Aharon Kabak warned against imitation of and integration in the ‘uncultured’ weak spirited Arab world (Segev 1999, 126), and Zeev Jabotinsky, the charismatic leader of revisionist Zionism, was particularly outspoken of the need to distance Jews and Zionists from Arab culture (see Rabinowitz 2002, 319). Admittedly, there was a tendency among some early Zionist practitioners and writers to stress the similarities between Jews and Arabs. For example, founding members of the early Zionist defense organisation ‘Hashomer’, established in 1909 and seen by many as the institutional origins of the Hagana, modeled their attire, riding skills and field craft after a romanticised version of Arabness.3 Many of them acquired considerable language skill in Arabic (cf. Hurwitz 1970; Talmi 1955; Rogel 1979).4 In many ways, however, this superficial mimicking of native Palestinians, unaccompanied by genuine attempts to lower barriers or promote assimilation between Jews and Arabs, served to reify and reaffirm symbolic borders. In fact by highlighting a similarity between contempo3 The Hagana, which was established in 1920, became the proto-army of the Jewish community in Palestine, and was the backbone of the IDF when it was established in 1948. 4 This was echoed in the 1940s by language and other practices adopted by members of the Palmakh (Hebrew acronym for Crack Platoons). Closely associated with pioneering Kibbutzim, the Palmakh were well trained battalions and brigades (one of their young commanders was Yitzhak Rabin) that played a decisive role in the war of 1948. Its members, who became the quintessential emblems of the image of the new Israeli Jew, adopted Arab culture, including elements of speech, use of place names and items of attire (primarily the Kuffia headgear) as trademarks of their supposedly deep-rooted belonging to the ‘native’ land.

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rary Palestinians and the biblical Hebrews, which many of them did quite explicitly, the Hashomer version of orientalism signaled that Arabness, in spite of its obvious claims to be an authentic representation of locality, is in fact merely a secondary incarnation of ancient Judaism.5 The mainstay of Zionist ideology was thus confined to a consistent – and on the whole successful – attempt to prop a new identity against a negated ultimate Arab Other. The representations of the east so rife in formative Zionist musings about the East are thus politically and historically significant: they isolate rural Palestine, incarcerating it in a time capsule with rudimentary technology and marginal economy, and make it into a prototype Arabness at large. By doing so, they repeatedly obscure contemporary Arab and Palestinian urban culture, Arab contributions to western thought and learning, and many other aspects of Arab culture and society which signify modernity and progress. The reification of the old dichotomy between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ was successfully achieved. These convictions thus became the substrate against which Zionist identity was shaped. This of course placed a formidable load on geographical borders and other demarcation lines purporting to reflect and signify it (cf. Barth 1969). When the time came in 1949 to draw an international border between the newly born Israeli state and the Arab states around it, it was construed not only as a line that separates physical communities, but as an interface of cultures and civilisations. The 1950s saw the border being socially constructed as a fetishised entity (Kemp 2000), a space where the nation defines itself against the ultimate Arab Other, perceived as a malicious, faceless mass conspiring across the sealed frontier. This notion, blurred beyond recognition following the 1967 occupation, began resurfacing after the 1979 peace agreement between Israel and Egypt, and once again, as I have indicated earlier, in the mid-1990s. It made a powerful re-entry, albeit in a different version, in the immediate aftermath of the terror attacks on New York’s World Trade Center on 11 September 2001, as Israel was scrambling to identify itself with the USA’s ‘coalition against terror’. To make sense of these developments, we can turn to Appadurai’s concept of culturalism (Appadurai 1996, 11-16). He highlights it as a conscious and active attempt on the part of states to establish composite notions of ‘culture’ and present them as defining features of their national 5 For a more elabourate argument regarding the role of biblical imagery of Palestinian peasants see Rabinowitz 1998, 17-38.


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projects. Israeli culturalism, to follow this logic, is characterised by an ongoing attempt on the part of the state to fabricate a new, essentially secular identity for immigrants from a variety of territories, cultural and socio-economic backgrounds. While much was (and still is) actively done to imbue it with a positive inventory, Israeli identity remains premised to a considerable degree on a dual negation: a negation of the Jewish diaspora (cf. Raz-Krakotzkin 1993; Boyarin and Boyarin 1994), and a negation of anything and everything remotely associated with the Arab East. Defining a border thus becomes a cognitive tool, something that helps consolidate processes of identity, solidarity and affiliation, at least as much as it is a vehicle for the attainment of tangible political and demographic goals. There are elements in the current desire of Israelis to have a border which were absent in earlier periods – a fact which further amplifies the role of borders as markers of identity. The first Intifada (1988 to 1993) illustrated the Palestinian capacity to attain self definition and activate democratic processes under occupation. It did, however, lack involvement of two important segments of the Palestinian nation: the Palestinian citizens of Israel and the Palestinian diaspora. The 2000-2001 Intifada of al-Aksa, which came about partly because of Israel’s refusal to discuss the Palestinian right of return, took place predominantly in the occupied territories. This notwithstanding, it was echoed in October 2000 by mass demonstrations inside Israel, leading to violent clashes with Israeli police that left thirteen Palestinian demonstrators dead and hundreds wounded. Abroad, Intifadat al-Aksa became immensely relevant for diasporic Palestinians, for whom the right of return carries concrete and personal ramifications. This turned it into a unifying process, integrating Palestinian communities in unprecedented fashion, seriously impairing the symbolic role of the green line. This created more confusion amongst Israeli liberals of moderate leftist persuasions. The traditional Israeli left needs the green line so as to define whatever happens on the other side as ‘temporary occupation’ (Shenhav 2001). This allows them to treat the territory within the line as a coherent, self explanatory component of the Israeli project. More importantly, it exempts them from the awkward task of coming to terms with the moral consequences and the catastrophic implications of the war of 1948 for Palestinians. The collapse of the Oslo process in Camp David in July 2000 left this important segment of mainstream Israel suspended. Intifadat al-Aksa brought home the new possibilities of an imminent dissolution of the

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green line. The dependence of Israeli identity on the existence and viability of an exclusive ethno-territorial project in the form of a well bounded Israel came under direct threat. Demands made by Palestinian negotiators for a Palestinian return into Israel proper, coupled with strong signals sent by Palestinians from within Israel of their feelings for Palestine, are interpreted by Israelis as threatening the integrity and stability of the Israeli project. This is a serious matter. The notion of re-defining Israel as anything other than an exclusive ethno-territorial project, for and by the Jews alone, is unthinkable for the majority of Israelis. Modifying Israel is thus not only a matter of national importance, but one that carries real significance on an intimate and personal level. Having entered the Israeli public debate uninvited, these notions frighten Israelis. Their response is an instinctive scramble for a border – any border – to reconstitute the national project and save their own identity in the process. Border controls and closures, and the regime established since 2000 to implement them, are clear reflections of this tendency (cf. Bornstein 2001). Conclusion Robins (2003, in this volume) shows how the quest for a European border with Turkey has become a salient component in the effort to constitute a European identity premised on fears of invasion and disintegration. Fortress Europe, it appears, protects its margins partly because of fears that diffusion might expose what Europeanist ideology is energetically trying to conceal: the fact that the New Europe is premised on an arbitrary economic and political logic, rather than a coherent sense of shared identity and affiliation. This insistence on defining others as ultimately different, thus keeping them out, can be seen as an exercise in the definition of self, which reaffirms and justifies the construction and management of Europe as an affiliatory mechanism and, concomitantly, as a political project (cf. Delanty 1995; Dussen and Wilson 1993; Shahin and Wintle 2000). This argument is in line with critiques of Europeanism which see it as an ideology in the classic sociological sense of the term, namely as tenets developed and promoted by interested elites, such as corporate Europe and golden Brussels bureaucrats, which are successfully cloaked in idioms purporting to represent the good of all (see Lewis and Wigen 1997; Derrida 1992). It forms an interesting basis for comparison with Israel, where national identity developed in a similarly bifurcated trajectory,


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marrying the notion of internal cohesion with that of robust, impenetrable borders circumscribing an essentialised primordial divide, that between Jews and Arabs. Significantly, for the argument I make here, the segment of Israeli society most attracted to unilateral separation, namely the Zionist Left, is the one historically identified with the bifurcated ideology of cohesive core and robust borders. Forming the backbone of the Zionist and later Israeli project since the beginning of the twentieth century, the Zionist left, and in particular the Labour movement, has always been deeply invested in the ethos of a composite, idealised Israeli identity. Typical of young states and nations, this vision came with a series of assumptions regarding the desirability and feasibility of universal values that underscore cultural homogeneity and solidarity. Such an ideology had an important role on the internal front: smoothing over socio-economic inequalities and disparities in access to resources, thus helping buttress a hegemonic order which ostensibly serves the good of all. The political right in Israel rose to political power for the first time when Menachem Begin won the 1977 elections, and has been in control, on and off, ever since. It has not, however, replaced the Zionist Left as the signifier of a composite Israeli identity, and is generally indifferent to issues of cultural difference at the frontier. Upholding Jewish nationalism as a self explanatory value strongly imbedded in a romantic view of sameness and solidarity of historic fate, right wing movements in Israel hardly need to resort to a culturalist definition of Israeliness. Lacking an explicit ideology of egalitarianism, they are largely exempt of the need to reconcile the hegemonic status they now enjoy with the ever growing sociopolitical disparities that characterise Israel in recent years. Israeli society is going through a process of fragmentation. The old sense of belonging to a unified collective has been eroded, partly as a result of a political system which rewards movements and collectives that construct themselves around identity rather than interests. This emphasis on identity is often expressed as an opposition to a unified and cohesive national identity. The Zionist left, so heavily invested in the old ideology of Israeli cohesion, laments this process. If, as with Fortress Europe, the need to check trans-border fusion is related to a desire to maintain internal cohesion, this may provide an explanation of the fascination on the part of the Zionist Left with Unilateral Separation.

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References Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities. London: Verso Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Barth, Frederik, ed. 1969. Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference. Oslo: Universitetforlaget. Baumann, Gerd. 2002. Grammars of Othering. Paper presented at the 2002 annual meeting of the European Association of Social Anthropology, Copenhagen. Borneman, John. 1998. Grenzregime (border regime): the Wall and its aftermath. In Thomas M. Wilson and Hastings Donnan, (eds.) Border Identities: Nation and State at International Frontiers.. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pp 162-190. Bornstein, Avram. 2001. Crossing the Green Line between the West Bank and Israel. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Boyarin, Daniel and Boyarin, Jonathan. 1994. The people of Israel have no Motherland. Theory and Criticism 5, 79-104 (in Hebrew). Brubaker, W.R. 1989. Immigration and the Politics of Citizenship in Europe and America. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Delanty, Gerard. 1995. Inventing Europe – Idea, Identity, Reality. London: MacMillan. Dent, J.A. 1998. Research Paper on the Social and Economic Rights of Non-nationals in Europe. London: ECRE. Derrida, Jacque. 1992. The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Driessen, Henk. 1998. The ‘New Immigration’ and the transformation of the European-African frontier. In Thomas M. Wilson and Hastings Donnan, (eds.) Border Identities: Nation and State at International Frontiers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pp 96-116. Dumont, Louis. 1980. Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Dussen, Jan van der and Wilson, Kevin (eds). 1993. The History of the Idea of Europe. Milton Keynes: The Open University Press. Fabian, Johannes. 1983. Time and the Other. New York: Columbia University Press. Friedman, Thomas. 2002. Winning war of the wall in Korea. Business Times 26 November. Gellner, Ernest. 1983. Nations and Nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell. Gingrich, Andre. 2002. Genealogies of Othering. Paper presented at the 2002 annual meeting of the European Association of Social Anthropology, Copenhagen. Heidegger, Martin. 1974. Identity and Difference. New-York: Harper and Row. Hobsbawm, Eric and Terence Ranger. 1983. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hurwitz, David. 1970. My Yesterday. Jerusalem: Schocken (in Hebrew). Kearney, Michael. 1991. Borders and Boundaries of State and Self at the End of Empire, Journal of Historical Sociology 4(1), 52-74. Kemp, Adriana. 2000. Borders, Space and National Identity in Israel. Theory and Criticism: an Israeli Forum 16, 13-44 (in Hebrew).


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Lacan, Jacques. 1968. The language of the self : the function of language in psychoanalysis. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. Lewis, Martin and Wigen, Karen. 1977. The Myths of Continents: A Critique of Metageography. Berkeley: University of California Press. Morris, Lydia. 1997. Globalization, migration and the nation state: the path to a post-national Europe. British Journal of Sociology 48, 192-209. Morris, Lydia. 2001. Stratified Rights and the Management of Migration: National Distinctiveness in Europe. European Societies 3, 4, 387-412. Rabinowitz, Dan. 1998. Anthropology and the Palestinians. The Institute for Israeli Arab Studies, Beit-Berl (In Hebrew). Rabinowitz, Dan. 2001. The Palestinian Citizens of Israel, the Concept of Trapped Minority and the Discourse of Transnationalism in Anthropology. Ethnic and Racial Studies 24, 1;64-85. Rabinowitz, Dan. 2002. Oriental Othering and National Identity: A Review of Early Anthropological Studies of Palestinians. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 9, 305-325. Raz-Krakotzkin, Amnon. 1993. Exile Within Sovereignty: Toward a Critique of the ‘Negation of Exile’ in Israeli Culture. Theory and Criticism No 4, 23-56 (in Hebrew). Robins, Kevin. 2003. Peculiarities and Consequences of the Europe/Turkey Border. European Studies 19. Rogel, Nakdimon. 1979. Tel-Hay: Frontier With No Hinterland. Tel-Aviv: Yariv (in Hebrew). Rouse, Roger. 1991. Mexican migration and the social space of postmodernism. Diaspora 1, 8-23. Segev, Tom. 1999. Palestine Under The British. Jerusalem: Keter (in Hebrew). Shahin, Jamal and Wintle, Michael (eds.). 2000. The Idea of a United Europe: Political, Economic and Cultural Integration since the Fall of the Berlin Wall. New-York: St. Martins Press. Shenhav, Yehouda. 2001. The Red Light of the Green Line. In Ophir, Adi (ed.) Real Time: Al-Aksa Intifada and the Israeli Left. Jerusalem: Keter (in Hebrew). Shlaim, Avi. 1990. The Politics of Partition: King Abdullah, The Zionists and Palestine 19211951. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Simmel, George. 1950. The Stranger. In Kurt H. Wolff (ed) The Sociology of George Simmel. New York: Free Press. Talmi, Menachem. 1955. Israel’s Freedom Fighters. Tel-Aviv: S. Friedman (in Hebrew). Van Creveld, Martin and Jennifer Byrne. 2002. A conversation on Israel and Palestine. CounterPunch November 16. Wilson, Thomas M. and Hastings Donnan, eds. 1998. Border Identities: Nation and State at International Frontiers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Yaar, Ephrayim and Harman, Tamar. 2002. The Peace Index. Tel-Aviv: The Tammy Steinmitz Center for Peace Studies.



PECULIARITIES AND CONSEQUENCES OF THE EUROPE-TURKEY BORDER Kevin Robins Abstract This article is concerned with what is distinctive about the border that has divided Turkey from Europe. It considers how this was historically predicated on the idea of some kind of fundamental civilisational difference between Europe and the Ottoman Empire; and then how, in the nineteenth century, this civilisational imagination became subsumed within the more ‘modern’ imaginaire of nationalism and imagined community. The article is particularly concerned with the idea of ‘imagined community’ in European thinking about culture and identity – an idea that came to be incorporated, with problematical consequences, into the agenda of the modern Turkish nation state in the twentieth century. What I am concerned with is how European discourses on culture and identity have worked to produce a border mentality, and through this a profound impasse in the relations between Turkey and Europe. The logic of ‘imagined community’ has overridden alternative cosmopolitan possibilities (which did, ironically, exist in the Ottoman Empire – only to be superseded there, too, when the national agenda came centrefield). The article concludes with some brief reflection on what would be necessary to move beyond the frozen binary division that presently separates the historically produced fictions of ‘Europe’ and ‘Turkey’.

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Every identity is also a horror, because it owes its existence to tracing a border and rebuffing whatever is on the other side. Claudio Magris (1999, 38)

In a recent issue of the journal NPQ-Türkiye, the distinguished Turkish film director Halit Refiğ (2001) has deliberated on the long and difficult relationship between Europe and Turkey. ‘Just as Europeans have greatly contributed to the formation of the Turkish identity,’ he argues, ‘so the Turks have also been the cause for the search for a common “European” project.’ Europe has appeared to modernising Turks as the place of progress and ‘civilisation’; and, from the European perspective, Turkey has long seemed to be a place of relative ‘backwardness’ or of ‘fundamentalist’ values, requiring a collective counter-mobilisation from the European nation states. The point is that the two ‘cultures’ have come to exist in a futile binary relationship to each other: Europe versus Turkey; Christianity versus Islam; West versus East. Each culture has created a remarkable mythology around its imagination of the other. And what is clear is that this reciprocal mythologisation has been extremely damaging (see, for example, Pesmazoglou 1995; Robins 1996). Both cultures have suffered, in complex and different ways, as a consequence of their respective fantasies about the other culture; though we may say that Europe is far less conscious and aware of how it may have suffered. In Turkey, where there is a much greater consciousness of what has been destructive about the Europe-Turkey relationship, the problem has been experienced in terms of the need to respond to the European challenge or contestation. For some, the way forward means making the case that Turkey has European credentials, that it is civilised in the European manner and really ‘belongs’ to Europe, and that it should therefore finally be given access to the ‘Fortress’. Others have retaliated against what they perceive to be European arrogance, and have defiantly asserted Turkey’s Islamic credentials, making the case that Turkish society is governed by quite different cultural principles. For Halit Refiğ – who is anti-European but non-Islamic – the solution to Turkey’s Europe problem entails a different kind of ‘Eastern alternative for Turkey’, through a strengthening of Turkey’s secular Asian credentials. What he evokes is a future opposition between Asia (including Turkey) and Europe, where ‘Asia’ comes to

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stand for the protection of ‘nature’ and for ‘spiritual’ values, whilst predatory Europe stands for ‘globalisation’ and ‘money’. Each of these positions or strategies represents a response to what we might call Europe’s civilisational provocation, and the cultural pain that Turks have experienced has arisen out of their implication in its futile either/or logic. How Europe – the dominant partner in this cultural divide – may have suffered through this fraught and difficult relationship is a somewhat more complex matter. The issue here, as I will come to argue, is to do with certain lost possibilities, with cultural possibilities that were forfeited by Europe – and by Turkey, too, as it turned out – as a consequence of the assertion and imposition of Europe’s so-called civilisational model. The relationship between ‘Europe’ and ‘Turkey’ and the question of the Europe-Turkey border are no less pressing issues now than they have been over the last five hundred years or so. On 9 October 2002, the European Union (EU) announced that it would be admitting ten more countries to membership in 2004 and two more by 2007. Few will have been surprised that Turkey was not included in the list. The German Christian Democrat politician Edmund Stoiber has claimed most outspokenly that Turkey could never be a member of the EU (as he puts it, ‘Europe cannot end on the Turkish-Iraqi border’) (Irish Times 29 October 2002). Even more recently, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing – head of the EU’s constitutional commission, and not a politican desperate for votes – has declared that ‘Turkey is not a European country’, and that its accession would signal ‘the end of the European Union’ (Le Monde 8 November 2002). Even if they do not agree with them, many Europeans will be aware, at least, of what Stoiber and Giscard are gesturing to when they thus invoke the profound and essential difference of Turkey. In this current European context, it seems to me, it is important to explore the meanings of this imagined difference, and the nature of the border that seems in some absolute way to separate Europe from Turkey. In the following discussion I will be concerned with what is problematical in the relationship between Europe and Turkey, and then I will go on to briefly reflect on how it might be possible to move beyond the impasse that this relationship has become. The Europe-Turkey border First, then, the peculiarities of the Turkey-Europe border call for some excavation. The division of Europe from Turkey is generally presented in terms of a fundamental cultural border, a border separating two different

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civilisations. There is the belief that Europe and Turkey inhabit different cultural and even moral worlds. This belief is no doubt historically grounded in the particular nature of the frontier that existed between Europe and the Ottoman Empire. Following Colin Heywood (1999, 233), we may characterise it as a frontier cast in a North American mode, as theorised by F. J. Turner, ‘ a region of colonisation and settlement involving both military action and proselytisation, and thus both a zone of passage and interaction and a political barrier.’ And, like the North American frontier, it came to function, from the perspective of both Europeans and Ottomans, as ‘the meeting point between savagery and civilisation’ (to use Turner’s formulation); the frontier assumed a moral quality (see Power 1999, 9-10). We may say that this frontier mentality provided the basis for the foundation – in the European imagination especially – of a metageography predicated on the spatial and cultural polarisation of Europe and Asia, East and West, the Christian and the Islamic worlds (Lewis and Wigen 1997). We are all aware by now of the extraordinary potency of this orientalist mythology – and its occidentalist counterpart – in Eurasian history. And we are aware, too, of how this imagination of civilisational difference – and potential civilisational conflict – has had a significant resurgence latterly, particularly in Samuel Huntington’s influential thesis on The Clash of Civilisations (1996), where the idea of a fundamental divide between Western and Islamic zones of the world is given a new, and dangerous, spin. It is this imagination of a civilisational border that Stoiber and his like are mobilising in the present context of EU enlargement. In his discourse the principle of essential civilisational difference simply functions as a legitimation for conservative European xenophobia. And I should emphasise at this point that this notion of civilisational boundary, this Turnerian frontier mythology, is a vast simplification of what the frontier between Europe and the Ottoman Empire really was. For, as Claudio Magris says, ‘The meeting between Europe and the Ottoman Empire is the great example of two worlds which, while hacking each other to pieces, end by a gradual understanding, to their mutual enrichment’ (1990, 179). Halit Refiğ’s arguments, too, are predicated on this civilisational principle. Even if we have sympathy with Refiğ’s anger about what Europe has come to stand for, and with his protestations about its arrogant stance towards Turkey, we must surely disagree with what he proposes as the way forward for Turkey. For what he does, through his invocation of Asia and imagined Asian values, is simply to create a coun-


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ter mythology; a mythology that is very much along the same lines as Samuel Huntington’s. In Refiğ’s propositions, the question concerning the way forward for the relation between Turkey and Europe remains caught up in a manichean worldview, in a way of thinking that divides the world into good and bad, right and wrong. That would seem to be an inherent limitation in this kind of civilisational mentality and discourse. This is the mythology that is generally associated with the eastern border of Europe, wherever it is drawn, and hence it is a mythology that continues to have strong resonance. But we should be clear that there is more to this border than simply its mythological dimension. The nature of the border zone has, of course, changed radically from what it was in the high period of Ottoman expansionism. Of particular significance, I suggest, were the developments in border consciousness and mentality that occurred in the nineteenth century, through the high period of European nation formation and nationalism. I want to argue, then, that the European national imagination became associated with a fundamental transformation in border thinking and ideology. In the modern period, the religio-moral discourse of civilisational difference gave way to a different cultural imagination. What were being mobilised from Europe were the idea and agenda of what Benedict Anderson (1983) has called ‘imagined community’. As Iver Neumann says, Europe was associated with ideals and words like ‘nation’, ‘government’, ‘law’, ‘sovereignty’, ‘subject’, and so on, and there emerged ‘the idea of representing the state of which one is a subject as more “European” than one’s more “eastern” neighbouring states’ (1998, 407). In any reflection on contemporary cultural developments in and between Europe and Turkey, it seems to me that it is this agenda concerning imagined community and the national project that has to be critically addressed. What is at issue is a particular way of conceiving and instituting cultures and identities, a way that was invented in Europe. The shift to the national mentality and the national imagination of borders was not, of course, absolute, and the moral discourse of civilisational difference and superiority continued to be mobilised. We may say, though, that this latter discourse was mobilised to lend its rhetorical and emotive force to the project of national cohesion and border maintenance. The Turnerian ideal of a moral border was appropriate to an expansionist and universalising Europe, but this Europe has been increasingly drained of its resonance and vitality. As Susan Sontag (1989) argues, the Europe objective is now about retrenchment, and about the conser-

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vation of Europeanness in the face of perceived external threat. And in this fundamentally changed context, border thinking becomes more inward-looking and defensive. In the relatively recent context of European integration, there might be some rekindling of the older civilisational rhetoric (associated with the new Islamophobia, for example, and Huntington’s ‘clash of civilisations’ discourse). But here, too, it is the nation-statist model that remains very much in the ascendancy. As Iver Neumann (1998, 409, 413) argues, ‘ a lot of thinking about the European Union and the forging of a European identity is… coloured by the categories of “state” and “nation”’; there is a dynamic at work whereby the European Union ‘would borrow from nationalism in order to strengthen one particular European identity…’. The geographical scale has increased, but the logic of imagined community and the statist border imagination continue to prevail, and continue to promote the logic of social and cultural cohesion (Pahl 1992). The significance of imagined community At a time when the idea of civilisations and civilisational conflict is on the agenda again, John Gray urges caution. ‘In our time,’ he declares, ‘international conflict does not come from “clashes of civilisations”. As it has done in every age, it arises from the conflicting interests and policies of states’ (Gray 1998, 150-151). By the same token, borders are not about the division of civilisations, but about the division of the world into different imagined communities. And what I want to argue with respect to the Europe-Turkey border is that it is this question of imagined community – its meaning and its consequences – that is paramount. It is this – and not the mythology of civilisational borders – that is crucial to any productive thinking now about a way forward with the seemingly eternal and intractable Europe-Turkey problem. It has been through the history of modern European nationalism that the kind of cultural attachment associated with imagined community has been most fully articulated and realised (Anderson 1983). Imagined community has been about belonging to a national order. And it has been about a very particular kind of belonging. An imagined community is organised around a shared collective identity, an identity that each person shares with all the other ‘members’ of the community (including, as Anderson makes clear, those who lived in the past and those who will live in the future). A culture in common, a unitary culture, is valued as a mechanism for collective cultural bonding. The imagined community always


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seeks to maintain its own (imagined) integrity and coherence. At a quite fundamental level, then, we may say that the community contains the desire for purity and homogeneity of culture and identity. And it seeks to fulfil this desire through the elimination of complexity, and the expulsion or marginalisation of elements that seem to compromise the ‘clarity’ of national attachment and belonging. The imagined community seeks to differentiate and distance itself from other communities, drawing attention to the threats that those other communities and cultures seem to present to its own (imagined) integrity, and insisting on its sovereignty with respect to them. To belong to the community is consequently to be contained within a bounded culture, and to rebuff whatever is on the other side of that boundary. What I want to stress here is that this organisation of cultures and identities on the basis of imagined communities is a very particular and peculiar way of organising them; though it has come, in the modern period, to seem a natural and self-evident way, the only way. Nation states were the pioneers of this ideal of imagined community. But it is not restricted to national communities alone. We may say that it is a mark of the success of this national kind of thinking – the mentality of imagined community – for it to have now become the template for all thinking about collective cultures and identities. ‘Belonging’ of the kind I have been describing has come to seem central to any kind of cultural order. In the context of the present argument, I want to note how central this kind of identity thinking has been in the contemporary imagination of a ‘new’ European community. The supposedly new Europe is being constructed on the same symbolic basis as the nation state: flags, anthems, passports and coins all serve as icons for evoking the presence of the emergent state (Shore 2000). The discourse of official Euro-culture is highly significant: its concerns are all about cohesion, integration, unity, security. European culture is imagined in terms of an idealised wholeness and purity, and European identity in terms of boundedness and containment. What is invoked is the possibility of a new European order defined by a clear sense of its own coherence and integrity. In its most developed manifestation, the logic of this imagination of identity expresses itself in the oppressive form of Fortress Europe (the Europe that wants to keep Turkey out). This desire for clarity and definition in imagined community is always about the construction of a symbolic geography that will separate the insiders – those who belong to ‘our’ community – from the outsiders, the

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others. What is at stake is clearly something more than just territorial integrity: it is more like the psychic coherence and continuity of the imagined cultural community. The imagined community socially institutes the illusion of self-containment and self-sufficiency, and collective passions and emotions are quickly aroused in defence against what is imagined to be threatening to the coherence and integrity of the community. Imagined in this sense, the community is always – eternally and inherently – fated to anxiety. Its desired integrity must always be conserved and sustained against what are seen as the forces of disintegration and dissolution at work in the world. What is emphasised is what is held in common, at the expense of diversity and difference within the community. Such a kind of identification supposes the elimination or the repression of what could divide. Difference is experienced, and feared, because it is associated with fragmentation. Hence the prevalence in contemporary European discourse of imagery concerned with the fortification and defence of identity. What is being denied is the reality that particular cultures are constituted in and through their relation to other cultures and identities. For those who ‘belong’ to imagined communities, the prospect of being changed or transformed through their interactions with others is experienced as a threat. What might happen, they will say, if we give up a certain way of being and belonging? What shall we become? What must be recognised is that there are always anxieties and fears at the heart of identity, and that the identity politics of imagined communities is always ready to play on these fears. We must be attentive, then, to the institutions through which the collectivity may seek to inhibit change, and to the ways in which it seeks to hold itself together. We may say that there are two different bonding mechanisms in the imagined community: the memory of a past that everyone can recall; and then, much more primitively, the call to stay together and to survive as a group. The point is that the group, the imagined community, is essentially an arbitrary construct. There is nothing inevitable or necessary about what now constitutes, say, Britishness or Turkishness or Europeanness (what we now have is simply the consequence of multiple historical accidents and contingencies). And yet the group will conspire to protect and defend its sense of its own necessary and absolute being. ‘The group needs this function,’ as Daniel Sibony (1997, 248, my translation) points out, ‘to ensure its continued existence, to ensure its love for itself, and to make sure that not “anyone” can become a member. The basis of this


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function, its core, are the points of silence which make the group a collection of people who are all resolved to stay silent about the same thing.’ Ultimately, he is saying, it is on the basis of a collective lie that the imagined community is held together. Europe against cosmopolitanism It is interesting to consider this logic of fear and closure in the particular circumstances of the historical relationship and border between Turkey and Europe. For what has been distinctive about Turkey, it seems to me, has been its capacity to disturb the point of silence at the heart of the European collectivity. Doesn’t the exclusion of Turkey from the European community threaten to make apparent the arbitrary basis on which the community of Europeans was founded? Let us reflect on the stance that Europe has adopted towards Turkey. In one way, we may see the relationship as one in which the community of Europe has exhibited an extraordinary arrogance. From the European perspective, it has seemed that there could be no meaningful possibility of a cultural encounter with Turkey. Europe defined the rules of engagement and treated the Ottomans and then Turks as supplicants. It occupied a position of narcissistic omnipotence. It has been a matter of imparting ‘civilised’ values, though always, it seems, with the conviction that the Turks will never be capable of learning to be civilised (indeed, if they did, it would be deeply disturbing, for what would then be unique about Europe?). The ‘uncivilised’ others had everything to learn from Europe and its ‘civilisation’, and Europe had nothing to learn from the others beyond its frontiers. This is one way of interpreting what is happening in the difficult historical relation between Turkey and Europe, in which European arrogance seems to derive from its unquestioned superiority, its civilisational advantage, over the Turkish other. But, in the context of the present argument, I want to draw attention to the significance of another dynamic in this relationship, and it is one in which Europe does not display incontestably superior and more civilised values. It is one in which what Europe has stood for, and still stands for, is much more open to question. In looking at this aspect of Europe’s relation to Turkey, I think we can see a more defensive stance beneath the surface arrogance of European culture. There was something about Ottoman culture that was profoundly disconcerting for the modern European cultural mentality.

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What I want to suggest is that the closure and defensiveness displayed by Europe has been related to its historical project of building national cultures and national communities. I would argue that the western European creation of the nation state was in opposition to the pluralistic empires within it and on its eastern edges, particularly the empires of the Hapsburgs, the Romanovs and the Ottomans. In the cause of building the unitary national community, the multi-cultural and multi-communitarian model had to be shown in the worst light possible. The European national project required, as the Lebanese historian Georges Corm (1992, 52, my translation) has argued, ‘the collapse of those complex ensembles, and with them their ways of life and a cultural cosmopolitanism that has today faded from people’s memories.’ And it was requisite because these empires exemplified another civilisational model (though we should note that ‘civilisation’, for Corm, means something very different from the sense in which Huntington uses this term). ‘Without exaggeration,’ says Corm, ‘one can talk of Balkan civilisation for eastern Europe and of Arabo-Ottoman civilisation for Asia Minor, the two sharing many traits in common, being complex syntheses of European, Greek, Slavic, Turkish, Armenian and Arab cultures’ (1992, 52, my translation). He conveys the sense of what this meant in the Lebanese case: Until 1975, a Lebanese , whilst enjoying the benefits of modernity, could also take advantage of a complex identity that enriched his [or her] personal life and also, through his interaction with the other complex identities of Lebanon, the perception of social life. In Lebanon one could be Arab, Armenian, Palestinian or Kurdish, a Jew, a Christian or a Muslim, Maronite, Shi’ite, Sunni, Greek-Orthodox, Catholic or Protestant, from the North or the South, from the Right or Left, from the city or the mountains (1992, 55, my translation).

What Corm is emphasising is the positive value of this cultural complexity; this cosmopolitanism, with all the possibilities that exist for moving freely across different cultural registers. The Nobel Prize winning writer Elias Canetti was brought up in the Ottoman Empire. ‘I always felt as if I came from Turkey,’ he tells us in his autobiography. ‘Anything I subsequently experienced had already happened in Ruschuk,’ he says. ‘There, the rest of the world was known as ‘Europe’, and if someone sailed up the Danube to Vienna, people said he was going to Europe’ (Canetti 1999, 230). Canetti, too, draws attention to the complexity of the culture he first knew, also drawing our attention to a cosmopolitan cultural model:


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Ruschuk, on the lower Danube, where I came into the world, was a marvellous city for a child, and if I say that Ruschuk is in Bulgaria, then I am giving an inadequate picture of it. For people of the most varied backgrounds lived there, on any one day you could hear seven or eight languages. Aside from the Bulgarians, who often came from the countryside, there were many Turks, who lived in their own neighbourhood, and next to it was the neighbourhood of the Sephardim, the Spanish Jews – our neighbourhood. There were Greeks, Albanians, Armenians, Gypsies. From the opposite side of the Danube came Rumanians; my wetnurse, whom I no longer remember, was Rumanian. There were also Russians here and there (Canetti 1999, 3).

What Canetti conveys is the formative significance of these early years in the Ottoman Empire. ‘As a child,’ he says, ‘ I had no real grasp of this variety, but I never stopped feeling its effects’ (1999, 3). It is, I think, very significant that Canetti, who became one of the most cosmopolitan of writers and thinkers, speaks in this way about the effects on his cultural formation of Ottoman cosmopolitanism, which existed and flourished even in a small town like Ruschuk. My point is that Europe sought, in the name of the unitary nation state, to discredit this kind of complex society. From the European perspective, such difference and mixture has been regarded as both scandalous and dangerous. There was closure in the face of the principle of cosmopolitanism that existed to the South and East of Europe; a cosmopolitanism that offered an alternative model for cultural organisation. I have deliberately focused on Europe’s relation to the Ottomans, and on what has been problematical in European culture. But let me just add briefly here that one could also reflect what has been problematical in this respect about contemporary Turkey itself. It is a problem that has arisen as a consequence of Turkey’s enthusiastic acceptance of the national model, from the days of Mustafa Kemal onwards, its assertion of the principle of cultural homogeneity, and its consequent modern fear of complexity within. It is the case, we may say, that its own Ottoman past has the power to disturb the point of silence at the heart of the imagined community of modern Turkey. Beyond imagined community? The imagined community implicates us in a relationship to a particular cultural group. But it also implicates us in a particular kind of relationship to identity itself. What I have argued is that the imagined community (particularly as it has existed in its most influential historical form, the

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nation state) presents itself as a singular and sufficient cultural community. It emphasises the primacy of the elements held in common, at the expense of elements of diversity and difference, within the group. And the imagined community actively works to sustain and reinforce the centrality of the common elements over time, thereby elaborating a heritage or patrimony. The perceived imperative is to establish a demarcation between the community and other such communities (and to ensure its right to sovereignty with respect to those other communities) beyond its frontiers. What we have to ask is whether, and how, we might be able to think about identity differently. Is it possible to think about identity in ways that do not invoke the values of unity, integrity, coherence, boundedness, closure? How might the emotional force of the national kind of belonging be dissipated? Can we think of our cultural situation in ways that offer more scope and possibility than does the self-enclosed vision of imagined community? Can we conceive of more complex identities? I now want to put forward some thoughts as to how we might begin to think about identities differently, beyond imagined community. First, I suggest, we must insist that identities suppose the existence of the other in order to exist and to develop. The affirmation of identity only comes through the incorporation and transformation of outside elements. Any kind of meaningful identity must depend on the valuation of cultural receptiveness and reciprocity, the awareness that it is only through their ‘valency’ that cultures revitalise themselves. And we must be clear that cultural interdependence is not just a reality, but that it must now also entail a value and an obligation. The fundamental issue should not be about the right of imagined communities to exist, but about how the communities that insist on asserting this right will co-exist. In the context of ever increasing interaction between cultures, a community can no longer simply follow the self-interest of its own members: its obligations must now extend beyond itself to the other, both beyond and within its frontiers. We might then extend our cultural discourses beyond the limited agenda of identity-as-belonging. If cultures are constituted through their interactions with, and appropriations from, other cultures, then we might move to a more relational account of what is happening in identity formation and re-formation. We might begin to reflect on the significance of cultural encounter, which involves a continuous process of negotiation between cultures. And we then have to consider the consequences of


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these negotiations. We may then consider the possibilities of what I would call cultural experience. Cultural experience involves the transformation of identity through encounter with the stranger, for experience can only be experience of the other, the unexpected. The question, then, is whether the challenge to identity can be made as satisfying as its confirmation has been. Second, there is also much to be said for a discursive shift from thinking about identities to thinking about identification. In a commonsense way, we tend to think about national identity in terms of something that we inherit from previous generations of fellow nationals. For some it fits well, while for others it may be uncomfortable. But it is something we are forced to carry around with us for our whole life; a kind of tortoise shell (at certain times we can curl up inside it). Such a condition seems to be something that we have little choice about, something we have to accept and come to terms with. As such, identity may be experienced as a constraining force, one that closes down certain avenues of experience. Identity defines a cultural zone in which we are at the same time both located and sequestered, and a zone to which the others are denied access. This is, of course, most apparently the case when the cultural identity is conceived as an ethnic identity. What I am suggesting is that this kind of cultural ascription may be challenged. I do not say overthrown, because I recognise that some factors of socialisation – those related to language particularly – may be deeply embedded, and also because there can never be a question of escaping from some form of collective belonging. To challenge cultural ascription is to make it more flexible, open and plural. I am suggesting that the shift from thinking in terms of identity to thinking about identifying and identification may help us to think about what is possible. Identification is something we do. In the psychoanalytical sense, the individual infant identifies in early childhood with the mother, in a relationship that is transformative for the infant. Then throughout childhood there is a further series of identifications – with friends, relations, teachers, and so on – and in each case there are further incorporations and experiential transformations. These sequential identifications are crucial to the development of a vital and creative sense of personal identity. As the French psychoanalyst, J.-B. Pontalis (1993, 14) puts it, ‘one could go on forever about the happy consequences of multiple identifications.’ What if we were to extend this principle from individual to collective identity? Would there not be something impoverished about a citizen

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who had only ever identified with their motherland (or fatherland)? Is it not possible to make more than one collective identification? Can we not think about a plurality of identifications that are significant but not constraining or exclusive? In this case it would be a question of identifications involving different investments of energy and commitment. The advantage of thinking in terms of identification is that it makes us recognise a sense of agency – and therefore openness – in the matter of who we are. And it should lead us to consider that there may be more to gain from these investments than just belonging. The point is that we do not just identify for the sake of identifying, but for transformative possibilities that may come through good identifications. Third, the experience of plural identifications at the collective level opens up the possibility of moving beyond the restrictive singularity of perspective that has characterised the national imaginary. Again Pontalis makes some suggestive observations that help us to consider identity, not as a ‘thing’ or a condition, but rather as an intellectual and imaginative disposition and sensibility that is sustained and enhanced by complex experience. Drawing on the image of migration and what he calls the ‘migratory capacity’ (‘capacité migratrice’), he considers psychoanalytical thought and experience in terms of the productivity of migration: ‘From one language – and one dialect – to another, from one culture to another, from one way of knowing to another, with all the risks that such a transfer entails’ (Pontalis 1990, 88, my translation). Pontalis puts a value on the movement between positions, and on the productivity of complex identifications. In his discourse, ‘migration’ is a metaphor, drawn from collective culture. Perhaps we can turn it back to where it came from, in order to help us think about collective identities in terms of the mobile sensibility, which allows us to cross both territorial and metaphysical borders. Such a possibility is not a utopian one. We should recognise that it is the culture of nationalism – and the exclusivist claims of the imagined community – that has simplified the meaning of identity, reducing it to the one-dimensional sense of just ‘belonging’. Within the European space, it is not difficult to find historical examples of the kind of cultural mobility that Pontalis is invoking. Indeed, there are places that are still reluctant to cede to the homogenising logic of the modern nation state. Slavenka Drakulić describes the attitudes, and the recent actions, of people living in Istria, a place where ‘nationality and identity don’t necessarily overlap.’ Istrianism, she argues, is a challenge and a confrontation to


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those who are presently inciting neo-nationalist fervour in that part of the world. ‘How,’ asks Drakulić can these authorities understand the meaning of Istrianism – the enlarging concept of identity, as opposed to the reducing concept of nationality? To Istrians, identity is broader and deeper than nationality, and they cannot choose a single ‘pure’ nationality as their identity. Living in the border region, they understand better than anyone else that we all have mixed blood to a greater or lesser extent. They also have suffered from nationalism, and in its worst form – ethnic cleansing – enough to have grown tired of it. Paradoxically, for the first time in their history, at the first elections of the newly independent republic of Croatia, the Istrians felt free to reject the concept of one nation; they felt that the time had come to express what they really consider themselves to be (Drakulić 1996, 164).

Drakulić’s points to what this means in an anecdotal reference to her neighbour, Karlo. ‘In the morning,’ she says, ‘he declares himself a Croat, speaks a bad Croatian dialect, and is prepared to enter any political debate, if he is not too preoccupied by the weather. By then he has consumed several glasses of cognac and enough beer in the local bar to assume his other, Italian identity. Now he is Carletto’ (1996, 165). Instructive, too, is the story that Claudio Magris tells about a certain Reiter Robert, an avant-garde Hungarian poet, who was later tracked down as Franz Liebhard, a writer of somewhat traditional German verse, and living among the German minority in Romania (‘he had changed his name, nationality and literary style’). This man with two names said that he had ‘learnt to think with the mentality of several peoples’ (Magris 1990, 291292). These accounts might help to put the national way of belonging into a more relative perspective, allowing us to think of nationalism as something other than the culmination of European cultural and political history. We may then see the issue in terms of how we might re-institute the enlarging – that is to say cosmopolitan and mobile – concept of identity. Cosmopolitan possibilities? In this discussion, I have tried to move beyond the binary logic of Turkey versus Europe and East versus West; a logic that is always encouraging us to think in terms of a metaphysical border of Good versus Evil. I am critical of identity politics in modern European culture; but in criticising European culture, I do not want to end up being an unthinking defender of the cultural order of modern Turkey. What is for me the fundamental

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issue is the logic of imagined community, which brought with it the very particular politics of national, or national-style, identity. It is a logic that originated in Europe, in the nineteenth century particularly, and was taken up by the new Turkish Republic early in the twentieth century. I have argued that there is a fundamental problem with this conception of identity, which posits the idea of unitary cultures; that works on the principle of inclusion of those who ‘belong’ and exclusion of the ‘others’; and that rebuffs whatever is on the other side of the identity border it has traced. The logic of ‘imagined community’ is deeply problematical for the way it sets culture against culture, and because it is asserted that this particular way of thinking about cultures is the best and, more than that, the only way. It is as if there could be no alternative to the national cultural order. What I have argued is that we have to find alternative ways of thinking about cultural arrangements in the wider cultural space of Eurasia. In part, I think, this should be a question of historiographical revision. As Elias Canetti (1985, 124) has ironically observed, ‘History portrays everything as if it could never have come otherwise… History is on the side of what has happened.’ And this has been particularly the case, I think, with respect to the modern emergence of nation states and national cultures. What is conveyed is an almost evolutionary sense of the rightness of their coming into existence. At various points in this discussion, I have briefly touched on the alternative cultural arrangements that existed in both the European and the Ottoman space before the national order came into place, and which involved the cosmopolitan acceptance of cultural diversity and complexity. What we should recognise are the possibilities that were present for coexistence and cultural interaction in the Ottoman Empire. As Cemal Kafadar (1995, 20) says, ‘Taking one’s commingling [sic] with the “other” seriously in the historical reconstruction of heritages… seems to demand too much of national historiographies.’ Fortunately, there are now revisionist historians, like Kafadar, who are reminding us of the cultural possibilities that were eliminated by national regimes, reminding us of the historical interactions of Ottoman/Turkish and European cultures. Is there not now the possibility of challenging that mentality which portrays history as if it could never have come otherwise? What we should also take cognisance of are contemporary developments that might challenge the insular mentality of imagined community. What I am particularly thinking of here, to take one example, are the new


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transnational cultures that have begun to flourish within Europe as a consequence of new forms and conditions of migration. Through these transnational developments, there is now a growing number of people who live dual lives, speaking two (or more) languages, having homes in two countries, and making a living through continuous regular contact across national borders. And what is significant is that ‘Turkish-speaking communities’ are establishing one of the most extensive and complex transnational networks. On the basis of regular and real-time communication and cheap travel, Turkish migrants are now routinely able to establish and sustain networks across the spaces of Europe and Turkey. These new kinds of transnational networks and mobilities are changing the nature of Turkish migrant experience, and they may be doing so, I suggest, in ways that once again provide the conditions for an enlarging concept of identity, to use Drakulić’s phrase. There is evidence to suggest that Turks in Europe are living in a condition that is between cultures, in a condition of only semi-attachment to – and therefore semi-detachment from – Turkey and Europe (for a fuller discussion, see Aksoy and Robins 2000; Robins and Aksoy 2001). What we are now seeing represents a new kind of cultural complexification within the European space. Writing as someone who lives in that space, I welcome these developments for what they might help to make possible, and that is a more accommodating and cosmopolitan culture in the broad European space. Claude Levi-Strauss (1952, 42) once reminded us that the achievements of European culture were a consequence of openness and creative incorporations. ‘Europe at the beginning of the Renaissance,’ he says, ‘was the meeting-place and melting-pot of the most diverse influences: the Greek, Roman, Germanic and Anglo-Saxon traditions, combined with the influences of Arabia and China.’ This did not continue to be the case, to the extent that Europe developed a fortress mentality. We need to be clear about what it was that Europe lost when it decided to turn its back on new cultural encounters and experiences. References Aksoy, Asu and Kevin Robins. 2000. Thinking Across Spaces: Transnational Television in Europe. European Journal of Cultural Studies 3(3): 343-365. Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities. London: Verso. Canetti, Elias. 1985. The Human Province. London: André Deutsch.

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