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The main claim of this paper is that European borders are thus being produced, both materially and symbolically, along the fault line ‘culture’/’technology’ and ‘nature,’ where illegalized travelers trying to enter the continent are perceived as less technologically developed and therefore less compatible with Western civilization. This operation reproduces and reinforces a deeply racialized vision of the non-European ‘others.’ As a consequence, certain subjectivities are enabled, fostered, or produced but also contested and disputed along the European borders, while the ‘border struggles’ are displaced into an allegedly neutral terrain. This analysis draws theoretically on the work of Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Bruno Latour. It is based empirically on a discursive analysis of the corporate material distributed by Frontex and by companies that produce technology for border surveillance and control, as well as on interviews and observations conducted in the Greek-Turkish sea border area between 2013 and 2016.
This working paper aims to reformulate the teleological concepts of Europeanization by relating them to
modernity’s ambivalences, which seems necessary for two reasons. First, both the number and the scope of
crises in European politics and societies have increased considerably in the last two decades. Second, and
more importantly, the project of European integration has changed its status from being a potential problem
solver to being a part of the problem. The paper establishes a broader historical perspective than is usual in
most projects on Europeanization. It argues that crises and drawbacks have been a part of European societal
and political development during most periods of European history. One reason has been the purely European
strategy of colonialism, which was used as a mechanism to outsource the negative consequences of
modernity to places outside of Europe and to peripheral locations within Europe. By including historical and
postcolonial perspectives on contemporary Europeanization, we argue that Europe and modernity are not
characterized by teleological progress but rather engender ambivalent and entangled developments.