[D66] Border Country

[J.N.]

  Border Country


      Étienne Balibar, Politics and the Other Scene


        Verso, 192pp, £8.99, ISBN 9781844677856


    reviewed by Marc Farrant



"The discussion is far wider-ranging than a mere discussion of the
physical, or rather imaginary, manifestations of the borders that
separate the nation states of Europe (although the crisis of the
nation-state lies at the heart of Balibar's thinking of the
potentialities of a trans-national or globalised citizenship). Indeed,
in 'The Borders of Europe' Balibar interestingly highlights the
proliferation of borders in our supposedly borderless European society.
No longer are borders imaginary constructs that coincide along state
lines, but topographically spontaneous entities that are manifested in
security and health check zones all over the major social spaces of
Europe. Fundamentally the question of the border is also the question of
the institution. For Balibar, the notion of the border is intrinsically
tied to the historical construction of institutions, as those entities
by which our democratic freedom is guaranteed but also demarcated and
regulated. He notes: ‘borders have been the anti-democratic condition
for that partial, limited democracy which some nation-states enjoyed for
a certain period’. Thus, the thinking of the radicalisation of democracy
is precisely to deconstruct this institutionalisation of the border."


Marc Farrant is a senior editor at /Review 31/. He is currently based in
Dusseldorf.

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