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<h1 id="article_title">Border Country</h1>
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src="cid:part1.01060102.04070903@ziggo.nl"></figure>
<h3 id="book_main">Étienne Balibar, <span id="book_title">Politics
and the Other Scene</span></h3>
<h4 id="book_details">Verso, 192pp, £8.99, ISBN 9781844677856</h4>
<h2 id="article_author">reviewed by Marc Farrant</h2>
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"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."<br>
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<aside id="article_author_bio"> <span id="article_author_name">Marc
Farrant</span> is a senior editor at <i>Review 31</i>. He is
currently based in Dusseldorf. </aside>
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