Borders increasingly capture the attention of policy-makers and scholars across Europe. The "deepening and widening" of the European Union, the spread of Euroregions, and the creation of new states in eastern Europe since the early 1990s have thrown the changing internal and external borders of the EU into sharp relief. Globalization has brought more widespread and fundamental changes, with increased cross-border flows of goods, capital, information and people. Increased border crossings have in turn provoked defensive, border-asserting reactions. The result has been greater variation in the permeability of state borders, and more differentiation between borders. Thus borders remain critical both in statecraft and in the construction of national myths and identities. Their significance and meanings are increasingly varied, disputed and contradictory. The authors present a combination of analytical chapters and case studies ranging from the English Channel to the Baltic, drawn from expertise in the fields of anthropology, communications, economics, geography, law, planning, policing, political science and sociology.
This volume demonstrates that borders and borderlands are key spaces within which issues of identity, memory and trust, economic integration, governance and communication between states continue to be played out and transformed.