On borderscapes of post-Cold War borders

Laine, J. & J. W. Scott (2018). Borderscapes of Post-Soviet Space. In: Laine, J., I. Liikanen & J. W. Scott (Eds). Post-Cold War Borders: Reframing Political Space in the EU’s Eastern Europe, 246– 256. Routledge: London. On borderscapes of post-Cold War borders Jussi P. Laine and James W. Scott Conceptual change – a contingent process This book has sought to explore different political and social contexts as a backdrop for re-bordering processes in Europe subsequent to the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. This has been done by examining conceptual change in rhetoric connected to the definition, negotiation and conflict over borders. Both continuity and change has been explored by the authors and indeed several historical layers can be recognised in much of the present-day conceptualisations of ‘new’ borders - for example in the political language of negotiating and legitimising post-Soviet borders in terms of earlier treaties and international law, but also based on ethnicity, religion, and other socio-cultural factors. In addition, the authors have identified debates that have taken place over the just definition of the borders in order to uncover the main arguments used in situations of disagreement. The authors also identified and analysed case specific events, such as the Kosovo War in Bulgaria or the Bronze Soldier affair in terms of a Russian-Estonian dispute. We have in this book looked at county-specific cases of conceptual change and the most obvious pattern that emerges is that of highly differential processes of rebordering, depending on the geopolitical stakes and quality of interstate neighbourhood involved. For this reason, normative comparisons between the European Union after its 2004 and subsequent enlargements and the states of the former Soviet Union are misleading, if not unfair. What conceptual change tells us about the significance of political, social and cultural borders in a comparative context is that they are very much contingent upon international relations, changes in geopolitical power relations and related rhetorical strategies for legitimating political projects of sovereign rule, integration or establishing self-government. At the same time, conceptions of state borders are affected by ‘domestic’ framings of social and political arenas and how territoriality is attached to projects of legitimising and challenging power in the name of the ‘people’. Culturally and symbolically, the significance of borders is constantly reconstituted as part of every-day institutional and discursive practices that include strategies of survival, responses to challenges as well as everyday identity politics. Moreover, as this volume indicates, while the understanding of borders as lines of division and barriers, both physical and mental, remains strong, borders can and do function as spaces of contact. Examples gleaned from the chapters in this book, notably Russia, Ukraine, Bulgaria and Finland, provide a rich cross-section of the multifarious rebordering processes that have taken place since 1989/1991 and of the conceptual shifts that have accompanied them The ‘Post-Soviet’ space In much of space formally encompassed by the Soviet Union, divisive aspects of borders are very much in evidence; here issues of state-building are conflated with projects of emphasising cultural uniqueness or difference. In Russia in particular, there is a tendency to differentiate between ‘good’ borders (those with ethnically and culturally close Slavic states) and ‘bad’ borders with South Caucasus and Central Asian states, which are perceived as sources of violence, conflict, and migration. In the case of Ukraine, a competition between state-centred (borders between states) and nation-centred (borders between nations) perspectives has been suggested. In the Caucasus there is a process of re-orientation and differentiation among various borders: thus, borders with neighbours who used to be part of the Soviet Union have become stronger and even closed (between Azerbaijan and Armenia); while former Soviet external borders have become more permeable (border with Iran for both Armenia and Azerbaijan, and border with Turkey for Azerbaijan). An analysis of post-Soviet change as expressed in new monuments, symbols, toponyms, exhibitions of local museums, etc. confirms the hypothesis that symbolic policy is a tool for the dissemination of interpretations that legitimise the position of the elite in power, and hence not always subject to rational assessments of historical events. In border regions of the Baltic countries and Ukraine, ideas of civilisational antagonism and historical injustices are being diffused. The use of contemporary European Union inspired ideas of cross-border cooperation serves not only to increase openness and trust but also to disseminate old phobias and stereotypes via new channels. On the Russian side, symbolic policy is much less developed than in neighbouring countries. The most important transformations of cultural landscapes are observed on the western borders, especially where ‘phantom borders’ can excite public opinion, such as in the Kaliningrad and Pskov regions. Russian discussion on state-building processes within newly independent countries appears closely linked to nationalist fears of anti-Russian foreign policy and bordering moves. In Russian political discourse, the general idea is that the elites of post-Soviet states try to create ethnocracies, applying the 19th century European model of nation-states and formally proclaiming the objective to build new political nations but in reality, privileging the interests of only titular ethnic group(s) or even some parts of them. The mainstream Russian discourse is also based on the assumption that the ideal of political nation will make easier post-Soviet integration. The most spectacular case in this regard is the radical re-bordering at the Russian-Ukrainian boundary resulting from political change in Ukraine, the annexation of Crimea and the civil war in Donbass. In 2015, Russia and Ukraine closed their air space for direct flights connecting their cities and for transit, and Ukraine abolished the simplified border regime with Russia. Nowadays, it is possible to cross the boundary between the two countries only through a few international crossing points. On Ukraine’s initiative, and unlike the recent past, only international passports are accepted by border guards on both sides. Furthermore, to avoid infiltration of the Russian military in the area of hostilities in Donbass, Ukrainian authorities have restricted border crossings by single Russian male citizens. Both sides stationed military units along the boundary, and cross-border cooperation was largely terminated. When it comes to border constructions in today’s Russia, the state continues to serve as the major border maker and operator. Throughout the post-Soviet space, Russia has stressed the importance of ‘compatriots’ and ‘Russian speaking’ people, who continue to live in the countries of former Soviet Union. This group plays important role in the construction of the concept of ‘Russian world’ (Russkii Mir), a more or less territorial imaginary of all those who feel connected to Russian culture regardless of their citizenship. The repercussions of this identity are far-reaching, as the concept of Russkii Mir is also one of the cornerstones of Russian foreign policy. The latent importance of this identity can be openly observed in the case of Eastern Ukraine, and Transnistria where pro-Russian orientations continue to shape perceptions of borders, even in the context of military conflict. Also elsewhere the Russian state has launched targeted programmes on strengthening or blurring the borders in various spheres of political and social life. In the contemporary geopolitical context the question about borders, and predominantly in their geopolitical sense, is one of the most debated in Russia’s media space. However, much of the mass media mirrors state policies and politics, which have lately been oriented towards border construction with the outside world, yet also within the country. In pro-state media, the depictions of the other are increasingly geared towards seeking and exposing enemies. The media is thereby shaping the space where the ‘other’ is presented, not merely as a different cultural other but as a danger or threat to Russia’s national security. This trend stems from international contexts which Russia is fully engaged in, such as the war in the Ukraine or in Syria, and also internal dynamics, namely the politics within the country oriented towards the strengthening of Russia’s ‘spiritual buckles’, supporting patriotism and exposing dangerous foreign agents within the country. On the level of everyday life and daily practices affecting the population, the role of the state in bordering processes in Russia is no less significant. The state limits the freedom of movement of its citizens, particularly of the state employees as has become the practice in the course of the sanctions’ war. In addition, playing out a patriotic card with an emphasis on Orthodoxy, patriarchy and cultural authenticity, the state frowns on social and cultural pluralism and creates a context for marginalising minorities that do not correspond to the national norm. In the conditions of strengthening the borders between the dominant ‘good’ core and ‘deviant’ others, people try not to demonstrate their difference; boundaries within society becomes less visible, something that people try to hide. The Bulgarian spatial turn The most notable shifts in the conceptualisation of borders in Bulgaria are related to two major processes – the country’s spatial and civilisational ‘turn’ from East to West after the end of the Cold War, and its search for a new regional and geopolitical identity against the backdrop of territorial changes and security challenges in the Balkans. In the early 1990s, Bulgaria sought its new geopolitical identity through integration in the political and economic structures of the West – the European Union and NATO. The search for alternatives to Soviet power promoted new horizons of expectations and new ideas of sovereignty. For Bulgaria, the integration into the European and trans-Atlantic structures represented a matter of both geopolitical and, what came to be called, ‘civilisational choice’. Border making processes here involved not so much stricto sensu political borders, as social, cultural and symbolic borders, temporal borders (past-future) and grander-than-national spatial imaginaries (east-west). In terms of regionalisation, the early 1990’s EU (and NATO) policies and strategies treated Bulgaria exclusively as a part of the spatial category of East Central Europe understood as a common post-Soviet space, consisting of countries in transition. Transition became the term that defined the borderline between the postSoviet and the non-post-Soviet space in the Balkan region. Bulgaria embraced this left-over of the Cold War partition and its positioning into the Eastern European spatial orbit since it contained the promise of future merging with the West. Moreover, Bulgaria’s re-positioning into Central and Eastern Europe was a process of ‘distancing’ itself from the territorial and border disputes that were taking place in the Balkan region at that time. It was accompanied by discourses that emphasised the right to self-determination – with respect both to the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the collapse of the USSR. Territorial changes in former Yugoslavia and former USSR thus did not trigger a notable debate on the role and meaning of political borders in post-Cold War Bulgaria. Rather, the new geopolitical identity of the country and the ongoing East-West turn proved to be a powerful tool against interpretations associating the Balkans almost exclusively with nationalism and nationalistic excesses. The absence of serious debates on the political meaning of borders in a context of territorial changes in the broader region constituted a steady tendency throughout the Yugoslav wars that would only change during the Kosovo crisis in 1999. The crisis in Kosovo triggered the first in-depth discussions on the role of political borders and territory in post-Cold War Bulgarian political and media language. The threat of changing Balkan borders was measured against possible delay (or acceleration) of Bulgaria’s European and trans-Atlantic integration. Furthermore, the crisis led to a political relocation of Bulgaria from the ‘Central and Eastern European’ to the ‘Southeastern European’ orbit, together with its (self-)differentiating from the other states in the Balkans. The country was no longer to be seen as a part of post-Soviet Central and Eastern Europe, but as a stable island within the turbulent Balkan region, committed to the policies and the political culture of the ‘West’. The Kosovo war thus served as a consolidating factor for Bulgaria’s new geopolitical and regional identity as a country belonging to Europe and the West. This process culminated with Bulgaria’s EU accession, which brought along the opening up of certain intraregional borders (e.g. with Greece and Romania) and the securitisation of other (especially with Turkey and Serbia). The case of Finland During the Ukraine Crisis, the Finnish-Russian border became again subject to geopolitical imaginations and everyday geopolitics that mobilised historical memories of conflict. Concepts such as spheres of interest, sovereignty and territorial integrity again made the rounds and the Crimea crisis and its aftermath were widely explained through an East-West or West-Russia clash of policies and narratives that emphasise historical rivalries and dichotomous international relations. Finland, commonly defined as a Russian borderland, has thus became more vulnerable because of its geopolitical position. Historical analogies, especially to the Cold War period, have been used to explain and understand the contemporary crisis. Finland and Ukraine are also in some respects parallel cases as both are non-aligned Russian border states in which the question of potential NATO accession have played geopolitical roles. Defining Russia as a threat, in the sense of traditional security, has become more common and acceptable during the Ukrainian Crisis; before that, formal statements to this effect were seldom heard. Common for all discursive events analysed is that Finland’s relation to Russia and Europe were debated during the crisis with competing visions of (military) alignment versus non-alignment. The Finnish-Russian border has historically played a significant role in nation-building and identity politics and has been used to define Finnish nationhood and relations to Russia and Europe. Yet at the same time, ‘post-national’ ideas have entered the discussion in which the border has served to construct spatial imaginaries of Finnish neighbourhood and to (re)-map Finland within a changing Europe. The idea of Finland as a borderland nation-state located between the East and West (or Europe and Russia) has been broadly used for legitimising political aims and strengthening of national identity, for example. In this way, Finns are both portrayed as a truly Western nation (not like Russia) as well as a special borderland nation between East and West, Europe and Russia. In general terms, sovereignty and territorial integrity were presented as key concepts of European borders. From the Finnish standpoint, the significance of the border is not only about territorial demarcation but national identity, debate on foreign and security policy, etc. Economic benefits and shared aims to create a European and natural neighbourhood with Russia has broadly been noted. However, during the shifting periods, these functionalities appear mainly in subordinate clauses, whereas identity and geopolitical discourses tend to dominate in political debate. Sovereignty, power relations and rebordering Liam O´Dowd (2010) has criticised border scholars who, influenced by the monumental geopolitical shifts since 1989, have engaged in ‘post-national thinking’. He argues that this indicates a lack of historical reflexivity and careless ‘epochal thinking’ that ignores the fact that states, state borders and their impacts are very much in evidence in Europe and elsewhere. O´Dowd has also criticised the use of neologisms such as ‘debordering’ and ‘rebordering’ that privilege subjective agency and neglect the structuring power of state borders. While O’Dowd is certainly correct that borders are not solely a matter of socio-cultural agency, the rebordering processes that this volume illustrates demonstrate that border-making is inherently a multilevel and multiactor undertaking. Sovereignly is not merely a question of international law and recognition, it is part of everyday identity politics as well as a basis for formal political power. The collection of essays contained in this book underscore the fact that issues of sovereignty carry different weight in different regions. In Western Europe, for example, fears of loss of sovereignty to the EU do not play a significant role in public discourses. However, in South-Eastern Europe, these issues are more acute, and the EU is blamed for failing to guarantee national sovereignty and territorial integrity. This is especially noticeable in the discourses emerging during the recent refugee and immigration crisis. The subsequent erection of fences against immigration from the (non-EU) Balkans and Middle East regions was commented in most national media as an act of re-establishing sovereignty and the national power to decide. In another Eastern European case, in Poland, the annexation of Crimea by Russia has raised concerns about security and national sovereignty. Issues of state sovereignty are even more central to rebordering processes within the former Soviet states. Russia under the Presidency of Vladimir Putin has begun to pursue a policy of multi-level and multispeed reintegration of post-Soviet space, with most advanced form of such reintegration represented by the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) comprising Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. Other initiatives included attempts to construct single energy space, including also Turkmenistan and Ukraine. However, what was seen in Russia as mutually beneficial forms of integration has often been perceived by the leaders of post-Soviet countries as constraints on their sovereignty, in both economic and political sense. Issues of ethnic and national claims dominate border discourses and practices in the post-Soviet space. There are a number of ethno-political conflicts dating from the late Soviet period that include conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan, conflict over Transnistria in Moldova, conflicts over South Ossetia and Abkhazia in Georgia, and most recently the crisis over Crimea and Eastern parts of Ukraine. All of these conflicts have in common incongruity between formal borders and cultural and ethnic borders, which have their origins in Stalin’s nationalities police as well as in the imperial history of the Russian, Hapsburg and Ottoman empires. Ethnic and national claims are also closely connected to the issues of self-determination and political autonomy. For example, in all of the post-Soviet conflicts cited above the ethnic and national claims have self-determination, ultimately in the form of independent statehood, as their aim. Among the emerging geostrategic problems that affect borders, the most important issue is the Ukrainian crisis following the annexation of Crimea and the unfolding of violent conflict in Eastern Ukraine. The strongest impact has been on the Russian-Ukrainian border, outside of the areas of military conflict. There is considerable strengthening of border controls from the Ukrainian side, restrictions on crossing the border by Russian men, and these actions are in contrast with the previous practices of open border that used to be crossed on foot. The perceptions of this process of fortification in Ukraine depend on the geo-political orientations: thus, pro-Russian citizens do not perceive the border as a source of threat, while pro-Ukrainian support the fortification. The crisis has also affected the border with Poland where there is now decreased border traffic, while at the same time traffic between Poland and Ukraine increased. Furthermore, the perception of threat coming from Russia gave rise to calls to abolish the visa-free regime experiments with Russia. Similar securitised concerns were expressed in Finland, where the Ukrainian crisis has given rise to interpretations of the collapse of multi-polar world, and the Finnish-Russian border became again seen not simply as EU’s external border, but as a civilizational boundary between the West and Russia. Further away from Russia’s borders, in Bulgaria, the Ukrainian crisis has led to a separation of discourses into pro-Russia and pro-EU strands, and a raising awareness of Bulgaria’s importance in the new geopolitical context. In Germany, the response has been more mixed, and has changed considerably over time. In the beginning, it was perceived as an outcome of interventions of a multitude of players, including the US and EU, and only after the unfolding of conflict in the Donetsk did discourses shift towards the confrontation between ‘the West’ and Putin. These interpretations pointed to a new perception of Ukraine’s border as a potential external border of the EU, and thus as a case of ‘rebordering from a distance’. The crisis also had an indirect impact on borders in the entire post-Soviet space. Thus, following the Ukrainian crisis Armenia and Georgia have found themselves separated by a new dividing line, as Armenia joined Eurasian Economic Union, and Georgia reaffirmed its integration with the EU. This has potential of complicating relations between the two neighbouring countries Conceptual development and future paths The common approach of this volume is based on perspective of conceptual change and it regards state borders as political concepts: fluid, contested and ambiguous. The approach assumes that borders have multiple meanings as state boundaries, frames of social and political arenas and as symbolic social and cultural lines of inclusion and difference (see Megoran 2017). These meanings are based both on collective historical narratives and individual identity construction of the self, in which difference is related, but not reducible to, space. Underlying such an approach is the understanding of space and borders as being not so much related to their material morphology, but to the premises of their social production and the ideological underpinnings of this production and the various forms of interpretation and representation that it embodies. Hence, to define ‘border’ comprehensively is neither possible nor appropriate. As other key concepts of modern political language, i.e. state, nation or society, the significance of ‘border’ is constantly changing and its meanings vary depending on users, contexts, purposes and intentions. State borders are historically formed as markers of spheres of power and, in this sense, they are products of competing projects of establishing power over territories and groups of people. From the perspective of political mobilisation and collective action, borders have, at the same time, been constantly reconstructed as frames of social arenas and political landscapes, strategies of challenge and survival as well as related patterns of identification and identity politics. Within the study of international relations, the post-Cold War period is seen as a time of fundamental change in conceptualising sovereignty and territoriality that are identified as symptoms of a new ‘postWestphalian’ international order. Our analysis of the discussions concerning post-Soviet borders verifies that there are clear tendencies of new kind of Europeanization of borders in the context of political and economic integration. Especially within the European Union, the implementation of EU-regulation has transposed parts of traditional state’s sovereignty to the supranational level. As part of EU neighbourhood policies these new thinking modes have been introduced and gained ground even within post-Soviet space. In general, the Westphalian idea of territorial sovereignty has, however, prevailed as a hegemonic conceptualisation throughout the examined period and ‘sovereignty’ as a concept has maintained its static-territorial links esp. in the context of discussions concerning the so-called frozen conflicts, the Chechnian and Georgian wars and Ukraine crises. More important than to construct a hegemonic border discourse is to identify these competing discourses, and to comprehend a nature of constant change of the border. Everybody involved in political debates from journalists and politicians to intellectuals and regular citizens make a border. Therefore, everybody shares a responsibility of creating border discourses and imaginaries around the border. In times of crisis, like in our contemporary world with news of all kind of crisis, there is need for critical evaluation of these discourses. Self-evident imaginaries of nation states, Europe, Russia, the EU, Orient, the West and so on need to be critically evaluated. Distinctive function of (state) borders is human-created social phenomena, it is not static and ahistorical ‘fact’ which cannot be redefined. On the contrary, critical studies are needed for reconstructing competitions between imaginaries and vocabularies, to re-conceptualize borders more as places of encountering than barriers of diverge. In order to better understand these border-making processes in their complexity, there is an apparent need to adopt a complex, multidimensional and dynamic concept of borders, encompassing not simply territorial delineation, but also political, social and cultural distinctions between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Borders are social and political constructs, open to change. They can be made through various means, including institutional practices, state-led policies at the national and local level, daily interaction, construction of various narratives, discourses and imaginaries. Yet, the processes involved in making of specific borders vary greatly from case to case: top-down and bottom-up border-making can be complementary, or the two processes can be at odds with each other. In this respect, important regional differences can be noted. Within the EU, there is a top-down institutional process of debordering, aiming at a culture of open borders and integration. However, top-down policies targeting this objective have resulted in different outcomes in different contexts and for different groups of people. Thus, while business people and civil society generally welcome such debordering policies, they are often resisted on the ground by ordinary citizens, many citizens remain attached to their national identities and feel that these identities are threatened by the EU debordering. In former Soviet Union, state plays the leading role in border-making; although in some cases, as in Eastern Ukraine until the recent crisis, everyday practices of interaction and cooperation challenged the formal borders. The concept of ‘borderscapes’ (Rajaram and Grundy-Warr 2007; Brambilla 2015; Brambilla et al. 2015) plays an important role in the conceptualization of border. It expresses the (geo)political and epistemic multidimensionality of the border, enabling a productive understanding of the processual, de-territorialized and dispersed nature of borders and their ensuing regimes in the era of globalisation and transnational flows. Adopting the borderscapes viewpoint allows to view borders genealogically and to historicize border-making and particularly border-migration nexus. This means rethinking Europe as an ‘ambiguous space’ that reflects its colonial and post-colonial experiences, also understanding the ambiguity that marks the EU’s engagement with its various neighbourhoods. This approach advocates an expansion of traditional concepts of border-making to encompass social imaginaries; borderscapes are social/political panoramas that emerge around border contexts and that connect the realm of high politics with that of communities and individuals who are affected by and negotiate borders. This volume has sought to contribute to the development the borderscape concept as a way of thinking about the border and bordering processes not only on the border, but also beyond the line of the border, beyond the border as a place, beyond the landscape through which the border runs, and beyond borderlands with their territorial contiguities to the border. As borderscapes, borders in fact cannot be reduced to instruments of terms of inclusion/exclusion as conveyed by metaphors such as ‘Fortress Europe’ but must be expanded to include what is happening every day at the EU’s external borders as reflected in the agency of migrants. What emerges are borders as fields in which processes of traversing and crossing meet those of reinforcement and blocking and in which borders are produced by social institutions and migration as a social force. The borderscapes perspective therefore transcends the panoptic gaze implicit in border spectacles as it follows the discursive and performative construction of migration, refugee crises and their consequences in a wider socio-spatial context. This perspective also goes beyond Eurocentrism because migrants and refugees become actors and protagonists of change as well as persons subject to multiple forms of victimisation. Different artistic expressions of borders and border crossings can be regarded as expressions of resistance to official understandings of EU southern frontier and as local politics of a new in-between identity that dwells in a borderscape where the very concepts of citizenship and Nation-State are questioned. In considering future developments and possible policy responses it is important to distinguish between various roles that the EU plays in different borderscapes, as well as different border context. EU’s geopolitical involvement in Eastern neighbourhood, particularly in Ukraine, has been also a controversial issue with greatly differentiated responses across the EU and in the post-Soviet space. The possible scenarios as well as policy recommendations that emerge from the differently positioned actors in this regard are inevitably complex and sometimes contradictory. Thus, in South-East Europe this involvement has led to rising Euroscepticism, and thus threatens a still fragile process of European integration. Along the Eastern borders of the EU, fears of involvement in an international conflict and concerns for the security of national borders has been growing. However, things look very different from the other side of the EU border. Particularly, in Ukraine, which has been the site of the military conflict as well as at the core of EU/Russia’s tense relations, greater engagement of the EU is sought and recommended. The trajectory of Ukraine’s increasing integration with the EU, most recently through an Association Agreement, suggests a need for a more comprehensive EU policy towards this country. In particular, it has been noted that EU’s relations with its Eastern Neighbourhood should be more differentiated and involve close interaction between those countries that have moved further in the process of association with the EU, such as Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia. However, in the current geopolitical context such integration trajectory leads to increasing tensions with Russia, which in turn lead to rising security concerns in the neighbourhood. Ukraine seeks the EU’s greater commitment to its own security; with particular regards to borders this commitment is envisioned in the form of EU assistance, technical and financial, in strengthening Ukraine’s borders with its neighbours. References Brambilla, C. (2015). Exploring the critical potential of the borderscapes concept. 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