The border is not the territory: the securitarian-humanitarian dialectic and the outsourcing of European borders

Abstract

At the core of the European projects there is a fundamental tension between the securitarian and the humanitarian aspects of border and foreign policy, especially in its response to the Mediterranean Migration Crisis. This tension has far reaching consequences, from the outsourcing of border controls to third party states to fundamental changes in the makeup of the European Project. Starting from Etienne Balibar’s seminal question “what makes a border” I explore several facets of European border enforcement and the impact it is having on the European project.