Neha Jain

Redrawing Europe's Map-of-Logo

Scholarship on the EU’s migration agenda and border securitisation has invoked the concept of “Fortress Europe”, whereby Europe reproduces colonial-era bordering practices in an attempt to deter and repel migration. As a corollary—it is claimed––European states have sought to increasingly create distance, both physical and legal, between themselves and potential migrants, through externalization processes, that is, pre-emptive border control measures controlled and implemented extra-territorially or through non-European actors. These include visa policies, carrier sanctions, safe third country concepts, interceptions at land and sea, and physical and digital walls that are intended to prevent asylum seekers from setting foot on European soil. Even though this literature mounts a powerful critique of the contemporary immigration policy of European states, this project argues that it remains rooted in a map-of-logo conception of Europe, which misses how states remake these borders both within and beyond the European space. Viewed through the lens of Benedict Anderson’s evocative metaphor of the map-as-logo–– the imperialist Mercatorian maps that represented colonies detached from the metropole in colourful imperialist dyes––European states’ offshoring of migration and mobility no longer appear as acts as de-territorialisation, but rather as efforts to expand their control and borders to Europe’s peripheries and to third states. In contrast to the defensive image of Festung Europa suggested in migration scholarship, the project demonstrates that this is an offensive neo-colonial strategy of migration control.