From the CIAO Atlas Map of Europe 

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Borders In Post-Westphalian Landscapes: The EU-Russian Case

Sergei Medvedev *

International Studies Association

March 18-21, 1998

Contents

A prologue in the backwoods of Karelia

One rainy day in late autumn, moved by love of geography and plain curiosity, I set out on a trip to find the easternmost point of the European Union, on the Finnish-Russian border. My gear included a map, a compass, Zeiss binoculars, and an old raincoat. The road from Helsinki passed by the silent expanses of Lake Saimaa, with clouds of fog curling over the waters, by rapids and factory smokes of Joensuu, then turned east into dark spruce forests, and took me into the town of Ilomantsi, 'the easternmost commune of the EU' as (proudly) claimed on the roadside board. I spent a night at a local hotel, with dim light in the corridor, and next morning continued my journey by foot.

Borders have fascinated me since childhood. Having grown up in a self-contained country insulated from the rest of the world by an almost impenetrable curtain, I used to imagine border landscapes: dark rivers, watch towers, and unknown lands lying beyond them. Over the years, as I started traveling, borders have been somewhat demystified, but now again, approaching the Finnish-Russian boundary, I was feeling that boyish excitement, an anticipation of a mystery.

This border is special in many ways. For decades, it was as geographically meaningful as the North Cape, and as ideologically charged as the Berlin Wall, where a tower was erected near the Brandenburg Gate from which tourists could observe gray houses and grim soldiers in the east. Likewise many Finns used to visit the Finnish-Soviet frontier, especially in the olden days of a sealed border, to feel the mystique of the place, take photos of the prohibitory sign, or even to step into the restricted border zone seeking to experience a geopolitical thrill -- taking a small step towards the Other, into the realm of shadows, whispers and fears. In the early 1990s, the border became a legitimate tourist attraction and an object of imaginative marketing, when the authorities endorsed the 'Road of the Runes and the Boundary' (Runon ja rajan tie) running from the Gulf of Finland through Lappeenranta, Ilomantsi and Kuhmo to Suomussalmi and further north. And there I was, in the midst of a symbolic landscape.

Rain had stopped; the forest was damp, covered by thick fog. The smell of wet spruce was almost overwhelming. By now the trail had disappeared, and I was walking strictly eastwards, waiting to come across the prohibitory sign marking the five-kilometer border zone. However, there were yet no traces of the border or any human habitat: still the same motionless, silent wood around me. After several hours of walking, I started wondering whether I was lost, when I suddenly noticed a dirty logging road and decided to follow it. A couple of miles down the road, I saw an abandoned rusty tractor; further down, I came across an empty hut overgrown by grass. Finally the forest made way, and I was soon approaching a village.

The street along the row of rickety houses was mostly empty; from a distance, an old man in winter hat was looking at me with suspicion. A woman's face quickly showed behind the window curtain, and disappeared again. Thick fog was hanging above fences and kitchen-gardens; the scene seemed unreal yet strangely familiar. Overwhelmed by premonitions, I continued along the street until I came to a small shop with a sign which read 'Food stuffs' in Russian. I walked in and stood there, looking at the shelves which offered three basic foods -- soap, macaroni, and vodka -- and coming to grips with my unwitting, uncomfortable discovery: the border had somehow disappeared, and I was now in Russia.

Welcome to the other side, I said to myself. Welcome into brave new world of virtual insanity; into post-modern space void of certainties and delineations, of border between East and West, between the EU and Russia; welcome into fluid, flexible, fanciful territoriality where one can cross from Finland into Russia without noticing or being noticed. If, in the all-too-popular definition of Benedict Anderson (1991), nation is an 'imagined community', why shouldn't borders be 'imaginary lines'? Borders fall prey to imagination of territory; at a certain point, they become so symbolic, significant and encoded, so semiotically intensive, that they cease to exist in reality, become mere facts of discourse, figures of speech, simulations. The Finnish-Russian border has been so many times invented and inverted, fought over and spoken about, remembered and represented, hated and idolized, adored and explored, conceived and construed that it turned into a simulacrum, got lost in a mist of words, like I now lost it in the fog among fir-trees.

I hardly remember how I got back to Ilomantsi. I spent a sleepless night at the hotel, and early morning left for Helsinki. It was raining all the way back. As months go by, details of this story become blurred and nebulous, my memories hazy and hectic, and now I'm not even sure whether it took place at all. In a way, this doesn't matter too much. Whether real or imaginary, the Finnish-Russian border which is also a border between the EU and Russia, and, some would say, a border between Europe and Russia, between East and West, remains ambivalent and contested, a place rich in symbols, perhaps of even greater semiotic import after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In the post-Wall Europe, the Finnish-Russian border probably claims the highest concentration of meaning per kilometer of barbed wire. This is a place where contexts, interpretations and representations intertwine and overlap, while Finland's accession to the EU adds yet another spatial dimension to the semiotics of the border. The symbolic exchange in the border region renders physical reality of the border less significant.

On the whole, the physical side of territoriality in today's world is often questioned by post-modern discursive practices, and the emergence of virtual spaces that challenge our mental maps and traditional ideas of space and place. Borders that used to be foremost markers and bearers of territoriality, nationality, identity, and historical heritage, become fragile and transparent, one of the first victims of virtual reality. In many places of the world, the bodily existence of borders has been suddenly put into question.

Indeed, this work aims to question the phenomenon of the EU-Russian border. It tests a 'nebular hypothesis' born in the Karelian fog: that this border is fictitious, evasive and ambiguous, a product of our imagination of territory. The study (con)tests the idea of a boundary by looking into the historical origins of borders, and analyzing contemporary discourses on borders. There's so much speculation on 'de-bordering' in contemporary IR literature (Joenniemi, 1997b: 14), that academics are entitled to cross any border in the world, at least in their imagination, and so do I.

 

Christianitas, Reformation, and the origins of borders

Borders are inevitable parts of landscape. They break through landscapes alternating their structure; they ultimately shape landscapes: raising hills, digging channels, planting forests and leaving deserts. A border is not so much a function of the landscape (e.g. a border drawn along rivers or mountain ranges); it is rather landscapes that become captive to borders. Borders are palpable, physical, mere facts of nature; they seem to be timeless and unfailing.

However, appearances may be deceiving. In the perspective of longue duríe, borders are not eternal or innate; like other kinds of spatiality, they are socially and politically constructed, or 'produced', according to the definition of Lefebvre (1991). Moreover, territory, as observed by Foucault, is not only a geographical but rather a juridico-political notion (1980: 68), subject to changing discourses of power, identities and patterns of interaction.

In this context, borders are not given facts of nature; but neither are they given facts of human history. As far as Europe is concerned, the idea of a border, and mass production of borders, started only with modernity, together with the making of nation-states (Giddens, 1987: 50). In fact, the very idea of 'Europe' as a free association of discursively and territorially defined units developed in parallel with the emergence of borders. Earlier, during the Middle Ages, the word 'Europe' was used on rare occasions: either as a special geographical term, or as a poetic figure, or even as an esoteric word, one could flaunt to show his erudition. In the meanwhile, it almost never meant a cultural and political community, which was described in such terms as 'Christianitas' (Christendom, Chrítientí, Christentum, Christianiti) or 'Respublica Christiana'. Both terms, 'Europe' and 'Christianitas', were for a long time interchangeable; even as late as in 1799, Novalis entitled his book of historical essays 'Die Christenheit oder Europa'.

'Christianitas' knew no strict delineations or territorial borders except borders between Good and Evil, civitas Dei and civitas mundi; it was syncretic and undiscriminating in modern political terms. Identity and citizenship were of a holistic nature: a person owed his citizenship not to the state but rather to the fact that he was member of the Church, and he tended to see the bishop rather than the king as a head of the Christian society (Dawson, 1950: 32, 137). In this sense, civil identities, nation-states, borders and 'Europe' started to develop at about the same time from the syncretism of Christianitas.

In fact, the production of modern borders can be traced back to a major cleavage in Western Christianity, one of its first encounters with modernity: the Reformation. State borders as we know them today were called into existence by the emergence of two bodies of divided Christianity: corpus catholicorum and corpus evangelicorum. Religious wars of Reformation and Counterreformation in 16th - 17th centuries proved the futility of any attempts to impose the rule of one confession in Europe. The formula cujus regio, ejus religio, that the German Protestant princes wrested from Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and that was sealed by the Augsburg religious peace of 1555, meant the emergence of a new political principle: the right of each state for self - determination and for a free choice of confession within legally delineated confines of a state (regio).

 

From Westphalia 1648 to Helsinki 1975

It took another century, and a Thirty Years' War (1618-1648), often called the last of the religious wars and the first of the national wars, to finally legitimize borders as the backbone of the European political system. The Peace of Westphalia concluded on 24 October 1648 in Münster and Osnabrück codified the coexistence of Catholicism and Protestantism in strict terms of state borders, legitimizing the principle of absolute national sovereignty and sanctioning the political fragmentation of Germany. This was a comprehensive multilateral compromise, a prelude to the so-called 'European balance' (Medvedev, 1998).

This balance, otherwise called the Westphalian system, turned out to be an enduring one. In the following centuries, European borders were many times redrawn, but the very principle of a border as an ultimate marker of national sovereignty was never put into question, and any change to borders, even a violent one, had to be legally justified. Indeed, title for territory became one of the larger preoccupations of international law and diplomacy.

The principles of Westphalia became so deeply instilled in the European polity, that another peace conference which took place almost 330 years later in some way followed the models of 1648. The 1975 Helsinki Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe had a semblance to the Westphalia peace: here, too, the coexistence of two ideological systems dividing Europe was codified in terms of state borders; the principal political achievement of the Helsinki Final Act was the recognition of post-World War Two European borders, and one of the Helsinki Ten Principles was the inviolability of frontiers. Also the choice of place was no less meaningful than in 1648: the Peace of Westphalia was signed on the line of religious divide, between the Catholic Münster and the Protestant Osnabrück, while the Helsinki Final Act was signed in the eloquent vicinity of the ideological divide, the Finnish-Soviet border.

In the meanwhile Helsinki was also a step forward from Westphalia as far as borders are concerned. During the three centuries of European history, borders developed a concreteness not shown before even though warfare associated with territorial acquisition was prominent. By the mid-20th century, warfare to change borders became illegitimate and thus the 'concreteness' and durability of borders seemed further reinforced (Drinan & Pfau, 1997). At the height of the Cold War, borders seemed eternal and inviolable, ruling out possible claims and conflicts and allowing Ladis Kristof to concede that boundary disputes 'are fading away from the international agenda' (1959: 278). Consequently, the Helsinki Final Act not only confirmed the existing borders, but banned any violent means to change them in the future.

In the wake of Helsinki, the primordial and inviolable character of borders was once again sanctioned by the 1978 Vienna Convention on State Succession. When a state collapses, the agreements concerning its borders remain in force; borders are therefore regarded as prior to the reconstitution of a state and are recognized to be a prerequisite to this reconstitution (Anderson, 1997: 28).

 

Borders as containers of statehood

In the latter instance, borders actually precede states. In the modern juridical practice, is not nationality, language, culture, economic infrastructure or spatial networks that constitute states; it is primarily borders that are acknowledged to be the main property, and formative element, of the state. The state of Israel could emerge only by virtue of winning its borders from the Arabs, and by legitimizing these borders in international agreements. Judaic tradition, or the Hebrew language as such did not suffice to make a state; it was only within that conquered borders that the nation-building process could start.

Borders are thus not mere functions or representations, but rather containers and constituents of statehood. The state simply fills empty space delimited by perimeter of its borders; modern state can therefore only be reified as a geometrical unit (Paasi, 1996: 19). This also gives a special role to maps, which, like borders, attain a significance of their own, and become dominant. In fact, maps, especially maps of a nation-state, are kindred to borders: these are essentially the same lines, drawn on paper, or across the terrain; and just like borders, maps precede states. In his 'Power of Maps', Wood observes that 'rather than being mirrors, maps are cultural texts, which construct the world rather than reproduce it' (1992).

Summing up, the state is a territorial practice of filling empty space delimited by perimeter of its borders, and a discursive practice of filling the semiotic space of its own map. At the turn of this century, Royce (1901) concocted a beautiful metaphor of a map of England containing every single detail of the country proper, and in fact, equaling the country. This parable turned out to be in demand among post-modern thinkers: Borges (1964), and especially Baudrillard (1981). The latter imagines an Empire covered by a gigantic map. In the course of time, the Empire falls apart and begins to decay, but the map stays, and underneath it, the remnants of the state keep decomposing like the body of a fossilized creature. 'It is pieces of reality', writes Baudrillard in his refined style, 'and not the map, which are scattered here, there, and everywhere in the deserts which belong not to the Empire but to ourselves: the desert of our own reality' (1981; cf. Medvedev, 1995: 84). In what he calls a 'precession of the model', the map precedes, prevails, and outlasts the state.

The role of borders (and maps) as ultimate containers of nation-states is particularly evident in the phenomenon of nationalism. Just like the state is reified as a geometrical unit, nationalism is embodied in borders (once again, Zionism being an outspoken example). In dealing with borders, nationalism emerges as a spatial phenomenon, always concerned with a struggle over the control of territory; a form of constructing and interpreting social space (Williams & Smith, 1983). Territory in general is a principal anchor of identity: 'territory is space to which identity is attached by a distinctive group' (Knight, 1982: 526; cf. Minghi, 1994; Gross, 1978; Paasi, 1986).

In this context, territorial borders instill people with a sense of kinship, attaching them to a place which they feel as 'theirs' (Paasi, 1996: 51). It is impossible to achieve a feeling of identity and culture without inscribing personal life experiences into a discourse defining the story of a recognized homeland (Smith, 1979: 3). As put by Paasi (1996: 51), 'the aim of nationalism is typically to create a national identity which is not based on the boundaries of language, race, tribe or religion but on state boundaries.' And here, not only collective, but also personal identity is at stake: as Malcolm Anderson points out (1997: 28), borders define, in a legal sense, the identity of individuals by conditioning and delimiting claims to nationality and exercise of rights of citizenship.

In their relation to an individual, borders also appear as an instrument of coercion. Weinstein (1972: 64, 66) reminds that 'coercion' derives from the Latin coercere, to surround, and intrinsically has a spatial and delimiting meaning. In Weberian terms, borders define the extent to which the state can claim its monopoly of legitimate violence, the limit to which it is 'the sole, exclusive fount of all powers and prerogatives of rule' (Poggi, 1978: 92); they contain, protect, but also encage the population (Mann, 1993; cf. Bigo, 1997: 81).

Borders as containers of statehood, nationhood, citizenship, and citizenry proper are therefore a centerpiece of the modernist vision of territoriality. One can see a certain 'Westphalian link', in which nation-states, nationalisms and identities, maps and borders are closely intertwined. Playing such a prominent role in the Westphalian system of nation-states, constructing and containing states, borders have also found themselves captive to states, an 'appendix' to ideas of sovereignty and nationalism (Forsberg, 1996: 363). The 'Westphalian link' turned out to be a trap: borders, as we know them, make sense, and have a case, only within the system of nation-states.

 

The new Middle Ages: Decline of the modernist project

But then, suddenly, it turns out that the very nature of the state is at stake. Nice delineations of the political actors in the traditional Westphalian system have been replaced with a much more complex web of different actors: from the traditional nation-states over subnational (regional, sectoral, elitist, local, etc.) actors to supra-national (strategic business alliances, non-, inter-, and supragovernmental units) which interact with each other over a far more complex bundle of goods than ever before (not only political, economic and military, but also ecological, religious, national, normative-ethical, etc.[de Spiegeleire, 1994: 2]). Consequently, the Westphalian thinking finds it difficult to cope with a variety of phenomena: the disintegration of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia; ethnic conflicts in the successor states; civil wars among rival ethnic, religious or political factions in countries long ravaged by the Cold War (such as Cambodia or Afghanistan); the failure of many post-colonial states, especially in Africa but also in parts of Asia, to become nation-states; and the attempts by Islamic or Hindu fundamentalists to replace a secular with a religious and thus highly exclusionary definition of a state (Hoffmann, 1995: 169).

Perhaps nowhere the challenges to the concept of a nation-state, and to state borders, have been so paramount as in the former Soviet Union (FSU). In a seminal work on methodology of post-Soviet studies, Segbers contests the term 'state' as the only relevant actor and category of analysis, referring instead to 'area(s) of transformation' (1995: 11-12; cf. Buzan, 1995); by the same token, referring to post-Soviet spaces, he doubts the traditional notions of governments, borders, democratization, economic reform, etc. as too deeply rooted in the traditional statist discourse. What one encounters in the FSU is not only disintegration of the state in territorial and institutional sense, but also the devaluation of the state in political and analytical sense. The fictitious nature of post-Soviet states, and the erosion of their organizational capacity are especially evident when confronted with expectations of effectiveness in most of the spheres of activity that are relevant for the transformation (Segbers, 1995: 27).

Rather than nation-states, the post-Soviet polity is dominated by a number of non-statist actors of a territorial (regions) and functional (economic sectors and elites) variety that often operate across, or regardless of, borders. States become mere marketplaces, or trading floors, for these new actors, where they bargain and compete for resources and power; in the meanwhile this situation prevents post-Soviet states from developing their own institutional interests.

In general, challenges to the Westphalian nation-state, in the FSU or elsewhere, also challenge our concepts of territoriality. While in the earlier period, it was forged by spatial definitions of sovereignty within the conceptual framework of a nation-state (Karppi, 1997: 1), today we are facing the comeback of territoriality proper, without overtones of nationalism or any other essentialism (Forsberg, 1996: 363). Scholars turn to non-modern, non-linear forms of territoriality: as Kratochwil (1986) and Ruggie (1993) have pointed out, boundaries need not be linear and fixed, they can be zonal and fluid; territories need not be continuous or mutually exclusive, they can be disconnected and overlapping. Moreover, territories do not have to be fixed, they can be moving, as was the ark of the Jews or a private car (Tuan, 1977).

In fact, our evolving ideas of territoriality accompanying the demise of the nation-state, often borrow inspiration from earlier periods of the European history, or, to be exact, from pre-Westphalian periods, notably the Middle Ages. Taking the EU as a sample case, the European federalist project, as conceived by the Christian Democrats Jean Monnet, Robert Schuman, Konrad Adenauer and Alcide de Gasperi in the wake of World War Two, was largely based on Catholic universalism and the borderless, transnational spirit of medieval Christianitas (Medvedev, 1998). In more specific cases of non-statist construction of spatiality like regional integration in the High North, reference is made to late-medieval Pomor Trade (Joenniemi, 1997a: 3). The Basque separatists refer to (an essentially pre-modern and feudal) federalist project of the Girondists in the early 1790s, that were executed in 1793 by the Jacobins, the standard-bearers of modernity (Puig i Scotoni, 1993). In a far-sighted work from 1923, Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdiayev predicted the advent of the 'new Middle Ages', the borderless supranationalism of a medieval type (1991 [1923]: 15). By the same token, speaking of non-exclusive 'unbundling territoriality' in today's international politics, John Ruggie fancies a 'neo-medieval world' (1993: 71).

The modernist script, together with the Westphalian system, the nation-state and its borders, thus seems to be if not completely exhausted then at least inconsistent with contemporary spatial phenomena and imagination of territory. Untergang des Abendlandes augured by Oswald Spengler turns out to be a decline of the modernist project and the Western system of nation-states. Westphalian borders are threatened not from the outside, but from within the system. At the same time as Spengler published his 'Decline of the West', the German geographer Friedrich Ratzel (1923) compared the state with a living organism, and described borders as functions of different life periods of a state. Using this metaphor, borders can be called the 'skin of the state' (indeed, Langer (1997: 2) characterizes them as 'the skin of the political society'); and it is a medical fact that skin diseases are among the first symptoms of larger dysfunctions of an organism, in this case the decline of a nation-state. Just as christianitas had a specific place in the European history, the Westphalian period, too, seems to be nearing its end, and ages of history vested into existing borders, or into border disputes, become a less convincing argument.

 

Towards the ecology of borders

Reflecting and conceptualizing post-Westphalian territoriality, contemporary IR discourses on borders are making a shift from a static and statutory vision to dynamic and multi-centric approaches. In the traditional view, borders were seen as dependent on the internal organization of societies, and the way in which political power was exercised in the core regions of the state. Debates among realist, pluralist, Marxist, and interdependence theorists in IR arose out of different views about the nature of the state; frontiers were regarded as 'epiphenomena whose role and function were dependent on the core characteristics of the state' (Anderson, 1997: 27). Largely grounded in neo-realist analyses, these discourses were thus focusing on the political imperative in the construction and operation of borders.

Contrary to that, new discourses stress the ecological imperative in borders (Becker-Mark, 1992; Scott, 1997: 2-3). 'Ecology' here means not only environmentalism (although 'green discourse' makes a strong presence in the new ideas of spatiality), but a wider holistic approach of pre-Westphalian spatial practices, a return from interrupted to continuous spatiality: on this occasion, Karppi (1997: 3) defines border regions as 'continuous economic landscapes'. Inclusive ecology of borders is created primarily by organizations as representations of particular economic spaces. Organizational units form parallel spatial systems in order to provide individuals with least-cost opportunities to make spatial decisions: e.g. to move from one place to another (Karppi, 1997:1). A recent example from the Russian-Finnish border is the fact that, with eased visa controls, population in the center of Russian Karelia prefers traveling to St. Petersburg via Finland, which takes them about six hours instead of 12 hours on rugged Russian roads... Cross-boundary networks of transportation, information distribution, transactions and other kinds of influence are creating virtual worlds overlapping with the ones bounded by political geography, allowing Paasi to conclude that 'the functional space of the organization of economic, political and cultural activities has partly exceeded the absolute space of nation-states' (1996: 6).

Rejecting the idea of border as an abstract line, the ecology of borders extends the notion both in time and in space. First of all, border is seen as a process. Many of today's borders are in the state of flux; they are fluid and evolving. They cease to be inner-oriented and linear boundaries (a boundary is not merely a line demarcating legal systems but also a line of contact between power structures at least partly manifesting themselves in territorial frames [Jones, 1959: 253]), and turn into outer-oriented and zonal frontiers (Kristof, 1959: 278; Stoddard, 1991; Taylor, 1985: 104-5); the temporal definition of a border is therefore a process of evolution from a boundary to a frontier.

Secondly, extending the idea of border in space, this is also as a region: a manifestation of continuous, inclusive territoriality. Elaborating on the border region, Joenniemi observes that 'strategies applied tend to work around borders, thus catering to a formation that transcends the previous territorially defined space along the border without leading to new territorial demarcations' (1997b: 14). Unlike borders closely related to the state, border regions develop their own interests and dynamics quite distinctive from that of a nation-state. According to Tegil,

'Border region is defined both by its position at a boundary and by its distance from, and its relative dependence on, a state center. The origin of a regional identity, of a feeling of distinctive history, is connected to a feeling or an understanding among the population that the region's problems are different from those of the state as a whole and that these problems can be best solved at the regional level' (1993: 21).

Finally, contemporary discourses have drastically expanded the functional definition of borders: as observed by Berdoulay (1989: 131), a place is an area -- but more important, this is a network i.e. a space of interaction between what is global, national and local. (Characteristically, instead of 'border', authors of a recent volume speak about the East-West 'interface' in the European North [Dahlström, Eskelinen & Wiberg, 1995]). According to Camagni, 'network logic' is replacing 'territorial logic', i.e. the pattern of a nested hierarchy of centers and markets. In this respect, the network operates as a 'club good' delivering advantages ('network externalities') to the members of the club; this being an intermediate structure between 'private' and 'public' goods (Camagni, 1993: 72). Katzenstein, too, stresses the role of networks in regional construction of spatiality (1996).

In the functional context, borders are seen as 'meeting places' (Massey, 1993), 'spaces of action' (Karppi, 1996), 'nodes or junctions within a complex network of flows' (Jukarainen, 1997). In fact, the ecology of borders introduces the notion of dynamic spatiality dealing with flows rather than fixed demarcated spaces. As Castells (1989) puts it, 'the space of places' is turning into a 'space of flows'. Clement identifies the following kinds of cross-border flows:

One should add to this list various information cross-border flows (or even intrusions) including those provided by high resolution observation satellites, cultural and political impacts via international telecommunications (especially the Internet) and broadcasting (particularly since the introduction of direct satellite TV broadcasting in the late 1980s).

The contemporary state, including the democratic one (perhaps especially the democratic one), is ill-equipped to control these cross-border flows (Bigo, 1997: 85). Even if it wants to protect itself from intrusions like pollution or information warfare, borders and sovereign control of territory provide only limited defenses against the impact of those (Anderson, 1997: 37). Borders are no longer curtains, but rather filters in resource flows, 'screening agents' regarding what can legally flow from one political jurisdiction to another and under what conditions (Clement, 1997: 6). As Morley and Robins argue (1995: 75), the very idea of boundary -- i.e. the one of nation-state or urban city -- has become problematic, permeable, an osmotic membrane through which information and communication flow.

 

Borders between liberalism and realism

At first glance, it seems that the contemporary IR discourse on borders is dominated by neo-liberal arguments and shaped by patterns of interaction, interdependence, and globalization (or rather, as the word of the day puts it, 'glocalization' combining globalization with localization/regionalization [Rosenau, 1994; Robertson, 1995; Vartiainen, 1997]). Borders are seen as elements, or interfaces, in all-embracing 'economic civilization' (cf. Braudel, 1993: 19-21). Speaking on European borders, Scott observes that

'within the context of economic internationalization -- and particularly within the continental integration contexts of the EU and NAFTA -- interdependence will lead, for all intents and purposes, to the disappearance of borders as instruments of exclusion. The fact that Euroregions, transboundary cooperation associations based on voluntary participation of regional and local governments, are being established through the EU, on its external boundaries and even between many countries of Central and Eastern Europe would seem to partly support the convergence argument' (1997: 3).

Images of economic convergence working across, or around, borders, result in the creation of neo-liberal regional models described as 'regional political economy' (Cohen, 1988) based on relations between the developed core areas of industrial production and their labor reservoirs (e.g. U.S. and Mexico; Northern Europe and the Mediterranean, etc.). In this context, Karppi (1997) hypothesizes 'regional political economy' of the Baltic Sea area that could gradually 'lower' the Finnish-Russian border in the next century.

However, these and other neo-liberal and multi-centric analyses, sometimes adjoining postmodern discourses (cf. Ohmae's vision of a 'borderless world' [1992], or O'Brien's 'end of geography' [1991] echoing the 'end of history') have not completely monopolized the contemporary debate on borders. Realist old faithfuls still confine territoriality to states and interstate politics to geopolitical rivalry (e.g. Waltz, 1993), and state-centric features are still allotted some significance in border studies (e.g. Rosenau, 1993). The neo-realists should not be totally excluded from consideration for the simple reason that borders were never reified in their approach. Distinctions between unit and system levels of analysis were more crucial than borders in neo-realist analysis; the emphasis was on the 'sameness' of units, and borders were but one aspect of this 'sameness' (Drinan & Pfau, 1997).

Yet another fact is that despite the decline of the modernist project, the nation-state, with its specific imagination of territory, remains in place (Forsberg, 1996: 357), and border regions are still dependent on shifting hegemonies, albeit to a lesser extent than before, and even less so in the peripheries (Lähteenmäki, 1995: 259). As observed by Huntington, many forms of transborder cooperation still function only with the approval of the government claiming sovereignty over the territory in question (1973: 362). It has also been hypothesized that transboundary regional developments serve not only local, but, ultimately, also national economic interests, thus strengthening the nation-state (Koch, 1974: 38).

The phenomenon of transnational border regions thus does not completely deny the idea of a state; rather, border regions now equal nation-states. They are considered to have joined the ranks of states, provinces, cities and other subnational actors in promoting their interests through paradiplomatic means (Duchacek, 1986a); they now form part of a complex process of interstate competition, negotiation, compromise and cooperation (Ratti, 1988; Cappelin, 1993).

Given this, borders, border regions, and border studies do not pertain exclusively to the state, or to the non-state domain; neither can they be interpreted in the binary neo-realist/neo-liberal paradigm. Both state-centric and multi-centric approaches may still be too mechanistic or unit-focused (whether state- or non-state units), particularly on the matter of border studies. So rather than follow the process of global bifurcation into a state-centered realm and a transnational one described by Rosenau (1990), borders emerge as a combination of both. They are essentially 'between': not only between nation-states, but also between discourses and definitions, between neo-realism and neo-liberalism, between state-centrism and multi-centrism.

In fact, there's a good deal of complementarity between state-centric and multi-centric approaches, as demonstrated by Lapid and Kratochwil in a recent work on culture and identity in IR emphasizing the 'unprecedented fluidity' of international affairs (1996; esp. Lapid, 1996: 9). Starting from the breakdown of distinction between domestic and foreign policy which has been one of the pillars of IR theorizing since the early 1970s (see e.g. Morse, 1970), a complex vision of the international society was gradually taking shape. Putnam (1988), for instance, argued in a seminal work that the entanglements of domestic and international variables could be conceptualized as a 'two-level game' whereby national governments sequentially satisfy the demands and pressures of both international imperatives and of domestic actors.

Largely by the same token, Rosenau analyzed the transboundary California-Mexico relationship to conclude that this connection shows 'a complex mix of state- and multi-centric interactions' (1993: 29; cf. Rosenau, 1994 and Duchacek, 1986b). At that point, border studies become a meeting point of state and non-state paradigms (Drinan & Pfau, 1997: 2-3). In the 1990s, blending state-centric and multi-centric approaches becomes increasingly popular among IR theorists, in particular within the so-called 'English school' of International Relations in the framework of structural realism (see e.g. Buzan, Jones & Little, 1993).

It is possible to speak not only of cooperation and complementarity of state and non-state practices in the border region (especially since the local level operates largely in the new areas that earlier were not in state competence anyway) -- but also of institutional competition between the two, intensified by global pressures. In the border regions, local and supranational levels compete with the state for resources and influence, and also compete in terms of efficiency. Such competition results in the perseverance of organizational designs and practices optimally suited to deal with new economic and political issues, and catering to the local needs in the best possible manner (Scott, 1997).

At the end of the day, the issue of state and non-state practices in the border region boils down to the question of choice. As pointed out by Strassoldo (1993: 35), after determined choices of the nation-state, spatial units can now more freely make choices of territorial practices. In other words, border units are to a certain extent free to choose between supranational, national, regional and local levels of government, and to combine elements of the above. For instance, communes on the Finnish side of the Finnish-Russian border (and to a smaller extent, their Russian counterparts) suddenly found themselves in a situation when they can choose between national programs, regional projects (e.g. in the framework of the Barents Euro-Arctic Region), the EU support (INTERREG II funds), and local efforts in carrying out cross-border cooperation.

The possibility to choose between state and non-state practices can be generally accredited with promoting liberalization and democratization: in fact, from restrictive barriers (and areas of restricted mobility: cf. the so-called 'border zones' in the USSR with a special passport regime), borders evolve into democratic spaces where a person is often endowed with a greater freedom of choice than in the core areas of a nation-state. Being interactive and open units in the economic sense, border regions also open up politically, and develop transboundary dynamic forms of democracy.

Indeed, as observed by Connoly (1991: 463) the idea of territorially-based democracy tends to become an anachronism (e.g. in some cases, needs of residents on the border are more effectively met in a cross-border network than in national democratic institutions). Contemporary world politics require a deterritorialization of responsibility (Campbell, 1994: 457) as well as deterritorialization of civil rights. In time, border regions might develop (and some in Western Europe already do) formal systems of representation of the populations concerned, reciprocal citizenship rights, and special legal rules and courts to deal with transboundary conflicts. In some cases, 'people from the other side' become, willingly or not, actors in the local political system (Anderson, 1983: 7, 12), thus also contributing to deterritorialization of representation -- or rather to a changed territorial format of democratic procedures.

 

Conclusion: Borders as objects of Land Art

Summing up changes in the international system, and recent reformulations of the border problem in IR studies, what is the contemporary meaning of borders, and of the EU-Russian/Finnish-Russian border in particular? With decline of the modernist project, and of the 'Westphalian link' connecting states, borders and nationalism, the status of borders has dramatically changed. In many regions of the world, first of all in the West and its peripheries and neighborhoods, borders have become eroded and devaluated; especially the EU-Russian border is not a boundary in the classical Westphalian sense since it delimits (or rather represents) both national and supranational jurisdictions.

However, it is certainly premature to speak of the abolition of borders: 'the rumors of borders' death have been largely exaggerated'. Rather than becoming extinct, borders transform, taking on dynamic, moving, zonal forms, evolving into border regions. There is a place for borders in post-modern (or ‘re-modern', or ‘late modern' [Lapid, 1996: 5]) world, as well as for other forms of territoriality. Forsberg has shown that decline of the nation-state and state sovereignty in late modern politics means not only deterritorialization, but reterritorialization as well: 'units other than nation-states increase their territorial identity' (1996: 371), post-Westphalian borders and border regions among them.

Borders thus emerge as a testing ground for late modern, post-Westphalian forms of territoriality. This is a place where territorial practices intersect and sometimes complement each other. Borders that were once containers of statehood, obviously transcend the nation-state, but also utilize its services; rather than abolishing the state, they involve it into multi-level games. The EU-Russian border, too, emerges as a specific form of deterritorialization and reterritorialisation, of shaping a new spatial identity and new territorial polity that utilizes and freely combines functional components of various administrative levels, nation-state and non-state practices, evolves as a 'semi-administrative European space' (Scott, 1997: 4).

This has a major implication for our analysis. First of all, it needs a multi-level approach, like e.g. the one found in the historical Annales-school (Bloch et al., 1977; Burke, 1990). Multi-level and network theories developed by the French historians describe developments as taking place simultaneously on various levels, whereby the interconnections between levels and their mutual relationship are to be determined specifically. As noted by a number of political scientists (Leonardi, 1993; Marks et al., 1996; Baldersheim, 1997), in the context of the European integration, Putnam's 'two-level games' are replaced by the emergent three-level game, in which regional actors become partners in decision-making alongside governments and the EU. The EU-Russian border is exactly the kind of a multi-layered story, involving actors of different administrative statuses; and here, one can speak even of a four-level game:

Trying to visualize this complex territorial concoction, it is impossible to use just one map (e.g. the political map of Europe); in fact, we need a number of maps with various scales. Jukarainen speaks of a 'sum of many overlapping map sheets on which it would be impossible to draw single, clear territorial borderlines' (1997: 6), and concludes:

'The future of European regions will not only make a reformed mosaic -- which replaces the former order of sovereign states -- but rather a heterogeneous complex of overlapping spaces. In other words, there seem to be tendencies to both (modern) mosaic-like regional system and (post-modern) multi-layered regional complex. In order to visually picture the geography of European regions, we would need not just one ‘paper', but many overlapping transparencies, and the outcome would, hence, be very tangled' (1997: 16).

Secondly, the border should be studied not just as a function of states and other actors, but a unit of analysis possessing of political and analytic sameness. It becomes a principal level of aggregation, receiving inputs both from 'above' and from 'below'.

The EU-Russian border, too, is an independent actor in the international system, developing its own interests and institutional dynamics, and ultimately influencing the EU, Finland, and, eventually, Russia to a greater extent than the EU, Finland and Russia influence this border.

In this sense, it is hard to conceive of the EU-Russian border as an old-type divisive line. It may look as a line on the map, or on the terrain, but taken in a wider international context, the complexity of interests, and the multitude of administrative levels involved, a number of 'overlapping transparencies' make this line if not erased altogether, then at least blurred and uncertain, turn it into a moving and zonal frontier. Finland and Russia on both sides may still guard their territorial demarcation, discharging duties of statehood and asserting their respective identities, but in fact the border is slipping out of their control, following the dynamics of globalization and regionalization. Maintaining the border has to do more with semiotics, ceremony, and routine of statehood, rather than with actual power and control over transboundary developments; this reminds the change of the guard at the Buckingham Palace, or at the Lenin's Tomb on the Red Square in Moscow. Both the Palace and the Tomb are important for respective states, but the actual power of decision-making lies somewhere else.

It may well happen that one day borders will turn into rudiments, or indeed museums of statehood. In fact, such museums emerge in some sections of the former Iron Curtain: Checkpoint Charlie, and the fragment of the Wall in Berlin, or the so-called 'Symposion', a park of enormous stone sculptures around a border pole at the meeting point of Austrian, Hungarian, and Slovakian borders (Langer, 1997). In the latter case, though, it is not so much a museum, as a piece of Land Art. As a matter of fact, borders of the future may eventually become a form of modern art, and their inherent symbolism will then be expressed in an appropriate medium.

 

Literature

*: Research Fellow, Finnish Institute of International Affairs, Mannerheimintie 15A, 00260 Helsinki Finland, Tel. (+358.9) 43 42 07 26, Fax (+358.9) 43 42 07 69, sergei.medvedev@upi-fiia.fi. Back.