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Sorting Machines

E-BookEPUB2 - DRM Adobe / EPUBE-Book
174 Seiten
Englisch
John Wiley & Sonserschienen am12.01.20231. Auflage
It is commonly thought that, thanks to globalization, nation-state borders are becoming increasingly porous. Steffen Mau shows that this view is misleading: borders are not getting more permeable today, but rather are being turned into powerful sorting machines. Supported by digitalization, they have been upgraded to smart borders, and border control has expanded spatially on a massive scale. Mau shows how the new sorting machines create mobility and immobility at the same time: for some travellers, borders open readily, but for others they are closed more firmly than ever. While a small circle of privileged people can travel almost anywhere today, the vast majority of the world's population continues to be systematically excluded. Nowhere is the Janus nature of globalization more evident than at the borders of the 21st century.



Steffen Mau is Professor of Macrosociology at the Humboldt University of Berlin.mehr
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Produkt

KlappentextIt is commonly thought that, thanks to globalization, nation-state borders are becoming increasingly porous. Steffen Mau shows that this view is misleading: borders are not getting more permeable today, but rather are being turned into powerful sorting machines. Supported by digitalization, they have been upgraded to smart borders, and border control has expanded spatially on a massive scale. Mau shows how the new sorting machines create mobility and immobility at the same time: for some travellers, borders open readily, but for others they are closed more firmly than ever. While a small circle of privileged people can travel almost anywhere today, the vast majority of the world's population continues to be systematically excluded. Nowhere is the Janus nature of globalization more evident than at the borders of the 21st century.



Steffen Mau is Professor of Macrosociology at the Humboldt University of Berlin.
Details
Weitere ISBN/GTIN9781509554362
ProduktartE-Book
EinbandartE-Book
FormatEPUB
Format Hinweis2 - DRM Adobe / EPUB
FormatFormat mit automatischem Seitenumbruch (reflowable)
Erscheinungsjahr2023
Erscheinungsdatum12.01.2023
Auflage1. Auflage
Seiten174 Seiten
SpracheEnglisch
Dateigrösse854 Kbytes
Artikel-Nr.10747031
Rubriken
Genre9201

Inhalt/Kritik

Inhaltsverzeichnis
Acknowledgements

1. Borders are back!

2. Statehood, territoriality and border control

3. Opening and Closing: The Dialectic of Globalization

4. Fortification: Border walls as bulwarks of globalization

5. Filtering borders: Granting unequal opportunities for mobility

6. Smart borders: Informational and biometric control

7. Macroterritories: Dismantling internal borders, upgrading external borders

8. Extraterritorializing control: The expansion of the border zone

9. Globalized borders

Notesmehr
Leseprobe

1
Borders Are Back!

The dramatic images from the Greek-Turkish border that flickered across our television screens in spring 2020 could hardly have packed a greater punch: buses carrying thousands of refugees across Turkey to the border, Turkish security forces herding people towards the border, wretched encampments with washing hung out to dry, Greek border police hectically putting up concrete barriers and rolling out barbed wire, stun grenades flaring and tall heavy-duty fans blowing clouds of tear gas over to the Turkish side of the border. Cut to John F. Kennedy Airport, New York, at almost exactly the same time. Hundreds of passengers stood for hours, crammed into narrow passageways, waiting to be allowed into the US. The requirements for entry into the US had been tightened overnight because of rising numbers of Covid-19 infections, resulting in chaotic scenes. Ad hoc orders to question incoming travellers and take their temperatures led to massive delays and bottlenecks, which the airport was not equipped to cope with. People were pushed together into tightly packed, slow-moving queues. Commentators spoke of a human petri dish, offering ideal conditions for the spread of the virus.

Both scenes are emblematic of the blocking and sorting effect of borders: borders stop people, push them back, lock them out, act as filters. Thanks to scenes like these, borders have made a dramatic return to our consciousness in recent years. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, many people succumbed all too readily to the illusion that we were living in an age of opening barriers, expanding mobility and increasingly permeable borders. In 2009, border - along with paternoster lift , cheese on sticks and tape recorder - even made it into the Lexikon der verschwundenen Dinge (Dictionary of Forgotten Things),1 as if it were something that belonged in a museum. Berlin, as the city once divided by the Iron Curtain, is especially symbolic of the end of a world structured by closed borders. One of the demands made in autumn 1989 was that The Wall must go ; today, the border strip is nothing more than a tourist attraction.

At first glance there seems to be much to confirm this view of borders as a relic of the past. Trend data show that cross-border transactions and movements have risen enormously in the past three decades and even before that.2 Borders are crossed more and more frequently, their compartmentalizing character seems to have softened and they are perceived as increasingly permeable. This applies not only to communication via the internet, trade and production chains, finance flows, and the dissemination of information and cultural goods, but also to the various forms of human mobility with which this book is concerned. More and more often, for an ever larger group of people, leaving the inner space of the nation-state is becoming an increasingly self-evident step; crossing and recrossing the border seems like the normal state of affairs. In analyses of these changes in the 1990s and 2000s, hypotheses about vanishing borders 3 or the borderless world 4 - all of them conjuring up obsolescent or increasingly porous borders - were not figments of the academic imagination, but often-evoked and much-quoted tags, which seemed to encapsulate major trends. Here, globalization was regarded as a powerful driving force, with a near irresistible capacity to open, or in some cases break down, borders.

In social theories from the same period, disembedding from place-bound contexts and the deterritorialization of social relations were even identified as crucial elements in the development of modernity.5 The theory was that we were no longer shackled to a single place, but extended our social relations over great distances, constantly crossing borders and striding around the globe in our seven-league boots. A few decades earlier, a period spent abroad had still been viewed as an exotic exception; now cross-border social, family, romantic and employment relationships and transnational CVs had become routine and normal.6 Processes of deterritorialization, denationalization and transnationalization took centre stage; clinging to what was limited, national and immobile was seen as backward-looking, since it ignored the powerful dynamic opening up previously closed and contained societies. There was even talk of an atopian society , where territorial limitations were radically abolished; some saw the world society appearing on the horizon.7 It seemed that nothing stood in the way of global interaction - or at least nothing in which borders played a major role.

Although this view may not have been an optical illusion, it overemphasized the debordering character of globalization and produced a one-sided image. And while an increase in border traffic is often taken as evidence that a border has become more permeable or has ceased to function, this is by no means an obvious conclusion. Perhaps the focus on the dissolution of borders is partly to do with the specific way that frequent travellers 8 - the group responsible for the majority of border crossings - experience the world. For this group - i.e., those who are able and authorized to travel - globalization mostly means opening, debordering and greater opportunities for mobility. The most prominent proponents of the discourse of globalization are undoubtedly part of this highly mobile group, able to popularize their theses on podiums in Boston, Cape Town and Seoul. People who are allowed to travel themselves, and whose mobility is scarcely restricted by borders, may be inclined to generalize from their own experiences and to underestimate contrary developments. Perhaps this is a déformation professionnelle on the part of conference tourists? But then again, this is probably not the place for such speculations.

It would be wrong, of course, to suggest that experiences of border crossing are limited to a small number of privileged groups - on the contrary, they extend far beyond these groups and are global in scale. And yet the experience of crossing borders quickly, smoothly, comfortably and without hindrance is by no means a ubiquitous phenomenon. For a large part - the majority! - of the world s population, the everyday experience of borders is one of exclusion, denial of mobility, and obstruction; of being on the outside, of rebordering. It is still the case that borders are the place where, in the words of the pioneering sociologist Georg Simmel, the merciless separation of space ( das unbarmherzige Auseinander des Raumes )9 becomes most obvious. At borders, critical processes of social division take place.10 Even in the global society, we live in parcels of territory, and borders take on functions of filtering, separation and circulation management. They are not just places where checks are undertaken: many groups are turned back at borders. The situation at the Greek-Turkish border, mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, is certainly not an isolated case.

So the idea that the process of globalization is essentially one of dissolution of borders is simplistic, and in my view misleading. Even under conditions of globalization - particularly under these conditions, in fact - border regimes enforce territorial control and selectivity; they are powerful sorting machines of the globalized world. There is therefore no real scientific justification for associating or equating globalization with porous or disappearing borders, rather than seeing it as a complex, inherently contradictory process. This default setting has turned blind spots into a scientific programme and suppressed any contradictory developments. These developments can only be deciphered if we cease to consider globalization solely in terms of cross-border transactions or flows. Instead we need to take a much more comprehensive view, seeing it as a relatedness that extends beyond the nation-state and the national society.11 Globalization is not just about crossing borders; it is about modes of interdependence that include the hardening of borders, the denial of mobility, and border selectivity. The question to ask about globalization is not just how old borders are opening or disappearing, but how borders are changing, and what logic of sorting is in operation at the new borders . Under conditions of extensive, indeed massive flows of mobility, borders are designed to allow only the desired mobility, and to control and, if need be, prevent unwanted mobility. In such an understanding of globalization, opening and closing belong together; to grasp the dialectic core of globalization and give it sharper conceptual definition, we can even speak of a globalization of opening and a globalization of closing. These are two sides of the same coin.

It is a widespread misunderstanding to reduce the new forms of closing that are constitutive of globalization to mere (ideologically motivated) anti-globalization. In fact, the reverse is true: because globalization exists, borders become more important, are gradually upgraded, and are used as sorting machines. The closure and control of borders is therefore not only compatible with globalization, but an integral part of it and a prerequisite for opening. To re-emphasize this point: globalization does not cause...
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