A union in distress: Contested spatial imaginations,narratives and practices of European (dis)integration

Integration approaches

Conventional integration theories and aspirations underline the idea of a progressive linear development. This is also what the EU’s policies of integration suggest and reflect how they are debated in public. Imaginations of a growing EU as a common framework of action, a common market and currency dominate, and which nations unanimously adhere to. Shifting political grounds and local bottom-up factors are rather neglected in this perspective (Scheller and Eppler, 2014: 6), and critical voices, in this narrative, are interpreted as Eurosceptic voices questioning the integration project. Disintegration as a social dynamic does not become addressable within this body of research (see also Bach, 2008; Münch, 2006; Scheller and Eppler, 2014: 6; Schünemann and Barbehön, 2019: 3; Vobruba, 2012).

Disintegration debates/EU-sceptical approaches

Just as European integration has never been a one-sided process, approaches towards a better understanding of the different dimensions of growing together – or apart – in Europe have diversified, varying between rather soft, critical approaches and hard, exit-related theories. Throughout its existence, the EU has undergone many moments of doubt. In order to offer conceptual frames for such worries, research approaches have, for instance, been concerned with specific internal regulations and outward politics of the EU or the role and position of national versus supranational interests within its frameworks.

Quite a few scholars try to disentangle the patchwork of critiques and strategic appropriations regarding the union’s fragile normative assumptions (see, for example, Scheller and Eppler, 2014; Schünemann and Barbehön, 2019; Vollaard, 2014). Recent years have witnessed an increased scholarly fixation on the powerful and seemingly omnipresent discourse of so-called ‘hard’ Euroscepticism (Szczerbiak and Taggart, 2000: 6), addressed not only as an expression and result of the difficulties faced by the EU (e.g. Dobrescu and Durach, 2016) but also as a much deeper crisis of trust and identity, sometimes even labelled as a ‘profound legitimacy crisis’ (Hall, 2014: 1238). Disruptive moments including withdrawal of membership of the EU (Brexit, for example, Schimmelfennig, 2018) have led politicians as well as scientists to speak of European disintegration (e.g. Becker, 2017; Patomäki, 2016; Vollaard, 2014).

Interactive approach

The interactive approach is rooted in theories of societal (dis)integration due to growing social disparities grounded in the process of globalization (Heitmeyer and Imbusch, 2012: 9). According to this perspective, integration and disintegration are considered emergent concepts that never become fully realized. Instead, Heitmeyer and Imbusch observe a sequence of phases of stability (integration) and crises (disintegration). Disintegration, here, is explicitly not understood as the opposite of integration, but as a contesting and dynamic process opening up space for innovations, debates and searches for solutions (Scheller and Eppler, 2014; Vollaard, 2014).

In a number of studies on EU-related developments, such conceptualizations were taken up, offering a new path in the debate on the future of the EU. This research highlights the limited possibility of determining exactly the integrative or disintegrative impacts of societal developments. Therefore, they differentiate between four dimensions of integration versus disintegration (territorial, institutional, economic and social-cultural (Scheller and Eppler, 2014: 296)) and discuss disintegration strategies as functional mechanisms to support integration, for example regarding the cases in which certain competencies are re-directed to the national level (Scheller and Eppler, 2014: 317). EU critique, in this approach, is understood as a form of appropriation, seeing critique generally as a constitutive part of the democratic project (Schünemann and Barbehön, 2019). In sum, European integration and disintegration are seen as taking place simultaneously and as processes which reciprocally influence each other (Scheller and Eppler, 2014: 10).

Decentring Europe

Postcolonial and feminist approaches to European processes (e.g. Boatcă, 2015) have emphasized the urgency of re-thinking Europe – as yet another province of the world – and re-positioning the West not only in relation to the global South and East but also to its violent (neo-)colonial histories. This strand of debate highlights the ambiguities that develop with an ‘integrated’ Europe that – based on its linear narrative of modernity (implying a logic of ‘catching-up’ and one-way development for regions defined as the external and internal other (Chakrabarty, 2008; Mitchell, 2009)) – co-produces internal and external outsiders. Put in dialogue with (dis)integration debates, this paradigm of ‘decentering Europe’ demands an unpacking and historicization of the coloniality of Western knowledge that underlies conceptions of Europe, European thought and theory-building (Chakrabarty, 2008). Against this background, critical Europeanization literature emphasizes non-Western knowledge and narratives and re-visits (dis)integration debates from Europe’s margins (Göle, 2012; Keinz and Lewicki, 2019; Römhild, 2010). Therefore, by focusing on the violent exclusions unfolding in epistemic, embodied and affective practices, and on necropolitics (Gressgård, 2022; Mbembe, 2019) and racialized violence reproduced within migration and asylum regimes (Davies and Isakjee, 2019; Gutiérrez Rodríguez, 2018), this strand of the debate promotes newly emerging imaginaries/imaginations of Europe as a space of continuing struggle around spaces of citizenship and belonging (e.g. Römhild, 2010).

These four fields of conceptualization on European (dis)integration are based on different understandings and spatial imaginations of Europe and the EU. Linear integration theories provide a vision of the European territory, which through increasingly common political and economic regulation creates a homogeneous field of action. Eurosceptical stances focus on the effects of this linear vision by uncovering the fragmentations within the territory articulated in numerous conflicts over national autonomies versus homogenizing regulations. The interaction approach focuses on the processes of establishing a common Europe unfolding between the (incongruent) aims of preserving integration, increasing its effectiveness and recognizing national autonomy (Höreth and Mann, 2013). And finally, the postcolonial approaches emphasize imaginaries of Europe as a space of ongoing struggles and micro-acts of re-creating Europe from below.

These conceptualizations of the European (dis)integration processes provide different ways to imagine, narrate and practice Europe and various forms of individual, collective and national European belonging. In this special issue, we therefore put the focus on the specific entanglements between imaginations, narratives and practices that shape everyday lives in different geographical contexts at different scales.

Spatial imaginations of European (dis)integration

(Intersecting) processes of European integration and disintegration are tightly interwoven with the process of (spatial) imagination. What, and who, is thought of as ‘European’ and ‘Not-European’? And how, for instance is the construction of territories linked with the attribution of (cultural) identities?

Since Bourdieu’s influential writings on the correspondence of the physical and social construction of spaces (e.g. Bourdieu, 1996), this idea was taken up and developed in many different considerations of the ways space is produced and constructed, controlled and reshaped. One strand of ideas deals with the transformation of space through the process of territorialization and through the constitution of nations, alongside the invention of borders by combining administrative, juridical, fiscal, military and linguistic functions (see, for example, Balibar, 2009; Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013). Another strand of literature elaborates on the production and construction of space by social, economic, ideological and technological factors, stressing people’s daily uses through different forms of exchange such as negotiations, protests, forms of memorizing and re-imagining (Low, 2000: 127f.; Massey, 2005). Departing from this, spatial imagination is understood as ‘a form of negotiation between sites of agency (individuals) and globally defined fields of possibility’, thus forming socially and locally situated practices intending to re-create and re-shape society’s space (Appadurai, 1996).

How we think about space and place informs our actions and materializes within the social world. According to Jen Jack Gieseking (2017), ‘geographical imagination affords ways of thinking about space and place, whether conscious or unconscious, that evoke power as it shapes practices, behaviors, and social structures’ (p. 1). Imaginations therefore influence and shape processes of boundary-making, distinguishing ‘us’ from ‘them’ (Gregory, 2009). Analysing spatial imaginations, hence, targets the interrelations embedded in organizing heterogeneity and difference (Massey, 2005), the interplay of ‘power-knowledge-space’ (Gieseking, 2017: 3; see also Gregory, 2009) and, setting out from a critical engagement with ‘assumptions, stereotypes, and expectations associated with space and place’ (Gieseking, 2017: 2) ‘plays a central role in envisioning and enacting just possible futures’ (Gieseking, 2017: 7; Massey, 2005).

In line with one of the central aims of this Special Issue, we aim to explore how imaginations reproduce (post)colonial orderings of the world and related bordering practices (El-Tayeb, 2011; Göle, 2012; Gutiérrez Rodríguez, 2018). What Stuart Hall (1992) figured in his seminal text ‘the West and the Rest’ reverberates until today. ‘Europe’ is thought of as a relational entity constructed, imagined and enacted along non-Europeanness and what is deemed ‘not Europe’. This powerful relational imaginary constructs, for instance ‘non-whiteness as non-Europeanness’ (El-Tayeb, 2011: xiii) and imagines ‘European space and citizenship as a right for the “native” European’ (Davies and Isakjee, 2019).

Europe ‘integrates’, one could argue, from these perspectives on the grounds of disintegrative/dissociating and of differentiating inclusive processes (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013), that become tangible in phrases such as ‘Does Islam belong to Europe?’ or in the policies and infrastructures of immigration and asylum within and to Europe that strategically work at ‘keeping’ certain subjects (e.g. non-white/non-Christian subjects) out or rather benched to certain social spaces and positions in society. These spaces of ‘Disintegration’ within Europe, however, also form the space from which bounded and bordered imaginations of Europe are ruptured/irritated and how ‘Europe’ becomes re-imagined, as, for instance a translocal space that evolved out of (violent) global relations and connections (Adam et al., 2019; Conrad et al., 2013), as a creolizing world region (Boatcă, 2021; El-Tayeb, 2011), and as a space of citizenship in which ‘Europeanness’ is reconstructed by various marginalized citizen subjects from below (Römhild, 2010).

Narratives of European (dis)integration

The notion of the narrative has been used to describe a sense-making discourse that influences the way the environment is perceived. It conveys values and emotions, is usually related to a nation-state or a specific cultural area and is subject to change over time. In this sense, narratives are not arbitrary stories but invested with legitimacy (Seidel, 2009).

As a basic definition, a narrative is ‘understood as a spoken or written text giving an account of an event/action or series of accounts/actions, chronologically connected’ (Czarniawska, 2004: 17). Narratives offer an ordering structuring possibility of the complex everyday reality (Erlemann, 2012: 149). They reduce complexity by leaving out some aspects while highlighting others and creating causal chains for action (Groth, 2019: 8).

People use reassuring narratives to give meaning to their actions and create a commitment to act (Tuckett, 2011 in Bronk and Jakoby, 2020: 11). Narratives can thus be seen as tools in unfamiliar, ambiguous and new situations, triggering emotion and empathy and having the capability to influence, mobilize or exert power. This is valid also in a spatial dimension when people produce spatial narratives by ascribing meaning and value to certain places. For the purposes of this special issue, we propose a widening of the term ‘spatial narrative’ in the sense of defining with it the spatialities and meanings of stories providing orientation and legitimacy.

The European context is marked by a variety of competing narratives contradicting each other regarding the state of Europe. They provoke polarized debates oscillating between pro-European and contra-European positions, either focusing on the advantages of European integration or the local disadvantages. Remarkably, these debates take place at all levels in nearly every European country whether in eastern or western Europe.

One dominant and rather stable narrative on a common Europe comprises its imagined superiority, positioning civilian Europe as a ‘better geopolitical actor’ against various ‘Others’ (Bachmann, 2021: 3, 4). Another narrative of an integrated Europe underlines the position of the continent as a guarantor of a permanent post-war peace order (European Community (EC), 1951: 11) When this narrative lost power in the decades around the turn of the century, the economic narrative was strengthened with the argument, that economic integration was essential in order to remain competitive in the light of other upcoming world regions (Steinmeier, 2015). While Steinmeier reasoned rationally from an economic point of view, others have highlighted the missing of an emotional underpinning of the EU, which draws on the senses of its citizens in order to feel a united Europe (for example Bachmann, 2021). This absence offers a gap particularly for reactionary, Eurosceptical forces that try to convince European citizens of their aims by offering them a counter-narrative in which ‘the idea of a return to the national is opened up and glorified as the only way out ’ (Butz, 2016).

The EU itself has recognized the absence of a strong unifying narrative and in 2013 and 2014 launched the initiative ‘New narratives for Europe’. It brought together artists, scientists, intellectuals and European politicians to debate what a new narrative could look like in order to find a new vision for the future of Europe. As an outcome, ‘renaissance’ and ‘cosmopolitanism’ as two cultural ideals were considered suitable narratives stimulating the debate on the future of Europe (New Narrative for Europe, 2014).

From the outside, a popular narrative has developed against the background of multiple refugees movements towards Europe during the last few decades. ‘Fortress Europe’ has been used to accentuate the EU’s restrictive asylum policies since the 1990s. In light of the selective permeability of the EU’s external borders, many scholars have preferred to substitute it with the concept of ‘gated community’ (Rijpers and Van Houtum, 2007; Rumford, 2008) focusing on the simultaneous inclusions and exclusions for different categories of people and goods the EU’s external border regime produces.

In sum, the selection of narratives illustrates that Europe is constructed by a multitude of competing narratives, and it shows concisely how the interactive process unfolding between these competing narratives constructs either an integrated common European space or fragmented national or regional differences.

Practices of European (dis)integration

If we consider Europe as a spatially related construction, then what role do practices play? How does Europe get (re)constructed in practices? As the former sections have shown, we consider Europe as an entity that exists through the actions that keep it alive. Deeply intertwined with imaginations and narratives of an entity such as Europe are the practices that (re)construct it.

Research has looked at the processes that give shape to Europe or the EU for some time. There have been well-known and intensive activities and measures to get the continent to grow together, analysed in detail, discussed and sometimes critiqued widely (e.g. Kramsch, 2011; Lissandrello, 2006). Such studies have focused on the aims, norms or modes of governance, which have supported our understanding of the steps taken and the frames established for European coherence. In addition to such rather explicit approaches, we believe that Europe is considerably shaped through practices of everyday life. A need for the appreciation of everyday practice is not entirely new in EU-related studies as Adler-Nissen (2015) has already argued for more attention to be paid to the ‘mundane’ or banal aspects.

A conceptual focus on practices emphasizes the close entanglement of thinking and acting, with knowledge activated both on explicit and implicit levels (Hörning, 2001: 161; Reckwitz, 2004). It offers the possibility of approaching practices in their relatedness to one another, to consider ranges of possible action, adaptations and disruptions. Following Schatzki (1996: 110f), the practice-theoretical approach particularly highlights the enormous role of the implicit knowledge that is part of a shared understanding of joint activity and speech (Schatzki 1996: 188f). Practice is conceptualized as embodied, knowledge-guided action, between the human and the material and, following some authors, needs to be regarded as the actual site of ordering the social (Reckwitz, 2004; Simmel, 1992 [1908]). So, when looking at Europe as a kind of spatial order, we can see how a changing and evolving array of practices has helped to constantly negotiate and establish this spatial entity. In general, territories or spaces can serve as very meaningful – albeit temporary – manifestations promoting the routine character of practices. While Europe as an entity can most certainly gain a lot of stability through its norms and rules and their institutionalizations, a much more powerful and binding form of manifestation is to bind European values, norms and rules to a range of everyday practices.

Some spatially effective everyday practices of European integration had for a long time become rather unquestioned, such as the crossing of borders on an everyday basis, commuting to work, studying across borders, travelling freely through member states without showing passports, in trains or buses that fluently zigzag between the territories of different nation states, using social or medical infrastructure or even roaming. Looking at such everyday practices and their entanglements with knowledge and imaginaries, senses and imaginatives, material aspects and territorial conditions will therefore be an important focus of analysis of European spatial integration within the contributions of this special issue.