Paper short abstract:

This paper seeks to read the EU’s Neighborhood policy and Border Externalization practices towards the Southern Mediterranean as a mode of writing “other” non-EU spaces into a single European standard of understanding development and mobility.

Paper long abstract:

We read ENP and border co-operation schemes promoted by the EU in Northern Africa and beyond as linked to a broader project to recode non-EU legal and political codes into a sole 'EU' role-model. Based on fieldwork and ethnographic interviews with EU officials, border officers and consultants in Brussels, Vienna, Madrid and Rabat we analyze the ways in which the Neighborhood is framed. We examine the production of a European borderland through a "modernity/coloniality" lens and using "border/thinking" (Mignolo 2000) to signal particular geopolitical constructions of otherness. Similar to Hamid Dabashi's criticism of Eurocentric epistemologies (2015), we propose that ENP can be understood as a "Geography of Coloniality" which reads other spaces as to how similarly they resemble the "metropole". The ENP's tool of "reading back into itself" furthermore erases other epistemes and potential geographical alignments (historical or current) that are not centered on the EU, such as the Non-Aligned Movement, Pan-Arabism and even the turbulent years of transition in Southern Europe.

While signaling this coloniality of knowledge production in ENP and border management schemes we also highlight the mutivocal dissonance, which occurs simultaneously. In this regard, the case of Morocco is exemplary signaling ways that "Neighboring" governments both adapt but also morph or resist ENP Action Plans. We conclude by looking to other emergent geographic epistemes signaled by the different protest cycles kicked off by the Arab Spring as well as by new migratory flows that disturb the South-North directionality that predominates debates of the migratory "crisis".