Borders and Their “Strong Repercussions”

One may think that borders do for societies what frames do for paintings. In both cases, outer lines mark the extension of the space occupied by what is inside the lines. Such a comparison was in fact made in passing by Georg Simmel, the early twentieth century German sociologist and philosopher: “The frame, the self-contained boundary of a structure, has a very similar meaning for the social group as for an artwork” (Simmel 2009: 548). On this reading, borders are not part of society, but external to it, in the same way a frame is not part of the picture it frames. Of course, we all know that an ill-chosen frame can play havoc with the overall impression of a picture. But it seems that Simmel, when drawing the analogy, had something else in mind. A “framing boundary,” he writes in another paragraph, creates a cohesive, self-governing society, set apart from the rest of the world, which in this sense is analogous to the “self-sufficiency of the artwork” (Simmel 2009: 549).

A “spatial boundary,” Simmel continues, divides a population into two separate parties by giving expression to prior or parallel “psychological boundary-establishing processes” (emphasis in the original). In an apparent contradiction to what he said before using the analogy of a picture frame, he now insists that spatial boundaries, far from being external to society, are a “sociological reality.” As such they are “a physical force” that transforms the internal functioning of the groups separated by them (Simmel 2009: 551). Even if Simmel doesn’t mention state borders explicitly, there is no doubt that he introduced his concept of the “spatial boundary,” which is backed up by a “psychological boundary,” with his home country and, more generally, the sovereign nation-state in mind.

Simmel can be read as suggesting that sovereign state borders are more than smoothly functioning “sorting machines” (Mau 2022) easing or suppressing the flow of passengers. Borders are also semiotic objects which emerge out of and store within them collective desires and fantasies. Simmel (2009: 551) writes that the coherence of a group is “symbolized in the spatial boundary” which in turn “radiates repulsions” toward outsiders. A phrase like this—a boundary that “radiates” repulsion—seems to allude to the fetish-like aspects of the sovereign border which is largely independent from its sorting function. In the USA and the European Union, some state borders are not only increasingly fortified, but also invested with the magical power to protect us from all the imagined evils associated with migrant “illegality.”Footnote 1

Simmel’s statement that every “border signifies defense and offense” is overgeneralized and makes sense only against the historical backdrop of a continent on the brink of war. He is right, however, when he emphasizes that borders, to the extent to which they signify defense and offense, only express “a standard relationship between two neighbors” (Simmel 2009: 549) or more distant societies. Borders symbolize and regulate inter-societal relations, and they are internalized as such. With something like this in mind, Tendayi Achiume (2022) has called the borders of Europe’s Schengen area “racial borders” since they can be regarded as perpetuating the continent’s racist and colonial tradition, even in the current situation where Europe is no longer driving world history. The point is that societies cannot be described independently of the ways in which they organize their borders through visa regimes, deportation rules or practices of border violence. The border tells us a lot about the respective bordered society, and vice versa. While Simmel is the first modern sociologist to arrive at this insight, his normative nationalism, which he tones down only late in his life (Fitzi 2018), leads him to exaggerate the unifying psychological effect of “a firmly circumscribed boundary line” on the population inside that line. Neither the consciousness of borders nor international conflicts between states translate automatically into national uniformity or what he calls “sociological centripetalism.”Footnote 2

For Simmel, the “consciousness of being inside borders” (Simmel 2009: 549)—inside a safe space created by well-protected borders—was indeed a happy consciousness of national unity. He did not foresee a future in Europe in which members of persecuted minorities or political opponents would experience borders as a hostile reality to be overcome at any cost. “The frontiers are my prison” is a line from Leonard Cohen’s song The Partisan (1969) expressing precisely this feeling of being incarcerated by borders.

Simmel conceived of borders primarily as internalized nation-building and identity-conferring institutions, not as biopolitical sorting machines to keep out allegedly unwanted migrants.Footnote 3 And, in the spirit of his time, he saw borders as staging areas for armies preparing to repel or attack an enemy. Like most of his male fellow compatriots, he welcomed World War I. Today we live in a different world where borders have other functions and meanings. In most parts of the world—notable exceptions are current conflicts in Russia/Ukraine and Israel/Palestine, among others—border struggles are not so much about the course of interstate borders but about their selective permeability for refugees, migrants, tourists, students, researchers, or businesspeople. While he could not foresee this development, Simmel’s observation that, once firmly established, modern fortified borders have “strong repercussions for the consciousness” (Simmel 2009: 551) of the societies separated by those borders is a useful point of departure for a more thorough discussion of what we call the “internalization of borders.”

Developing the Concept

To summarize Simmel, the border is many things at the same time: a sociological reality, a physical force, and a symbol of the nation and its relations toward others. In all these respects, the border has, to use Simmel’s expression, “strong repercussions” for society. This concept needs to be unpacked. The first thing to note is that internal repercussions of the European (or other) border regimes do not flow spontaneously from the border to the center of society. Rather, they are being actively produced by multiple forces in society. The border itself has to be distinguished from the way it has become an object of desire and political “imagination” (Ticktin 2023).

The idea of border internalization originates from the observation that sovereign state borders, especially if they normalize the use of force against (ill-defined) “irregular” migrants, have widespread consequences not only for outsiders who want to get in, but also for the internal organization of the society that is responsible for building and governing those borders. In the field of the sociology of migration, internalization research focuses on the domestic implications of any politics aimed at making border regimes sustainable, widely accepted and even welcomed among the population “protected” by those borders. Here is a broad working definition: Border internalization is the bundle of policies, practices, institutions, and infrastructures through which the sovereign state as well as its non-state and supranational allies, in constant interplay with critics and opponents, attempt to produce and maintain inside a bordered territory the necessary affective, social and politico-legal conditions for border and migration regimes.

Let me add two corollaries. First, we are primarily interested in “bad” and violent border regimes—like the crisis-ridden European regime (Hess & Kasparek 2017)—but it’s important to stress that the proposed working definition applies also to relatively “good” and welcoming borders. Borders are by definition exclusionary, or rather, they are built for the purpose of “differential inclusion” (Bojadžijev 2021). They are the site where foreigners are admitted to the territory of a state, or excluded if they don’t have the required travel documents or other reasons such as seeking asylum. Sadly, exclusion is sometimes a euphemism, as when coast guard personnel in the Mediterranean throw migrants overboard to their deaths (Smith & Steele 2024).Footnote 4 But borders are not intrinsically arbitrary, racist or violent. They can, in principle, serve reasonable ends and be influenced by universalist ideals of equality. In the 1960s, the United States, for example, gave up on the idea of organizing its immigration system around explicitly racial preferences (FitzGerald & Cook-Martin 2014: chap. 3).Footnote 5 The history of European unification also shows that a sustained policy of opening borders had significant, mostly beneficial, democratizing and peace-inducing consequences for European citizens and their societies. In this Forum, however, we are interested only in oppressive border and mobility regimes and their domestic prerequisites. Unlike the much-quoted “good fences” which make “good neighbors,” today’s oppressive border regimes are built without any consideration as to how they hurt people and to whom they “give offense” (Frost 1914).Footnote 6

Second, violent borders are not only internalized in the Global North but also in countries and regions in the Global South (or its East European/Eurasian equivalents), where people suffer the consequences of border externalization policies. Seen from the south, border externalization has its own internalizing effects. Morocco, for example, has been demonstrated to have expanded its border regime in recent years by shifting it from the edges of Moroccan territory into cities in the interior such as Fes, Agadir, or Casablanca, where Black migrants are abandoned and marked as racialized outsiders (Gross-Wyrtzen 2020).

Whereas others focus on the costs of unauthorized or irregular migration, we are interested in the costs of deterring migration for the societies responsible for the deterrence policy. These costs can be broken down into different components. They certainly go far beyond the economic costs of fortifying borders and enforcing restrictive immigration policies inside the country.Footnote 7 They also exceed the human costs of interior enforcement which are directed against undocumented immigrants, or against noncitizens in general. Of course, workplace raids, the detention of undocumented migrants, or their deportation can have traumatic consequences for both migrants and natives. Think of the following example: a couple of years ago, about 7 percent of all children in the USA, most of them being US citizens, lived with at least one undocumented parent. This means that it is impossible to neatly separate the “illegal” migrant community from all other residents. Deporting undocumented migrants may often “directly impact US citizens as well” (Watson & Thompson 2022: xvii).Footnote 8

This example illustrates the human costs of interior enforcement, but it also draws attention to the more general point we wish to make. The internalization of violent and arbitrary border regimes implies that not only outsiders who run up against border walls are being harmed, but also people living behind those walls with a false sense of security. Policies pursued with the professed aim of protecting the citizens of democratic countries by building militarized borders tend to jeopardize the rule of law and erode social trust among people in highly diverse societies (e.g., Cohen 2020; Goodman 2024). Moreover, there is a danger that citizens do not only accept borders as natural, but also the violence exercised by border guards and other agents against border crossers. Some sections of the population condone or even celebrate violence, whereas others close their minds and engage in border violence denialism (Cohen 2001). The militarization of borders has a corrosive effect, habituating the nation to violence against mobile and resident foreigners who are pursuing liberty and prosperity like everyone else. This raises the question of “border justice” (Mann 2022) which is a neglected aspect of the overall question of political and social justice.

Two Binaries

The concept of the internalization of borders is a difficult one because it logically presupposes an “inside” and “outside”—a territorial border—while at the same time denying that drawing a clear-cut dividing line between inside and outside is at all possible. One reason why this dividing line is constantly blurred is that contemporary migration regimes have either maintained or are aspiring to revive the colonial practice of confining sections of the migrant population in detention centers or other camp-like spaces. At the present juncture, these carceral institutions, which in legal terms are often neither fully inside nor outside the state (Rahola 2010; Samaddar 2020: 155–156), are experiencing a resurgence.Footnote 9 In the United States, certain politicians are publicly calling for “giant detention camps” (Sargent 2023) for undocumented migrants, while the European Union’s New Pact on Migration and Asylum aims to detain asylum seekers in a vast network of border camps called Closed Controlled Access Centres (CCAC). Migrants in these camps will be subject to the legal fiction of non-entry by which states claim that the arrival of a person from outside the EU only occurs once she has been legally approved to enter the state, regardless of her physical presence in the territory.

In addition, the inside/outside binary is challenged by the fact that the sovereign border is always both real and imagined, material and symbolic. In the political imagination, the binary does much more than in reality. The border is imagined as creating a territorially circumscribed and unified group of “good” insiders, well-protected from “evil” outsiders. That’s what has been called the “border fetish” (Albahari 2017: 64). Benedict Anderson also alludes to the fetish-like qualities of the sovereign border when he writes that it is based on the paradox of a fiction that is “more real than the reality,” or “super-real” (Anderson 2016: 156).

A similar problem bedevils, of course, the better-known conceptual twin of border internalization: the “externalization” of borders. Externalization has been defined as “the process through which states directly or indirectly operate activities related to border control outside their sovereign territories, namely in other countries or on the high seas” (Cobarrubias et al. 2023: 1, emphasis added). It’s in the eye of the beholder whether these activities can be called successful. For Europe, it has been shown that externalization policies such as the EU-Turkey Statement, while failing to protect refugees from violence and death, have deflected rather than “stopped” migration flows (Mesnard et al. 2024).

Both the externalization and the internalization of borders rest on the idea that border power manifests itself in territorial as well as in non-territorial forms and is exercised by the state as well as by non-state actors. Internalization research thus includes but goes beyond migration and border studies by focusing on the many ways in which external borders reach out inside societies and the minds of citizens. The concept of internalization owes much to the work of scholars who have argued that borders are neither fixed nor static, and that “what counts as part of the inside or outside is subject to ongoing negotiation and contestation” (Bosniak 2006: 7). Negotiation and contestation are possible and even unavoidable since borders are simultaneously territorial and social, legal and affective, real and “super-real.”

Recent years have seen successful civil struggles for widening the circle of who counts as being inside. A striking example was certainly the positive response of much of European civil society, not only in Germany, to the arrival of hundreds of thousands of refugees from Syria and other places, and the shift it brought about in European publics who, on average, have become more positive toward immigration and socio-cultural diversity in the last 10 years (e.g., Hamann & Karakayali 2016; Heins 2021; Harris et al. 2023). The mass arrival of non-European refugees was used as an opportunity to create inside Europe at least some of the affective and social conditions for a more humane border and migration regime. This transnational expansion of solidarity, which addressed and often succeeded in defusing popular concerns about “too many” migrants, has been triggered by what Jeffrey Alexander calls “frontlash” movements. However, these progressive movements produce countermovements. “Frontlash always produces backlash: movements of cultural, social, and political un-doing that aim to unwind cosmopolitan widening and civil incorporation” (Alexander 2019: 5).

Alexander’s conceptual pair of frontlash and backlash helps us to make sense of the ebb and flow of migrations struggles including recent border policies and their internal effects. It also sheds light back on Simmel’s assertion that perceived threats to the internalized border would be answered by “very active repulsions” (Simmel 2009: 549) unanimously supported by a cohesive public.Footnote 10 Contemporary struggles over migration and border regimes tell a more complex story. We see fluctuations of frontlash and backlash movements. Western publics are deeply divided over the issue (e.g., Ambrosini 2021; The Migration Observatory 2023). In fact, one could argue that the question of “the border” is now much more than an ordinary political “issue.” It drives what political scientists have called, not without controversy, a new and dangerous dynamic of “affective polarization” (Iyengar et al. 2019) within the electorate and the wider population.Footnote 11 Periodic “anti-immigration backlashes” (Del Savio 2020), for example in Europe after the “refugee crisis” of 2015, pose a threat to solidarity and civil institutions. They have considerable costs for the stability of society and its economy. Going beyond periodic backlashes, the long-term project of border fortifications deeply affects and transforms the societies on whose behalf they are realized. All of this remains surprisingly understudied. A “more systematic analysis of the social and human effects of fortifications,” which considers their harmfulness to both natives and migrants, “is still missing” (Korte 2021: 53).

Two Fallacies

We hope that we have built the concept of border internalization in such a way as to avoid two fallacies. The first is the functionalist fallacy which would claim that the border itself produces the social hinterland it relies on to perpetuate its existence. This is not the case. We are careful not to suggest that oppressive border regimes have consequences such as more racism or the erosion of the rule of law, which then feed back into perpetuating those regimes. Racism can be regarded as a causal input to violent bordering practices which in turn might reinforce the already existing racism, but only to the extent to which increasing border violence is accepted in society. This, however, is by no means certain. Oppressive border and migration regimes are unstable and can be changed if the population doesn’t fear immigration or is unwilling to believe that their future is being secured by “securing” the borders.Footnote 12

Second, our approach avoids the false cause fallacy. We do not suggest that the current border and migration regime is the direct cause of phenomena ranging from the erosion of constitutional constraints to racial discrimination. The border regime is not the one big bad thing responsible of all or most social evils. We rather believe that the fortification of borders, the trend toward abolishing the right to asylum and racist violence are but aspects of the broader project of authoritarian transformation of western societies. Militarized borders cause enormous suffering among civilians who seek protection and a better life beyond the borders that imprison them. But they threaten democratic institutions only if they are translated into more far reaching material and symbolic practices which need to be organized, funded, justified, and legalized inside the borders.

Moreover, we are careful not to mistake certain correlations or co-occurrences for causation. Correlation means that things move in line with each other. For example, escalating border violence, the deepening of racism in society, and the growing influence of far-right parties and policy agendas seem to be somehow connected. More specifically, we notice that EU member states at the outer borders of the Union, where most of the conspicuous violence against migrants happens, tend to rank relatively poorly compared to countries deeper inside the EU in terms of rule of law standards. Thus, according to the “WJP Rule of Law Index 2023,” Poland ranks 36th and is only one place ahead of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Other EU member states score much lower. Croatia ranks 45th, behind African states such as Rwanda and Namibia, and Bulgaria is in place 59, behind Malaysia and close to Ghana and Senegal. Hungary ranks 73rd, behind Kazakhstan, Indonesia and other Muslim-majority countries (The World Justice Project 2023: 22). We see here a correlation between this poor record of some European member states and their violent bordering practices. However, the causal variables at play are not at all obvious and need further investigation.

Dimensions and Fields

We agree with legal scholar Linda Bosniak (2006: 132) when she writes: “Liberal democracy’s allegedly soft interior cannot be entirely insulated from its exclusionary edges; rather, […] that exclusion routinely penetrates the interior as well.” To make these routine penetrations of the interior of society amenable to empirical research, we suggest distinguishing three analytical dimensions: the affective, the social, and the politico-legal. This distinction has deep roots in the history of social and political thought. Let us quickly recall Alexis de Tocqueville’s analysis of “sentiments,” “mores,” and “laws” as bases of American democracy and other political orders.

Tocqueville’s concept of sentiments anticipates much of the more recent affective turn in social sciences which has transformed how we approach the emotional dimensions of social life including the behavior of people in organizations such as border enforcement agencies (Vrabiescu & Anderson 2024). Tocqueville speaks of the “sentiment of superiority” toward others, the “sentiment of affection” that ties us to others, but also, and oftentimes, of the “sentiment of equality” on which democracy rests (Tocqueville 2012: 521, 525, 692). Sentiments flow from our belonging to, or being excluded from, a world of social encounters. Affect is a more visceral, often preverbal force, but like Tocqueville’s sentiment it is different from conscious knowing or thinking (“ideas” and “opinions” in Tocqueville’s language). As Sarah Ahmed (2010: 31) argues, being affected (or having a sentiment) also means “to evaluate” something or somebody in a way that drives us toward or away from other objects and persons. We tend to think of affect, emotion, or sentiment as unstable and fleeting. Tocqueville, by contrast, believes that circumstances, education, and the media can make sentiments “thoughtful and lasting” (Tocqueville 2012: 160).Footnote 13 Affect can be transformed into habit. For example, Annika Lindberg (2024: 12) speaks of Europe’s “affective attachment to border violence” as one of the reasons why the current border regime is so difficult to dismantle. Others, like Sartre (1995), have called antisemitism (and, by extension, racism) a habitual affect.

This implies that there is a bridge between affect and habit. Tocqueville uses the term “mores” (mœurs), which he takes from Montesquieu, to refer to habits and customs shared by large numbers of people. Mores are suffused with beliefs and lasting sentiments. They can be morally good or bad, and they can be, which is important, shaped and governed.Footnote 14

In addition to sentiments and mores, there is the law. Mores play a key role in Tocqueville’s analysis because of their complex relationship with law and law-making. Most of the time, he suggests a primacy of mores over the law. There is no legal guarantee against tyranny in a democracy. Any remedy against this danger “must be sought in circumstances and mores, rather than in laws” (Tocqueville 2012: 415). This argument also works the other way round. Mores can perpetuate injustice even when the government has begun to nullify unjust laws.Footnote 15

Following this tradition of political thought, I distinguish between the affective, the social, and the politico-legal, which roughly correspond to sentiments, mores, and the law in older intellectual vocabularies. The affective does not have “autonomy” (Ahmed 2010: 30); nor are the social or the legal autonomous dimensions of social life. These are merely analytical distinctions which in reality intersect and feed into each other. The sole purpose of the distinction is to structure the investigation of border internalization.

But more is needed to build a useful conceptual framework. To the extent that border internalization is about creating and sustaining the affective, social, and legal conditions for oppressive border and migration regimes inside a country, then we must also make room for thinking about ways to resist this process. Where there is internalization, there is counter-internalization.Footnote 16 Transnational migration, especially when it originates from the Global South, is polarizing the politics of immigrant-receiving countries. People are divided between those who want to see immigration stopped or reduced, and those who are, for whatever reasons, in favor of more open borders. Some have internalized a “desire for borders” (Rumford 2008: 3–4), while others harbor very different sentiments. These conflicting interests and affective forces correspond to, or are in conflict with, entrenched social practices (“mores”) and laws. To include counter-internalization into our framework is important because it helps us to avoid the trap of linear thinking in a world replete with contradictions and paradoxes.

Table 1 summarizes these ideas. I should add that the two columns of “internalization” and “counter-internalization” must not be read as expressing a neat opposition between “natives” and “migrants” which are problematic categories anyway. Empirically, the preference for restrictive border regimes cuts across this distinction and can also be found among former migrants or their descendants. Coming from a family of immigrants is no predictor of favorable attitudes toward an increasingly diverse society (Harris et al. 2023: 15).

Table 1 Border internalization and counter-internalization: Analytical dimensions and empirical fields
Full size table

A Note on Causalities

The idea of border internalization rests on the assumption that border regimes, especially violent and racist border regimes, affect the societies responsible for those regimes in ways that can be studied systematically. The militarization of borders threatens not only noncitizens outside the country who might want to immigrate, but also racialized migrant communities inside the country, borderland communities and the rest of the native population. Anti-immigration backlashes, the rise of far-right political movements, and the erosion of the rule of law are causally connected with increasingly militarized borders. If this is a valid hypothesis, researchers need to pay attention to the causal forces driving the interaction between border regimes and the wider society. These forces are of different kinds and operate at different levels and scales. To conclude this Introduction, I outline three main causal forces that in my view account both for the establishment and the internalization of oppressive border regimes: leverage, manipulation, and strategic adjustment. There may be additional mechanisms, but these three are certainly crucial.

Leverage means that strong actors impose their will on their weaker counterparts. In international relations, strong states often coerce weaker states into adopting certain policies. In migration politics, strong governments can force migrants outside the state territory as well as everyone inside the territory to put up and live (or die) with a violent border regime. Leverage can go beyond the routine use of a given set of powers and tools to achieve one’s goals. As Nathan Goodman (2024) has shown, officials in the USA have used the southern border to think creatively and experiment with new techniques of social control which were then also applied in the interior of the country. For example, the Border Patrol has frequently lent their personnel and equipment (surveillance drones, etc.) to domestic police units. Citing other examples such as the expanded role for the Border Patrol Tactical Unit (BORTAC) in policing the American interior, he concludes that “tools and powers developed for use at the border are eventually used for domestic policing. Militarizing the border does not merely militarize the border: it militarizes domestic life” (Goodman 2024: 4). As Joseph Carens (1987: 251) has put it: “Borders have guards and guards have guns,” but it is by no means always certain in which direction these guns are aimed.Footnote 17

However, leverage has downsides. It may antagonize those over whom power is exercised. Those who feel coerced into accepting a decision might reach for the proverbial “weapons of the weak” (Eule 2024) against their masters. Leverage can also backfire in other ways, in particular if accompanied by the kind of paternalism often displayed by western powers toward countries in the Global South which are tasked with stopping migrants on their way up north (Nzuki 2024). Another disadvantage of openly wielding power is that observers sitting on the fence might change their attitude and side with the weak in solidarity.

For these reasons, power holders have always been keen to make use of the arts of manipulation which have the distinct advantage of being by definition imperceptible to those who are fooled by them. Manipulation does more than using language and images strategically so as to persuade an audience. Whereas conventional power play including leverage is aimed at overcoming resistance, political manipulation is “undermining resistance” (Goodin 1980: 8) through subtle interference with the ways people think, feel, and behave. If successful, manipulation is quietly coercing people into choices they aren’t even aware they’re making. This ability of manipulatory politics to neutralize any opposition makes it morally more offensive and more dangerous than other forms of power. It is for this reason that political scientist Robert Goodin (1980: 20) has called manipulation “the ugliest face of power.”

In the context of migration politics, manipulation is widely used to create the domestic conditions for violent border regimes. During the 2024 US presidential election campaign, for instance, the single most used word in conservative political ads and speeches has been “the border” (Burgis 2024). It was insinuated that the allegedly wide open southern border was the mother of all ills afflicting a nation invaded by dangerous Others. The obsessive talk about “the border” and its vital importance for the nation is not a reflection, but part of the fortification of border regimes, in the same way as political language is an aspect of reality, not its mirror. Political language helps to generate the affective flows that attract people to strong leaders and repel them from anyone who is imagined as a threat to the nation and its borders. Not only good vibes are contagious (Ahmed 2010); fear and anger, too, can spread across large sections of a population.

In addition, and throughout the collective West, the obsession with “the border” is compounded by the rise of a “regime of war” (Mezzadra & Negri 2022) which does at least three things: it deliberately confuses migrants with “invaders” and “infiltrators”; it manipulates the population into accepting a Manichean world view of friend vs. foe, good vs. evil; and it habituates the population, via the media, to an endless stream of images of death and destruction occurring in “our” name in distant war zones, of which “the border” is but one.

There is one more causal force worth mentioning. In their book on racist immigration policies in the Americas, FitzGerald and Cook-Martin (2014) have identified “strategic adjustment” as one among several mechanisms of policy diffusion. Strategic adjustment results from unexpected events or new actor constellations that compel politicians to consider a change of course. In the European Union, strategic adjustment is crucial for understanding policy shifts in individual member states. As mentioned before, Germany, for example, has been well-known for a relatively liberal refugee policy after 2015. However, the electoral success of right-wing parties in other EU member states has pushed Germany in a new direction. Of course, it’s debatable whether the government was pushed or whether the right-wing turn in Europe gave German politicians a pretext to change course in line with what they believe is necessary anyway. In fact, even purportedly liberal politicians seemed quite happy to announce that Germany could no longer afford a “liberal refugee policy” (Kretschmann 2023) and had no option but to follow the rest of Europe in accepting the turn toward illiberalism in asylum and migration policy. Strategic adjustment is the main mechanism through which the illiberalism of some EU member states has been adopted and internalized by almost all EU governments.

All three causal forces—leverage, manipulation, and strategic adjustment—are key to understanding the fortification of borders as well as the domestic production of the affective, social, and legal conditions that are necessary to secure the long-term functioning of oppressive border and migration regimes. But none of these forces goes unchallenged. Governments can be overthrown, manipulation can be detected and avoided, and strategic adjustment can be countered by bolstering the autonomy of states in the international system. Counter-forces against border internalization aim at reinventing the democratic state as an “existential space” (Simmel 2009: 549), but in a sense that deviates significantly from the nationalist meaning attributed to it by Simmel—a space without violent borders that is a sanctuary for refugees and all others, regardless of their legal status and migration history.

The Forum

This Introduction has offered a conceptual framework of how to study the internalization of borders. Forthcoming papers will present case studies on the affective, social, and politico-legal dimensions of border internalization as well as on situated ways of countering the spread of border power inside countries. The authors, who were all members of an international research group on “Internalizing Borders” at Bielefeld University, Germany, are social anthropologists, historians, legal scholars, political scientists, and sociologists from Europe and the USA. Accordingly, the articles will cover aspects of border internalization from different disciplinary angles.

Some contributions will explore how negative perceptions of migration, and thus the support for oppressive border regimes, are being shaped by the law, welfare policies, or conspiracy theories. Others focus on specific countries such as Italy, Poland, or Switzerland, among others. All articles of this field-defining collection contribute to the same key question: How does the ongoing project of fortifying and militarizing borders, and the violence perpetrated by state and non-state actors at the borders, affect and afflict, transform and undermine democratic societies, and what can be done about it?