Judith MIGGELBRINK, Technical University Dresden, Germany
Kristine BEURSKENS, Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography, Germany
By opening many internal borders, EU member states have aimed at establishing a “common area of freedom, security and justice”—a space of integration and less hindered mobilities from which also border areas should profit. While inequalities and insecurities in EU-internal border regions still kept persisting in many hidden but also visible ways, the internal Schengen borders proposed an imagination of a space for free movement. Driven by biopolitical attempts to protect the population and safeguard the respective national communities, the handling of the COVID 19 pandemic disrupted this picture. In the emerging pandemic situation, border closures were among the means of choice, taken by many governments that eventually strove for an almost complete lockdown of societal activities. In the pressing need to find powerful ways to reduce the pandemic risks, European politics witnessed a COVID-19-related backslide into patterns of nation state-based problem solving.
Our contribution focuses on the German-Polish border region in this conflicting situation. In the light of the crisis, the stories and pictures of people living alongside this border once more demonstrated the strong cross border entanglement of everyday life in this area. Along ongoing empirical investigations, with a focus on an analysis of media articles published during the first and second wave of the lockdown, we show how national orientations, integration and insecurities have been negotiated during this pandemic and how such responses fuel into recently re-emerging debates on the role of the nation, the state and its powers to territorialise and secure, and related reactionary and populist discourses.
Mots clés : COVID-19|internal EU borders|everyday life|insecurity|media analysis
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