ABSTRACT
From my home in Nijmegen it is about a quarter of an hour by bike to Germany. The perception of that time travel in this borderland is very special, because I not only leave Nijmegen, I leave the Netherlands. It is hence a bicycle tour ‘abroad’, to a foreign country. In perception however, Germany lies much further away than a quarter of an hour. The one day trip feels like the beginning of a holiday. Physically, the border is not obviously present. A sign with ‘Willkommen in Deutschland’, an old, expired customs office, an artistic border monument and an occasional police van, these are the physical remnants of the political border. What dominates in this inner borderland of the European Union is the void, the disappearance. The vagueness of the morphological border may be striking, yet this is not to say that the border actually disappeared. The border is not present, yet it is not absent. Maybe imperceptible to the untrained eye, but vividly present and mentally powerful, there is still a border between the Netherlands and Germany. Once one has crossed the border, one does de jure and de facto enter another country. Crossing a border makes one from a human from the interior into a human from the exterior, a foreigner, someone from them over there. The opening-not-disappearance of borders in the European Union after 1993, it is clear that the border in the European Union, is still filled with meaning, and internalized in everyday practices, institutions, conventions, acts and mentalities. It is clear that this certainly holds for borders that are not as open as is the case of the European Union. Hence, it is safe to say that despite a strong rhetoric of global world, as we saw in the ‘90s, borders continue to play a persistent part of the daily lives of human beings. This contribution deals with the question why and how in general borders are socially produced and/or reproduced Why do we border ourselves and at with what gains and at what price for ourselves and others? And if we do accept that borders are indeed human constructs, does that mean that it is possible to reconstruct the border, to give it another meaning? I will argue that the void of the border in terms of its morphological absence should not be interpreted
as a symbolic void. The borderland may be emptied of the border proper; the head of the borderlander is not emptied. Although indeed the heads may be full, and some may be more full (of themselves) than others, this does not mean that the function and mentality that we still implicitly attach to borders, even if these have been opened as is the case in the European Union, could not be deconstructed and reconsidered ontologically. It is that deconstruction which opens the way for a new dynamism in this time and age, in order to make it possible to ontologically reinterpret this persistent phenomenon called the border.
