Geopolitics of Border Securitization: Sovereignty,Nationalism and Solidarity in Asylum Reception in Finland

ABSTRACT

The paper examines the recent security interventions at the northern Finnish-Swedish border crossing point in the town of Tornio, the particular focus being on the 2015 migration influx in which Finland received a tenfold increase in asylum applications compared with the previous years (~3000 → 32 476 asylum applicants). The resultant securitization of the Finnish-Swedish border and the organization of asylum reception practices, in which nongovernmental organizations played an important role, created tension between the Finnish and Swedish authorities, borderlanders, and within wider Finnish society. An empirical study of various materials (documents, interviews, social media debates and media reports) is used to examine the coexistence and intertwining of different border securitization practices and discourses. The analysis is structured around three story lines that disclose border securitization as multiple and aims to problematize the assumption that states, as entities holding sovereign authority, fully determine matters of border securitization. Firstly, the state intervention examined here occurred through and fully depended on collaboration with local authorities and nongovernmental actors. Secondly, nationalistic groups mobilized demonstrations against immigration and started independent street patrols in the name of security, throwing into question the effectiveness and authority of the state government in matters of border securitization. Thirdly, the discourses of the securitized Finnish-Swedish border reflect the wider solidarity crisis between EU countries with respect to shared sovereignty. The study complicates the understanding of border securitization as a straight forward state effort and provides a picture of a hybrid border securitization environment.     

Technologies of Border Management: Performances and Calculation of Finnish/Schengen Border Security

This paper focuses on the Finnish Border Guard, a professional law enforcement authority responsible for the control and surveillance of the Finnish and Schengen borders, and its performances of border security. Performativity approach means that the analysis of the material, consisting of the bulletins and reports that have been published by the Border Guard service, is not merely focused on the representation of borders but the bulletins themselves are understood as performances of border security. The paper argues that new technological innovations, together with new legislation and institutional procedures, now steering the governance of the Finnish/Schengen border, are bound up with a new culture of border management in which border security is not (just) conceptualised in terms of territorial sovereignty but in terms of international cooperation, prevention and economic profitability.     

Borders in tourism: the transformation of the Swedish–Finnish border landscape

Permeability in the European internal borders has increased, challenging state-centric tourism development in the border regions. The aim of this article is to examine the development of the Finnish–Swedish border, which has been one of the European Union's internal borders since 1995, as a tourist attraction. An examination of the path of tourism development in this border region shows that the differentiative meaning of the border that has been characteristic for state-centric tourism development has diminished and some of the excitement of crossing the old east–west border has vanished. At present the significance of the border for local tourism development can be seen in the new cross-border enterprise and commercialisation of tourist attractions. Such development can have a wide-ranging influence for the reorganisation of border landscape and dissolution of mental boundaries in the region. This study contributes to an understanding of the transition in the European Union's internal border regions from the perspective of tourism.     

Border Narratives at Work: Theatrical Smuggling and the Politics of Commemoration

This paper discusses how cultural and artistic work constitutes a powerful means for mediating the collective memory of state borders. The empirical case study concerns the commercialisation of a borderland culture in the form of a ‘Smuggling Opera’ in a cross-border project on the Finnish-Swedish border region where border crossing has been unrestricted for decades. This theatrical performance constructs a particular local narrative which contests the authorised representation of borders in the discourse of the nation-state. The narrative analysis method is applied to this popularised border narrative and its interpretation among local participants, leading to the conclusion that the understanding of state borders differs between authorised border narratives and the stories of borderland people for whom it represents part of the everyday surroundings, although both serve to fix the meaning and moral justification of the border or argument for its rejection. The narratives of people living in the ‘borderless’ Finnish-Swedish border region show the continuing significance of the border in people's lives as both a barrier and a place of contact.