Building Borders on a Bias: The Culturalist Perception of Turkish Migrants in France and Germany and the Debate on Europe’s Boundaries

Abstract

In most German school manuals on politics and society, the history of European integration is illustrated with a picture of smiling people tearing down a barrier and opening up the border between France and Germany. Indeed, the dominant European narrative up to the 1990s was one of breaking through frontiers, opening and enlarging a free market space for people and goods, while constantly reshaping and deepening a very particular political union. In the aftermath of the Eastern enlargement of 2004, however, this process ground to a halt. The story now seems to be more about defining the boundaries of Europe, drawing new frontiers and establishing new and ‘thicker’ borders as a buttress against migrants from non-member states (Cardwell, 2009: 164). The history of European integration could be summarised as follows: ‘an international cooperation project in the 1950s, to a policy-making project in the 1960s, an institutionally consolidated system in the 1970s and a system of trying to foster identity and citizenship in the 1980s and 1990s’ (Bruter, 2005: XIV).