ABSTRACT
One of those internal borders is the one between Germany and the Netherlands: a border that is 536 km long and 0 cm high. But for most of the people who live in the Dutch-German borderland, it is not the border's total length that is of any significance, but its level. Level, however, is not meant in terms of 'height', rather in the sense of 'experiencing' the border as obstacle - an obstacle that is at work within processes of socio-cultural relations and within the popular imagination. This level is related to perceptions of the border, its cognitive and affective meanings, which shape people's lives and forms of socio-spatial identification and can be circumscribed as the 'border in people's minds'. For, in spite of progressing European integration and the formal removal of the EU's internal borders, the barriers in people's minds persist to act as thresholds in people's everyday practices. These thresholds refer to imaginative borders that let everyday practices of borderlanders 'end' at the border and demarcate the 'bordered spheres' of people's lives.
