ABSTRACT
This chapter explores some of the issues of the creation of an European Community (EC) without frontiers by looking at a number of the ways in which the Irish Border may change, both physically and symbolically, due to and during EC integration in the internal market. It examines ways in which the Border may be reinforced as a symbolic cultural boundary, which for hundreds of years, and certainly since the 1921 partition of Ireland into a twenty-six county Free State and a six county Northern Ireland defined some of the limits to local Border culture and community. The chapter deals with the ways the Irish Border symbolizes cultural dissonance in Ireland and the ways material relationships are changing at the Border, due in part to EC integration. It analyses the unproblematic ways in which the EC has used the term "frontiers" when referring to economic, political, and social barriers to free movement in an integrated economy of a common market.
