ABSTRACT
In 2015, the European border regime collapsed, at least temporarily, under the weight of its own contradictions. A few months later, Europe's executives were busy erecting a new border regime on the ruins of the old. At the same time, these efforts stand in continuity with existing European migration policy, as the persisting basic antagonisms have not been overcome – in the first place the asymmetric North-South relationship and the internal discord characterizing the project of European integration itself. Antagonisms that are “invisibilized” by the border understood as a reified social relationship. We analyze this process of reconstruction from the perspective of a materialistic theory of the state, outlining the struggles over migration policy against the backdrop of an imperial way of life and production. We argue that there are two rings of externalization that have both undergone repair work and reorganization in the wake of 2015. In the first part, we focus on the new “European Border and Coast Guard” to demonstrate how a genuinely European state apparatus is emerging from these struggles. The following section shows how European externalization strategies toward countries of origin and transit have been emphasized.
