ABSTRACT
As was mentioned in the previous chapter, the phenomenon of the international border is a complex set of physical conditions, social processes and practices, norms and perceptions. Ignoring some of these dimensions weakens our understanding of the phenomenon, reducing it either to analysis of insignificant empirical regularities or to abstractions divorced from reality. Additionally, it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to study borders separately from borderlands and vice versa, because they mutually determine each other. The borderland, indeed, exists insofar as it is influenced by a border, the status of which is due to the boundary, while border regimes and infrastructure, the system of trans-border communications, border management strategies, as well as most relevant perceptions of these cover not only the border and narrow adjacent strip but a much wider area up to borderland counties and provinces. Thus, the EU–Russian border and borderland are to a large extent merged in this chapter’s analysis, which aims to specify both the physical and virtual features of the object whose security is at stake. First, I consider landscape, socio-economic, and other factors that have an objective dimension and exert a significant influence on the border’s functioning. Then, in the largest section of this chapter, I attempt to trace the evolution of mutual perceptions in Russia and current EU member states bordering it during the post-Soviet period. This is very important because such perceptions shape a virtual border between the Self and the Other. In the final section I shall scrutinize the most popular representations – both modern/territorialized and postmodern/deterritorialized – of the Russian–EU border(land).
