ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at borders in terms of their relationship with territory. The first two sections in the chapter describe the emergence and main features of the EU border regime and analyse the complex redefinition of the European political space it has entailed. The third section demonstrates that the peculiarities of the EU's political spatiality are reflected in two different official representations of its borders, which, in a sense, replicate the different dimensions of the border as ‘security technology’ as discussed in chapter 1. The main argument expounded in this chapter is that these different representations of EU borders substantiate the dialectic between openness and closure typical of the contemporary border regime, a dialectic that the fourth section in the chapter analyses in detail by considering the meaning and evolution of the concept of ‘integrated border management’ (IBM) and describing the main characteristics of the two geostrategic models inspiring EU border control policies.
