Boundaries Revisited

Along with the post-war European integration process, the western part of the continent has experienced decades of stability and prosperity, which was gradually supplemented with growing levels of mutual trust, collaboration and openness. Eroding internal Schengen borders have illustrated this process well, symbolizing additionally de-boundarization tendencies. However, the first years of the new millennium's second decade have revealed opposite processes in some part of Europe, where borders, in many cases, have been (re)approached more classically, especially by decision makers as well as by the people. The aim of this volume is to critically (re)approach classic understanding of borders and border related policies by revisiting the concepts of boundary, state-power, borderlines, nation state buildings, empires, geopolitics, border disputes, history and memory of borders as phenomena again visible in the contemporary Europe. Multidisciplinary perspective was achieved by inviting scholars representing not only various academic specializations (historians, political scientists, geographers, sociologists, etc.), but also various European centers, where borders are subjects of reflection. However, to build a platform of mutual under-standing and high level of homogeneity, the starting point for all the contributors was a classic text of Ladis Kristof and concepts of boundaries and frontiers as two manifestations of borders. This resulted in eleven contributions prepared by seventeen authors, representing academic institutions from Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Russia and Turkey. The volume consists of three sections. In the first part, the four contributions deal with the old, previously "hot," but later frozen border disputes and conflicts. New forms and manifestations of the previously problematic borders are debated here. The second section collects also four texts that test the newly emerging border issues, usually in the case of previously relatively stable and "non-border-related" cases. They are more a matter of political and academic disputes, often attracting and engaging wider audience. The third section of the volume deals with a border related interactions with a highly conflictive potential and those, where a borderline and its location have already become an object of the "twenty-century-like" relations.