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This paper argues that contemporary hegemonic projects such as ‘Fortress Europe’ exercise violence at their borders forcing certain people to be borders. Those very borders and the people who inhabit them constitute paradoxically the very conditions of possibility of any hegemonic order. This paper focuses on Sangatte, the site of a Red Cross ‘reception centre’ outside Calais for refugees and migrants seeking entry into Britain, as one manifestation of the border in the context of asylum and migration in Europe. This paper draws on contemporary Marxist and feminist theory to think through how those on the borders of the state provide real, material insights into practices that subvert the power of the sovereign state and its corollary hegemonic projects of violence, and to argue that attempts to envision alternatives to the contemporary hegemonic political orders in Europe must begin at the political apertures opened up by thinking the border as paradox. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mass migration of non-Europeans into Schengen Europe and the terrorist attacks perpetrated in the name of Islam in various cities in the European Union have led to a series of mediated public debates on the control of the nation-state border over the past few years. Right-wing populist parties have been prominent in structuring these debates. However, can the urban media, and specifically the commercial ones often accused of sensationalism, be considered as tools that promote the securitization and progressive closure of the state border within Schengen Europe? Based on a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the representation of non-European migration and terrorism by a metropolitan commercial paper in borderland France, the current article shows that reporters can be instead instrumental in the definition of a "Mediapolis" that is a debordered, global, and moral space of mediated appearances helping to deal with international crises. The promotion of this Mediapolis is presented as the result of multiple spatial and temporal conditions in a series of interconnected cities contained in the French nation-state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the relationships between the migratory policies of the EU countries with more experience of immigration and their national political cultures. It focuses on France, Germany and the United Kingdom. It then looks at Italy, a relatively new country of immigration, which, with 3,000,000 legal immigrants, has become the fourth country of immigration in Europe and the first in the Mediterranean basin. In its final part it highlights the incipient process of 'communitarisation' of the immigration policies of EU countries in the last decade. This process, which has already entailed a significant convergence of their migratory policies, is expected to continue after the recent enlargement of the European Union. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]