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Death is the ultimate border. We who write for a living realize with the passing of a comrade that we write on the hither side of this border, approaching it ourselves on borrowed time. We, too, sh...

Writing against the grain of historical‐materialist as well as social‐constructivist accounts of cross‐border networking within the European Union, the author draws on a stream of French geopolitical writing so as to craft an alternative conceptual lens for understanding the possibilities and constraints of cross‐border governance in Europe today. Informed by phenomenological and hermeneutic approaches, this work attempts to reinsert time as a key analytical variable in grasping the intensity and direction of change and possibilities for novel territorial alignments brought about by recent shifts in the structure and flow of world power. Within this largely Francophone tradition, the challenge thrown up by globalization is framed not so much in political economic terms but fundamentally as a problem of meaning (or, sens), experienced in the dilemma of adequately interpreting the temporal and symbolic break brought on by the end of the Cold War and the demise of all forward‐looking ideologies whic...

Political governance and democracy are associated so closely with the modern nation- state that it is difficult to imagine them in any other political setting. As a consequence of globalization, the alleged passing or "unbundling" of the nation-state (at the very least its transformation) therefore poses a severe challenge to these two founding concepts, requiring a new language of politics and rule which can at least partially transcend traditional state-centric territorialities (Ruggie 1993; Held 1995; Linklater 1998). The field of human geography, in particular, has been challenged to think beyond the "territorial trap" of perceiving culture, identity and politics as isomorphic with national space (Agnew 1999).