^aDepartment of Political Science, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1S 5B6. E-mail: wwalters@ccs.carleton.ca

¹An earlier version of this paper was presented as a keynote address at Rethinking European Spaces, Royal Holloway, University of London, April 2005. I am very grateful to the organizers and participants for their comments.

Abstract

This paper explores three ways of imagining borders in Europe. The first is the most common. It sees borders in relation to an emergent European region-state or polity. The second looks beyond conventional political figures and uses the gated community to think about the complex political affects and social identities that invest the border. The third also breaks with standard political images, but this time by drawing upon the realm of information technology. Here I thematize the firewall — a non-geographical, non-territorial figure, and non-linear form of border. My second and third images are closer to Foucault's idea of a diagram. The point of the exercise is not to establish which is the most accurate. If borders are multiplicities then we need a plurality of concepts to think their different dimensions and changing functions.