Stretching Borders Beyond Sovereign Territories? Mapping EU and Spain’s Border Externalization Policies

Abstract

The EU’s borders, and those of its member states, are shifting zones of power arranged by novel institutional strategies and the subsequent proliferation of legal texts, maps, technologies and actors, reconstructing where and what the border is. This paper focuses on the phenomenon of “border externalization” in the European Union, in particular the case of Spain, describing it as a stretching of the borderline. Externalization includes the outsourcing of border control to non-EU countries, as well as the spatial extension of where EU governments and forces can patrol, thus a literal expansion of the borderline. The latest EU strategy of border policy and migration control yet to be fully implemented is called “the Migration Routes Initiative” and involves spreading checkpoints, migration control experts and other dispositifs of migration management along shifting migrants itineraries passing through sending, transit and destination countries. In this paper we identify different policies and institutions that constitute this “external dimension” of border management for the EU as a whole and for Spain vis-a-vis its Southern borders with Africa, mainly focusing on the Rabat Process. These changes in migration management practices present possible reconfigurations in the exercise of sovereignty and its relationship to territoriality.