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Along the Borgesian Frontier: Excavating the Neighbourhood of “Wider Europe”

What would a non-Eurocentric European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) look like? Starting off with this perhaps “impossible” question, the first half of the article traces recent shifts in thinking about ENP on the part of EU administrators and intellectuals who argue for a strengthened and reinvigorated neighbourhood policy around the Southern Mediterranean, Middle East and CIS countries, through what has now been termed a differentiated “ENP plus”. Parsing recent EU reports, opinions and speeches, it isolates a crucial ambiguity within this re-framed policy landscape regarding ENP's relationship to the previous round of EU expansion, which has important political consequences for how ENP currently envisions the thorny problem of transition within the neighbourhood. The second half of the article draws on a parable by the Argentinean novelist-philosopher Jorge Luis Borges to frame more sharply the problem of cartographic representation embedded within ENP. Applying the neologism of a “Borgesian frontier” to the space of the European Neighbourhood, the paper concludes by suggesting some potential pathways for re-imagining this space in ways that work along with, rather than are “blind” to, contradictions inherent to Europe's newly minted external borderland. At stake, the article argues, is a politics that can properly re-envision regions of the world located at the limits of Europe's sovereign spatial imagination.