Migrating Borders and Moving Times. Temporality and the Crossing of Borders in Europe

Humans experience time in different ways: the future can be predicted, the past can be reconstructed, and the present can be ignored. The collected volume Migrating Borders and Moving Times: Temporality and the Crossing of Borders in Europe, edited by Hastings Donnan, Madeleine Hurd, and Carolin Leutloff-Grandits explores the phenomenon of borders through the troubled relationship between time as a physical phenomenon and time as a human experience. The book is a result of a long cooperation between researchers examining borders in the framework of EastBordNet and the COST network. Contributors are scholars in the fields of social anthropology, human geography, and political science. There is only one editor representing the field of historiography—Madeleine Hurd, an established expert on borders and territory in Scandinavia. The anthropological approach in the broader sense of the word seems to be the leitmotif of the collected volume.

The basic proposition of the editors of the book is simple: spaces are bordered by both territory and time. The authors explore three interrelated themes, which are connected by their common focus on borders and time. First, the way polity borders are narrated as separating time-spaces between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’. Second, how time features in the cross-border networks of migrants. Third, the relationship between time and the body itself as borders are shaped, felt, experienced, and embodied. Although the contributors use Einstein’s term time-space, they do not discuss time as a physical category. Time is, above all, a category of human perception. The authors do not understand time as linear, progressive, and orderly, but rather as concurrent, parallel, and synchronic. The simultaneity of competing temporalities is emphasized, which may at times diverge, converge, overlap, or collide.

Border studies have dealt with the issue of time in various ways. Michiel Baud and Willem Van Schendel constructed a ‘life course’ of borders as a framework for their comparative analysis;^[1] the concept of phantom borders captures the live legacy of past borders, which is still capable of structuring contemporary social and political reality;^[2] the metaphor of tidemark does not postulate a border line being located somewhere specific in the landscape. Like tides, changing borders cannot be captured, but they can leave material traces. The traces of the now almost obsolete Dutch/German border are the main topic of Chapter 1, written by Olivier Thomas Kramsch. The author claims that borderland signifiers encourage observers to remember and challenge both past and present meanings. Borders are seen as a process, in terms of ‘becoming’ rather than in terms of ‘dwelling’. In Chapter 2, Zaira Lofranco analyses the experiences of internally displaced Sarajevans after the 1992-1995 war. Focusing on two neighbourhoods located on opposite sides of the Inter Entity Boundary Line, the author shows the dynamic dimension of borders, which are moving in both space and time. Prewar interethnic cohabitation was indeed replaced by ethnic homogeneity, but both neighbourhoods have become more heterogeneous in terms of the socioeconomic status of inhabitants. These changes have created a feeling among the long-term residents of having stepped back in time due to the fact that their neighbourhood has become less urban than in socialist times.

In Chapter 3, Kathryn Cassidy describes the smuggling activities of Ukrainian citizens in the borderland with Romania. The author argues that, in order to understand the border crossings made by smugglers in the Ukrainian–Romanian borderlands, both shame and transtemporality need to be taken into consideration. Shame emerges from the attempts by female traders to elicit sexual interest from Romanian custom officials in order to divert attention. The actors mitigate their shame through comedic narrative forms of storytelling. The Soviet past is seen as a time when people were not forced to perform shameful activities in order to survive. On the other hand, new border regimes can stimulate the creation of new pasts. In Chapter 4, Jelena Tošić describes cross-border family activities after the opening of the sealed border between Albania and Montenegro. Locals on both sides of the border have been mapping family genealogies extending far into the Ottoman era. By doing so, they are openly challenging established oppositions (Montenegrin / Albanian, Muslim / Christian) and are strengthening cross-border patrilineal ties.

Robin A. Harper and Hani Zubida (Chapter 5) explore the difference between national time and the time of non-nationals through the case of Philippine labour migrants in Israel. Migrant experiences of time are dependent on their legal status and their distance from home and family. Carolin Leutloff-Grandits (Chapter 6) analyses Kosovo Albanians’ transnational family networks. Migrants abroad and relatives back home live in different times, yet they manage to synchronize their ‘time zones’ through the cyclical temporalities of migrant visits for family festivals and marriages. The migrant return visits can strengthen time-space disjunction. Migrants often experience home as conservative and villagers experience migrants as cultureless. In Chapter 7, Nataša Gregorič Bon explores an interesting feature of labour migration from Albania to Greece. If couples originally migrated together, it was often the wives who remained abroad, while their husbands returned home. Men benefit more from returning than female migrants. Women are, therefore, inclined to stay abroad. This enables them to successfully avoid traditional male-female power relations ‘at home’ and at the same time enjoy the elevated status of an important relative from abroad. Iosif Kovras and Simon Robins (Chapter 8) analyse the treatment of the deceased migrants who tried to cross the Mediterranean. Although undocumented migrants literally have no right to have rights, as living human beings, they must be managed and processed. By contrast, if they perish trying to reach the EU, they cease to exist as an issue for the EU border regimes: no people—no problem. The EU denies any responsibility for such deaths including the responsibility of identifying and/or repatriating their remains.

The editors of the collected volume have emphasized the fact that borders are not just objects or material artefacts, but also a belief, an imagination that creates and shapes social reality. Border studies based on the tradition of political history tend to focus on the creation of borders (movements / stability) or their maintenance (strengthening / dissolving). Political historians are used to understanding borders in a material sense, as objects. Border studies based on the tradition of social anthropology concentrate, first and foremost, on people and their practices, strategies, and motives. Are these two perceptions so very different? In my opinion, they are not. Borders as objects are time machines, which freeze certain political divides in the landscape/institutions and move them into the future. In this regard, border time is definitely linear. But borders as lines and infrastructure tend to play with time in more complicated ways. The more rigid, the more impermeable the border is, the more it manipulates the different types of time mentioned in the book—familial, national, transnational, and various types of cyclic time.

If we truly want to understand the temporality of borders, we need to explore both perspectives—borders as imagination/belief and borders as objects. The authors and editors of this volume have done an excellent job exploring the relationship between borders as social reality and time. Historians examining borders should follow their example, join forces, and create an equally in-depth volume on borders as objects and temporality. The conundrum of how existing borders, conceptualized as objects, conserve the past and how they create space-time remains unsolved. Nevertheless, the two perspectives are interdependent. Behind every story in the collected volume, there is a tangible border hiding in the landscape; on the other hand, borders in the landscape are borders because they influence people, whatever they may be separating and wherever they may create that separation. Only one thing about time is certain: it never flows backwards.