Tag Archives: European Union

July 27, 2017 · 8:53 am

The Earth of Nvogorod

“Nvogorod [is] the village where my grandparents were from in Belarus,” Jared Kushner clarified on the eight page of 11-page of testimony he provided to the U.S. Senate, intending to reference Novgorod, off the Volga, but not following Belarusian geography or Kushner family history. when he sat down with the head of the Russian state investment bank that had funded many state projects, to “help advance the President’s foreign policy goals” in a half-hour meeting perhaps designed to open the secret back-channel between the incoming Trump administration with the Kremlin many suspected both Trump and Putin had desired. Gorkov is a banker, but had studied in the arm of the intelligence agency of the Soviet Union, like Putin, and was suspected to have been a trusted agent to Putin–as well as to be seeking to address the sanctions that were imposed on the bank since the invasion of Ukraine. Gorkov said meeting with foreign companies–not governments!–was “normal practice” for an officer of Vnesheconombank, without mentioning the Ukraine, but he hoped to talk to Kushner as a businessman, stressing a business angle outside diplomatic contacts between foreign ministers; his ties to security services made him precisely the sort of individual entrusted for delicate tasks of a personalized government, as it had led Putin to appoint him to run a state bank tasked with financially funding many of his own personal pet projects.

The sort of kinship that the donation of earth Gorkov carried to New York seemed a way to forge a human tie to Kushner, and to suggest something like an odd token of fealty–although it does not seem that Kushner got it. But the sense of a tie to the earth akin to the ties that Russia had long claimed to Ukraine, seemed an odd sort of argument about the ties to land the Russian government felt to the area of the Crimea in Ukraine, and the pro-Russian separatist factions in Ukraine that Moscow has supported since 2014, and Putin hoped that Trump would recognize as a part of Russian territory. If Kushner sought to minimize the stakes of the half-hour meeting by describing the exchange of trinkets and tokens like a bag of dirt, the gift symbolized questions of territoriality and Russian rights to Crimea–to personalize a territorial conflict that led the European Union to target Russian energy, defense, and finance sectors, but which insider ties to Kushner–and Trump’s White House–might help smooth.

Tattered Ukraine Flag Planted in Contested Earth

It is no surprise Russia wanted to shift from a topic of international debate to an internal issue of administering domestic affairs, asserting irredentist ties to the region settled by Peter the Great, by securing a personal and confidential contact to Trump’s team before it assumed government power.

So why the dirt from Novgorod on the heels of the 2016 election? It seemed a personal touch, if one that Kushner didn’t get, and that Gorkov seemed to have aimed fairly low as a way to present a token of opening a personal tie to the son-in-law Trump clearly trusted. Perhaps the most amazing aspect of the gift is how openly Kushner didn’t get it–and the land of Crimea that Gorkhov probably wanted to personalize as a part of Russian lands Putin had only sought to restore to his country in a rightful manner might conceal the 1.6 million internally displaced that the aggression into Ukraine had produced, and the conservative estimate of over 10,000 civilian and military casualties, and almost 24,000 injured, as it entered its fourth year.

In concealing the personalization of a major foreign policy initiative, by dismissing the presentation of a “bag of dirt” Kushner may have foregrounded the highly personal nature of the back-channel of foreign policy–the meeting was set up by the Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, who had ties to several members of the Trump administration in waiting. Donald J. Trump administration has continued to pressure Russia over its involvement eastern Ukraine. Although the United States, soon after Trump’s inauguration, in fact imposed new sanctions that Russian called tantamount to a “trade war” on nine companies and twenty-one individuals tied to Russia’s occupation and annexation of Eastern Ukraine, engineered by Rex Tillerson and Kurt Volker, Special Representative for Ukraine Negotiations, and approve sales of anti-tank weapons to Ukraine in 2018, Gorkhov seemed eager to open a personal contact with Kushner between businessmen, parallel to American national interests. Was the bag of earth and art from “Nvogorod”

Might Jared Kushner have mis-remembered his ties to a Russian region where Charles, his father, regularly took the kids–suggesting that it was Novgorod? The bag of dirt might seem a link that Putin or Gorkhov wanted to consolidate, and probably brought from Belarus, but the suggestion of the strength of regional ties to a region in Russia’s sphere of influence, who also hoped to develop close ties to the United States. It arrived beside “a piece of art from Nvogorod, the village where my grandparents were from in Belarus,” although the ideas of this being a tie of affectionate remembrance is contrived. Oddly, displacement, death, and invasions would have been told in the dirt that Gorkhov sought to present to Kushner, could well have evoked the city from which Kushner’s grandparents were in fact refugees, albeit because they had fought as partisans in Belorussia against Nazi invaders–now the nation of Belarus. In describing an ancient Russian city, long part of Lithuania, that was residence for many Jews, Kushner revealed his hazy purchase on a site dear to his father Charles, whose parents had once been members of the city’s large Jewish community from the Pale of Settlement, where Jews were granted permanent residency in a region imagined fenced off and enclosed, as if to be the site where Jews had long lived apart–a point of memory not dear to Kushner, where Jews had made up a large part of the overall population, and had been a large group of partisans, but faced anti-semitism.

But Jared oddly used the term associated with Novgorod Land, near Moscow, where, one suspects, the dirt he had been brought by the Russian banker Sergey Gorkov, personally appointed to run Vnesheconobank (VEB), the foreign bank of the Russian Federation by Vladimir Putin, had derived–a region close to Moscow, where Kushner’s father-in-law had famous ties.

*Novgorod Land in Duchy of Moscow (1593)*

Kushner’s admission to receiving a ceremonial “bag of dirt” from Gorkov not only played down its ceremonial status quite adroitly–“he gave me two gifts–one was a piece of art from Nvgorod, the village where my grandparents were from in Belarus, and the other was a bag of dirt from that same village”--seemed a token that this grandson of immigrants thought to be innocuous, but in underscoring its incidental nature. But the city in the Pale of Settlement where Kushner’s family hailed was from from the bucolic land of prancing reindeer mapped in 1593, he betrayed his deep sense of ethics in claiming that bag as his own, and may have called attention to the somewhat conspiratorial gesture the head of the VEB, revealing ties of a broader sphere of Russian influence the bank had Combe to embody.

Kushner’s orthodox religion is public record, and a matter of considerable pride. But Kushner cloaked that ethnic identity and whatever significance his family might have assigned the dirt–and whatever Gorkov thought he was doing carrying the earth to New York City–a bit too smoothly. The conspiratorial nature of the gift seemed symbolic, but the associations that the earth seemed spiritually impregnated were deprecated in odd ways in Kushner’s haste to play down the meeting’s significance as an exchange of family trinkets. Kushner’s grandparents had fled the walled Litvak ghetto of Nowogródek months after it was established in June, 1941, in Belarus, joining a fierce Jewish partisan resistance in as Nazi troops extended the Jewish genocide into Russian lands. As the Nazis ghettoized Jews and extended policies of extermination in the city near Minsk, the Kushner elders joined a Jewish partisan squad in the Belarus–escaping the ghetto via a tunnel of over two hundred yards dug over weeks by his grandmother Rae, then seventeen, with her brother Chonom, by hand-made instruments, successfully tunneling underneath electric fencing surrounding the ghetto walls, and helping some 350 Jewish men and women fled the ghetto to nearby forests where many lived for a surprising stretch of time, often in underground bunkers: would the groups trained in Zionist Youth Groups in the Pale of Settlement think of themselves as Russian? Or was this the history Gorkov tried to conjure, to forge a tie to Trump’s son-in-law?

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Filed under Belarus, Cold War, geopolitics, Vnesheconombank, World War II

Tagged as burial grounds, Crimea, diaspora, diasporic imagination, European Union, foreign relations, Jared Kushner, Jewish diaspora, NATO, Navahrudak, Novogrudok, Pale of Settlement, Russia, Ukraine, Vnesheconombank

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The Imagined and Actual Geography of Brexit: Topologies of Social Anxiety

What sort of precedent did the Brexit vote sent for the validity of the demonization of immigration, and the growth of a firmly anti-globalist impulse? The combination of a growing state security apparatus and economic insecurity on European boarders has created a fear of hordes and the arrival of migrants moving on foot that has created the now-dismantled migrant camp known as the “Jungle” near the port of Calais, not far from the Ferry Terminal for ships leaving for England. This settlement became a site emblematic of the proximity of migrants to Britain in the summer of 2016, and helped to embody the fears of immigration close to the shores of England, giving a concreteness to the fears of immigration that deeply divided Britain on the need to protect its borders, and the dangers of doing so. It was a debate about what being British meant, and where we draw our borders, which the Calais encampment, as the posters of refugees from Eastern Europe and Syria, illustrated with increased proximity.

Crossing to Calais on the Eurostar this summer, I looked out intently out of the rapidly moving train window for migrant camps who had been so central to the “Brexit” referendum by which England recently left the European Union, that has held up to 6-8,000 refugees hoping to move to England–and some suggest the number reached as high as 10,000. Indeed, as “Leave” seemed so successfully cast as an imperative, and “Remain” as the honest commitment to “Remain” seemed to have decidedly less media presence and staying power, the haunting residents of the camps, filled with refugees and migrants from Syria, Eritrea, Sudan and Afghanistan, if often left out of most maps of the election, provided a compelling if faceless specter for many.

Reuters

BBC

The haphazard and improvised constellation of lean-tos, make-shift huts, and tents were ordered in streets beside orderly rows of fenced-off white metal shipping containers relocated to Calais to provide temporary forms of housing after their arrival. Although there were not any migrant camps in evidence from my position in the train, the camps were in the past few weeks increasingly in the news, as the UKIP party that predicted an England inundated by refugee influx that social services and health could not accommodate, all because of England’s membership in the European Union, on the eve of Britain’s vote on the European Union Referendum–as “Leave” parties conjured fears of what belonging in the European Union would mean for the everyday Englishman in an age of increasing global displacement of refugees and cross-border traffic of men and women seeking work, education, and safety. When the rapid train suddenly paused for unforeseen difficulties due to people on the tracks, one couldn’t but wonder how the halt related to those risking lives to enter the tunnel running beneath the Channel, whom local police quarantined in semi-permanent “homes” of converted shipping containers.

While the Eurostar connected two railway stations, and half of London and Paris was glued to the European Cup, the “Brexit” vote revealed a hiving off of about a third of Britain similarly eager to separate itself from the European Union–as voters voted, probably unaware of the consequences, in a plebiscite that trumped parliamentary politics in anti-democratic ways. For Brexit became a performative mapping of a severance from Europe, in ways to manufacture an imaginary boundary between England and a refugee crisis. The precarity of living in shipping containers now seems to be about as great as that of the European Union. What was Jungle is largely destroyed, rendered uninhabitable save for the 1,200 unaccompanied minors who reside in the complex of huts, tents, and containers, as 4,403 migrants bussed to refugee centers across the country, to seek asylum, the settlement provided an effective threat of migration and effective specter of fear in the EU Referendum. Indeed, it helped to ensure the surprising and unexpected success of a referendum designed to keep refugees at bay and finally withdraw the country –at significant national monetary cost–from the European Union for the foreseeable future. As multiple fires began to burn in the Jungle after workers moved in to begin dismantling the camp, while some pointed the finger to refugees seeking to dismantle and erase the structures where they lived others pointed to British anarchists, even with the clearance began, so strong was the fear of migrants that the fate of 1,000 children seeking entrance to the UK is unknown, suspended by the post-BREXIT government of Theresa May.

English voters on the Referendum were presented with almost dizzying fears of immigration and declining social services that were impossible to visualize adequately. In an onslaught that dominated the news and challenged voters’ attention spans and moral compass, “Leave” flyers used fear to mobilize against remaining in the European Union. In a canny onslaught and bid for attention, reminiscent of right-wing politicians, flyers of “Leave” raised the specter of fears of immigration policies out of control and wrested away by a European Union whose member states stood only to escalate. The eventuality of remaining in the EU was seen as an abdication of responsibilities, and a misplaced trust in Brussels to control the entry of refugees and Eastern Europeans seeking jobs into the UK: if migration to the UK had grown to above a quarter of a million–“the equivalent of a city the size of Newcastle“–the arrival of two million over the coming decade mandated by “free movement of people” conjured a suitably dystopian future. Voting to Remain in the European Union was to accept this lack of control, and the subordination of British law to an over-reaching European Court; expanding the myth of foreign oversight of Britain, Leave claimed to offer the opportunity to check the flow of migrants to restore control to British hands. The argument of empowerment may have been deluded. But the powerful promise to return £350 million in taxes flowing to Brussels, and the prospect of immigration growth once such “candidate countries” as Turkey, Serbia, Macedonia, and Montenegro joined Romania, Bulgaria, and Croatia, to the tune of a cost of nearly £1.8 billion, provided a compelling rationale to vote “Leave” and to identify interests with the possibility of controlling the fair of the expanded borders of globalization alone, and rather than in the European Union. As a movement of “faux populism,” carefully orchestrated to be effective at the ballot, the Brexit supporters stirred up fear into a central role in the election that attracted a growing range of supporters to the ballot.

The dizzying expansion of a region without frontiers was joined by a cry “to take back control” of England’s future. The Referendum was presented as “our last chance to take back control,” a virtual mantra of the Leave campaign, and control “our borders” and international “influence” lest the nation be filled with immigrants against who one can draw no clear border. With the Turkey, Serbia, and Macedonia joining the EU, ran the implicit message, Syrian refugees were bound to be waiting at the gates as well, without a compelling way to turn them back.

Daily Express

Such a compelling framing of the debate about the nation’s compromised future in a landscape of expanding “rights” fostered fears of an end of public futures, “without handing our permanent control to people we cannot vote out”–as if the vote presented the last attempt at independence, ignoring the special relation of the UK had long insisted to the EU. To be sure, the Leave campaign also increased regulations that the EU introduced, without suggesting other financial benefits.

The mapping of the response to the Referendum released a new plethora of maps in hopes better to explain the final vote of the plebiscite that precipitated the break from the EU. Can these maps–and the mapping of social divides in England’s complicated tapestry of islands which integrate immigrants and regions where they still remain unknown, provide any insight in the difficulty to create consensus about the growing population flows that globalization has produced? The question is important, because it suggests a new problem of political consensus not only in Britain and the European Union, but also in the United States. For the unprecedented misinformed plebiscite gave voice to a deep unease with parliamentary deals that brokered the terms of England’s membership in the European Union, and with globalization, that dangerously undermined the responsibilities that the EU has gained to respond to the global threats of refugee crises–a role that has been foisted upon it by the economic promise Europe continues to offer as a zone without apparent national frontiers. While we’ve been told by informed voices that the EU “had it coming,” whatever that means, or that the current European Union compromised British demands, or warned that the creation of social and political affinities could ever follow from enforced economic union, or give rise to public confidence, rejection by plebiscite of membership in the European Union subverted democracy, by a campaign bred from xenophobic fears and assertions the EU “has failed Britain” as a whole.

The recourse to demographic polling, hex bin maps sought to go beyond easy dichotomies, and unpack what seem deep-running fault lines within the country, and the difficulty of reconciling the nation given the increased political fault-lines attempted to process and reconcile divides in political parties that plagued the land. But rather than suggest the complex lines of fracturing between the political mosaic of Conservatives, Liberals, Labourites, UKIP and Greens in England’s new political landscape, the Leave/Stay dichotomy revealed new divides in the body politic.

Despite the many tired dichotomies that have been extracted ad nauseam from data visualizations of the EU Referendum–from old v. young, north v. south, working class v. metropolitan elites; educated v. non-graduates; identifying as “English” v. cosmopolites–the complexion that has redefined the country reflects a growing retrograde tendency of rejecting the status quo and belief in the benefits of hiving off that was undemocratic and displayed a perverse nostalgia of deeply conservative roots.

The referendum that former Prime Minister David Cameron presented as a panacea or safety valve to staunch opposition to the EU in Great Britain encouraged one of the most badly informed electorates in memory to protest the entrance of eastern Europeans into the country, and the perception of economic malaise and overburdened public services, and erase the benefit of free trade accords and that led to considerable economic growth. The economic amnesia Brexit provoked led to a massive rejection of the national government and indeed political elites, even when undermining their economic interests, producing the increasing likelihood that many wish to leave Britain even among working class groups in England and Wales, and many voters more angry about the EU government than aware of the actual impact on trade relations to Europe or manufacturing and health standards. Although turnout was in general quite high, with 30 million expressing their opinion at the ballot box, or some 72%, the vote was predicted to be determined by turn-out, and the distribution of votes varied. If most in Scotland turned out, many in London and in northern Ireland voting less, and many of the regions who voted to “Leave” turned out to vote intensely–and turnout markedly lower in areas with greater numbers of younger voters–who tended to vote to Remain in reflection of their economic futures, especially in areas with greater student populations in relative to their size. But the appeal to the nation and national independence deeply obscured the issues on the table.

BBC

What was Cameron thinking in opening up this question to a plebiscite that gave greater voice to those with stronger opinions, and indeed in opening up a question of particular complexity to a public yea or nay vote that hinged on turn-out? Democratic “consent” to membership in the EU was long been “wafer thin” in much of Britain, and low turnout among the young gave a greater share of the vote to Brexit. But the opportunity that the vote offered many the chance to decamp from the EU in ways few intended. For during a refugee crisis, the cards were steeply stacked the party reduced to take “Remain” as its slogan, although the very passivity of whose construction suggested an absence of cogent arguments to respond to false promises of helping England’s shaky economy, persistent low wages, growing waiting times at National Health Service, and rising rents–all of which were represented as stretched thin by serving migrant workers and their families, and rising rents.

Partisans of “Leave” tapped such concerns so effectively that despite the value of data visualizations in anatomizing and describing the broad distribution of adherents mobilized behind a “Leave” mandate, the vote seems little understood or analyzed for its appeal as in its ramifications, and has created an ongoing puzzle about what place of England will now occupy in relation to the EU–or how the EU will look.

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June 28, 2016 · 11:26 pm

November 17, 2015 · 8:01 am

The New Xenophobia

One of the scarier consequences of the Paris Terror Attacks are the waves of renewed xenophobia that have swept Europe’s already seething right wing, and somewhat surprisingly travelled across the Atlantic. The suicide bombings by jihadis were widely mapped in Paris at first, in attempts to comprehend the coordinated suicide bombings and sites at which terrorists struck with AK47’s and Kalshnikovs in quite shocking near-simultaneity. (Coordination of the attacks, which claimed 130 lives, and left 368 wounded, undoubtedly increased their terror, and eerily echoed the parallel hijacking of planes on September 11, 2001, in suggesting vulnerability and geographic reach of an unseen network.)

The transformation of reflexive spontaneous public displays mourning the victims or in solidarity with migrants have all too rapidly been replaced in many European cities, as if leading us through a looking glass, into nationalist protests of anti-migrant sentiment, channeling fears that have grown with threats of another attack into neo-nationalist sentiments–as if governments had failed to defend public safety, following on the immediate declaration of a state of emergency, closing of borders, and multiplication of police raids. The initial reflexive show of widespread solidarity of mourning and commemoration at the unprecedented attacks appeared to heal profound shock and disbelief at the murders at outdoor restaurants and night clubs in Paris and attempted assassinations at a soccer stadium attended by the President of the Republic outside the city. Those public displays of sentiment contrasted sharply to how the deadly attacks have fed a new xenophobia in Europe and America, and a deep suspicion of the “other” of the refugee–now increasingly suspected of disguising their own ties to terrorist cells. If these protests appears–inadequately–to orient and focus fears of further terror attacks of such terrifying scale, they suggest the disorientation before the shock of the Paris attacks, if not outright cynical deception. After ISIS claimed responsibility for the coordinated attacks, President Hollande’s immediate declaration that ‘France is at war‘ prepared the stage for a rhetoric of opposition evoking George W. Bush’s declaration of a clash of civilizations, giving broader circulation to a misguided concept first theorized by Samuel P. Huntington, but that gained startling currency to justify the so-called war on terror: it returned as a master-narrative of global oppositions reduced to the easiest alterity of us v. them and cast less in terms of law than religion; if it was readily reclaimed by ISIS news releases to magnify the actions of a group of attackers resident in Belgium who were second-and third-generation immigrants, the group of plotters was not based in Syria.

Despite clearly harmful over-simplifications in so faulty an opposition, the narrative have mobilized unjustified fears of infiltration removed from evidence: mapping ties between ISIS and the perpetrators of the attacks shifted nefariously to mapping terror onto Syrian refugees. Only three days after shock and outpouring of global sympathy to shootings that left 129 dead in six simultaneously timed attacks in the city’s center, fears of infiltration of displaced Syrian refugees by ISIS terrorist cells have gained unprecedented currency based on only the flimsiest of circumstantial proofs. It is as if this responds to the relative inadequacy and failure of efforts to comprehend the plight or the scope of needs of Syrian refugees, and shock at the use of military-grade weapons in civil spaces. Many of the multiple attackers in fact held French or Belgian nationality, and for disaffected underemployed Europeans living in the Brussels’ district of Molenbeek and other poor urban neighborhoods, the Islamic State appears to have exercised a particular appeal. And although the attacks were coordinated by the Belgian ISIS Lieutenant Abdelhamid Abaaoud, who sought to impress higher ups with a devastating attack in France, the group of terrorists and gunmen, if many were trained in Syria, are poorly mapped onto Syrians writ large, even if they were adept in evading security forces at airports and in cars. For despite his presence in every available database of terror, Abaaoud evaded suspicion, as did other Paris plotters and Belgian jihadists, who had sequestered large amounts of triacetonea triperoxide explosives and automatic explosives. The danger of terrorist threats and operations is profoundly mis-mapped and poorly apprehended as originating abroad, even if Abaaoud was indeed eager to “do jihad”: ISIS propaganda has lavished praise on the “eight knights” for having “brought Paris down to its knees” but increasing evidence points to local coordination of the attacks, most probably planned and executed by a contingent of Europeans. Yet rather than being coordinated at a remove from secretive locations in Pakistan, Syria, or Yemen, as Al Quaeda, European residents who joined ISIS have apparently hatched plots of their own–as firing automatics at close range in a concert hall or stadium–that reflect ISIS’ increased exploitation of social media and crowd funding to attract jihadis eager to pose beside the black ISIS flag.

From ISIS’ online recruiting magazine, Dabiq

The topography of the Paris attacks is increasingly reveled to have unfolded in the changing urban sociology of European cities in France and Belgium, and neighborhoods plagued by high unemployment rates and disaffected youth as St. Denis and Molenbeek; although some suspects have indeed traveled to Syria, they are removed from a central command, and seem to have enacted their own fantasies of violence in crowded public spaces (a rock arena and soccer stadium), rather than being orchestrated from abroad as the French President Hollande has asserted: indeed, despite the target of ISIS’s Syrian de facto capital, many of the ISIS higher ups have left the city long ago, and bombs are focussed, it is argued, on empty lots. The perpetrators are among thee roughly one thousand French citizens and six hundred Germans who have travelled to Syria to join the Islamic State; over 3,000 Europeans committed to jihad, attracted in part by IS’s increasingly effective use of the internet as a recruitment and fundraising tool, as well as for diffusing a call to jihad.

1. It is striking how public spectacles of collective mourning have rapidly mutated into frustration to contain deep fears of where terrorists might strike, and desperation at the unexpected attacks–even as parallel protests have occurred sympathetic to the plight of refugees.

The government’s official denunciation of attacks as “planned in Syria” have justified airstrikes against the Syrian capital of the Islamic State, led to over 600 raids and numerous house arrests across France, and increased visible military presence in much of the nation. French President François Hollande’s involvement of the army across the country “confirms we are at war“–as is, by extension, suddenly, much of the world. The absence of the face of the “enemy” has led concern to be projected upon the next potentially scary suspect, in an attempt to contain fears of repeat attacks, with the whereabouts of their actual coordinator unknown. We assume that it must be contained in fixed border, and arrive from a place that lies far outside the boundaries of the European Union.

Yet if France is at war, where’s the enemy? Molenbeek? The problem of mapping the threat has provided substantiation of deeper fears of the arrival of terror cells in the European Union’s borders whose provenance was limited to the Middle East is no longer tenable, and the bombing of unidentified targets in Syria may not even be an adequate response to a network of men in their late twenties or early thirties, mostly petty criminals, who are presumed to have recently traveled to Syria. Even if their radicalization occurred in Syria, they are not refugees.

New York Times

The lack of clear compass to where the enemy exists has made the apparent insinuation of terrorism into the European Union so startling that a finger has been quite deceptively pointed toward refugees. A similar lack of knowledge and growing fears of further attacks have come to justify an unprecedented public expansion of xenophobic protests calling for a rethinking of the European Union’s previous decision to admit refugees. These protests, stoked by threats of continued terror attacks, mirror a broad attack on outside, external forces as if they have indeed coordinated the vicious jihadi attacks, and the de facto ISIS capital of Raqqa constitutes an odd localization of the the terrorist threat. Bombings have been unleashed against northern Syria, announced to be in retaliation, concentrated in the operational capital of the Islamic State, have been concentrated on its outskirts. Even in the face of evidence locating coordination of attacks in Paris among local jihadis, the unprecedented intensification of anti-migrant rhetoric across Europe mismaps and exploits the danger of further jihadi attacks in irresponsible ways, largely because of the discovery of a Syrian passport near the corpse of one suicide bomber in the Paris attacks at the Stade de Paris.

Marion Ruszniewski/Agence France Presse

The Syrian refugee crisis has already provoked severe human rights violations, from sequestrations and confinements to arrests and strip-searches, and numbering, dehumanizing displaced refugees who try to enter Europe in search of residence and work. The renewed currency of ties between terror and migrants have also led American politicians eager to find common ground to condemn Barack Obama’s offers of asylum within the United States to those displaced–as if it constituted a heedless abetting of the spread of terror attacks, mirroring inflated anti-refugee rhetoric throughout the European Union. The wholesale borrowing of such groundless charges from right wing European parties is a particularly toxic manifestation of anti-Islamic xenophobia, transported by means of tweets and social media, and giving rise to a melding of anti-immigrant xenophobia and nationalism that attract an inverse demographic than protests welcoming immigrants in recent months, demanding their repatriation and literally cloaking themselves in regional nationalisms.

Russia Today

The protest of Germans anointing themselves as “Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the Occident” hearken back to visions of oppositional political history framed by Karl Schmitt in the Nazi period. The pressure they have put on Germany’s continued promises to resettle refugees has forced its Minster of Justice, Heiko Maas, to caution against equating refugees with terrorists, and affirm the absence of any actual ties between Syrian migrants and the perpetrators of the Paris attacks, and the EU to tighten security on the boundaries on the Schengen region.

The actual geography on the ground hasn’t at all changed. But the links already insinuated between hidden terrorist cells and Syrian refugees have materialized as a rationale for collectively turning our backs on the growing refugee crisis as if our actual well being and survival depended on it–and the acceptance of refugees has provided an entry point of sleeper cells who may execute similar attacks. As the manhunt for the terrorists who committed the atrocities has expanded, waves of panic have spread, stoked by accusations that resemble a witch craze, as the association of migrants and terrorists has virally mutated not only in Europe, but migrated across the Atlantic to the United States, in ways that stand to infect political discourse and debate. The recent reassessment of how open America’s doors would remain to refugees–and absurd request for assurances that none would engage in “terroristic activity,” as Greg Abbot of Texas put it, or, as Senator John McCain glibly demanded, while defending migrant asylum, that “there’s a process that prohibits any kind of infiltration like we’ve just seen in Paris,” entirely misses the point. And they stand to expand the waiting-time to process Syrian refugees in the United States beyond the 18 to 24 months now required, and hamstring plans to grant 10,000 refugees asylum in 2016–by requiring the heads of the FBI and Secretary of Homeland Security to personally approve each refugee for entrance, radically reworking practices of processing Syrian and Iraqi refugees at a crucial and sensitive time.

The discovery of a passport of the Syrian Ahmad Almohammad, who entered Europe from the island of Leros in Greece and the traversed the Balkans, near one site of terrorist attack offered circumstantial evidence but needed grist to identify refugees who have arrived in Europe with feared terrorist groups. Links between ISIS terrorists and Syrians refugees in Europe acquired the sort of substantiation which politicians believed to exist, even if they were not searching for them. Although no previous proofs of actual connections exist that could have prevented the Paris attacks, the fingerprints of one of the suicide bombers on a Syrian passport has suddenly substantiated fears of terrorist infiltration of groups of millions of undocumented refugees. Such identifying signs, no doubt since they provide the archetypical clues for how the police have apprehended and identified criminals, offer the needed grist for inflammatory ties between national security and displaced Syrian migrants and substantiating long latent xenophobic fears. The documented passage of the holder of the passport through the Greek island of Leros tied to the cluster of deadly attacks under the name Ahmad Almohammad suddenly offered possible grounds to fear potential infiltration by Islamic State operatives among the 1.5 millions displaced entering Europe from Turkey–even though the other perpetrators were of longstanding European residence, including a French national and Belgian resident. The poor sense of the geography of terror is to blame. For even the discovery of the even crudest hand-drawn map of a route from Turkey through Greece and Hungary to Germany provokes speculation about terrorist plots. Suspicions of the presence 4,000 “covert gunmen” in Europe have been stoked by ISIS videos promising further attacks, and led refugees to be stopped on suspicion in Turkish port cities.

Ahmad was clearly not the ringleader of the operations–local police finger the Belgian-born jihadist Abdelhamid Abaaoud–but the apparent presence of a Syrian refugee at a site of terror has provided the needed catalyst for expanding increasingly inflammatory rhetoric linking jihadi terrorism to Syrian refugees, despite the unfounded nature of these links. The potential links of terrorist threats and the arrival of Syrian refugees in Europe has been often cited by countries than had already built barbed wire fences in order to discourage the arrival and block the progress of Syrian refugees across the Balkans in the Schengen region. The border barriers built in Greece, Hungary, Bulgaria and Croatia served as physical barriers to transit points of entrance to the Schengen area of passport-free travel–

migrant-borders-europe-1442357424369-master495-v3

But the identification of the fingerprints–regarded as a clue that conceals the illogical association of guilt with all refugees from the region to seek a home in Europe–has become grounds to criticize whatever agreement existed for resettling refugees within the European Union.

And so, three days after outbursts of sympathy and horror at the Paris shootings, panic has been fostered about the fear for admitting terrorists disguised as refugees and displaced. European nations from Poland to Czechoslovakia, a nation already eager to turn away refugees from its borders, and a rousing chorus of tweets from others to close their borders in the light of terror attacks for which ISIS claimed responsibility,–by linking the danger of the further attacks that ISIS has promised to the presence of refugees within their borders, as if accepting refugees constituted surefire vulnerability to further attacks. But even closing borders won’t help stave off the attacks that ISIS promises would be repeated, though the reflexive agenda of far-right politicians in Europe–and, shortly after, in the U.S.–has been surprisingly swift. Poland provided one of the easiest cases for accepting this policy, its new right-wing government having been elected on a platform of anti-migrant platform. Such right-wing opponents of accepting refugees have even found recognition and previously implausible legitimacy as defenders of the common good: they obscure the fact that such home-grown jihadis originate in districts of European cities with unemployment rates exceeds 30%.

The Paris attacks may have broken a delicately negotiated managed solution to a growing crisis, despite the reluctance of Austria, Hungary, and other nations. Only shortly after the President of the European Commission, Jean Claude Juncker, instituted an emergency quota system to spread the admittance of an expanding number of refugees who entered the Schengen region among EU member states and their neighbors–requiring almost all of the member states to welcome a total of 160,000 people–the Paris attacks that claimed 129 victims have provided a pretext for Europeans as the incoming Polish president or Slovakia’s government to bend to popular protests against the acceptance of immigrants from Syria and the Middle East. (None other than the now-cranky Lech Walesa has reared his head again as a nationalist spokesperson, asking the world “to remember that Poland has been transitioning from communism for only 25 years.”) Yet the market has little to do with the rampant xenophobia nourished in anti-migrant marches in Polish cities, which have prominently included emblems of explicit nationalist protectionism.

But the Euroscepticism of several incoming conservative governments has relished in having found new fodder for their claims. Just after an equably distribution of refugees among Europeans seemed reached, the shock of processing the terrible deaths of innocent civilians in Paris seems to have helped redraw the map again, giving far-right European politicians from Marine Le Pen–tweeting an “immediate halt to all intake of migrants in France”–and Poland’s European Affairs Minister Konrad Symanskic, with Viktor Orbán not far behind, occasion to tweet about the need to close borders to prevent unsubstantiated fears of terrorist infiltration. Even in France, where President Hollande had recently if only grudgingly decided to accept 24,000 displaced refugees over two years, the readiness to evoke fears of admitting unwanted terror cells give expression and justification to longstanding deeply-seated anti-migrant and -immigrant attitudes that have been suddenly given a new boost by conservative social media.

While Facebook unveiled the Safety Check app to alert friends ‘I’m Safe’ just after the Paris shootings, post-shooting tweets have disseminated particularly dangerous rallying cries from the right on social media. The rage of tweets from members of the radical right from Filip Dewinter of the Flemish secessionist Vlaams Belsang party to Nigel Farage of England’s UKIP echoed the decision another Eurosceptic, Poland’s Foreign Minister, to use the events to revise his nation’s policy toward migrants. The tragedy has sadly provoked the weirder, post-tragedy tragedy of making it even harder for refugees to be accepted in Europe who are fleeing ongoing civil war, even as that war seems to have visited Europe. The New Xenophobia is of the most dangerous sort–a xenophobia prominently rooted in the fear of enemy agents potentially destabilizing the nation, based on linking the displaced to the most nightmarish event visited on a nation for several years. The new xenophobia stigmatizes the humane acceptance of displaced migrants based on the paranoid fear that displaced migrants, rather than seeking asylum, seek to attack our security and our cities and our homes.

The stoking of all this barely logical fear has, back in our own country, somehow swiftly set the stage for the weirdly unpredicted closing of ranks that Presidential candidate Donald Trump couldn’t have possibly foreseen himself. But it stands to add an element of distinct charm to the presidential race: for in the face of President Obama’s humane decision to multiply the number of accepted refugees accepted by the United States from Syria five-fold, a strikingly cynical consensus has emerged among American republicans in the wake of the Paris tragedy that state governors must act as federalist sheriffs to protect the country, and refuse the entry to displaced Syrian refugees which Obama had earlier promised. If Donald Trump has taken the opportunity to impugn the President’ sanity as much as his foreign policy choices–

–other candidates have not hesitated to broadcast their own readiness, unlike the President, by implication, to protect similar tragedies in the United States, and rather put at risk the hopes of entry of the 30,000 refugees that the United States government promised it would soon increase from 70,000. Indeed, the strike in Paris, claimed to be the proportional equivalent of the Twin Towers’ destruction in New York City back in 2001, and “France’s 9/11,” has led Republicans to direct renewed attacks on President Obama’s offer to resettle a small share of the refugee crisis to be equated with putting Americans at risk.

And so, just three days after the terror attack in Paris, Texas’ Governor, Greg Abbott, took it upon himself to write a letter informing President Obama that, given his experience in dealing with the dangers of migrant crises and immigrant threats, and the foiling of an ISIS-related terrorist attack, and by extension his greater familiarity with terrorist threats, he would refuse to allow Syrians to be placed in the state he represented, and called on the President to “halt your plans to allow Syrians to be resettled anywhere in the United States,” given the possible danger that they pose to the country. The chorus of Republican governors, from Bobby Jindal’s advice of prudence to Charlie Barker of Massachusetts, to Chris Christie of New Jersey, seemed an attempt to drown out the airwaves after shock over the terror attack. The bizarre move imitated far-right European parties again evoked the degree of “unacceptable peril” Republicans have long liked to Obama’s presidency, rather than any material threat. But within a few days, sympathy was overwhelmed by isolationism, as the television news network CNN trumpeted in banner headlines that governors of over half of the states in the union–twenty-seven states–have unilaterally refused to accept Syrian refugees, although the position has limited if any legal ground, in ways that have been imitated by a spate of Republican presidential candidates eager to prove their executive abilities. All have been magically transformed, including Jindal, into foreign policy experts.

CNN

The map of those still honoring their commitments to accept displaced refugees struggling to find homes appear to be in the vast minority–five states that seem almost foolhardy embraces of national vulnerability, from Vermont to Pennsylvania to Colorado and Washington, against the dominating common sense of declaring closed doors to the displaced. When placed in context of nearly five million Syrian refugees displaced truth, of course, regions of the United States have hardly absorbed their share–and those states whose governors were so quick to condemn the possibly plausible terrorist ties of refugees from Syria or Iraq had admitted far fewer than 300 or 250 refugees since 2011 at most: their governors seem to be showing their own ignorance by taking such a broad stance.

The map of those local Republicans who took it upon themselves to retract any offer of resettlement to all displaced Syrians–by far the greatest majority of refugees who left homes with hopes to resettle in Europe–seems not only an eager posing as patriots, or launch grenades at the existing foreign policy of the Obama White House yet again, but reveals an unforeseen opportunism as well as little familiarity with the workings of the federal government: those most quick to reject entry to refugees as if this were within their competence responded to the fears of their own constituents, or so it looks in the below visualization printed by the New York Times–the graphic may not map clearly onto where displaced Syrians have been relocated or placed, but to the demographics that local politicians seek to reach. The declaration spread like a meme, at any rate, over the airwaves of the United States, alerting constituents that their immediate governors would not place them at risk–as, by implication, the folly of the President had, and Hillary Clinton and the Democrats had been uniformly duped to advocate. And it is not a surprise, to enter the world of the archeology of data visualizations, that they mirror those states that reject the federal government’s expansion of Health Reform.

And so, the entire party has been associated with irresponsibility, and the other accepted xenophobia as the cry of the day. Quickly, not only Donald Trump but Marco Rubio and Chris Christie and Ted Cruz have joined in calling for shutting the borders to the displaced, and Bobby Jindal can appear a model of executive authority–whose deeply felt opinions illustrate little familiarity with constitutional law or Geneva Conventions.

New York Times

The opportune nature of such a quick in-step realignment of the debate about immigration took up its lines went without much comment. But it unsurprisingly seems to replicate opportune lines of political pandering at its worst: if it was the ultimate insult to most refugees, and the perhaps poorest forms of protection mirrored political opportunism below the historical 48th in the United States parallel that so sadly seems to continue to divide north and south, and have little correspondence to the areas where most of Syrian extraction live–or Syrian refugees have been placed by the US Government since 2012, and mirror the red/blue divide, as configured in these cartograms reflecting the electoral results of Presidential elections of 2004 (state by state) and 2012 (county by county).

What do they have in mind? Out-Trumping Trump? Winning, more likely, or hoping to do so by stoking fears and bringing them to the surface again.

For the close-minded knee-jerk refusal stokes the most unfounded fears in the wake of the tragic terrorist attacks that we are all vulnerable: and to pretend we are living in the shadow of 9/11, when Republicans once unbelievably came to be improperly equated with protecting our nation’s safety and common good, and to wallow in complete amnesia by bandying about the word “terrorism,” ISIS, and “terror attack” with undue frequency to suggest the benefits of responsibly closing our frontiers. The good old days.

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Filed under Clash of Civilizations, ISIS, Paris Terror Attacks, refugee crisis, refugees, social media, Syrian refugees

Tagged as European Union, Francois Hollande, Geneva Conventions, Greg Abott, Marine Le Pen, UKIP, xenophobia

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Fenced In/Forced Out: On the Uncertain Fate of the Refugees Kept Outside of Hungary’s Borders

The coils of razor-wire lain by a rag-tag group of workforce workers atop the thirteen-and-a-half meter high fences seek to define Hungary’s southern border by mapping a visible barrier against refugees fleeing Syria’s civil war. It is low tech. As much as blocking attempted passage across the border, the project has been a crusade of Hungary’s Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, in an attempt to inject vigor into the Hungarian strongman’s flagging political career, as much as to create fear among border-crossers. Since Orbán’s public promise in mid-June to construct a fence that defined Hungary as Europe’s frontier to mid-September, made mostly by state-paid workers, created a sufficiently imposing fence to close the country’s border with Serbia. This is border building as performance–introducing the sort of fencing that reveals his own strength to his nation, and to the European Union, staged by thousands of uniformed soldiers and with military vehicles and designed to illustrate the integrity of Hungarian border policy before the world media, as much as to demarcate Hungarian territory. The spectacle of the border has made a lasting impression on Europeans and the global media, creating a visual representation of a border for entry into Europe, even if it has not helped process refugees.

The fence has come to symbolize the tragic plight and obstruction faced by refugees who took a humanitarian corridor across the Balkans on foot or by car to enter Schengen countries, and present them face-to-face with an unexpected obstruction that would define Hungary’s integrity. The fence topped with razor wire and manned by improvised forces of military policing has become a notorious national symbol reveals the blatant disregard for human rights in a time of increased humanitarian crisis. It rests on a deeply misguided mapping of the bounds of the Europe Union, an entity under increasing pressure, now understood more as an employment zone than a geographic entity. The state police who ask refugees to apply for asylum at the newly prominent border as they wait in “transit zone” create a spectacle for Hungarians as much as for the global news. The liberal use of concertina wire along one hundred and ten miles (one hundred and seventy-five km), topped by security cameras and surrounded by border guards, created a newly militarized space–whose relation to an earlier iron curtain, by no means lost on bloggers, clearly evoked an earlier sense of a work-camp.

The eagerness with which Orbán promoted and adopted the project of border boundary building may originate in the somewhat liminal geographic situation of Hungary in Europe, but the viciousness of the enterprise reflects Orbán’s increasing desperation–and that of his nationalist anti-immigrant FIDESZ party–makes due on his promise to Hungarian voters to act as defenders against the imagined enemy of “migrants” entering the country, to inflate its power by bolstering its own borders in increasingly militaristic terms. For while the construction of the wall is indeed part of an increasing construction of fences, border barriers and border controls that have emerged across central Europe to repel an increasingly desperate attempt of refugees to enter Europe, and find employment and safety in the Schengen region, the decision to construct such a brutal wall complete with “transit zones” to process refugees may be understood as having its origins in the grotesque theater of Hungarian politics: although the decision to erect the wall along Serbia’s frontier may precipitate a crisis in refugee flows, it has origins in the willingness of the current Hungarian government to act as the defender of an imagined “European” identity–as evidenced in its blame of the European Union itself for not clearly formulating a plan or policy to deal with refugees, and to assign soldiers along European borders to process human rights migrants. And as winter descends along a well trodden “West Balkan route” of travel, migrants face new dangers that demand a humanitarian response. For the dramatic expansion of an even larger two-hundred-and-sixteen-mile long fence topped with razor wire along Hungary’s border with Croatian frontier in mid-October promises to interrupt refugees’ movement on an established West Balkan route, but create a backup that would constitute and even more shameless affront to global human rights and an affront to their actual plight. Orbán has portrayed the entrance of migrants as an offense against Hungary’s frontiers in manipulative ways–but also wanted to strengthen border boundary to illustrateHungary’s ability to guard the border of “Europe,” after an unprecedented number of 20,000 refugees illegally crossed the border to enter the European Union by crossing the Hungarian border in the Balkans during 2013, a number which had doubled during 2014, increasing alarm of poor border management and giving rise to an unprecedented wave of xenophobic violence.

Frontex Risk Analysis reports

In ways which will have quite steep consequences for the actual fates of many refugees in Europe, constructing so prominent a wall is a bizarre exercise both in Hungarian historical memory, and a posturing of a a local strongman who seeks to represent a global crisis through the distorted lens of purely local terms to Hungarians, in what he paints on a global stage as a crisis in European identity. Orbán has quite outrageously called for “defending the common borders of the European Union with European forces,” but blocking the transit of refugees–or quarantining the newly arrived in euphemistically dubbed “transit zones”–will not intimidate them or prevent their arrival in Europe, but only reroute them, and delay or divert any successful humanitarian strategy from being effectively framed.

This makes the pretense of acting as a defender of Europe all the more outrageous.

1. Although the wall was ostensibly built to protect Hungarians from the arrival of refugees, the symbolically powerful wall across the Hungarian border has become an attempt to preserve the strength of Hungary’s government against a largely imaginary enemy. While few refugees hope to settle in the country permanently, the border-fence is a particularly tragic rewriting for the start of the twenty-first century of Marx’s bold statement at the start of The Eighteenth Brumaire that figures and personages of history not only often repeat, as Hegel believed, but do so first as tragedy and then as farce–if the farce is poised to precipitate an international human rights tragedy of its own. For the walls evokes historical memories for Hungarians and for Europeans as an assertion of the right of state, even as it seems staged a spectacle to illustrate the strength of the Hungarian state to ward off an entirely imagined enemy, and aggressively grandstand on an international stage in myopic ways.

For if the actual iron curtain was dauntingly divisive, the rather hastily erected fence nominally sought to prevent the arrival of refugees, far less impermeable for desperate refugees than an illustration of the Hungarian government’s resistance to allow progress across a Balkan passage, than notice of the government’s open disregard for their rights. Refugees are penned like animals along the fences congruent with national borders, rather being than extended asylum or offered any needed humanitarian assistance or refuge. The building of the border barrier by conscripted labor–as much a police–the border boundary is more of a declaration, and a site for exhuming memories–both of the electric wire fences taken down along the Hungarian-Czech border in 1989-90, pictured below, retained when the fall of an “iron curtain” was celebrated–with far more violence than that longstanding boundary barrier. Indeed, the sole surviving fragment of that border is far less threatening than the new barbed wire barrier that was ostensibly built to block entry of the destitute into Hungarian lands.

Along Bulgarian-Turkish Border, July 17, 2015 (REUTERS/Stoyan Nenov)

The fence on the Hungarian-Serbian border was allegedly constructed only after Orbán declared himself open to consider all options which could stop the flow of refugees into Hungary short of physical closure of the border, after discussions with Serbia. Hungary’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Péter Szijjártó mustered the declaration that he believed that its planned construction would not violate international accords or laws–yet it is truly hard to even imagine how he thought it did not, and was quickly recognized in Budapest to be a somewhat ghastly public unthinkable refashioning of the Hungarian state.

Budapest Beacon (June, 2015)

Beyond obstructing or refusing entrance of those who have travelled from former homes through crowded refugee camps in Turkey and Greece, recast refugees fleeing destruction in Syria and Iran as criminals. For as well as a means of preventing passage across borders, the notorious construction of the border fence is particularly opportunistic move of Prime Minister Orbán: constructing such imposing border fences cynically re-regulates the very legal procedures to which asylum-seekers are forced to submit. Is the recent rehabilitation of this oldest and most authoritarian of fictions of national identity not the most reactionary of performances of national exclusion?

Triple Concertina-Wire Fence at Hungary’s Serbian Border near Kelebia (Photo: Freedom House )

The geographical location and situation of the imposing border fence have been mapped multiple times in the news as an obstacle to the northward progress of “thousands of migrants and refugees”, and portrayed as a crisis in European unity as Germany and other countries ordered temporary border restrictions. But the fences that run across Hungary’s borders are less often examined as a dangerous psychological projection of the Orbán government’s loose understanding of legality and manipulation of national identity. For the increasingly militarized boundary fence not only traces the border barrier around Hungary. It translates the mapped boundary line into an impassible frontier, surrounded by resettlement camps, which effectively places refugees outside both the status quo and apart from the state.

Has the marginalization of refugees along Hungary’s borders also become an occasion for recovering memories of the marginalization of populations in Hungarian politics, most recently the Roma people and other immigrants? The patrolled barrier on Hungary’s southern border ostensibly responds to fears of an “endless flow” of illegal immigration which Prime Minister Orbán warns would threaten to “overrun” Europe. By militarizing the border barrier on its southern border, the Hungarian government ostensibly seeks to defend its protection of its citizens, but also allows itself to charge refugees with violating local laws and protocols in ways that disrespect international law. Since the fence was completed on September 15, Prime Minister Orbán’s priority recasts him a strongman able to protect the country and defend the state. The barrier offers Hungary’s government the excuse to punish attempted crossings with three years of imprisonment and automatic deportation.

This haunting but perverse image of the reception of migrants–at a time when Hungarians view emigration as a more dangerous threat to the nation than immigration or the arrival of new and potentially skilled workers–offers an illustration of the strength of the nation and the extent to which the nation will go in taking strong mesures against an imaged enemy. For in refusing entry to refugees as they seek to enter the European Union, confining them in “transit zones” sealed off from Hungarian territory, but open to Serbia, Orbán’s government turns the other face to many without medical, legal, or financial assistance.

2. By declaring “a state of emergency due to mass migration,” that expands police rights to stop suspected “illegal” refugees, the Orbán government has rewritten the rules refugees follow while authorities decide asylum applications and decide who can be admitted to Hungarian territory: hence the need for the fence. (The decisions are unilaterally made without possibility of appeal.)

The barrier quarantines those pleading from asylum on the margins of the country through which they desire passage. Does the fence, patrolled by police and the state army, not provide an image of the defense of the nation where one lacked before, blocking transit across a route where some 170,000 refugees have already entered the EU this year? The militaristic maneuver seems a show of force disproportionate to, as does the recent dispatching of armored vehicles and hundreds of troops to its Croatian border. In undermining the most central values of granting asylum that most all European Union countries affirm, dehumanizing refugees as the new target of xenophobic accusations recasts their plight as a disturbance to the state. And in using national workers to create this boundary barrier, as an artificial boundary of the state, the Orban government could be accused of reallocating funds that the EU had in fact provided his country.

Hungarian Border near the village of Horgos, Serbia; September 15, 2015 (The Independent)

Even if it is not the impermeable boundary it has been touted–

Near Röske, Csaba Segesvari (AFP/Getty Images)

What role does the fence serve in blocking refugees entrance to the Schengen countries where they have travelled in search of work? Designating those who attempt to cross its borders as “illegal” dramatically reinforces regional ethnic prejudices, blaming those undocumented for their circumstances and alternately recasting their identities as muslims, opportunists and actual terrorists, the construction of border barriers crudely exploits the mapping of the national unity as a way to divide space and the flag as a threatening sign of national belonging.

3. Hungary may lack prison space to accommodate refugees, but seeks to portray itself as able to manage the “crisis” of refugees’ arrival, choosing deportment while ignoring their presence or dilemma. It is almost paradoxical that the insistence on protocols of boundary-crossing and legal procedure should be so strongly espoused by Prime Minister Orbán–who has regularly flouted and rewritten laws and the constitution, and attacks an independent judiciary. For the Hungarian border barriers continue Orbán’s openly anti-democratic defense of the Hungarian “homeland” even as he flouted the many EU reprimands his government has already received. Building the border wall offers a way to ignore global actualities even as refugees cannot continue to comprehend the interruption of their attempt to flee civil war.

Refugees from Turkey and Syria who have crossed the Balkans have been met by similar barriers along the borders of Bulgaria, Slovenia, Austria, Germany, and Macedonia, to be sure. While Hungary insists, in double-speak fashion, it hasn’t betrayed the Schengen Accords allowing free transit, whereas border controls were thought dissolved by the European Union, they have returned with a vengeance, stranding many families and individuals in the non-places of airports, parking lots, and improvised camps guarded by attack dogs. Current plans to expand similar fences and border barriers have spread to Serbia, Ukraine and Estonia, who see themselves as victims of Germany’s vice-chancellor promise to accept one million refugees and half a million yearly. The fence has served to direct media attention at the problem of a refugees trying to enter western Europe, illustrating the reflexive response of a government providing similar fences of barbed wire on its borders with Romania and Croatia–lest Europe indeed be “over-run,” whatever being over-run by those on foot might mean. Perhaps we have a failure to map their arrival less in terms of lines of sovereignty–and border fences–and governmentally than charting their painful itineraries.

BBC

The erection of such border fences on Europe’s edges echo a concept of state sovereignty that seems outdated at a time when the national protection of governments in Syria, Iraq, and elsewhere no longer exists. Their creation on a map offer a truly paradoxical means and symbol to cynically assert his own authority, openly rebuking human rights traditions even as he shrouds himself with legitimacy, but has sanctioned the spread of similar frontiers that obstruct the local overland routes on which most refugees have travelled.

ˆNew York Times

By 2016, they had grown, and seemed to reflect not only growing xenophobic suspicions but a deep distrust that actual borders provided meaningful national frontiers, with the number of countries that had completed boundaries or planned to do so providing cordons against future travel that eerily illustrated the removal of the Iron Curtain:

Economist: January 7, 2006

And the world looked little different, as the reaction to growing global migration was to construct imposing walls to impede human motion:

Economist: January, 2006

The long-planned fence championed by the Orbán government as a response to the “mass-migration” of refugees seems to have sanctioned the “return of the long repressed.” For it has given a green light to the proliferation of other border controls that constrain refugees’ movement as they search for safety and homes. The effective obstruction refugees now face has redefined their movement as “illegal”–in ways, that, as Bill Frelick warned, create a categorical confusion that questions the value and rights of humans and transforms their movement across boarders into a punishable event. If this seems to respond to the 85% jump in requests for asylum since 2014, mostly Syrians followed by Afghani, Albanians, and Iraqi, the abdication of actions of processing or accepting individuals in civil society intentionally marginalize refugees. Even if Hungary is only a transit zone for these families of refugees, the construction of a fence responds to their arrival in ways that have only unleashed as a response latent xenophobic tendencies.

4. As increasingly desperate and uneasy refugees walk on foot to reach the perpetually receeding illusion of the “rich EU”–many hoping to join their families–by foot, taxis, rented minibuses, trains, or through human traffickers, their searches for asylum are complicated by the relative nature of European prosperity in the poorer countries through which they travel. After refugees and immigrants were granted asylum at rising rates in western Europe since 2010, Hungary has erected a militarized border against those forcibly displaced entering central Europe as if to distance the plight of those crossing the Balkans through Turkey and Greece from the mental space of Hungarians and portray their entrance into the country as a national danger–inordinately magnifying the role of Hungarian law on the already unduly onerous lives of refugees beyond what they ever expected. The difficulty in mapping the numbers of those seeking asylum, and the difficulty of determining where increasingly desperate refugees might settle, complicate the inhuman exaggeration and magnification of the difficulties they pose to governments who may grant them asylum, as do the multiplication of dehumanizing metaphors of swarms of insects, tidal waves, a tsunami, herds of animals, or indeed as an army convert the almost two million who have fled from Syria and live in refugee camps in Turkey. Such metaphors certainly seem to sit well with the Hungarian government, who demolished neighborhoods where Roma live only to pay the cost of their reconstruction; other party members call for a ““final solution” for Roma in Hungary–even as the EU has both funneled money to Hungary to aid Roma and prioritized their integration in Hungarian society.

Are our very maps complicit in concretizing and perpetuating such dishonest and profoundly unuseful metaphors as they show the routes refugees take across the Balkans, and the exclusion from countries they confront?

New York Times

Since the now rightly notorious wall was completed on September 15, the Orbán government announced that any attempted crossing the border barrier by families and children will be punished by Hungarian law. The continued “mass-migration” has led the Orbán government to declare a state of crisis in which it needs to defend its borders in ways that trump international law–and the rights of persecuted refugees arriving from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan, detaining them in “transit zones” controlled by military police. If the fence responds to a crisis in governmentally–alleging that the river of refugees who have crossed the Balkans from Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq were not displaced–the newly militarized borders of nations facing arriving refugees have cast themselves as victims of “mass-migration” by desperate people fleeing on foot; hastily erected fences are monitored by officers in riot gear, bearing ammunition, and water-guns, installing security cameras at a barrier they are investing a paranoid tenor with quite terrifying concreteness.

The chain-link fence topped by barbed wire and security cameras suggests a knee-jerk response to mass-migration with eery echoes of the past. Hungary’s government has only proposed its rights to build analogous fences on the country’s borders with Croatia and Romania–even as UN officials and the UNHCR voiced dismay at the militarization of its southern borderline. For while those seeking asylum view Hungary as a site of transit to Europe, and to a new home, this affirmation of local boundaries and exercise in territoriality places those following the hundreds of thousands who have already fled civil wars in countries like Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq, in a sort of legal limbo of displacement unforeseen by countries who became members in the Schengen Agreement promising unity to asylum requests. Rather than grant asylum, the labelling of refugees as terrorists, criminals or violent, collectively not deserving entry, rehabilitated flimsy conceit of the border as impassible barrier.

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE

The Guardian UK

Such widespread projects of constructing militarized border fences mark unprecedented local distortion of the thirty-first article of the Geneva Conventions. The consensus of preventing punishment for refugees illegally entering any territory of a contracting State responded to an era of violence Europe sought to banish. But the barrier distorts Hungary’s place in the world, by treating those who seek passage through Hungarian lands as criminals who are to be kept at a gate. While the Geneva Conventions affirmed rights for those with refugee status, without medical care or financial means. the criminalization of border-crossing lies not within any nation’s right to police its boundaries, as has many sustain in the United States, is an affront against humanity and international law.

So much is already apparent ent in locally-produced videos seeking to persuade refugees–here identified “illegal Immigrants”–to adopt alternate pathways for eventual asylum in Germany, across mine-filled Croatia:

The desire to shunt refugees through Croatia, rather than Hungarian lands, conceals the ugliest of inheritances in the Balkans–and its distinctive topography of active land mines blocking most paths and roads to Austria or to Zagreb.

The obstruction of the progress of landless refugees lacks any sense of the global dilemma we increasingly face. For the notorious fence strikingly reveals how this oldest of designators of territoriality has been rehabilitated and so openly championed when the pathways of refugees across borders is both common and challenging to visualize–and distorts their plight as if it were a purely local affair of following procedures, but whose Kafkaesque character conceals a hatred fueled by xenophobia.

“Global Trends in Displacement”/New York Times (based on UNHCR data from 2014)

Such authoritarian boundary-building is all too easily justified by ignorant questions of who deserves refugee status or which government is rightly tasked with processing petitions of asylum–even if Schengen accords clearly place that responsibility in the country of entrance, the massive movement of nationals across the Balkans was never imagined. Rather than appreciate human displacement, the Hungarian decrees unilaterally police entrance into a region of passport-free travel by local law; those seeking asylum are “othered” as illegal, and deserving punishment, without recognition of their dire trajectories or desperate search for new homes: labelled “migrants,” rather than refugees, those fleeing civil wars and destroyed states are portrayed as opportunistically seeking benefits and jobs–rather than the economic air political security that is their legal right.

As much as the arrival of refugees challenges a notion of governmentality, refugees are unfairly recast as offenders decorum who stand in violation of legal codes. The argument for building boundaries on our borders to prevent human border-crossing is not without other precedents, as Americans well know–and are knee jerk responses to questions of governmentally, as much as they offer responses to human needs. Is it a coincidence that the assertion of this imaginary borderline by an actual wall–similar to the fortified border barrier between the US and Mexico, lambasted by Vincente Fox as “disgraceful and shameful”? President George W. Bush had prioritized the fence to prevent “illegal entrance” and immigration in 2001. It has not prevented migrants from crossing–and, as Michael Dear noted, whatever deterrence of migration is created by the barrier, it can hardly justify the “enormous expense of maintaining the fortifications — estimated to be $6.5 billion over the next 20 years.” But the game was always primarily political, and when it was resurrected in the first platform paper Donald Trump released for his presidential run, he cast the plan to expand the border barrier in particularly xenophobic terms–and may have led the hapless Scott Walker to continue the folly of drawing borders by casting wall-building on the US-Canada boundary as a “legitimate issue”.

The border barrier Orbán erected along Hungary’s southern frontier echoed that on the US-Mexico border, but averts eyes from the refugee crisis: “Don’t come,” an aid to Orbán quipped, “because this route doesn’t lead where you want to go.” “Don’t come here anymore,” chimed in Serbia’s Interior Minister, pressing his government’s control over passage; “This is not the road to Europe.” Inhumane response almost taunt refugees–as liberal use of pepper spray, water canon and teargas against those who have tried to breach the barrier materialize these only slightly veiled threats. The fence not only keeps out refugees, but imagines their distance from the Hungarian state, and indeed costs Hungary as a frontier of Europe–and a country of Christian Europeans. Much as patrol agents prevent passage at the US-Mexican border, the border barrier distorts questions human rights by way of recasting them in terms of national defense, in ways far less constructive or considered response to human needs or occasion needing international cooperation.

The fence that several presidential candidates propose to further expand the fence that runs along a third of the boundary ignores that the fence’s ineffective role in stopping migrants than has the US Border Patrol–the border barrier has been ineffective in discouraging migration, although it has actually prevented migrants from returning to Mexico–expanding 83 miles of fenced border to militarized expanse of 700 miles at a cost of $2 billion. The embrace in Hungary of fortifications that recalls the triple curling of concertina wire atop the US-Mexico fence at Tijuana “to make the border safe and secure” claimed to have reduced illegal border-crossings by 50% in 2008, forgoing the “aesthetically pleasing” federal design standards used in other regions of the US-Mexico fence, the fence is a similarly foreboding remapping of the boundary line for visual effect in a new rallying cry.

Razor Wire Fence Patrolled along the US-Mexico Border

AP (2006)

Donald Trump’s logic that “A nation without borders is not a nation” seems adopted by the Orbán government’s actual plan.

The improvised barricade constructed iduring the summer of 2015 runs along Hungaryy’s southern border with Serbia seeks to create the absolute division one might read in a regional map. But protection of the actual border may have somewhat less relevance to FIDESZ Prime Minister Orbán than the desire to appear strong in the face of the anti-migrant and anti-gypsy rhetoric he has profited from and continues to incite. Orbán declared with mock magnanimity that “the tolerance period is over” for granting refugees asylum as it was erected, intentionally creating, seeking to “stir up popular sentiment against immigrants and refugees” by any means possible, observed Marta Pardavi. Despite being a signatory to the Geneva Convention that makes it incumbent to accept refugees from war-torn lands, even to a country which sees itself as poor, the wall prevents recognition of refugees–each of whom the far-right-wing Jobbik party, which has portrayed the arrival of refugees as a failure in local governance, argues will cost Hungarians 4300 HUF daily, in a country where daily unemployment benefits for its citizens come to 2362 HUF.

In this politicized context, the plans for enforcing the construction of the fence along Serbia’s border primarily constituted a strong public statement. The enforcement of the boundary barrier illustrates Orbán’s commitment to a distorted image of the Hungarian nation’s integrity, and suggesting his willingness to defend Europe from refugees who most saw as fleeing from their lands, but he portrayed as alien migrants. After protesting delays in its construction, the deployment of troops to this newly militarized zone to stop those seeking transit to Europe creates fixed portals for processing people without according them human dignity, for the rationale that “They don’t look like people who could become useful members [of society].” There is all too clear a danger that the refusal of Hungary’s Prime Minister and government to process refugees who seek asylum and have traveled across the Balkans on foot from Syria, Afghanistan, and also Iraq is an attempt to pander to the right-wing Jobbik party, who have consistently claimed and asserted that the current government will not be able to solve the refugee crisis as it has staged public anti-refugee rallies in Budapest that distort the dangers that the “migrant crisis” will cause the nation–and that Hungary’s current government fails to fully address.

The imagined dangers posed by such refugees, wrongly cast as opportunistic threats, or immigrants in search of work, uses the border from a map as a way to disengage from refugees’ actual plights. (Indeed the unstinting support Hungary’s Foreign Minister voiced for Germany’s decision to start border controls on rail travel from Austria seems a poorly disguised attempt to unite Europe against the arrival of refugees.) Meanwhile, alternative routes refugees might take to have been proliferating on social media. Will the creation of such controls, now enacted by both the Netherlands and Slovakia and apparently being considered in Denmark, impel more human smuggling of refugees who are often both educated and able-bodied and even with cash reserves, and expand the humanitarian crisis of refugees?

Border Barrier Under Construction in Bulgaria

Has the Hungarian government’s sanctioning of the building of this fence from June 2015 given rise to a knee-jerk defense of territoriality? Or has the fence also inspired a return of memories of strongmen from Hungary’s past?

The completed border fence on Hungary’s border with Serbia is more suitable for animal chattel to halt the progress men, families and children, and constitutes a new low point in local respect for human rights–oddly resonating with how members of Orbán’s party liken Roma people in Hungary to “animals” who are “not fit to live among people.” As much as it reveals a panicked response to the global rise in refugees, the chain fence reveals the reluctance of Hungary’s government to confront the problem of refugees, and refuse, ostrich-like, to believe that problems might enter their own national space–a space from which Orbán’s circles have already expelled Roma. The rhetoric of the wall closely mirrors the project of wall-building US Presidential candidate Donald Trump openly xenophobic proposal to extend a fence across the US-Mexican border to ward off the arrival of “criminal” Mexicans, as much as migrants in search of work who the wall originally targeted. Indeed, the Orbán government’s “defense” of the boundaries to Schengen countries of the European Union both recalls the creation of an impermeable US-Mexican wall, 700 miles of which already exist–and uses the outdated nature of the national border despite the limited value of border patrols beyond public political posturing.

Is it only a coincidence that the strengthening of such walls parallel the vanishing of the frontiers and borders that once defined the imaginary integrity of the nation-state? Both “walls” ignore the growing irrelevance of the borders in a global situation. Both take refuge behind the most antiquated of artifacts: indeed, the construction of such barriers only affirms the declining significance of the border as an actual divide, in the face of anxiety about the diminished meaning of national borderlines, and offers opportunities for photo-shots to affirm a national imaginary. Is it only a coincidence that Trump trumpeted an expanded border barrier against the “extreme danger” of Mexican arrivals at the campaign stop he made at the border city of Loredo, TX, for the first time sporting a now-famous trucker hat bearing his campaign promise to restore America’s national greatness?

Donald Trump First Sports His Campaign Hat at the Border City of Loredo, TX

When the unlikely presidential candidate looked at the camera declaring that the future of the United States rested in extending border barriers along the entire US-Mexico boundary against “illegal” migrants, Trump unwittingly offered a defense that has been adopted by countries who take it upon themselves to militarize and police Europe’s borders. As Trump espoused the expansion of border barriers that illustrate national sovereignty in an age that demands increasing international cooperation, the devotion of attention to the policing of boundaries comes at huge cost for addressing refugees’ actual needs.

5. The Hungarian government has similarly linked the militarized border-zone built along its southern border to the preservation of its national identity. The fence intentionally creates a no-man’s land and quasi-police state suspending human rights, filled with refugee camps which fail to help prioritize or meet individual needs, and dehumanize refugees, in the ugliest of illustrations of inhumane treatment at “migrant centers.” For the razor-wire fence that traces Hungary’s southern border with Serbia seems both to be an abdication of legal responsibility and ethical obligation to those seeking asylum from war-torn nations–and a misguided local response to a global problem whose actual proportions it sadly seems to seek only to obscure. As much as the wall on Hungary’s border has complicated questions of European unity and identity, it puts into crisis a coordinated response to the global problem of refugees.

As Hungarians seem to refuse to grant asylum as the first country in the Schengen area, where passport-free travel is allowed, it has offered a case where the global crisis of refugees in need of protection have been met by a hostility that treats their movement from shattered pasts as a threat to the civil society–and intentionally obscures the role of Hungary as a transit country.

Hungarian Soldiers Building a Fence near Asotthalom, southern Hungary, on Aug. 30, 2015 (Xinhua/Attila Volgyi)

How did this come to be? The border-fence built by Hungarian soldiers seems created to prevent any passage of refugees seeking asylum, but suggests a cynical exploitation of a global crisis. Building an improvised wall of some one hundred and eight miles, complete with a public announcement that any damage to the temporary fence along Hungary’s Serbian border will be punished by imprisonment, is a theatrical attempt to refuse housing or accommodating the refugees who have travelled across the border since the Spring by foot. For the highly staged building of a such a highly symbolically charged, breachable, and deeply inhumane metal-link fence–whose breaching will be punished, according to the books, by three years imprisonment.

For those seeking refuge from persecution are indeed regularly beaten by police as if they were criminals and left “in legal limbo” in Serbia and Macedonia, wbhie seeking asylum as they try to enter the European Union. Refugees have been forced to face increasing barriers created to their entrance to Europe even as they are subject to routinized bad treatment and forced to negotiate police brutality on Europe’s borderlands. “We are human too,” plead refugees, fearing state police. Orbán’s fear that Hungary may receive some 800,000 asylum requests, and by “next year we will be talking about millions and this has no end,” has fomented xenophobia against refugees at significant human cost, and perversely magnified the problem of those seeking refugee status as a purely national problem at significant cost.

But the true disgrace, as the invocation of a line on a map–the line of the European Union–but is the last in a series of protective insular walls of small-minded construction. It symbolizes a quite desperate and panicked attempt to keep reality at bay, in the perversely misguided belief that a truly global disaster could be either held at bay or flat-out locally denied. But the arrogant assertion of the fence is far more emblematic of the hysteria that the Hungarian government seeks to stoke rather than it contains any legal justification.

At the same time as refugees seeking asylum have abandoned perilous transit across the Mediterranean, and were rebuffed by Iran, Hungary has become a default to enter the EU and area Schengen accords that permit travel without a passport. Passage by the Balkans is now the recommended by smugglers as a route of transit–such smugglers seem to have a more clear map of the geography of displacement and challenges of asylum than even the UNHCR. Although Hungary has received a significantly larger number of applications for asylum for refugee status by June, 2015, when Orbán announced the wall’s construction, the requests are merely a way to enter a new life in Europe–as all refugees are obligated to declare their status at a point of entry. Rather than process those seeking asylum, the wire fence barrier is both a blatant and a cynical rebuff to human rights and legal rights, and an exercise of turning the other shoulder to those attempting passage.

The dedication of public funds to such a barrier seems a further violation of refugees’ legal rights, and constitutes a glaring slight to if not an actual crisis of international law. The position adopted by Hungary’s FIDESZ government deeply distorts its position in relation to Europe and the world by casting the “crisis” in purely local terms–far beyond the practical difficulties of processing and registering refugees who cross its southern border with Serbia. The distortion of a ‘local’ crisis created by “migrants” has led the government to use state radio and immigration police to use the border barrier to remove desperate global refugees from their own mental space. The dangers distort precedents of anti-semitism and xenophobia that the government has long pandered: indeed, the strongly anti-gypsy rhetoric Orbán’s party has recently exploited and normalized has been rapidly refashioned as Islamophobia, in ways that echoes the antisemitic rhetoric of one of Hungary’s pasts.

As much as the fence reflects an actual rise of immigrants with Hungary as their destination, the figures of those seeing asylum in Hungary the wall is part of a highly choreographed if misguided moment to rebuff refugees that will allow his xenophobic FIDESZ government to prevent refugees from entering the attention of the government–and claim to represent not only the Hungarian people, but by arrogant and increasingly evidently self-important assumption, all Europe. As the Balkan route of refugees grows, even as the rights of refugees fail to be adequately defended, a renewed on-foot march of refugees to Austria and beyond has resumed. Even as a refugee policy is not clearly in place. Illustrating belonging and its boundaries is what the Hungarian government’s spectacle seems chiefly to address and to do in particularly terrifying terms. The severely imposing barricade (or fence) constructed from June is the latest attempt to prevent refugees who have travelled from Syria and elsewhere from crossing the frontier–although their suggestion of a fence more worthy of animal pens than humans reveals the disdain and hatred that the Orbán government has concertedly sought to direct to the refugees, to obscure their own dire situation, as much as the threat that they purportedly pose to Hungarian social services–and to treat refugees as human chattel that Roma people have been so regularly cast.

Sergey Ponomarev/New York Times

The fence is most inopportunely placed. The fence is an assault on human dignity which however has clear origins in the theater of Hungarian politics. For it was in part built as a response to the threat refugees pose to the mental space of the Orbán’s government and his FIDESZ supporters, as much as Hungary–as is the recent confinement of desperate refugees who have arrived, homeless, at Budapest’s nineteenth-century eastern Keleti railway station, in search of final passage to Germany and the European Union. (The buses that had carried thousands of refugees to Austria–where they have been more generously received–are no longer being provided, according to Hungary’s police chief, but some 1,200 also attempted to walk the same distance, on the highway, to seek to try to reach their destination by foot in the stifling midday heat, after westward buses and trains to Austria and Germany were suspended.)

There a sense that the current and ongoing crisis of processing refugees creates a conceptual crisis in the nation-state, but the reaction to an influx of refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, or Iraq. But it has been highly staged as a way to deny the humanity of those fleeing, rather than to need to address their misfortunes, and the response of other countries, as Austria, reveals a clear possibility of a different reception for refugees in Europe, less dictated by fear.

The cyclone chain link fence that along ten miles in length was planned on a political map, in hopes to prevent a global disaster from entering the mental space of the Prime Minister and of sustainers of the right-wing FIDESZ party, as well as Hungarian territory–it stands for a reactionary impulse to affirm the impermeability of the country’s national frontier is an unacceptable reaction to the arrival of refugees in increasing numbers and with increasing desperation. By exploiting the status of Hungary as the first Schengen nation able to grant asylum, tasked with the job of fingerprinting and processing refugees, the Hungarian government has opportunistically and inhumanely decided to exploit its situation to prevent those seeking asylum from entering the European Union, in ways that have tended to elevate its status as a frontier for its own ends.

While the problem of processing refugees is surely not only a European one, the position that the Hungarian government has taken is more than opportunistic. The overtly protectionist barricade is an attempt to force those desperately seeking asylum, and may also encourage them to search for other, riskier, overseas routes. It seems, moreover, inseparable from terrifying images of the mute rebuff met by the anguished face of terrified refugees. But it is also a deadly political game. Prime Minister Orbán’s Foreign Minister, Peter Szijjarto, stoically vowed in mid-June of 2015, unilaterally and with the apparent intent of stoking alarmism, that his country “cannot afford to wait any longer” having processed 54,000 immigrants and with the count of refugees poised to rise 120,000 by the year’s end–even though Hungary was actually way-station to asylum elsewhere, rather than a final destination, for most, and was obligated as the first nation in the Schengen area to grant asylum to refugees who had crossed the Balkans.

But the sense of desperation that he voiced reflected a deep confusion about the place that Hungary seemed to have inherited on the border of Europe. The fence slated for completion in August, 2015 was not alone; it was only one in a series of fences that Europeans are engaged in building as they wrestle with new global patterns of refugee traffic in Calais, Greece, Bulgaria, Estonia, and the Ukraine, misguidedly construe local perceptions of a truly global crisis–much as Orbán has recast the plight of refugees as a conflict between opposed faiths. The reaction to refugees has been particularly poignant in Hungary, and has prompted news maps to characterize the dreams of the ruling party to create a gate to Europe, as much as provide a possible response to hopes many refugees will continue to nurture.

Yahoo News

Sealing the border with a militarized chain-link barricade provides a particularly stony rebuff, truly terrifying, evident in images of recent encounters with the anguished faces of desperate and panicked refugees who sought asylum.

For the attempt to block the flow of refugees what one seems to erecting is not only an inhumane gesture, but a desperately local distortion of a global problem. The fence has recently impelled French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius to express credulous wonder at the scandal that this act disrespects European respect for human rights–as United Nations refugee agencies stepped just short of condemning the construction of a fence as a fit response to those searching for safety and protection–and asylum; the Swiss would ban Orbán’s travel to their country, and freeze Hungarian assets in response to indignation at the “human rights situation and the refugee scandal” in the country.” The fence may well encourage those fleeing their own perilous conditions from adopting still more dangerous itineraries and routes of illegal migration. “This wall–we will not accept it,” Syrian refugee Mohamed Hussein bitterly observed, pausing on travels through Turkey and Serbia, as he attempted to walk from Iran to Turkey.

How can one, however, insist on responding locally to a truly global dilemma of desperate flight?

Even though the actual routes of illegal immigration of refugees are so complexly negotiated and improvised to defy a clean cartographical synthesis, the actual routes of refugees were rarely imaged as running through Hungary on earlier news maps.

But if the routes of refugees are difficult to map, the propaganda map issued by the Hungarian government’s Office of Immigration and Citizenship pictured the routes of refugees in ways that seem particularly distorting : the map almost openly validates fears of invasion in a crudely (and no doubt intentionally) propagandistic map designed to stir up fears that shows the Hungarian nation as imperiled from an onslaught of “illegal immigrants” needing to be stopped:

Hungarian Office of Immigration and Citizenship

The bold and forceful red arrows that lead directly through Hungary conjure the flows that the proposed barricade proposed to stop or “staunch” along the boundary lines between Hungary and Serbia.

The propaganda map issued by the Office of Immigration and Citizenship seems designed to intentionally stoke xenophobic fears, emphasizing the nation as a unit of continued meaning in an emergency of truly global proportions, as well as to magnify the role that such a fence on Hungary’s border would have. There is something grotesquely inhumane to chart the itineraries of refugees who have travelled on foot from Iraq, Afghanistan, or Syria as if they were a phalanx of approaching Panzers, adopting the rhetoric of a map of military advances–although the refugees who often took these paths often travelled not only without arms, but barefoot. But the map conjures a threat as if it were in danger of being immediately posed to the national frontiers.

The actual routes of refugees take are considerably more complicated and improvised, of course, but when schematically mapped reveal routes less exclusively focussed on a Balkan itinerary–although this is one of the sites of greatest police push-back according to Amnesty International–until they find detention centers to welcome them across the Sebian border.

Financial Times (September 2, 2015)

Yet the image echoes the deeply xenophobic fears that the Orbán government has intentionally sought to stoke. Faced with growing unemployment rates and nourished by openly racist xenophobia, the 23,000 people who applied in the past year for asylum in Hungary alone from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq no doubt created a basis for panic in the Orbán government and ruling Fidesz party, whose prominent display of public billboards cautioning asylum-seekers “IF YOU COME TO HUNGARY, YOU CANNOT TAKE HUNGARIANS’ JOBS” in Hungarian were not only the revers of a red carpet, but widely cast their xenophobic rhetoric–long adopted by Orbán’s FIDESZ ruling party–in the disquieting garb of national protectionism. Despite the posters, however, Oban has continued to state that the arrival of Muslim immigrants poses not only a challenge to jobs, however, but a challenge to Europe’s faith in particularly incendiary rhetoric, describing the “madness” of the current EU immigration policy as a departure from common sense.

Independent

As the United Nations’ Office of the High Commissioner of Refugees has noted, such response hardly befit refugees seeking asylum who are in need of international protection. And in an attempt to gain the upper hand, UNHCR displayed its own counter-billboards in Budapest–

–providing images of integration of immigrants that the FIDESZ seeks to banish from Hungarians’ minds.

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE

The rhetoric of preventing the arrival in European territories of refugees who have travelled through the Balkans appeals to the nationalist imagination of some Hungarians. The fence was build, allegedly, in a move of protectionism of European identity, “to stop the flood,” as Zoltán Kovács, government spokesperson, coldly put it, indulging a particularly dehumanizing rhetoric that has led not only to the construction of the fence. In going so far as to claim that Hungary is “the most affected EU country in absolute terms,” the government has perversely distorted a crisis of painfully global proportions by representing it in local terms. The defense Prime Minister Orbán openly made advocating the use of internment camps as suitable responses to immigrants reflect this perception that Hungary lies the “forefront” of the immigration crisis–although this crisis is clearly global–in order to justify the building of a fence along the Hungarian-Serbian border of over 100 miles in length.

For Orbán has gone to great pains to defend the impassibility of a border rather than devote public funds to possible resettlement of immigrants, or to their processing as refugees. While the construction of an improvised fence of coiled razor-wire and chain link, to be monitored by armed officers who will guard the border with the aim to prevent the fence from destruction with wire-cutters, builds on a conviction that Hungary is the gateway of illegal immigrants to Europe’s borders, and filled his self-assumed charge “to keep Europe Christian,” as Orbán told the German Frankfurt Allgemeine Zeitung in a particularly ill-considered attempt to win sympathy, does not conceal disregard for human rights in proclaiming the risk of Europe being “overrun“–adopting a explicitly anti-islamic xenophobic tenor that unabashedly invokes a politics of global opposition, if not a conflict between faiths, that echoes Samuel P. Huntington’s clash of civilizations. The very deployment of this inappropriately oppositional rhetoric all too conveniently overlooks the desperation behind refugees’ flights. (FIDESZ is an acronym, but evokes the Latin deity of trust and reliability–much as Agenzia Fides remains the news agency of the Vatican, adopting the term for faithfulness or faith to link its pronouncements to those of the Catholic church–even as Pope Francis has ordered all churches and clergymen in Hungary and Europe to open their doors to those claiming status as refugees.)

Attila Kisbenedek / AFP / Getty Images

Overrun, we might well ask, with whom, or with what?

It is true, the strident rhetoric of Orbán’s government may build on a series of similarly xenophobic precedents by which flustered bureaucrats have, maybe imitating the United States, built walls–perhaps more for their own populations than as actual preventive measures. In seeking to terrify immigrants and refugees, Orbán has all too openly conflated the dangerous criminal and the immigrant with particular zest. For the image of a fortressed Europe is a scarily common reaction to fears of immigration that many Europeans can barely suppress, and may press unique pressures on the European Union.

If English newspapers like the Daily Mail seized up on the image of the Hungarian fence as a response to illegal immigration–

Daily Mail

–no doubt in part due to the proximity of London to the 3,000 refugees crowded into substandard camps in Calais, where refugees are waiting to cross the channel, even as British PM David Cameron has publicly ruled out the granting of safe havens, as Englishmen have volunteered to provide them with some relief in migrant camps, and hundreds from Ethiopia, Sudan and Somalia daily risk travel to England by train and ferries.

6. The demands to contain the global flow of refugees has often been perceived in a very distorting local optic that seem less interested in care–or of conceptualizing care–than of creating clearer boundaries than refugees might perceive.

The widespread trending across much of Europe toward “fencing” borders to turn back immigrants echo a broad misconception that the best defense is to built fences that blithely believe they can push the “problem” elsewhere in areas on the edges of Europe, as public projects that resemble the extensive ditches dug in the Middle Ages, if they are far less effective:

Such public works projects suggests unique pains of the human rights crisis of refugees seeking asylum, albeit that these attempts have so far been largely located on the margins of the EU (Bulgaria; Greece; Estonia; and Ukraine)–and uncomfortably imitate the same sort of strong-man statist rhetoric with which Orbán confronted his own government’s crisis.

But the truly terrifying materialization of the border line with razor wire in the lengthy fence along Hungary’s border with Serbia conjures a distinct flavor of xenophobia, no doubt, of dubious legality, oddly analogous to the Catch-22 type of situation at Budapest’s Keleti station, where refugees are clustered, confined by guards, in ways that have increasingly come to reflect the markedly increased brutality that the creation of fences so often inspires among border guards and police officers. Did the existance of the fence not increase the markedly inhumane violence of border guards and police at Keleti station?

Such rhetoric is tied to the improvised creation of a counter-city that has emerged at Budapest’s Keleti railway station, as migrants are denied transit on trains that would provide passage to other EU countries where they would more readily be granted asylum.

Lazar Simeonov/Al Jazeera

Is detention, and the prospect of the completion of the iron fence–so analogous to the fences that Donald Trump has promised to build along the United States’ border with Mexico, and based on the distorted logic of viewing non-nationals as akin to terrorists that has been diffused by the US Office of Homeland Security–either an adequate or humane response? Fears of the brutality of guards brought into face-to-face confrontation with immigrants who border guards feel are both illegal and guilty of having entered across a state-built barrier seem more likely to occur.

Lazar Simeonov/Al Jazeera

There is something deeply troubling–and deeply pathetic–that the Eastern Railway station of the capital, a triumphalist beaux arts symbol of the Hungarian nation’s new image of industrial progress, has become a site of confinement–and of refusing to asylum or refugee status to those seeking passage to Europe. The marginalization of these refugees to a stateless limbo hopes that their problem will go away, rather than develop a consensus that their fate remains a pressing problem needing collective attention. So much seems a symptom of the priorities that the Orbán government has established, as if to deny any possibility of refugees’ entry and to deny their actual itineraries and travails.

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September 3, 2015 · 2:19 pm

April 24, 2014 · 11:01 am

Where Is Ukraine? What is Ukraine?

“In Ukraine, there are no problems,” I was reprimanded a customs agent in Stockholm’s spotless Arlandia airport. Hearing she had left Kiev over twenty years ago, I had ventured to ask about her native country, after she had gamely asked us five questions about our favorite Swedish foods, before asking why we had just arrived in Stockholm. In response, it was evident she had been barraged by the question: “Problems are on border, . . . across border, where they always are.” Across the border lay the large petrostate of Russia, increasingly dependent on the sale of buried gas and oil reserves, which had given a new strategic value to Ukraine, once the site of many nuclear ground-launched ICBM’s directed toward the west, and now a site for easy overland and underground transit of the buried wealth on which the future Russian state depended to the wealthier markets and countries lying to the west.

But what are the borders of Ukraine, and where exactly does over the border lie? Regional maps of Ukraine–and of the region of Crimea–are inevitably filled with their own narratives, most usually of the ethnic and cultural division of the region. Maps of the region’s populations implicitly pose the question of where the region’s unity in fact lies, or from where derives, as if to question the validity that the post-Soviet nation could ever gain, even under the best of circumstances. The map of Ukraine’s population becomes a mirror of disunity, by mapping the linguistic and ethnic groups in the region, although such a division of Ukraine is only using the results of long-term plans of Russification that were designed to promote an image of national unity for Russians that is manufactured as a retroactive justification for invasion. For although such images of ethnic regional fracturing recall the multiple maps of national divides with which we’ve been inundated, the veneer of democratically determined ethnocentric or linguistic parcels that they create are a false mapping of the regional divides or sovereign boundaries of a state.

The increasing number of visualizations mapping ethnicity and political preference mirror the disunity of the region in ways that have an oddly libertarian undertone–and is particularly pernicious to the sovereign unity of a state. Even if they don’t all explicitly advocate or question secession, the explicit fracturing of Ukrainian unity, such as it is, exploits the importance of ethnic-regionalism in ways that are harmful if not toxic to democratic practices. Indeed, Ukraine provided something of a start for Vladimir Putin’s regime to stoke separatists and racialists in annual conferences since 2014, under the aegis of the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia, headed by Alexander V. Ionov, under the fraudulent title of a The Dialogue of Nations. The Right of Peoples to Self-Determination and Building of the Multipolar World. For although term “deglobalization” has gained currency as a critical tool against international business and multi-nationals, the “Dialogue of Nations” promoted at the conference is less of a critique of global capital than a championing of ethnic divisions among parties who hold positions that are deeply undemocratic in tenor, and less promote the stated goal of “sovereignty for small nations around the world,” than to question nations’ existing borders and independent sovereignty, inviting and promoting such groups as the Texas Nationalist Movement, the anti-Iranian Talyish Revival Movement, or National Sovereign State of Borinken. Such hopes to champion regional interests under the banner “self-determination” constitute a sustained subversive regional nationalism seeking to divide liberal consensus, in ways that have provided something of a deep precedent for Russian sponsorship of Donald J. Trump and Russian Ukraine, or Novorossiya, in addition to the Brexit movement.

For if the sponsorship of such meetings stands in odd contrast to the themes of Russonationalism, and includes members of the smaller states outside the boundaries of the Russian Federation, including Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, Azerbaijan and Armenia, who it keeps in its orbit effectively by increasingly stoking their own divides. And although Russionationalism is often invoked to justify the invasion of Ukraine, and the overturning of a democratically elected President, returning to maps of ethnic division muddies questions of the military invasion of Ukraine occurred, and offer seizure of Crimea unwarranted and unwanted justifications.

The steady cross-border entrance of support for the separatist pro-Russian rebels over the summer of 2014 proceeded largely from military bases located on the border, as a stream of military support to rebels in Ukraine undermined the question of its national sovereignty in particularly disrespectful ways. Russia made its military presence increasingly known to Ukraine, in an openly bullying manner of shooting jets, supplying separatists arms, and crossing the Ukrainian border at several undefended sites. Questions of what are the actual “true” borders of Ukraine may ignore the question of its tactical importance as an area of contesting global energy flows. Indeed, as much as there existed any enmity or opposition for many to Ukraine as a political entity, the crucial place the region occupied in the energy reserves that Russian held may have made it increasingly desired as a site of political control, in ways that the debate over Ukraine’s politics seem to have served as a smokescreen to conceal. For the manufactured war against Ukrainian independence seems to proceed less from the protection of ethnic Russians, or the survival of the Russian language and cultural groups whose dominance in Ukraine was encouraged in the Soviet Union, than the cold economic interests of securing a continuous pipeline for oil transport on the ground.

The redrawn boundaries of Ukraine might take into account where the Ukraine actually lies, but to understand their contestation one might do better to map the global ties that have reconfigured not only the place, but the political and economic stakes that have directed new global attention to that region. How might the global dynamics that have invested Ukraine with compelling global interests be best mapped? The stakes are great. So much seems increasingly important as, despite the UN’s declarations that the internationally recognized boundaries of Ukraine must be respected, the precedents for those borders and boundaries turn out to be messier and more unclear than one would expect–and the hold of the Ukrainian government over these borders become difficult to assert, with several of Kiev’s border posts physically abandoned by soldiers and undefended. Increasingly, Ukrainian border checkpoints became porous to Russian troops. With the borders being wiped off the actual map as the result of outright intimidation, what, one is tempted to ask, is Ukraine–and where does it exist?

From the point of view of Vladimir Putin, her poised in his Palace in 2006, the Crimea is presented as native “Russian land.” Its 2014 annexation was promoted as reclaiming a region long part of a Russian Empire-and not only as inhabited by linguistic or ethnic Russians, whose scarlet boundaries seem to place its entire topography beneath his eyes: and in ways that prefaced the Russian role in the eastern Mediterranean and Syria, expanding its ties to warmer seas through its extended intervention in Syria’s Civil War, the importance that Putin’s Kremlin has placed on Syria’s prominence as a point of entry into the Middle East’s geopolitical landscape was prefaced by the warm sea outposts that Crimea–and Ukraine with it–offered the Russian military both to delegitimize a democratically elected government, and secure its ownership of gas pipelines through Ukrainian soil, not pictured in the below map.

Vladimir Putin before Map of Russia in his Novo-Ogaryovo Residence, 2006/KremlinRU

The bleeding crimson boundaries of the Russian Federation are indeed more prominently highlighted than any city, region, or old soviet state, as if to insist on the naturalization of the integrity of its borders, and erase any other borders–quite tellingly–from the map. Putin has demonstrated considerable affection to romancing the map as a fiction of state boundaries, recently presenting Moldova’s President, Igor Doyon, with a late eighteenth century map of Moldova drawn during the Russian-Ottoman War by Italian cartographer Bartolomeo Borghi in 1791, which he noted to his Moldovan hosts showed the undeniable truth that “Half of today’s Romania is actually Moldavia”–to the considerable annoyance and consternation of many in Bucharest, who bristled at the apparent disinterest Putin showed for Romania’s territorial integrity. (The gift was successful in its effect: Dodon viewed it as an occasion to lament that the Russian Empire, back in 1812, had annexed what was then Bessarabia, but stopped short of the Carpathian mountains at the Prut River, and later announced before Putin left that his party, should it gain the majority, was committed to shifting his country away from EU ties.) And when the single mother Yekaterina Vologzhenova decided the she would repost a cartoon showing a Putin lookalike looking at a map of the Ukraine, focussed on the city of Donbas while holding a large knife Putin poring over a map of Donbas, knife in hand; the single mother was sentenced to 350 hours of community service for “internet extremism” for sharing an image that suggested that Russian forces were behind the loss of much of the Southeastern Ukraine’s territory, and suggesting President’s mania for maps; the government ordered her lap-top computer to be destroyed.

The image of the President before the map suggested a sense of restoration of past borders, and a sense of romancing territorial integrity as if it were removed from state interests or personal advantage–using the map as a mask, similar to Putin’s caution that the anger of the Ukrainian government at Russia for its loss of Donbas in the southeast were related to Moscow, lest they “take a stand-off between Ukraine and russia to a higher level”–since “no one needs an armed conflict” on Europe’s edges.

Detail of above map, on Black Sea

But the claims for Russian ties to Crimea and Ukraine–and illustration of Russian military might in the Ukraine’s invasion–used assertions of ethnic nationalism as a basis to place Russia in a position of strength in the national news, and assert its relation to Chechen and Crimean neighbors, and parade the strength of military hardware in so doing.

In so doing, the Putin government is remapping the Crime as part of an expanded Russia, using Russonationalism to deny or ignore the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 to “respect the independence and sovereignty of the existing borders of Ukraine,” but remapping the region on Russia Today as lying in the boundaries of an expanded Russia whose military might is right–as a decision of local ethnic Russians–in the hope to assure a continued tie to the shipping and piping of oil outside of its borders. The scrim of a Russia Today set showed the new configuration of the Crimea as a part of Russia once again, joined to its expanse of yellow in ways that left room open for the continued violation of Ukrainian sovereignty under the illusion of a false democracy of a referendum to rejoin the Russian Federation: the vote, which offered the possibility of independence or integration with Putin’s Russia, in response to the ouster of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was immediately remapped as an expansion of Russian territory by popular demand, even as the plebiscite was held as Russian soldiers occupied the peninsula.

1. Putin’s tie to the prominent topographic map that is displayed in his residence–a map that seems to naturalize political boundaries, and is oddly without any clearly visible names, but includes striking national borders, provides a site before which he seems eager to be photographed–as if to suggest his keen study of the geography East of the Urals, as much as his care to the Russian nation. The relation of Ukraine to the Russian Empire and nation is complex–and goes back to the secession during the Revolution, when the region claimed an independence that has become far less clear in its national or linguistic autonomy. But the enmity between Russia and Ukraine is over-exaggerated. While the Ukrainian Republic that seceded from the Russian Empire was greater than the now seceded region–the area had been significantly “Russified” as a Soviet Socialist Republic, whose ethnic or linguistic autonomy was attempted to be erased–if not denied–to integrate the region into the Russian historical lands, as if to erase the scars of the splintering of Ukraine from the Soviet state and from “European Russia” after the 1917 Revolution. Despite the importance of this historical legacy, the spatial importance of Ukraine to Putin’s government has much to do with the geography of energy and oil pipelines for Gazprom and the Russian state–to recover national claims of Russia to the region are tried to be magnified more than are seen as a part of Russia’s identity.

“Dismembered Russia–Some of its Fragments,” New York Times (1918)

Yet the remapping of the region is often cast as an integral whole. And so when Putin gazes quite icily if somewhat longingly at the regions that extend to the Black Sea, but exclude Crimea, in the large topographic wall maps of his Presidential Palace outside of Moscow, it is pressing to consider what sort of region he saw, and what continued Russian presence–cultural or linguistic–existed in the region he was so ready to invade.

REUTERS/ITAR-TASS/PRESIDENTIAL PRESS SERVICE (RUSSIA) – RTR1GAL3/August 11, 2006

The creation of a newly independent Ukraine more closely tied to the European Union would be so close to Moscow evoke a Cuban Missile crisis like setting, reviving deep Cold War fears–even as it would reaffirm the cultural independence of the region, the image of a repeated division of Ukraine from Russian state seemed to undo its longstanding Sovietization, and to return to an image of Russification that was first cultivated by Peter the Great, or cultural assimilation of non-Russian minorities in a fictive map, and can be traced as far back as to the sixteenth-century Russification of the newly conquered Tartar Khanate of Kazan (which included the former Volga Bulgaria) and extended to become a state policy, and was most present in the marginalization of non-Russian languages, the use of Russian as the sole language of government, and Christianization, but included the marginalization of local memory, which increased the large number of endangered languages in the current Russian Federation, as well as the effective persecution of indigenous minorities in ways that intensified in the Soviet Era: forgotten languages of Komi, Mordvins, Volgic Finnic peoples, Belarusians, and Lithuanians were reduced to symptoms of its implementation–and in Ukraine led Peter the Great of Russia to issue a blanket decree in 1720 designed to expurgate any evidence of Ukrainian language or theological treatises from typographical houses in the region, making ethnic nationality virtually supervise; Catherine the Great similarly ordered a program of rigorous Russification for Ukraine, Livonia, and Finland–allegedly using light-handed methods, and remapping Ukraine as “Novorossia” to indicate its subordinate nature of its possession. The renaming of the region not only absorbed Ukraine as a territory, but tired to erase Ukraine’s cultural memory.

2. Even if much as it is tempting to see Russian invasion of Ukraine through the lenses of a Cold War, as Putin seems to want to suggest, and a deep desire of Moscow to keep ties to former Soviet military bases as a sort of buffer zone, it seems in fact the renewed economic importance of the region’s stability to the transport of gas and oil that has produced the increased insistence on the integrity to Russia. For the fraudulent claims to ethnic protection conceals the emergence of a new global geography of the energy market, where boundaries are less based on the demarcation of united ethnic units or political bodies than the ways that gas has increased the value of those and adjacent lands. Mapping the region of Ukraine and nearby lands demands situating the region’s boundaries in a global context of economic value, where economic transactions and activity are often bound up in the growing value of the gas pipelines that ran across its territory. Rather than to fall back into categories of the Cold War, or inherently Russian qualities of regions of the post-Soviet state, even if these might line up with recent politics, we might do well to explore other reasons for interest in its redefinition on a map.

To be sure, the geographic distribution of Russian-speakers in the country appears relatively confined to regional divide which are both linguistic–

–and reflect the political divisions of its landscape of the supporters of Timoshenko and Yanukovich, a basic fault line across the region’s terrain that seems to threaten its integrity and division in separate blocks.

But the clear lines that are drawn between dominating parties and political persuasions in these choropleths draw far clearer divisions in the integrity of the region than might be useful as tools of analysis, and they might be better taken as starting points than as coherent projections of data. These maps place their viewers at a distance and remove from the increasing strategic importance of Ukraine’s boundaries in a post-Cold War world, which is perhaps more defined by the circulation of regional capital and energy from the growing number of gas fields and already built pipelines than the positioning of military material. Indeed, these maps of regional divisions oversimplify the potential actual reasons for military invasion, as do analyses that seem to privilege fears of Russian deployment of ICBM’s within a Cold War scenario, in which the placement of tactical weapons lead to the escalation of a war of conventional aggression into nuclear weaponry, by removing the region from the new reasons for the tensions surrounding its coherence in a growing market for natural gas, and relying on recycled narratives of the Cold War. The annexation of Ukrainian land is striking since not really about geography, or territory, in ways that are able to be quickly reduced to the surface of a map. And although Russia’s Federal Border Guard Service continues to insist that it allows no one to enter Ukraine illegally, with the Ukrainian post sitting some two miles within the official border, the apparently porous boundary between the two states–as the boundary between Ukraine and Belarus–is far less clearly defined than the boundaries appear to be on the map.

3. To effectively carve up a country in a delicate balance of power and global economy is exceptionally dangerous. The variety of choropleth maps that depict the ethnic, linguistic, and electoral divides across Ukraine in our national news as “the data visualization needed to understand the political situation in Ukraine” have, no doubt, distracted us from the situation on the ground and the geographic questions that underlie the political crisis. In fact, the country’s geopolitical situation may be far better mapped explain its emergence as a somewhat unlikely theater for playing out scenarios from an old Cold War, although for reasons more tied to natural resources: for the webs of pipelines, as much as the ethnic and linguistic divisions of the region, provide a the economic networks of the breakaway former Soviet. Although we’ve become accustomed to posit deep divides within our electoral politics and to grasp political divides by handy data visualizations, as if they both synthesized and decoded compelling sociological explanations, the data visualization seems to replace real reporting with stories of deeply set national fracture-lines, our love of infographics might become a form of disinformation that migrate from the television screen across the internet. For the infographics define and restrict the questions that might be asked about the situation, dangerously removing the issue of Ukraine’s sovereignty or politics from a globalized context of financial capital.

Infographics create particularly problematic in representing news about the Russian Federation’s recent annexation of Ukraine: they obscure the variety of more informative maps that have been drawn about the region, and the dilemmas of mapping the value of Ukraine as a region, or the specific value that its individual parts have gained. With the closure of many US news agencies abroad, and the shrinking of foreign bureaus, mapping Ukraine is an increasingly important means for grasping the political effects of shocks in a global inter-connected economy, where transactions are as important as the demographic composition of inhabitants, but the range of already generated and accessible data, readily processed into data visualizations, is in danger of drowning the real story of a narrative of global economics. For the projection of strategic value in Ukraine is replaced by images leaving viewers dumbfounded at the messiness of mapping electoral or demographic divisions or synthetic charts that compress a complex historical narrative that only make us wonder on what basis that country came to exist.

The narrative needs to be recuperated in a broader map, perhaps one synthesizing less information on its surface. Perhaps even a clearer visualization of the place of Ukraine within the continuity of a spectrum of corruption and authoritarianism in post-Soviet republics can tell more of a story than one that carves up the country into distinct sectors. The so-called ‘civil war’ in Ukraine is clearly exacerbated by the increased eagerness of Russia’s interference with the nation’s sovereignty than divisions lying within its populace, in ways that the charting of the area as a longstanding “geopolitical prize” might reveal. We might need to look at the shifting ways that geopolitics have changed to make propitious the recent return from the dead of the Tsarist geographical construction of Novorossiya as a category that has suddenly acquired a rehabilitated geopolitical meaning in a globalized world: the surprising re-introduction of a construction of Tsarist geographers to refer to the Eastern Ukraine has the primary goal of rehabilitating a Ukraine primarily oriented to Russia–instead of its current government–that nicely lends itself to Putin’s pan-Russian (or anti-russophile) rhetoric.

To understand what makes this particularly advantageous, we might begin from remapping Ukraine less in terms of ethnic divisions than pathways of transit of gas and other natural products; for these pathways might show what issues are at stake in Russia’s contesting boundaries of the region, and the reason’s for Putin’s odd re-use of a long dead name to hide his quite pragmatic interests in making it part of Russia once more. For the discovery of a range of gas fields in the country, and the inherited gas lines that run underground through Ukraine, have shifted the geopolitical meaning of the frontiers by which the country is mapped, as much as the mapping of its different ethnic inhabitants.

4. Ukraine’s contested sovereignty–or rights to sovereignty–can maybe be succinctly mapped by a variety of quite simple tension lines that exist in the region crisscrossed by a dense network of pipelines of natural gas. Indeed, the control over the pipelines speaks volumes about the mobilization of military forces along the borders of this relatively recent country than the ethnic divisions which can cause many Americans to raise their hands and shrug their shoulders as they try to grasp the volley of double-speak around the protection of Russian minorities. Andrew Barry has revealed the degree to which the pipelines of gas created a rapid shift in pricing the value of lands in the Caucasus in ways that are utterly incommensurable with the economies of its inhabitants; the value of the land for laying pipes and creating new sources of multinational investment have suddenly involved globalized economies in regions that were, until incredibly recently, rarely considered of value or easily on the map by international agencies, who are now increasingly involved in their use to a degree that local inhabitants have difficulty grasping. The new constellations of interests appear to be configured around the Ukraine in ways that questions of political annexation cannot come to terms with.

The explosion of Ukraine as a sudden hotspot of the global map might be explained by maps of its status as a nexus of economic networks that many current infographics fail to register, since they are foreign to most of our cartographies of social or political division. The concealed motivations for militarization in Ukraine seem to reflect the pipelines that are concealed underground or just above its surface–and the projected value that Gazprom identifies with their flow–in ways that have little to do with local sovereignty in ways that it is often considered, and are often removed from its inhabited lands. And it may well be that in mapping divisions in Ukraine as if condemned to irresolvable quagmires of disunion and political dissent, we obscure how its geopolitical situation reflects the rising stock of the region’s value for economic resources. Infographics that parse space by either ethnicity or electoral divides conceal and bury the geopolitical interest of Ukraine beneath data as if to mask the global strategies being played out on the ground. Have we fallen into a blind acceptance of the Ukraine as divided by diverse constituencies?

Putin branded Ukraine’s government as a “junta” and announced cryptic “consequences” should the actual government–whose authority he denied– purportedly “threaten Russian lives“, the rhetoric of Russia jumped borders. What Putin duplicitously presented as a defense of human liberties or civil rights denied the sovereign bounds of a nation to defend ethnic Russians, playing a high stakes odd game with maps, in which the place of a mythical unity of “Russia” echoed the geographers of Peter the Great. For Putin has elegantly balanced his threats with the double-speak accusation that places direct responsibility at the United States–“for causing the demon of fascism to once raise its head in Europe, [while] Europe and the international community are for the most part silent and are instead engaged in a frenzied irrational campaign to demonize Russia”–barely concealing his own frustration that the world did not recognize by consensus the “treaty” or “Independence Bill” annexing Crimea unilaterally signed on March 18, 2014.

The readily redrawn map must not be so readily given common currency. The motives for its radical redrawing cannot be so easily attributed a purported desire to protect human rights, since the redrawn boundaries to forge new networks that would meet economic aims and guarantee a monopoly on gas. Indeed, Russia’s open contesting of the sovereign independence of Ukraine is not so much about political sovereignty or the sorts of claims of economic dominance that are supported by shifting globalized economy, which cuts across boundary lines, and works with the facilitation of the extraction and flow of natural resources across land, and which dispenses with questions of political sovereignty. Putin’s openly Machiavellian rhetoric intentionally creates confusions between sovereign identity, national divides, and the strategic value of political control. The problem may lie in how Putin maps Ukraine, how many news maps map Ukraine in the US and world media, and the obstructions that both maps create in understanding what is at stake. We are, perhaps, in danger in assuming identities and divisions are synthesized and captured in maps, since they also easily package the rehabilitation of the rhetoric of the Cold War that Putin’s government seems to expect we’ll accept as credible.

The new geography of Ukraine might, it is true, not be so readily understood, or its strategic importance incompletely grasped. As much as offer a port on the Black Sea, or a market for Russian gas, the status of Ukraine as a border into which the EU or NATO appears ready to poach invites this projected image of inevitable ethnic or linguistic divides in Ukraine that are ready lead to inevitable lines of national fracturing that would reflect its geographical position on the edge of Europe, defined by the Dnieper, Dniester and Bug rivers that run through it to the Black Sea.

WaPo’s Max Fisher stoked the news-wires as he chose to illuminate the potential for an inevitable dissensus across the map, as if the point the country to inevitable social fragmentation of the sort Fisher has delineated in the past–as if a nation were ethnically determined in its constitution. One can, for example, map the linguistic divisions of Russian as linguistic and demographic fault lines in a sequence of three-color choropleths of the country:

Or find the tensions in the electoral divisions of the landscape, in ways that naturalize the focus of government protests by arguing that these regions weren’t the ones that wanted Viktor Yanukovich to win, anyways, as if this would explain the rightful secession of “red” states from the USA, as a sort of reflection of national preferences and easily comprehended data visualization of civic divisions that foregrounds the spectrum of its political lines of division:

And yet–what do these visualizations even describe, save the inevitability of regional divisions? Is this all window-dressing of the deeper divisions of economic value and the inheritance of international investments in built pipeline that threaten to increasingly paralyze a Western response to Russian aggression, as much as motivate it? Is it possible that in those areas where the pro-European party won, and which directly abutted pro-Yanukovych regions, the amount of protests were fewer than in those which bordered on Russia? Can the election between Yanukovich and Tymoshenko be understood by analogy to the rifts and fault lines among political parties in our own country? How could they not be informed by the economic, as well as the ethnic, complexion of different regions of the country, and local pressures of self-definition of a region that had an unclear sense of identity before 1991? And aren’t these divisions now clearly based on economic interests, and the changing economic ties that have created a different calculus of value for folks in different regions of the country? Even as many pro-Russian nationalists exist in Ukraine who imagine a “Transcarpathian People’s Republic,” the geopolitics of the region have been eager to imagine the region’s incorporation into the Russian Federation for reasons far removed from ethnicity.

In an era where “Ukraine” means many things, most reports have been oddly silent about the webs of international traffic that run across Ukraine, tying it to a larger picture of economic transactions that are as determinant of Russian attitudes to the region as the internal composition of the country. For s much as a nation of different areas of linguistic dominance, which evokes neo-Whorffian notions of linguistic-formation, the crucial fact of the presence both of gas fields in much of Ukraine that borders the East and Crimea key routes for the transit of Russian gas, and potential areas of future exploration, outweigh the geopolitical or ethnic considerations most often invoked in news media. (This surely seems more relevant to the current crisis than the survey of 300 years of Crimea’s history in a sequence of maps that chart its shifting boundaries and relative autonomy–despite the healthy volley of exchanges that post elicited.) But the most recent contention of Ukraine’s sovereignty or boundaries seem driven by the shifting relation of a network of gas pipelines–and the traffic in gas–to the policing and control over its frontiers: the map of key pipelines that underlie the nation’s territory might be the clearest indication of the redrawing of this region as two geobodies, and the pronounced pressures placed on its continued cohesion.

For the rapidly rising stock of the Eastern Ukraine with the discovery of a relative abundance of a range of potentially valuable gas fields has both created new ties and conduits between Ukraine and the EU, and Russian Gazprom’s reliance on transmitting gas to the EU in ways that have dramatically shifted attitudes to the regional landscape and its geographic significance, as it would also allow European gas to “reverse-flow” to Ukraine, separating the region from a dependence on Russian gas. The situation of active gas pipelines–and potential or recently discovered gas fields–has shifted international focus to a region, in ways that reveal how the presence of pipelines have mediated the strategic importance of Eastern Ukraine, in ways poorly understood or represented by maps of lines of ethnic division or of linguistic groupings, and that might determine how the region has become a site for the investment of global capital:

BBC News; source: National Gas Union of Ukraine

The recent mid-June decision of Russian CEO Alexei Miller to cut off gas shipments to Kiev and Ukraine–“Gazprom has decreased deliveries of gas to zero,” reads the public statement, seems the latest elevation of a declaration of real war, following months of negotiation, in which Russia seems confident that it can continue to funnel gas to the EU through Ukraine, the company which it mostly (50.1%) owned by the Russian government announced an act of economic aggression that seems to realize the true stakes over which the conflict had occurred. Although the territorial boundary line between Ukraine and Belarus, and Ukraine and the Russian Federation, does not seem to have been formally negotiated after 1991, the decision to cease gas imports to Ukraine challenge the region’s autonomy–and significance–as much as the surreptitious transport of tanks and military material across its recognize national borders: for cutting off gas supplies would achieve a similarly interventionist means to challenge the legitimacy of the government, just after the election of Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk in June 2014. With Gazprom insisting that Kiev has been pumping gas deliveries from Russia into underground storage tanks, without advancing adequate payments, Yatsenyuk observed that the decision “is not about gas,” but rather “a general plan for the destruction of Ukraine.” Ethnic rights of return seem less the point than controlling both oil reserves in the Black Sea and shipping lanes for valuable exports.

If Ukraine has been long been said to have been loosing control over a tenuously drawn border with Russia, what is Ukraine save a territory needed to grow the Russian economy, and a region over which “threat[s] to the lives and health of the local population” are less relevant than restoring energy revenues? Perhaps the ethnic Russian groups encouraged the fostering of economic ties to specific regions. But for all of Putin’s rhetoric of cultural and linguistic nationalism–and the spectre of Russian persecution–the wells in the Crimea and Black Sea and in the shale sands of Eastern Ukraine have determined the value of the region’s annexation–and the rehabilitation “back from the Dead” of “Novorossiya” [New Russia], even if anti-Russian sentiment is strong in the “ethnically Ukrainian” western regions of the country, as if to prompt the increased federalization of the country.

The investment of European banks informed the reluctance of banks to impose sanctions on Russia’s annexation. If the space occupied by Novorossiya was located historically by the Black Sea and Crimea–rather than the steppes–the areas that guarantee the future flow of secure gas to travel through Ukraine as it leaves for Europe constitute a central prize for Russians. (Although there is some suggestion that the term might augur a basis for claims for local independence of the region, separated from Russia, the term floated long before in the Russian press.)

The constellation of pipelines situate Ukraine in a global energy market, revealing a web of ties linking Russia to Ukraine, and linking Russia to Europe through Ukraine–and indeed through several of the cities in the new entity, from Dnipropetrovsk and Lugansk, both of which lie on significant pipelines that route supplies from Siberian gas fields to the West–and the strength, as we have seen, that Russia could end Crimea’s gas supplies.

And the emergence of new maps of the region of Novorossiya as a part of the Russian Federation, predating the annexation of Ukraine, mirror an imagined image of the region’s appearance by the year 2035 in a set of maps attributed to high-level report by Russian security and policy experts on what Europe’s borders would probably look like in 2035, an ultra-nationalist vision that imagined an expanded Romania and a Ukraine surrounded by a newly enlarged Russian Federation including a Carpathian Ruthenian Republic from Ukraine’s oblast, and around the former Czechoslovakia, and an independent Galician state taking part of the western Ukraine, while Bukovina amalgamates with Romania in the Chernivtsi oblast, dismembering Ukraine at the same time as Russia encompassed the area by the Black Sea, while, the same report predicted, Europe balkanized. We see a large region of Belarus beside a landlocked Ukraine in this fantastic futurology, where the regional name “Novorossiya” is already emblazoned on the map’s face, apparently sharing borders with the named region of Crimea, both apparent states, with Transnistria, within the Russian Federation:

5. The futurology allegedly based on CIA information and geopolitical experts in the USA predicted both a division of Scotland from England, the separation of the Basque region, division of Italy and emergence of Wallonia and Lorraine, as if to deflate the image of NATO and comfort any fears of the coherence the EU might have ever possessed–at the same time as Germany incorporated Poland and emerged as the only power worthy of consideration in the region. The premise of Russian “rights” to these lands may mask a deeper sense of the continued economic coherence that they present to Putin’s revision of Russia’s economical relations to the perhaps-to-be-soon-disolved European Union.

Charting routes of gas flows across the region and the central points of entrance and exit from the country, within the Crimea and in its eastern regions, suggests how intense the region has been for new investment of global capital in ways that make the Russian government particularly concerned: the economic consequences of pushing large quantities of gas to Eastern and Central Europe, potentially destined for expansion with the discovery of oilfields in the Black Sea and Sea of Azov, could both make Ukraine less dependent on imports of gas, boost Ukrainian exports of gas, or create a bonanza for Gazprom suppliers of the EU. (Since most of Russian gas going to Europe passes through Ukraine, the potential energy independence of Ukraine could pose a deep threat to the marketing of Russian gas, as the decision for such pipelines to be raised levies or used less widely, raising the spectre of a blow to Russian imports and balance of trade on the global energy market.) The increased involvement of European banks to the expansion of investments in pipelines across Ukraine has also inflected the ability to coordinate any national response–or the response of the European Union–to the very question of respecting national sovereignty, and made delicate questions of how Ukraine could be mapped: only the fear of Crimean nationalization of natural gas-fields in the Black Sea has led to potential ban on banks’ financial ties to Crimea, now a center of Russian finance. Lack of stability has been a source of banks’ continued concerns and increased financial concern of the energy industry.

Despite aspirations for future expansion of the matrix to funnel gas to the EU, the pipelines already illuminate the increasingly central role that Ukraine plays both as a conduit and by its fields of future exploration for shale gas, increased interests for the United States as well as nurturing Ukrainian energy independence, may be superseded by new pipelines. The plans to expand the network of gas pipelines outside Ukraine–through which over half of this gas now passes in pipelines–would alter the configuration of the region to wean Russia from its dependence on Ukrainian pipelines, and expand a range of alternative energy pipelines, most significantly from northern gas fields into the EU, built with funds from German and European corporations and governments eager to underwrite the importation of gas from new fields at a relatively cheap price:

The planned Nord Stream and South Stream pipelines would allow Gazprom to avoid dependence on conduits in Ukrainian lands–and draw from the Shtokman and Yamal fields and Central Asia–is not yet on the horizon, and And so when Putin threatens that negotiations must begin with Russo-philic “real representatives” of the so-called Russian-speaking rebels of the Eastern Ukraine, who Putin has insisted should manage their own political affairs–and promote their “own” ties to Russia: by belittling the “utter nonsense” that Russian troops were in fact sent into eastern Ukraine, they are allowed to bemoan the “grave crime” of Ukrainian soldiers being sent to Eastern Ukraine.

At the same time, the recent annexation of Crimea continues to play out quite uneasily on the ground and local politics. With looming bureaucratic disasters of the integration with Russian government growing increasingly troubling and apparent, even if “Crimea has always been an integral part of Russia in the hearts and minds of its people,” the annexation of Crimea within a month after the February 21 collapse of Yanukovich’s government on March 18 seem to have greater risks than alleged hopes to protect a population tied to Mother Russia and facing alleged persecution by a constellation of “russophobes” and “neo-Nazis.” The actual interests involved in this power game are so removed from those of local inhabitants or a hope for ethnic tranquillity, and seem more guided to restore harmony in a balance of the gas trade–or allow its manipulation and orchestration by Russian businesses.

Wired: Map Time

Indeed, the emergence of maps that projected the future remapping of the region helped to create its coherence.

6. The confirmation in the face of Russian denial that “separatists” who stoked unrest across Eastern Ukraine were Russian military and defense forces–based on systematic photographs of individuals and descriptions that the Obama administration confirms, indicating that subversive agents were placed into the country’s borders by the Russian military, drawing from a KGB playbook of fomenting local civil unrest in foreign states, at the same time as increasing military operations were staged near the Eastern border of Ukraine, in ways that seem to mirror the very points of entry into Ukraine of significant pipelines of natural gas. It may make sense to ask whether Max Fisher was duped by data of social divides–in suggesting that the above infographics of social divisions among groups favoring integration with the EU and those who seek, for ethnic or political reasons, to “draw the country closer to Russia,” reflect the dividing lines in recent electoral results–claimed to mirror linguistic divides between Russian and Ukrainian, but is actually less of a divide based on whether Ukraine will face Russia or Europe–and rather something like a ghost of Cold War rearing its head in Ukraine.

New York Times; source: IHS Janes

The opportune clustering of Russian forces to the East–at the entrance of gas pipelines that enter Europe–almost seem to respond the Soviet-era placement of military arms in Ukraine to the far West, where tanks and mechanized infantry were intended to serve as an effective balance to NATO–with airforce and navy in and near the Crimea.

How is the right of Russia to “protect” Sevastapol and Crimea repeatedly evoked as a basis for a “just” war? The odd evocation of all of Southeastern Ukraine by the old term of “New Russia” or “Novorossiya,” evoking an imperial term and eighteenth century legacy to designate the lands that the Empire conquered, north of the Black Sea, after which “God knows” why it rejoined Ukraine. While the area was widely colonized by Russians, particularly in its urban centers, after being taken from the Ottomans, and nineteenth-century Novorossiya centered at Odessa, the sparsely populated region included a plurality of ethnic groups, and Russian became the language of its cities–with Yiddish–while Ukrainian dominated the countryside, but was resettled and developed after huge population losses by famine and in World War II by Soviets, leading to some unease that the former “New Russia” became part of the Ukraine in 1991. However, the adoption of the term by protesters in Donetsk who sought independence from Ukraine–and perhaps to rejoin Russia, and perhaps backed by Russia in a coordinated plan to federalize the region–was mirrored in Putin’s rehabilitation of this old toponymy, as if the reversion of lands away from Russia was a devolution of a former satellite of the late nineteenth century, was voiced on the region’s current website–and had circulated in the region ever since the region became part of Ukraine with the fall of the USSR.

7. Putin promoted an inflected Newspeak of the Cold War to argue that although Russia had the “right” to invade the province, Russia also “hoped” that such an unwanted act would be unnecessary–recasting regional boundaries that had existed from 1764 as a natural right to areas north of the Black Sea or Sea of Azov. By reclaiming sovereignty over an area of Tsarist heritage (rehabilitated as a Soviet) as a “natural right,” the invocation of “Novorossiya” re-brands a borderland in ways invoking how Catherine the Great invited Europeans to settle and over which Prince Grigori Potemkin presided, but largely to prevent it from sustained incursions of Cossacks and Tartars.

But the rebirth of the geobody that Putin wants to redefine has, bizarrely, served as a sort of screen on which to project new identities in maps. For the densely inhabited regions between the Dniester and the Dnieper rivers were settled by towns, but surrounded by steppes, former swamps and peaty plains of Polesia, in a triangle of Brest, Mogilev on the Dnieper and Kiev, or the region of Lithuania, Wallachia, Bulgaria, Lithuania and Poland and Muscovy, whose heterogeneously inhabited cities and “deserted fields,” long part of the Ottoman Empire , where divided, and shown, quite disorientingly, as East of Asia, if the inhabitants of these once-swampy area also seemed to be poised between sparsely settled lands of Walachia an Muscovy, as if poised between East and West, and populated by amiable-looking traders of sorts: if the late seventeenth century sought to divide “Europe” from “Asia” along such rivers as the Volga, Don, Kama, and Ob, only by the eighteenth century did Philip Johan von Strahlenberg define the geographic divisions between Europe and Asia along the Ural Mountains, in a proposal Peter the Great’s program of Westernization adopted–and which Peter’s commander, the cartographer and future historian of Russia Vassily Nikitich Tatishchev claimed as his own, redefining Russia as European, and reclassifying Siberia as lying at an Asiatic remove.

Although the Urals gained dominance as a geospatial division, and the Ural River’s entrance in the Caspian Sea became a borderline, the question became less clear as one approached the Black Sea, but was less clear in the continually contested “vanquished areas [loca deserta]” that faced tartar incursions to the north, or the wilderness of the steppes, later settled by Russian nobility, but also by a range of Serbs, Poles, Armenians, Bulgarians, and Tartars to populate the historical wild lands of the steppes:

The addition of qualitative images of local inhabitants at the base of the map, around its cartouche, in the tradition of illustrating the variety of local costume and habits in maps of foreign region that Abraham Ortelius expanded in his Theatrum Orbis Terrarum to amplify the truly scenographical functions of the map as a description, serve both to supplement the erasure of any inhabitants in terrestrial maps, and expand the descriptive qualities and enargaeic power of maps to make a region present before readers’ eyes: pensive inhabitants stand about the cartouche in varied local dress who seem trustworthy traders and businessmen, expressive, not only of sartorial variety their headgear and buttoned-up shirts, but sympathetic characters current maps erase by shoehorning into demographic divides, unlike this delineation of the shifting ethnic constellation of “Ukraina cum adjacentibus Provinciis“:

That is not that political divisions do not exist, but that the attentiveness to dividing the region into its constituent parts may go back to the positivistic origins of regional geography that hoped to grasp a coherent and legible picture of the region, rather than to capture the variety of forces that have now poised around its borders.

Long hopes for creating a clear picture of the region is something of a geographic dream of clarifying the ethnic divisions of the region, if it is now presented not in the division between Christian and Islamic (Turkish) towns, and Cossack so much as political parties that seem all too rooted in ethnic divides. For a generation of Enlightenment geographers obsessed with delineating state frontiers and classifying continental divides, this area, not clearly on either side of the Ural Mountains, Ukraine posed problems of liminality, partly in Asia and partly in Europe, like Poland, and peopled by groups without frontiers, or whose relations were particularly hard to determine and would be even harder to determine during the ever-shifting regional geopolitics from Cossack resistance to Ottoman forces to the of Russo-Turkish wars over much of the late seventeenth and eighteenth century that would, in the end, grant Russia access to the Black Sea and a sense of entitlement to the region: the inhabitants of Ukrainian lands were situated in relation to other regions, rather than as a region, and Turkish and Christian cities on both sides of the Dnieper distinguished on the map–which noted continued incursions of Cossack and Tartar tribes.

The unexpected recent rehabilitation of the mythic-historical construct “Novorossiya” as being not a myth, but rather defining “a country of twenty million people, with industry, with resources,” may in fact conceal that the resources are what military intervention would allow the Russian government access and the ability to control.

The newly resurrected language of borders created an alternative nation-state. It has provided a basis to shift the denial Ukrainian autonomy into an actual excuse for military invasion: the assertion of the imaginary region of Novorossiya has effectively denied the boundaries renegotiated with the fall of the Soviet Union, as if they perpetuated a swindling that shortchanged Russian collective memory, and offered cover to deep-set fears the West would actually reclaim Ukraine; Putin has from April 17 re-described greater Crimea as if it were Russian, beyond having ethnic Russian residents. There is little coincidence that the wealth of Eastern Ukraine in its many coal fields and iron ore beside the Donetz River would itself make the region such a profitable site of resources. The region’s considerable wealth seems to have solidified the deep ties of the region to Soviet Russia, so that it is in practice impossible to extricate Russian desires for control over the region from trade in its natural resources or actual mineral wealth. So is his land grab a pragmatic one, or is Putin shadow-boxing both with Soviet collectivization and imagined NATO-expansion to Russia’s frontiers by resurrecting the historical confines of Novorossiya, over a century after its demise?

New York Times, from Friesen, Rural Revolutions in Southern Ukraine; Magocsi, Ukraine: A Historical Atlas

8. The reclaiming of this region that existed in a historical imaginary alone–but whose frontiers were far larger than the region where Yanukovych had won a large share of the popular vote–suggests the invocation of an imaginary heritage of a past frontier to disguise the protection of economic resources in an age of globalization. Indeed, Putin seems intent on enlarging the historical boundaries of Novorossiyain his current land grab. Putin was quite open about his true target of concern: “Needless to say, first and foremost we wanted to support the residents of Crimea. But we also followed certain logic: if we don’t do anything, Ukraine will be drawn into NATO sometime in the future. We’ll be told, ‘This doesn’t concern you’ and NATO ships will dock in Sevastopol, the city of Russia’s naval glory.” Mapmakers might do well to engage this redefining of the Ukraine’s sovereign bounds, and to consider the region less as a bounded territory in the manner it is so often mapped, but of crucial importance not only on account of the access that it offers to the Black Sea, but for the access that it allows to burgeoning gas fields in the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, and to the network of pipelines Gazprom long ago laid across the region’s current actual boundaries.

The situation of these pipelines no doubt offer a considerably persuasive rational for backing and sustaining claims to Crimea’s alleged regional sovereignty, and its integrity to the Russia’s economy and state. Google Maps quickly caved to repeatedly recarving of the map of Ukraine that the invasion created, when it opted to reflect user preferences or the path of least resistance. The decision to go ahead and allow the peninsula of Crimea appear part of Russia for its Russian users was in part an abdication of responsibility in mapping–and an attempt to remove the map from politics, by making it one of the disinterested provision of information, and offering two different maps to two sets of map-users. But in claiming agnosticism on its decision to air this boundary line–as if to boost its page views, more than adopt a position of clarity, while continuing to retain place names in Crimea as part of Ukraine (see Simferopol, Crimea, Ukraine). Google’s not-so-Solomonic option seems to mirror the announcement by the politician Anatoly Sidyakin that Bing, Google, and others to imitate how the Russian search engine “Yandex . . . shows Russian users that Crimea is part of Russia, while showing it as part of Ukraine to Ukrainians,” as if in a sleight of hand, and leaving its spokesperson Svetlana Anurova only to remark with taciturnity that “In relevant cases the borders of disputed areas are marked in a special way. In countries where we have a localized version of our service, we follow local laws on representing borders and use of landmark names.”

Is the actual vociferous denial of any contested territories in the map itself a Solomonic judgment, or a weirdly back-handed denial of the power of the imagined maps and boundary lines that seem so important to Putin’s own created image of himself as the protector and defender of Russophiles, and his manipulation of the situation to booster a flagging Russian nationalism?

Or are we just punting, as the National Review‘s Alec Torres worried about National Geographic‘s decision to quickly recognize Russian annexation of the region, and Wikipedia’s hemming and hawing about how to acknowledge the disputed relationship between Crimea and Russia in its maps.

In announcing the “historic reunification treaty” as expected to be ratified by the Russian parliament, somewhat gleefully noted that “Experts at the Washington-based National Geographic Society have announced plans to redraw the world map to show Crimea as part of Russia after the Ukrainian breakaway region’s reunification with Moscow is finalized,” as if it were but one step away from formal recognition by the UN. (There seems to be a clear conflict here between demands for 24-7 news and the difficulty of shifting the boundaries on a map to reflect a shifting situation on the ground; Rand McNally’s Amy Krouse promised its prospective readers that in mapping the region, “we take our direction from the [United States’] State Department,” which, of course, has not recognized the annexation, leading to a kerfuffle about the drawing of maps that did little to clarify news information, as it amounted to flag-waving.)

9. WaPo’s Monkey Cage jumped into this confusion of drawing boundary lines, by asking how much these maps even reflected geographic knowledge. The creative blog featured a widely popular map questioning, in a lamentational vein, taking knowledge of the Ukraine’s geographical location “as a proxy for overall knowledge and news consumption” about events in Ukraine. The post explores how much Americans’ know about the geographic position of Ukraine. Despite the reported pseudo-statistic that over two thirds of Americans are following the situation on the ground at least “somewhat closely,” the Monkey Cage punchline is that the least understood about it geographical location, the readier folks are to advocate military intervention by the US as a solution to a problem they are unlikely to have understood: only one in six were able to place Ukraine on a world map, let alone a regional map of Europe, and the failure to locate Ukraine extended to some 77% of American college graduates, most placing it 1,800 miles away from its actual location, based on a poll of Survey Sampling International. Most are removed from the imaginary geography of Novorossiya that Putin invoked: the spread of locations identified in the sampling use blue dots to show places most widely varying from Ukraine’s actual geographic location, in a map whose methodology and relative relevance was later elaborated in depth:

Stephen Colbert present the map while he wondered about odd clusterings of imagined notional Ukraines in South Asia, Greenland or Canada, and one response near Iowa–as if the move suggested the belief of one polled respondent that in invading Ukraine, Putin might be entering himself in the next Iowa straw poll. Doubtlessly, the notion that Russia might be fighting a war far from its borders is somehow a part of the odd mental baggage most Americans have about being stationed in Iraq or Afghanistan–an uneasiness informing the recent toponymic mutation of “Chiraq” to describe the surge of violence in the city in the Midwest. But the point is that unless we return Ukraine to a sense of geographic place, our understanding of the situation that has led to the crisis.

Where is Ukraine, anyway? Definitely on a map, and in many heads, but you might do well to take care to map the dynamic to understand how its frontiers are in danger of being redrawn.

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Filed under geopolitics, mapping ethnic groups, mapping national divides, Mapping Ukraine, Ukraine

Tagged as anti-globalization movements, Crimea, ethnic divides, ethnic divisions, European Union, gas and oil pipelines, Gazprom, national separatism, Novorossiya, Russia, Russian Federation, Russification, russonationalism, USSR, Yanukovich

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