Ghost in the Genevan borderscape! On the symbolic significance of an “invisible” border

Abstract

This paper explores the symbolic significance of national borders in a cross-border regional context. The main argument is that the transformation of borders is actually part of a complex and contested process of symbolisation, predicated on articulations between political projects, everyday experience, and collective memories. The Greater Geneva borderscape provides an emblematic case of cross-border cooperation that is marked by the physical erasure of the Franco-Swiss border. Rather than an absence of symbolisation, we hypothesise that the border continues to play a symbolic role through its implied “absence” in the affirmation of a cross-border territorial project. First, we show how the invisibilisation of the border in the Greater Geneva spatial imaginaries is in fact a symbolisation strategy aimed at underlining its obsolete character. Second, we reveal how the discordances between the symbolic recoding of the border by cross-border cooperation elites and existing popular imaginations and competing meanings weakens the project. To the extent that borders are powerful symbols that are intended to stimulate emotions and a sense of belonging, the ability to mobilise their meaning-making capacity is at the heart of symbolisation politics, as much for the proponents of open borders and cross-border cooperation as for the reactionary forces that emphasise national interests and ontological insecurity.