Finding a place for freedom, security and justice: the European Union’s claim to territorial unity

Abstract:

Legal and political analyses tend to downplay the problem of spatiality evoked in the notion of an "area" of freedom, security and justice, focusing instead on the distinct policy fields covered by this triad of values. Whatever its merits, this analytic strategy neglects the central claim hidden in this notion: the closure of space into a legal place, into a bounded region, is essential to the very possibility and concrete realisation of freedom, security and justice. This paper explores this claim in four stages. Initially it examines and rejects the preliminary objection that globalization marks the irreversible decline of legal place as a constitutive feature of social life.

Then, drawing on Directives 2003/9 and 2003/86, it argues that the borders of the area give rise to two different forms of exteriority: the place from which a foreigner comes, when entering the EU, need not be strange; conversely, a strange place need not be foreign: it can irrupt from within what the EU calls its own place.

Subsequently, drawing on Communication 459/98 and the Preambles to the Treaties, the paper outlines a genetic account of the area, describing the representational process by which its boundaries are posited. The paper concludes by asserting that the primacy of security over freedom and justice is related to the paradox governing a fledgling European public order: in the process of enforcing the Union's claim to an own place, the area of freedom, security and justice becomes unrecognisable as the Union's own place.