Europe’s contested borders function to separate it from communist and Islamic alienness

Evidence

Anderson’s witty account highlights the illogicality of recent definitions of Europe. Yet it is precisely the politics of civilizational identity that is at work in the discourse of Europe’s extent. For Poles, Czechs, and Hungarians it is a matter not only of participating in the European common market, but of distancing themselves from a socialist history. Where Europe’s borders are to be drawn is also a matter of representing what European civilization is. These borders involve more than a confused geography. They reflect a history whose unconfused purpose is to separate Europe from alien times (“communism,” “Islam”) as well as from alien places (“Islamdom,” “Russia”). — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 831

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the critique of civilizational discourse in Said’s work and to the current ‘Islamic values in Europe’ debate; also parallels the reader’s interest in how identity borders are drawn. — connects to: Expellee elites framed their lost-homeland cause as pan-European unification that would erase borders. — Pertti Ahonen, Domestic Constraints on West German…, 60; Wealthy nations respond to climate refugees by fortifying borders rather than addressing causes — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 809; The West’s imagined independence from outside is failing as borders break down — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 2015