Infrastructure as tactic: "Soft geopower" on the Euro-Mediterranean frontier

Keywords: infrastructure, geopolitics, geoeconomics, Mediterranean, urban geography
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 05:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 06:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 8

Abstract

Euro-Mediterranean integration aims to redress regional disparities, and local authorities play a role in this process by promoting the externalisation of market-based policies and regulatory measures across international frontiers. Such "extrospective" initiatives take many forms, e.g. training programs and other knowledge transfer activities for non-EU administrators, cross-border policy experimentation, but increasingly more direct involvement in infrastructural development and regeneration activities in contexts outside the EU. The presentation will bring together different strands of writing on borders, cities and development to demonstrate how infrastructure is used as form of "soft geopower" to enforce two key motives of the European project in the Mediterranean. On the one hand, infrastructural development is designed to bring foreign markets into closer proximity with the EU, allowing European investors better access to opportunities in times of cyclical downturn. On the other hand, infrastructure-led development has provided a vocabulary to push responsibility for the EU's regressive social policies, particularly those migration, onto third countries - thus acting as a foil to avoid any mention of them. The infrastructures that underpin such tactics are often minuscule compared to intercontinental projects like the Belt Road Initiative. The symbolic influence of these social and material infrastructures, however, continues to have a direct and lasting influence on both European and southern Mediterranean actors charged with implementing them.