Bioracism, or, spiritualism evolutionism

On November 10, 2004, eight days after the murder of the film director Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam, Etienne Balibar was invited to Radboud University in Nijmegen, the oldest city in the Netherlands, to offer that year’s Alexander von Humboldt Lecture in Human Geography. The title of his talk, which was subsequently translated and published in several European languages, was “Europe as Borderland,” indicating that far from “being a solution or a prospect,” “the issue of citizenship and cosmopolitanism” in Europe must be based on the fact that “Europe currently exists as a borderland.”1 By this, Balibar means that “the question of ‘borders’…is central when we reflect about citizenship and, more generally, political association”; and the question of borders itself in turn presupposes “address[ing] the issue of political spaces” as a means of representing specifically “European borders” (194).