Beyond Walls: Re-inventing the Canada-United States Borderlands by Victor Konrad Heather Nicol

Author:Victor Konrad, Heather Nicol [Victor Konrad, Heather Nicol]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Human Geography
ISBN: 9781351955454
Google: YkqoDQAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 32832456
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2008-11-30T00:00:00+00:00

Geopolitics, Security Discourse and Current-Border Management Regimes

In the United States as in Canada, the concept of security as an overwhelming object for concern clearly has changed since 9/11. However, it would be wrong to conclude that there is consensus for security which speaks with one voice for all constituents and all borders. Rather there are varying geopolitical discourses concerning security and insecurity, and overall a slightly different consensus about the importance of borders and the security issues at hand. One constituency is the traditional realist International Relations perspective, a group of policy-makers and academics, as well as students and citizens. It perceives border security as an important state function, and as a deliverable good in the form of traditional security—protection from crime, drugs, smuggling and terrorism along U.S. borders. In many respects it is this constituency which has gained hegemony in determining the issues at stake and the nature of cross-border security agreements, and the concept of homeland security.

Homeland security is indeed the institutionalized product of American perspectives on security requirements. It is, in essence, a mass securitization project which creates ideals about security itself. What are the normative security benchmarks? Where is insecure? What constitutes insecurity? The use of the word “homeland” in U.S. security discourse speaks to a classical security language of homelands, rimlands, heartlands and all kinds of “lands” ranked in terms of their strategic importance. It is the stuff of Haiford Mackinder and early geopolitical rhetoricians who believed that power was the prize earned by strategic moves in a “risky” game of world politics. Homeland as a word embeds the concept of the territory, the country in which a particular national identity began. It is a word often associated with the concept of paternity, or ethnic hegemony, “When used as a proper noun, the word, as well as its cognates in other languages (i.e. Heimatland in German) often have ethnic nationalist connotations: Fatherland, Motherland, Mother country, each have some distinct interpretation according to nationality or historical usage.”58

While U.S. policy-makers would clearly wish to make a disclaimer concerning the racist and/or sexist connotation of the word as was as used in classic geopolitical discourse, it is nonetheless impossible for those on the outside of the American homeland to see it as an innocent or neutral word. There is a connotation of heartland, power and definitive American territory which essentialized the concept of Homeland Security in the U.S. and which sets it apart from other possible names for the process of heightened securitization of the U.S. territorial state. Homeland, the heartland, the sanctuary of what some have argued is a universalizing geoeconomic and geopolitical process, namely Americanization and globalization.

The word Homeland and the phrase Homeland Security can be contrasted with the Canadian equivalent: Emergency Preparedness. Security from a Canadian perspective is defined in slightly different terms. It speaks to the different “governmentalities”, political cultures and structural differences which fashion and respond to security imperatives in both countries. Emergencies are security challenges in this policymaking universe—where natural and human catastrophes must both be planned for.

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