Abstract

This chapter briefly overviews how scholarship has tracked social developments since around 1990 toward understandings of a concept of “Fortress Europe” – contestation around which reflects the polysemous and destabilised meanings surrounding Europe in the post-Cold War context. “Fortress Europe” occurs at the intersection of several policy areas which have shifted toward more prominently addressing threats or challenges coming from outside Europe, particularly from the Global South: European integration, European security, and European immigration policy. Several scholarly vantage points have opened which have helped to evaluate or envision Fortress Europe, of which this chapter discusses (EUropeanised) immigration policy failure, securitization, and bordering (aligning crudely to political science, IR, and sociology). All have increasingly seen Fortress Europe not as simply about external walls, but proliferating internal barriers and divisions. This chapter concludes by synthesising three main normative accounts of Fortress Europe: a chauvinistic conservative one, defending supposed European identity, patrimony, and superiority; an ambivalent liberal one, anxiously managing the encounter with the southern Other out of fear the experience will cause Europe to regress; and a radical, critical one, rejecting images of the idealized European, and seeking the dismantling of Fortress Europe in all its forms as part of broader social transformation.