T.H. Marshall At The Limit: Hiding Out In Maas-Rhein Euregio

The 1990s and early 2000s have witnessed a flourishing of cross-border institutional initiatives in Europe, most notably in the establishment of administrative cross-border regions (or euregios) along the dorsal spine of its former internal political borders. As self-confessed 'laboratories of European integration', they provide windows through which to observe the tensions inherent in the European project, in reconciling macroeconomic integration with the social and political goal of building an authentic transnational demos. Given the on-going problematic of democratic deficit in the euregios, this paper argues that, in order to grasp the stakes involved in creating new transborder regional governance structures in Europe today, one must shift from the political economic analysis pioneered by Alfred Marshall to theories of citizenship elaborated by T.H. Marshall. Reviewing the fraught experience of transboundary governance in the Maas-Rhein euregio, and drawing on T. H. Marshall's tripartite evolutionary schema of citizenship based on civic, political and social rights, the authors reflect on the limits of Marshall's conceptual enframing for understanding the dynamics of internal border regions which are increasingly assuming the exclusionary geopolitical logics of political frontiers. Building on this critique, they propose the idea of the 'frontier political' as a widening horizon of social rights to replace that of a cross-border politics rooted in a priori civic or political rights. They conclude that such a repoliticised arena, defined by qualities of partial invisibility and 'hiddenness' exemplified by the stark constellation of migrant detention camps located at both the inner and outer borders of the EU, offers a chance to rename the problem of euregional citizenship from the perspective of its multiple constitutive outsides.