CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020
| Author | Hollenhorst, Johannes |
|---|---|
| Title | Zoning Europe: The Im/Mobilization of Life Forms in the Danube Basin |
| Summary | Starting from the New Danube Bridge at the Hungarian-Slovakian border, this thesis seeks to analyze and propose the “Zoning of Europe” in a double sense. Adding to the literature of governmentality studies, it first analyzes how this EU financed infrastructure project contributes to the micro-politics of attracting foreign capital investments to industrial parks in postsocialist Hungary. Zoning is understood here as the cultural process of parceling space in specific manners, creating moral topologies which organize movements in a desired way. Connecting this setting to the transit zones at the Hungarian-Serbian border, the present taxonomy of movement in the Danube basin becomes clear: While in the case of capital investments space is deployed for the establishment relations, in the case of migration it is oppositely deployed to prevent it. By tracing this nexus back historically while staying situated in the Danube basin the second form of zoning is proposed following the conception of “critical zones”. Through this situated methodology, the contingency of the present zoning of Europe becomes apparent: While in the present, migration is stopped between Hungary and Serbia, the very same habitat appears as a central destination for migration from German lands after the Habsburgs defeat of the Ottomans at the end of the 17th century. Enlarging the empirical basis of governmentality studies towards the emergence of Cameralism, it becomes clear that this historic migration movement was also already organized through the technology of zoning: It was meant to cultivate life in the Danube basin in the form of a “civil society” as part of the emerging political discourse of Europe. In going beyond this analysis of zoning, it is asked whether the Danube as fundamentally relational socio-ecology might inspire new forms of solidarity beyond these translations of the discourse of Europe to the river’s basin. |
| Supervisor | Rajaram, Prem Kumar |
| Department | Sociology MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2020/hollenhorst_johannes.pdf |
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