Contenu du sommaire : L'Europe vue(s) d'ici et d'ailleurs

Studying representations of the entity called Europe or of the object European Union is a key issue in political geography. If the diversity of methodological approaches and surveyed public can appear as an obstacle to any tentative of generalization, the articles in this special issue of the journal L'Espace politique dedicated to Europe seen from here and abroad show the richness of such studies both to understand the logic of actors (individual or institutional) to enter the social and political issues inherent in these representations.

The EU frequently prides itself with being the largest donor of official development assistance (ODA) in the world and consequently claims a lead role as a major global actor in international development. This paper examines how this role of the EU is exercised and perceived by the EU's development partners in East Africa through a qualitative research approach centered around semi-structured interviews and participant observation. The paper thereby does not evaluate perceptions or judge their reality value, it rather emphasises the existence of different perceptions and how they vary depending on the eye of the beholder and the policy field under consideration. It further argues that conceiving of one coherent international role of the EU reveals limited insight; instead a more diversified view of the EU as both an appealing geopolitical model and a resented geoeconomic power is presented. Moreover, it suggests that conception and implementation of European development policy should be more consultative and perceptive in order to dispel perceptions of the EU as a neo-imperial power.

Using nuanced and specific to each geographical context news media and public opinion data from a trans–national comparative research project ‘The EU in the Eyes of Asia–Pacific' (2002-on going), paper draws together a number of common comparative themes from the seven case-studies of EU external perceptions in Asia: Japan, China, South Korea, India, Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand. The study explores EU media and general public images in Asia before and during the sovereign euro debt crisis testing the claim that the on-going economic crisis has ‘damaged' EU external image. The findings debate on the EU's expectations and capabilities in Asia. This debate reflects on the hypothesis of ‘capability-expectations gap' (Hill 1993) (namely, the gap that exists between the excessive expectations placed on the EU from both inside and outside the Union and the insufficient capability assigned to the EU by its members that renders it unable to match these expectations).

In contemporary concepts globalization is understood as a process interconnected to dynamics of re-bordering that develop in relation to political dynamics of fear. In this context the application of migration management is practiced as an externalization of European border controls to places like Senegal. Such practices are severely criticized by migrant activist who blame EU agencies and states ‘in cooperation' with African states to violate basic human rights and the right to mobility. The campaign of the Senegalese hip-hop movement against “illegal” migration seems to stand in opposition to this migrant activists discourse. This paper argues that the way how the hip-hop scene imagines mobility and performs socio-political citizenship is not a reproduction of a European securitization of migration rather it can be understood as a geopolitical critic of European political relations with Africa.

The European Union pretends to protect itself against the arrival of migrants from southern countries. To do this it set up a migratory policy that aim to reinforce the controls on borders, including far beyond its territory (frontex), making itself a “Fortress Europe”. Migrants and candidates to migration are aware of this politics and of the coercive measures and sometimes violent measures accompanying it, and that not lead to decrease their wish to migrate in Europe. The strategic and concrete knowledge they gain thanks to their experience when they go through the administrative procedure to claim for papers, thanks to the stories of those who made a tentative to enter Europe with success or not, or thanks to the associations that defend the migrants rights, profoundly shape their representation of Europe. One of the effects of this politic is the radicalization of the poles of references (negatives or positives) of their representations and the increase of the ambiguity that characterize them. This text is based on information collected with Argentinian and Malian migrants during surveys conducted by several researchers in Argentina, Spain, Mali and France in 2009-2010 on their representations of Europe.

We propose here an alternative and innovative analysis of the perception of the European Union (EU) influence in the world apprehended from its geographical center point. The analysis is derived from the european perimeters freehand drawn by students in Politics (SPO) and in Engineering Sciences (SPI) that reside within the EU-27, in France and outside, in Cameroon. Our main objective is to test the hypothesis that students surveyed in SPO, unlike SPI and regardless of their place of residence (in and out Europe), have a mental perception of the location of the european geometric mid-point (i.e. the barycentre) closer to the one calculated by the french National Institute for Geographic and Forestry Information (IGN). For doing that, we carried out a centrographic analysis of cameroonian and french students' mid-points derived from their mental maps (i.e. their handmade european perimeters). Our results revealed two significant lessons. The first one is the spatial proximity of the results for the two groups of students that reveals a systematic shift of that mid-point toward the east. This shift reflects a good knowledge of world geopolitical matters, especially in European geopolitical facts. The second result, which follows from the first one, concerns the surveyed students' perception of the european perimeter extension : SPO students surveyed in Cameroon seems to have incorporated the idea of an effective enlargement of the EU toward the east and the south while the same students surveyed in France have a perception of this extension rather oriented to the north. These morphological different views of an enlarged Europe probably witnessed important bilateral exchanges, they probably also reflect the need to integrate countries that are located in the neighborhood of the EU-27 current administrative boundaries. 

This paper concerns the relative visions of Europe and the European Union provided by geography textbooks used in various countries for secondary school. In most of them, the teaching of the geography of Europe precedes the evocation of the EU. In this order, Europe tends to be presented as a reified object while the EU appears mostly as a political actor developing its own spatial strategy. This succession mixes different geographical paradigms and attempts to pursue various educational goals at once, each of them inducing a specific ideological prism. This accumulation of contradictory epistemological frames often provides an ambiguous vision that complicatesthe possibility to develop a clear understanding ofgeopolitical issuesrelated to the European process.