Since 1990 draftees of the Austrian army have been stationed at the border to Hungary, and later to Slovakia, as a reaction to both the system change in Eastern Europe as well as the expected increase in cross-border crime. This socalled 'support deployment' was initially planned to last no longer than 10 weeks, but soon it became apparent that the military's border security deployment could also serve other ends than mere security goals. Since then it has been prolonged numerous times. In scrutinising the strategies of the various actors involved, the paper shows that the support deployment can be considered an act of securitisation and is as such almost entirely decoupled from the actual policing of the Schengen internal border. Furthermore, it argues to 'bring the audience back in' and to recognise the audience's agency in the analysis of securitisation processes.
This article is part of the special section titled From the Iron Curtain to the Schengen Area, guest edited by Wolfgang Mueller and Libora Oates-Indruchová. The cooperation between German and Polish border police from the middle of the 1990s to 2007 is characterized by a striking paradox: border guards on both sides claim their working styles are incompatible with one another while in most cases they cooperate very well. Yet, as this article argues, the border guards employ strategies of boundary-drawing and self-staging that help them cope with the asymmetry they encounter when cooperating with the “other.” German and Polish border guards develop informal strategies of action and communication that rest upon a joint professional culture, leading to mutual trust and solidarity and a congruence of subjective professional honor and official mandate. Yet, this win–win situation runs the risk of emphasizing police-cultural aspects that focus on security while leaving the underlying East–West asymmetry untouched.
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