"When they come to Europe, they are confronted by still closed borders. Thus, the concept of open borders is a very selective concept, one that is not taken seriously at all in the experience of non-Europeans"
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The sting here is in the word “still”: Beck is calling out a European self-image that hasn’t caught up to its own mythology. “Open borders” is sold as a signature achievement of modern Europe, a civic brag that signals sophistication, peace, and post-national ease. Beck punctures that story by pointing out who actually gets to experience it. Inside the club, movement is frictionless enough to feel like a moral principle. From the outside, it looks like what it often is: a privilege disguised as an ideal.
His phrasing is clinical but loaded. “Confronted” frames the border not as a neutral administrative line but as a force, something that meets the traveler with pressure and refusal. “Selective concept” is the key diagnosis. Beck isn’t merely arguing that Europe has borders; he’s arguing that Europe has perfected a two-tier regime of mobility: openness for those already recognized as legitimate Europeans, closure for the people who most need the promise of openness to be real. The subtext is about hypocrisy, but also about power: who gets to define what “openness” means, and whose bodies are made to prove it through checkpoints, visas, and suspicion.
Context matters. Beck’s work on “risk society” and cosmopolitanism tracks how globalization distributes freedom and insecurity unevenly. This line reads like a snapshot of that broader thesis: borders haven’t disappeared; they’ve been rearranged. Europe’s internal permeability depends on external hardening, and the rhetoric of openness becomes a cultural alibi for exclusion.
His phrasing is clinical but loaded. “Confronted” frames the border not as a neutral administrative line but as a force, something that meets the traveler with pressure and refusal. “Selective concept” is the key diagnosis. Beck isn’t merely arguing that Europe has borders; he’s arguing that Europe has perfected a two-tier regime of mobility: openness for those already recognized as legitimate Europeans, closure for the people who most need the promise of openness to be real. The subtext is about hypocrisy, but also about power: who gets to define what “openness” means, and whose bodies are made to prove it through checkpoints, visas, and suspicion.
Context matters. Beck’s work on “risk society” and cosmopolitanism tracks how globalization distributes freedom and insecurity unevenly. This line reads like a snapshot of that broader thesis: borders haven’t disappeared; they’ve been rearranged. Europe’s internal permeability depends on external hardening, and the rhetoric of openness becomes a cultural alibi for exclusion.
Quote Details
| Topic | Human Rights |
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