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Acknowledgements

In the summer of 2015 I was asked to write an essay for Philosophy Month, which occurs annually in the Netherlands. With images of the refugee crisis in mind, I chose ‘dealing with borders’ as my theme. The essay was published the following spring under the title ‘The Freedom of the Border’. It prompted many reactions, which set me thinking further on the subject. A long series of readings and public debates sharpened my ideas. This book is the result.

Here I have taken the original text of that essay as my starting point. I’ve expanded the original chapters and added six more. In various places I’ve freely made use of earlier publications and lectures. More specifically, I’ve used the Pacification Lecture that I gave in Ghent in 2012 and a lecture at the University of Tilburg from 2014. I’ve also drawn upon my contribution to a book about the shooting down of flight MH17.

The issue of borders is to the fore, so the essay form is no accidental choice. The genre lends itself beautifully to the crossing of borders. Overcoming the division of labour between disciplines, which José Ortega y Gasset once called ‘the barbarism of specialization’, is essential if you want to say anything useful about dealing with borders. Without specialists, generalists are powerless, so here too we have to take dividing lines seriously. Furthermore, such an undertaking is of course risky, since nobody can encompass such diverse disciplines, but a broad view remains necessary if we are to find a direction in a chaotic world.

I am grateful to John Thompson and Elise Heslinga of Polity for their willingness to publish another book of mine, after Immigrant Nations. And I would like to thank Liz Waters, who translated this book with great care and patience. She also translated my previous book with Polity and the cooperation proved to be, once more, a real pleasure.

Notes

1 1 Paul Scheffer, De grenzen van Europa, Brussels, Academia Press, 2012.

2 2 Paul Scheffer, ‘De gewelddadige randen van het continent: Europa tussen macht en moraal’, in Gabriël van den Brink (ed.), Een ramp die Nederland veranderde? Nadenken over vlucht MH17, Amsterdam, Boom, 2015, pp. 29–57.

3 3 See José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses, transl. Anon., New York, W. W. Norton, 1932, ch. XII, pp. 107ff. (originally published as La rebelión de las masas, 1930).