Introduction : Citizenship and its boundaries

This introduction presents an overview of the concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book examines the role of Frontex in the European Union as an agency to protect its external borders in the Mediterranean from irregular or 'illegal' migration. It discusses that Europe is an arrangement for European citizens only – and for some privileged non-citizens as in the Swiss case. The book explains the points to the possibility of a transnational membership regime that, however, bears certain antinomies that also point to unresolved problems. It offers an interesting view on the symbolic boundary between the citizen and the consumer, discussing this nexus from the perspective of citizenship studies, consumer culture and surveillance studies. Among the many far-reaching transformations that both societies and citizens have faced in recent years, the European migration crisis has most urgently brought to mind the fact that modern citizenship has always been about boundaries and about processes of inclusion and exclusion.