Cross Border Areas: Entrance Exam

Hey guys!

This will be (at least for now) the last piece of purely academic writing that I share from my semester in Finland, the entrance exam from my "cross border areas in the Baltic Sea region" course. Hope you enjoy!

Löfgren largely characterizes the nature of borders as artificial projects, and the experience of crossing them as alienating and othering. He mentions cases such as the two sides of the opposing sides of the Öresund bridge, where nationalist characteristics are assigned even to the surrounding flora and fauna to act as cultural symbols and cement the physical sense of the nation-state, and its perception by others. The crucial notion that “marking differences of privilege and status and symbolic worlds of two territories” is highly important, bearing in mind that the flow of people across borders and their experiences vary greatly based on rather arbitrary aspects of who they are, where they come from, why they are coming, and what permission they may or may not have to do so. He describes “sharp divisions and distinctions” and “transgression” not only national but also physical and psychological in nature, such as intimidation and guilt, that are used to strategically other groups of people in transit, making them feel welcome or unwelcome in their passage into another nation state, often based on obsolete and biased traits of physical or stereotypical attributes associated with particular places.

One of my most defined experiences in moving across international borders has come from this very semester. Being the son of an Italian mother and an American father, I inherited two of the world’s most powerful citizenships upon birth. As such, I have been awarded an immense amount of privilege in where I am allowed to go and how I am allowed to move across the world, and how I am able to present myself in the context of my various identities in different contexts. Living in Finland as an exchange student, my possession of a European citizenship and its associated documents (my Italian passport and identity card), I can stay, study, and live here for up to three months at a time without even needing a residency permit, and was able to travel to Finland from Italy and between Finland and Sweden without having to show so much as my identity card, and undergo little to no scrutiny or even formal document control in the process, even though I was born in the United States and have been raised and educated there for the vast majority of my life. In contrast, I have met many other non-European citizens who have had to go through intensive bureaucratic processes in order to come to Finland, even flying across their homeland for fifteen-minute appointments at the Finnish embassy. As such, situational luck and individual privilege have greatly dictated my own ability to move freely across our ever more interconnected world and engage with different places therein, just as it has for others.