Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies

It is a paradox of contemporary social science that the shifting dynamic and increasing importance of border zones within the globalized economy has resisted comprehensive or global explanations. Hewing to a residually Leninist paradigm, the geopolitical expert Parag Khanna argues that globalization is a new form of economic imperialism: “The European Union has become the one contemporary empire that continues to expand, year after year, by absorbing new countries – with many more in line begging to join in” (Khanna xvi–xvii). Although the work of certain contemporary European filmmakers does not provide a thorough conceptual framework for interpreting globalization, it arguably does afford a more ramified and less binary understanding of the effects that globalization has on the “first world.” The Greek filmmaker Angela Melitopoulos theorizes the relationship between “fortress Europe” and poorer eastern countries not as a centripetal domination of a larger body over a smaller one, but as an interpenetration that is made possible through the creation of makeshift buffer zones:

Southeast Europe, the Balkans – each of these terms designates only part of the region of our network and also bears the tinge of fascist and colonial ideologies. So we agreed on a term that designates a zone of transitions, processes of becoming, unstable political conditions, neocolonial strategies of cooptation, and antithetical historiographies: the B-Zone.

The B-Zone is the becoming EU that is developing in relation to the constituted EU, the A-Zone. The B-Zone does not subordinate itself to the AZone as a semi-colonial territory, but is rather a necessary space in which the future politics of the A-Zone invents itself. The B-Zone is changing faster and must be more mobile in order to solve its problems: it is the A-Zone’s space of experimentation.

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In Melitopoulos’s view, spaces of postcapitalist productivity have become increasingly dependent on an underpaid workforce – even bonded labour and human trafficking – that lie outside the well-defined borders of individual countries and economic coalitions. While corporations are free to shift their manufacturing and assembly processes into border zones that are cheaper [End Page 499] because they are unregulated, the workers in these zones provide a new form of indentured labour. They are not free to leave or to unionize to negotiate better working conditions, in part because many of them hold temporary worker status, or are illegal migrants, or because their families depend on their continued re-mittances. The moral paradox of globalization is that a transnational, highly mobile productivity is fuelled by labour in preindustrial conditions and in interstitial spaces that exist within (as well as between) countries. In the EU, such spaces exist, for example, in southern Spain and in the North African Spanish enclave of Ceuta, or to the East in western Ukraine. What is different for their labour pool is that many of the transnational migrants shuttle back and forth in hopes of becoming part of fortress Europe through their hard work, but remain at best on temporary work visas. A case in point are the Moroccan agricultural labourers working in the vast greenhouses of Almeria (“Spain’s Greenhouse Effect”).

Two filmmakers have distinguished themselves as commentators on the ways in which German-speaking countries have intersected with this re-configured global network of labour. Films by the Swiss feminist filmmaker Ursula Biemann (with her camerawoman Angela Sanders) and the Austrian filmmaker Ulrich Seidl insightfully focus on the especially precarious status that women workers have within this underpaid and transmigratory workforce. Many of these women are employed in the informal sector, where fair labour practices are even less likely and where work is performed as domestic labour, sex work, or geriatric or child care. Two documentaries by Biemann, Remote Sensing (2001) and Europlex (2003), critique female body trafficking by chronicling the predominant global routes along which it is conducted. In her films women sex workers (who are shown in the company of German-speaking men) and assembly-line workers are given their own voices through interview segments that are presented on the same plane as interviews with women activists...