Geopolitics, Vol.9, No.3 (Autumn 2004) pp.674–698 Copyright © Taylor & Francis, Inc. ISSN: 1465-0045 print DOI: 10.1080/14650040490478738 The Frontiers of the European Union: A Geostrategic Perspective WILLIAM WALTERS While state borders remain the pre-eminent frontiers within geopolitics, regional blocs are also acquiring frontier characteristics. How might we understand the function and identity of such frontiers? Taking the European Union as its focus, this article offers answers to these questions by developing the idea of geostrategy. Four geostrategies are identified: networked (non)borders, march, colonial frontiers and limes. Each corresponds with a particular way of territorialising the space of the border, as well as a certain idea of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, and of the risks and problems that the border is to govern. A geostrategic perspective uses contemporary social forms (such as networks) but also historical forms of borders (march, limes) in order to enhance the intelligibility of the frontiers of the EU. As such, this approach seeks to capture the multiplicity and plurality of borders. In a recent article in Geopolitics Gerald Blake observes that, far from spelling the demise of state borders, globalisation can be associated with the reasser- tion of territoriality and the proliferation of border forms and functions. While he notes the dangers of making facile projections as far as the future of borders is concerned, Blake draws special attention to the tendency towards the ‘region- alisation of border functions’. ‘Before long, the world political map depicted as a mosaic of brightly coloured independent sovereign states of equal status will have become meaningless. It will need to be replaced by a map that shows the major political and economic blocs, distinguishing between the internal and the external boundaries of the blocs’. 1 This article takes up Blake’s call to examine borders in the context of these regional blocs, and especially ‘how the external boundaries of the blocs func- tion’. 2 My focus is the regionalisation of borders in Europe where transforma- tions in form and function have been particularly pronounced. The study of borders is rapidly developing as a major area of interest for scholars of European integration as well as geopolitics. In the first section of the article I briefly outline the principal ways in which the regionalisation of borders at the level of the EU have been framed. I then make an argument for a different William Walters, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Carleton University, Ottawa K1S 3A6. E-mail: <wwalters@ccs.carleton.ca>.