A geography of debauchery: State-building and the mobilization of labor versus leisure on a European Union border Gustav Peebles Abstract: By comparing the spatial organization of Swedish labor and leisure prac- tices today with the movements and stereotypes tied to previous generations of Sweden’s sizeable population of so-called “vagrants,”this article studies the impact of state policy on the spatial imagination of both citizens and other sojourners within its bounds. Because the ethnographic research for the article took place in a new transnational city that is being created by the European Union and various local proponents, the article then considers the same issue at the EU level, to pur- sue the question of the EU’s “state-ness” and the status of migrant laborers within that emerging polity. Keywords: European Union, migrant labor, money, transnationalism, vagrancy You can’t read away development. It has its pace. And we vagrants will disappear, and all people will work in the service of society for the sake of all, and life will re- ceive its inspiration through the hands of labor.—Harry Martinson 1 [E]very prodigal appears to be a public enemy, and every frugal man a public benefactor.—Adam Smith In the year 2000, two royal families met at the halfway point of a shiny new bridge in order to inaugurate the new connection between their two countries. It spanned a body of water that had separated two land masses since the last Ice Age and had separated the countries of Sweden and Denmark since 1658. True to the millennial year of its completion, the bridge promised to usher in a new Golden Age for Swedes and Danes. According to its proponents, the bridge would lead to greater prosperity because it stood as the capstone of a general European Union (EU) project to promote “mobility” over an age-old national border by creating a new transnational city (the so-called “Øresund Region”), a city that would meld Copenhagen, Denmark with Malmö, Sweden. 2 The transnational and EU-sponsored Region would evolve, they claimed, into a truly Focaal—European Journal of Anthropology 51 (2008): 113–31 doi:10.3167/fcl.2008.510109