The famous Strasbourg-born New York political cartoonist and writer of children's books, Tomi Ungerer was once asked what it was like to grow up in Alsace (he was born in 1931), and he replied: It was like living in the toilet of a rural railway station: toujours occupé (always occupied). He was, of course, referring to the fact that for more or less four hundred years, and certainly during the period of 1871 to 1945 Alsace changed nationality many times over, back and forth, between France and Germany, and for most of that time, either nation was felt to be an occupying power by the inhabitants.

Double Occupancy: An Intermediary Concept

Toujours occupé seems as good a motto as any with which to confront the present debate about the new Europe and its sometimes siege mentality, when it comes to the so-called “non-Europeans” at its borders or in its midst. By proposing the idea of a permanent occupation, or more precisely, a double occupation, I am thinking of it as a kind of counter-metaphor to ‘Fortress Europe’, the term so often applied to the European Union's immigration policies. Toujour occupé keeps in mind the fundamental issue of the nation states’ of Europe's own ethnicities and ethnic identities which, when looked at historically, strongly suggest that there has rarely been a space that can be defended against an outside of which “Europe” is the inside. There is no European, in other words, who is not already diasporic in relation to some marker of difference – be it ethnic, regional, religious or linguistic – and whose identity is not always already hyphenated or doubly occupied. I am not only thinking of the many European sites where the fiction of the fortress, the paranoid dream of tabula rasa, of cleansing, of purity and exclusion has led, or still continues to lead to bloody conflict, such as in Bosnia, Kosovo, Northern Ireland, the Basque country, Cyprus, and further afield, in Israel and Palestine.