Grenzen von Inklusion und Exklusion. Sozialräumliche Regulierung von Fremdheit und Armut im Europa der Neuzeit

Abstract

Borders and Limits of Exclusion/Inclusion. Spatial Regimes for Poor People and Strangers in Modern Europe

Taking up the debate about the active role of space (both as a physical unit and a mental map) in shaping social relations, the article defines four elementary forms of using space for the sake of excluding or including strangers or poor people in society in Modern Europe. «The settlement» or belonging to a local community, the border and pass controls, the places of confinement and the ghetto are discussed as four structures of longue durée that have even survived the transformations European societies underwent since 1800. But industrialisation, nation building and Welfare regimes have altered their functions and added mainly two new spatial structures to these established spatial regimes. The homogeneous national container space, the nation-state, has given more or less equal rights and living standards for poor or strangers on the territory of the nation state. The spatial segregation has become the most effective but politically and morally contested form of both excluding and including social groups along lines of class, race or ethnicity in European cities since the nineteenth century.