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This contribution has three overarching objectives. First, it seeks to describe the logics of fracture and cohesion governing current geopolitical dynamics in the Mediterranean. Second, in the face of these contradictory tendencies, it proposes the notion of archipelago-frontier as a concept for deepening our understanding of an ever more dispersed and ubiquitous geography defining the Southern border of the EU. In this light we draw on the contemporary resonances of the destabilising cartographic imagination of Al-Idrissi (1100-1165). And we argue that, read today, it helps us rethink the current symbolic, terminological (and hence geopolitical) abduction of the Mediterranean by the European Union, which the very term 'Euromediterranean' encapsulates. Finally, the paper underlines the necessity of forging new vistas on the Mediterranean engendering perspectives that are more dialogical, plurivocal and sensitive to permanent transformation, as evoked by a long-term spatial as well as political horizon of struggle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on the work of philosopher-semiotician Louis Marin, this contribution to Outlook on Europe reveals the 'spatial play' of contending outlooks hovering fitfully over the construction of a bridge at the 'ends of Europe', in the heart of the Amazon rainforest, on that very spot where French Guiana and Brazil, the European Union and Mercosul, physically touch one another over a muddy tributary, the Rio Oyapock. The inter-play of visions colliding around the Oyapock bridge, it is argued, illuminates the paradoxes and contradictions of European territorial governance in the globalised time-space of its postcolonial frontiers. In spite of the high geopolitical rhetoric seeking to unite both continents, the peculiar blindness of Europe's metropolitan gaze vis-à-vis indigenous difference sets the stage for perverse effects of exclusion and disempowerment in and around the site of the bridge itself, extending far into its regional hinterlands. Framed against the backdrop of a long, 'utopian' modernity of European imperial expansion and territorial conquest, the ghostly spatial dynamics surrounding the Oyapock River bridge project serve to illuminate wider challenges to the projection of EU influence 'in the world'. A close examination of similar dynamics elsewhere may help bring into focus the lineaments of a more fully confident and mature postcolonial European border studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the failed geopolitics of European Union (EU) enlargement in the case of Cyprus. Cyprus joined EU on May 1, 2004, along with the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia. A brief history of the island of Cyprus is presented. A forecast on the EU-Cyprus relationship is discussed.