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EUROPE BENEATH OUR FEET? GEOLOGY, SECURITY AND THE
MAKING OF VERTICAL TERRITORY IN THE EUROPEAN UNION
Marcus WALLNER
Uppsala University, Sweden, [email protected]
In 2008 the European Commission launched its so-called Raw Materials Initiative. One
way in which the Commission is working to achieve the overall aim of securing access
to economically and politically important non-energy minerals is by promoting and
facilitating the exploitation of more European deposits. According to the European
Parliament the ore-rich underground of northern Europe is particularly important in this
regard. Yet, in recent conflicts around mining, environmental protection and indigenous
rights in, for example, northern Sweden, the question of the role of the European Union
has been largely overlooked. By drawing on critical geographical research on territory,
security and resource access this paper brings attention to the Raw Materials Initiative
and examines the related, recent effort to create a pan-European geological
knowledge base. In doing so the paper asks if we are now beginning to see, at the
level of the European Union, the making of what the geographer Bruce Braun has
called a “vertical territory”. The paper ends with a call for theoretically informed case
studies in different parts of the European Union, not least in its northernmost regions,
that explore this process and its effects on the ground.