The iron curtain revisited: the ‘Austrian way’ of policing the internal Schengen border

Abstract Since 1990 draftees of the Austrian army have been stationed at the border to Hungary, and later to Slovakia, as a reaction to both the system change in Eastern Europe as well as the expected increase in cross-border crime. This so-called ‘support deployment’ was initially planned to last no longer than 10 weeks, but soon it became apparent that the military's border security deployment could also serve other ends than mere security goals. Since then it has been prolonged numerous times. In scrutinising the strategies of the various actors involved, the paper shows that the support deployment can be considered an act of securitisation and is as such almost entirely decoupled from the actual policing of the Schengen internal border. Furthermore, it argues to ‘bring the audience back in’ and to recognise the audience's agency in the analysis of securitisation processes.