Europe: from National-State Borders to Cultural and Religious Identitaries Borders

Contemporary Europe is not anymore characterized by traditional National-State borders, but rather by new borders within National-State borders. These new borders arise by cultural, ethnic and religious identity claimed by national and non-national citizens who live in the same public space. Therefore, these new borders are not territorial borders, such as those, which divide a state from another, but rather identitaries borders. The fact that even territorial borders are nowadays less strong is a problem for law. Indeed, law needs a territory, which is a space with borders where the rules of a legal system are in force. The aim of this paper will be to focus on how the law manages the phenomenon of strengthening of the identirary borders in order to understand what are the solutions that states give to identity making claims.