Creating a Borderless Community — Can it fare better than a Westphalian state?
As the world progresses further into the 21st century, the people of the world come closer to each other, all thanks to the advancements in technology and science. The world has become a small village. People today are focusing on becoming global citizens. As we take a horseback ride into the future, it seems that the borders of the countries grow increasingly redundant. Globalisation has made it possible for people from various countries to try products and live lifestyles of people living a thousand miles away. However myriad national and international laws, rules and regulations can never really allow for a truly globalized world.
The concept of a Westphalian state was propounded and gained acceptance after European influence spread across the world. The idea that a nation had sovereignty over its territory and internal affairs and was protected from any kind of interference from any foreign powers gained momentum. The name comes from a treaty called the Peace of Westphalia signed in 1648 that brought an end to the Thirty Years War, fought in Central Europe and regarded as being one of the most destructive conflicts in human history.
Today, the Westphalian concept of sovereignty has evolved to embrace a greater, deeper meaning of nationality. The “state” is the primary institutional agent in a system of interstate relations. While there is a lot of harking about “internationalism” and “globalization,” the underlying concept of a closed, protected state remains intact, because we as humans primarily lack trust.
It feels good, almost ostentatious, to imagine a world governed by one single law, where there is no disparity based on the geographic location, but it sounds too good to be true, the stuff of Utopian dreams. Of course, for the foreseeable future, there are going to be international borders, and with international borders come different laws. This is where the problem begins.
Every country has a different set of rules that govern how the citizens should live. To make matters worse, almost all countries have regional or state borders (the federal system), with their own specific rules. While these rules are made keeping in mind the specific demography, it is, obviously, a pain to execute all these rules efficiently, not to mention the tremendous amount of state money that goes into maintaining the law and order.
Some states, for example, have legalised the use of recreational cannabis, meaning they don’t have to spend a single penny tracking down illegal suppliers, but for states who haven’t yet legalised it, millions of dollars go into curbing the sales of cannabis, which is a huge sum of money down the drain which could rather be used for providing shelter to the homeless or improving the education quality.
At an international level, these borders seem to do more harm than good. Traditionally governments have used borders to isolate their citizens, and these borders restrict free trade, communication and travel. Enforcing borders reduces the citizens to prisoners confined to their own governments.
The solution seems to be a fairly simple yet straightforward idea. A Borderless World. A world where there are no international or state borders, and is governed by one set of rules. In his white paper, “Borderless: A Governance Platform and Charity for a Global Society” Christopher Franko has promulgated a concept of a voluntary, borderless society as a true alternative for a Westphalian sovereignty. Franko believes that a borderless governance platform will “substantially lower the operational costs required to run a nation state, allowing for a smarter allocation of scarce resources while at the same time introducing competition into the age-old governance monopolies”.
Franko believes that the system will change the way we, as a civilization, understand citizenship and what it means to be connected. This system will be made possible with the help of blockchain technology, which was first created for Bitcoin. Along with blockchains, this software will also make use of smart contracts (computer programs that enable, verify or enforce the negotiation or performance of a contract, making a contractual clause unnecessary) and Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO).
The creation of a borderless world starts with a voluntary civilization. Humanity can only be free when the impositions that come with the borders are removed. Hence a voluntary civilization is a must for true freedom and empowerment. In order to achieve something like this, all humans need access to life-sustaining resources. If one doesn’t have true access to these resources, then he is implicitly controlled by the person who controls the resources. When access to life-sustaining resources are restricted, it creates an impediment to a civilization’s progress. Civil unrest and war are symptoms of misallocated resources, because those without resources are going to fight to acquire them while those that have resources are fighting to protect them.
All the negative aspects of society today stem from an illusion of scarcity and from the elite minority controlling the common majority — like puppets on a string — by restricting access to crucial resources. As history has taught us, it is truly impossible to have a voluntary society without ending scarcity and without sharing resources. So, if we value freedom, peace and progress, then it is in our best interest to allocate resources more wisely and end artificial scarcity.
To curb the misallocation of resources and to create a voluntary civilization is the mission of Borderless Charity. The Borderless Charity is a legal entity that uses voluntary donations from Borderless Tech and gives it to people in need. It is designed to provide emerging markets with access to a borderless infrastructure.
The Borderless Charity can help curb problems like hunger, housing, healthcare and education, which are plaguing every country of the world. Borderless Charity initiatives are designed to provide or partner with non-profits to provide access to life sustaining and empowering resources. Each borderless governance service will have a completely voluntary donation associated with the service. Donations are optional, because everyone should have access to these services regardless of economic standing. In order to incentivize the donation for services, those who donate will earn “amity”.
Amity is a special attribute that citizens can earn by donating to the Borderless Charity. The more Amity a citizen has, the greater influence that citizen has over the distribution of the charity’s funding. The fees collected from the services will be pooled into a Charity DAO where Borderless Citizens will be able to directly vote on how these fees get spent. Users who have paid for their services will have a greater say in how the funds are distributed. The DAO will use a curator/contractor model. Curators are like board members who whitelist contractors. Contractors are actors looking to provide a service for the DAO.
So, how is the Borderless governance platform better than the current government models? Or rather, why is it better to discard the current system and move to a new one, where there are no more imaginary lines separating people? By abstracting governance services away from governments, the costs incurred by the government to run can be lowered. This frees up vital resources governments can use to better serve the people they look after and provide them better services. As Prometheus liberated mankind by giving them fire, so will Borderless Technology liberate mankind by creating frictionless citizenry.
