Us/Them
The role of borders in a borderless world
I’ve always been interested in maps and the stories embedded in them. As a child, I would spend so much time staring at a globe my Grandma bought me, wondering why the countries looked the way they did. I also loved looking at make-believe maps too. I used to draw my own, copying the Tolkien style, and use them as battlegrounds to play Risk-style war games on. I poured over every scaled square mile of fantasy land depicted in video games.
A few years ago, I started to casually browse Google Maps (as you do) with an interest in looking at the relationships between the nations and states of the world–their borderlines. By dragging the Street View icon to the blue dots, I could look at geotagged pictures people had taken along these borders. I managed to amass an interesting collection of photos showing a variety of defended walls, natural features, and amusing, anti-climatic indicators.
What follows is a few of those photos, as well as a short piece containing some research on the subject of borders and what they mean in today’s society. The article could be added to or revised in the future.
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Defining space
Humans use space to define themselves. We stake claim to an area. We build walls for defence. We have immigration control, land rights, property ownership. We create cities of great historical, cultural, financial importance. We create exclusive restaurants and bars, airports and nightclubs with exclusive VIP areas, because what we do defines us. We customise, because the things we put in the spaces mean as much as the space itself. Some people choose to paint their walls Brilliant White™. Some choose White Cotton™.
The spaces in which we occupy speak of our individual identities, and our societies as a whole.
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The world is marked with invisible lines where people have delineated their areas, and staked their territory. National identities were formed (and are constantly reforming). Neighbours can be loved, hated, or anything in-between. Mostly, they are tolerated, perhaps looked upon with the suspicion naturally afforded to an outsider. The concept of ‘Us and Them’ was born; they who aren’t from our neck of the woods known as ‘The Other’.
To look at a map of the world, and the contours of her nations, tells a million stories of conflict, struggle, compromise and resolution.
Patterns of migration are evident by looking at the size and shape of states in the USA, with a combination of straight lines and natural borders following rivers and mountain ranges, with the states generally increasing in size the the further west you go.
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Africa tells a different story. The Berlin Conference of 1884 saw the continent portioned off to the colonial powers of Western European nations for the purposes of trade and empire expansion. Great expanses of the Sahara Desert were split by straight line borders, and the valuable rivers and lakes of the east carefully divided to neighbouring nations.
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In its current state, Europe, with the exception of The Vatican State, does not have any geometric borders, instead relying solely on natural features to differentiate the nation states. Yet, memories of the Berlin Wall are still fresh in peoples minds, for it is when the Soviet Union split Germany into two, dividing families and a nation into competing ideologies.
Papua Island, shared between Islamic Indonesia and the predominately Christian Papua New Guinea is sliced straight down the middle, with a relatively small section in the centre zig-zagging to the curves of the Fly River. Low-level conflict around the 760 kilometre border has continued for decades.
Yet, should these borders mean anything in an increasingly ‘borderless age’?
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Arguments for the increased insignificance of geophysical borders.
Culturally
A common narrative of Globalisation says that the world is getting smaller. The interconnectivity between people and cultures, facilitated by radio, television and the internet, is so limitless and instantaneous that rarely is a thought given to the geophysical location of its participants.
“Patterns of movement and flows of people, culture, goods and information mean that it is now not so much physical boundaries — the geographical distances, the seas or mountain ranges — that define a community or nation’s `natural limits’. Increasingly we must think in terms of communications and transport networks and of the symbolic boundaries of language and culture — the `spaces of transmission’ defined by satellite footprints or radio signals — as providing the crucial, and permeable boundaries of our age”
Morley, D. and Robins, K. Spaces of identity: global media, electronic landscapes and cultural boundaries, 1995
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Strategically
Historically, borders have always played an important strategic role. Countless wars were waged to capture territory, and seize resources, so mountain ranges and rivers provided vital defence against invading armies. However, advances in warfare have almost rendered these strategic points obsolete.
“Former Israeli Prime Minister, Shimon Peres argues that, in a world of ballistic missiles which can accurately pinpoint their target from distances of thousands of miles, there is no longer any significance in the existence of localised land boundaries.”
Newman, D. and Paasi, A. Fences and neighbours in the postmodern world: boundary narratives in political geography, 1998.
Modernity has given to a rise in ‘soft power’, exercised through the export of products, brands, entertainment and services. Soft power has arguably replaced military might as a tool for one nation to coerce, influence and control another.
…there is no longer any significance in the existence of localised land boundaries.
Economically
“Economists have concluded that in terms of real flows of economic activity, nation states have already lost their role as meaningful units of participation in the global economy of today’s borderless world and that the nation-state is increasingly a nostalgic fiction”
Newman, D. and Paasi, A. Fences and neighbours in the postmodern world: boundary narratives in political geography, 1998.
In 2011, British banks — amongst them, HSBC, Barclays and Standard Chartered — threatened to leave the UK for more ‘laissez-faire’ climates such as Hong Kong and Singapore, if economic reforms intending to avoid another tax-funded bank bailout were passed into law. There are no allegiances to nation states and patriotism looks like a twee notion from some yesteryear. Today is a world where the economy rules, wealth is global, and historic ties can be severed in an instant for the love of money.
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The Gatekeepers: defending the borders
Whilst it seems that the march of globalisation is dissolving borders and assimilating states into one ‘global village’, some nations aren’t too happy and are fighting back. Across some countries in Europe, we see a more conservative, anti-immigration sentiment is spreading. Reasons for this might include economic costs through increased competition in the jobs market, a burden on existing social services like welfare and health, and a perceived dilution of the national identity. Disillusionment with the idea that a more open, freer world would lead to an improvement in living standards has settled into a large section of the general population of these countries.
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Rises in popularity of the Eurosceptic political party, UKIP, in Britain indicates that a significant quantity of the population has grown wary of the strains that the open-borders policy of the EU has had on their local communities.
Switzerland, invoked by a national petition, has voted for a referendumon capping immigration numbers, a move which flies directly in the face of the European Union and the Schengen Agreement.
Division is also happening within countries as well. In September, Scotland is voting for independence from the UK, after 307 years in union. Reasons for the referendum include a lack of political representation for the Scottish people, with many major decisions being made in London.
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It seems that walls are, again, being built. However, is this rise in nationalism, and a preference for decentralised policy-making merely an understandable reaction to the times?
In their study on boundary narratives, geographers David Newman and Anssi Paasi remind us that the role that borders have played historically has shifted time and time again.
“States and other territorial entities, as well as their boundaries, are not static; neither are they permanent structures. As human constructs they are historically contingent processes, which emerge, exist for some time and disappear. The number of states and their boundaries has been continuously changing as have their respective meanings and roles. This means that boundary studies should be approached historically as part of a dynamic process, rather than as a collection of unrelated unique case studies.”
Sociologist, T. K. Oommen argues that,
“the rise and fall, the construction and deconstruction, of various types of boundaries, is in fact the very story of human civilization and of contemporary social transformation.”
It’s hard to see the present time we live in as just another part of history, which will be looked back on with the benefit of hindsight, but it feels like the attitudes towards open and closed borders will continue to ebb and flow relentlessly.
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Space/Identity
It seems that space and identity are two sides of the same coin, inexplicably linked together in symbiosis — space, which is created through identity, in turn, creates identity.
Do we need defined boundaries in order for us to grow and flourish? It is said that the modern age is devoid of any grand narratives, becoming increasingly defined by what you possess, and equally, what you don’t. Is having a national identity more important than ever in a world which increasingly devalues historic borders and boundaries? Can we value the borders and what they represent, but acknowledge that the role they have historically played has changed?
“Without boundaries, without direction and location, social and cultural activity would itself be a simply pointless thrashing about in the world.”
Tester, K. The life and times of post-modernity, 1993.
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