National borders — a thing of the past?
THE BIGGEST CHALLENGES FACING THE WORLD TODAY ARE GLOBAL.
Climate change, migration… they transcend national borders and require an international response. Yet the world’s not coming up with any real solutions.
It’s an old paradigm based on self-interest and self-preservation. International organisations are failing to overcome national interest. Even smaller regional organisations, like the European Union, are distracted, to the point of destruction, by the differences of member states. National borders are preventing global solutions.
Some people even think they can build a wall between themselves and the other.
At the same time, technology is taking down walls. Its democratising power is already recognised: it’s led to greater choice and faster supply. It ranges from instant access to all the music in the world with Spotify, to the global marketplace of Amazon.
But the real power of technology lies in its potential to remove borders and divisions. We are yet to see its full impact but the signs are there — from Skype taking away the fiefdoms of the national telcos, to FinTech companies doing the same to the national banks. Technology means that the old structures can be bypassed. Those structures and walls were put there purely to protect the self-interest of companies; if they come down, it’s in the interests of all of us.
We’re living in a world where international governance is failing to overcome borders but technology is succeeding in removing them.
Where do those two apparently unstoppable trajectories leave us? I don’t know. Maybe the future lies in the re-imagination of what a nation state actually is.
Take Estonia… creating a new country from scratch has given Estonia the license to imagine what a country could be. With its e-residency programme it’s positioning itself effectively as a platform. It’s a digital interface, offering its services to anyone in the world irrespective of location and nationality. That completely changes the way an individual relates to their nation state. Everything we turned to them for before, we can choose to get elsewhere. If we don’t need our nation state, where does that leave national borders?
Maybe we don’t need them anymore.
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