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How would a world without borders look like? Would you want it? If so, what would be the steps to make it work?
What I meant is a world without any barriers whatsoever for the circulation of people. Each country would have border checks for things like explosives, heavy drugs, and weapons, but apart from that everyone would be allowed in, always. I'm not sure about economy measures, trade barriers, and circulation of goods, though.
But please, feel free to interpret "world without borders" however you wish! ;)
I think presupposing the existence of nation-states is already a significant break from the initial anarchist understanding of the idea of a borderless world. After all, what is a nation-state but a set of ideas about things that happen within some borders?
Thanks for answering.
That makes sense. I don't have a good understanding of anarchism, to be honest. But I would probably not want any kind of anarchism as a goal. Just a world without borders, I didn't really think about which motivating philosophy I'd favor.
That said, I like to think that nations, as an amalgam of tradition, history, and cultures, are probably something we shouldn't live without. But nation-states, as we understand them today, are not entirely necessary. Some degree of public administration is probably unavoidable, but it could be more like the states that currently form most countries (and by states, I mean as they work in a truly federalized country, not like they work in the US).
Frankly, I fail to see how you can divorce the abolition of borders from the abolition of nonconsensual hierarchical power. I mean, how can you possibly have a nation without borders?
How I read @lou's meaning would be more akin to how the EU works (for EU citizens). Nations with open borders. Back in the good old days I could get on a train in London, get off in France to grab a coffee, get back on it and be in Germany for lunch. I took my passport of course but nobody ever asked to see it. I could move anywhere, work anywhere, purchase goods from anywhere any pay no import taxes, etc. It's a nice setup. You can drive around the mainland and not even notice you're crossing from country to country sometimes.
Nations still exist within the EU, of course. How could you possibly run a modern, functioning society without a government operating in a defined area? But they are more akin to administrative areas rather than the old idea of discrete states, walled off from each other.
Then of course my country fucking fucked it all up and now I'm stuck on this pissy little island which is at least 52% imbeciles.
There's lots of potential ways. I think Abdullah Öcalan makes some good arguments against the idea of the nation state in his essay on Democratic Confederalism, the ideology of Rojova in Syria.
I think this shows that under the EU model the borders/barriers are still there, they're just permeable at the moment. A world that actually lacks any barrier whatsoever for the free circulation of people would need to actually remove those borders; otherwise there is nothing stopping one 'country' from declaring their borders impermeable once more and fucking it up for everyone again.
Sorry, I'm not well versed in this matter so I apologize if my question is unsophisticated, but isn't the only thing stopping this from happening at any scale the threat of violent repression from a higher power? For example, if a lot of people who lived in, let's say, Barcelona wanted to create a border around their district to keep the rest of the spanish apart they'd be prevented from doing so by the spanish army. The same thing goes for a US state. Extrapolating, wouldn't a highly centralized world government capable of repression be required for actually creating a borderless world by your definition?
I think “open borders” is closer to what you’re talking about? You might be interested in this book making the case for it. Sadly the political climate makes it unlikely.
Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota series describes a far-future open borders world. Highly recommended. I reviewed it here and here.
Yeah, that's about right.
Thanks for the book suggestion. Seems great.
This is an incredibly multifaceted question. I'm sure smarter people than me will have more thorough responses but here's how I see it.
If what you meant by your question can essentially be described as visa-free travel, sure, I'd certainly be up for that. If what you meant was anyone anywhere in the world can move to a country of their choosing and expect to have the same legal right as the citizens of their country of destination, I'd say no. As much as I'd want that to happen in spirit, it'd be practically, legally, politically, economically and in some cases culturally near impossible to implement and the downsides would far outweigh the benefits.
With Syrian refugee crisis, roughly one million refugees, most of which had months long thorough background checks, managed to make it to Europe and anyone who reads a newspaper can tell you how much of a seismic change this introduced into politics all over the world, even to countries that didn't take any meaningful number of refugees. The effects one million refugees had wouldn't even be considered a worthwhile event compared to a world in which there are essentially no borders. Maybe after a lot of turmoil and pain and suffering, there would come a point of equilibrium and we'd all live in peace and harmony with no borders between us, but who would even bring this idea up let alone try to implement it?
I still remember the uproar when Hillary Clinton said in a leaked tape that she dreams "a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders, some time in the future with energy that is as green and sustainable as we can get it, powering growth and opportunity for every person in the hemisphere." That sounds great to me. I wish we lived in that world. But it's not gonna happen for a long time.
Something to consider here -- as the effects of global warming worsen and low-lying areas flood, there will be far more than one million refugees moving inland across the entire planet, regardless of whatever borders are in their way. I don't think maintaining the concept of borders in the face of such a crisis is workable unless the borders became ridiculously locked down (which would be very bad and probably lead to the deaths of millions of people).
I was going to mention global warming and related migration as a consequence of that but I thought a similar event of smaller proportions would be a better example to drive my point1. Global warming is obviously going to force a lot of people to migrate but I'm ignorant about the numbers, pace at which it will happen, and what portion of the movement will be contained inside respective countries. (Meaning the percentage of people who will be forced to migrate to another country vs people who will migrate more inland in their own country.) Even if that number is in tens of millions, I'd seriously doubt the concept of borders would come in question, though. (I agree that it should, just doubt that it would.) During crises people cling to their nationality more than they already do.
1. Global warming is also a good example to show the lack of initiation and willingness for collective action, which is necessary if open borders were ever to become reality.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/climate-justice-migrant-labour-harsha-walia/
Like everything climate related, it's super hard for people to think about the numbers involved here. Even your high estimate -- tens of millions -- is off by at least an order of magnitude. I don't think any of us are prepared for what this will really look like.
My point with this is to say that when this happens, we'll have no choice but to either suspend the idea of borders altogether to allow for mass migrations inland, or to double down on enforcing them in what will almost certainly kill an enormous amount of people. There is no reality in which we can keep a workable visa-free travel version of borders under the pressure of migrations that large in scale.
I agree that we're not ready to combat what's to come but I think before mentioning the numbers (which is more than I would have imagined) it's always good to find out what the methodology behind them are. The numbers Open Democracy provided comes from IDMC and according to their most recent data from 2020, the numbers from 2016 seems to have increased almost two-fold. But if you check their methodology, you'll see that whenever someone's been displaced for any reason, they count that person more than once as having been displaced. (Say you moved temporarily because of a recent hurricane, then moved back home. That's one person counted twice.) The organization's definition of displacement is also pretty broad, including people who've been voluntarily displaced after having been compensated for country-wide projects. (This isn't just limited to construction but policy-related projects.) A lot of the numbers they provided seems to have economic and/or other migration baked in, which isn't wrong, it is technically displacement, but I don't think it's completely fair to correlate the number to global warming. Their dashboard also indicates that, unless I misunderstood it, most of these displacements are considered IDPs, meaning internal displacements, which borders are not affected by. If you break down IDPs, most of them were caused not by disasters but conflicts raging within countries.
Whatever the numbers are though, I think it's pretty obvious that the number of displacements (even with a narrow definition of it) due to climate change will increase and governments will have to think about how to act collaboratively in that world. I'm not hopeful that they will and instead, as you said and as grim as it sounds, millions of people will probably die as a result.
I think we’re looking at the upper end of that scale. Canada’s gonna make a lot of money selling northern land.
If there were truly no borders, refugees crisis might be mitigated by the fact that people would be continuous relocating instead of waiting for life to become unbearable to mass migrate all at once. Since the effort required to find shelter would be much less, and their legal status in the new country entirely safe and guaranteed, Syrians might have left the country little by little while the situation worsened. In fact, in the entire world, it would take much less incentive to relocate.
IDK, just a thought.
Edit: also, if every country is equally open, refugees would be split more evenly between neighboring countries instead of just flocking in masse to the countries with more welcoming immigration policies.
Sure, but like you said, it's just a thought. No country would even consider to act as if they don't have borders anymore while letting in as many people as they can to mitigate the eventual, accumulated refugee crisis. It's simply not feasible. You can be prepared for the legal and economic ramifications to an extent, but every single country in the world will have to deal with internal political and cultural pressure. To reiterate, I'm arguing for practicality.
Syrian refugee crisis or related crises are not good examples for taking in refugees in an ordered fashion because wars are by their nature chaotic. You can't expect people to not move during a war because it's not their turn to do so.
Your edit is easily refutable because I'm from a country with the highest refugee population (64% of all refugees), while our neighboring countries don't even crack top 5. (We also host more Syrian refugees than the rest of the world combined.) There's no simple reason why refugees choose one country over the other. You'd think that merely being able to staying alive would be enough, but they, rightly, also want better lives for themselves and their families and a lot of factors play into what they might interpret as "better life". I simply do not think it's realistic to expect that refugees would be evenly split among countries with open borders simply because no country is equal. In time (that equilibrium I mentioned before) maybe, when opportunities countries provide are equal or negligible, but are we even close to that happening?
There is free movement within the US and the EU and it doesn't balance out. Rural areas tend to stay rural. Some cities grow while others decline. People move to where there are jobs and sometimes to nicer weather.
National borders exist for the same reason that Tildes is invite only: Fear that outsiders will invade and undermine the local culture.