essay on world before borders
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We live in perplexing times. We are more interconnected than ever before. World economies are tied together and utterly dependant on each other. Yet the very thing that fuels our globalization is also the very thing that fuels our destruction. Climate change and oil spills that have devastating environmental impacts are showing the price of our global trade.
While we give lip service to things such as free trade and global human rights, the sovereignty of nations remains unquestioned. However, in a world bound together by environment and social networks, we must be ready to re-imagine what it means to be both a global citizen and local community member.
The political trend towards isolationism and self-interest is as strong as ever, even while the problems facing the world today are global in nature. But the thought of foregoing nationalistic pride is scoffed at in the name of self-interest. What if the most self-interested decision we could make would be a greater move towards global cooperation? In a world connected by social networks, this has never been more possible.
Imagine for a moment a world without borders. A world where people freely travel and move about. In this world, the only obstacle to seeing the great wonders of human civilization would be the cost of transportation. Imagine a world where transportation does not come at the cost of environmental degradation. A world where visas and passports are no longer necessary and we would be free to travel and work anywhere and everywhere we wanted. Is this a dream worth fighting for? Is this a world worth sacrificing for?
The first response for many is that this is an unrealizable pipe dream, and not even a positive one. A borderless world—for all its promises of freedom and harmony—is fraught with all kinds of problems as well. I would wager that the most common possible problem in the reader’s mind is a fear of security. A borderless world likely conveys fears of terrorists moving about at will with their threats and acts of violence on a defenseless people.
There are some who might argue that a borderless world would be a cultureless world. That without distinct national, sovereign boundaries, our world would descend into a single homogenous corporate Amero-culture. My first response is, what does that say about the culture each of us helps create and define each day? Our great fear is that the culture we have created would be a plague on the world. If not completely unsettling, what that indicates about who we’ve become is at least a little tragic.
However, maybe this is not how a borderless world would have to be. What if we could live in a safe and free world that did not cling desperately to culture in the face of overwhelming capitalistic domination? What if culture the world over thrived and blossomed—not in spite of a borderless world, but because of it? Could this really be so?
Why do nations exist? Why did states come to be? Well, in a world before flight and worldwide transportation, resources had to be protected. In a finite world of limited resources, this was the single greatest reason for war. Someone else wanted what you had and the easiest way to get it was by force. National boundaries were established in an attempt to end the constant battle for resources. It was a pragmatic solution to the constant bloodshed that plagued the world. And it worked—at least some of the time.
That was before international trade. That was before oil. That was before avocados in February. That was before UPS overnight shipping from Seattle to Shanghai. We now live in a global world that must manage resources globally, not locally.
Socially and politically we must think globally. We must find a way to look past our nationalistic tendencies as they have now outlived their usefulness. Just as record labels have lost their power to be the sole distributor of media, so too have the great power brokers of the twentieth century. Now, information is power, and in this new global world, we have access to all the information we need to obtain all the power we want. The power to form and shape our world is in our hands like never before. We are increasingly in control of our world and we are the ones who will shape it if we reach out and connect with those around us. Borders have limited usefulness and increasingly less meaning.