The Permanence of Borders

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

Humans draw lines that divide the world into specific places, territories, and categories; this has been an essential component of activity for millennia. 

Beginning as fuzzy zones between tribal groups, boundaries became more clearly defined with the development of states.

Following Europe’s wars of religion during the sixteenth century culminating in the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, frontiers across Europe morphed into fairly rigid lines. 

This model of organizing political space was subsequently exported to the rest of the world through European colonial conquest, most prominently during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

By the late nineteenth century, the extent of a nation’s territory had become an index of its power, with overseas colonial possessions augmenting prestige and wealth and redefining territoriality.

Without frontiers, there can be no exercise of sovereignty -- the authority and control over a distinct territory and its corresponding population and resources. Territorial boundaries provide a framework for organizing political and economic life.

National borders create imagined communities, which are limited by boundaries and are where people are aware of their sovereignty within finite frontiers. 

Harvard historian Charles S. Maier has explored the evolution of territorial organization as a worldwide practice of human societies. His 2016 book Once Within Borders: Territories of Power, Wealth and Belonging Since 1500, tracks the changes that have defined territories over five centuries and draws attention to ideas and technologies that contribute to territoriality’s remarkable resilience.

At a time when the technologies of globalization are eroding barriers to communication, transportation, and trade, the interdependence of economies and the emergence of cyberspace seem to have reduced the salience of physical territorial control and weakened traditional notions of sovereignty and citizenship, he notes. 

But if Maier is correct, the rise of cross-border processes and institutions, often defined as part of “globalization,” may challenge established notions of territorial sovereignty, but they are far from transcending them. 

Territory will continue to claim an important place in the human imagination. “People still want frontiers. There’s a certain comfort in them,” he suggested in a January interview with the Harvard Gazette. They remain a foundation for statehood, power and identity.

“I thought that borders were coming down all over, that we were moving toward a borderless world. 

The fall of the Berlin Wall remained a vivid memory. Going into this project, I assumed territory didn’t matter as much as it had earlier. Well, that was innocence. Now I think that if borders are fading, they’re fading slowly and with a lot of pushback.”

In fact states throughout the world are enhancing their border security in an effort to better manage the flows into and out of their territories. Good fences may not make good neighbours, but they at least keep them from causing trouble.

When the Berlin Wall was torn down in 1989, there were 16 border fences around the world. Today, there are at least 65 either completed or under construction.

Examples include the United States constructing hundreds of miles of fencing along the Mexican border (and this predates Donald Trump’s intention to build a wall), and India fencing its 4,000-kilometre border with Bangladesh and 2,900-kilometre border with Pakistan. 

Pakistan has built fences along sections of the Afghanistan border, while Iran strengthened its 700-kilomtre border with Pakistan. 

Israel has constructed a 760-kilometre security barrier around many Palestinian areas in the West Bank, while shorter fences have been built along Israel’s borders with Gaza and Egypt. 

More recently, Hungary erected a border fence with Serbia to prevent migrants from crossing into the country. Macedonia decided to block the border with Greece, and Bulgaria with Turkey, for the same reason.

Kenya, Saudi Arabia and Turkey constructed border fences in a bid to keep out jihadist groups next door in Somalia, Iraq and Syria, respectively.

Along the Moroccan border with Western Sahara a sand wall called the “Berm,” is surrounded by mines to stop Polisario Front fighters from crossing. It is second in length only to the Great Wall of China, and has kept families separated for decades.

Numerous other countries, including China, Greece, Kuwait, Spain, Thailand, Uzbekistan, and the United Arab Emirates, launched new fence construction projects over the past decade.

It isn’t the borderless world of the utopian dreamers just yet. As long as there are sovereign states, there will be borders, even if “soft” ones.