{"id":9402,"date":"2016-08-01T15:37:15","date_gmt":"2016-08-01T22:37:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=9402"},"modified":"2016-08-01T15:37:15","modified_gmt":"2016-08-01T22:37:15","slug":"why-borders-matter-and-a-borderless-world-is-a-fantasy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/why-borders-matter-and-a-borderless-world-is-a-fantasy\/","title":{"rendered":"Why borders matter \u2014 and a borderless world is a fantasy"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ Los Angeles Times<\/em>
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

Borders are in the news as never before.\u00a0With Muslim refugees flooding into the European Union from the Middle East, and with terrorism on the rise, a popular revolt is taking shape against the so-called Schengen Area agreements, which give free rights of movement within Europe. The European masses are not racists, but they now apparently wish to accept Middle Eastern immigrants only to the degree that these newcomers arrive legally and promise to become European in values and outlook\u2014protocols that the EU essentially discarded decades ago as intolerant. Europeans are relearning that the continent\u2019s external borders mark off very different approaches to culture and society from what prevails in North Africa or the Middle East.<\/p>\n

A similar crisis plays out in the United States, where President Obama has renounced his former opposition to amnesty by executive order. The populist pushback against unchecked immigration from Mexico, Central and South America gave rise to the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump\u2014predicated on the candidate\u2019s promise to build an impenetrable border wall\u2014much as the cascade of asylum-seekers into Germany has fueled opposition to Chancellor Angela Merkel<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The truth is that formal borders do not create difference \u2014 they reflect it. Elites\u2019 continued attempts to erase borders are both futile and destructive.<\/p>\n

Driving the growing outrage in Europe and North America is the ongoing elite push for a borderless world. Among elites, borderlessness has taken its place among the politically correct positions of our age \u2014 and, as with other such ideas, it has shaped the language we use. The descriptive term \u201cillegal alien\u201d gave way to the nebulous \u201cunlawful immigrant,\u201d then \u201cundocumented immigrant,\u201d \u201cimmigrant,\u201d or the entirely neutral \u201cmigrant\u201d \u2014 a noun that obscures whether the individual in question is entering or leaving.<\/p>\n

Today\u2019s open-borders agenda has its roots not only in economic and political factors \u2014 the need for low-wage workers who will do the work that native-born Americans or Europeans supposedly will not, and the desire to flee failed states \u2014 but also in several decades of intellectual ferment, in which Western academics have created a trendy field of \u201cborders discourse.\u201d What we might call post-borderism argues that boundaries are mere artificial constructs, methods of marginalization designed by those in power, mostly to stigmatize and oppress the \u201cother\u201d \u2014 usually the poorer and less Western \u2014 who arbitrarily ended up on the wrong side of the divide.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhere borders are drawn, power is exercised,\u201d as one European scholar put it. This view assumes that where borders are not drawn, power is not exercised \u2014 as if the Middle Eastern immigrants pouring into Germany do not wield considerable power by their sheer numbers and adroit manipulation of Western grievance politics.<\/p>\n

Dreams of a borderless world are not new, however. Plutarch claimed in his essay \u201cOn Exile\u201d that Socrates considered himself not just an Athenian but instead \u201ca citizen of the cosmos.\u201d In later European thought, Communist ideas of universal labor solidarity drew heavily on the idea of a world without borders. \u201cWorkers of the world, unite!\u201d exhorted Marx and Engels. Wars broke out, in this thinking, only because of needless quarreling over obsolete state boundaries.<\/p>\n

The solution to endless war, some argued, was to eliminate borders in favor of transnational governance. H. G. Wells\u2019 prewar science-fiction novel \u201cThe Shape of Things to Come\u201d envisioned borders eventually disappearing as transnational polymaths enforced enlightened world governance. Such fictions prompt fads in the real world, though attempts to render borders unimportant \u2014 as, in Wells\u2019 time, the League of Nations sought to do \u2014 have always failed. Undaunted, the Left continues to cherish the vision of a borderless world as morally superior, a triumph over artificially imposed difference.<\/p>\n

Yet the truth is that formal borders do not create difference \u2014 they reflect it. Elites\u2019 continued attempts to erase borders are both futile and destructive.<\/p>\n

Borders \u2014 and the fights to keep or change them \u2014 are as old as agricultural civilization. In ancient Greece, most wars broke out over border scrubland. The contested upland eschatia offered little profit for farming but possessed enormous symbolic value for a city-state to define where its own culture began and ended.<\/p>\n

Throughout history, the trigger points of war have traditionally been such borderlands \u2014 the methoria between Argos and Sparta, the Rhine and Danube as the frontiers of Rome, or the Alsace-Lorraine powder keg between France and Germany. These disputes did not always arise, at least at first, as efforts to invade and conquer a neighbor. They were instead mutual expressions of distinct societies that valued clear-cut borders \u2014 not just as matters of economic necessity or military security but also as a means of ensuring that one society could go about its unique business without the interference and hectoring of its neighbors.<\/p>\n

Few escape petty hypocrisy when preaching the universal gospel of borderlessness. In 2011, open-borders advocate Antonio Villaraigosa became the first mayor in Los Angeles history to build a wall around the official mayoral residence. His un-walled neighbors objected, first, that there was no need for such a barricade and, second, that it violated a city ordinance prohibiting residential walls higher than four feet. But Villaraigosa apparently wished to emphasize the difference between his home and the street, or was worried about security, or saw a new wall as iconic of his exalted office.<\/p>\n

While elites can build walls to insulate themselves, the consequences of their policies fall heavily on the nonelites who lack the money and influence to navigate around them. The contrast between the two groups \u2014 Peggy Noonan described them as the \u201cprotected\u201d and the \u201cunprotected\u201d \u2014 was dramatized in the presidential campaign of Jeb Bush. When the former Florida governor called illegal immigration from Mexico \u201can act of love,\u201d his candidacy was doomed. It seemed that Bush had the capital to pick and choose how the consequences of his ideas fell upon himself and his family \u2014 in a way impossible for most of those living in the southwestern United States.<\/p>\n

Those who deride borders are unwilling to address why [people choose to cross them], leaving their language fluency and native soil \u2014 at great personal risk.<\/p>\n

More broadly, those who deride borders are unwilling to address why tens of millions of people choose to cross them in the first place, leaving their language fluency and native soil \u2014 at great personal risk. The answer is obvious: migration, as it was in the 1960s between mainland China and Hong Kong, as it is now between North and South Korea, is usually a one-way street, from the non-West to the West or its Westernized manifestations. People walk, climb, swim, and fly across borders, secure in the knowledge that boundaries mark different approaches to human experience, with one side perceived as more successful or inviting than the other.<\/p>\n

Western rules that promote a greater likelihood of consensual government, religious tolerance, an independent judiciary, free-market capitalism, and the protection of private property combine to offer the individual a level of prosperity and personal security rarely enjoyed at home. As a result, migrants make the necessary travel adjustments to go westward \u2014 especially given that Western civilization, uniquely so, has usually defined itself by culture, not race, and thus alone is willing to accept and integrate those of different races who wish to share its protocols.<\/p>\n

Many unassimilated Muslims in the West assume that they can ignore Western jurisprudence and yet rely on it in extremis. Today\u2019s Pakistani new arrival in London might wish to follow sharia law as he knew it in Punjab. But implicit are two unmentionable constants: The migrant most certainly does not wish to return to face sharia law in Pakistan. Second, if he had his way, institutionalizing his native culture into that of his newly adopted land, he would eventually flee the results \u2014 and once again likely go somewhere else, for the same reasons that he left home in the first place.<\/p>\n

Similarly, when undocumented Latino youths disrupt a Donald Trump rally, they often wave Mexican flags or flash placards bearing slogans such as \u201cMake America Mexico Again.\u201d But note the emotional paradox: In anger at possible deportation, non-citizens nonsensically wave the flag of the country that they most certainly do not wish to rejoin, while ignoring the flag of the nation in which they adamantly wish to remain.<\/p>\n

Borders are to distinct countries what fences are to neighbors: means of demarcating that something on one side is different from what lies on the other side. Borders amplify the innate human desire to own and protect property and physical space, which is impossible to do unless it is seen \u2014 and can be so understood \u2014 as distinct and separate. Clearly delineated borders and their enforcement, either by walls and fences or by security patrols, won\u2019t go away because they go to the heart of the human condition \u2014 what jurists from Rome to the Scottish Enlightenment called meum et tuum, mine and yours. Between friends, unfenced borders enhance friendship; among the unfriendly, when fortified, they help keep the peace.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ Los Angeles Times Borders are in the news as never before.\u00a0With Muslim refugees flooding into the European Union from the Middle East, and with terrorism on the rise, a popular revolt is taking shape against the so-called Schengen Area agreements, which give free rights of movement within Europe. The European […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[848,28,111,383,99],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-2rE","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":9332,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/walls-and-immigration-ancient-and-modern\/","url_meta":{"origin":9402,"position":0},"title":"Walls and Immigration \u2014 Ancient and Modern","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 2, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"The Roman empire faced a challenge similar to what the EU faces. 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Its dilemma is a warning to Americans that we should turn\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Europe"","block_context":{"text":"Europe","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/europe\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"europe-terrorism-edge-abyss","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/europe-terrorism-edge-abyss-e1459355057647.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":926,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/history-never-quite-ends\/","url_meta":{"origin":9402,"position":5},"title":"History Never Quite Ends","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 6, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services The European Union and the United Nations, as well as globalization and advanced technology, were supposed to trump age-old cultural, geographical, and national differences and bring people together. 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