A Borderless World

The essays collected on this website do not argue for the elimination of borders. That would make little sense. Like laws, borders are institutions that enable us to organize and manage our affairs. Rather, these essays reflect a growing awareness that little of what happens today stays within the borders we have created. Globalization has made the world more crowded, more tightly connected, more energetic—and consequently, harder to discipline. Modern corporations and regional trade networks exceed national economies. An expanding system of international governance threatens the exercise of state sovereignty. The growth of global media and the social impact of large-scale migrations blur the divisions between cultures and challenge the coherence of national identities. Terrorist organizations, criminal gangs, and human traffickers operate everywhere with increasing impunity. Environmental degradation, climate change, and communicable disease disregard borders altogether. Should we ever be foolish enough to unleash our stockpiled nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons, the resulting catastrophe will affect the entire planet. If artificial intelligence finally goes rogue, as many experts predict, it will not distinguish between nations. Judiciously placed borders might help us meet these challenges, but they will never serve as barriers behind which we can hide. Whether we choose to acknowledge it or not, we live in a borderless world.

Historians will continue to debate why the Soviet Union collapsed. But to outsiders at the time, it appeared as though the nationalist forces pulling it apart had proved stronger in the end than the ideological universalism holding it together. Marxism, with its emphasis on class formation, class consciousness, and class struggle, had tended to regard nationalism as a spent force. But now, in the 1990s, that force resurfaced, as if risen from the dead. Across Eastern Europe, independence encouraged the revitalization of older nationalist traditions, especially in Poland and Hungary. In Russia, the collapse of the communist regime unleashed a rightwing chauvinism targeting Jews and other minorities. But the greatest tragedy unfolded in Yugoslavia, where demagogues like Serbian President Slobodan Milošević or Croatian President Franjo Tudjman exploited the country’s ethnic divisions for political ends. As Croatia and Bosnia declared their independence and the Yugoslav federation broke apart, Serb minorities in both regions, backed by the Milošević regime in Belgrade, waged war to grab what they could. With growing horror, the world stood by and watched as Bosnian Serbs laid siege to Sarajevo and engaged in ethnic cleansing, most notoriously at Srebrenica, where they massacred over 7,000 Muslim men and boys. The savagery of Yugoslavia’s descent into violence, which recalled the Balkan wars of the early twentieth century, served as a reminder that nationalism remained as powerful and disruptive a force as ever.

Sovereign states and borders naturally go together. For most of the postwar period, westerners believed that they lived in a familiar world of fixed sovereign states, each with clearly defined borders. “A bipolar world,” the phrase used to describe the postwar international system, balanced as it was between two superpowers, evoked stability and permanence. But then, almost without warning, the Cold War came to an end, the Soviet Union disintegrated, and Europe underwent a remarkable transformation. All of a sudden, assumptions about a stable world order seemed hopelessly naive. The Soviet Union’s withdrawal from Eastern Europe made it clear that the state system was mutable after all. Talk of “bipolarity” disappeared, replaced by promises of a “new world order,” which no one could define. Sovereign states came and went. German reunification in 1990 presupposed the dissolution of East Germany. The “Velvet Revolution” in 1989 led to Czechoslovakia’s bifurcation some three years later. Most spectacularly, the Soviet Union itself imploded. Lithuania declared its independence in 1990, Latvia and Estonia followed in 1991, and by the end of the year the remaining Soviet republics, including the Union’s Slavic core—Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine—had all gone their separate ways.

The chaos of the 1990s sparked a wide-ranging debate about the structure of international politics. If the state system was really as mutable as recent events suggested, if its history had reached a crisis point, then what was coming next? In the absence of bipolarity, what would the new world order look like? Was the nation-state, the system’s basic building block, capable of meeting the challenges of the future, especially given the vehemence of the nationalism that provided its rationale? In response to questions like these, globalists started thinking in terms of international governance. They pointed out that antiquated notions of sovereignty, dating from nineteenth-century nation building, were inadequate for dealing with late twentieth-century problems. Nation-states might be good at pursuing their own immediate interests, but they would never willingly make the sacrifices necessary for securing the wellbeing of the planet. Rather than consigning the fate of the earth to a bunch of competing states, globalists dreamed of subsuming those selfish actors within a system of governance that would encourage them to work for the greater good. No one seriously proposed a centralized world government. Instead, they envisioned a multi-layered system in which national and international agencies, with overlapping competencies, would cooperate to investigate problems, design and implement policies, and resolve disputes. Here was a forward-looking approach to human affairs that would enable experts to do their work on a truly global scale.

The proliferation of transnational regulatory agencies in the 1990s suggested that this vision was not as utopian as it might have seemed. This was particularly the case in western Europe, where a number of independent states were cooperating to create a system of international governance that would require them to surrender voluntarily a degree of sovereignty for the peace and well-being of the continent. As the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia collapsed in the east, European leaders in the west agreed to transform the European Community into the European Union. The Single European Act, coming into force in 1987, called for an open internal market enabling people, capital, goods, and services to move freely across borders. The Maastricht Treaty, signed in 1992 and implemented a year later, paved the way for future monetary union with a single currency, for common environmental and social policies, and for defensive military cooperation. Despite the many challenges it has faced, the EU has achieved remarkable success, bringing peace, prosperity, and unity of purpose to what had been one of the world’s most bellicose regions.

The essays posted on this website reflect this moment in history. The debates over transnational governance that animated the 1990s are still relevant today. The problems we face continue to exceed the borders we have created, and coordinating our efforts to solve them has proved exceedingly difficult to achieve. The nation-state, with its narrow understanding of sovereignty, still gets in the way of international cooperation. Saving the planet will require expansive thinking, a realization that things need not be the way they are. Many of the assumptions that we bring to international politics were formed during the nineteenth century, which historians have called the age of nationalism. Exploring what people at the time said about nationalism—the explanations they offered, the challenges they posed, the alternatives they proposed—might help us to think differently. The essays on this website aim to do just that. They are academic in style and fall within the discipline of intellectual history. They invite readers to put their assumptions aside for a moment and to consider what earlier thinkers said, not because they had answers to our questions—they lived in different times—but because their insights might spark thoughts of our own, might caution us against overhasty conclusions, and might encourage us to pursue new avenues of inquiry.