Responding to a not so recent TIME article1 by Parag Khanna2 the author argues that a world without borders would be a better place. But please, read the article and come back for my conclusions, I promise, I’ll wait.
You are back? Great, I hope you found the article by Khanna at least somehow interesting. While I do not agree that a world without borders would magically solve all of humanities problems as the author seems to imply, I do think that a world without borders is a goal worthy to achieve. But how would a world without political borders look like? In the absence of a common language, how could we possibly achieve the necessary integration of everyone? Another problem would be an administrative one, how do you manage centrally a world without borders? By introducing local/regional governments? This would drive the will for a borderless planet ad adsurdum as it doesn’t matter whether the borders are called national borders or regional ones.
What I believe is much more feasible and would reduce a lot of friction would be a much more open approach to more regional independency with the obligation to cooperate with the rest. Borders may exist on a map and for administrative reasons, but they need to be permeable. When borders are permeable you achieve a great deal of integration as well as the development of more infrastructure. As citizen of Europe, or more exactly of one of the smallest countries, Luxembourg, I live a live in a region with porous borders. In our region, it should not be a bigger problem building transnational infrastructures than it would be building infrastructures spanning multiple administrative regions and yet it is.
So the real question is, how can we solve this problem? I’m eager to read your comments and possible solutions to the problem.
Quellen
- http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1971133_1971110_1971105,00.html [↩]
- Khanna is the author of The Second World: How Emerging Powers Are Redefining Global Competition in the 21st Century [Random House, 2009] [↩]