History: The Changing Meaning of Borders
(written by Lancelot Finn, September 2003)
Have there always been borders? In one sense or another, they have existed for a very long time. But their function and their meaning has changed in the course of history. The world in 1900 and the world in 2000 both had lines on a map that were called borders, but I suspect this resemblance is an optical illusion: in truth, borders today are a new and unprecedented institution.
One of the pitfalls of history is that words, institutions and traditions can seemingly persist over time while their meaning completely changes. An ancient Roman who stepped into 18th-century France might make the mistake of thinking he was still living in the Roman Empire. He would be disappointed about the way the language had deteriorated: only priests and the learned spoke Latin (and that with a bad accent) and the dialect of the vulgar had been debased completely, to the point of being unintelligible. And he would be dismayed to find that people no longer called the province Gaul, but had substituted the name “France.” He would be reassured to discover, however, that there were still officials called “dukes” (Latin dux or general), and “bishops” (from a Greek word meaning "overseer"). And the last of these, presumably the most important, firmly declared their allegiance to Rome. The relieved Roman would conclude that there had been a few administrative and linguistic changes over the years, but the Roman Empire was still going strong.
What this Roman would not grasp is that, while a duke might have the same name as a dux, he was a completely different figure: dux was no longer an office of state, let alone of the Roman state, but a hereditary rank in the aristocracy, signifying not command of soldiers but feudal control of land. The “bishop” was not simply an “overseer,” as in Roman times: his was a spiritual office now. And the allegiance that the bishops, and the people, owed to Rome had changed, and was no longer political at all; instead, it was a purely spiritual allegiance. And the Roman Empire was no more.
Just as this Roman might be betrayed by the etymological similarity of words into thinking that institutions had been preserved, so the survival of the word “border” from older and different periods of geopolitical history misleads us into thinking that the lines on a map have the same meaning now as they did then. A look at the history of borders will help show how the concept has evolved. In Roman times, a border was a military frontier, the edge of the empire, the end of civilization. In 19th-century Europe, a border was the boundary between the jurisdictions of different sovereign states. Today, a border has acquired a new chief function, as a membrane regulating the entry and exit of people.