Whither Borders in an Age of "Globalization" and "Empire?"
(written by Lancelot Finn, December 2004)
If borders in Roman times meant military frontiers, and in 19th-century Europe meant jurisdictional boundaries, what do they mean today?
First of all, military frontiers will certainly not serve as their core definition in the modern context. Some borders are not defended at all, and many more are defended only against immigration and not against invasion, a topic with which we deal more later. Moreover, many states station troops far beyond their own borders, thus seemingly expanding their “military frontiers,” but this is not understood as expanding those nations' borders. The US has bases in Japan, Korea, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Cuba and the Philippines, yet all these remain independent countries. Multinational peacekeeping missions under UN auspices have brought German troops to Afghanistan and Australian troops to East Timor, without anyone thinking that East Timor and Afghanistan are now contained within the borders of Australia and Germany. Even for countries that do garrison their borders in the traditional manner, such as Russia, a line of soldiers along the frontier is clearly not the real source of their national security. In an age of nuclear weapons, border garrisons can no longer provide security to the citizens behind them, because ICBMs can go right over their heads. On the other hand, the doctrine of the sanctity of borders, which after sixty years of the operation of the UN has embedded itself deep in international norms, gives any country whose borders are violated potential access to a great deal of outside help. Actual and potential deployments of military force have quite limited relevance to the map of political borders in the contemporary context.
The 19th-century meaning of borders as boundaries between the jurisdictions of different sovereignties, by contrast, still seems to apply today. Indeed, it has been perfected. At the turn of the 20th century, though that principle of borders was well-accepted, there were a great many anomalies that conflicted with it. England’s rule in Egypt was just one example: England intervened in 1882 at a time of Ottoman bankruptcy, but never assumed formal sovereignty, assuring the other powers year after year that their rule was a temporary expedient. Or in China, the old Manchu empire lingered on, yet was militarily helpless against the foreign powers, who sometimes dictated policy, who occupied bases along the coast, who expected “extra-territorial” rights that exempted them from ordinary Chinese law. The British Empire included the white Dominions, which had an acknowledge right to secede, and the colonies, which did not as of yet, but whose eventual independence was foreseen. In the course of the 20th century, the Westphalian state system in Europe has gone global. Nations subjected to European imperialism—or rather, in most cases, Europeanized elites within those nations—have aspired to the form of Europe’s sovereign nation-states, and have achieved it—or rather, in many cases, have haplessly inherited it from colonial masters who lost the will to govern them. Ex-colonies tended to be extremely sensitive to anything that resembled imperialism in the years immediately after independence, and many protected their economic sovereignty by pursuing autarky, though more recently this trend has reversed. The advent of the UN has given a new prestige to international law and an institutional substance to the formal equality which states have always conceptually enjoyed in its eyes.
Yet at the same time international organizations and treaties, and economic globalization, have begun to subtly constrain states’ freedom of action, and thus eroded their jurisdiction from above. It must be pointed out here that jurisdictional boundaries make neither borders nor sovereignty. All polities are subdivided into smaller units for administrative purposes to some extent. These subdivisions imply jurisdictions with discrete boundaries. In federal systems, the subdivisions have some degree of autonomy themselves, in the sense that they have discretion in certain areas and cannot be over-ridden by the center. Yet federal units are considered part of the federation and not separate sovereignties. Yet ever since the founding of the UN there have been restrictions on states' sovereignty from above, on their right to engage in aggression against their neighbors for example. In the course of time, countries have signed up to more and more treaties which prevent them from, say, testing nuclear weapons, or abusing the rights of children. The UN and international treaties are notoriously weak, but they still create a conceptual puzzle: what is the difference between a “sovereign” polity which abrogates certain rights by international treaty and a federal unit which abrogates certain rights in favor of a federal government. This question is as old as the United Nations, as the name of the United Nations suggests; the UN embodies an aspiration towards some sort of world federation.
It was a fad in 1990s journalistic best-sellers to claim that the world of nation-states is being superseded, that national governments are helpless in the face of overwhelming global trends, and that we are headed for (as one of William Greider’s titles put it) One World, Ready or Not. Such institutions include the WTO, the IMF and the World Bank, as well as (with somewhat different implications) regional trade organizations, of which the most important—the EU—openly aspires to pioneer a new form of sovereignty. The WTO, IMF and World Bank have come under fierce attack as modern reincarnations of the old imperialism, imposing Western institutions and compromising the sovereignty of poor countries. Here the EU, being (at least until the accession of the eastern European states) an association more of the ex-imperialists than of the ex-imperialized, is a case apart, but it does seem strange, and demands explanation, that so many ex-colonial nations once so sensitive to hints of neo-imperialism and jealous of their sovereignty have voluntarily (for loans can be refused) come under World Bank and IMF tutelage, or accepted the strictures of the WTO. Thomas Friedman’s The Lexus and the Olive Tree gives a glimpse of why. He portrays how countries feel impelled towards the “Golden Straitjacket” economic model, how they are at the mercy of “the Electronic Herd” of mobile capital investors, how the failure or stagnation of state-led models has led them to come to understand that interaction with the global economy is the touchstone of prosperity.
If the nation-state is becoming obsolete, that raises the question of what is replacing it, which may explain why the enthusiasm for globalization has been eclipsed by a resurgence of the idea of “empire.” In this vein, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire is an outstanding example. It is fiercely Marxist, yet with a twist: it seeks to replace charges of imperialism with charges of (in a new sense which they carefully lay out) “Empire,” and although their view of Empire is mostly condemnatory, they see it as a necessary stage on which to stage a world revolution. So in this back-handed sense, even Hardt and Negri’s view of empire is a positive one.
Dominic Lieven, in a general historical study called Empire, entertains the idea of “An American Empire?” and concludes that “according to definition and taste the United States may or may not be an empire." Niall Ferguson, in his 2004 book Colossus, voices strong support for empire, and forthrightly declares that America is one, but strangely he does not address the obvious question: if America is an empire, what are the borders of that empire? In my view, the "empire" question is ultimately a semantic one. The world presents us with an array of practices, rules, power and influence, cultural, political, ideological, and military, of flows of goods and of people, of officials with various mandates and incentives, of forces that operate locally, nationally, regionally and globally; the character and structure of all these in some ways resembles, in some ways differs from, those historical entities which have given meaning to our term “empire”; and whether we therefore choose to assign this label is arbitrary. Whatever one may think of messianic proletarian revolutions, Negri's and Hardt’s paradigm of the world as a single “Empire,” a single government in some mysterious and unprecedented sense, is a highly interesting and instructive exercise. So for the next phase of the argument, I invite the reader to engage in that exercise, and consider not the semantic question of whether the US (or the “international community”) is or is not (or “has” or “does not have”) an empire, but rather, to assume the world is an empire and ask: what kind of empire is it?
What is immediately clear is that if we view the contemporary world as a single world empire, that does not mean that we can simply erase those strange entities, borders, from the map of the world. Borders are facts, which interfere with people’s lives and plans and prevent hundreds of millions from pursuing their dreams. They are no longer military frontiers, and ex hypothesi their role as the boundaries between sovereign jurisdictions is obsolescent. But they still serve one major function: as membranes, controlling the entry and exit of people.