THE BORDERS OF OUR IMAGINATION
As I’ve been reading articles and books that touch on globalization, war, illegal immigration, international energy markets and other current affairs, it occurred to me that our commonly held concept of borders no longer match reality. The invisible and imaginary lines that criss-cross maps, over which so much blood and treasure have been shed, are functioning less and less as we would expect. Even in Europe, borders have not yet been reduced to polite fictions but they are a far more multifaceted and less impermeable phenomena today than a generation ago.
If you consider a border to be a barrier of an absolute sovereign power fencing out the rest of the world, then you need to look increasingly hard to find one. The lavishly fortified DMZ at the 38th parallel that divides capitalist South Korea from its ghoulish communist twin in the North remains a pristine example of the traditional ” do not cross this line ” model of a border. Ancient in pedigree, this kind of border was exemplified by China’s Great Wall and East Germany’s lesser imitation that was designed not to keep barbarians out but to allow the barbarians to keep people in. France bet all their chips as a great power on the Maginot line – and lost. Unrivaled in military power by any of its neighbors yet plagued by terrorism, Israel is staking its security on a ” fence” and selective, strategic, withdrawals from the territories to achieve unilateral separation from the Palestinians.
There are other conceptions of borders, notably the geographic. Great mother India went no further north than the peaks of the Hindu Kush – literally, the ” Killer of the Hindus”. Under the Bourbons and then Bonaparte, France sought to establish ” her natural frontiers” in Europe. America’s 19th century Manifest Destiny proclaimed an America bounded only by the Atlantic and the Pacific – ” from sea to shining sea “- and had James K. Polk gotten his way, Mexico City would be the largest metropolis in the United States today. Yet when Manifest Destiny was an accomplished fact, Frederick Jackson Turner lamented the effect that the closing of the frontier would have on the American character.
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