My latest piece for DIPLOMAT wonders what happens when international borders start to melt:
… some people think that borders are less and less important. This in turn seems to signify politically (or even morally) that within the European Union so-called nation states are less and less important. As perhaps they are, with so many legally binding initiatives now emanating from EU institutions in Brussels.
Yet even in the European Union the border signs between countries still have enormous practical meaning: they tell you that you are crossing from one legal, normative order into another. The rules change. In a matter of metres you pass from French jurisdiction into Spanish or German jurisdiction.
Many rules in Europe are now harmonised. But that does not mean that they are identical. Car-crash liability, divorce settlements, child custody issues, owning property, taxes, health and safety standards, employment rights – all these important areas of life and many more change massively depending on which side of a European border you’re on.
In short, borders really matter. They answer Lenin’s famous existential question of politics: Kto kogo? Who [does what to] whom? Who gives orders – and who takes orders? It follows that states really matter. A state represents how we know with almost microscopic precision where one national legal system ends and another begins…
… a new, dismal precedent for changing international borders has appeared, namely Crimea. Russia has proclaimed that Crimea is now part of Russia. A handful of states with derisory human rights records have announced that they accept this annexation. Shame on them. A UN General Assembly resolution has overwhelmingly supported Ukraine’s position that Crimea remains part of Ukraine’s sovereign territory.
The Crimea/Ukraine problem is arguably the most dangerous crisis in Europe since the end of World War II. As Western governments see it, Russia has been deploying its army to attack a neighbouring country and founder UN member, using tactics and rhetoric and logic eerily reminiscent of the 1930s.
Yet as bad as all this certainly is, it seems that the issues are conceptually clear and containable: sooner or later the crisis will be settled by a messy deal, more or less within familiar rules of international law and established practice.
What is happening in the Middle East is far beyond alarming in this sense. We see the fraying of the very idea of national rules as such. Syrians and Iraqis are seeing their state borders dissolving under ruthless attacks by various extremist groups, most significantly the ‘Islamic State’ formation.
Isis is like a lethal ideological Ebola virus, spreading and mutating and bringing something quite new to modern diplomacy: an organisation with leaders and followers who openly boast about their war crimes. Even Stalin, no slouch as a mass murderer, grasped that murdering some 30,000 Polish officers at Katyn needed covering up. He ordered a huge exercise in disinformation that echoed on down the decades until finally in 1990 Mikhail Gorbachev admitted what had happened. Isis want none of that namby-pamby furtive villainy. They fall over themselves to murder their prisoners live on YouTube.
However much territory and oil Isis manage to loot, it’s hard to see a ‘caliphate’ based on mass murder and carved by Isis from other states in the region winning even de facto international recognition. Its borders will be defined not by what it is, but what it isn’t. It will have no legitimacy or recognition. Its leaders will be hunted for war crimes. It will have no UN seat, no international telephone dialling code, no international air services, no international sports competitions, no free NGOs, no good hospitals, no respected universities and libraries. It will have nothing and invent nothing that makes life civilised and interesting, or offers a decent future to people under its sway.
Or maybe that’s not the point. Maybe what Isis represents is not the building of anything positive as we understand it, but the start of a new phase of generalised disintegration as modern states find themselves unable to cope…
It turns out that some of these Isis murderers are British. What if parts of London or other cities in the UK or in other countries start to be dominated by gangs of people who think like them, then start to act like them? How many people need to be in such gangs before the territory they control starts to look – and starts to be – a ‘no-go area’ for the police and other state authorities?
Once a state effectively loses control of some parts of its territory to local violent extremists, how long does it take for the mass of citizens to start to challenge state authority, if only because they fear for the results if the state can no longer guarantee equal rights and responsibilities for all within its borders?
Read the whole thing. If you can face it.
All this of course is part of a wider phenomenon. Increasingly no-one knows or is ready to say what ‘foreign’ means. Once the whole planet is mapped and observed by all of us in micro-detail, the idea of ‘foreign’ starts to recede. And borders recede too.
The current clamour and confusion on ‘migration’ is linked to this. No-one is foreign any more! Why set limits to people moving wherever they want? That’s fair, isn’t it? Trying to limit migration is a priori discrimination (unless it’s done by those states with a legitimate need to protect their vibrant and authentic cultural heritage and values, ie any state that is non-Western).
As previously pondered here, what if World War Three in the form of a generalised free-for-all has started – and we don’t know it?
Share this page:
O/T The anniversary of the Berlin Wall fall has come. I am sorry your countryman Winston did not live long enough to have seen it. I've sure I've said this before, but I remember as a young boy watching Winston's funeral live on our black and white tv and especially when they lowered the cranes as his barge passed. My family was/is a Texas working middle class, but then and to this day my father and mother would say that Winston was the man of the century and more, I agree. There are time I wonder what he would have made of Putin and the current crop he have now.
I very much liked the post above.
I don't know what Churchill would have "made" of Putin, but it is certain that he would, if necessary, have composed with him in the same way as he did with Uncle Joe (Katyn and the Polish Government-in-exile refer). Add in Tito and Yugoslavia.