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RADIO 4
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ANALYSIS
BORDER STATES
TRANSCRIPT OF A RECORDED DOCUMENTARY
Presenter: Andrew Dilnot
Producer: Nicola Meyrick
Editor: Nicola Meyrick
 
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Broadcast Date: 27th April 2000
Repeat Date: 30th April 2000
Tape Number: TLN016/00VT1017
Duration: 27'35"
 
 
 
TAKING PART IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE:

Professor John Kay Economist

Mary Kaldor Director, Global Civil Society Programme, London School of Economics and Political Science

Niall Ferguson Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford

David Held Professor of Politics and Sociology, The Open University

Maruska Svasek Lecturer in Anthropology, Queen's University, Belfast

Philippe Aghion Professor of Economics, University College London
 


Dilnot : They hold us in, they keep them out, they're coming down across Europe, going up in the Balkans, coming down between East and West, altering their role in the United Kingdom. What are they? Borders, easy to take for granted, but rapidly changing and hard to understand. What are they for?

Kay : The sense of social solidarity which exists within a boundary can be used either to encourage people to take care of each other on the one hand, or it can be used to develop hostility to people who lie outside the boundary on the other.

Dilnot : Professor John Kay, like all the best economists, seeing that there are two sides to the question - on the one hand borders can enclose those we want to be nice to and on the other hand can exclude those we want to be nasty to. It's the nasty aspect that drives some people's desire to see borders in decline.

Kaldor : I'm certainly strongly in favour of a boundary-less Europe and perhaps the most important reason that I'm in favour of it is that we really aren't likely to see wars of the type we experienced in the 20th century. Yes there are wars of the Bosnian type but they're very very different from these barbaric state wars or the possibility of nuclear war.

Dilnot : Mary Kaldor, director of the LSE's Global Civil Society programme, in no doubt that Europe would be a better place without borders. Maybe she's not got long to wait - after all, we've got the Channel Tunnel, much of Europe is moving towards a single currency, the economy is increasingly globalised, and now we even let pets into Britain without quarantine. Have borders have had their day? Oxford historian Niall Ferguson.

Ferguson : Borders aren't on their way out. The number of sovereign states in the world has trebled since 1914. Then there were about 59 and now we're well over the 180 mark. I think it's 192 at the last count. Whether these borders are meaningful is another question but the fact of the matter is that particularly since processes like de-colonisation and of course the collapse of communism there are more sovereign states in the world and therefore more borders.

Dilnot : How do we make sense of this? Are borders good, or bad, growing in significance, or dwindling away? Can we make a world with fewer or no borders work, and what would we lose if we did? These are the questions for tonight's Analysis. The political and territorial aspects of borders perhaps come first to mind, but what have other disciplines got to say about them? A question for the economist, John Kay.

Kay : I suppose an economist would recognise a boundary by saying you have a different kind of relationship between people within the boundary than the one you have with people across it. Now that might be a very superficial difference like you pay people in one boundary in pounds, you pay people across the boundary in lire. Or it might be a deeper social difference like you care about people on one side of a boundary and less about people across the other. Or it might be the kind of relationships as between a firm and a market so that within a firm, you tend to have hierarchically organised relationships whereas across the boundaries of the firm you're more likely to have commercial, market relationships.

Held : The borders drew a line, a very firm line, between those who were potentially involved in the democratic process and those who were simply regarded as outsiders.

Dilnot : David Held, Professor of Politics and Sociology at the Open University

Held : At the heart of modern political theory lies the assumptions that political decision-makers can be held to account by those people inside their borders as it were, and that those decisions will affect no one other essentially than those people inside their border. In other words there's an assumption of symmetry and congruence on the one side between political leaders, and then the other side between those who are as it were experiencing the effects of political leadership. In short, sovereignty and borders were the power container in and through which democratic leaders were held to account and the constituencies, the proper constituencies for political decision, were clearly defined.

Dilnot : For both economists and political scientists then, a crucial characteristic of a border is that it defines a group we expect to see sharing objectives and resources, co-operating to achieve given ends. But somewhere those ends have to be decided on. We draw boundaries around the group with whom we have a particular relationship - the people we regard as fellow-citizens - and then within the border we set in place accountable and legitimate arrangements for making decisions. Unfortunately, life's a lot messier than that. The Czech/German border is one example of how fluid, difficult and violent borders can be. The annexation by Germany of the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia in 1938 began the final drift to the Second World War, and then after the war millions of German-speaking Sudetens were expelled from the Czech area and the iron curtain went up. Anthropologist Maruska Svasek, herself half Czech, has studied the emotions brought to life here since the end of the Cold War.

Svasek : This is an area where the Iron Curtain was for forty-one years so people on both sides of the borders, they actually, they haven't met, they haven't seen each other and now with the opening of the border people get in contact with each other and one part which is quite problematic is that the Sudeten Germans have been expelled that were about 3.1 million Sudeten Germans from the Czech area. Many of them now live in Bavaria and are interested in first of all having a look in the place where they were born and maybe doing up the graves and things like that. But some are also more aggressive and they want their property back so you can imagine that on the Czech side people are sometimes wary and afraid. There is also a lot of cross-border contacts and reconciliation processes going on.

Dilnot : There's nothing `given' about these borders, and they're not tame, they're powerful emotionally, culturally, ethnically, politically, as well as economically. Cyprus and Ireland show pretty clearly that even living on an island doesn't always provide natural, uncontested boundaries. Maruska Svasek now works at Queens University, Belfast, which - not surprisingly - has developed a specialism in the study of borders. All the same, many of Europe's borders have been in much the same place for long enough to seem more or less natural. How did they get there? Political Scientist Mary Kaldor.

Kaldor : We have very specific political borders that emerged in the 16th and 17th centuries and have gradually got strengthened which are territorial borders, and are very much linked to the rise of the modern state. Traditional states had frontiers. It was always a bit fuzzy where the territory of the king ended and people obeyed the king because they were his subjects, not because they lived on his territory.

Dilnot : And what sorts of pressures led to the kind of initial push to political territorial borders?

Kaldor : Well obviously first and foremost it was war, but in order to fight wars, kings needed to start raising taxes, and they needed to define who had to pay taxes and so they needed a much clearer definition of citizenship. In an earlier period people were subjects. They sort of decided did they or did they not bear allegiance to a particular monarch. Once you were a citizen, this wasn't a voluntary decision. It depended where you lived, and so raising taxes and gradually all kinds of other things that went along with that, expanding administration, where did administration begin or end in earlier periods. People's lives weren't really affected by the state. As the state expanded, they were in almost everyday contact with the state. You had to have standards of measurement, you had to have the single currency, and all of those things meant you had to know where the state's writ ended and where it began.

Dilnot : Standards of measurement and a single currency - in the abstract these seem pretty mundane, but the anger about the loss of imperial weights in the selling of food, and the charged British debate about EMU are further reminders of the emotional power of boundaries. Governments may not care much about emotion, but they do care about tax, and as the role of governments grew, so did the need to define borders so as to enforce taxation. Within borders we raise taxes to pay for the things that we decide on by electing political leaders. Legitimate, accountable, and democratic. But largely ignoring anything outside the borders. And David Held, author of Democracy and the Global Order suggests that simply isn't enough any longer.

Held : In the 19th century, the decision to go to war or to secure a colony was one that was largely taken by political elites and had consequences for those people well and beyond their borders. But today the decisions that political leaders take often have a massive array of consequences beyond borders. Let's give you some brief examples. The decision to use a particular kind of energy policy may well be a decision taken by reference to a delimited domestic poverty but it has consequences for those around the world in terms of the effects of an environment, industrial strategy and so on. The decisions let us say to site a nuclear plant near a border may be a decision again taken largely with reference to an internal political debate but it too has consequences beyond borders. The decision how to regulate capital in both financial markets and also in the wider markets of trade may be perceived to be domestic decisions but they have massive consequences for people across borders. So I would argue today that public policy every more is not just about taking decisions for those people inside the political border but it has consequences across borders.

Dilnot : There's a growing tension here. We have borders to define a community which coheres, accepts common rules and shared goals, and submits to political authority. But if many of the decisions that affect those within the border are made outside it, and the decisions made within it materially affect people outside, the traditional institutions of government have a problem.

Held : At the beginning of the 20th century, states were hardly involved in many international organisations and they were hardly being buttressed as it were by many international non-governmental organisations. But at the end of the 20th century states found themselves meshed in hundreds of international governmental organisations and being lobbied by thousands of international non-governmental organisations. At the beginning of the 20th century state leaders would hardly have to travel. Today the number of major inter-state conferences totals between four to five thousand annually. In addition the scope and form of international law has changed fundamentally. Today sovereignty is defined by reference to a set of legal and moral standards given in the human rights regimes and so on so the very nature of political power, the nature of sovereignty is more complex both in legal terms and in political terms. All this is made much more complex still by the dynamics of the world economy.

Dilnot : It's in global trade that we perhaps see these forces most powerfully. It really doesn't make much sense to try to ascribe nationality to a multinational corporation, and cyberspace takes boundarylessness to new heights. One response to all this is for countries to club together with their neighbours. Philippe Aghion, Professor of Economics at University College London, argues that this is the best way forward.

Aghion : Having big blocs can facilitate trade agreements. Trade organisation is like a big bargain between many countries. If you have small countries, a small country can misbehave or not co-operate but if the worldwide trade negotiation is between a small number of blocs, what you have is that each bloc is representative to the negotiation and then you have a negotiation with more representative people. I think they will be much more responsible and it might be that it's more like to find an agreement when you have more balanced forces being part of the global trade negotiation whereas if you have a very strong and a very weak, the very weak might free-ride on the very strong. In the new world you will need somebody to talk for Europe. It will be much easier to deal with Europeans this way than to have to deal with ten different European policies going in different directions. If Europeans agree among themselves and then send a representative to the global negotiation, I think the global negotiation has a much better chance to get somewhere.

Dilnot : If a country wants to build a nuclear plant close to its borders, its neighbours have a much better chance of stopping if they all belong to the same group. And the bigger the group, the stronger it will be in negotiation with other blocs, or major powers. To be entirely happy about this you would have to believe that the new "big bloc" always had the interests of all members in mind, but the gains from economic co-operation within expanded borders are certainly real, and may help to explain the bringing-down of borders and the formation of larger Western states. But at the same time, in areas like the Balkans, we see new borders and states being created. How does historian and author Niall Ferguson explain this?

Ferguson : One possibility is that there's a connection between democratisation in country formation and I think that's plausible because once you democratise ethnically mixed countries, one of the first things that happens is that the minorities vote for exit and so it's actually I think democratisation that drives this process. And democratisation is, it's real, it's happening. In world historical terms in some ways it's the bigger story, bigger even than globalisation. We've had globalisation before and before 1914 the world economy was almost as integrated as it is now, in some ways more so. What's really striking about early 21st century global history is that for the first time ever a majority of the world's population live in democracies. And one of the first things that people tend to do once they have the vote is to vote for some degree of ethnic separateness.

Dilnot : There's a nasty irony here. In Western Europe the global economy is driving the decline of borders, but in the East the introduction of democracy that followed the triumph of market capitalism appears to be having the opposite effect. In countries which contained groups of people who didn't feel they belonged together, it seems to have unleashed powerful and potentially very dangerous movements that are putting borders up, not pulling them down. This isn't peculiar to democracies, of course. Ethnic cleansing in the Balkans now echoes events like the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans from Czechoslovakia in 1945. In 1990, it became possible for them to return. Maruska Svasek spoke to some of those who went back.

Svasek : For instance one woman, a Sudeten German who now lives in Bavaria, she talked to me about the opening event and everybody was very optimistic and very happy that finally they no longer lived in this peripheral area. So there was this big party and people drinking beer and seeing each other and then this woman, she decided to take her bicycle and just cycle into Czech territory. The village where she came from was just ten kilometres or something from the border and as she cycled into the Czech Republic, she was first of all very happy and of course nostalgic but then suddenly it became later and later and she got really afraid because all these fears of this traumatic expulsion kind of came back. It ended well. The house where she lived before was now occupied by a man who had some American flags in his windows so she thought oh my god, thank god somebody pro-Western.

Dilnot : There's something odd about the delight at seeing American flags while searching for your lost Sudeten heritage, but it's a reminder of the need for security as well as cultural identity. The woman we just heard about didn't know where she belonged, whether she would be welcomed because of her birth or despised because of her links with both Hitler's Germany and Western economic and political power. This is a very specific example of the tension created by confusion about cultural identity. Historian, Niall Ferguson.

Ferguson : There's a strange paradox here. Certain cultural phenomena, mainly of American origin, appear to be now universal. These range from the Big Mac to Microsoft Windows and yet at the same time that the world is absorbing the McDonalds and Microsoft culture, it also seems tremendously good at creating far more narrow ethnically defined or linguistically defined nationalist cultures, tribal cultures and I think there is a perfectly legitimate historical explanation that says you need one in order to bear the other, that these things are not necessarily mutually exclusive. The world can be eating a McDonalds burger, it can be drinking Coke and at the same time chopping itself up into ever smaller cultural units and that I think is one of the phenomena that's gone unnoticed, that the fragmentation, the political fragmentation which seems to accompany globalisation may in fact be a way in which people cope with it, by retaining some distinct national identity to prevent the world dying of a ghastly boredom, generated in Hollywood or in Seattle.

Dilnot : As less and less of what we make and buy is distinctive to our own nation, perhaps we do come to care more about other ways of feeling secure - our cultural traditions, and even ethnicity. Free international trade in goods and services is more and more widespread, but the idea of allowing free international trade in workers seems to be making very little headway, as we see in Britain in the debate over asylum seekers. The economic arguments for free trade in labour are just as strong as those for goods, so what is going on? Economist John Kay has a suggestion.

Kay : The common values that unite us are undermined less if we drive German cars than if German car workers come here to manufacture these cars. So it's perhaps not surprising we're more receptive to one than we actually are to the other.

Dilnot : The co-operation that exists within the nation state that allows us to do lots of things - share values, build roads, have a health service - might be undermined by entirely opening the borders so that the community was no longer a stable one?

Kay : Yes. What is happened in the City of London would actually be a good example, where you typically maintained a structure of regulation and values which actually for a long time operated pretty well, really as a result of a social and cultural homogeneity of the people who were there. And that was actually seriously undermined by the internationalisation of the City of London that brought into it both a lot of firms, a lot of people who didn't have that same social and cultural background and the result is a whole lot of things that were simply done in the past by understandings about the ways people behaved now have to be done by explicit bureaucratic regulations that often don't work very well.

Ferguson : Why are we attached to borders? The other is scary.

Dilnot : Niall Ferguson, reminding us that the challenges posed by bringing together people from diverse backgrounds aren't enough to explain the strength of feeling opposed to anti-immigrant feeling now seen in Dover, in Austria, in parts of Germany and France. Is there something a bit more sinister as well?

Ferguson : People are scared by difference. They feel threatened by it. That is why in the last great age of globalisation before 1914, there was a serpent in the garden and the serpent was nationalism. Nobody who thinks that salvation is guaranteed by economic liberalisation can feel comfortable in the face of the history of the 20th century and the history of the 20th century is a story of economic globalisation being snuffed out by a nationalist backlash. And what lay at the core of particularly the racism that came to power in central Europe in the fall of national socialism was a fundamental fear of the other, a hostility say to Jews from Eastern Europe because they were different and one sees exactly the same thing in the way that Albanian or Hungarian migrants are treated today. There is no simple cure for this psychological reaction which seems to be a universal facet of human nature. What's problematic is that the more we democratise the world, the more that sentiment can be unleashed. In some ways it's the most potent sentiment of all in the politics of democracy, ourselves against them.

Dilnot : We may have to use the same computer software, eat the same food, watch the same TV, but that can make us even more desperate to do these things with people like ourselves. Defusing that tension is one of the aims to the whole European Union project, trying to instil a shared sense of Europeanness, and there are many, like the French economist Philippe Aghion, who believe this really can work.

Aghion : I might be idealising things but I have a feeling that the economies want to stay in Europe because they say there is a quality of life. In Europe I talk to somebody in the street, this person has education. I can talk about news with him, I can talk about politics, I can talk about the country that I visited and he will interesting questions to ask. No such things I would find in the US and that's part of my quality of life and I think this counts also in a country like the UK. I think people value that, not only GDP per capita as an index of development.

Dilnot : Well maybe there is a set of "European" values which can bring us together, although there are plenty of Europeans who might disagree. And even a federal Europe wouldn't get rid of borders, just shift them out. All the problems of actions and decisions beyond the border affecting those within, and vice versa, would still be there. To respond to that we would need to see the development of institutions that crossed borders, rather than merely pushed them outwards. What prospect does Mary Kaldor see for this?

Kaldor : I think there is a rise of global governance and the central elements are a whole set of global institutions that have been established through treaties between states to regulate various things in the world, ranging from the United Nations and security issues to the World Trade Organisation to environmental issues, and that together constitutes a form of global governance. The parallel I sometimes draw is, in the literature on economics, people now often talk about the hollow corporation. Although you still the global, the corporate headquarters and there's still a managing director, actually it's an empty shell, and the managing director, instead of ordering people around, is sort of simply trying to manage a whole set of complex partnerships and networks and I think that the same is true for prime ministers now. Your civil servant in your ministry of agriculture will be popping across to Brussels every week, he'll be engaged in all kinds of agreements and so even if he gets orders from the prime minister that he's supposed to do this or that, he may not be able to, so in a way the job of the prime minister is really managing all these complicated relationships. You can talk about if you like the hollow nation state.

Dilnot : Mary Kaldor's description certainly rings true for the Foreign Secretary or Secretary of State for Defence, and for those concerned with international human rights and law. But that leaves huge areas where so far global government has little to offer - the provision of health care, education, social security, roads, for example. Here, perhaps, the nation state isn't so hollow. But if global government won't deliver, how will these functions be fulfilled if borders are pushed back, or become more permeable? David Held.

Held : Power is not just evolving upwards. It's also devolving downwards. Parts of countries, parts of old nation states are more autonomous than ever before. Scotland, Catalonia and many other examples besides are sub-national entities that can flourish side by side with the growing centralisation of political power so we have in Europe the emergence of a multi-led form of governance that potentially offers citizens greater power and sub-national regions, and also some democratic accountability above the level of the nation state.

Dilnot : But if we still think that the central government, whatever it be, be it the nation state or be it Europe, has crucial functions in terms of redistribution, the provision of welfare states, how can we provide enough accountability, enough legitimacy to the central core of government to allow that kind of redistribution, raising of tax, spending of public money across the existing national borders?

Held : Well that's a very pressing question. There's a great danger that some of the old coalitions that bound nation states together and that were progressive in the sense of being supportive of redistributive policies, they may be fundamentally weakened in the new international order and I think that's true. There's a great danger that in a more international and mobile world, that this form of legitimacy breaks down.

Dilnot : So sub-regions will become more important, because at least there we'll feel we belong. But will we then expect poorer regions to fend for themselves on health, education and social security? Fine for Southern England or Northern Italy, but not so good for the south of Italy or the north of England. One of many things national borders have done in the past is provide a container for legitimate democratic and redistributive policies. Could we still have this with global government?

Kaldor : Global governance is a reality; the problem I think, and it's a very serious problem, is what does that then imply for democracy? How do we then influence decisions, where are decisions taken? It's not clear to me where they're taken at all. Governments still have the power within these global institutions, but by the time they get there they've gone through so many compromises and so on that it's very unclear what are the decision points.

Dilnot : So the big advantage or a big advantage of the clearly defined nation state with territorial boundaries was at least you knew who the leaders were and you felt some ownership of them and some control over them?

Kaldor : Exactly. And I think that's a lot of what's behind these, these new nationalist claims, that people feel terribly frustrated. A decision about what's going to happen to you or your local factory or your local job is taken thousands of miles away and you have no way of influencing that decision, so you say well I want to be in charge here and that's why I want my own little statelet.

Dilnot : It would be great to think that we could be true global cosmopolitans, caring for one another and willing to pool our taxes to pay for their health and education. But we're still a long way from that. Borders are second best, but they can be a way of making communities work. Getting borders of the right kind in the right place will always be a struggle. But if we're too obsessed with getting rid of them, we risk undermining the values that hold communities together. The consequences of that, from resistance to tax-funded redistribution to ethnic cleansing, range from the worrying to the terrifying.