Fence Me In
Globalists believe borders inhibit humanity’s progress. But they overlook the benefits of our natural inclination to build fences, both real and metaphoric. By Frank Furedi.
“When are we going to reach the border,” asked my older sister on a wet and cold November night back in 1956. The Furedi family was on the move, anxious to escape from the Stalinist regime in Hungary and cross the border to Austria. For us at that moment the border to the West appeared as a magical door to a new and wonderful future. From the perspective of history we were fortunate – as the experience of many refugees indicates, borders are often an insurmountable wall.
Europe, along with many other parts of the world, has become obsessed with borders. Debates on this question are as polarised as they are ill-informed. Some regard borders as an affront to the human condition whilst others are convinced that they constitute the foundation for their security. As these debates rage, it is worth taking a step back and asking the question: can humanity live without borders?
A contradictory experience
The human experience on this question is contradictory. Throughout history, people have drawn boundary lines. At the same time – and especially since modern times – they are continually attempting to transcend the borders established by their ancestors. Often borders are portrayed as a relic of the past. In recent decades, advocates of globalisation insisted that the movement of goods, services and people would make borders redundant. Yet although mobility has expanded, borders in their geographical, symbolic and virtual forms remain salient features of our lives.
Within Europe, and also within different national communities, borders are experienced differentially. Well-off, secure, sophisticated travellers often perceive border controls as an unnecessary annoyance. Others, who are less travelled and more community-bound, regard borders as essential for their psychological and cultural security, and the relaxation of controls on migration as antithetical to their well-being. For centuries, this tension between the fundamental human aspiration to move freely has co-existed with the fundamental human yearning for the reassurance that is founded on secure borders. Human beings have migrated – and then turned their energies towards drawing borders.
The drawing of borders is fundamentally a psychological and cultural phenomenon: indeed, it is a precondition for human cognition. People’s identity and sense of belonging and difference depends on possessing a sense of boundaries. For example, through the medium of culture individuals internalise the line between the sacred and the profane, good and evil, or adult and child. Although often these distinctions can appear arbitrary, they provide the cultural resources through which people understand their day-to-day life.
Back in 1909, the remarkable German sociologist Georg Simmel provided an eloquent reminder of the human impulse to draw borders, noting that: “Only to humanity, in contrast to nature, has the right to connect and separate been granted, and in the distinctive manner that one of these activities is always the presupposition of the other.”
Simmel’s essay, Bridge and Door, highlights the surprisingly intimate relationship between separation and connection. He wrote that “we can only sense those things to be related which we have previously somehow isolated from one another; things must first be separated from one another in order to be together”. This imperative to connect and separate transcends the domain of physical boundaries: “In the immediate as well as the symbolic sense, in the physical as well as the intellectual sense, we are at any moment those who separate the connection or connect the separate.”
Borders are not just physical and geographical realities, but also possess a powerful symbolic significance through which communities gain insights and a sense of meaning about their life. The significance that people attach to acts of separation and connection depends on the way that their ideas about social reality is internalised through their engagement with symbolic boundaries. These symbolic boundaries between the “self” and “other” often influence the meaning that people have about ‘us’ and ‘them’. Today, as in the past, attitudes about physical and spatial borders are subject to society’s cultural sensibility towards symbolic ones.
Society’s estrangement from holding the line
Contemporary society – especially its cultural and political elites - finds it difficult from to gain meaning from symbolic borders. The language used in academic literature and social commentary today frequently highlights the arbitrary and fluid character of borders, and implicitly or explicitly questions their moral status and legitimacy. Often influenced by post-modernist theories – particularly the work of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze – borders are represented as an indeterminate and artificial construction. In these writings, the so-called artificiality of the border between East and West, civilised and uncivilised, or Europe and Asia, are given as examples.
The tendency to regard borders – and indeed, other strongly drawn distinctions and boundaries – in a negative light is widespread in contemporary popular culture. Identification with the state of being post-border or beyond border is frequently represented as a positive virtue. This is not confined to Médecins Sans Frontières: engineers, musicians, chemists, veterinarians, executives, librarians, builders, plumbers, MBAs, lawyers, astronomers, creatives, journalists, rabbis, herbalists , acupuncturists and clowns are only some of the occupational organisations who flaunt their status of being without borders.
It is tempting to interpret this enthusiasm for embracing the title of being borderless as an expression of the valuation of genuine risk-taking; a pioneering longing to explore the unknown. Indeed, it would be inspiring if this represented an endorsement of the enlightened Kantian notion of cosmopolitanism and the aspiration to become a “citizen of the world”.
Unfortunately, while there are numerous contradictory impulses fuelling the cultural reaction to borders, the dominant driver is an anxiety about taking responsibility for the drawing of symbolic distinctions and clear lines. This reaction to borders runs in parallel with a wider loss of nerve about the making of moral distinctions. This, in turn, is underpinned by a reluctance to make judgments of value.
We can illustrate this problem with the example of child-rearing, where the problem of holding the line has become very stark in recent years. Parents know that children cannot be properly socialised unless they learn to draw lines, respect certain rules, and gradually acquire the habit of self-control. Testing boundaries is part of children’s development. Some aspects of a child’s defiance of parental authority can be a creative expression of their personality; others – such as running out into a busy road – are dangerous.
For a parent, knowing when to hold the line and when to overlook bad behaviour is a difficult problem to negotiate. Matters are complicated by the fact that discipline has become contested: it is often presented as an outdated idea, and even an abusive practice. Parents are nervous about disciplining their children in case they are criticised for their methods by those in authority: and, increasingly, because they fear that holding the line invites their children to reject them. Parents who fear that disciplinary measures could turn their children against them will resort to bribery or simply give in.
The problem of holding the line is connected to society’s reluctance to uphold the symbolic border that divides adults from children. As I argued in my study Paranoid Parenting (2001), western society finds it difficult to answer the question of ‘where do we draw the line between adulthood and childhood’? However, this lack of clarity about where to draw the border between childhood and adulthood does not simply pertain to the sphere of childrearing. It reflects profound confusions about the meaning of adulthood leading to a reluctance to embrace the practices associated with adult authority.
Ignoring the generational divide is perceived as a more enlightened approach to life than to take this boundary line seriously. For some time now, parents, teachers, and other adults have gone out of their way to become young people’s friends, rather than their moral guides and mentors. This changing perception of adulthood – an unconscious process of infantilisation – indicates that the classical generational boundary has lost cultural respect. This unease with generational boundaries has fostered attitudes that regard becoming adult with negative qualities. Consequently the phase of adolescence extends into the late twenties and sometimes even beyond, in order to avoid crossing the border into dark territory of adulthood.
Western society’s ambivalence towards symbolic borders is striking in relation to the maintenance of the line that divides the private from the public spheres. The symbolic site of privacy usually rests on a physical and spatial foundation, which may be a house, an apartment, or a room. Until recently, this space, which is usually captured by the metaphor of a home, has been perceived as physically and especially symbolic distinct from the public sphere. Today, however, calls to weaken the border separating the private from the public are even more explicit than the devaluation of the line that divides childhood from adulthood.
Privacy is under constant assault from a variety of sources. The periodic rhetorical affirmation of the right to privacy is continually paralleled by its practical devaluation. The main argument for rendering the boundary between private and public more porous is the claim that this border protects violent abusers from public gaze. Hostility to the private sphere is founded on an outlook that represents family and intimate life as a site of abuse, exploitation and violence.
Policymakers and moralists have been in the forefront of a clamour for more public scrutiny of private life. Cultural feminists in particular have pursued a trenchant critique of privacy. Some claim a that in the private sphere, women are rendered invisible; their work is unrecognised and therefore devalued, and their lives becomes subject to male violence. The view that the private sphere is an intensely dangerous place, particularly for women and children, has become an unquestioned truth in popular culture. Hence, intrusive policies have been introduced in order to eliminate the line that divides the private and the public.
Privacy is frequently described as a ‘cloak’ or a ‘sham’ that allows unspeakable horrors to take place in family life. This assumes that, left to their own devices and away from public view, people tend to be dominated by destructive emotions. This unflattering representation of intimate relationships promotes the idea that everyone is under threat from imminent victimisation. From this standpoint, privacy has no redeeming features at all.
Yet the separation of the public and private spheres, and the strengthening of the boundary that divides them, has been essential for the emergence of the modern individual. The aspiration for autonomy and identity cannot be entirely resolved in the public sphere. The private sphere not only provides a potential space for reflection but also for the development of personality. Intimate relationships require privacy if they are not to disintegrate under the pressure of public scrutiny. Whatever problems might exist in the private sphere, it is the pre-requisite for the exercise of moral autonomy.
Individual autonomy and self-determination are cultivated within spaces protected by a border. This border maybe physical or symbolic but what is important is that they provide an opportunity for the cultivation of an identity: individual and collective. Thus, as the private sphere is crucial for the development of the individual, sovereignty has played a vital role in the cultivation of a collective identity.
Critics of borders insist that borders are social constructions which are both artificial and arbitrary. It is difficult disagree with this point, since anyone looking at a map of the world will be struck by its arbitrary character. Many of the frontiers of Africa are drawn in straight lines, serving as testimony to the lack of imagination of the colonising power. The boundary between a child and adult is violated numerous times by youngsters who grow up faster than others. Borders between nations are continually tested by politicians, armies, internet providers, businesses, smugglers and of course by migrants. No border is beyond question.
However borders are not simply artificial social constructions. They are, as Simmel noted, the physical or symbolic expressions of a social need. Not everyone can be expected to like a specific border, but this medium of division and separation expresses needs and aspirations rooted within society. As Simmel observed: ‘not the state, not the pieces of property, not the city district, and not the county district limit one another, but rather the inhabitants or owners exercise reciprocal impact’. It is through reciprocal human interaction that borders gain significance. Whether they become impenetrable walls or open doors is determined by values, concerns and attitudes that prevail in society.
In defence of borders
However one views borders, it is important to acknowledge that humanity has always been in the business of drawing lines. Symbolic borders have expressed values that allows people to establish a sense of moral equilibrium necessary for leading their lives. The human imagination often stimulates us to soar above borders to experience the unknown. But this very flight of our imagination has as its precondition a sense of limits – of boundaries that must be overcome. When the Furedi family crossed the Hungarian border into Austria in November 1956, we were in no doubt that the world needed to hold the line that separated two very different ways of life.
But boundaries are necessary for the flourishing of humanity. Simply to reject them on account of their arbitrary character represents an act of evasion. That is why western’s society’s estrangement from borders expresses its crisis of nerve about holding the line. Western society needs to re-learn how to affirm the value of making distinctions, and to overcome its reluctance to make judgments of value. In this context it is essential to reject the idea that borders between nations are simply an artificial prop that merely serves the unworthy project of keeping people out.
Borders are essential for the maintenance of national sovereignty – so far, the only foundation that humanity has discovered for the institutionalisation of democratic accountability. Without borders a citizen becomes a subject to a power that cannot be held to account.
That the idea of sovereignty has suffered the same fate as autonomy or privacy is not surprising. These are all interlinked enlightenment values that presuppose the capacity to make judgment of value about the conduct of the human condition. The reluctance to take borders seriously represents the rejection of modernity’s fundamental value of sovereignty, autonomy and the separation of the private and the public.
The current debate on migration and what, if anything, European borders should mean is not simply an outcome of the crisis inflicted on the people of Syria, Libya or Afghanistan. It is founded upon a pre-existing mood of confusion about the meaning of a nation in the context of EU. That western European borders have lost meaning for many people is linked to their disenchantment about what it means to be German, or Dutch or British. Other Europeans – who feel culturally insecure – regard their border very differently; as essential to their existential security.
The desire to transcend the limitations of all borders is in many circumstances a daring and worthy impulse. However, in the current historical context there is nothing courageous about not taking borders seriously. Those who believe that people who desperately cling on to borders, and fear the threat of their dissolution inhabit the moral low ground, should engage more sensitively with these existential concerns.
The current debate on the borders of Europe is driven by two contradictory – but very human – passions. The human aspiration for freedom of mobility clashes with people’s existential need for security. Neither one of these sentiments can be ignored; and this is why Europe has some very difficult choices to make.