Borderless Worlds for Whom?

Ethics, Moralities and Mobilities

Anssi Paasi, Eeva-Kaisa Prokkola, Jarkko Saarinen, Kaj Zimmerbauer, Anssi Paasi, Eeva-Kaisa Prokkola, Jarkko Saarinen, Kaj Zimmerbauer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780815360025
• eBook ISBN: 9780429765100
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

The optimism heralded by the end of the Cold War and the idea of an emerging borderless world was soon shadowed by conflicts, wars, terrorism, and new border walls. Migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees have simultaneously become key political figures. Border and mobility studies are now two sides of the same coin.

The chapters of this volume reflect the changing relations between borders, bordering practices, and mobilities. They provide both theoretical insights and contextual knowledge on how borders, bordering practices, and ethical issues come together in mobilities. The chapters scrutinize how bounded (territorial) and open/networked (relational) spaces manifest in various contexts. The first section, 'Borders in a borderless world', raises theoretical questions. The second, 'Politics of inclusion and exclusion', looks at bordering practices in the context of migration. The third section, 'Contested mobilities and encounters', focuses on tourism, which has been an 'accepted' form of mobility but which has recently become an object of critique because of overtourism. Section four, 'Borders, security, politics', examines bordering practices and security in the EU and beyond, highlighting how the migration/border politics nexus has become a national and supra-national political challenge.

The chapters of this interdisciplinary volume contribute both conceptually and empirically to understanding contemporary bordering practices and mobilities. It is essential reading for geographers, political scientists, sociologists, and international relations scholars interested in the contemporary meanings of borders and mobilities.

1 Introduction

Borders, ethics, and mobilities

Anssi Paasi, Eeva-Kaisa Prokkola, Jarkko Saarinen, and Kaj Zimmerbauer

Introduction

‘Borderless world’, a catch phrase promoted by Ohmae (1989; 1990; 1995), became highly attractive in border studies in the 1990s. Borders and political cartographies that ‘trapped’ nation-states were, for Ohmae, elements that hindered progress, economic growth, and cooperation in the globalizing market. Even though this idea resonated, especially with the global business economy, Ohmae also saw the borderless world – a geography without borders – as a geopolitical ideal and a valuable model for post-Cold War era politicians and military leaders. He suggested that open cartographies and the ‘opening’ of nation-states would benefit both the global economy and markets. Such cartographies would challenge the dominant state-centric political territories that governments routinely mobilize to control citizens.

Supported by Castells’ (1996) ideas of network society, Ohmae’s slogan took on a life of its own after his manifesto. Currently, the idea of a borderless world is associated with many kinds of social issues and contexts (Paasi, 2019). For some, the idea represents the worst kind of idealism or naïve cosmopolitanism. However, for a number of scholars and activists the notion of ‘open borders’ or ‘no borders’ is increasingly significant, and they push the goals of freedom of movement and a borderless world much further than Ohmae suggested. Radical researchers fervently argue and struggle for a freedom of movement on political as well as economic grounds, but they also emphasize the importance of human rights, morals and ethics.

The title of this collection and introduction poses a critical question: for whom – beyond economic flows – is or can the world be borderless? Although challenging to answer in practice, this question is justified since it forces us to confront how borders and territorial spaces are organized to control mobilities – how they have become historically materialized and achieved specific meanings, and how bounded spaces transform over possibly discernible time-horizons.

Border studies has been a well-established research field for a long time, but a simultaneous expansion and a sort of fragmentation of this research area has occurred since the 1990s (Newman and Paasi, 1998; Johnson et al., 2011; Wastl-Walter, 2011; Burridge et al., 2017; Novak, 2019). It has become clear during the last two decades or so that the significance of borders is, to a greater extent than before, rooted in the relations between borders, bordering practices, and mobilities. Such relations are multifaceted and in constant flux. Borders are not merely lines that divide state spaces from each other. Instead, they are increasingly complex technical and ideological processes and institutions that states mobilize to control all kind of flows, not least of all mobile people. Mobile people, for their part, are extremely heterogeneous; they can be explorers, tourists, international students, highly educated specialists, guest workers, forced labour, regular and irregular migrants, asylum seekers searching for refuge, heads of states and governments, spies and diplomats, soldiers, professional athletes, traders, terrorists, and so on (Bulley, 2017, p. 3). Furthermore, their statuses are often differentiated by nationality, gender, ethnicity, race, religion, linguistic capacities, and others.

As Bulley (2017) shows, the questions of hospitability/hostility and hosts/guests touch upon many kinds of mobile human beings that can have various kinds of subjectivities, roles, and identities, even simultaneously. Whereas business people, elite travellers, and prosperous tourists, for example, cross relatively soft borders regularly without difficulties, migrants and particularly asylum seekers often face the hard side of borders and bordering practices. Instead of hospitality, they frequently face hostility, prejudice, racism, and xenophobia, phenomena that seem to be the order of the day in many states around the world. Suspiciousness towards mobile people has reached a new level in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the US and the later strikes in Europe. As a result, regressive, nationalistically toned political cartographies have emerged in the US, and in many European Union member states, such as Poland and Hungary, governing nationalistic parties have pushed for stricter migration control. In addition, in the United Kingdom nationalistic voices and purported needs to restrict and control human mobilities have characterized the Brexit process.

Tensions between various forms of mobilities and their relations to borders are the key focus in this edited book. In a situation where every year thousands of asylum seekers and migrants drown in the Mediterranean and Pacific or die trying to cross hot, dry deserts, we are forced to reconsider borders and their relations to social and ethical practices and social justice. Ethical issues also emerge from technological developments. The deployment of big data and the introduction of new border surveillance technologies, through which even the biological features and affective expressions of mobile individuals become objects of suspicion, poses fundamental ethical questions regarding human rights, privacy and identity, and the development of future societies in general (Adey, 2009; Amoore and Hall, 2009; Longo, 2018).

We argue in this book that while borders and human mobilities are among the most significant research themes across social sciences, the debate on the ethical issues has not been as central in border research as it ought to be. One interesting exception is the book edited by philosopher Allen Buchanan and political scientist Margaret Moore (2003) in which the authors look at seven ethical traditions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam, natural law, Confucianism, liberalism, and international law) in the making and unmaking of state and national boundaries. The conclusion of the book is that since ethical theories are by their very nature universal, they tend to be rather suspicious of borders. Especially liberalism’s emphasis on equal freedom seems to apply to everyone, not merely the citizens of liberal democracies. Geographers Diener and Hagen (2009) note briefly the significance of ethics in their critique of the borderless world thesis. More recently, Espejo (2018) has addressed the moral significance of territorial borders and suggests that the prevailing view among liberal thinkers is that from a moral perspective borders are arbitrary and that borders matter because they differentiate politics on the basis of territorial jurisdictions. Hence state borders are morally relevant and are important because ‘they demarcate places juridically, and because they sustain place-specific rights and duties’ (p. 73). She also makes a useful distinction between the boundaries of belonging and territorial borders. The former mark identitarian memberships, the latter the territorial bounds of legal jurisdictions – a divide that resonates with the current division between migration and border research.

Migration scholars have paid considerable attention to ethical questions and these are becoming ever more significant alongside increasing levels of migration (see for example, Hayter, 2000; Pevnick, 2011; Wellman and Cole, 2011; Carens, 2013; Sager, 2016; Bulley, 2017). The growing numbers of migrants echoe complex social and environmental problems, wars and conflicts, natural disasters (droughts, floods), famines, daily amenities, and livelihoods, and also reflect a search for better possibilities in life in the face of often miserable conditions. One additional background factor is population growth, which in many states, especially when combined with conflicts, environmental change, and lack of food, pushes people to migrate across dangerous routes. The lottery of birth seems to determine very profoundly the future life possibilities of human beings. Migration scholars of course also discuss borders, but this rarely seems to be a key theoretical concern or motivation (see the summary by Burridge et al., 2017). For them, borders are usually seen as obstacles embedded in social practices that protect privileges and as instruments that maintain the status quo. Compared to border research, however, migration studies tend to recognize the gendered and intersectional nature of lived mobilities, and how border crossing is an effort that is often dangerous for women and children, for example (Andrijasevic, 2010; Choi, 2011).

Borders persevere

Thus in spite of the increased mobilities of the globalized world economy, borders are not disappearing and we are still far away from a borderless world. Obviously, borders do fluctuate and transform, at times hardening, at times softening. Currently, border dynamics are in many cases moving towards a hardening of borders, reflecting the unsecure and unstable global geopolitical and geo-economic situation and increasing distrust between key political leaders. It seems we are witnessing the return of power politics and a strengthening of the ‘spheres of interest’ thinking in international politics. Although many economic regulations have been removed to boost ‘free’ trade, simultaneously more than a few borders have gained more significance and there has been an unforeseen global tendency to build physical walls on borders between states, often to prevent human mobility (Jones, 2016). Very recently efforts to curtail free trade have also emerged (Nicol and Everett, 2019). Current geopolitical tensions between the EU and Russia, for instance, have again raised borders between the ‘East’ and ‘West’. A good example of this is Barents cooperation in northernmost Europe, where some advocates are concerned that the cooperation might founder or come to an end because of the new, tense political situation (Zimmerbauer, 2018). Yet, while cultural and economic cooperation has in many ways stagnated, post-9/11 security thinking has intensified cooperation in the field of border security, where states are increasingly cooperating with non-national and non-sovereign actors. This has complicated our understanding of borders and bordering, and of where border enforcement actually takes place in space and time, and by whom (Longo, 2018).

Likewise, the borders between Europe and the African continent as well as between the US and Mexico have gained massive attention, not so much as ‘borders’ but as immense fluctuating systems of control and ‘bordering’. The former has become a fuzzy, mobile border that is a graveyard for thousands of immigrants attempting Europe for various reasons related to security, environment, and/or economy. Even nature itself has been put to work in the Mediterranean to create a deterrence and to stop migrants (Schindel, 2019), with the effect that such arrangements blur the boundaries of responsibility in the case of border-related deaths. Efforts to move this border far away from the concrete European state borders and to outsource bordering have been styled as ‘humanitarian borders’ (see Pascucci et al., 2019) in the guise of ‘humanitarian bordering’. Also, the US government has mobilized new ideological dividing lines, most recently manifested in President Trump’s plans to build a concrete wall between the US and Mexico. The wall debate is ideological in the sense that much of this border is already walled and because the wall is used to provoke images of threat, terrorism, crime, and illegality (Nicol and Everett, 2019). The construction of walls is also an example of the fusion of geopolitics and geoeconomics in which populist politics and nationalism are effectively mobilized. Fitting examples of such reterritorialized propensities are Trump’s straightforwardly nationalist Twitter claims: ‘we need a strong border’…‘we have no country if we have no border’. As noted above, such anti-migration tendencies are also evident in various European states (such as Hungary, Poland, France, the Netherlands, and the UK), showing that the state-centric world map continues to provide an ideologically dominating, ‘ethically relevant’ moral geography, a map that should be replaced by a more equitable map that incorporates an ethic of respect for difference (Shapiro, 1994).

Migration scholars argue that borders actually produce migrants, yet simultaneously acknowledge that researchers need to be aware of ethical dilemmas and of their own positioning. De Genova puts this plainly:

If there were no borders, there would be no migrants – only mobility. Another way of saying the same would be that the elemental and elementary freedom of movement of the human species necessarily posits a relation between the species and the space of the planet, as a whole. From this standpoint, territorially-defined ‘national’ states and their borders remain enduringly and irreducibly problematic.

(De Genova, 2013, p. 253)

A historical perspective shows that the bordering of different groups of people is not only a modern phenomenon. Borders in politics are both persistent and dynamic, as an analysis of the borders in ancient Greek cities and the Roman Empire for example displays (Longo, 2018). The analysis of the ‘no borders’ alternative, which is often presented as a more ethical approach, needs to be broadened from the modern state system to other political units and needs to question what potential there is for political life without bordering effects in general. Open borders without an international system of political protection and management is not necessarily a sustainable scenario (Bauder, 2019). Accordingly, what if it is not borders per se that are the main problem but the shifting neoliberal states that appear no longer to protect their own citizens (Longo, 2018, p. 197)? Ultimately, the neoliberal open borders economic policy has benefited only the global elite, whereas the number of people who face expulsion from their professional livelihoods and from the very biospheres that sustain their lives is continuously increasing (Sassen, 2014).

The earlier optimism associated with the ‘borderless world’ thesis has thus faded for several reasons. Firstly, instead of seeing borders merely as lines dividing (state) spaces, more nuanced views now prevail in academic debates, regarding what borders actually are and what they do at and across various spatial scales in their capacity to permit some and (selectively) restrict other forms of mobility, sustain national(ist) landscapes and mobilize powerful memories. Secondly, many border scholars suggest that the contextual and geohistorical features of specific borders force scholars to approach borders in more sensitive and multifaceted ways (Paasi, 1996; O’Dowd, 2010; Megoran, 2017). Thirdly, contrary to the seamless borderless world ideal, humans live on an increasingly unevenly structured planet where borders are important, and where critical elements of biopolitical control are carried out by states, which leads to ever more discriminating regulation and control of migrants and refugees. Graham aptly reminds that

… states are becoming internationally organised systems geared towards trying to separate people in circulations deemed risky or malign from those deemed risk-free or worthy of protection. This process increasingly occurs both inside and outside territorial boundaries between states, resulting in blurring between international borders and urban/local borders.

(Graham, 2010, p. 89)

Previous tendencies have provided fuel for the open and no borders movements, which are continuously struggling with the idea of a borderless world.

The multiplicity of mobilities and of ethical dilemmas: the question of hospitability

Scholars in the fields of geography, international relations, and anthropology, for example, have challenged state-centrism and methodological nationalism, as well as the ‘self-evidence’ of national states. Similarly, in the context of ethics, Bulley (2017, p. 3) argues that to approach the politics and possibilities of international ethics we must look beyond the ‘statist imaginary’. Yet, he notes, state-based international ethics continues to be important in responding, through humanitarian interventions, to major catastrophes such as genocides, ethnic cleansing, atrocities, and natural disasters. States as institutions are therefore critical in such interventions. Bulley also contends (p. 4) that the practices of hospitability involve not only the construction of ethical subjects (hosts and guests) and their relations (identity/difference, welcome/refusal, safety/threat), but also the production of spaces, a point made also in the context of tourist strategies that generate cities, hotels, cafes, and leisure zones as more or less welcoming. Hospitability for Bulley is the means by which particular spaces are brought into being as ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Preface
• 1. Introduction Borders, ethics, and mobilities
• Part I: Borders in a borderless world
• Part II: Politics of inclusion and exclusion
• Part III: Contested mobilities and encounters
• Index