: Why Borders as We Know Them Won’t Survive the Century to Come #WorldNEWS Our modern world now has more borderlines than ever before in human history. Not only that, but walls, barriers and fences,

Why Borders as We Know Them Won’t Survive the Century to Come #WorldNEWS
Our modern world now has more borderlines than ever before in human history. Not only that, but walls, barriers and fences, and the repressive border policies that go with them, are in clear view across the political, and consequently physical, landscape. At the end of the Cold War, just 12 border walls stood around the globe. Today that figure has risen to 74, with the majority constructed since the beginning of the 2000s. What is becoming less clear, however, is what they are actually dividing.
While bordering has existed for millennia, how borders are conceived and operated has changed considerably. Our present system is only 350 years old, product of a peace treaty—the 1648 settlement of Westphalia—drawn up after decades of European religious war. Its basic principle established the right of a monarch’s exclusive authority over religion, government, taxation, law and the military within a specific geographical area. Where previously political dominion in feudal Europe had been impossible to map spatially, borders offered clear lines of separation and control.

Out of this came the concept of sovereignty and later the emergence of the nation state and nationalism. Borders were the conduits for shared stories of culture and belonging—for those inside the lines. But, as the supremacy of religion was replaced by the new god of industrialism, they also became the means of corralling resources, of establishing colonies, wealth and empire. For a time, borders were always on the move, being drawn and redrawn and rubbed out by expansionist powers: a process that culminated, ultimately, in the devastation of two World Wars.
What we have today however (with the obvious exception of Russia’s war with Ukraine, a conflict driven by Vladimir Putin’s manic nostalgia to reclaim the borders of a long-lost motherland) is a calcification, a closing-off. Less of nation from nation, though, than of rich from poor. By the summer of 2022, the U. N. Refugee Agency (UNHCR) reported that the global number of forcibly displaced people had passed 100 million for the first time. Largely, the rise of the latest generation of border walls is aimed at controlling, funnelling, and stemming the flow of these displaced (along with many others seeking to leave the borders within which they were born). Or, rather, the walls are aimed at being seen to stem the flow.
The efficacy of border barriers—particularly given the spectacular costs of their construction—is often limited when measured in terms of preventing movement and entry. The symbolism, on the other hand, is potent. Take the U. S. -Mexico border wall. In recent years, there have been two bizarre attempts to have fragments of it designated as national monuments of special cultural significance.