A borderless planet?

September 16, 2005 3:33 PM

Delete the Border Pictures and links about worldwide action taken against border controls.
posted by BuddhaInABucket (24 comments total)

I don't even know where to start with this.
posted by keswick at 3:36 PM on September 16, 2005

In other news:
Imagine there's no countries,
It isnt hard to do,
Nothing to kill or die for,
No religion too,
Imagine all the people
living life in peace...

Imagine no possesions

etc.

(beats dead horse)
posted by lalochezia at 3:41 PM on September 16, 2005

I'm not so sure getting rid of borders is a good idea. It would put mapmakers out of work, for one.

And Stripes would have been alot less funny without the border crossing scenes.

Eh, I'm going to go and sit with keswick and scratch my head.
posted by fenriq at 3:50 PM on September 16, 2005

Do they discuss why they don't like borders anywhere? I couldn't see it.
posted by loquax at 3:51 PM on September 16, 2005

loquax writes "Do they discuss why they don't like borders anywhere?"

They're anarchists. They believe that states are inherently authoritarian and coercive; that sovereign political authority begins and ends with each individual. Borders are anathema to this philosophy.
posted by mr_roboto at 4:04 PM on September 16, 2005

try No Border.org.
posted by Acey at 4:04 PM on September 16, 2005

They're anarchists. They believe that states are inherently authoritarian and coercive; that sovereign political authority begins and ends with each individual.

Kinda hard to argue with.
posted by iamck at 4:08 PM on September 16, 2005

So they wish to exist in Hobbe's State of Warre?
In this situation where there is no common authority to resolve these many and serious disputes, we can easily imagine with Hobbes that the state of nature would become a “state of war”, even worse, a war of “all against all”.

How would that be any improvement?
posted by fenriq at 4:13 PM on September 16, 2005

Well, they would disagree with Hobbes on that point. Some anarchists, for instance, might argue that the state of nature is collectivism or mutual cooperation, as seen in (some) early human societies. Others might argue that without a state, the (absolutely) free market becomes the ultimate arbiter of human interactions. Whatever tact they take, they would certainly insist that the State, rather than preventing wars, has only served to makes wars more frequent and more bloody.
posted by mr_roboto at 4:24 PM on September 16, 2005

tact=tack
posted by mr_roboto at 4:26 PM on September 16, 2005

I like Borders...I prefer them to Barnes and Noble.
posted by Postroad at 4:28 PM on September 16, 2005

Amazon.com all the way!

Also, mapmakers will still have plenty of work.
posted by delmoi at 4:41 PM on September 16, 2005

Good fences make good neighbors.

This takes me back to the 80's when punker guys used to brag about "beaner bashing" along the border and in the river bottoms that were travel routes for migrants.

I'm all for the Utopian Dream, but for now borders are here for a reason.
posted by snsranch at 8:54 PM on September 16, 2005

I dunno. Seems to me the analogue to free trade is free borders. Id capital can move, labor ought to be able to, too. But I'm a weirdo & didn't RTFA.
posted by dame at 9:22 PM on September 16, 2005

I.. uh.. hmm.
posted by TwelveTwo at 9:56 PM on September 16, 2005

Borders are disappearing in Europe. Once you're in the EU, generally you can go anywhere with almost no bother.
posted by pracowity at 9:56 PM on September 16, 2005

This reminds me of a guy who used to write letters to corporations pretending to be an idiot. He wrote to Rand McNally asking why he could never actually find the borders when he looked for them.
posted by srboisvert at 4:20 AM on September 17, 2005

I'm sympathetic, but ...

I believe in population control, even China style. I dislike nations, but I dislike world government more. "Natural selection" of nations is extremely slow (as is species slection), but there can be no "natural selection" under a world government, and hence not reliable improvment. Together population control and no world government clearly imply a need for strong borders.

What we need is less U.S. & E.U. screwing around with the internal politics of less developed nations; including less humanitarian aid. Such peoples are more then capable of helping themselves, they should "steal" all our (medial) IP, as we did to Britian's copyrights, violate all our other monopolies (including possibly nationalizing industries like Venusala did with oil), and just develop themsevles. The west got there for itself, but it does not know best.
posted by jeffburdges at 7:34 AM on September 17, 2005

Anarchy is a great system of government which should all consider. Anarchy has worked so well in such places as... umm... such places as... well there that one place where uhh... no, didn't go so well there.... hmmm... where has anarchy ever worked well? Hmm... oh I know: Atlantis!
posted by StarForce5 at 9:14 AM on September 17, 2005

Borders are very useful, especially in creating an underpaid underclass with little or no rights to do the work that nationals won't do or would charge reasonable wages to execute, e.g.: Mexicans in the US, Palestinians in Israel, Peruvians in Chile. It's important to shoot some of them once in a while so the rest don't get uppity. The system is working so well, why fuck with it? Where's Trevor Goodchild when you really need him?
posted by signal at 9:47 AM on September 17, 2005

Anyone would be able to move anywhere else (for the most part) without borders if the receiving society could be assured that they would be good little taxpayers from the get go. That's why Europe has essentially dropped their borders internally, but retain them with the rest of the world. France doesn't care if a German wants to come live in France, all the better, more tax revenue. They do care if an Eritrean wants to come by, however, as the odds of the Eritrean being able to contribute to French society instantly are far lower. Hence quotas and immigration point systems. Borders have comparatively little to do with "human rights", racism or even cheap foreign labour, and everything to do with internal taxation and the relative cost/benefit of allowing a particular new member into your society.
posted by loquax at 10:48 AM on September 17, 2005

In other words, the rich don't want the poor in their neighborhoods, sucking up valuable resources that could be applied to buying pleasure boats and summer houses, and using it for their health care and education instead. Plus, there's crime, and disease, and all the other concerns that led the Gretna, La. sheriff's department to prevent a column of hundreds of starving, desperate people from fleeing New Orleans and entering their parish, saying, "We are not turning the West Bank into another Superdome." Gretna's mostly white, and the starving, desperate people were mostly black, but of course, race has nothing to do with it.

Do people have the right to travel? Should we be free to live where we wish? Or should governments have the right to tell us where we can and cannot live? Immigration restrictions, especially quotas, are just another way to artificially maintain a global system of privilege for the few and misery for the many. The best solution is to raise the standard of living for everyone in the world, but as long as the rich can live in gated communities while the poor are relegated to the surrounding slums, only allowed in if they are lucky and have the proper papers, the strong can afford to ignore the problems of the world (while continuing to profit from them).
posted by skoosh at 1:52 PM on September 17, 2005

StarForce5, a few hundred years ago you could have made the same argument about modern democracy. See "Past and present anarchist communities" on Wikipedia. There aren't any recent, long-lived (10+ years) examples of large (nation-sized) anarchist societies, but it does not follow that anarchism therefore does not and cannot work in practice.
posted by bpt at 5:20 PM on September 17, 2005

Hmmm. Is the problem, as these folks see it, more to do with states or borders?

I would say that borders are a necessary consequence of states. If you don't like the existence of states, well, fine, go protest those, but it seems as if the focus on borders is misapplied.
posted by Vidiot at 10:03 AM on September 18, 2005