Can we—should we—do without borders? Interview with Astrid Von Busekist

Astrid von Busekist holds a full professorship at CERI, and is co-author, with Dominique Bourg and Michel Foucher, of Frontières, une illusion ? Méditations sur le risque (Philosophie Magazine éditeur). Here she answers our questions on this burning and often controversial issue.

Borders are clearly a successful concept, given the world has seen more than 27000 km of them created since 1990 (mostly in Europe and in Asia), but how would you define a border?

It is not easy to give just one definition. As I show in the book, borders are not only political or geographical, they unfold in a range of social situations and are continually shifting. A migrant who crosses a state border still has a number of obstacles to overcome.
Borders are not merely lines on a map, even though maps help us to understand them in metaphorical terms. They separate geographical territories, but also social and psychological spaces. They separate high from low, “us” from “them”, inside from outside, sacred from profane, left from right.
Such divisions are everywhere but in the form of borders between states they are consistent, and heavy with signification, due to their political, social, symbolic, and epistemological nature. Joseph Carens sums this up neatly when he writes, “borders have guards, and guards have guns.”

How can we reconcile border protection with the democratic principles of openness and equality, without succumbing to protectionist nationalism or naive cosmopolitanism?

That is indeed the question. Borders must be fairly managed, given that they exist, have existed before, and are not likely to be abolished any time soon. This is not an alternative between open or closed borders, but a need for a pragmatic management of the borders that exist. We need just borders, that are respectful of the right balance between reasonable openness and permeable closure. This is a very difficult position to sustain. Borders serve to protect legal spaces where citizens can defend their rights (which is what Arendt meant when she spoke of the “right to have rights”, but they must also be sufficiently open to allow the movement of goods, ideas, and of course people.

How would you define the philosophical and political foundations of your pragmatic position, and what would be the limits of such an approach?

That is a difficult question both from a practical and a theoretical perspective. In the literature around the boundary problem, ideas are often caught up in a zero-sum game where some argue that borders are neither useful, nor justifiable from a democratic perspective, while others argue for the need to maintain them. The latter are not hostile to democracy, and they are not necessarily nasty nationalists, but they are concerned with the moral, political and economic burden imposed on ordinary citizens when they are asked to welcome migrants.
The pragmatic position supposes taking into account the interests of all, citizens and migrants alike, for both instrumental (protection of rights) and intrinsic (cultivation of mutual respect and equality) reasons.
The real question is how belonging is organised at different levels. Some have an interest in preserving the specificity of their territories, others in gaining access to democratic spaces and helping them thrive. We all have an interest in cultivating our autonomy as citizens, which often entails autonomy of jurisdictional territories.

Borders as commodities do not align with republican or egalitarian conceptions of citizenship. Does this commodification of access to citizenship reflect a weakening of states as providers of the common good?

You are referring to the global sale of passports. This is a concerning development that is occurring in a good third of UN member states. The dissociation between nationality and traditional civic duties shifts the sense of citizenship, belonging, and political obligations. It is also unfair, because only the richest can pay for a new passport and their entrance ticket into democratic welfare states. The quest for democratic protections is often also a quest for the protection of material goods but it does not imply any meaningful civic commitment in the host societies.

To what extent can the Kantian conception of cosmopolitanism be reconciled with the preservation of territorial borders and what limitations would that impose on state sovereignty?

Reconciliation is unnecessary because Kant never advocated the abolition of borders in his essay on Perpetual Peace (1795). He initially pleaded for an alliance of republics where any threat to freedom in one place had repercussions everywhere, subsequently for a right to visit and a duty of hospitality, and finally for the publicity of practices (today we would say political and legal transparency). Kant argues for a transversal principle that would unite citizens around the experience of freedom. Jürgen Habermas was inspired by Perpetual Peacewhen he devised the notion of “constitutional patriotism”, which is not meant to abandon specific national cultures but rather to advocate a primary commitment to legal principles and public ethics.

Is the principle of cosmopolitanism, according to which every individual affected by a law should have the right to participate in the drafting of that law, achievable in the context of international governance?

No, it is not, although it is good idea for two reasons. Establishing democratic authorship (where all those affected by a law should also be lawmakers, which in principle, as it stands, excludes non-citizens) would create a situation where each decision would have to be justified or accounted for by a different group of citizens; but this would lead to the creation of different constituencies for each new bill, or alternatively would require a global demos. We are all affected by the election of Donald Trump, for example, but we did not all participate in his election. In the absence of a global demos,or a global civil society, these changing constituencieswould result in global instability on the one hand, and would lead to fundamental lack of bounded political legitimacy, on the other.

Political and social rights are national, but the issues we are facing are increasingly transnational—global warming for example. Can we do without borders? Can we imagine a democracy without territory and thus without borders?

Environmental issues are clearly not limited by borders. Remember Chernobyl, think of the COPs today. Global politics are emerging but for the moment environmental policies and international negotiations are conducted by sovereign states, and therefore also guided by power relations, Trump is again a good example here. Or think of the organisation of international football competitions in a country where temperatures are over 50 degrees. This is utterly unreasonable, but global markets and private investors seem to have the last word over protecting the planet.

Interview conducted by Corinne Deloy, CERI.

Cover photo: The wall between Mexico and the United States. Credit: Kamran Ali pour Shutterstock.
Photo 1: Paraisópolis, a favela in São Paulo surrounded by the wealthy neighbourhood of Morumbi where the palace of the state governor is, 2007. Credit: Tuca Vieira.
Photo 2: Book cover Frontières, une illusion ? Méditations sur le risque (Philosophie Magazine).
Photo 3: September 2023, Heathrow airport in London, travellers pass through the automatic doors at passport control. Credit: 1000 Words for Shutterstock.