The Enduring Power of Borders

They divide and unite. They isolate and protect. They are the source of civilization… and wars.And today they are more disputed than ever. Here’s why.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine. the Gaza war. Brexit. The expansion of NATO.The Venezuelan referendum on the annexation of Essequibo, territory of Guyana. There is one common element that connects all of these disparate situations (and the list could go on): they are all border issues. Ironically,the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 was celebrated as the end of all borders…But it was not like that. On the contrary,geographers calculate that for every kilometer of Berlin Wall that fell,172 km of new borders were erected in Europe alone.the reason was the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which unleashed the nationalism of the satellite states (latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Chechnya…).

It is indeed enough to remember that the word “Ukraine” comes from krajina, “border”, as it was the southwestern periphery of the Russian Empire. Today, borders are questioned everywhere. Transatlantic and trans-pacific trade agreements, created to reduce customs barriers and promote trade, are blocked, while tariffs between China, Europe and the United States rise. The main international institutions (UN, WHO) are in crisis, and many countries are recovering sovereignty and protectionism. Why is this happening? Where will it take us? To answer, we must go back to the origin of borders.

IDENTITIES AND TENSIONS

According to legend, the long history of the Roman Empire began with Romulus, who made a furrow in the earth with a plow: the first boundary of Rome, on top of which a defensive wall was erected. Though, the borders are much older. They emerged about ten thousand years ago, when communities were stabilized thanks to agriculture and livestock in the Fertile Crescent: the valleys of the Tigris, the Euphrates and the Nile.

Towards the fourth millennium BC, the Sumerian city-states emerged and, as Manlio Graziano of Sciences Po recalls, “with them arose the need to define the political space between one city and another and to control the surrounding lands, vital for survival.” This is how natural borders and defensive walls were born. According to Yuval Noah Harari, borders allowed sedentary communities to create shared values, laws, religion and currency, without which large societies could not