Borders are the core concept of our political discussion. But the cult of drawing borders fails to recognize that something is always lost in the process.
Perhaps the most emotionally and politically charged term of our time is “border”. Borders preoccupy us. We look at our various external borders. We ask ourselves whether they “hold”. We think about establishing new borders or reactivating those that have become obsolete.
But drawing a border doesn’t achieve much – especially not the end of mobility. On the contrary: a border always brings with it a new mobility regime. Borders channel mobility, but they also create it.
The ultimate inclusion and exclusion, the (perhaps even militarily monitored) border fence, is only one possible regime for border management. Differently pronounced porosities would be others. These would certainly be more interesting, especially in times of global flows, as Scott Lash and John Urry analyzed years ago.
Every border ultimately contains its own forms of mobility. These are condensed at a border and at the same time reveal themselves there, so to speak. The architect Teddy Cruz demonstrates this using perhaps the most blatant border in the world, the one between the USA and Mexico. Cruz himself works in the border region between Tijuana and San Diego. With his projects on the (sic!) border between architecture and art, he repeatedly questions the absoluteness of this spatial border. He reveals that various crossings naturally take place there – sanctioned by the state to varying degrees. “Legal, illegal, sh…whatever”, as the cultural border-crossers of the 1970s proclaimed.
In Germany, we are also currently discussing the borders. Ours. The classic national ones. Peter Sloterdijk, a philosopher who has actually always inspired me and whose “Weltinnenraum des Kapitals” is actually a fantastic paean to border-crossers (the great sea explorers), is suddenly propagating the cultural significance of national borders in a strange neoconservative transformation.
I just wonder why. The way Sloterdijk understands borders, they are really just defense mechanisms of a frightened society. People duck behind the fence and hope that nothing spills over. Ulf Poschardt has rightly criticized Sloterdijk for this as anti-liberal. The Angela Merkel doctrine only sees borders as an incentive to transgress them, criticizes Sloterdijk. I think he is even right about this finding – but it is not to be criticized. In fact, borders are always the first step towards crossing them. Here, societies act no differently than kids who curiously and cheekily climb over the fences of their schoolyards. The moment of crossing borders offers a liberating and socially productive moment. Something new is created. This is precisely the appeal of a liberal, open society. Precisely because life becomes more complicated once a border has become porous.
The clearly demarcated world is a less complex one. That is what the insecure and permanently nervous masses find so attractive about the various symbolic and real new border fences of our time. However, “attractive” as a term with aesthetic connotations is perhaps more wrong than almost any other. After all, it is remarkable how ugly the borders of this world always are. The unsurpassed example to this day is, of course, the Berlin Wall. Not only was it itself of rarely surpassed ugliness, it also brutally deconstructed the entire history of urban planning and spatial development of a metropolis. The ugliness of the border is the repressed bad conscience of the border guards. They actually know that they are acting out of an unsovereign negative impulse. They express this knowledge in an unconscious act of self-punishment through the ugliest possible border installations.
I am not saying that crossing borders leads to a problem-free world full of happy nice people (as a counterpart to the “do-gooders” who have just been condemned). We have just seen at Cologne Central Station that this is not the case. I also don’t believe that the individual border crosser is a great world thinker or necessarily carries a positive political agenda. Of course, not all refugees are nice or even democratically minded. And of course the anti-Semitism imported with the migration from Syria or Iraq is a major problem. I just believe that it is a sign of an adult society to deal with the complexity of the political situation of our time in a different way than by closing borders. And that if you really can’t think of anything other than “close the door”, you should at least always bear in mind that this is always the least original way of dealing with a social problem.
