Abstract
Although I have talked about the notion of soft borders as an ideal, the fact is that borders are fluid, porous, and regularly renegotiated in practice. Not only are they constructed and reconstructed in historical imaginations and through warfare and diplomacy, but they are also regularly traversed, reconfigured, and deployed as part of the everyday economic, social, and cultural activity of individuals and groups throughout the world.1 Cross-border activity and (re)negotiation of borders take place both formally and informally through governmental and nongovernmental organizations, the transactions of local farmers and transnational corporations, and the shadow networks of traffickers at all levels of trade. Theoretically, we lag behind this practice, not wanting to let go of comforting configurations of power defined by state sovereignty and hard borders. There are many reasons for this, some of which have been discussed in this work in terms of ethnocracy and similar efforts to maintain skewed relationships of power. Others are more complex in that they tie the organization of the bounded nation-state to ideas of social solidarity and democratic rule of law.
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Notes
See, for example, Urvashi Butalia, “The Nowhere People,” in Tales of Nowhere People, ed. Arindam K. Sen (Kolkata: Center for Development Activists, 2001), 113–122; Willem van Schendel, “Stateless in South Asia: The Making of the India-Bangladesh Enclaves,” Journal of Asian Studies 61, no. 1 (February 2002): 115–147. “Border spaces may …be ideal research sites for the examination of some of the everyday ‘transversal struggles’ of globalised life.” Carl Grundy-Warr and Clive Schofield, “Reflections on the Relevance of Classic Approaches and Contemporary Priorities in Boundary Studies,” Geopolitics 10, no. 4 (2005): 653.
For different approaches to the notion of affected interests, see Ian Shapiro, Democratic Justice (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999; Robert E. Goodin, “Enfranchising All Affected Interests, and Its Alternatives,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 35, no. 1 (2007): 40–68; Rainer Baubock, “Expansive Citizenship—Voting beyond Territory and Membership,” PS: Political Science & Politics 38, no. 4 (October 2005): 683–686; and Carol C. Gould, Globalizing Democracy and Human Rights (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Baubock considers the notion of stakeholdership “less vague and overinclusive than affected interests,” 686. Gould uses the notion of “importantly affected interests” linked to the protection and promotion of human rights, calling attention to the importance of cross-border political associations.
David Held, “Democratic Accountability and Political Effectiveness from a Cosmopolitan Perspective,” Government and Opposition 39, no. 2 (2004): 375.
Note the following reference to international diplomats: “there isn’t much enthusiasm, especially in the EU, for creating an ethnically divided and poverty-stricken ministate in the most volatile corner of the Continent. It is just that diplomats now believe they have no choice. ‘The other alternatives are all worse,’ says Carl Bildt, a former envoy to the European Union and the United Nations.” John W. Miller, “Arranging Independence for Kosovo—Diplomats Encounter Few Easy Solutions for Isolated Territory,” The Wall Street Journal, 5 April 2006.
This is reiterated in all of the articles in the Special Issue on “Transnational Crime and Conflict in the Balkans,” guest ed. Peter Andreas, Problems of Post-Communism 51, no. 3 (May–June 2004).
Seth Kaplan, “West African Integration: A New Development Paradigm?” The Washington Quarterly 29, no. 4 (Autumn 2006): 81–97.
Ibid., 85.
Ibid. See also Nancy Birdsall, Underfunded Regionalism in the Developing World (Washington, DC: Center for Global Development, November 2004). On East Asian regionalism, see Mark Beeson, “Rethinking Regionalism: Europe and East Asia in Comparative Historical Perspective,” Journal of European Public Policy 12, no. 6 (December 2005): 969–985.
UNDP, “Bringing Down Barriers: Regional Cooperation for Human Development,” Central Asia Human Development Report, 2005, 2 (emphasis mine), <http://europeandcis.undp.org/?wspc=CAHDR2005> (accessed 10 October 2006).
See, for example, Francis M. Deng, “Ethnic Marginalization as Statelessness: Lessons from the Great Lakes Region of Africa,” in Citizenship Today: Global Perspectives and Practices, ed. T. Alexander Aleinikoff and Douglas Klusmeyer (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2001), 183–208.
See Carolyn Nordstrom, “Shadows and Sovereigns,” in State/Space: A Reader, ed. Neil Brenner, Bob Jessop, Martin Jones, and Gordon MacLeod (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 326–343; Carolyn Nordstrom, “Invisible Empires,” Social Analysis 48, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 91–96; and Mark Galeotti, “Underworld and Upperworld: Transnational Organized Crime and Global Society,” in Non-State Actors in World Politics, ed. Daphne Josselin and William Wallace (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 203–217.
Willem van Schendel and Itty Abrahms, “The Making of Illicitness,” and Willem van Schendel, “Spaces of Engagement: How Borderlands, Illegal Flows, and Territorial States Interlock,” in Illicit Flows and Criminal Things: States, Borders, and the Other Side of Globalization, ed. Willem van Schendel and Itty Abrahms (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 1–37, 38–68.
In the 1990s, a number of experiments in “global governance” emerged, such as the World Commission on Dams, Minerals, Mining and Sustainable Development Initiative, which were designed as multi-stakeholder and cross-sectional endeavors to focus on critical problems that states and interstate systems could not address. Participants included multinational corporations, intergovernmental agencies, and other cross-border nonstate groups as well as state actors. International Institute for Environmental Development (IIED), “Breaking New Ground,” Final Report on Mining, Minerals, and Sustainable Development (MMSD), 2002, <http://www.iied.org/mmsd/mmsd_pdfs/finalreport_es.pdf> (accessed 10 October 2006); see also United Nations Division for Sustainable Development Partnerships, <http://webapps01.un.org/dsd/partnerships/public/partnerships/title_D_1.html> (accessed 10 October 2006).
For an empirical study of regional institution-building across national borders, see Joachim Blatter, “ ‘From Spaces of Place’ to ‘Spaces of Flows’? Territorial and Functional Government in Cross-Border Regions in Europe and North America,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 28, no. 3 (September 2004): 530–548. Blatter outlines four ideal types of cross-border institutions: commissions, connections, consociations, and coalitions. According to his research, “We can conclude that in four border regions in Europe and North America there exists indeed a trend towards ‘glocalization.’ The institutionalized links between subnational actors and official inclusion of subnational actors in cross-border institutions are undermining the exclusive gate-keeper role which national executives held during most of the twentieth century. The modern political system which separated the world into neatly separated spaces of place is becoming transformed. Spaces of place like territorial states are no longer the only imaginable basis for creating and defining primary political communities and institutions,” 545.
Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC). Cross Border Projects. <http://www.fgdc.gov/international/cross_border_projects> (accessed 10 September 2006).
Some theorists caution “the premature” assumption that cross-border regions (CBRs) in Europe are a significant challenge to the sovereignty of the nation-state, as they in large part flourish “because of their increasingly relevant role as implementation units for European regional policy in a context of multi-level governance.” Markus Perkmann, “Cross-Border Regions in Europe: Significance and Drivers of Regional Cross-Border Cooperation,” European Urban and Regional Studies 10, no. 2 (2003): 153. According to Perkman, the increase in crossborder regions today can be explained largely by INTERREG programs, 167–168.
Amitav Acharya examines the Bush administration arguments about “selective sovereignty” that would legitimate intervention in states that are accused of supporting terrorists. “State Sovereignty after 9/11: Disorganized Hypocrisy,” Political Studies 55 (June 2007): 274–296.
Willem Van Schendel and Itty Abrahms, eds., Illicit Flows and Criminal Things: States, Borders, and the Other Side of Globalization (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005).
P. B. Anand, “Financing the Provision of Global Public Goods,” World Economy 27, no. 2 (2004): 215–237; Inge Kaul, “Global Public Goods: A Key to Achieving the Millennium Development Goals,” Office of Development Studies, UNDP, Prepared for the Third Forum on Human Development: Cultural Identity, Democracy and Global Equity, Paris, 17–19 January 2005; Inge Kaul and Katell Le Goulven, “Institutional Options for Producing Global Public Goods,” in Providing Global Public Goods: Managing Globalization, ed. Inge Kaul, Pedro Conceicao, Katell Le Goulven, and Ronald U. Mendoza (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 371–409. “In the absence of a global government with taxraising powers, voluntary cooperation and building of global or regional coalitions is necessary.” Anand, “Financing the Provision of Global Public Goods,” 235.
See David Held and Anthony McGrew, “Political Globalization: Trends and Choices,” in Kaul, Conceicao, Goulven, and Mendoza, Providing Global Public Goods, 185–199.
See Thorsten Benner, Wolfgang H. Reinicke, and Jan Martin Witte, “Multisectoral Networks in Global Governance: Towards a Pluralistic System of Accountability,” Government and Opposition 39, no. 2 (Spring 2004): 191–210; Diane Stone, “The ‘Policy Research’ Knowledge Elite and Global Policy Processes,” in Josselin and Wallace, Non-State Actors in World Politics, 113–132.
See Craig Calhoun, “The Democratic Integration of Europe: Interests, Identity, and the Public Sphere,” in Europe without Borders: Remapping Territory, Citizenship, and Identity in a Transnational Age, ed. Mabel Berezin and Martin Schain (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 243–274.
Held, “Democratic Accountability,” 378–382; Kofi A. Annan, We the Peoples: The Role of the United Nations in the 21st Century (New York: United Nations, Department of Public Information, 2000), 70; and Jean-Francois Rischard, High Noon (New York: Basic Books, 2002).
Anne-Marie Slaughter, A New World Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 9.
Ibid., 10.
Ibid., 6.
Andreas Follesdal, “Survey Article: The Legitimacy Deficits of the European Union,” The Journal of Political Philosophy 14, no. 4 (2006): 441–468.
Ibid., 454.
Ibid., 456, 456–461.
Ibid., 462.
Some legal theorists attempt to find another solution to conflict resolution around questions of sovereignty by developing a theory of “earned sovereignty.” While unbundling the functions of sovereignty, this attempt to rethink the issues remains within the hard border framework of the notion of sovereignty. James R. Hooper and Paul R. Williams, “Earned Sovereignty: The Political Dimension,” Denver Journal of International Law and Policy 31, no. 3 (2004): 355–375.
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© 2008 Julie Mostov
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Mostov, J. (2008). Reconstructing the Polity. In: Soft Borders. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230612440_7
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