Why the dream of a borderless world misunderstands what borders are for

The borderless world is one of modernity’s most seductive ideas. Tear down the barriers, let people and capital flow freely, and prosperity will follow as surely as water finds its level. It is an argument advanced with equal conviction by Silicon Valley libertarians and campus progressives, by Davos panellists and street protesters. And it is, in its purest form, wrong — not because openness is bad, but because the argument mistakes all borders for the same kind of thing.

There are, broadly, two kinds of border in the world. Call them the membrane and the wall. The distinction matters more than any slogan about tearing them down.

The wall needs no introduction

A wall is a non-cooperative border. It exists to exclude, to hoard, to punish movement. The Berlin Wall was a wall. The barriers that sealed off South African townships were walls. A wall says: what is mine stays mine, and what is yours stays out. Walls are instruments of zero-sum thinking. One side’s gain is the other’s loss. They are, in the language of game theory, the physical expression of a non-cooperative equilibrium — a Nash equilibrium in which every actor, pursuing narrow self-interest, produces an outcome inferior to what cooperation might have achieved.

Nobody of good faith defends the wall as an ideal. The trouble is that critics of borders too often assume every border is a wall, and proceed to demand its demolition.

The membrane is harder to see

A cell membrane is not a wall. It does not exist to keep everything out. It exists to regulate what passes through — and it does so by osmosis, the quiet, purposeful movement of substance from where it is abundant to where it is needed, governed by the membrane’s own selectivity. Without a membrane, a cell is just chemical soup. The membrane is what allows the interior to maintain the specific concentrations, the particular order, that distinguish a living organism from its surroundings.

Cooperative borders work the same way. They are semi-permeable by design. The Schengen Area did not abolish borders; it replaced non-cooperative ones with cooperative ones, harmonising rules so........

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