What a border means depends on who you are. The reopening of international borders after Covid lockdowns was hailed as a return to normality, at least for wealthy global travellers. At the same time British politicians, crowing about having “taken back control of our borders” after leaving the EU, set about the surreally punitive wheeze of outsourcing asylum to Rwanda. For the fortunate, a border might be merely a queue at an airport; for those less so, a literal wall between their home and workplace.
Borders have often been figured as the skin of the body politic: a defence against external infection. So 19th-century theorists such as Friedrich Ratzel argued that, just as an organism’s skin can stretch to accommodate its growth, so can geographical borders, shifting outward to give the nation adequate room to live, or “Lebensraum”. We know where that led.
