The Persistence of Borders

A border is not a line. It is an argument about who belongs and who does not, institutionalised in wire and bureaucracy and law. The physical demarcation is almost secondary to the social and legal systems it represents. Two points a metre apart, on either side of an international frontier, can differ more in terms of the life chances of the people who occupy them than two points separated by a continent.

This disparity is among the more remarkable features of the contemporary world. Economists who study it call it the "place premium" — the difference in wages for identical work performed in different countries. A truck driver in Norway earns roughly twelve times what a truck driver with equivalent skills earns in a neighbouring but non-EU country. The difference is not explained by the individual. It is explained by the location.

Political philosophers have struggled with this. John Rawls, whose theory of justice is among the most influential of the twentieth century, largely confined his analysis to justice within states, on the assumption that nation-states were the relevant unit of analysis for questions of fairness. Critics, including Thomas Pogge and Joseph Carens, have argued that this assumption cannot be sustained. If the birthplace lottery is among the most consequential determinants of life outcomes, it cannot simply be bracketed as morally irrelevant.

The difficulty is not merely theoretical. Borders perform real social functions: they maintain political communities, sustain welfare states, enable democratic accountability. The argument is not obviously that they should be abolished, but that their costs and benefits are distributed extraordinarily unequally.

That inequality tends not to appear in political discourse within countries that benefit from it. This is itself a fact worth noticing.