a foreign country it’s not easy to read between the lines. I understood this better than ever when I started to investigate divided Belgium. If we take no interest in the linguistic conflict in that country, what can we hope to say about Europe as a whole? In Flanders you never need to remind anyone that borders matter. From time to time I’ve asked liberal politicians like Guy Verhofstadt and Karel De Gucht what lessons for Europe they derive from the long process that is the disintegration of Belgium. They usually fail to give satisfying answers. But how can they speak with such confidence about ever closer union between almost thirty countries when no one has yet succeeded in curbing the nationalism of tiny Flanders?
Writer Geert van Istendael summed this up beautifully: ‘L’Europe sera belge ou ne sera pas.’11 Freely translated, this means that Europe needs to model itself upon Belgium as a multilingual democracy or it will fail. He was writing in the late 1990s, when Belgium was still functioning reasonably well, but now, twenty years on, the Walloons and the Flemings are drifting further and further apart. To what extent can the unification of Europe be achieved if it’s so hard for these neighbouring citizens of one country to find an accommodation?
So I pursued my quest to discover the value of borders. In 1996 I made a television series called ‘Waiting for the Barbarians: Borders of Europe’. The title was of course derived from a famous poem by Cavafy:
Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion?
(How serious people’s faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home lost in thought?
Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven’t come.
And some of our men just in from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.
Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution.12
Cavafy’s poem invites self-examination. We should be able to overcome our weaknesses without any need for an external threat.
A number of politicians and philosophers appeared on the programme, including Helmut Schmidt, Francis Fukuyama, Jacques Attali and Peter Sloterdijk. The last of these said in a conversation with Attali, ‘What the skin is to a person, the border is to a state.’ He added, ‘Only angels have no skin, but we are not heavenly, we belong to the earth.’13 Sloterdijk was at the time working on his Spheres trilogy, a cultural history that begins from the space in which humans find themselves. He believes that the issue of how to create security in a borderless world is the cause of the moral panic that characterizes our era.
On reading his work I began for the first time to see the questions surrounding borders as philosophical in nature. I had earlier been struck by a sentence from Hegel: ‘Etwas ist nur in seiner Grenze und durch seine Grenze das, was es ist.’ Or, ‘Something only is what it is in its limit and through its limit.’14 I asked myself: does the same not apply to an open society? Can a democracy endure without borders? If freedom flourishes only within certain limits, might this borderless era presage a new absence of freedom?
These questions kept pressing themselves upon me after a new century arrived. The issue of how to deal with borders was given a fresh urgency by migration. I was increasingly aware of a moral embarrassment surrounding them. It occurred to me that when liberals no longer have words to refer to borders, people with authoritarian tendencies will begin to erect them. The call for borders to be closed cannot be far away if all that liberals can come up with is an appeal for them to be open.
Migration is the most visible sign that our world is smaller than ever. Distances have shrunk and we can no longer ignore the needs of the rest of humanity. Diversity is an everyday reality in cities where more than a hundred nationalities live, but resistance to it is growing – and not only among the traditional residents, since within the circles of newcomers there are people who because of their religious beliefs want to limit contact with their adoptive country as far as possible.
The refugee crisis is revealing our unease more starkly than ever. How can we justify having borders at all? Who are we to deny others access to our territory? Are citizens’ rights not the same as human rights? Surely citizenship can’t be dependent on where you happen to have been born? But communities cannot exist without any boundaries at all. The right to decide who is and who is not allowed into the community is essential.
The meaning of borders became clear once again, dramatically so, in the coronavirus pandemic that caught the world off guard in the spring of 2020. It ought to surprise no one that national borders were embraced as the first line of defence. It was an understandable reflex. In Flanders roadblocks even appeared at the border with the Netherlands, as shipping containers were used to block access from a neighbouring country that the Belgians believed had too complacent an attitude.
All over Europe, daily television news programmes began with the number of deaths in the home country. Only later was there any mention of victims of the disease in other European states and later still attention might turn to New York. Somewhere towards the end of each broadcast we would be given an impression of the situation in the slums of India or Brazil, which says something about the geography of our emotions. Whatever is closest weighs heaviest.
This suggests one lesson to be drawn from the crisis. How often have we heard it said over recent decades that the nation state is a thing of the past? It quickly transpired that an announcement of a state of emergency or emergency measures is possible only on a national or regional basis. The legitimacy needed to take such drastic steps cannot be contracted out to international institutions. No German waits eagerly for a speech by Ursula von der Leyen, whereas a speech by Angela Merkel is a different matter altogether. It’s first of all within national borders that people accept authority and feel a sense of solidarity.
What has surprised me is how willing we are to give up freedom in exchange for safety. Sealing off a city of millions like Wuhan is possible only under a dictatorship; a democracy could not summon the discipline for it. Yet despite all their differences, many European countries were prepared to accept a rapid adjustment that radically disrupted daily life.
Most citizens proved willing to adhere to new rules about social distancing or working from home. Indeed, most people will do the right thing if there is a trustworthy government close by. The trust that citizens have in each other is closely bound up with the trust those same citizens have in their government. Why were more people fined for breaking lockdown rules in France than in Denmark? More trust means less coercion. The cultural differences between countries become obvious.
Social abstinence has sharpened our awareness of the community that makes all our individualism possible. We now see how dependent we are on all those who keep the wheels turning. They are the people in key occupations, who run the greatest risk because they cannot work from home. And theirs are precisely the jobs that tend to be poorly paid.
Governments need to ensure this crisis does not heighten inequality, as the last crisis did. We see companies that have made huge profits in the recent past now applying for state support. They neglected to build up reserves in times of plenty. An internet company like Booking.com, which has benefitted hugely from tax breaks over the past few years, surely has quite some gall asking for help for its 5,500 employees in Amsterdam.
There is another way in which the spread of the new coronavirus has shown up the deficiencies of national governments. I had taken it on trust that my country had detailed disaster plans,
