Soft Borders and Thin Bonds: Citizenship and Transnational Democracy
BY JULIE MOSTOV
In the midst of domestic arguments for fortifying the United States’ borders, I argue for soft borders and thin social bonds. I have been thinking about borders with respect to Southeastern Europe, but my arguments are meaningful in a larger context. While boundaries are regularly and easily traversed by capital, electronic information, a wide class of goods, pollution, and certain categories of people, others are held hostage within the hard borders of their “home” states or blocked at the hard borders of potential “hosts.” At the same time, hard border policies discourage creative cross-border alliances and multiple memberships in political and civil associations at regional and transnational levels despite the fact that globalizing trends lend themselves to precisely these levels of social and political cooperation.
It is troubling that some democrats today support hard border politics, arguing that boundedness and national fellow-feeling are critical to democratic processes of social cooperation. Thick notions of bonding such as common national myths and memories of a long shared last are not effective building blocks of democratic cooperation. Such bonds provide a potential mechanism for fixing and naturalizing difference, facilitating relationships of domination, and promoting notions of belonging inconsistent with democratic choice. Instead, the promise of democratic social cooperation in the twenty first century rests on assumptions about the multiple and fluid identities of individuals and groups exercised in overlapping and soft bordered polities.
NATIONALISM AND DEMOCRACY
The links among nationalism, citizenship, national identity, and democracy are historically limited. The nation-state and national citizenship emerged within a particular international system and a particular conceptual framework of sovereignty, both of which are being challenged. While the modern notion of the nation played a role in the development of citizenship, its historical movement also made way for organic models of community that promote hierarchical and patriarchal relationships of power and deny the democratic extension of citizenship. At the same time, the numbers of immigrants, guest workers, refugees, and asylum seekers legally and illegally crossing nation-state borders challenge milder notions of national identity. Limiting participation in public life to those sharing common national myths, memories, and language prevents many of the current denizens of “host” states from protecting their basic interests and prevents these newcomers from exercising rights and obligations where they live and work. Limiting entry to maintain a territory’s national character eventually undermines whatever democratic intentions initially motivated such a policy.
The ability to control movement is a powerful determinate in the way in which difference is defined as either an opportunity for self-expression or a source of domination. If only some people exercise the right of movement then the boundary drawing exercise is a tool that replicates and fixes differences such that lines are continually being redefined and hardened. Boundary-setting processes that hold people hostages to territories and erect symbolic, legal, economic, and physical barriers among people promote differential relationships of power and standing that are inconsistent with democratic practices of social choice.
Yet, just as there is great resistance to re-conceptualize the static units of the inter-state system of Westphalian sovereignty, there is significant nostalgia for the notion of national identity. Quite apart from racist/nationalist complaints about the disappearance of white Europe or America, diluted resources, and the loss of unique national character, political theorists appear reluctant to let go of links among nation, state, nationalism, and democracy. This is partly because fellowfeeling is thought essential in establishing the requisite trust among members of a polity for collective action because people develop special commitments to those who are like them.
National identity or other relationships of fellow-feeling are not undesirable, but they are not necessary grounds for the democratic practice of social cooperation. People are able to feel strong affective ties to groups or individuals and, at the same time, develop political or civic ties to others quite “unlike” them if this is encouraged by institutional design, democratic advocacy, and positive collective action experiences.
DEMOCRATIC BONDS
How bounded do democratic polities have to be and what kinds of bonds provide commitments necessary for democratic practices of social cooperation? Democratic polities may set some borders, but they increasingly ought to be porous and elastic soft borders that facilitate the management of a particular set of functions and allow for corresponding processes of social choice. A soft border approach envisions democratic practices of social cooperation exercised through multiple and overlapping polities by individuals and groups with multiple and fluid identities.
Individuals and groups can develop sufficient commitment to a democratic process of social choice based on their different experiences of cooperation, expectations of right treatment or respect, and understandings of power. These experiences may range from supportive ties between child and parent to degrading economic and psychological relations of domination and abuse.
Similarly, individuals and groups develop different expectations of right treatment or respect through family life, community practices, religious and cultural rituals, or basic life experiences. Some may not expect reciprocity for the respect that they show to others, for acts of kindness and charity, or for the observance of familial obligations; others will expect equal recognition of rights and responsibilities and feel demeaned by the absence of mutual respect in public and private life. Expectations of reciprocity may also be extreme, as in the expectation of revenge and fear of violence or understated, as in simple acts of civility.
Finally, people understand a range of relationships of power: vulnerability, privilege, domination, subordination, equality, inequality, and functional hierarchy. They may differently assess these relationships as natural and inevitable or arbitrary and unjust depending upon their place within them. Indeed, as with all of the above, these understandings may change over one’s lifetime and will leave a stronger or weaker impact on one’s life view and life chances.
Attempts to promote democratization and institution-building must address these varied experiences, expectations, and understandings; their distribution and intensity in the particular population(s) in question; and the conditions that might ameliorate or exacerbate bad experiences. In this sense, democracy is more about institutional design and the background conditions of choice that reduce opportunities for the abuse of power, increase exit and entry options, and offer a variety of opportunities for exercising one’s voice than it is about shared histories, roots, and values.
Democratic processes require that institutions recognize the formal equality and independence of individuals in social choice. Thin ties among denizens of a polity are strengthened through reiterated collective choice experiences approximating this relationship. The more that citizens experience the benefits of “playing” under such rules, the greater becomes their trust in one another and the process. In many places in the world, however, formally democratic decision procedures do not afford circumstances that inspire faith in democracy. In weak states, where the absence of the rule of law has encouraged corruption, democratic reformers may be hard pressed to find institutional mechanisms for regaining public trust. In this case, neither multi-party elections nor the ascendance of leaders possessing particular ethno-national characteristics or values will inspire confidence.
While one’s experience with government at a local level may be discouraging, cross-border activities in a regional development project or participation in a regional association might provide positive experiences reaffirming a belief in democratic practices of social choice. Fluid and open memberships in different levels of political association provide people with more options for securing the delivery of public goods and for enforcing democratic accountability.
It is precisely this issue of public goods, however, that leads some theorists to promote hard border polities. This is a question of institutional design, however, rather than social solidarity. Only very small communities can rely upon solidarity and social pressure for the regular provision of public goods and welfare benefits. Resolving free-rider problems in all other communities requires a combination of threatened sanctions, effective institutions, civic engagement, and positive collective action experiences. Reiterated positive experiences need not, however, be had in the same place. Good experiences in one venue support positive expectations in another whereas negative experiences of dependence or inequality may increase a person’s aversion to risk and decrease trust or, alternatively, increase a person’s desire to seek and support a fairer game of social choice.
SOFT BORDERS AND DEMOCRATIC DECISION-MAKING
Softening borders reconfigures space to include virtual communities and foster participation in transnational polities or local trans-border cultural communities. Participation in sub-national and cross-border polities does not necessarily require travel, but makes the advantages of travel accessible to greater numbers and decreases the danger of traversal. Softening physical borders provides space for a softening of symbolic borders, thus dissolving the naturalized binary differences of outsider/insider entrenched in the discourse of nation (or race). Although crisscrossing borders at multiple levels has historically produced cultural hybridity and rich creative outcomes, softening borders is not necessarily about encountering and mixing with the other. Rather, it undermines the construction of power relations around fixed definitions of difference and institutionalized practices of domination and violence.
Julie Mostov (mostovj@drexel.edu) is associate professor of history and politics, director of the International Area Studies Program (http://www. drexel.edu/coas/ias/default1.asp) at Drexel University, and a speaker at Dehegemonization: The US & Transnational Democracy, a 2006 conference co-sponsored by CGS.
