Good fences and good neighbours

Some thoughts on the obsession with boundaries…

There is some good news this week from England. The inhabitants of the towns of Northampton and Peterborough have agreed, following the result of a croquet match, on the pronunciation of the River Nene, which intersects both towns.

At a time when there has been a near orgy of border-making around the world, it is good to be reminded that borders and boundaries on their own create neither hostility nor comity, but are instead mirrors of politics. Boundary markers may sometimes appear innocuous, as the above image of the Mason-Dixon line may look to us today; but they are also sometimes taken bloody seriously, as last week’s news from the Holy Land has also reminded us.

In general, border-making and ‘enforcement’ are products of insecurity. They aim to impose a feeling of security where one is lacking for reasons that have little to do directly with walls or with particular pieces of land or bodies of water. John F Kennedy may have been right when he said that a wall in Berlin was hell of a lot better than a war, but the wall (actually the barbed wire that preceded the wall) did not make him say that. And there was a time when borders mattered much less than they now do. Passports, for example, are a recent invention; few were needed before the Great War. Even after a passport rule was invented, it could be waved. It was possible just a few decades ago for an American professor who had misplaced his passport to fly across the Atlantic and arrive to his destination unscathed after showing his university library card.

To transform hostile borders into healthy borderlands around the world will require much more than croquet matches. But sometimes it helps to step back and remember that transformations can and do happen.

ps Talleyrand is grateful for the many kind messages he received about last week’s slightly intemperate comment. Readers may be assured that he meant no offence.