World Borders, Political Borders

TLDR

Balibar’s work frames borders as state‑controlled limits rooted in property rights, underscoring their role as undemocratic police power and a central site for debates on class, race, citizenship, and international human rights. The essay argues that to democratize borders—viewed as the state's nondemocratic police power—requires reforming the nondemocratic aspects of sovereignty, thereby redefining citizenship in a post‑national, globalized Europe. He concludes that democratizing borders is a juridically difficult but politically realistic endeavor, as borders will continue to shift under socially, culturally, and economically global forces.

Abstract

The work of the distinguished French political theorist and philosopher Etienne Balibar has emerged as profoundly significant in shaping post-1968 debates around class, race, national sovereignty, citizenship, and international human rights. The following essay is particularly relevant to this issue of PMLA insofar as the essay signals the importance of the border as a limit case for globalization and reflects on what the philosophical bases of citizenship would be in a postnational order of Europe. Borders, Balibar suggests, are products of the state's attributing to itself a right to property, which becomes, in turn, a limit case of institutions (their means of self-stabilization) that allows them to control subjects rather than be subject to their control. The police power of border control is the state's most undemocratic condition, its discretionary exemption from democracy. To democratize the border, he maintains, one must democratize this nondemocratic aspect of democratic sovereignty, a task that would be juridically difficult but that would be an act of political realism none the less, since borders inevitably shift whether nations want them to or not, redefined by socially trans bordered, culturally transnational, and economically global spaces.