It’s the summer before the pandemic; I am riding shotgun with Kamal Mukaker, my Palestinian host, as we pass through Beit Jala and Bethlehem. The separation wall looms behind us as we traverse zones A, B and C, to reach the Herodion, Herod’s palace. An Israeli military camp guards the palace at the foot of the hill. Later, we will come across a group of Israeli soldiers conducting painstakingly precise preparations for what seems to be a parade among the ruins.

Our gaze moves across a barren landscape currently shimmering with heat. From where we are standing, we can see the small Israeli towns on the neighboring hills, surrounded by sturdy walls, and the sparse Palestinian settlements in the flat valleys.

Within barely a few years, Israeli settlement policy has created a tangle of interlocking territories with a complicated relationship to their surroundings; formally considered illegal, they are nonetheless subject to international law.

Unfolding in front of our eyes is a war fought in slow motion. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.

I hadn’t realized just how much I had grown used to the experience of a Europe without internal borders until the day I was sternly reprimanded by a Brazilian immigration officer shortly after landing in Rio de Janeiro. I had forgotten my passport. Without a it, he exclaimed, I would be placed on the next flight home. “Hey – U.S. immigration treats us the same way”, he shrugged. It took a call to the German embassy, and a firm talking-to from his supervisor to convince him otherwise. Unknowingly, I had stumbled upon a Mini-Bolsonaro long before Bolsonaro. 

And yet, he was right about one thing. When I think back about entering the United States, I immediately recall a sense of unease and humiliation, palpable among the crowds lining up coyly at the immigration booths inside JFK airport.

Trumpism long before Trump.

If you’ve ever watched a GDR soldier conduct a border inspection by taking apart a packed family car, removing underbody mirrors and back seats while brimming with menace, you’ll never forget the underlying sense of helplessness and dread shaping the moment.

The draconian upkeep and inspection of borders is an out-of-date practice that must be abolished.

In order to thrive, inclusive cities must be freed from barriers, video surveillance, fences, walls, and security posts.

Sovereignty and good governance require cooperation, not separation; laws do not need walls, neither do welfare systems or those regulating access to them.

Before the pandemic, billions of tourists were traversing global borders every day. Many continue to do so. They are treated as assets, not drains on government resources.

The Berlin Wall fell in 1989, but many more have arrived in its place. These walls have divided nations (Cypress, Korea, India and Pakistan), attempted to ward off undesirable migrants (Hungary, Turkey, United States), and marked ethnic and political conflicts (between the Palestinian territories in the West Bank and Israeli settlements, Saudia Arabia and Irak, Western Sahara and Morocco).

Especially when viewed against this backdrop, the concept of Fortress Europe seems alarmingly absurd. Borders are inhumane; wreaking havoc on civilizations on either side rather than protecting one from the other. Moreover, border posts, surveillance technology, staff and detention centers devour government resources: Security regimes are incredibly expensive. 

Securing territories in this way makes little sense because physical borders cannot contain contemporary concepts of membership.

Many Europeans would agree. The Schengen Area is based on the premise that eliminating borders is a way to increase freedom and quality of life.

In many respects, nation-states have simply ceased to matter. We’ve seen this recently with regard to climate change and global pandemics. And it is certainly true for the consequences of global financial crises, transnational corporations and organized crime. Fashion, music, architecture, ideas and the need to consume have long rendered border fences irrelevant. Even the most discernably physical elements of infrastructure, such as railroads and air transport, highways, satellites, gas and oil pipelines, sea freight and fiber-optic networks are transnational in scope and can only function in this way.

Societies, especially those organized in urban spaces, will be more successful if they invest in the development of networks and infrastructures, and commit to cooperation over compartmentalization. Disparities across borders need to be minimized, not exacerbated.

We cannot grasp the reality of contemporary cities by merely concentrating on their political borders. Instead, today’s cities are urban conglomerates that spread far beyond their original territory.

These conglomerates are created and maintained by networks of infrastructure connecting large areas and a variety of urban centers.  

Berlin, like most other German cities, has long expanded past its formal borders, physically bleeding into the rural state of Brandenburg that encircles the German capital from all sides.

But formal jurisdictions remain in place, curtailing the region’s potential to grow organically as planners disagree and pursue uncoordinated and politically driven agendas.

This is at odds with what we are seeing with cities like Paris and Amsterdam, which cover smaller territories than Berlin, but have much more sprawling metropolitan regions. The “aire urbaine de Paris” is home to twelve million, and the Randstad region surrounding Amsterdam counts seven million. For Munich, that number is currently at six million; the Pearl River Delta linking Hong Kong, Macao, and Shenzhen currently includes 60 million people, and the Tokyo metropolitan area includes 40 million.

These metropolitan regions are defying formal borders by drawing on their respective infrastructures to expand and connect.

Streets and roads have outlived the Roman Empire by centuries. The Silk Road’s legacy overshadows the Great Wall of China. Creating an S-Bahn connection between Naumburg and Leipzig, a deepwater port in Triest, a solar power plant in Postmasburg, South Africa, can create so much more impact than patrolling a border.

As the coronavirus pandemic continues to rip through border walls and fences, countries are closing their borders, frantically shutting their gates in fear of the great Plague of the 21st century. But they are doing so in vain. The mutant viruses have long arrived.

Borders have been fraught with many expectations.  They are supposed to maintain a tariff system. They are supposed to keep out drugs, ideas, and violence, and to keep a range of -isms at bay. They are supposed to preserve social systems an to reduce migration in all directions. But when has this ever actually worked?

Self-destruction, failed policy, and astronomical price tags are always part of the toxic equation when it comes to the upkeep of border regimes. They create boundaries within and between communities and intensify existing conflicts that could be solved much more constructively without them.

My vision is a world without borders.