Border Bollocks

The modern obsession with borders is routinely presented as timeless. Every country, we are told, has always guarded its frontiers. Human beings have always needed permission to move. None of this is true.

For most of history, movement was normal and paperwork was exceptional. Borders existed, but they were not gates. They were vague zones where authority thinned out rather than hard lines where it stopped. People moved because work required it, because land failed, because wars displaced them, because trade depended on it. States noticed when movement threatened taxation, conscription or control. Otherwise, they largely ignored it.

Documents did exist, but they were not what we now imagine. Safe conducts, letters of passage, seals and introductions were about protection, not permission. They said “do not harm this person” rather than “this person is allowed to cross”. The assumption was mobility. Restriction was the anomaly.

Even rulers were largely indifferent. Medieval kings could not have cared less who crossed into their domains unless they arrived with an army at their back. A handful of labourers, traders or refugees posed no threat and might even be useful. What mattered was force, loyalty and revenue, not the quiet movement of ordinary people.

This becomes brutally clear when people point to historic expulsions as supposed evidence of ancient border control. Take the expulsion of Jews from England in 1290. It is often imagined as a managed removal, enforced by some medieval equivalent of border checks. Nothing of the sort existed. There were no identity papers, no exit controls, no way to track who had left and who had not.

The Crown issued an edict. After a certain date, Jews remaining were outside the law. Enforcement relied on proclamation, intimidation, denunciation and fear. Ports were watched not to ensure departure but to seize property. Inland, there was no systematic monitoring at all. Some converted and stayed. Some left quietly. Some almost certainly never left. The state lacked both the means and the interest to track individuals.

Expulsion worked not because borders were controlled, but because life was made unlivable. Legal protection was withdrawn. Violence was tolerated. Property was seized. The mechanism was terror and dispossession, not surveillance. To cite this as evidence of historic border enforcement is to misunderstand how power functioned before bureaucracy existed.

Even the emergence of the modern state did not immediately change this. The system of sovereign states that crystallised in early modern Europe was about rulers recognising one another, not monitoring the feet of peasants and sailors. Borders mattered diplomatically. They mattered militarily. They did not yet matter administratively.

What hardened borders was not tradition but crisis.

The turning point comes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and decisively with the First World War. States at war wanted to know who was inside, who was leaving, who might be a spy, who might refuse to fight. Passports, visas and controls were introduced as emergency measures. Temporary tools for extraordinary times.

They were never rolled back.

Once states discovered that movement could be monitored, categorised and restricted, the apparatus became self justifying. Bureaucracy does not voluntarily dismantle itself. What began as an exception was normalised. What was once a human default became a regulated privilege.

By the interwar period, identity papers were standardised. Borders were no longer lines on maps but systems. Migration was reframed as a problem. Mobility became suspect. The language shifted from people moving to people being “managed”.

This is where today’s arguments collapse. When politicians invoke historic borders, ancestral caution or ancient instincts, they are projecting a twentieth century security regime backwards and calling it heritage. The modern border is not old. It is barely a hundred years old. It is the child of war, paperwork and fear.

The irony is universal. The wealth of most modern states was built on circulation. Trade, labour, ideas, skills and people moving. Roads, rivers, ports and markets mattered far more than barriers. States that grew powerful did so by managing movement, not by pretending it could be frozen.

Today’s border panic is not history speaking. It is insecurity masquerading as tradition. It confuses paperwork with permanence and emergency measures with timeless truth. Medieval rulers did not control borders. They controlled force. When they wanted people gone, they did not monitor exits. They made life unbearable.

Borders exist. States draw lines. None of that is new. What is new is the insistence that human beings require constant permission to cross them, and the claim that this arrangement is how it has always been.

It is not.

Movement came first. The forms came later.