Y.

Seck
D.Cobarubius
INTL/GEOG 3000

Mid-Term Essay

In class we have discussed how the arrival of the millennium was marked by
an assumption of having entered an era of globalization marked by an
increasingly borderless world with growing flows of people, money, goods
and ideas from one place to another. At the same time, the past 10-15 years
have seen an exponential rise in the number of border walls being raised in
order to control, manage or defend against certain flows. In your essay
please discuss how these seemingly contradictory tendencies play out. Is this
a contradiction? Or is this apparent dichotomy really two elements of the
same process?

Globalization is a process that occurs simultaneously at national and supra

national levels. The most powerful global players in the West have largely
determined the rules of the game as far as the current global economy is
concerned. However, some countries have managed to modify the rules to
their own advantage and thus engineered more favorable terms of engagement
with the global economy. Globalization is also the rapid acceleration of cross-

border movements of capital, labor, people, goods, knowledge and ideas. At

the same time, the past 10-15 years have seen an exponential rise in the
number of border walls being raised in order to control, manage or defend
against certain flows as revealed the subject of our essay. Therefore, even if I
do believe it is not a contradiction, I will discuss how these seemingly
contradictory tendencies play out.

This rapid acceleration in the transnational flow of capital, trade, and

technology has profoundly affected the nature of international migration as well
Messina Anthony M.and Gallya Lahav, eds. (2006) The Migration Reader. Lynne
Rienner: Boulder (p 569). This authors who had noticed how migration in our
global era has change think also that: transnational flows that have all but
eradicated meaningful national frontiers. Marshall McLuhan theorizes this world
as a global village(McLuhan and powers 1989) in the paper of Arjun
Appadurai (p 47), Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy.
Globalization in its manifold forms has carried with it a loosening up of older
territorial boundaries of political power and cultural identity, and stimulated the
emergence of new and different forms of bounding political economies and
cultures at every geographical scale. Among the most useful and interesting ways
to describe this loosening up and selective reconfiguration is through the terms
deterritorialization and reterritorialization. Broadly defined, this pairing refers to a

reorganization - a debordering and rebordering - of territorial power, autonomy,

and identity at multiple scales of government, from the global governance system
to the local state.Houtum, Olivier Kramsch and Wolfang Zierhofer, B/ordering
space. - (Border regions series.p46). However, Houtum who gives his thoughts
about a borderless world insist in the existence of boundaries. This territorial
restructuring does not necessarily involve an actual realignment of formal
government boundaries, but even when established boundaries remain intact and
unchallenged, there have been sufficient changes in their meaning and intended as well as unexpected - effects to create a substantially different political
organization of space. All these authors I refer share to a certain extend the same
idea that globalization has brought a borderless world which led to a growing
flow of goods, people and money. Alongside financial integration the operations
of multinational corporations integrate national and local economies into global
and regional production networks. Under these conditions, national economies no
longer function as autonomous systems of wealth creation since national borders
are no longer significant barriers to the conduct and organization of economic
activity. The distinction between domestic economic activity and worldwide
economic activity, as the range of products in any superstore will confirm, is
becoming increasingly difficult to sustain. Friedman, The world is flat, 2005.
Friedman realizes that the world is flat in his words, the global competitive
playing field was being leveled. The world was being flattened. Friedman goes
on to discuss forces that are flattening the world. He notes that when the Berlin
Wall fell, the world became a little flatter. Friedman argues that although many

forces caused the Wall to fall, the first among equals was the uses of
information technology like fax machines to spread information. For him, the
creation of the World Wide Web accelerated this process, as did work flow
software. Friedman also points to the power of the community that arose in the
twenty-first century, which can be seen in groups of people creating open-source
software in their spare time while large companies are trying to sell the same
service. Outsourcing and offshoring are also "flatteners." The worlds economy
seems to be changing, and that change is largely being driven by individuals
rather than governments because individuals can now meet and interact using
online services like Skype. has added Friedman. People used to rely on visas to
travel to areas with opportunities, but now, Friedman explains, people can
innovate without having to emigrate. Therefore, at the same time, the past 10-15
years have seen an exponential rise in the number of border walls being raised in
order to control, manage or defend against certain flows. I think the
tendencies of a borderless world and the exponential rise in the number of border
walls is not a contradiction. On the contrary, it is an extra tool to help protect the
states and citizens from threats that the borderless world may have brought. From
1945 to 2001(September, 11 2001), the numbers of walls built, increases, among
other reasons of the terrorist threat. Friedman in his theory of the world is flat
warns of the forces that could seriously harm or slow the flattening of the world,
particularly the threat posed by terrorist networks such as Al-Qaeda. His
perspective is refreshing in a media driven largely by scare tactics and fear
mongering as he encourages a realistic and objective approach to this threat.

Human smuggling adds another dimension to the debate on border control by

changing circumstances of international cooperation on immigration policy,
border control, and asylum. Messina Anthony M.and Gallya Lahav,eds.(2006)
The Migration Reader. Lynne Rienner: Boulder (p 571). The border of a
province or a nation-state is first and foremost a legal fact, one that is reproduced,
literally kept alive by a large ensemble of connected practices, ranging from
printed bodies of law and maps to corporeal inscriptions and the surveillance of
boundaries on the landscape. The b/order is an active verb. Houtum, Olivier
Kramsch and Wolfang Zierhofer, B/ordering space. This shows, the self-interest
of the states to justify in a way the building of walls, fences and other types of
barriers to control their external borders. Therefore,as Hotum and his co-authors
thinks : rather than constitute barriers or obstacles to globalization, boundarymaking practices should be conceived as inescapable features of the globalization
process.
Nevertheless, border securitization through militarization has shown its limits
in Europe. A good example is given by X. Ferrer-Gallardo.it is clear that in
the cases of Ceuta and Melilla, the high permeability associated with the illegal
flow of goods and the selectively Schengenized flow of people collides with the
idea and practice of an intensively securitized and sealed off border. This raises
questions about the effectiveness of militarization and establishes a clear
differentiation between the functional and symbolic purposes of border
securitization. The growing importance of immigration issues in recent European
(Union) debates indicates the extent to which the future of Europe is linked to the

future of its migration policy. In this sense, the increasingly restrictive migratory
legislation, which goes hand in hand with the physical hardening of the EU outer
border, is pro- viding the framework for the symbolic delimitation between those
who are in and those who are out. X. Ferrer-Gallardo/ Political Geography 27
(2008) 301e321 313.

Al territory, and national governments can no longer be regarded as the sole

masters of their own or their citizens fate. But this does not mean that national
governments or national sovereignty have been eclipsed by the forces of political
globalization; the state is not in decline, as many may think.