National Borders :- A necessary evil?

National Borders differentiate between different cultures, languages and people. While a seamless world could be a great idea, these borders are actually the reason for our progress as a society. Understand why National Borders are a necessary evil with our new writer Divya Robinson.

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Protecting Diversity and Creating Belongingness

National borders are natural. Nature itself has differentiated us in various ways - look at the continents and islands; look at the difference in various cultures, languages and people. To help people feel like they have their own culture, their own language and their own roots, we need national divisions. These help give people a sense of ownership in turn creating progress. If the whole world wasn’t divided into countries but instead was united to form a single nation, everyone would technically have the same roots and over time, people might not be able to satisfy their greatest desire - to belong.

Peaceful Co-Existence and Application of Common Law

For any society to survive peacefully and to progress, common stringent laws are critical. A national border promotes the application of a common law. A borderless world will not be able to apply uniform laws to the immensely diverse society we live in. A country like India itself where what is working for one state rarely works for another is simply a world without borders on a smaller scale. Being one nation there needs to be common laws and this sometimes is the biggest impediment to our growth.

Take an example of reservation for schedule caste – it is 16 % across India, irrelevant of the state, but the proportion of scheduled cast is not the same in all states. Similarly, another example of reservation for minorities – while Muslims and Christians are considered minority all over India, in states like Goa and Kerala, they constitute a sizeable proportion of the population. Although the system is working efficiently in India, there is a high chance it won’t do so on a larger scale. Administration will be tougher and immense time will be taken to implement decisions as so many different types of people will have to be taken into consideration. There will be several ethnicities and cultures that might feel neglected if power is concentrated in a few hands.

So while many a wars are being fought to secure disputable borders, they aren’t the problem. When we say two countries are against each other or are fighting a war, most of the common people of the two countries rarely consider each other as sworn enemies. It is not borders that are creating rifts, it is greed and politics that are doing so.

What we need, is to steadily progress into a phase like the European Union, which while protecting diversity, will also encourage us to become one large society where individual cultures are protected at the same time better values are created by associating ourselves with the larger picture - our planet.

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Written By Divya Robisnon, Edited by Nandini Nalam