at least in some areas, becoming porous.
Increasing cross-border interaction and new sub-
and suprastate regionalizations are leading to a
change of formerly closed ‘alienated border-
lands’ to ‘interdependent’ and perhaps finally to
‘integrated borderlands’ (Martinez, 1994). The
assumed isomorphism between territorial and
national integrity is increasingly problematic,
and territory as the source for loyalty and identity
is increasingly divorced from territory as the site
of sovereignty and state control.
On the other hand, the continually increasing
number of states and boundaries suggests quite
opposite tendencies than ideas of the disappear-
ance of borders. The emergence of new states
does not mean that their boundaries should be
closed. Most contemporary boundaries do not
mark the limits where ‘politics ends because the
community ends’ (Balibar, 1998: 220). Cross-
border cooperation has increased during the
whole post-war period, particularly in the current
EU area. Still, some borders are more closed than
others. New emerging spatializations, such as
economic and institutional ‘fortress Europe’ (!)
or, on a broader spatial scale, geopolitically
laden ideas like the ‘clash of civilizations’ may
concomitantly become instruments of exclusion
and a basis for new images of threat against out-
siders (Paasi, 2001).
The debates on globalization and boundaries
force us to reflect on the connections between
territory, political community and democracy.
Democratic societies in the future are likely to
involve increasing openness and porosity of
borders. For example, the relationships between
citizenship and sovereignty, national identity
and political community, and cultural order and
global flows are likely to be negotiated and
renegotiated. If nations are ‘imagined commu-
nities’, it is the same imagination, Appadurai
(1996) argues, that will have to carry us beyond
the nation, even if the contemporary ‘national
imaginary’ has not yet given in to the rise of
non-national, transnational or postnational
claims on loyalty and identity. There is no
reason to assume that moral boundaries or even
notions of ‘home’ and ‘the nation’ should
overlap with the boundaries of our territorial
traps in the current world (Agnew and
Corbridge, 1995). Peace activists, feminists,
environmentalists and anti-capitalist move-
ments, for instance, increasingly ‘cross’ the
state borders in their argumentation and activi-
ties. Similarly environmental problems show
the porousness of boundaries: risk society
knows no national boundaries (Kuehls, 1996;
Lash and Urry, 1994).FUTURE CHALLENGES FOR
BOUNDARY STUDIESA major challenge for research is to develop new
conceptualizations of the changing meanings of
boundaries. Blossoming studies on the roles of
boundaries, cross-border cooperation and trans-
border regionalization in Europe and elsewhere
show that boundaries, identity and citizenship
still matter and will provide important subject
material for border scholars. In this context
the political inevitably bleeds into economic,
cultural and regional. Boundaries should not be
regarded as static territorial lines but should be
understood from a broader socio-cultural per-
spective. Researchers need to emphasize the
social production and everyday reproduction of
territories and boundaries, and their symbolic
meanings in discourses and institutional prac-
tices that occur at all spatial scales.
Boundaries are cultural processes. They are
both symbols and institutions that produce dis-
tinctions between social groups and are produced
by them. As institutions and discourses, bound-
aries are ‘spread’ everywhere into the society,
not only in the border areas. Therefore, bound-
aries are one part of the discursive landscape of
social power that exists in numerous social prac-
tices and discourses in the fields of economy,
administration, legislation and culture. This is
why boundaries do not inevitably vanish when
some structures and practices – for example, in
the field of economy – change as a consequence
of globalization. To the extent that we have
social power networks we will have boundaries.
The boundaries that states create are no longer
the only boundaries that matter, as the state is
re-scaled from above by the processes of globali-
zation and from below by the everyday operation
of flows of peoples, ideas and commodities. We
also have to be sensitive to boundary claims and
representations that social groupings make at
supra- and substate scales. These changes pose
challenges for the politics of boundaries, i.e. the
production and reproduction of physical and
symbolic boundaries in the life of a society, in
which nation and state, for instance, no longer fit
neatly into the territorial trap.
All these processes are expressions of the fact
that states and their identities are never finished
as entities but are ongoing processes and projects
(Campbell, 1992). They force scholars to reflect
on how the meanings and interpretations
attached to boundaries in the processes of state-
and nation-building express state ideologies,
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