Borders and Belongings

For some commentators it seems that the combined effects of global flows of information, investment, trade and people across national borders mean that we are heading in the direction of a “borderless world”, in Kenichi Ohmae's phrase. ¹ At its crudest, this argument is represented by Ohmae himself as a matter of technology making natural borders obsolete, as the process of what he calls “California-isation” produces universally homogenous forms of consumer culture, focused on global brands. In a world where global capital markets set severe limits to what any national government can do, the idea of the nation-state as the basic form of organisation of human affairs is, for Ohmae, “increasingly a nostalgic fiction”. In this scenario, he claims, we face a global logic which is slowly but surely “dissolving the fabric holding nation states together” alongside the “progressive globalisation of markets for consumer goods”. ² In this vision, the nation-state has simply been by-passed by history and operates at a level of aggregation which makes it dysfunctional for the organisation of economic activity in the global marketplace.