Twenty-seven years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, 25 years after the adoption of the Schengen Agreement and 26 years after the publication of Kenichi Ohmae's The Borderless World, borders are back. Why did so many think that borders are going away? And why should we be surprised that they have never left? The answer has to do with how we thought about and misunderstood the consequences of globalization.
The reality is that globalization actually empowers locality, and intensifies the need for protecting locality. In other words, we will have more borders, not fewer, and more walls because we are building more bridges. The change that we are witnessing will exalt borders precisely because they are being rendered more vulnerable. And the task for policymakers is to realize this and to recognize that it will demand greater cross-border cooperation rather than less....