The first response for many is that this is an unrealizable pipe dream, and not even a positive one. A borderless world—for all its promises of freedom and harmony—is fraught with all kinds of problems as well. I would wager that the most common possible problem in the reader’s mind is a fear of security. A borderless world likely conveys fears of terrorists moving about at will with their threats and acts of violence on a defenseless people.

There are some who might argue that a borderless world would be a cultureless world. That without distinct national, sovereign boundaries, our world would descend into a single homogenous corporate Amero-culture. My first response is, what does that say about the culture each of us helps create and define each day? Our great fear is that the culture we have created would be a plague on the world. If not completely unsettling, what that indicates about who we’ve become is at least a little tragic.

However, maybe this is not how a borderless world would have to be. What if we could live in a safe and free world that did not cling desperately to culture in the face of overwhelming capitalistic domination? What if culture the world over thrived and blossomed—not in spite of a borderless world, but because of it? Could this really be so?

Why do nations exist? Why did states come to be? Well, in a world before flight and worldwide transportation, resources had to be protected. In a finite world of limited resources, this was the single greatest reason for war. Someone else wanted what you had and the easiest way to get it was by force. National boundaries were established in an attempt to end the constant battle for resources. It was a pragmatic solution to the constant bloodshed that plagued the world. And it worked—at least some of the time.

That was before international trade. That was before oil. That was before