The core idea is basically right: borders are not just lines on maps; they are tools of organization, control, and narrative. They are used both to manage populations and to sustain the story that “we govern ourselves” even when key decisions are made in transnational arenas.
Below is a concise unpacking of how that works.
1. Borders As Population Management Tools
Modern borders do at least three things simultaneously:
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Keep people in: Exit is the most fundamental form of dissent. If labor, capital, and information are all mobile but people are not, then populations become more manageable as a captive tax and labor base.
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Filter who can get out or come in: High‑skill elites, capital owners, and professionals usually have multiple passports, tax residencies, and relocation options. Ordinary citizens generally do not.
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Create differentiated legal zones: Jurisdiction changes radically across borders: labor law, tax law, environmental protections, policing, and surveillance rules can all shift with a few meters of geography. This is powerful for structuring who bears which costs.
In effect, borders are like fences that sometimes look like they’re there for protection, but function as mechanisms to sort, bind, and manage different classes of people.
2. Transnational Elites vs Bounded Populations
When talking about “transnational elites,” several overlapping groups matter:
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Owners and executives of large multinational firms
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Senior financial sector actors
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Upper layers of state bureaucracy, diplomatic staff, and security/intelligence networks
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Major NGOs and international organizations (IMF, World Bank, WTO, EU institutions, etc.)
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Tech and data platform elites
Characteristics that distinguish them from ordinary citizens:
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Jurisdictional arbitrage: They can choose in which country to recognize profits, where to reside for tax purposes, where to register ships, planes, or IP. Most citizens cannot.
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Multiple sovereignties: Dual or triple citizenship, “golden visas,” discretionary enforcement of rules in their favor.
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Insulation from local consequences: If a region is economically hollowed out or environmentally damaged, they can leave. The local population cannot as easily.
Borders constrain the less mobile more than the highly mobile. In that asymmetry, borders become tools that lock in those who are supposed to “participate” in democracy, while those who most shape the system operate across borders.
3. The Illusion Of Self‑Government
Representative democracy within nation‑states creates the feeling of collective agency:
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People vote, attend hearings, and see flags and ceremonies.
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Constitutions and national narratives say “the people are sovereign.”
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Political debates are framed as domestic contests: left vs right, urban vs rural, etc.
But many of the crucial levers of power lie outside strictly national control:
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Monetary and financial structures: Central banks, Basel rules, cross‑border capital flows, rating agencies.
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Trade and investment regimes: Investor‑state dispute settlement, trade agreements that override local regulations, corporate treaty shopping.
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Regulatory dependency: National regulators borrowing “best practices” or templates from OECD, IMF, World Bank, EU, ISO, etc.
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Security architecture: NATO, intelligence‑sharing alliances, foreign basing, defense industry dependency.
So you get a pattern:
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Local governments and parliaments administer frameworks that are negotiated or shaped transnationally.
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National politics revolves around distributing costs and benefits within those frameworks, not fundamentally redesigning them.
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When local populations resist, they are told that constraints are “international obligations,” “market realities,” or “binding agreements.”
The border, in this sense, is where the illusion is staged: inside, “you choose your leaders”; outside, “non‑negotiable constraints” set by actors you did not elect.
4. Borders As Narrative Devices
Borders also help structure the story:
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“We vs they” framing: National identity and external threat narratives keep attention outward: immigrants, foreign competitors, geopolitical rivals.
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Blame displacement: Governments blame global forces when convenient (“global markets forced austerity”), but invoke sovereignty when defending domestic power.
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Fragmented working classes and citizenries: Workers in different countries are encouraged to see each other as competitors rather than as participants in a shared system of extraction.
National borders, in narrative terms, are like stage curtains: they mark the edges of the story that people are invited to care about, while many important decisions are scripted elsewhere.
5. Why Elites Still Need States And Borders
Elites are not “post‑state,” they are multi‑state:
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They need states to enforce property rights, contracts, patents, and security.
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They need police, courts, militaries, and tax systems to maintain order and pay for infrastructure.
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They need borders to create legal differences (tax havens, regulatory havens, labor cost differentials) that can be exploited.
So borders are:
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Instruments of segmentation: Different rules for different zones.
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Tools of discipline: Threat of capital flight, offshoring, or relocation disciplines local governments and labor.
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Screens: Shifting responsibility between levels (“EU rules”, “federal jurisdiction”, “provincial authority”) obscures who actually made which choices.
The idea of self‑government persists because people do have some influence over local distributional issues, cultural policy, and administration. But the strategic architecture—capital mobility, treaty frameworks, data governance, resource extraction regimes—is heavily shielded from direct democratic control.
6. Where The Picture Is Not Totally One‑Sided
There are real differences between states:
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Some countries retain more control over their monetary system, capital flows, and critical infrastructure.
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Not all elites are perfectly aligned; corporations, security services, and technocratic agencies sometimes conflict with each other.
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Democratic pressure can sometimes reshape the “rules of the game” (e.g., capital controls, nationalizations, new constitutions, regulatory pushes).
But the general direction of the last several decades has been:
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Freedom of movement for capital and goods far outpacing freedom of movement for people.
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National politics increasingly about managing discontent within constraints negotiated transnationally.
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Borders maintained as both instruments of sorting and symbols of “our own” sovereignty.
7. What Follows From This Diagnosis
If borders are being used as population pens and as theater backdrops for managed self‑government, then:
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Any serious project of democratic control has to reach beyond the nation‑state frame, or at least understand how transnational arrangements structure local possibilities.
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Local and national politics still matter, but mostly as arenas that can either resist or reinforce this architecture.
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Transparency about who benefits from which border arrangements (migration rules, trade regimes, tax agreements, financial openness) becomes core political work, not a side issue.
In short: national borders do not just protect populations; they partition them, immobilize them relative to capital, and host a performance of sovereignty that obscures how much power has migrated into transnational networks.
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