Why left-wingers should care about borders

Anyone who has ever found themselves within earshot of a middle class communist will have heard that, like most things disliked by progressives, national borders are fundamentally racist. They’re just imaginary lines arbitrarily drawn on a map that, much like biological essentialism, exist only to stoke hate and division. They are ugly reminders of a parochial and outdated nationalism that has no place in our fluid modern world. But one thing that gets overlooked by the progressive left is that they are also essential to making their redistributive economic fantasies function in reality — and that, without firm borders, their public spending plans are about as useful as leafleting Santa.

Although border controls are seen as a right-wing issue these days, while welfare is viewed as a cause of the left, it was actually Dominic Cummings’ political idol, Prussian iron chancellor Otto von Bismarck, that implemented the first modern state-backed social security measures back in the 1880s. Sweden’s social democrats began to build upon this in the 1930s before other Nordic countries followed suit, progressively expanding the social safety net over the following decades until eventually arriving at the universalist welfare state that uniformed leftists erroneously hold up as an example of actual functioning socialism in the 1950s. Yet this sort of high tax social democracy has only ever existed on a nation-state level. And nation-states do not exist without borders and a distinct political community of citizens that comprise the nation.

These uncomfortable truths will be anathema to the modern progressive left, which regards borderphobia as a key article of faith. Zack Polanski’s Green party, perhaps the most fanatical representative of the prog-left worldview active in contemporary politics today, has committed to essentially abolishing borders and citizenship in all but name. Yet the golden age of social democracy that flourished across the West in the years that followed World War II was made possible by the fact that both people and capital were confined within national borders. This meant that governments had far greater control over the economic actors upon which redistribution depended.

Financial assets were so immobile in those days that anyone who wanted to hide their earnings in some tropical tax haven offshore had to physically carry it out of the country in big bags of cash. Solid national borders made it much easier to police capital flight, tax economic activity, and redistribute resources within a bounded political community. This became increasingly difficult with the rise of global finance and the technology that made globalisation possible and weakened national borders to their current state of porousness.

In 1996, the German economist Fritz Scharpf made the argument that markets, especially capital markets, had become transnational faster than democratic politics had. National electorates could still vote for redistribution, but governments found it increasingly difficult to act on those mandates because the tax base and the firms they sought to regulate were no longer securely contained within national jurisdictions. In effect, the economic space had outgrown the political one, which made the global economy larger than any single nation state.

Dani Rodrik made a similar argument in more direct terms several years later. According to Rodrik, international capital mobility creates a structural difficulty for redistribution because capital can evade taxation more easily. The more mobile it becomes, the harder it is for states to sustain generous welfare commitments without weakening investment or competitiveness. Digital technology had transformed money from a physical commodity into numbers on a screen that could be transferred across the world with the click of a button, which gave the rich far more leverage over political parties that threatened to tax a greater share of their wealth on the campaign trail. 

At the same time, nominally centre-left politicians like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair compensated for their submission to the free market by leaning even harder into a post-national liberalism that chimed with the third worldist instincts of the old left. But far from representing a modern update to social democracy, this attitude only accelerated its demise. Whenever lefties talk about economics, they inevitably put all of their focus on public spending while evading the question of solidarity — that is the willingness of citizens to accept large and continuous transfers of income to those worse off than themselves. It’s often overlooked that the height of social democracy preceded the arrival of mass migration and it was at its most successful in countries like the Nordics, which had small, ethnically and culturally homogenous populations. Welfare was incompatible with post-national politics both on economic and cultural grounds.

The high taxation that generous and well-functioning welfare states rely on can be far more easily justified if the electorate can be convinced to treat the nation as a sort of extended family united by common ancestry and shared ethno-cultural bonds. The “system” that people pay into isn’t presented as a redistributive bureaucratic machine, but a community that has been built collectively over many generations by the forebears of its individual members. As soon as you start letting foreigners into such a community, solidarity understandably starts to crumble because it’s glaringly evident that new arrivals haven’t contributed to building that community. Their contributions pale by comparison even after multiple generations because it’s still common knowledge that the natives have been there for far longer.

David Goodhart made this point more than 20 years ago to predictable outrage. The notion that there might be limits to human compassion, or that ethnicity, culture, and national belonging are a far stronger basis for collectivism than “Mr Blobby patriotism” is heretical to a progressive worldview that only believes in limits on individual wealth. As we can see from the Green party’s migration policies, the modern left wants collectivism without a genuine collective – that’s if you discount fuzzy notions about common humanity that disintegrate as soon as normal people come into contact with weird foreign practices like cousin marriage or taharrush gamea.

Unsurprisingly, this doesn’t pass the sniff test for the average tax payer, which is one of the reasons why the Nordic welfare model began to unravel as these societies grew increasingly diverse. The great irony is that the politics of redistribution is actually underpinned by the very conservative principle of compulsory obligation: it is the natives that have to show endless tolerance and compassion while migrants are allowed to build their own parallel societies that resemble the ones that they emigrated from. Any expectations of mutual obligation, like assimilating into the native host culture, are inevitably rejected with crocodile tears about white privilege and post-colonial debt. But far from contributing to social cohesion, this only makes social democratic politics even more untenable.

An inconvenient reality for the progressive left is that there aren’t many examples of ethnically diverse societies that are as generous or extensive as the full-fat social democracies that existed in homogenous Europe in the second half of the 20th century. The closest example is probably Mauritius. But there are two critical differences that set it apart from Europe.

According to the African Journal of Elections, Mauritius “has no indigenous population and essentially comprises people of immigrant origin.” This obviously isn’t the case for European nations, which all have native ethnic groups with centuries-old cultural traditions that are racially distinct from the vast majority of their migrant populations. Despite what official UK government propaganda might tell you, Britain is not a nation of immigrants, Mauritius is. In reality, Britain is a country with a lot of immigrants and an indigenous population that isn’t nearly as attached to its distinct national folklore as continental European ethnic groups are. 

So, as a true immigrant nation, Mauritius doesn’t have to deal with the deeply emotional antagonisms that diversity creates. The fact that everybody knows that their roots lie somewhere else probably makes welfare more workable under these conditions. But ot’s also important to note that Mauritius spends a significantly lower percentage of government revenue on its social safety net than Sweden does, which might in itself point to a potential limitation of diversity. We can only speculate whether this solidarity would endure under the pressure of a Nordic tax burden. Mauritius also doesn’t have to deal with the sort of migration levels that Europe has endured over the last few decades. Its comparative lack of development to our own societies also makes it a poor parallel. In that regard, Singapore is a much better comparison: the city-state is home to a cohesive multi-ethnic society where the native Malay population is actually vastly outnumbered by the Chinese majority by a factor of 5.5-to-1.

Singapore’s most socially democratic feature is its vast stock of public housing. Around 80 percent of Singaporeans live in homes built by the state. There are various other social provisions like healthcare subsidies but they are underwritten by authoritarian measures like compulsory saving. The country has been ruled by a single party since its foundation, it imprisons those who criticise the government, and ranks 14 places lower than Hungary — which was frequently described as a dictatorship by progressives — on the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index. Far from being a social democracy, Singapore is more of a paternalistic autocracy with, it deserves to be said, strict immigration policies and tightly-enforced borders.

Again, this illustrates just how impossible it is to make like-for-like comparisons between different welfare models in countries that bear no resemblance to one another. Far from being a product of some sort of enlightened humanist universalism, welfare states are born out of the unique local circumstances of the nations that created them. Predictably, progressives will counter this historical reality with constructivist arguments about how the future is unwritten and just because things were done a certain way in the past it doesn’t mean that they can’t be done differently. Perhaps they are right, maybe Europe can develop a multiethnic solidarity to sustain the existing welfare model. But this still can’t be done with the sort of laissez-faire border policies promoted by Zack Polanski. And this isn’t even a political argument; it’s a practical point about state-building.

In his book Seeing Like a State, author James C. Scott argued that modern states first had to make societies legible before they could govern effectively. Census-taking, land registration, surnames, and population records were more than boring bureaucratic procedures; they were the tools by which states learned who their subjects were, where they lived, what they owned, what could be taxed, and how this could be budgeted for purposes of public spending.

The anti-border obsession of the progressive left isn’t merely anti-nationalism, it’s also anti-social democracy

Without this information, a state cannot create a tax base. Without a tax base they cannot finance welfare programs. Without tightly-controlled borders, the state is unable to maintain accurate information that it relies on to keep these systems running because it cannot keep track of how many taxpayers, welfare claimants, citizens, and foreigners, are on its territory at any given time. Yes, borders discriminate, but they also enable taxation and redistribution. This means that the anti-border obsession of the progressive left isn’t merely anti-nationalism, it’s also anti-social democracy. This isn’t even a rightwing take. The famed economic sociologist Wolfgang Streeck has written extensively about the national component to redistributive economics. Streeck is nothing if not a man of the left. He’s just a rare example of one who recognises that socialism and social liberalism aren’t compatible.

With this month’s local elections unleashing a green wave of victories for Polanski’s moocher lefty raving party, many on the right will inevitably worry about whether the inevitable progressive surge might carry over into the next general election. To them I would say this: fear not, because even if they do enter government, the gaping internal contradictions of the prog-left worldview mean that their political project will be impossible to implement in reality until they learn to love borders.