As tens of thousands of people crossed from Morocco towards Spain’s enclave of Ceuta in a single day, the question of what borders are actually for returned with renewed force. For philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, the answer is straightforward: the world still needs them.
“Only one answer – yes,” Appiah told Die Zeit in an interview published as part of the German newspaper’s “Nur eine Frage” series. But his argument is not a defence of closed borders or unrestricted state authority. Instead, he sees borders as part of a political structure in which different communities can govern themselves, experiment with different systems and prevent excessive power from accumulating in a single centre.
Appiah, who teaches philosophy and law at New York University, has spent decades examining questions of identity, origin and belonging. Born in London and raised in Kumasi, Ghana, he studied at Cambridge. His book Cosmopolitanism helped shape an influential intellectual tradition, while The Lies That Bind contributed to debates about identity. Barack Obama awarded him the National Humanities Medal, and he is president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. For more than a decade, he has also answered questions about everyday morality in his “The Ethicist” column in The New York Times Magazine.
His starting point is deceptively simple. If societies believe that states and nations are necessary, then those political communities must be able to determine who belongs to them. A state, by definition, is a community with some form of membership. That does not mean its borders must be difficult to cross. Nor does it mean that governments possess unlimited authority over entry.
For Appiah, the deeper question comes first: why have separate nations at all? A single global state could eliminate many of the restrictions created by national borders, although practical rules governing movement might still be necessary.
Yet he rejects the idea that a single global political centre would necessarily be an improvement. A world state could make some international problems easier to solve and make tax evasion more difficult. But concentrating political power in one institution would create another danger. If that central system failed or abused its authority, there would be no comparable political force outside it capable of correcting the problem.
The advantage of having different states, in Appiah’s view, is therefore partly institutional. Political power can remain decentralised. Different jurisdictions can experiment with different policies, while smaller political units can act as counterweights to central governments.
He points to the United States as an example. The division of authority among government, parliament and courts was designed to prevent excessive executive power, while federalism gives individual states room to pursue their own political solutions. Massachusetts, for example, tested a health reform under Republican governor Mitt Romney before the model was adopted nationally and became known as “Obamacare”.
Borders also help define political communities in which people are prepared to make sacrifices for one another. Appiah argues that democracy does not require cultural, religious or linguistic uniformity. Switzerland has four national languages, South Africa has eleven and Canada has two. What matters more is a sense of belonging to the same political community.
That sense of belonging can have tangible consequences. Appiah describes the welfare state as one expression of solidarity. He pays more in taxes than he personally receives in benefits because he accepts redistribution to other Americans. Wealthier parts of the United States contribute more to the federal system, while poorer states such as Mississippi receive more because their needs are greater. Such arrangements depend on a sense of common membership.
This does not mean that obligations stop at national borders. Appiah’s cosmopolitanism requires concern for people beyond one’s own political community. But he distinguishes between the particular solidarity generated by citizenship and the broader responsibilities people have as members of humanity.
Borders also serve practical functions. States need to determine who qualifies for public services and how those services are financed. They enable political communities to make decisions at different levels, following the principle of subsidiarity: decisions should be taken as close as possible to the people affected by them.
Appiah traces another historical function of borders to the development of settled societies. As agriculture, cities and complex economies emerged, communities accumulated resources that needed protection. He uses ancient Rome as an example. A city of enormous scale required grain from surrounding territories, creating a need to control access to those resources and regulate movement.
The same logic, he argues, eventually became associated with property and political authority. Once societies accumulated fields, mines, livestock and other resources, controlling access became essential. Borders became one mechanism through which that control could be exercised.
But Appiah rejects the idea that national identity requires cultural uniformity. Identity, he argues, has several dimensions: it establishes who belongs, gives members a sense that belonging matters and affects how people are treated. National identities are therefore social constructions rather than simple statements of historical truth.
They can also be built around incomplete stories. In The Lies That Bind, Appiah examined how communities are often held together by narratives that simplify or omit uncomfortable aspects of history. He cites the United States’ long-standing emphasis on freedom while overlooking the fact that many of its founders were slaveholders.
For Appiah, acknowledging such contradictions is preferable to pretending they do not exist. The same principle applies to Germany’s history. The decades of separation between East and West Germany produced different political, economic and social experiences. Yet those differences have gradually diminished since the fall of the Berlin Wall as people move between the former East and West and live together again.
The challenge, he argues, is not to erase those differences but to ensure comparable educational and living opportunities across the country.
His approach to identity is similarly pluralistic. Appiah describes himself simultaneously as a New Yorker, an American and a citizen of the world. Each identity creates different responsibilities. Local citizenship brings one set of obligations, national citizenship another, while global citizenship requires cooperation on issues that transcend borders, including climate change, economic development and pandemics.
This layered understanding of identity also shapes his view of migration. States have a right to control their borders, but that right has ethical limits. People with credible claims to asylum should at least temporarily be admitted. Migrants must be treated as equal human beings, even when they do not possess the same rights as citizens. People should not be prevented from living with their spouses, and exclusion based solely on origin or skin colour is, in his view, racist and morally wrong.
At the same time, Appiah maintains that societies have a legitimate interest in shaping their political and cultural arrangements. The ethical question is therefore not whether borders should exist, but what governments are morally permitted to do through them.
That distinction becomes particularly important as migration pressures increase. Appiah argues that border policy cannot be separated from foreign policy, development assistance and trade policy. If people are willing to risk their lives and those of their children to cross a border, the conditions they are escaping from must also be considered.
Global solidarity, however, does not come naturally. Appiah points to the psychological difficulty of responding to suffering on a massive scale. People tend to react more strongly to the suffering of an identifiable individual than to statistics involving thousands or tens of thousands of people.
Yet moral responsibility cannot be determined solely by immediate emotion. People may not be capable of feeling the suffering of every individual in the world, but they can still recognise an obligation to help those who are suffering.
Climate change offers one example of a problem that could create a broader sense of shared responsibility. Appiah notes that some communities, particularly inhabitants of vulnerable island states, face consequences created by a global problem. But misinformation, short-term thinking and reluctance to accept immediate costs continue to obstruct stronger collective action.
The future of borders will depend partly on how these pressures evolve. Climate change could force people to move from regions that become uninhabitable, while improving living conditions in poorer countries could reduce some of the economic pressures driving migration. Ageing societies in Europe could also have stronger incentives to permit migration as they require younger workers in sectors such as healthcare.
Economic integration creates another tension. Small political units can strengthen solidarity and decentralised decision-making, but too many borders can impede trade. Appiah points to Africa, where moving goods between cities such as Lagos and Accra can involve multiple customs and passport controls, making economic cooperation more difficult.
He does not believe the answer is necessarily larger states or a single global government. Different political communities can pursue different models, provided they respect basic international obligations and human rights.
That is perhaps the central principle running through his argument. There does not need to be one universal political system. Democracies can take different forms, and societies can legitimately disagree about the balance between public and private services or how their institutions should operate.
But there is one area where Appiah sees a universal standard: human rights.
The internet has connected people across borders without eliminating difference, and Appiah sees that as a strength rather than a failure. Cosmopolitanism, in his understanding, does not mean making everyone alike. It means remaining interested in people precisely because they are different.
For that reason, he does not envisage a borderless future as the inevitable endpoint of globalisation. If different societies continue to exist and retain the freedom to experiment with different political arrangements, borders will remain necessary to define political membership.
The hope, however, is that they become less fearful places. Appiah does not predict what the world will look like in 50 years. But his preference is clear: a world of different societies, dispersed political power and different democratic experiments, combined with fewer reasons for people to flee their homes.
Borders, in that vision, do not disappear. Their moral purpose changes. They remain instruments for organising political communities, but they must operate within ethical limits and universal human rights.
For Appiah, the world still needs borders. What it does not need is a world in which crossing them means abandoning humanity.
