Bounded Territoriality: The Roots of the STO

Any intergroup order must be defined by rules of group membership and rules of political authority. Territorial states are the central actors in international relations (IR). But IR scholars have not fully grasped the reasons for and consequences of the dominance of territorial states. The connection between place, identity, and political authority is evident throughout recorded history. Renaissance ideas fundamentally challenged these connections by separating the state from the person of the monarch, claims of authority from kinship, and dynastic rule from religious justification.Footnote ³ During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the cartographic revolution—the rediscovery of Ptolemy, cartography, and the graticule (the grid on the map)—facilitated a new political order that combined place, space, identity, and political authority in powerful ways. In this new STO, claims to rule over and to belong to a group that were once based on principles of shared type were increasingly superseded and supplanted by claims based on the principle of exclusion by area.Footnote ⁴ This process, facilitated by the rapidly spreading use of maps, took centuries to fully consolidate, and first reached its full expression in Europe in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Already by the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, “authority [in Europe] was understood exclusively as a delineated geometric expanse, depicted visually on maps.”Footnote ⁵ Colonial empires exported these processes, using cartography to establish their claims, delimit their holdings, and legitimize their rule in the unexplored lands of the New World,Footnote ⁶ where the kinship and ethnic relations of the populations were unknown, and claims to direct dynastic succession were implausible. The strategy of territoriality was brutally imposed on local populations, but it proved attractive as imperialist rulers back in Europe agreed to use a common standard to delineate claims in the New World: longitude and latitude. Territoriality and linear boundaries were subsequently ensconced in Europe and then imposed in Asia and Africa,Footnote ⁷ though with wide-ranging consequences for the entities that were eventually recognized as sovereign territorial states.Footnote ⁸

The conceptual point is this: clear linear boundaries were attractive for emerging nation states because they helped define group membership.Footnote ⁹ As Ostrom notes, “who is in and who is out of a defined set of relationships and thus with whom to cooperate” is the first essential principle for collective action.Footnote ¹⁰ The project of defining group members is fundamental to the creation and reinforcement of group identities.Footnote ¹¹ Abbott argues that “social identities come into existence when social actors tie social boundaries together in certain ways. Boundaries come first, then entities.”Footnote ¹² Within those borders, rulers worked (often violently) to homogenize entire countries “from above.”Footnote ¹³ By facilitating new spatial identities, the STO did more than demarcate spaces of political authority. It enabled new forms of collective identity and collective action.Footnote ¹⁴ While these identities were by definition statewide in scope, they were not automatically “national” in content. The emphasis on common culture is but one potential statewide group identity.Footnote ¹⁵ Two modern alternatives that come to mind are ideology and religion.

While it often involved violence, the strategy of territoriality was largely successful in the modern era. Maps combined with mass education to produce common knowledge of the standards of group membership.Footnote ¹⁶ In this new era, individuals, whether citizens or rulers, could coordinate on a set of standards and norms to guide their behavior, and this coordination yielded increasing returns. Branch documents the power of coordination and standard setting: “even though officials did not plan to use this map—or perhaps any map—to resolve territorial conflicts, they feared that others would do so, hence making such maps important shapers of the conditions within which [territorial] negotiations would take place.”Footnote ¹⁷ Territorial delimitation, moreover, tended to empower central state rulers, since local disputes would often be referred to them for resolution.Footnote ¹⁸ In a rationalist formulation, defection from the strategy of territoriality will be costly.Footnote ¹⁹ As a result, scholars in various fields argue that boundaries at all levels of scale “are implicated in reducing violence.”Footnote ²⁰ This process had another important consequence: it supported identity formation around notional lines on the earth that created new bonds of belonging, while marginalizing groups who refused to submit to the power of European notions of territorial delimitation.

The STO brought together three distinct but intertwined phenomena: territorial governance, which overtook other claims to political authority by the eighteenth century; the practice of bordering, a tool to govern through exclusion by area, which helped consolidate the state; and identity formation, which was fundamentally shaped by borders. By the twentieth century, territorial sovereignty constituted a core norm of IR.Footnote ²¹ Territorial integrity and international borders were institutionalized as the underlying, nonnegotiable bedrock of the international order from the days of the League of Nations,Footnote ²² and reiterated with the formation of the United Nations.Footnote ²³ Bordered territoriality was so sacrosanct, in fact, that any debate over its central position barely rates a mention in the travaux préparatoires of the UN Charter.Footnote ²⁴

The STO and the LIO: Diverging Theoretical Assumptions

The LIO was a deliberate, if controversial,Footnote ²⁵ post–World War II effort to reorient the divisive nationalism of the first half of the twentieth century toward cooperation, commonality, and efficiency, even while enshrining territorial integrity as a bedrock principle. However, many of the LIO's central institutions at least partly diminished the salience of states’ territorial borders (and thereby their effective authority). The United Nations and the European Coal and Steel Agreement were explicitly designed to resolve potential problems between territorial states at an international level. The International Monetary Fund preserved each territorial state's right to issue currency and to develop national economic priorities, but was designed to stabilize the international monetary system, create obligations for macroeconomic adjustment, and pave the way for border-defying market forces. The International Trade Organization was meant to perforate national barriers to trade, coordinate their reduction, and integrate markets for goods and eventually for services, though it was rebuffed in its initial form and replaced by the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was conceived as universal, and stipulated rights for all human beings, regardless of their location.

Tensions between the newly institutionalized LIO and the old STO are evident in early postwar debates. The International Trade Organization died an early death largely because protectionists in the United States and elsewhere feared it would not permit enough of a firewall between international and national economies.Footnote ²⁶ Debates about human rights exposed the STO's grounding in the bedrock of territorial sovereignty, as opposed to the universalist aspirations of the LIO.Footnote ²⁷ Even cultural rights are framed as belonging universally to individuals, not cultural groups per se.Footnote ²⁸ Group rights had roots in the STO but lacked a firm platform in the LIO, but universal human rights continue to struggle against the competing norm of territoriality. Tensions bubble to the surface in the area of rights of indigenous peoples, where universalizing concepts of nondiscrimination enjoy far greater consensus than a collective right to land.Footnote ²⁹

The central divergence, as we see it, is between liberalism's commitment to universalism, aggregate welfare, and individual utility on the one hand, and theories that assign power and meaning to locale, groups, and bordering on the other. Classical liberal theory does not have especially sharp tools for analyzing the latter. Some liberal thinkers have tried, but the struggle to make sense of space and place is evident in a simultaneous reading of Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations. In the former, Smith echoed the insights of David HumeFootnote ³⁰ and others, asserting that real sympathy among human beings is largely spatial. Smith's theory of “habitual sympathy” was based on the centripetal pull of human proximity and familiarity,Footnote ³¹ or “social distance” in Viner's terms.Footnote ³² It is telling that his notion of spatially dependent sympathy led Smith to expect national “partiality,”Footnote ³³ which was one reason Smith held out very little hope for widespread compliance with “the laws of nations.”Footnote ³⁴ Acknowledging the social glue of local sentiment, Smith nonetheless thought international trade would help overcome “nationalism” and produce peace.Footnote ³⁵ Indeed, he viewed “sovereignty as the maintenance of well-being through the management of [economic] flows.”Footnote ³⁶ That the satisfaction of economic transactions could substitute for that of community is an idea that has been attractive in neoclassical and mainstream economics ever since.

Borders are not easily explained in liberal theory, either. Liberalism's unease with borders—essentially an exercise in distinction drawing—stems from its central commitment to universality. The demos of democratic theory is in principle unbounded.Footnote ³⁷ Yet liberals recognize there is no demos without boundedness. Modern liberals such as Rawls assume a closed political system to be governed.Footnote ³⁸ As Walzer says, “distributive justice presupposes a bounded world within which distributions take place: a group of people committed to dividing, exchanging, and sharing social goods, first of all among themselves.”Footnote ³⁹ Presupposes is the right word: governance itself seems to require such bordering. Benhabib views the dilemma between universal principles and sovereign self-determination as resting at the heart of democratic theory itself.Footnote ⁴⁰ Critical theorists go further, declaring that borders are “a source of embarrassment for liberals of all stripes.”Footnote ⁴¹ Holmes notes that liberalism is “wholly unable to draw territorial boundaries.”Footnote ⁴²

This deficiency in theory and practice is also evident when it comes to human mobility. Nineteenth-century liberals claimed an individual right to emigrate, since “it was wrong to treat man as a ‘passive agent in the hands of authority.’”Footnote ⁴³ Contemporary liberal theorists struggle over the right to exclude people who want to immigrate. On the one hand, Walzer defends border restrictions against migrants on the basis of preserving “communities of character” that give meaning to political life,Footnote ⁴⁴ while on the other hand Carens deploys Nozick, Rawls, and utilitarianism to argue that liberalism offers little justification for limiting migration.Footnote ⁴⁵ The liberal stance on immigration thus remains unreconciled.Footnote ⁴⁶

Liberalism's commitment to universality underlies its relative silence on bordering, group determination, and spatial attachments. Liberal trade theory largely ignores space and dissolves boundaries. Prior to the relatively recent behavioral economics trend, economic models stripped people of their psychologies, their social identities, and their locations.Footnote ⁴⁷ Liberal trade theory largely ignored another (less elegant) branch of economics, location theory, which links value with location relative to markets and not with the quality of inputs alone.Footnote ⁴⁸ Space mattered in such accounts. But liberal economics could not find a theoretically satisfying way to incorporate this observation into their models.Footnote ⁴⁹ Political economy has had a hard time with preferences that are space specific. People and the land they worked were theorized first and foremost as factors of production.Footnote ⁵⁰ Their preferences were largely assumed to be a function of their individual, or their household's, assets and other endowments.Footnote ⁵¹ Independent utility functions assured that economic man meant individual man. The sociotropic turnFootnote ⁵² in research on trade preferences was harder to model but seemed to capture an essential truth: people care about the places where they live; place fundamentally matters to economic behavior. The attachment to place, it turns out, can evoke strong urges to draw distinctions between us and them—that is, to border.

To summarize, there is a tension between liberal theory's emphasis on universality and the necessity in liberal democratic theory to distinguish and hence to bound a polity for purposes of self-governance.Footnote ⁵³ We are not arguing against liberalism. We are arguing that the overlay of a liberal international order over a preexisting territorial one is a source of theoretical and practical tension that has created blind spots for policy, research, and scholarship. These blind spots are the product of intellectual commitments that privilege market integration, aggregate welfare, joint gains, universal rights, and methodological individualism. Far from coevolving in a natural, reciprocal, and irreversible manner, the STO and the LIO have managed to coexist through a series of negotiated agreements, from free trade to open borders to universal human rights, the political support for which has begun to shift in response to the hyperglobalization of the past three decades.

The Identity Reaction

The territorial order was so well ingrained that when challenged by the universalizing, integrating, and aggregating pressures of the LIO, the principle of clearly bounded governance shaped the response. The STO relied on territorial borders, which in turn foster group and identity formation.Footnote ⁵⁴ When borders are weakened—by trade, foreign ownership, immigration, or even “foreign values”—privileged members may experience a sense of external threat. This can prompt what we call an identity reaction: exclusionary identities emerge in other forms to effectively reclaim the group boundaries previously defined by geographic borders. Whereas individuals had previously coordinated on the border and the principle of exclusion by area, in an attempt to maintain the group individuals may recoordinate on type, for example, cultural or ethnic attributes.

Scholars in several disciplines have examined the consequences of the weakening or erasure of borders in the last thirty years. Pelkmans studied how the partitioned village of Sarpy/Sarpi on the border of Turkey and Georgia responded to the fall of the Iron Curtain. The differences created by the closed border did not disappear once it reopened. “Instead, the former cold war border became more ‘truly’ a divide between Islam and Christianity, Georgians and Turks, and Asia and Europe.”Footnote ⁵⁵ The weakening of the border was quickly followed by the recreation of that border in a different form, maintaining local group membership. Cultural distinctions which were largely the result of the old border now set the boundaries of the group and define group membership. Similarly, when East and West Germany reunited, the former border was replaced by a new cultural border that distinguished and effectively maintained the same groups. The new cultural border contrasted East German “socialist” values of “egalitarianism, modesty, solidarity, social security and stability”Footnote ⁵⁶ to “arrogant” West Germans, who ostensibly did not share those values. As Andrews notes, “Ironically, as the Berlin Wall came down, the inner wall—the wall which marked the psychological distance between eastern and western Germany—was for many strengthened.”Footnote ⁵⁷ The erasure of internal European borders as a result of the Schengen Agreement continued this pattern. In the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, and Portugal, border populations have reproduced the erased border and deployed cultural referents that maintain and perpetuate the groups formed by the old international borders.Footnote ⁵⁸

Identity reactions deserve more study. Rationalist perspectives emphasize borders’ power to coordinate group identity, governance privileges, and public (club) goods. When borders fade, other coordinating focal principles, such as cultural type—along race, language, or religious divisions, for example—can emerge to maintain the group and the benefits it brings. Often cultural differentiations closely approximating the earlier state border may (re)gain political salience.Footnote ⁵⁹ Dissolution of the border threatens group cohesion and elicits new forms of group reinforcement. Because falsification by type is easier than falsification of group membership by area, and therefore requires a higher standard of monitoring, in an identity reaction, individuals may adopt starker norms of group identity than existed prior to the border's elision.Footnote ⁶⁰ For example, nationalist groups may threaten internationalists with exclusion, by voting out globalists and electing populist leaders. National in-group members might tap anti-immigrant sentiments or foreign trade suspicions to deter internationalist defection.Footnote ⁶¹ To liberal scholars, the rise of international institutions and transnational networks may look like cooperation; but to local communities, in an ironic reversal of perspective, it may represent defection.Footnote ⁶²

Permeable borders are especially susceptible to such dynamics. Increased mobility has resulted in social profiling to reduce real or perceived threats to dominant national groups. Muslims crossing the “open” border between the United States and Canada, for example, are increasingly identified by country of origin for special scrutiny—an intensified form of social differentiation that can increase identity formation by members of the profiled group.Footnote ⁶³ Around the highly porous Lesotho–South African border, xenophobia has reinforced distinctions between insiders and outsiders, creating barriers to belonging in South Africa.Footnote ⁶⁴ Despite liberalized border trade between India and Pakistan, some studies suggest that “Indian Muslim citizens [have] consistently dealt with the stigma of ‘the enemy within’ and [have] had to prove their credentials as non-threatening citizens within the borders of India.”Footnote ⁶⁵ While copious research documents a “liberal,” or “democratic,” peace, close spatial analysis shows that there may be a good deal of democratic “othering” associated with cross-border liberalization as well.

State Reaction I: Squaring the Circle Through Multiplying Borders

A second response to weakening borders may come from the state, which may be pressured to be “liberal” and “territorial” at the same time. States have incentives to create a bordering logroll that preserves public goods coordination while facilitating openness. Ad hoc arrangements for maintaining control are proliferating, from efforts to regulate the internet, to partially coordinated biometrics, to prescreening goods and travelers, to internal enforcement of immigration law. In a sense, borders now are everywhere.Footnote ⁶⁶ States deploy filters designed to be unobtrusive to the more internationalist membership, even as they develop border policies overtly designed to deter human movement.Footnote ⁶⁷ For example, airports present as shopping havens while obscuring securitization in an effort to provide affluent customers a pleasant experience. Increasingly, solutions to the problem of collective action are multiple, layered, and targeted.

The accretion of these solutions has produced a syncretic territorial state. Some new decision spaces entail solutions that explicitly reject state borders: Bitcoin, Doctors Without Borders, and “increasingly autonomous and private transnational structures, such as financial markets.”Footnote ⁶⁸ In other cases, states are redefining their bordering authority and exerting it in a multitude of locations. Immigration control no longer occurs only at the border. After 9/11, for example, the United States authorized the DHS to “‘assess the security risks of all US-bound travelers and prevent potential threats from reaching US borders.’”Footnote ⁶⁹ What Amoore calls the “biometric” border can operate anywhere for purposes of control, exclusion, and proscription, essentially making a fixed border portable.Footnote ⁷⁰ Imports are no longer checked primarily at the border; preclearance licenses are often issued at the point of production. Some liberal societies now require private landlords to conduct immigration document checks on prospective tenants, essentially turning the private rental market into a border checkpoint.Footnote ⁷¹

These are borders that even a liberal might tolerate because they define belonging while facilitating movement for privileged transactions. But that may be precisely their weakness: multiple and moving borders are no longer clearly legible.Footnote ⁷² The state is perhaps functionally intact, but it is symbolically weakened by manifold and mysterious structures of governance.Footnote ⁷³ Citizens can no longer apply to the syncretic state for redress or resolution. Now the authority to resolve their concerns is vested in an often bewildering array of vertically nonintegrated institutions, leading to “a growing disjunction between the democratic, constitutional, and social aspirations of people—which continue to be shaped by and understood through the framework of the territorial state—and the increasingly problematic potential for collective action through state political processes.”Footnote ⁷⁴ By attempting to situate the LIO on the foundations of a national territorialized order, shifting and disappearing borders may, in Hardin's framework, fail to assuage a nationalist coalition of groups who fear internationalist defection and want to return to an earlier notion of security and belonging, not obscure it with technology or delegate it in multiple directions. For these groups, it may be desirable for the state to provide structures and symbols of secure identity, rather than piecing together its authority willy-nilly.

State Reaction II: Border Reinforcement

Thus, even attempts to square the circle by erecting multiple, moving, and invisible borders may not suffice to address the anxieties of globalization. Instead, many states have doubled down on territoriality by erecting protective structures along their borders. One interpretation is that these policies are meant to legitimate the state's territorial authority, and to solidify a faltering sense of national identity and growing insecurity.

State-created walls and fences are unmistakably on the rise worldwide.Footnote ⁷⁵ Their intensification—decades after the height of the globalization of the 1980s and 1990s—suggests a plausible causal connection. Simmons and Kenwick have developed a concept of “border orientation,” defined as the extent to which the state is committed to the public, authoritative, and spatial display of control over territorial entry and exit at its national borders.Footnote ⁷⁶ This definition captures the idea that (often symbolic) physical border structures are responses to challenges to state territorial authority.Footnote ⁷⁷ While autocratic states score higher on this measure and have accelerated border infrastructure faster than democracies, liberal regimes have accelerated physical border controls as well. Poland, Latvia, and Norway have all announced and built border fences since 2015. The trend has gained momentum elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere. Argentina began to develop a series of small fences in 2015, ostensibly to control border-crossing traffic, and in 2017 Ecuador started building a wall on the Peruvian border to control smuggling. In 2015–16 an American presidential campaign, and in 2018 the longest governmental shutdown in US history, were centered on the contentious matter of walling the southern border of the United States.Footnote ⁷⁸

A growing physical presence at border crossings is especially intriguing. These are the spaces in which states, especially the non-Schengen wealthy democracies, tend to expend the most effort to filter, with structures and symbols that connect and separate, that facilitate and block exit and entry selectively. Satellite images reveal the increasingly dense built environment on each side of the world's international borders, visual evidence of the effort to filter persons, goods and services, and threats at the border crossing. In a sample of countries that include most of the liberal core, political leaders’ populist rhetoric correlates with border orientation as well.Footnote ⁷⁹ Demands for territorial bordering are on the rise, even in this age of globalization.

International organizations have arguably contributed to the acceleration of border reinforcement in some cases. The European Union has long required border reinforcement along its outer edge as a key quid pro quo for joining the liberal Schengen interior. Even so, the migration crisis in Europe occasioned a number of national border controls in the ostensibly visa-free Schengen zone.Footnote ⁸⁰ As borders become places of growing security anxiety, “secure borders” and “border measures” account for a growing share of business in the United Nations Security Council.Footnote ⁸¹ But states rather than intergovernmental organizations are most often at the forefront of border restrictions. Recent anxieties surrounding the coronavirus have intensified the panic to make international borders “secure.” Days after the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 an international pandemic, ninety-two states had closed their land borders, sixty-five had closed their ports, and 109 had suspended international flights.Footnote ⁸² Within a week of the WHO determination, and though the WHO urged states not to do so,Footnote ⁸³ border closures in fifty-eight states were nearly total. Many had doubled down on a narrative that the virus was a foreign threat that could effectively be blocked by sealing national borders against the Other.

International Organization's Liberal Lens

IO is both one of the most influential IR journals in the world,Footnote ⁸⁴ and has done more than any other to advance a liberal view of world politics.Footnote ⁸⁵ IO's widely cited special issues exemplify liberal projects, from transnational relations (1971),Footnote ⁸⁶ to international regimes (1982),Footnote ⁸⁷ to international legalization (2000), to the rational design of international institutions (2001).Footnote ⁸⁸ The common theme is that of states transcending territoriality through networks, cooperation, and international institutions.Footnote ⁸⁹ Interestingly, the version of constructivism favored in some of IO's key articles has focused on international elite socialization and identities; local identities that might resist sociological shifts were given less prominent analysis.Footnote ⁹⁰ This may explain why it was hard for scholars who read and publish in IO to “anticipate the current challenges to the LIO”Footnote ⁹¹: who was minding the growing opposition to the globalization of elite identities back home?Footnote ⁹²

That liberalism is on the defensive and nationalism on the rise around the world is hardly news to anyone following politics, and is widely acknowledged in scholarly research in geography, sociology, and comparative politics. John Ruggie's idea of embedded liberalism reminds us that domestic social purposes shape and constrain international cooperation and globalization. The understanding of such social purposes would benefit from a spatial analysis of identity and attitude formation, national policy agendas, and patterns of globalization. Research should build on insights from theories of social identity that view group membership as fundamental to identity.Footnote ⁹³ Group identity has a strong spatial component: distance attenuates attachments, while borders shape a sense of group membership by delineating ingroups and outgroups—the sociological complement to our argument about the need for spatially defined group coordination of public goods. We call for research on spatialized identities, and how these identities are coordinated by markers of community. This involves detailed attention to the scale of meaningful political activity, research into ways that scale can be muted and manipulated, and study of international and transnational institutional adaptations to recognize the value of clear international borders while acknowledging the threats they can create.

Taking Spatial Preferences Seriously

Globalization has not been experienced as a spatially homogeneous force. Trade shocks from Chinese exports tend to affect regions throughout the world with uncompetitive manufacturing sectors in decline;Footnote ⁹⁴ technological shocks have differently benefited regions where technological spillovers are greatest;Footnote ⁹⁵ a global coronavirus pandemic has hit urban centers especially hard. Local experiences and perceptions matter.Footnote ⁹⁶ We suggest a research agenda that examines the perceived need to alter, elide, and reinforce the boundaries of political space based on these experiences. Andrew Moravcsik's analysis of “ideational liberalism”—a liberal account of politics that explains state preferences as shaped by social identities and values, which in turn are historically and spatially contingent—suggests a liberal framework that recognizes the importance of place and borders for IR.Footnote ⁹⁷ He identifies geographical borders as one of three “essential elements of domestic public order,” and generators of fundamental social dynamics that could in turn drive foreign policy behaviors of the state. Spatialized border politics should be much more closely and deliberately integrated into the growing body of research on immigration, for example.

Globalization has neighborhood effects. These effects have potentially powerful influence on attitudes about inclusion and exclusion. Variation in urban ethnic composition has helped increase tolerance for different ethnic groups,Footnote ⁹⁸ a finding of potential interest for spatial preferences for stronger border control. Ryan Enos has recently proposed that perceptions leading to political action can be influenced by social geography: the size of a group, the proximity between groups, and the extent to which they mix with other groups.Footnote ⁹⁹ He proposes that when a distinctive group emerges in a nearby area, but is largely segregated from another group, backlash is predictable.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ These insights could be unpacked and applied to understand polarization over national border hardening, for example, in the United States, Europe, India, and South Africa. Border control becomes a polarizing issue between communities with very different social geographies.

Spatial preferences and identities should not be confused with cultural preferences and identities. It would be a mistake to conflate attachment to the “nation” with attachment to the territory of the state. A series of survey experiments in Bolivia, Argentina, Colombia, and Thailand demonstrates the power of spatial identities. Respondents were asked about their willingness to sacrifice for the defense of the homeland, and their attitudes toward various attributes of national identity.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Alongside these questions, half of the respondents were shown the outline of a map of their country. These respondents were willing to sacrifice significantly more for the defense of their homeland, compared to the ones who were not primed with the map. However, exposure to the map did not affect attitudes toward co-nationals or feelings of national attachment. These findings do not support the well-known argument by Anderson that maps can be and often are used to foster “national” identities.Footnote ¹⁰² Instead, they reaffirm that coordination on borders does not necessarily align with coordination on type.

We therefore call for new research on spatial identities. Such research might consider how the “nation,” the state, and communities at different scales compete to construct identities. It seems obvious that there often are important political and economic consequences when states redraw their internal administrative boundaries. But since Roeder showed that successful nationalist independence movements typically rely on administrative and not cultural boundaries to delimit their new independent states, we now need to understand how changes in administrative boundaries affect local identity formation.Footnote ¹⁰³ Gavrilis showed that institutions at the border can fundamentally affect interstate relations.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ We need additional studies to examine the effects of different forms of bordering. How do walls, fortifications, and biometric and other diffuse borders affect identity?

Taking spatial preferences seriously acknowledges that distinct spatial identities may exist and interact at different scales. As our reference to Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments suggests, liberals can acknowledge that distance erodes sentiments of commonality and trust. This insight should infuse analyses of the LIO. Research in social psychology has found that distance is correlated with objectification of others, less emotional intensity, and less sense of moral obligation.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Perhaps global integration of markets and pooling of authority has stretched the idea of the polity beyond what can be sustained (i.e., beyond its ability to effectively coordinate social purpose) without relentless efforts to reinforce a more expansive spatial identity. The European Union has faced this problem,Footnote ¹⁰⁶ as Brexit illustrates, but modern states are hardly immune to the perception that governance is not only unaccountable but increasingly distant.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ States as varied as the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and Sudan have been challenged to hold together when local interests and identities clash and gain salience. If distance changes how people think about events, other people, and political authority, then the elision of borders can be expected to affect identity formation.

Political economy research has established that attitudes toward integrating moves such as international trade are not influenced by people's incomes and assets alone, but rather by general attitudes toward citizens of other countries and even differential valuation of the lives of nationals versus foreigners.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Research should continue to probe the spatial limits of neighborliness. Does it extend discontinuously over (bordered) space?Footnote ¹⁰⁹ What are the conditions under which survey respondents have discontinuous preferences across borders? We envision the use of geocoded surveys, and localized text analysis of news publications, social media, and other forms of political dialogue, to tap the sources of identities, preferences, and attitudes in space.

Finally, more research is needed on the consequences of doubling down on border security. We have argued it may assuage fears associated with a debordered world, but there may also be insidious consequences. Border security can be interpreted as a humiliation, as a recent survey of Palestinians traversing West Bank checkpoints has shown.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Border walls and fences may worsen bilateral relations between countries and their citizens. Whether reinforcing distinctions in physical space antagonizes outsiders, thus inflaming bilateral relationships, is an important and policy-relevant area for future research.

Aggregating Preferences into National Choices

Preferences alone do not constitute national policies, nor are they inevitable or immutable. We need much more research on how political leaders and institutions accommodate or resist the tensions between the LIO and the STO. Many liberal internationalists assume that border hardening went out with the fall of the Berlin Wall. They also often interpret structures at border crossings and new technologies at airports as effectively designed to make cross-border transactions easier. This is only partially true. We believe the question is not whether states are successfully blocking their borders, but rather whom and what are they attempting to filter, and why.

We also need a deeper understanding of how anxieties about globalization are aggregated at a national scale. Leaders may depend on specific kinds of political coalitions that can be consolidated and strengthened by privileging nationals while “othering” nonnationals and marginalized citizens. IR theorists have leaned very heavily on democratic institutions to explain international behavior. They have yet to investigate how domestic institutions, such as the US Senate, magnify or assuage sentiments in particular geographic spaces, and with what implications for participation in the LIO. Attention should also be drawn to the internal borders that (re)produce values of exclusion nationally and internationally. Skewing preference aggregation through gerrymandered electoral districts is another technique that may benefit powerful but declining interests and their perspectives on hardening the border, for example, to immigration. In short, when we take geographic preferences seriously it becomes necessary to go beyond how democratic a polity is, and to consider how institutions (over)represent spatially clustered attitudes in the policy process.

Political leaders are central to the domestic politics of bordering. Leaders’ manipulation of maps, information, and rhetoric becomes extremely important. Populist rhetoric may be associated with the reassertion of the territorial order vis-à-vis the LIO. Rodrik relates the rise of populism, on both the left and the right, to specific global economic shocks. Populists from the left are often concerned with combatting threats from trade and investment, while those on the right are often concerned with immigration and refugees.Footnote ¹¹¹ One conception of populism clearly distinguishes two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, a “corrupt elite” and a “pure people”—concepts that are often racially and nationally exclusive.Footnote ¹¹² Another framing sees populism as emerging from fissures between “globalists” and “territorialists,” which transect traditional left–right divides.Footnote ¹¹³ Left or right, both varieties of populism are largely anti-establishment, anti-elite, and, crucially, anti-globalization. Politicians may opportunistically tap these currents by highlighting border security and exclusivity as a salve to (dis)affected groups. We hypothesize that both functional and symbolic border displays are increasingly attractive under these circumstances.Footnote ¹¹⁴ How political entrepreneurs in the “core” liberal democracies manage these tensions could have a significant impact on the stability of the LIO.

We also welcome research that gives a hard kick to the tires of our analysis. Have the allegedly disappearing borders of the modern state in fact made national collective action harder? In the 1990s, IR theorists thought that the “residual” state was losing legitimacy because the scale of specialization under global forces would make it harder for states to provide collective goods.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Class-based, geographically concentrated fears (of being “left behind” with massive fiscal burdens, low investment, and a host of cultural “others” depressing wages and demanding services) grow when global forces overtake national ones, in turn fueling demands for clearer borders to define who pays into and who benefits from collective effort.