Nation, state and identity at international borders

According to some scholars, we are living in a world where state borders are increasingly obsolete. This view holds that international borders are becoming so porous that they no longer fulfil their historical role as barriers to the movement of goods, ideas and people, and as markers of the extent and power of the state. This withering away of the strength and importance of international borders is linked to the predicted demise of the nation-state as the pre-eminent political structure of modernity. The threatened passing of the state, in turn, heralds the weakening of most of the world's existing political, social and cultural structures and associations. As a result, the role of individuals in these structures is called into question, especially in terms of their loyalties and identities. In line with this fall-off in the determinative power of traditional political statuses is the rise of the new politics of identity, in which the definitions of citizenship, nation and state vie with identities which have acquired a new political significance, such as gender, sexuality, ethnicity and race, among others, for control of the popular and scholarly political imaginations of the contemporary world. Moreover, these processes are supposedly accelerating, continually shifting the ground upon which nation-states once stood, changing the framework of national and international politics, creating new and important categories of transnationalism, and increasing the significance and proliferation of images and a host of other messages about the relevance of 'other' world cultures in the everyday lives of us all.