Borders Erased, Borders Created, Borders Blurred

Zagreb, Croatia

It is a symbol of hope really. Public buildings all across this city display not only the red, white and blue checks of the Croatian national flag, but also the ring of twelve gold stars on a blue field that is the flag the European Union. The funny thing though is that Croatia isn’t a member of the EU, not yet. A lot of people here hope that it will be soon.

For the moment, Croatia is blocked from EU entrance because it hasn't handed over a former general who is under indictment with the international criminal tribunal dealing with war crimes from the Serbian wars of the 1990s. Some people here consider the general involved a hero but mostly no one can find him. A Croatian friend noted to me that the country's entrance to the EU is going to be really screwed up if the guys turns out to be dead and is never found.

So here is a nation that for much of this century was an independent republic, then got swallowed into a forced Yugoslavia, spent the 1990s in a bloody break-up with its neighbors, especially the Serbs, and now is aching to become a part of a united Europe, just as Europe (after big public votes in France and Holland) is starting to look a whole lot less bent toward uniting.

It all begs the question – what is a country now?

I am a big fan of globalization. I am a gringo living in Andes with three Bolivian kids. How can I not have a stake in the boundaries of the world being torn down and something more unified being constructed in place of those lines?

Should we be fearful that, in the midst of all this mixing and blurring of boundaries, that cultures will be absorbed, that those places where each people most expresses its uniqueness will disappear? Is an American shopping mall the truest vision of the world's collective future?

I have asked that here in Croatia, where the unique culture of a people is held in high regard. The answer one friend gave me was this. Just as we are unifying across nations and cultures in some ways, in others we are more dedicated than ever to protecting what is unique in our culture. I think she has a point.

Croatia celebrates its music and art.

Bolivians celebrate indigenous rituals that are centuries old.

Our hearts want to hold on to these things, even as economics wants to make us more the same.

The populations of the world, especially the young, are on the march. Corporations and the wealthy have argued for decades that capital ought to be able to run free, like water, downhill to wherever it can make the most profit. Workers want to do the same.

Young Bolivians flock to Barcelona to watch children and wait tables. Young Hungarians and Poles want to head to London to do the same. Mexicans, Guatemalans and others head to California. Vigilantes head to the southern border to keep them out, following in the footsteps of those who didn't want my grandparents to come a hundred years ago.

People will go where they find opportunity. As long as opportunity is a resource divided with unbelievable inequality between some parts and others, people who live where opportunity resides in abundance had better expect visitors. Some of those visitors will stay just for a time and go home (as many, many immigrants do) and some will make a life. And most will miss home, bring something of it with them, and we'll all be better off for it.