Brexit is about drawing lines on maps and hearts. In that respect it is at odds with the 1998 Good Friday agreement which sought to erase them.Savour that one: Brexit draws line on maps and hearts.
I have argued before about the nature of borders and the way some people see them as sacrosanct divisions of identity rather than man-made concepts to separate one administrative area from another. The people on each side of the border are the same and frequently closely related, as they are in Ireland.
We can blame John of Gaunt and his puppet master, Will Shakespeare, for encouraging our insular attitude in the sceptred isle speech: This fortress built by Nature for herself Against infection and the hand of war, This happy breed of men, this little world, This precious stone set in the silver sea, Which serves it in the office of a wall Or as a moat defensive to a house, Against the envy of less happier lands.
If that last line does not breed British exceptionalism, it is hard to know what does.
As John of Gaunt reminds us, the borders of our island are very visible and we easily confuse these with the borders of our nation, ignoring the separate identities of the constituent nations: Scots, Welsh, Irish and ...
Those on mainland Europe are all too familiar with borders which run through fields and besides country lanes, just as we now have in Ireland where the border even runs through houses. After hundreds of years of thinking that our border was wet, the government has no idea how to cope with a land border. Their natural instinct would no doubt be to erect a Trumpian wall against alien invaders but they are hamstrung by the Good Friday Agreement.
Borders are at the heart of Brexit: whether, as a nation, we are to draw a line on our border in the manner of the past or whether, like the rest of the world, we are to adopt a more flexible and participatory approach, working in partnership with larger groups.
This is a challenge of globalisation.
Being global has its risks of course. In an excellent TED talk from soon after the referendum vote, social scientist Professor Alexander Betts Professor Betts characterises Leavers as being fearful of a globalised world while internationalists, he says, embrace it, determined to reap the benefits of greater engagement, greater dialogue, greater trade, greater inter-connectedness and greater peace.
Peace? Yes, peace. In his now-famous Special Place in Hell speech Donald Tusk reminded us that The EU itself is first and foremost a peace project. Peace can only come through greater understanding and greater trust - the breaking down of barriers: intellectual globalisation.
Many of the problems that the world faces are ones which are going to need global solutions: climate change, managing the internet (almost the definition of a global industry), ensuring people and companies pay tax, corruption, smooth trade ... Solutions to these will only come from global approaches.
The efforts of 193 individual countries as individuals will be in vain. There needs to be concerted international action at a pace faster than has so far proved possible, by negotiations between blocs or groups of countries with common interests.
Take the internet as an example There is a perceived need to 'control' some of the activities of social media organisations like Twitter and Facebook although it can be embarrassing to see how out of touch our legislators can be about the workings of such companies: witness the exchanges between US Senators and Mark Zuckerberg.
The UK government tried to call Zuckerberg to account with a complete lack of success. Why should he respond? His company is based in the US and this is his controlling legislation. If we, in the UK, want to use his products then the UK government has no control over him any more than it does over China if I choose to use Weibo. Would China take any notice of UK legislation saying what they must do? No.
The only way to manage the standards of internet companies like Facebook is to bring international pressure to bear and that requires concerted action, maybe even by the UN itself.
The same applies to 'non doms' squirrelling money away in tax havens. There is nothing an individual country can do to control them; only international action will have any real effect and that requires fewer than 193 voices all talking at the same time. A few large trading blocks working to common standards just might.
Global problems need global solutions by groups. Not by individuals determined to draw lines in maps and hearts, or to build walls.
The route the UK is embarked on will draw lines. It will create barriers. It will make no improvement to the UK's economy or way of life (in fact exactly the opposite). It will emphasise the impotence of the insular UK in a global world.
I am left with an image of a small UK politicians jumping up and down behind a high wall or marooned on an island with no ships, shouting at global companies like Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft ... insisting that they do this or that while the commercial behemoths continue on their way blithely ignoring the two-bit irrelevant government of some tiny inward-looking country somewhere just off the coast of Northern Europe.
The people who live there are all mad, they will say, as they cruise past in their sleek yachts. They thought lines, barriers and borders would solve everything. They live in a little world of their own imagination; behind their self-imposed moat. Their hearts are broken and they spend their lives shouting at the empty wind. I shouldn't try and land if I were you.
