By Tim Dunlop Posted Thu Jul 25, 2013 2:11pm AEST

Photo: "Border control" and "security" more generally has become ground zero in governments' fight for relevance. (Darren Marsh)

"National security" is the last shot in the locker of governments who have actively ceded control of nearly everything else they do to corporations, writes Tim Dunlop.

We live in independent nations of peoples that operate within an interdependent globalised economy of trade and finance.

As barriers to trade have evaporated over the last 30 years, barriers to the movements of people have, by and large, remained.

The two matters are related.

Governments, like the Rudd government and the Howard government before it, are in thrall to the demands of capital on everything except the movement of people.

Big business, multinational corporations, international finance and the various think tanks that provide them with their intellectual rationalisations would, in the name of cheap labour, be more than happy to see open borders, but it is the one wish otherwise obedient governments will not grant them.

Yes, business is thrown the occasional sop in the form of something like 457 Visas, but basically governments of all persuasions cling to Howard's mantra of "we will decide who comes here and the circumstances in which they come".

Why? Because, in having gone down the path of trade "liberalisation", having created and accepted an elite consensus around some form of neo-liberalism, governments everywhere have gutted themselves. Their citizens still, rightly, demand that they "do something" in terms of ameliorating the risks and problems involved in everything from healthcare to education to retirement, but the elite consensus around neo-liberalism has robbed them of the tools (and the inclination) to do so.

Given this retreat from governing, "border control" and "security" more generally has become ground zero in governments' fight for relevance and in most nations' understanding of themselves as nations at all. Like most forms of nationalism, there is an element of racism present, but as Jason Wilson argued in a recent piece:

The decision by the Australian Prime Minister to no longer accept refugees who arrive by boat is not a demonstration of power, but of impotence.

What it is not is a sign of a politicised racism among the Australian people. This specific policy is an artefact of political strategy, no more and no less. There is no mass political or social movement calling for the sequestration of refugees in another country. The idea that this is a response to democratic pressures, or a "populist" gesture, is a blasphemy that seeks to absolve the decision-makers by blaming the people. Accepting that would mean renouncing our faith in those around us, and placing it in the those who, in our own names, offer to hold democracy at bay.

Pieces like this rant from David Marr miss that essential point, a point that has been apparent for a long time.

In 2002, in the aftermath of the Tampa incident, academic Rob Schaap and I wrote a piece that said:

We have an unprovable and unpopular theory arguing that when John Howard announced in the lead up to the 2001 Federal election that we will decide who comes here and the circumstances in which they come that people responded less out of any actual racist antipathy to 'dangerous foreigners' than out of a sense of relief that someone had at last said something that put the country first.

For nearly thirty years the public have been told that due to the 'forces of globalisation' we had to privatise government services, sell off public assets, deregulate banking and every other industry, reduce worker entitlements in order to remain 'competitive' and integrate ourselves into international institutions like the WTO - which by their nature undermine our own control over economic and social policy. In other words, having lived through a generation of neo-liberal reforms that were constantly presented to people as not only desirable despite the obvious pain they caused but also as 'inevitable' and for which they were told that there was 'no alternative', people were hanging out for someone to say, hey, what happens in our country matters and what's more, I'm going to act as if it did.

Nothing has changed.

We all know that the allure and promise of globalisation, of "free" trade across borders by minimally regulated and taxed corporations is an exercise in inequality. Yes, it means an avalanche of consumer goods, cheap overseas holidays and the chance to watch Game of Thrones at the same time as Americans, but it also means an erosion of the basic institution of the nation state and with it, the benefits of citizenship that most of us presume are the whole point of a nation state.

It means civil unrest in countries as various as Britain, Spain, Greece, Brazil and Turkey. It means the failure of "austerity" measures across the EU to address basic economic problems. It means the massive inequality in the US that has enriched a few at the expense of the many, something that is increasingly happening in Australia too. It means a degraded natural environment. And it means a degraded media environment where it is almost impossible to even have these discussions in other than the most cartoonish terms.

"National security" is the last shot in the locker of governments who have actively ceded control of nearly everything else they do to empowered corporations at the expense of citizens. It is the one major area of public policy where an otherwise disempowered government (of whatever political persuasion) gets to tell its people that "we we will decide" what's going on.

For those outside the developed world, in failed states trying to escape persecution, it means the sort of humane globalisation provided by instruments such as the United Nation's Convention on Refugees is increasingly worthless. For those inside them it means endless surveillance by states themselves, as governments invade our privacy, all in the name of "security".

Immanuel Wallerstein recently summed up what is happening:

[W]e are in the midst of a structural transition from a fading capitalist world-economy to a new kind of system. But that new kind of system could be better or worse. That is the real battle of the next 20-40 years... [and] how we behave here, there, and everywhere must be decided in [regard to] this fundamental and major worldwide political battle.

Policies like John Howard's Pacific "solution" and Kevin Rudd's PNG "solution" are immoral because they treat asylum seekers as means (pawns, scapegoats) rather than ends (individuals with their own rights), and we are right be concerned about the wretched of the earth.

But such policies are also a symptom of a fundamental problem with our entire political system and we need to focus on that too.

Tim Dunlop writes regularly for The Drum and other publications. You can follow him on Twitter. His book, The New Front Page: New Media and the Rise of the Audience, will be released August 26. View his full profile here.

The only border security we have left - The Drum (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)