Fuzzy Borders

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Canadian prime minister Mark Carney is exploring the possibility of Canada becoming an »associate member« of the European Union.¹ There’s no such status at the moment; it would have to be invented.

»There’s no reason for a country’s belonging to be either/or. Perhaps this is what’s becoming fuzzy: not the border itself, but the things for which the border is supposed to be a useful boundary«

The idea isn’t that Canada should become a European country, or join the EU in the ordinary sense. Rather, Canada could become more deeply integrated with Europe in particular areas: energy, artificial intelligence, critical minerals. Goods, services, and perhaps workers could move more freely between the two. They could build things together, from undersea cables to satellite networks. Canada would remain Canada, on the other side of the Atlantic, without seats in the European Parliament. And yet, in some respects, it would be inside.

Are borders getting fuzzy?

To understand what that might mean, we need to go back to a 43-year-old professor of electrical engineering, alone in his parents’ New York apartment in the summer of 1964, after a dinner engagement fell through.²

His name was Lotfi Zadeh. He had spent two decades working with the precise, binary logic that underpinned much of engineering. That evening, he began thinking about something that seemed almost embarrassingly imprecise: the categories we use to describe the world. Classical logic is wonderfully clean. Something is either a member of a set or it isn’t. But the world is full of things that don’t behave like this. Is a person tall? Is a room warm? You can impose a threshold on either question, but the threshold is something we have added. There’s no sudden physical event that takes place when somebody becomes »tall« at, say, 180 centimetres. Zadeh’s insight was that membership itself could have degrees. You could be a little bit tall (in one context), yet a little bit short (in another). His 1965 paper »Fuzzy Sets« formalised the idea, introducing what became known as fuzzy logic.³ It is one of the most-cited papers in the history of the information sciences.⁴

Fuzzy logic is not the same thing as uncertainty. The question is not »Do we know whether this belongs?« but »How much does it belong?«. The idea escaped mathematics into control systems, pattern recognition, medicine, and consumer electronics – anywhere a machine had to make useful decisions about a world that didn’t divide neatly into yes and no.

Now consider Canada. Its border with the United States isn’t fuzzy at all – it’s a line on a map. But the things that make Canada function as a country don’t necessarily stop at that line. Its economy, energy infrastructure, supply chains, security arrangements, and data networks are all entangled with systems beyond its territory. And now it’s considering strengthening some of those relationships with Europe too. The interesting thing is that these relationships don’t have to move together.

Canada could lean towards Europe in energy while staying closer to the United States in defence, or towards Europe in AI standards while remaining more American in agriculture. There’s no reason for a country’s belonging to be either/or. Perhaps this is what’s becoming fuzzy: not the border itself, but the things for which the border is supposed to be a useful boundary.

For centuries, geography organised political life efficiently. A country occupied a territory; within its boundary, a government made laws, controlled immigration, and defended the population. That was always an approximation, but a powerful one – smugglers, migrants, and diasporas never quite respected the line, and empires governed territory they didn’t fully control.⁵ Now that map is being overlaid by others, such as the geography of energy, where pipelines and grids create one set of relationships, and the geography of data, where servers and fibre-optic cables create another. Each has its own edges. Some coincide with national borders, others ignore them entirely.

The result isn’t necessarily a world without borders. It might be something stranger: a world in which there are still borders, but fewer things that have only one. Canada may be a useful test case, attempting something that would once have sounded contradictory: remaining entirely itself while becoming, in selected respects, more deeply part of somewhere else.

Nationhood depends on a meaningful correspondence between people, territory, institutions, and belonging. But what happens when that correspondence breaks down? If your electricity comes from one network, your data from another, your defence from a third, which country are you actually inside? Perhaps the territorial nation-state will prove more resilient than this suggests. Or perhaps »belonging to a country« was always a crude way of describing a much more complicated arrangement.

The Canadian border hasn’t moved. What may be moving is everything we thought that border contained.

References