Being in possession of an EU passport and a credit card means being a privileged traveler. Following our alarming encounter with passport control crossing from Hungary into Serbia, I had the impression that our kindly little conductor felt responsible for ensuring that of couple of clueless western tourists caused no more trouble – as though we were children not entirely capable of rational action. I am ashamed to say that I seriously doubt that a traveler with a similar language handicap, but no EU passport and credit card would be met with the same care and consideration in the countries that Ruth and I set out from. Perhaps I should have expected it, but somehow I was not really prepared for the impact of borders as we traveled overland. Not only did the passport controls seem even more oppressive than in airports, where passport control is part of the general "security" circus, but the arbitrariness of borders appeared all the more palpable to me as well. The border police that we encountered along the way were apparently furnished with substantial power over the individuals before them, and I had the impression that many of them would have no inhibitions about wielding that power. Thinking about the ten incensed Hungarian border police that Ruth and I seriously pissed off with our misunderstanding, I wondered later what might have happened if we had not been two mature white western European women. And the way that people end up being categorized on the basis of which passport they have was so glaringly obvious and unjust that I felt unbearably helpless with my privileged EU passport. First of all, national borders are not naturally visible in the landscape. As it is beautifully demonstrated in Cym's project "No Men's Land", for instance, to recognize borders you have to look for man-made markers. Although the borders we crossed on this overland journey were not visible in the landscapes we passed through, they were all the more heavily marked by fences and security buildings. The whole arrangement of border crossing conveys an atmosphere of oppressive and unchecked power. Requiring some 80 people to get off a bus (twice!) and line up single-file to present their passports from a lowly position standing on the pavement to stern guards sitting high above in a secure tower clearly creates an oppressive atmosphere, even more so in the middle of the night under cold, grayish lights. What kind of resistance might be possible under these circumstances? When I started to object to the Turkish border guard retaining my passport (for closer inspection, as it turned out), as I traveled by bus from Istanbul to Sofia, women nearby ahead of or behind me in line quickly and discreetly communicated to me that I should just be quiet and move on. What could have happened, if I had not complied? It was all too easy to imagine how very unpleasant the situation could have quickly become for all the passengers on the bus, even if my gray hair and EU passport might provide me personally with some security. What reasons could there be for these oppressive displays of power? The behavior of the border police was generally imperious, sometimes even menacing. Any checks and balances to their behavior that might exist are all far away from the borders, and in case of trouble, it would not be easy to call for help. Who or what are these border police "protecting"? I had a sense that the power wielded by the border police seems to be almost in inverse proportion to the potency of nation-states, demonstrating all the more clearly how wholly abstruse, arbitrary and absurd the entire construct of nation-states and nationalities actually is. As passports are now "enhanced" for security with RFID chips and biometric photos, the conditions of inequality based on the nationality of one's passport remain at least as rigid as ever, despite the patent absurdity of that. In the small world that I live in, a substantial number of people speak multiple languages and have several different passports, and in the mid-90s I knew a number of people whose Austrian residence permits were attached to passports issued by countries that had meanwhile ceased to exist as such, which made the renewal of an expired passport extremely complicated. Opportunities to study or work somewhere else should not be dependent on something as random and arbitrary as "nationality". For me, traveling overland from Linz to Istanbul via Budapest, Belgrade and Sofia made the unbearable absurdity of national borders surprisingly palpable and tangible, but at the same time made me feel far less optimistic about any chance of rescinding these useless borders any time soon. Perhaps it might make sense to modify the pledge in the sense that people whose passports make it more difficult to cross borders should fly, whenever that means only one passport control rather than crossing multiple borders with passport control on each side. And those of us with passports allowing us to leave and enter different countries more easily should stay on the ground and keep crossing borders until we can figure out how to get rid of them.