Lines On The Map--What Are Borders, Anyway?

Recently Americans have been showing a hang-up about borders. Consider the yapping and quacking, teeth grinding and chest thumping over our own porous southern limit. The Geek grants that the ultimate test of a state's sovereignty is its capacity to control its own borders.

He further grants that history shows, here in the northern portion of the Western Hemisphere, numerous cases where well-organized, long established, and easily identified nations collapsed before the European interlopers because the nations had no recognised, established, and defensible borders. They had no lines on a map (or maps for that matter), which showed the Europeans the limits of their incursions.

The Indians had no signs saying, "This far and no farther."

In short, the difference between a nation (a group of people self-identified on the basis of shared language, ethnic background, culture, and area of habitation) and a state (the organized, centrally directed source of authority over the people in a defined geographic area) is, quite simply, lines on a map. Borders with signs that say, "Here we are. Over there you must stay."

Looked at this way, the American hang-up with borders is actually an inability to properly distinguish between a nation (people) and a nation-state (people plus central authority plus recognised and defensible borders.)

The border fetish is not uniquely American, it has spread throughout the world. There are two important historical realities on which we have to take a grip.

The concept of the nation-state is of relatively recent vintage, having come into fruition after a number of fits and starts with the English in early modern times and the French a bit later. (The Brits had an easier time of it since they live on an island.)

The creation of a centralized state government controlling armed force and thus possessing the capacity to coerce its own residents into paying taxes, obeying the laws, and serving in the military led to the establishment of borders, bright and shining lines (as a lawyer might say) between Us and the Others. Borders provided both a basis for defending the nation-state and the base for expanding it.

The organic, recent development in Europe of the concept of the bounded nation-state is the first reality of history on which we all have to get a grip.

The second is this. For the vast majority of the 160 independent states in existence right now, the process was not organic, not rooted in the development of the structures of state from the ground of a nation. For the overwhelming majority of the states in existence today, the process was artificial.

Lines were drawn on a map, usually by European politicians, diplomats, soldiers, and adventurers regardless of the people, the nations on the ground. Borders led to the apparatus of state. The apparatus of state was shoved into the ground of the people or peoples.

Europe had a long history of imposing rule on people. For a long, long time during the early modern period, alliances were sealed by the transfer of people from one prince or king to another. The word was "compensation." Compensation was typically expressed as "souls" residing in a given piece of territory.

Since Europeans came from a historical background where the concerns of "nation" were always clearly subordinate to the interests of "state" such that the religion of the new prince or king became that of the "souls," it isn't very surprising that diplomats in plush conference rooms in Paris or Berlin or London drew lines on the map without the slightest interest in the souls who would be affected by the new black line. It was not so much that the Europeans were arrogant as they were historically conditioned. Conditioned by their own past.

In other areas of the world, in Africa, in the Mideast, in much of Asia, the idea of the nation-state complete with borders and the organized, centrally directed force needed to either defend or expand them was notable by absence. There were empires, kingdoms, principalities to be sure, but not actual or nascent nation-states.

Borders were not lines so much as areas. As a beach is an area between land and sea, a border was seen as a vaguely expressed buffer between one empire, kingdom, or principality and another. The notion of buffer areas makes a great deal of pragmatic sense--it makes it harder for two nations to tangle. Again the analogy of a beach is apt. The beach protects the land against the sea.

Internally, empires, for example the Ottoman, had administrative districts. Typically these districts followed the contours of nations. For most of the four hundred years during which the Ottomans controlled the Mideast, they reigned but did not rule. The various nations were left relatively alone under their own forms of government with their own leaders as long as they kept the peace and paid taxes.

Benign neglect supported by a pervasive political intelligence service and backed by a fierce capacity for ruthless suppression when required gave the Ottoman Empire at least three hundred years of imperial calm (almost four hundred if attention is limited to the Mideast portion of the Empire.)

Throughout the Mideast, as in Africa and pre-Conquest South America, nations existed. Later, they might have been deprecated by Europeans as "tribes," or the Geek's personal favorite, "autochthonious assemblages," but they were nations nonetheless. The people in each nation were aware of their identity, proud of it. The national identity along with that provided by lesser sized groups such as clan and family served to anchor a person in time and space, past and future.

The lines on the map and the artificial states they defined split nations, shattered patterns of buffer area and rival heartlands. No matter how much the politicians, diplomats, and soldiers might have loved their creations, it was the love of Frankenstein for his Monster.

When the American president Woodrow Wilson put forth his call for "self-determination of nations" as one of the Fourteen Points upon which the Germans sought an armistice in 1918, this political scientist meant "self-determination of nation-states." Most of those who heeded and answered this call were not political scientists, they were members of nations. Nations which wanted a bit of self-determination.

They didn't get what they wanted. What they needed. Instead, from Central Europe to the Mideast they got new lines on the map. They got new artifacts marked, "Made in Europe." They got new states with names like Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia.

The world, the world of the future, got unending miles of very bad road.

The road was made more potholed and rutted by the inanely misguided attempt by Lenin and his successors, most importantly, the one time specialist on the "nationalities question," Josef Stalin, to manufacture a homogenized critter called the "New Soviet Man," by ruthlessly suppressing nationalities, relocating peoples, and, when all else failed, piling up bodies in uncounted and uncountable windrows.

Nations can and do evolve into nation-states. That's why Canadians are Canadians and not Americans with a bit of a funny accent. The key word is "evolve." Whether the root nation is large or small, it must develop its own expression as a state. It must create its own concept of government, of governmental responsibilities, of the relationship between government and the citizen. Over time, through trial and error, a nation will produce its own organic mechanisms and institutions of state.

The alternative to organic evolutionary processes is identical to the end results of the European and Soviet makers-of-maps. We see it all across the Mideast. We see it in Thailand, the Philippines. We see it in Russia. We see it in former Soviet dependencies. We see its results in the half-standing ruins of Yugoslavia.

The end result is insurgency, specifically defensive insurgency. That's the type of insurgency which we Americans waged against the "Mother Country." It is the kind of insurgency which seeks to establish a new line on a map. A genuine line that says, "Here is a Nation. Here You Cannot Go."

If the insurgents have the numbers, the weapons, the equipment, the money, they will wage war, either conventional or guerrilla. If they lack the requisites, this does not mean they will submit with folded hands to the superior power of the larger nation-state and its international supporters.

No. They will not submit.

They will use the tactics of the weak, the small in numbers, the lacking in money and material. They will use terrorism.

If one goes to all the websites, carefully matches and cross-references all the terrorist incidents for any given year, or all the years on record over the past decade, one very, very important fact stands out.

If the incidents that can be traced to Islamist groups are factored out, the resulting terror attacks whether kidnappings or bombings can be linked to defensive insurgencies.

We may believe that the terrorists who hope to bomb, to shoot, to kidnap their way to statehood are dreaming an impossible and impossibly vile dream. But they don't.

We respond by counselling, sanctioning and, if necessary, coercing these terrorists into accepting the rule of law, the status of the nation-state whose borders bind them. We do this because we believe in the nation-state while forgetting how long it took for us to establish and accept our own.

Americans have a short lived sense of history. To us the past is dead and gone. To others, to those who have been imprisoned behind lines on a map which they did not draw, the past is alive and well.

Alive, well and planting a bomb right now.

Others don't believe as we do. These others are nations which want to become their own nation-states.