1
Understanding Homelands
Humans, it is sometimes asserted, are territorial animals.1 While this claim is undoubtedly accurate, the tremendous historical variation in the types of spaces we seek to control, the ways we delimit these areas, and the tactics with which we exercise this control cannot be accounted for by human nature. Human territoriality is better characterized as a strategy with which this control is exercised. It is “the attempt by an individual or group to affect, influence, or control people, phenomena, and relationships, by delimiting and asserting control over a geographic area.”2 As a strategy, the particular ways territoriality is deployed vary over time and are sensitive to historical, ideational, and technological developments.3
For example, the shifting conceptions of space engendered by modern mapping technologies changed how states pictured, demarcated, and sought to control their realms.4 Likewise, for most of modern history the unpopulated atolls in the South China Sea were relevant largely as obstacles to seafaring vessels. It was only after the invention of the internal combustion engine and the discovery of oil underneath these atolls that the application of various strategies of territorial control to these once-forsaken areas accelerated (along with the international conflict over them).5
Homelands are also the product of a historical development; in this case ideational rather than technological. The categorization of land as part of the homeland is a specific form of territoriality engendered by the idea that a particular group of people (the nation) ought to control a particular territory because that land is part of who the people are. Homelands, in other words, are a product of the nationalist project. In terms of its effect, the emergence of nationalism was like the discovery of oil; it was a change that revamped the way territory was valuated.6
At its core, nationalism defines the appropriate bounds within which the mundane politics of who gets what and how should take place. It delimits the people from whom sovereignty should derive and the territory over which this sovereignty ought to extend. Many colloquial uses of nationalism, and not a few scholarly ones, emphasize the impact of the lines nationalism draws between the in-group and out-groups over those it draws on the map. Patterns of exclusion are certainly consequential. However, understanding the ways homelands shape domestic politics and international conflict requires also paying attention to nationalism’s territorial dimension.7 It is this dimension that endows the homeland with value and shapes conflict over its loss.
The territorial aspect of nationalism is inherent in the concept itself. As Hans Kohn argued, nationalism “presupposes the existence, in fact or as an ideal, of a centralized form of government over a distinct and large territory.”8 Ernest Gellner’s conceptualization of nationalism as the drive to make the cultural and political borders of the nation congruent assumes a territorial component to these borders.9 Similarly, Benedict Anderson’s cardinal definition of the nation as a political community that is “imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign” requires a geographical location in which this sovereignty is to be exercised.10 The importance of territory to the national project led John Agnew to conclude that territorial “borders are kit and caboodle, then, to everyday nationalism.”11
While abstract nations are not necessarily anchored in any particular geographical location, they do have to be tied to some place. This territorial imperative leads nationalists to identify a particular piece of land as their home land. To be sure, groups have long had locations that they were from, in which they resided, and to whose landscapes they were emotionally bound (what geographers term cultural regions).12 People have also long sought to control particular locations for material reasons (as in the apparently age-old conflict between farmers and ranchers).
Nationalism, however, renders homelands more than these locations. Nationalism transforms cultural regions (whether actual or imagined) into “the physical and legal embodiment” of collective identity and into the very essence of a people.13 It does so by providing a story that “tie[s] together the fate of the nation and the territory … [; and] explain[s] why a given territory belongs rightfully to the nation, how the nation arrived at the present territorial situation, and which territory would fulfill [the nation’s] destiny.”14 The nationalist political project imbues territory designated as the homeland with so much meaning that its defense becomes the nation-state’s cardinal duty and control of homeland territory becomes the sine qua non of national existence. This binding of nation and territory constrained the territorial horse-trading that had been the norm until that point, and transformed the loss of homeland territory into a grave injustice whose remedy justified tremendous sacrifice.15 This attachment is so great that nationalists’ willingness to sacrifice for the homeland is sometimes seen as irrational.16
This is the case, importantly, for all nations and all nationalisms. Even so-called civic or inclusive nationalisms—nationalisms that use the borders of the state rather than ethnic criteria to define their membership boundaries—are territorially grounded.17 They too seek exclusive sovereignty over a homeland.
This understanding of homelands implies that the rhetorical designation of land as part of the homeland plays a critical role in calling the homeland into being. Actors apply homeland territoriality to land by saying (in words or images) that a particular parcel of land is part of the homeland. This is why nationalists devote so much costly energy to maps, geography textbooks, and seemingly quixotic battles over the names used to label particular places. The need to rhetorically delineate the location of the homeland also leads nationalists to speak differently of land that is part of the homeland than of land that is not part of it. As Walker Connor pointed out, nationalists routinely use familial metaphors to “mystically convert what the outsider sees as merely the territory populated by a nation into a motherland or fatherland, the ancestral land, land of our fathers, this sacred soil … the cradle of the nation, … and most commonly, the home—the homeland of our particular people—a Mother Russia, an Armenia, a Deutschland, an England (Enga land: land of the Angles), or a Kurdistan (literally, land of the Kurds).”18 The resulting depictions of the homeland generate an “instantly recognizable, everywhere visible” logo that penetrates the popular imagination and forms a powerful emblem for the nation.19
If the applications of homeland territoriality to land embodied by these map-images are (or become) socially resonant—that is, if they spread widely in a society—the territory to which they are applied becomes part of the homeland. Conversely, territory omitted from these logos ceases to be part of the homeland.
There are certainly concrete, material, ways of applying homeland territoriality to land. Physical conquest, the erection of border fences, checkpoints, passport controls, the sowing of minefields, the settlement of conationals, and the extension of state services, including legal, tax, and education regimes, into new spaces are all tangible ways of saying that “this land is ours.” These methods of applying homeland territoriality are available, however, only when a state actually controls the territory in question. Maintaining the homeland status of land in the absence of sovereignty over it is an almost exclusively rhetorical act. Assessing the conditions under which homeland territoriality is withdrawn from lost homeland territory thus requires paying attention to the pattern of articulation about that territory.
Understanding homelands as a nationalist form of territoriality also has two additional implications. First, homelands are valuable because of their ideational categorization as homelands rather than having their value derived from some other attribute of the territory (such as its material characteristics or the presence of coethnics). As a result, the potential impact of the ideational value of homelands on conflict (or on any outcome of interest) should be considered alongside the other dimensions of nationalism and the material features of territory. Second, since the claim that a particular territory constitutes the homeland is part of the nationalist political project to configure politics and societies in particular ways, the designation of land as part of the homeland is as likely to be subject to the same kinds of contestation and potential changes over time as other political projects. The remainder of this chapter takes up each of these implications in turn.
The Ideational Value of Homeland Territory
So that my generation would comprehend the Homeland’s worth,
Men were always transformed to dust, it seems.
The Homeland is the remains of our forefathers
Who turned into dust for this precious soil.
Cholpan Ergash, Uzbek poet20
How can an amputated man sleep comfortably at night?
Somali liberation song21
Understanding homelands as a nationalist form of territoriality—as a rhetorical strategy of asserting the nation’s control over a particular space—does not render them epiphenomenal or rob them of their power. In fact, it is difficult to overstate the value nationalists place on their homelands. Their loss “touch[es] the main nerve center of popular feeling” because the establishment of a link between the nation and a territory identified as the homeland fundamentally transforms an otherwise unexceptional piece of real estate into something worth dying for.22 The German nationalist philosopher Johann Herder was thus exaggerating only slightly when he exclaimed that if you “deprive [nationalists] of their country, you deprive them of everything.”23 Indeed, nearly all nationalisms echo the Uzbek poem quoted in the epigraph that calculates the worth of the homeland in the currency of the sacrifices of earlier generations.24 As Connor notes, “The homeland is much more than territory… . [It is] intermeshed with notions of ancestry and family. This emotional attachment to the homeland derives from perceptions of it as the cultural hearth and, very often, the geographic cradle of the ethno-national group. In Bismarckian terminology, ‘Blut und Boden!’, blood and soil have become mixed.”25
Important strides have been made in integrating homelands’ ideational value into research on territorial conflict. Most notably, the Issue Correlates of War (ICOW) project includes the categorization of a territory as the homeland by representatives of the state among the factors that make up its index of “intangible value.”26 Other studies flag the ability of a territory’s symbolic value to increase the salience of territories in conflict and to shape the politics of such cases by mobilizing domestic support, enabling state leaders to fight off domestic challengers, and constraining their ability to make territorial concessions.27
Yet, too often the role of ideational attachment to territory continues to be overlooked in contemporary studies of international conflict.28 For example, Gary Goertz and Paul Diehl’s discussion of a territory’s “intrinsic value” is conceptualized primarily in economic terms, minimizing its independent ideological importance.29 Other studies categorize international territorial conflict as taking place over largely tangible assets.30 Paul Huth’s valuable disaggregation of the issues at stake in territorial conflicts as strategic location, minorities in the territory with ethnic ties to the challenger, and the economic value of the territory, similarly excludes the ideational value of the land in its own right from the list of potential reasons for conflict.31 This was also the case for an important account of the rise of the territorial integrity norm in international relations.32 Scholarship on enduring territorial conflict sometimes dismisses the ideational value of homelands as cheap talk by leaders seeking to mobilize support. From this perspective, because leaders “can easily embed symbolic value onto claimed territory,” whether the territory has symbolic value is irrelevant for testing alternative explanations of conflict.33 Ideational attachment to the land is also sometimes dismissed as a constant that cannot explain variation in the existence, onset, or severity of conflict.34 Even work on “what makes territory important” excluded nationalist attachment to homelands as a potential answer to this question.35
Studies of irredentism also tend to minimize the impact of the ideational value of the territory itself. The dominant understanding of irredentism assumes that a state demands the incorporation of territory outside its borders primarily because the territory is populated by its coethnics.36 The possibility that the territory could be desired because its value is derived directly from being part of the homeland separately from its demographic characteristics is rarely considered.37
The omission of ideationally based nationalist attachment to the homeland as a relevant variable also characterizes the logic of many supporters of partition and accounts that assume nationalist conflict is driven by the security concerns created by ethnic intermingling.38 While these arguments acknowledge the importance of a territory’s demographic and strategic characteristics, they tend to downplay the importance of nationalists’ ideological attachment to homelands. They see territory as fungible; any territory will do for the location of the national state as long as it has relatively defensible borders and is reasonably ethnically homogeneous.
The elision of the ideational value of homelands is...
