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Borders

Frontiers of Identity, Nation and State

Hastings Donnan, Thomas M. Wilson

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Borders

Frontiers of Identity, Nation and State

Hastings Donnan, Thomas M. Wilson

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About This Book

Borders are where wars start, as Primo Levi once wrote. But they are also bridges - that is, sites for ongoing cultural exchange. Anyone studying how nations and states maintain distinct identities while adapting to new ideas and experiences knows that borders provide particularly revealing windows for the analysis of 'self' and 'other'. In representing invisible demarcations between nations and peoples who may have much or very little in common, borders exert a powerful influence and define how people think as well as what they do. Without borders, whether physical or symbolic, nationalism could not exist, nor could borders exist without nationalism. Surprisingly, there have been very few systematic or concerted efforts to review the experiences of nation and state at the local level of borders. Drawing on examples from the US and Mexico, Northern Ireland, Israel and Palestine, Spain and Morocco, as well as various parts of Southeast Asia and Africa, this timely book offers a comparative perspective on culture at state boundaries. The authors examine the role of the state, ethnicity, transnationalism, border symbols, rituals and identity in an effort to understand how nationalism informs attitudes and behaviour at local, national and international levels. Soldiers, customs agents, smugglers, tourists, athletes, shoppers, and prostitutes all provide telling insights into the power relations of everyday life and what these relations say about borders. This overview of the importance of borders to the construction of identity and culture will be an essential text for students and scholars in anthropology, sociology, political science, geography, nationalism and immigration studies.

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Publisher
Routledge
Year
2021
ISBN
9781000180794

1
Introduction: Borders, Nations and States

There has always been a tension between the fixed, durable and inflexible requirements of national boundaries and the unstable, transient and flexible requirements of people. If the principal fiction of the nation-state is ethnic, racial, linguistic and cultural homogeneity, then borders always give the lie to this construct.
Horsman and Marshall, After the Nation-State
Borderlands are sites and symbols of power. Guard towers and barbed wire may be extreme examples of the markers of sovereignty which inscribe the territorial limits of states, but they are neither uncommon nor in danger of disappearing from the world scene. In Northern Ireland the relatively dormant security apparatuses on the Irish border remain, despite the rhetoric of a Europe without frontiers and the negotiations between the British and Irish states and a variety of political parties and paramilitary groups in the Northern Irish peace process. Observation towers, security gates, concrete pillboxes and helicopter pads appear and disappear overnight, testament to the adaptability of the state. In fact, the resilience of the physical power of the state is one of the dominant themes in the lives not only of those who live and work at the Irish border but also of the peoples of the borderlands of the world. But while the negotiation of state power is a central motif in any narrative or image of the world’s borderlands, it is certainly not the only one. In this book we explore some of the ways in which these signs of military might must compete with, and in some cases accommodate, other forms of power in the borderlands of nation-states. We examine how an anthropological focus on international borders can illuminate the role of border identities and regions in the strengthening or weakening of the nation-state, an institution synonymous with the creation and exercise of political power, but one experiencing the twin threats of supranationalism from above, and ethnonationalism and regionalism from below. Through this review we hope to place the anthropology of borders firmly within the anthropological analysis of the relations of power between and among nations and states.
We take as our starting point that anthropologists have much to contribute to an understanding of the transformations in nations and nationalisms in the world today. Attention to these changes is timely and appropriate. It has become increasingly apparent over the last decade that as some states cease to exist, others come into being, and that allegedly new forms of nationalism are both creating and destroying traditional borders, thereby setting in motion the forces of war, racism and the mass movement of refugees. Many of these developments have been claimed by the other social sciences as their domain, yet few recent studies of nationalism by political scientists, sociologists, geographers and historians deal adequately with the cultural aspects of international borders, the frontiers with which they are associated, and the physical and metaphorical borderlands which stretch away from the legal borderlines between states. This book seeks to place general anthropological studies of border communities and border cultures within the wider social science of borders, nations and states. At the same time, it seeks to problematise the role of culture within other disciplines’ investigations of international borders and frontiers, in an effort to provide a fuller picture of the historical, ethnic and nationalist forces which sustain a variety of identities in the borderlands of modern nation-states.

Old and New Borders, Nations and States

On one level, our focus on the anthropology of international borders is a reflection of the many and startling changes which the world has undergone since 1989. A list of these world transformations is now something of a cliché, but is nonetheless a compendium of such radical change in global politics, economics and social relations that it is worth repeating. The fall of the Berlin Wall, the most famous symbol of the border between two competing world systems, heralded the end of the Cold War, the disintegration of the Soviet empire and state, and the reawakening of long quiescent nation-states, as well as the creation of some new ones in Europe and Asia. The dissolution of Yugoslavia was the spark to another twentieth-century Balkans conflict, a series of ethnonationalist wars which overshadow all processes of nation- and state-building in the region. The Gulf War, which marked a so-called New World Order of American, Arab and European cooperation, followed so closely on almost a decade of Iranian and Iraqi conflict that the effects on the sovereignty of small and large states alike in that part of the world are still unfolding. The European Community, an intergovernmental association of twelve states which worked towards a common internal market, has become, since the Maastricht Summit of 1992, the European Union (EU), a group of fifteen states seeking monetary and political union and the establishment of rights, entitlements and protections for its ‘European’ citizens. The EU’s success, coupled with the major advances in economic performance in the Asian Pacific Rim, stimulated similar moves in the western hemisphere, leading to the North American Free Trade Agreement, an economic arrangement among the United States, Mexico and Canada, which will have far-reaching social and political effects, not least in the borderlands of those three countries. And the accords in the Middle East and Northern Ireland have given hope to people around the world that a ‘peace process’ can lead to lasting solutions to the problems of ethnic and nationalist strife.
As a result of these and other changes, in all of the continents, the number of states in the world has risen at a rate not seen since the heady days of the dissolution of the Great Empires after the two world wars. The membership of the United Nations has grown to today’s total of 185 states. As a necessary complement to this, the number of borders between states has grown apace, resulting in no fewer than 313 land borders between nation-states. Along with the growth in numbers of states and their borders comes a redefinition of their structure and function. However, some of these changes do little to increase communication and cooperation between nations. The transformations of the post-1989 world have brought with them a rise in the number, type and intensity of border disputes. These include conflicts between states over their supposed sovereign territory (for example, between Iraq and Kuwait, Armenia and Azerbaijan, Ethiopia and Eritrea, Israel and Lebanon, Greece and Turkey, Serbia and Bosnia and Croatia), cross-border ethnic conflict (in such areas as Nagorno-Karabakh, Zaire and Rwanda, Greece and Albania, Ireland and the United Kingdom, Palestine and Israel, Serbia and Albania), regional contests over self-determination and nationhood (for example, among the Chechens, the Kurds, the Basques, the Irish, the Sikhs and the Quebecois) and local, regional and national efforts to support or to curb the cross-border movement of refugees, immigrants, illegal workers, smugglers and terrorists (perhaps most notably at the US-Mexico border and at the many external borders of the EU).
In fact, border wars have been a long-standing if not necessary component to the processes of nation- and state-building in the post-imperial age, and have not only inspired their protagonists to greater nationalist endeavours but have fired the imaginations of people everywhere who sympathise with the rights of minority nations and small states to rule themselves. Such border wars are too numerous to list them all here, but we might mention as examples the impact which the conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, India, Pakistan, China, the Belgian Congo, Nigeria and Biafra, Chad, Mozambique, South Africa and Israel have had on the balance of power, both in the world and in the regions in which they took place.
Borders no longer function as they once did, or at least not in every respect. Globalisation of culture, the internationalisation of economics and politics, and the decline in Cold War superpower and satellite hostilities have apparently resulted in the opening up of borders and the relaxation of those state controls which limited the movement of people, goods, capital and ideas. Scholars debate the extent and the depth of these border transformations, which seem to fly in the face of numerous examples of international borders which have been made stronger and more impenetrable. This book explores some of these debates in ways that make them more relevant to anthropological concerns, and it presents arguments regarding the role which culture plays in the social construction and negotiation of these borders.
One thing is clear. Changes in the structure and function of international borders, whether they be world-wide or restricted to one state, reflect major changes in the strength and resilience of the nation-state, and in the variety of social, political and economic processes long thought to be the sole or principal domain of the state. State borders in the world today not only mirror the changes that are affecting the institutions and policies of their states, but also point to transformations in the definitions of citizenship, sovereignty and national identity. It is our contention, moreover, that borders are not just symbols and locations of these changes, which they most certainly are, but are often also their agents. It is not surprising that the concept of transnationalism, which has become central to many interpretations of post-modernity, has as one of its principal referents international borders, which mark off one state from another, and which sometimes, but not as often as many people seem to suppose, set off one nation from another. However, these borders, structures of the state themselves, are constructed by much more than the institutions of the state which are present there, or of which the border’s framework is a representative part, as in customs, immigration and security forces. Borders are also meaning-making and meaning-carrying entities, parts of cultural landscapes which often transcend the physical limits of the state and defy the power of state institutions.

Nations and the ‘Great Fiction’

There are many definitions of ‘border’, ‘frontier’ and ‘boundary’ in the social sciences, and almost as many research designs for their study. The anthropological approach to international borders which we advocate in this book entails the study of power in and between nations and states, including the ways in which versions of that power are enhanced or growing, or diminished or declining, with particular reference to border cultures and identities. In this and subsequent chapters we consider how the state is subverted in its borderlands, how borderlanders are often victims of the abuse of power, and sometimes agents or the sources of state power, and how the state’s borders may be strengthened, in the face of the so-called processes of globalisation, internationalisation and supranationalisation.
Almost all that occurs in the everyday lives of people in the modern world can and does occur in its borderlands. This makes borderlands interesting to social scientists, but not necessarily special. However, some things can only occur at borders. This is because of the function of borders in the relations between states, and because of the role played by borders in the origin and development of states, a role which they may continue to play in the future. Moreover, many features peculiar to borders are significant to their respective nations and states, both historically and today. We are not alone in recognising that borders have characteristics that differentiate them from other areas in states, and that border people are part of social and political systems unlike most others in their respective countries. Like Adeyoyin (1989: 378), we assume that ‘border regions as socio-cultural systems are a living reality. They are… characterized by an inner coherence and unity which is essential to their nature’.
Martinez has suggested that five key processes help to shape the ‘borderlands milieu’ (1994b: 8–14; see also 1994a: 10–25). Transnationalism is the process whereby borderlanders are influenced by, and sometimes share the values, ideas, customs and traditions of, their counterparts across the boundary line. This is partly a function of their peripheral location in their states, which, together with their unique local culture and shared economic relations with other border communities, gives them a sense both of political and social separateness and otherness, i.e. of being culturally different from core or majority populations in their ‘national societies’. Martinez also recognises that borders are areas of ethnic conflict and accommodation, due in large part to their cultural heterogeneity and their role as areas of immigration. But perhaps most predictable of all, borders are places of international conflict and accommodation unlike any others in their respective states, precisely because of their geographical location, the structures and agents of the state present there, and the aforementioned cultural characteristics which set most borders apart from more homogeneous, developed and powerful zones in the state.
These special characteristics of borderlands correspond to those identified by Malcolm Anderson (1996a: 1–3). To Anderson, borders (he uses the term ‘frontiers’) are both institutions and processes. As institutions, they mark and delimit state sovereignty and rights of individual citizenship. As processes, borders have a number of functions. They are instruments of state policy, although the state’s policies may be enhanced or impeded by the degree to which it exercises actual control over the border and its people. Anderson also recognises that borders are markers of identity, and have played a role in this century in making national identity the pre-eminent political identity of the modern state. This has made borders, and their related narratives of frontiers, indispensable elements in the construction of national cultures. This important role of the border, in the creation and the maintenance of the nation and the state, is one reason why borders have also become a term of discourse in narratives of nationalism and identity.
Anthropology may be the best placed of the social sciences to examine some of the least studied and understood phenomena of international borders, namely border cultures and identities (sometimes called border ‘mentality’ by our colleagues in other academic disciplines; see, for example, Rumley and Minghi 1991a). To do this, anthropologists must return to a topic long studied by the discipline, but one which has proved mercurial and exasperating to many of the scholars who have immersed themselves in its study. Ethnicity, and its correlate, national identity, is a fundamental force found at all borders, and it remains the bedrock of many political, economic and social activities which continue to befuddle the institutions and agents of the state, in the borderlands and in metropolitan centres of power and influence. As the geographer Ilidio do Amaral (1994: 17) remarked when considering the present condition and future of international boundaries:
Even in Western Europe, the home of the ideal homogeneous nation-state, ethnic divisions are readily apparent in regional and nationalist political activity. Conflicts whose origins stem from the multi-ethnic compositions of the state are the most difficult with which governments have to contend, and their severity can be great enough to threaten the territorial integrity of the state. Therefore, the ideas about the role of ethnicity need to be reconsidered in a new light.
Ethnicity and national identity pose threats to many states today, as they have in the past and will in the future, precisely because ethnic groups and nations have as one of their defining characteristics a perceived and essential relationship to a real, i.e. historically recognised, territory, or to a homeland to which they can only aspire. We define nations as communities of people tied together through common culture, who have as their pre-eminent political goal the attainment of some form of independence, autonomy or devolution. Nations can be distinguished from ethnic groups by their political role in a state, and by their political goals. Ethnic groups are often - we go so far as to venture most often - minority nations within states which are dominated by one or more majority nations, or within which some form of political autonomy is all but impossible for the members of the minority. Most such ethnic groups are in fact ethnically tied to nations elsewhere, but this does not prescribe their actions within the state in which they are a minority. Minority nations in a state may have as their principal political objective such things as the avoidance of ethnic strife, an active role in party politics, the attainment of wealth and prestige, and/or assimilation in a variety of ways. These behaviours do not preclude their affiliation or ascription to a nation elsewhere, whether that nation be just over the border, as among ethnic Hungarians who reside in all of Hungary’s neighbouring states, or among Mexican-Americans, or be found in much more distant locales, as among the Armenian diaspora. In fact, whether self-ascribed or imposed by the wider society, the vast number of ethnic groups have a national identity as the cultural cement which binds them together, and their nationalism is linked in varying degrees to a past, present or hoped-for future national territory and nation-state sovereignty.
Affiliations such as these are based on what can be called the ‘great fiction’ of world politics, which has guided the actions of poets, priests, peasants and patriots since the nineteenth century, namely, that all nations have the right, if not the destiny, to rule themselves, in their own nation-state, on their own territory. Yet not all nations have been able to achieve this. States have a number of internal structural requirements. There are simply not enough natural resources, territory or wealth around to give every nation a star role as a nation-state. Said differently, there is too much power in the hands of too few to allow minority nations to achieve the type and degree of independence to which such gilded terms as ‘self-determination’ continue to inspire. This has become especially apparent in one area of the world which, because of its history of nations and states, and its current role in the redefinition of traditional relations between borders and states, is of particular concern to us in this book, in Europe, events since 1918 … have proved the bankruptcy of the idea of every ethnic nation forming its own state’ (do Amaral 1994: 20).
Much recent scholarship in the social sciences has debated the future of the nation-state, particularly in the context of such ‘threats’ as multinational corporations, supranational trading blocs and political entities, globalisation of culture and society, and the perceived demise of imperialism and other forms of nationalistic enterprise (for an excellent review of these scholarly debates, see Milward 1992). Not surprisingly, much of this debate centres on Europe, birthplace of both the nation and the state, and where the European Union is both a symbol and an agent of the changes which may befall the states of the world in the future. And it is Europe that provides supportive case material for both sides in the debate: both for the view that the nation-state may be losing political and economic competencies, such as agricultural, fiscal and foreign-policy making, to the elites and institutions of an integrating Europe, and for the view that the reports of the nation-state’s demise may be premature. In fact, it has been persuasively argued that the nation-state may be reconfiguring itself in Europe today, and is certainly not losing ground to either supranationalism or to the globalising pressures of consumer culture and capitalism. Michael...

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